World of Tanks - Lessons To Be Learned

So we talked about how World of Tanks and Eve Online are very different and offer very different types of vehicular PvP. Now we're going talk about what each game can learn from the other.

World of Tanks

To be fair, this is a relatively young game (1 year) and I have not participated in the Clan Wars part of the game yet, so my advice is mostly centered on the Random Battles and platoons.

If you look at the wiki, you can see the developers at Wargaming.Net have a lot planned for the future (see left). That's good because while the variety of maps, tanks types, and tiers gives lots of options for players, I can see the monotony of random battles, even with friends, eventually setting in. Variety of game play is the spice of life in Eve and WoT would be well advised to offer more variety.

Another thing is the interface. If I have a module in Eve and I want to compare its stats to modules of the same type but different tier (i.e. metalevel), all I need to do is click a single button. World of Tanks makes it not real easy to quickly see if I want to upgrade to the next gun. Also, some windows are modal (like the tech tree or market) and if I want to quickly check something in my hanger I have to close the window I have open. Modal windows suck.

Finally, its cool that WoT allows modding. I have a mod installed that gives me more indication of what the tanks are with colour codes for the different classes and the tier number on it so there is no need to memorize every tank of every faction right away. But some mods have been developed that allow player to reskin tanks to make them look different and some skins are done such to highlight specific hit areas on each tank so players can aim more precisely for vulnerable spots on their opponents.

Now I'm in a quandry: my mod is designed to help me remember the tanks I'm facing and thus improves my gameplay (e.g aim for lower tier tank I can hurt instead of higher ones, etc) and the skinning mod is designed to help a player find and remember the vulnerable spots on enemy tanks to improve their gameplay. Why is the former OK if the latter gives me feelings of a line being crossed?

Perhaps Eve has the right of it: prohibit modding to make sure players have as much of an even playing field as possible in terms of the client.

Eve Online

Eve needs arena PvP. Full stop.

It boggles the mind that this simple game play mode has never been added to Eve's feature set. Even worse, it was considered and technically sound a few expansions ago but cut because some people at CCP felt it didn't work for the game. I think that is poppycock but let's play devil's advocate and ask ourselves why arenas would not work in Eve.

1) Safe Space - By their nature, in order for arenas to provide an even playing field for the teams then outside interference must be disallowed. However, in Eve no one can hide completely safely in space, that is to say, that everyone can go everywhere in theory. These two concepts cannot exist together.

2) Lower PvP Population in Low/Null sec - Arenas would provide easy access PvP and thus cause a number of pilots to not bother with frustrating roaming to find targets when willing targets are available. As fewer people choose to roam, fewer targets present themselves for those that do.

3) Gaming the system - Eve players are notorious min-maxers and any system put in place to try and find even matchups would quickly get disassembled and analyzed to find the perfect combination to give an advantage, making casual arena players quickly loose interest as they can't compete with the "hackers"

To which I respond, bullcrap. (I realize this is making a strawman and then beating up on him, but since no official explanation was offered to the general public as to why arenas don't work, I'm going to do this. People can correct me in the comments and I will re-evaluate my position then.)

Docked in stations players are completely safe. Sure they may not be doing anything in a space ship but they can market PvP from there, including in null sec causing great havoc to enemy logistics. The casual PvP population in low and null sec is already low and the players most interested in arena type combat (assuming moderate consequences and fast turnover) are players not interested in long-ass roams and big risks anyways. In other words, the players most likely to participate in arena combat are players that would otherwise be tempted to log out and do something else, like World of Tanks.

Now I could go on to how I would design and implement an arena combat system in Eve much like Seismic Stan did in his latest blog post, and I hope other bloggers take this topic and run with it in a Blog Banter type idea (hint hint), but suffice to say that I think something needs to exist to provide casual quick PvP in Eve to keep players with short time scales in the game, to provide a stepping stone between PvE combat training and PvP combat training, and actual full on PvP combat in low and null sec (and high sec wars).