Lert's tier 3 challenge, final stats, conclusion and musings about gamepl...

Lert: Many forum regulars will be familiar with my tier 3 challenge that I just finished. If you aren't, here's what the challenge was about, in a few words:   To see if an experienced player in a newbie's shoes could do well in a tier 3 tank.   For this purpose I got a Medium III, a tank generally - ... not loved by the majority of players, upgraded it to elite status, dropped a 75% crew in, put some small consumables on and got to fighting 50 battles. There was no equipment and no camo paint on the tank. Reason being that beginners at tier 3 wouldn't bother with that kind of stuff to begin with.   Here are the final results:       Battles played: 50 Win rate: 50% Mastery: Ace*3 DPG: 239 Survival rate: 8% APCR fired: 27 Battles with a credit loss (assuming standard account): 5 Top tier battles: 27 Battles vs tier 4: 8 Battles vs tier 5: 15 Net profit made (assuming standard account): 175551   "You did the challenge wrong, because "   Yeah? Go do your own challenge then, following your own rules.   Let me get this thing out of the way:   Before I started this challenge I thought that it would be easy. That 'I would show them how powerful a tier 3 with a good gun could be' and that I was going to own face and murder tier 5's.   I was mistaken. I was wrong.   Doing this challenge made me realize a few things. One of which that - while I do keep a few low tier tanks around for fun - they are all cherry picked tanks that I enjoy, decked out to the brim with equipment worth dozens of times more credits than the tank, and crews that wouldn't be out of place in a tier 10. Yeah, it's easy to 'matter' in a tier 3 if you stack the deck in your favor. Doing it in a POS that newbies need to grind through with a ghetto crew and no equipment? Not so much.   As such, I want to extend my apology to various people who have recently posted "my tier 3 is useless vs tier 5's! I can't do anything!" type threads in which I have been rude to them. Because I have. I thought they were just whining, because my experience of playing tier 3 is in fully equipped, cherrypicked tanks with mighty crews.   As such, I am sorry.   So what are my conclusions?   Can a tier 3 matter vs tier 5's?   Without stacking the favors with hundreds of thousands of credits worth of equipment and a phat l33t crew? Yes. It is possible. Same way it is possible to drive on the highway and get hit by a truck. Same way it is possible to win the lottery. It's possible and the law of averages guarantees that it'll happen every now and then, but don't count on it happening to you a lot.   What of those complaints that a tier 3 has to fight tier 5 all the time, every time?   Absolute bullcrap. Out of 50 battles, I had only 15 battles vs tier 5's. And I didn't even find the 5's in every one of those 15 battles. Sometimes the 3's murdered me before I got that far. I got 8 battles vs tier 4's and 27 battles where I was top tier. Maybe I got lucky with MM - it's all possible - but I refuse to believe that tier 3's have to fight tier 5's 'all the time and 'never get top tier'. One possibility that remains though is that because a tier 3 takes so short a time and so few battles to grind through that you might get an unlucky MM streak and fight the majority of your battles vs tier 5's, but that's a problem with small sample size of battles in a short grind, not the tier of tank.   What of those complaints that you can't make a profit with APCR shells?   Well, that depends on how many you fire, doesn't it. If you fire them all day erry day, yeah, you're going to lose money. If you pick when to fire them and at what targets to fire them, you might get a small loss in credits for some individual matches, but overall run a fat profit at this tier. Over my 50 battles, I would've earned 175551 credits had I been on standard account. Being as I have a premium account, the net profit margin is probably double that. I fired 27 APCR over 50 battles, that's just over 1/2 premium shell per battle.   And that of sealclubbers ruining low tier gameplay by the dozens?   Bullcrap as well. Sealclubbers are there ofcourse, but most likely no more than one or two per match, if that. Sometimes a bit more, oftentimes less. And the chances are about equal that they're on your team as opposed to the enemy team. I personally find sealclubbing a non-problem.   So what's my opinion on the medium III?   Piece of crap. No viewrange, no camo, ok pen, anemic damage, decent top speed and mobility, no functional armor. My armor use efficiency stat for this challenge is 0.05%. This means that along 4080 damage received (50 battles * 272 average damage taken) I've bounced maybe one or two Pz I C shells. The main problem with this tank though is that the size, speed and armor dictate a pop-out-and-shoot playstyle, minimizing exposure - but the rapid fire DPM style gun relies on a lot of exposure to do its damage. The complete package asks for a sniping role, but you can't affect the battle very much while sniping all the time. Unless you get stuck in, you're going to be irrelevant. Especially at these lower tiers where gameplay is frantic and fast. I honestly don't see how this tank is in any way, shape or form the equal of a Pz II G.   Do I think the +2 spread tier 3's get is too much?   Had you asked me this before I started the challenge my answer would have been unequivocally 'no'. I was convinced the spread was fine and people just needed to stop whining and step up to the challenge, and anyone who quit the game over the tier spread at tier 3 was just a quitter and a whiner. However, as I explained before, that was out of the mindset of someone who played low tiers with cherrypicked, fully equipped tanks   Now? I'm not so sure anymore.   Some tier 3 tanks will do fine vs tier 5's (Pz I C, Pz II G, T82 ... ) provided you alter your playstyle to fit the situation, but some other tier 3's do need help. It's easy to say 'flank' or 'scout', but the situation and the tank need to allow that. The hitpoint disparity is also simply enormous between 3's and 5's.   But what is the main problem?   Being effective in a tier 3 vs a tier 5 requires skill and patience. It requires knowledge of the map and of gameplay mechanics. But even those are not a guarantee that it's going to work every time, and there remains a big difference between being effective, and feeling effective. I had 6 or 7 matches or so where I was effective. But I had only 2 or 3 where I felt effective.   A newbie just passing through tier 3 on his way to his first tier 4? He's not going to feel effective. And that's very demoralizing. It's very easy to say 'flank' or 'scout', but unless he steps up his game and learns how to do those things, it's not going to help him feel any better. And what do people do who feel ineffective and useless in a game?   Maybe getting through tier 3 is a 'rite of passage' sort of deal. Maybe getting your first tier 4 is like 'good boy, you stuck with it and persevered. You're not a quitter'. Followed closely by 'Here. A tier 6 battle for you to fight in'.   What would be a possible solution for this?   I honestly don't know. It's less a product of the MM spread and more a product of players not being knowledgeable enough to make a difference and experienced enough to know when they did. I never felt 'powerful' in my medium III, even with all my experience and knowledge. I can only imagine how a newbie would feel.   Would limiting MM to +/- 1 help? I don't think so. You're still going to get torn to shreds for making a mistake. Some tanks like the Medium III could fight only their own tier and still get their faces pushed in by everything from derps that usually full pen and autocannons that just tear you to ribbons while other tier 3's would be hilariously OP if they only fought their own tier (T-127, Pz I C, T82, Pz II G, etc ... ) I can't think of a single solution that would help with the biggest problem this game has, for beginning players:   Driving a tank is supposed to fulfill a power fantasy. At these tiers, it doesn't.   And that is a far broader problem than I have the wisdom to even try and solve.