World of Tanks balance

Above is my current overall result from the statistics screen of World of Tanks. Of 3,596 battles fought, I have won 1,748 and I have lost 1,748. For the math wizs among you who notice that there are 100 battles and 2% missing, those are the draws. My win loss ratio is perfectly balanced, and that after thousands of battles.

Recently a reader wrote me a mail complaining that he didn't see it like that. While his victories to defeat ratio was 50:50 like everybody else's (you can only derive in a major fashion from that by doing tank companies and clan battles), he was looking at the last line on that screen. He only counted battles as victories when he was still alive at the end of the battle. Dying early felt like a loss to him, even if his team won. He didn't care much for his team, they were random strangers to him anyway.

As you can see on my screen, my battle survival ratio is extremely low. That is because how likely you are to survive a battle depends strongly on the kind of tank you are driving. Artillery has a high survival rate, if your side wins. But personally I play mostly light tanks, nearly exclusively these days, and those tend to die in the first minutes of the battle. A scout simply isn't worth anything when staying behind and hiding. At most you might want to wait a minute or two before going scouting. If I manage a good scout run I might light up a tank or two for our artillery, or even kill an enemy artillery, before dying. But I next to never survive the battle. Of the 620 battles survived shown above only 4 were with scouts.

And I don't mind dying early with my scout in World of Tanks. I still believe that if I scouted well, I contributed to the eventual victory. Even if the people in my team are random strangers, many of which don't even share a common language with me (European servers), I still consider World of Tanks as a team sport. And I don't need to be always the hero, the most valuable player of my team for that to be fun. The obvious advantage of that is that I consider any win a win. And even if I played well but my team lost, I'm not unhappy with the result. I can only advise anybody who gets extremely unhappy when he loses or when he isn't an outstanding player in a win to stay away from balanced PvP games like World of Tanks. Losing gracefully is a lost art.