Let's bring on the paranoia

Stinger63, on Jun 29 2021 - 05:59, said: Because I have moved, I've had to create accounts on other servers to keep my ping manageable.  Ultimately, I simply couldn't bare to rebuild hangars full of tanks and put up with unskilled players on the way so I mostly play the US servers with a high ping... not ideal but still playable up to 220 ping.    I was puzzled to find that I had very different stats playing the same tanks with the same set up, which added to my suspicion that players receive tanks with randomly slight different parameters. This would not only explain the stats disparity between 2 same tanks, but also the stats disparity between different tanks as in, why do I have high stats and low stats tanks?  I get that one can play better in some tank types than others, but there are tanks I don't even like that I keep simply because I have higher stats in them, while I have horrendous stats in tanks I really like.  Also, why is it that most often when I get a new tank I achieve high stats (60+% win rate) until about 75 battles, then drop to around 50% over the next 30 or so battles?  My game play isn't different and I can see that battles become increasingly more difficult (low tier vs high tier battles, low win chance vs high win chance battles, etc..) but something has always been nagging me that WoT could simply have a backend system that automatically modifies tank parameters slightly on receiving the tank and also based on other parameters, like time, number of battles in the tank, win rate, etc. .  Have you ever found that a tank suddenly seems to bounce shots more frequently than usual and then, a couple weeks later, it's back to "normal"?  We all know about RNG... but what if that was this?  That RNG is a backend parameter modifier, there to always alter tanks to prevent some from dominating the field (except when the system chooses to do so for sales purpose).  Ultimately, the question is, how much is a player in control of their tank (skills) versus being subject to soft manipulation by a system that, per the developers themselves, is meant to bring players to about 50% win rate.   Of course I expect the very high stats players to call bull.  And likewise, I am exceptionally suspicious of very high stats players, those with 30k+ battles and win rates in excess of 70% regardless of the tank they're in.  Platooning with other high stats players will certainly affect stats quality as win chance increases, and always platooning with other very high stats players would help raise one's stats too.  But there are peripheral tanks in the game that contribute to a victory but rarely are the reason for them, like scouts and artilleries.  How can very high stats players have a 70% win rate in either of those in random pub games?  Something isn't quite right to me.  I don't want to disparage very high stats players (I often watch them play in pub matches once I'm dead, to learn from them) but I'm suspicious that some players either cheat and/or, more likely, have figured out how to beat the system.