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

Lert:   That's just a difference in balance. AMX 38 and D2 are virtual Maus's when fighting their respective tier, but really struggle against higher tier tanks. Medium III can punch above its weight but is toast the moment it's spotted. When fighting tier 3's I'd much rather be in an AMX 38 than in a Medium 3. IMO the problem with the Medium 3 is the size (thus lack of camo) combined with the lack of viewrange and armor that gets full-pen'd by howitzers and autocannons alike means that it simply has no survivability at all. AMX 38 and D2 have a lot of survivability - derps only do partial damage and they're virtually autocannon-proof; meaning that only single-shot high-pen weapons can really hurt them. Unlike medium 3, where everything hurts it for full damage.  

Lert:   I addressed that in my OP. Yeah I might have gotten lucky with the MM spread, but my point was that tier 3's don't fight against tier 5's "all the time" as some people claim. Far from it. Even in your example, it's half or less than half the battles vs tier 5's. As for mercy MM, if that exists at all, it doesn't last for 50 battles. You will find in my OP that the 4th battle was my first tier 5 one, so if any mercy MM existed at all, it had ran out by then.  

Lert:   Overall? No. Tier 3 is where you start finding tanks that punch above their weight very well and can hold their own vs tier 5 when played smartly. Maybe some T3 tanks deserve pref MM, but some certainly don't. I might argue for a rebalancing of tier 3 by this metric, some tanks getting pref MM (tier 4 max) and some not (tier 5 max) but that would take a whole lot of balancing and work that WG isn't going to put into tier 3. Not at this stage of the game.