Wargaming CEO: "We Were A Little Arrogant"; 2017 Focus Is On World of Tanks
2015's Rubicon update for World of Tanks was, to put it mildly, a disaster. The dev team admitted to as much in a video last year, and at last week's GDC, the CEO agreed -- and took the blame for the game's recent struggles.
In an interview with Polygon, Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi opened up about some of his decision-making, which led to the Rubicon not-quite-a-disaster:
"We were a little arrogant, let's say, three years ago. We were thinking we know everything that our players need without talking intensively to them ourselves. It turned into — I wouldn't call it a disaster, but we hit the wall at some point."
As a result, Kislyi has made some changes, reshuffling the World of Tanks team and allowing World of Warplanes and World of Warships to go their own way, development-wise. "I was pushing all those teams to literally copy World of Tanks," he said.
For 2017, Kislyi will give those franchises space while also looking to breathe new life into Wargaming's flagship title, with a graphics engine rebuild scheduled to launch in August.
"We realize that World of Tanks can last forever. But we have to prepare for a very long winter. The winter is coming, and it will not go away. That’s a good problem to have. So the approach should be that we’re making the game to be built like the pyramids, for centuries or millennia."
"Winter is coming" and you need a monument to last for millennia? Hmm...
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Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
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I play WoT heavily in EU. It is horrible. (I still play it for reasons unknown). They have a huge bot problem. And a huge match making problem and a huge unbalance issue based on current tanks. Their response was to give us more light tanks...No word on nerfing current tanks, if they do that, they lose the last half of kids that paid for them. But it sadly is what the game needs, so until then give people more light tanks (your role is literally not to shoot but sit and spot...and you are fodder end game). Oh, and lets cut up the tier match making more...SIGH. Still taking the short easy route.
They need match making based on performance and skill pools like in other games that rank you up when you do good, and rank you down in pools when you do bad, making everyone happily playing against a pool of like skilled players. But nope. Just divide and give more low tier classes.
EU is instant matches when I hit PLAY. In US, it takes an average of 2 min to find a match on high days, 5min on low hours, it has HEMORAGED players. "Will be around forever"....yeah but...your fans wont. And when it takes 1 hour to find a match, just pull plug....oh yeah, Woplanes, boats etc...kind of left in the dust XD
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As a side note: recently I've noticed that whenever I see that an article got new comments I don't think "ooh, a chance to have an intelligent conversation with fellow MMO fans" anymore. Instead I think "okay, I know exactly who posted and what he posted, Ima avoid that article like a plague from now on". That's not a healthy situation if you ask me. Maybe it's time to do something about it.