and this, Wargaming, is why I'm starting to loathe this game I've lov...

Redcoat, on Sep 08 2020 - 08:01, said: 12 battles to get my first win this a.m. playing T7 and T8 mediums:     I think it's pretty obvious that the quality of play in randoms - especially in higher tiers - has been declining the past year or more and it's taking a toll... I personally am finding it crushingly tiresome watching pickup teams of apparently clueless newbies do paralytically stupid crap.  It would seem the player base has become so thoroughly polluted with legions of egregiously - even contemptuously - incompetent players that most battles are no longer a matter of which team plays better, but merely a contest to see which team is slightly less incomprehensibly stupid. Wargaming's emphasis on simplifying the grind - via Personal Reserves, Blueprints, endless EXP multipliers and etc. - makes it so much easier for "casual" players to reach tiers 8 and up that they have effectively neutered any incentive to understand the finer points of the game and try to improve your play to maximize your benefit in the in-game economy; basically, they've dumbed down the game to the point where WASD and left click are all the average player thinks they need to know (though I would contend there are a fair few of them incapable of managing even that)...   I've enjoyed a dispiriting win rate over the past few days, but that's neither here nor there; my very green win rate has been very green for the past several thousand battles and will no doubt remain so over the next thousand, due to my own limitations - intellectual, temperamental and physical. Yet the teams of late - whether mine or the enemy - are so densely populated by the clueless that they are falling apart around me faster than I can react, with a persistence that makes it all feel damned futile... Tier 7 lights running without camo and sniping from the TD line; mediums camping out beside the base or around arty; heavies ignoring the meta en masse and flocking to one ineffective corner or another, or floundering about in open fields with three enemy arty zeroing in on them; lemming trains of 13 players that flock to one flank and hide behind the same rock when faced with two enemy tanks, ad infinitum...  and here I am trying my damnedest to turn the tide but it makes no bloody difference; 3 out of 4 battles are little more than a grotesque pantomime of idiocy, with practically no relief... Most players apparently cannot comprehend the ammo or armor mechanics, they certainly don't understand the vision mechanics, and they have zero map knowledge... Where once the grossly stupid were the exception, I feel that over the past year or so they have become the rule. Ultimately, the majority of today's players seem to think they're playing a throw-away game of Checkers when they are actually involved in team match of 3D Chess, a game they appear constitutionally and intellectually unprepared to play.    Which ever side you're on, playing with or against this level of stupidity does not make for a good time. When there were only a couple of of seriously clueless players on either team every few battles, it was manageable; but with so many failing their way to the top these days, it's clear that the anti-skill "play for funz" and troll contingents are the ones defining the rhythm of the game. Whether winning or losing, these games just aren't satisfying, and I'm beginning feel like this game has hit the tipping point; the quality of the player base is the worst it's ever been, and playing with legions of players who are so unconcerned with actually trying to play well is simply frustrating.