World of Tanks cheat: it's the economy stupid!

This is part 4 of a series, see part 3, 2 and 1 first.

World of tanks is a free to play game, with some pay-to-win elements. While gold ammo is indeed overpowered, it's expensive enough to keep most players from using it. Cosmetic nonsense is sold but no one cares and there are gold-only tanks but they aren't overpowered. The feature that brings the money to the developers is subscription. What does it do? Increases XP gain by 50%, which isn't really interesting if you are not rushing anywhere just play the game. Its other effect is increasing credit gains. Credits are important part of the game. You not only spend them on buying more tanks but on maintenance of your current tank. If you don't make enough credits, you can't continue playing with your favorite tank and must go to farm credits with lower tanks. Maintenance costs increase with tank tier. The wiki says that you get a few credits for joining the battle but most of your credits must be earned by damaging enemies, spotting them for others to damage and capturing objectives. These credits are multiplied by 1.5 if you have subscription. Tank maintenance means repairing the damaged tank, credit cost depends on HP lost in the battle and tank tier. You also have to replace used ammunition and consumables, top level ammo is pretty expensive. The maintenance cost can be higher than credits earned, ending the match with a net loss for you.

The subscription gives you no income at all, it multiplies the income you make by playing. If you did zero damage and zero spotting, it will multiply only the near-zero base reward. It means that there are two hard skill limits for every tank tier: the higher line is the free-play line. If you are better than this, you earn enough credits to maintain that tank without paying subscription. Divide this "skill number" by 1.5 and you get the scrub-line. If you are worse than that, you can't maintain your tank even if you pay subscription.

You see the catch? Subscription can only be sold to "average" players, the ones between the two lines. Those who are better than the free-play limit don't need subscription. They may buy one for convenience, especially if they want to get tier 10 tanks for clan matches but most of them won't pay a dime to the developer. Those who are below the scrub line have absolutely no reason to pay as it won't do them any good. They are practically paying for multiplying zero by 1.5. Gold tanks have higher multiplier but that still doesn't help if you have nothing to multiply, so bad players won't spend on gold tanks either.

The 1.5 multiplier places the two lines very close to each other. If we assume that the average (or median) player is halfway between the two lines, then the scrub-line is at 80% of the average and the free-line is at 120% (80*1.5 = 120). Let's approximate skill with kills. It's far from perfect but follow me please. The average player has 0.74 kills/battle. So if you have less than 0.6, you can't play in a tier that meant to be playable for an average player, even if you pay subscription. If you have more than 0.9 kills/battle, you can play that tier for free.

The most iconic gold tanks, the Type59 and the Löwe are at tier 8. Tier 8 is where people farm their credits, so an average player meant to have income in T8 assuming he pays subscription. I have 1.23 kill/battle with my Tier 8, way over the free-limit. It is 67% higher than the average, so I should earn more credits without subscription than an average player earns with subscription. I didn't earn anything. I continuously lost credits, about 100K over 40 games. The debriefing screens clearly shown that I could earn lot of credits if I'd have a subscription. But I should be earning now!

This is the purpose of the cheat. In order to make World of Tanks profitable, every player must be held between the scrub and the free limits. Someone outside the limits is a lost customer. The goal of the cheat is not to give you losses, it's not to deny you kills, it is to deny you income over the limit. Similarly it's not about to boost a horrible player to wins or kills, it is to give him credits to have something to multiply. You can have significantly higher winrate than 50%. You can increase your XP gain. You can get medals. But you can't earn significantly more or less credits than the average player. Since credits come from dealing damage, the game needs to mess with your damage. Since winners survive and losers don't, in order to give you maintenance cost, the game needs to mess with your winrate. Also to give others damage, you need to get damaged. What you experience during battles is a by-product of the cheat that aims to set your "proper" income. This is why gold ammo is now available for credits: since it cannot earn its price, even with ideal hit, the algorithm can't care less if you increase your winrate with it, you are losing credits.

Please look at these two income sections. They were made when 300 gold was given for changing your password, so we had a 1-day subscription. There was also an event, giving 15000 credits for a medal. Without event and subscription my girlfriend earned -5587 credits while I earned -2361. Maybe we just weren't good enough on this battle. I mean our performance could easily be worse than 1.2x the average, therefore did not deserve income. Maybe this is average play: On this battle each of us damaged more than the rest of the team combined. With subscription it earned lot of credits. Without it, negative. I'm of course not saying we always played like this. It would be OK to gain credits on this and still lose on average. But we lost credits even when we had the above performance. You can literally do miracles and still lose credits on the same battle where drooling morons gain credits - with subscription.

We know what the cheat wants. We know how does it work. And we know for sure that every cheat can be exploited. Tomorrow you will see how can you double your XP gain, triple your credit gain, and pull awesome stunts (like that unkillable T-50-2) at the cost of making the battle a pain to everyone else involved.


PS: I'm obviously not saying that the developer shouldn't earn money or should allow anyone to use its service for free. The problem is that WoT officially allows you to play the game fully for free, but makes it impossible via a cheat. Officially you can earn credits with a T10 if you play good enough. Practically, you can't even do that with a Tier 8 when you are just becoming Ace Tanker.