[Sandbox] New Balance Test Kicks off on February 10

United_Stealth, on 11 February 2020 - 11:13 AM, said: Are you kidding me? Ive recently bought all german tanks and put a 100% crew in it paid with gold. Now youre telling me youre gonna remove those tanks? What will happen to the crews? Could I have just flushed that gold down the drain???????? 


KanonenVogel19, on 11 February 2020 - 11:30 AM, said:   I tried to visit the Sandbox forum, but it's offline. Fortunately I did have the text + images saved somewhere else, so              First of all, I want to thank you WG for testing these mechanics on the Sandbox server so that all of us can get a chance to try it out and tell you how we feel about the changes. Thank you very much.   I feel that the changes that you’ve made here doesn’t really solve the actual issues with premium ammo. Therefore, I’d like to write you a suggestion on an alternative way of designing this, which in my opinion would be the best solution to the problem.   There’re a few things that I want to mention before presenting the suggestion.   First of all, it’s extremely important to understand that credits cannot be used as a balancing factor. The reason is that players can either grind or purchase credits before a battle, which means that a player can basically have an infinite amount of credits in an individual instance of a battle. Thus, balancing ammo types by their cost will not have any affect on players with a lot of credits. The current state of ranked battles should be enough proof of that.   Secondly, it’s also extremely important to understand that high penetration rounds can exist without being a premium item. This means that the performance of an ammo type, and the cost of an ammo type, are two completely different issues. We should keep in mind that if an item is actually required to play the game, then it should not be a premium item, and on the other hand, if the item is not required to play the game, then there’s no reason for it to exist in the first place.   With that in mind, allow me to present my suggestion.     The entire concept of premium ammo should be completely eliminated. Instead, all different ammo types should be implemented as standard ammo. They should be good and bad at different things, and they should be used in specific situations. It should be the players job to constantly analyze the situation in the battle, and judge what kind of ammo that will do the job in the best way.   My advice is that you implement all current ammo types as realistic as possible. Look into how these shells work in real life, what upsides and downsides they have, and then make them work the same way in the game. If you need to balance the ammo types even further, you can also make small additional adjustments to the damage of each shell type.   Regarding the characteristics of different shells, there are a few important things that I specifically want to highlight.   Overpenetration

APCR shells have a solid core and doesn’t explode after penetration, thus they always run the risk of overpenetration. This means that if the shell has enough penetration to pierce the armor twice, it will simply go straight through the tank and do very little or no damage at all. To inform the player that an overpenetration occurred, you can use the existing notification system, as shown in the image below.     High Explosive Anti-Tank

HEAT shells are not dependent on kinetic energy in order to penetrate, but they do not have the high amount of penetration that they currently have in the game. What makes these shells useful are the fact that they don’t lose penetration over distance. On short distances, these shells might have less penetration than a regular AP shell, but they make up for it at longer distances.

Next, I want to suggest how you should handle the cost of ammo and consumables.
The most important thing is that credits should never be used as a balancing factor in battles. The reason to this is that players with a lot of credits will be able to bypass this balancing, while players with a shortage of credits will have to play at a disadvantage. The battle situation should affect what shell the player loads, and the players economy should never ever interfere with that judgement.   In order to solve this, all ammo types should have the same cost. Of course, it’s fine if there’s a tiny symbolic difference, but this difference should be kept at a minimum and never be more than 5-10%. The point is that players should never think that they don’t want to use an ammo type because it’s expensive, but instead they should equip their tank with the ammo types that they’ll need for different situations in battle.   For consumables, the exact same principle applies. All consumables should cost the same, and the cost should be reduced, so that players make their decision based on what they need and not based on what they can afford. The small versions of consumables should be removed since this will make them redundant.       Thank you for reading, and I really hope that you WG can take this suggestion into consideration. If there’re any questions or missing details, please ask and I will do my best to answer. I would also be very thankful if you WG could at least write a few sentences about what you think of this suggestion.             That was the post I did on the Sandbox forum. Unfortunately it didn't get a single reply from anyone at WG