Don't even try to start this game.....

I agree, this game is a bad game and its success is almost, if not fully, due to the fact that there isn't really any other "arcade-y" mmo tank shooter on the internet, for now it's this or nothing, but with the release of War Thunder: Tanks that is going to change and I believe the competition will force both games to improve themselves greatly or fall to the side and be forgotten. World of Tanks problems stem mostly from its mechanics many of which are either poorly explained, poorly understood by its community or entirely unnecessary wastes of time. The XP system is broken, by this I mean it serves no discernible use other than artificially lengthening and padding the gameplay, it CAN be directly used to improve your crew at an accelerated rate after unlocking that ability through excessive grinding but with crew experience not being transferable to new tanks it makes this a relevant option only if you particularly enjoy a specific tank, NOT to reduce the grind and tediousness of tanks you're only playing because the game promises to "eventually" be good at a later date. Instead, the XP earned in matches is used as a third form of currency in game. See the game has for all practical purposes 3 forms of currency, premium gold which is is bought with real money and Silver Credits and XP are both earned through playing matches. Now the problem arises with the latter two, to explain the problem I'll use an analogy: Lets say that you went to the market to buy a soda, but upon arriving to the counter the clerk asks you to pay 1/4 of the soda in pesos and 3/4 of it in dollars, you'd look at him rather angrily and question both his intelligence and motives for doing this. Well, that's World of Tanks, XP is used almost entirely for unlocking equipment and the game effectively forces you to buy things and grind (further artificially increasing game time) twice. This isn't what I would call a recipe for good gameplay, I mean, an entire section of the game (XP earning) could be eliminated from it and nothing negative at all would happen, it's entirely unnecessary and quite frankly a bit stupid and it is inexcusable having this in place at such a late stage of development. Oh, and I forgot to mention, XP is non-transferable between vehicles unless you have unlocked every equipment node in a vehicles tech tree making that vehicle Elite AND are prepared to pay a gold transaction fee (nice money making scheme guys), so you WILL be grinding on tanks you absolutely hate, just because. Matchmaking is something that has been a problem throughout the games development and continues to be so, rather than taking XP earning into consideration (hey Wargaming, there's a GOOD use for XP *wink* *wink*) the MM relies mostly on Tiers, this will often result in tanks that simply don't have anything to do in the battle, IE tanks too light to take damage, too slow or big to stay out of fire, with a gun that can't pen or is too inaccurate for sniping and a radio that doesn't allow them to scout properly all because they are the same tier and (supposedly) similar in usage to its enemy counterparts. The game also has a major flaw seen almost everywhere these days and, sadly, mostly accepted by present audiences, something I call "eventually good syndrome", games that present powerups (in this case equipment) that promise that once you get them the game will be good but until then will be boring, bland and frustrating. This isn't good gameplay and is in my opinion, a dishonest, greedy and unimaginative way to hook users (mainly young ones) on to your game through tedious grinding. The maps are also dull and boring after a few days, with 33 maps you would think that you'd have a good selection and variety going but there's only really three types of maps, closed, mixed and open and they're all fairly small with the largest maps being 1000m x 1000m seriously limiting the amount of tactics that can be applied and making matches repetitive and boring with teams continually fighting for the same strategic points usually in the same manner. Moreover, with matches lasting a fairly short amount of time you will likely see most maps within your first three days of grinding, I say likely because WoT does not have ANY map choosing feature. Maps like matches are picked and issued to your tank entirely at random with no input from you whatsoever, despite this WoT has included a camo option for your tank which runs you a few hundred thousand credits for a 1 week paint-job to a few gold for a permanent one, there are two camo options, summer camo and winter camo, and each only reduces your visibility by 5% in the environment it is meant for, but once again, you can't choose your environment. The game also punishes you for a team effort. Regardless of how well YOU do, both your win percentage and earnings will suffer if the team (which you had no hand in picking) you're on is bad. Rather than rewarding you for being on a bad team and still earning 5 kills the game will punish you for it and at higher tiers wont even give you enough money to repair the tank as well as giving you a pathetic amount of XP. This is exceedingly frustrating on weekends when many younger and inexperienced players join the servers and will frequently lead to losing streaks within the game that are not really your fault but for which you will get punished anyway. Now, I understand why they did this, it is after all a team based game and they are trying to reinforce that concept, the problem is that it's done in a clumsy and heavy handed way, it's done in a manner similar to a certain FPS, where you're given generic objective X and sent on your way and if you don't work together you all lose, the problem is that those FPS's are generally not as team driven as one would think and most definitively not as team reliant as WoT is, so an improvement of some kind is sorely needed. The prices(credit and XP) for both items and tanks are also excessive given what was just stated about not being able to pick your teams and it seriously affecting earning potential. With Tier 6 tanks costing upwards of 900K credits and 27-30K XP to purchase and Tier 10 being the last tier of tank you can see that things get pricey (and grindy) fast, while this might not seem like a great deal to very good players that regularly get 4-5 kills per match and hardly ever get killed meaning they keep all their winnings, it is quite a bit to players that have been playing for 2 weeks or less are lucky to get 2 kills in a game, and have to repair their tank almost every match. This really seems like yet another tactic to artificially pad the game with additional "playability" and try to seduce the player into purchasing a premium account. On the whole I would recommend trying WoT out just to see if you like the genre then staying as far away from it as possible until some serious competition shows up that forces them to improve gameplay, because as things are right now the game is stagnating.