Exercise 4: Writing About Visuals
Alex Porter
World of Tanks Player Statistics 2011-2013
Within the past three years the World of Tanks community has grown significantly in every way. They are
quickly becoming a worldwide known game with servers on every main continent of the globe. With the
massive increase in players, it is neat to note into what tank class players have been playing most and into what
tank they have chosen to play the most. The game is a player versus player format, and if you want to excel in
matches, it helps to know what tanks players have been using most so then you’ll have a good idea as to what
you will face when you get onto the virtual battlefield.
Breakdown of tank classes
In the game World of Tanks, you will choose a specific class of tanks to use. Depending on the tank class you
choose, your game play style will be different. Now if we take a look at the profile of the classes you will see
why.
To get into the play styles of each class would be arduous and not necessarily needed for the purpose of this
document. All you really need to know is that the light tanks are lightly armored scouts tanks. The medium
tanks are fairly armored, moderately fast, main battle tanks. The heavy tanks are heavily armored, hard hitting
tanks that can tank a ton of abuse from the enemy and then serve it right back. The tank destroyers are just that,
they destroy tanks, often by hiding in wait to ambush other tanks with a powerful gun. They are typically used
in defense of the friendly base. The self-propelled guns (SPG), also known as artillery, are like the angel of
death in that; it can precisely drop a massive round onto the top of any spotted tank. Artillery can sit back far
away from battle and support the main push.
Now by briefly understanding the
tank classes, you can begin to pick
up on players play styles just by
looking at what class they like to
use. Take for example figure 1.
We can see here that a majority of
this player’s matches are played
with heavy tanks. So we can
assume that they like to be the
main force behind the push and
deal back mass amounts of
damage to the enemy. You can
narrow down the understanding of
a player even more just by
looking at what particular he has
done the most battles in.
Figure 1: Break down of number of games played in each particular tank class.
Source: http://worldoftanks.com/community/accounts/1000599417-NorthernPorter/
Breakdown of the heavy tank class
When you take a look at a class on its own, it is best to look at all the tanks of that class that are in same tier.
This is because the game is set up upon tiers from one to ten. The tiers increase by difficulty, so tier one will
have very easy tanks to battle, while tier ten will have very difficult tanks to battle. So in order to get a better
understanding of this player’s play styles, we need to break apart the heavy class and see which one particular
heavy tank he plays to really understand. This is because each tank of that tier class has their differences, and
areas which they excel in better than the others. So by looking at figure 2 we can see that, this player has had
Figure 2: Shows how many battles the player has battle in each particular tier 8 heavy tank.
Source: http://worldoftanks.com/community/accounts/1000599417-NorthernPorter/
the most battles in his Tiger II. Now by understanding that the Tiger II is a big heavy tank that is very well
armored, very accurate, and has a very powerful gun, it would be safe to say that this players has a very precise
well calculated push when going into battle. He would not be one to charge in blasting at everything he sees,
nor would he be one to sit and wait for the enemy to make a mistake. But rather he would probably be one to
take his time to make sure he has a good shot and only exposing himself to fire in order to cause the enemy to
drop back. That is another thing about the Tiger II; it tends to have a high fear factor. It is a very intimidating
tank to come up against and not many players want to take on one directly.
So in conclusion, we can see that by observing what tank a player plays most we can better understand the play
style of that player. Leading to fairly accurate prediction of how best to counter the players attack or defense
and giving you the best advantage for success.