[Sandbox] New Balance Test Kicks off on February 10

19ANDER02, on 10 February 2020 - 10:09 PM, said: The whole game needed only two major changes: lowering the alpha damage of premium/special shells and HP increase on lower tiers.   Instead of that WG decides to completely rebuild the whole game by not touching premium ammo () and changing all the other statistics which in result makes players re-learn the whole game, huge amount of stats, etc.Moreover, they get rid of 92 vehicles which provided the diversity right from the get go and made new players learn different classes. Now they are supposed to magically play TDs or SPGs well at tier V when it's their first contact with these classes (hello, tiers II-IV are supposed to prepare new players for higher level and bigger challenges on higher tiers).   Ironically, both the increase of HP and alpha damage of standard shells is going to make battles even faster because of 25% RNG cause now e.g. BC25t will be able to one-clip another tier X med or even HT which isn't the case right now. And there are more examples like this. This whole HP/alpha damage would even make sense if RNG was lowered to about 10% but it's still choosing the longer and worse way instead of just nerfing prem ammo or simply putting its limit in each every vehicle per battle (e.g. only 15% of ammo carried by you can be the special one - and this way the weakpoints could be reintroduced to the vehicles once the special rounds are not spammed on every single occasion).   Just to sum it up, these current plans of WG are even worse than the infamous Rubicon patch...


Jogonam, on 10 February 2020 - 10:44 PM, said: At the moment your defense in a cumbersome tank with a big gun, against nimble lightly armored tanks, was to shoot one high explosive and hope for the best. But perhaps that isn't working for the давай meta .
It would be nice if you had a pool on this thread or another, where we can vote if we like the changes or otherwise.
As for the tech tree changes, I'm sure that is just a joke or something else, that will not be implemented on the live server. 


Backewatsch, on 11 February 2020 - 12:12 AM, said: So I have been trying the "New Balance" for a while, and here are my conclusions.
  New Balance does *not* work. The reason for that is that it doesn't address the main problem of standard ammo: It's low penetration, making it impossible to penetrate many newer, heavily armored vehicles. In the end this forces vehicles with low standard ammunition penetration to resort to premium ammo anyway. What New Balance does is to give vehicles with a high standard ammo pen an even bigger advantage than before, since they can keep using standard ammo and do not have to fall back to premium ammo to do damage.   New Balance will also widen the gap between tank tiers, as lower tier tanks have a harder time penetrating most higher tanks, while higher tier tanks can easily penetrate lower tier tanks. That means a low tier tank will still have to use premium ammo to do damage and gets punished by doing less damage, while the higher tier tank can use standard ammo and benefit from its higher Damage.   What is WG trying to achieve with the new damage model? They say they want to encourage players to use standard ammo more often. But what is the point of that? If I would pen with standard ammo anyway, using premium ammo doesn't make a difference. If I wouldn't pen with standard ammo anyway, using it is still pointless, regardless of how much more potential damage it does.   This means that New Balance actually doesn't at all reward players for using standard ammo, but punishes them if they have no other chance than to use premium ammo (because they wouldn't otherwise do damage).
The real solution for this problem would simply be to generally somewhat increase standard ammo penetration and somewhat decrease premium ammo penetration. That would remove the "auto pen" property of premium ammunition, force you to aim at weak spots again and just give you a better chance to pen there, and not everywhere on a tank. A better standard penetration would mean that in many case you might have a chance to penetrate weak spots without having to use premium ammo.
On top of that, certain premium tanks are made obsolete (Chrysler K e.g. very much depends on premium ammo, and that has been intentionally implemented by WG).
New Balance is a nerf for every low standard ammo pen and thus also most low tier tanks.
If the "New Balance" model will go live as it is now, it will create more problems than it will solve.


mrnewton, on 11 February 2020 - 12:32 AM, said: Am i understanding correctly that the credits i spent in the sandbox will not affect me in the standard wot version at all?