Just now, for instance, when, after having had a decent-ish match on Himmelsdorf, my Loltraktor and I headed over to Province and lasted all of 35 seconds.

In fairness, that wasn't a complete "hang on, why did I just explode?" moment like several other games I've had in Norbert (that's what I call my Loltraktor don't judge me) - I exploded because the guy I was aiming at beat my aiming time. He was shooting at the front of my tank, though, so that he was still able to one-shot me is a bit nonplussing.

Interestingly, one of the other tanks on my team was a bit of a rock star and managed to win the match anyway, despite the rest of us having been of no use to man nor beast.

Reinforcing my "you can be a complete hump and still progress, albeit slowly" point from elsewhere, I've managed to elite Norbert (n.b. that means researching everything reachable from the tank in the tech tree, including both the upgraded equipment available and the tanks it leads to) despite never yet having survived a game. (I almost did in that one Himmelsdorf match, but somebody came out of a side street and blew me up in that few-second grace period between "my team won by capping" and "the tanks stopped working". Nrf.) Admittedly, the Tier I grind is absurdly short - research XP costs are very low down there and I had a significant leg up in the form of the 300 free XP you get for completing the tutorial - but still. If even a scrub like me can elite a tank without spending all week at it, it's not that insane to envision someone who sucks at the game as much as me, but is more patient, getting to Tier X of, say, the German heavy tank line eventually.

And that doesn't even take into account the fact that if I felt like, say, jumping into a Tier VIII game in World of Warships two minutes from now, all I would actually have to do is go to the wargaming.net Premium Shop and give them 50 or so United States dollars for a Takao-class heavy cruiser (which for some odd reason they have labeled as Atago, the second ship in the class, in the game).

(Please note that I might do that anyway, just because I like collecting things, but if I did I wouldn't feel right actually using the ship to inflict myself on real Tier VIII players. I'd just keep her in my port and admire her from time to time. :)

Speaking of which, I just noticed that the Großtraktor is for sale this weekend in the WoT wing of the Premium Shop. It's Norbert's big brother. I might have to get in on that.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That sounds like you might have fallen prey to the other big problem with WoT- premium ammo. Costing 1 (or more) real money tokens* per shot, it's 25-50% stronger than normal ammo, and it's usually the answer to the question "why the hell is that guy hitting so much harder than I am with the same tank?"
*you can buy this ammo with credits as well, but it costs ~400x as much credits, which will empty even the most skillful player's reserves in a hurry.

>(I almost did
>in that one Himmelsdorf match, but somebody came out of a side street
>and blew me up in that few-second grace period between "my team won by
>capping" and "the tanks stopped working". Nrf.)

Don't feel bad- at least you weren't the guy with all the capture points who stuck his nose out and got that treatment.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

For the most part, they use the Kantai Collection designation for most of the IJN ships, not the superior Arpeggio ones.

... huh? KanColle doesn't call it the Atago class either. The heck are you talking about?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Also.. War Gaming logic, i gave up trying to even ATTEMPT to understand it.

Well... yeah, I just don't see how that specifically connects to KanColle. Atago is in Arpeggio of Blue Steel too, she just didn't appear in the TV series, and there's a KanColle incarnation of Takao as well. (And Maya and Chōkai, for that matter.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, I have seen it speculated that they called that particular one Atago as a hedge against introducing the Takao class (with slightly different stats, perhaps?) as a non-premium ship at some future date. That's only a guess (and not even my guess), though. (The Tenryū class originally appeared in the closed beta under the name Tatsuta, which was the second ship of that class, but that appears to have just been someone at Wargaming not paying attention, because it quietly got fixed in a patch without changing anything else about it.)

It's at least somewhat plausible, IMO, since there's plenty of precedent in World of Tanks for parallel tech lines - many of the national tech trees have more than one line of tank destroyers, or heavy tanks, or what have you - so as World of Warships matures, I wouldn't be very surprised to see something similar developing there. Admittedly, ships required heavier industry and whatnot than armored vehicles, and so didn't exist in quite the same sort of profusion of types, but they've already dipped into the "only existed on paper" realm with a few of the Tier X ships, so... who knows.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

They do that. The 'Gremyashchiy'-class, for instance, was actually named the Gnevny-class, and the ship wasn't even the first, and it wasn't that notable among the 28 Gnevny that were made.
And, of course, the HMS Warspite was of the Queen Elizabeth-class, and the second of 5 ships.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Well, notable enough that he has one of only two individual Wikipedia pages held by ships of that class (the other being Rekordniy, which is mostly notable for having been sold to the Red Chinese in the '50s). And heck, it appears that people only call it the Gnevny class because Gnevny was the first one; officially - as is so often the way with Soviet hardware, since the Soviets named their equipment like accountants - it was just the Project 7 class.

As and if the Soviet tech tree develops in World of Warships, they're going to have a lot of problems of that kind, i.e., if they do name the Soviet ships after classes, that tech tree is just going to be a mass of meaningless project numbers. It'll be like the American tech tree in World of Tanks, where almost everything is either Msomething or Tsomething. :)

>And, of course, the HMS Warspite was of the Queen Elizabeth-class, and
>the second of 5 ships.

She was at least the most storied of her class, though (which lends some credence to the theory that premium ships are meant to represent individual vessels).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, yeah, I know...but, having read that page...there isn't really much of anything THERE. I mean, it's a lukewarm list with nothing particularly notable in it.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

That seems to be par for the course for Wargaming- take the Myogi for example, which at best is one of a series of concept sketches for the Kongo. Much of the German tank line in WoT likewise consists of "crazy things we found on an engineer's wishlist during the Great Spring Cleaning of 1945".

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

He'd only be in real danger from "Green_Elf" or similarly named players.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

My actual name in WOT is cyber_pagan, just in case you wonder who killed you :)

******************************
I'm really here, but I'm not here, really.
******************************

This reminds me, as an aside, that I love seeing a particular kind of player name in high-tier replays: the kind that that imply a certain hilarious confidence in that player as a newcomer. I mean, imagine seeing KingTigerLord2000 back in his first Tier I match. So entertainingly sure of himself as he potters around in his Loltraktor. So destined for disappointment when he at last reaches Tier VIII and discovers that a) that's not the correct translation of Königstiger; and b) it's not even called the Königstiger anyway in World of Tanks, it's just the Tiger II. :)

(And that's not even the correct name for it either; it was really just the Tiger Ausführung B.)

Nobody's a Carnage_God at Tier I, is all I'm saying. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Too little time studying military history, too much time playing C&C Generals.

Only wish I had a screen of that tank alongside...well, any other tank in the game. It's at least three times larger. Overcompensation in spades.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

Japanese. Almost completely fictional, of course - the IJA never had heavy tanks, nor indeed even really terrific interest in them - but what the hey, World of Tanks.

>One of the players that sent videos in, is called
>'Gargantua', spelling uncertain.
>This amuses me to no end, as, as I understand it, everyone starts at
>the Tier 1 light tanks and, no matter nationality...gargantuan, they
>ain't. Even the biggest among them is barely larger than a Cadillac
>Escalade.

To be fair, maybe it's a reference to The War of the Gargantuas. But yeah, that's the kind of thing I mean. Players with ridiculously badass names - even if they live up to them in latter-day replays, it's fun to picture them lugging those names around in their fumbling larval stage and trying to live down their optimistic decisions. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Duh. Japanese. Sorry, I DID know that. Think it was the OTHER recent WoT-Jingles-Vid, where-in there WAS a new Chinese tank. Well, Chinese-with-American-Parts tank.

Speaking of 'not actually HAVING tanks but still appearing in WoT', I have to wonder what'll happen with the Czeckoslovakian tanks that I heard might be coming. If there's just a flag on tanks from other nations, as it were...fine. If they're trying to somehow finagle an entire line of tanks that were distinctly Czech...that, as far as I know and understand, would require medication-worthy flights of fantasy.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

A number of the existing tanks in the German tech tree are actually Czech in origin (most notably the Panzer 38t and its various dervatives), so there may be duplications (à la the British tanks that first appeared in the Soviet tech tree under Lend-Lease). As for the rest, I don't know. Czechoslovakia didn't have a functioning army (or even really exist as a country) for much of the time period World of Tanks loosely corresponds with. Perhaps they had Early Cold War tanks of their own, though, to go along with entries like the US Patton series, the (West) German Leopard, and so on? No idea. Cold War Military Technologies of the Eastern Bloc Outside the USSR is not one of my areas of expertise. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.