World of Tanks Improving Win Rate Guide

World of Tanks Improving Win Rate Guide by montanakennedy

We have all seen the swinging ePeens in the forum and in chat: “That sounds great – what with your XX% win rate…”

If you get grumpy when you lose, when you see that someone else has a higher win rate, and when you see your win rate drop or your loss rate go up, take heart! Just by coming to the forums, it shows you want to get better.

And, yes, while this is a TEAM game, a team is made of individuals. If you have a great pitcher and hitters, what happens if the infield keeps committing errors? If your garage band sounds really good, but the drummer keeps speeding up and the bass player forgets the chord changes, what do you do? These individuals practice and improve or they make the team fail. If the individual improves, the team improves.

The key here is that the skill of the individual can swing the battle. I would bet that, no matter your ability, you can point to an act you took, on purpose, that positively affected the battle.

• You pulled back from the main thrust to bolster the flank and ended up as the sole survivor on that flank, having finished the last enemy there.
• You sacrificed yourself to block a bridge or narrow, provide a benchrest for an ally, reset a cap, or just held up an enemy for the 5-10 seconds your team needed.
• Saw a scout retreating from one lane so you displaced to the alternate and popped him before he got to your arty.

(Please post examples of how you or others made a conscious decision that positively affected the battle)

So, What will it take to increase my win rate?

Practice. Lots and lots of practice.
This sounds like a flippant answer to your question, but it is serious and no different from anything else you want to get better at. If you play baseball/softball, are learning guitar, shoot trap, tag railroad cars, surf, shoot pool, ski, throw darts, play hockey, or anything else that is a learned skill and want to get better, you have to practice. But it goes beyond that.

You have to be practicing while being consciously aware of what you are doing and WHY you are doing it. If you pick up a guitar and just start thrashing through some chords or playing scale just because you had to (without getting the best tone, accurate fingering, etc.), did you get better? no. If you go to the driving range for a bucket of “grip it and rip it”, do you get better? no. Why do you think that hitting “Battle” and heading toward a choke point with no intent other than to blow up stuff will help you?

Have a Goal
Go to one of the various stats analysis sites and take a look at how you are currently doing.

• Tank Tracker – accesses your WoT profile
• WoT Dossier Tool – upload your cache file
• Stats Performance and Analyzer page – upload your cache file
• WoT Logger 2 – produces a battle report following each battle
• WoTStats for Greasemonkey – Greasemonkey is a script-running add-on for Firefox.
• WoT-News Extended Player Statistics

The benefit of Tank Tracker and the Dossier Tool at this point is that you can see where you are against others. The Stats Performance and Analyzer allows you to track your progress over time through the use of charts. The information becomes more useful with more uploads of your dossier. I have not used the WoT Logger, but the selection of charts looks interesting and the comments appear positive. WoTStats shows more information on your Profile screen. It allows the user to save a moment in time and then provides stats from that benchmark.

The tool at WoT-News tells you much of the same information available elsewhere, but it also tells you where you rank on the server by percentile. It also has this stat compared to the top players on the server. Unfortunately, it does not tell you what the criteria is for the “Server TOP” sample size. For example, as of this update, I have more battles than 98.1% of those on the server, but only 27.8% of those in the “Server TOP”.

Now that you have started to look at where you sit, find something that you don’t like (other than W/L) and want to improve. I saw an apparent correlation between my hit percentage and my win rate, so I started working on that. In each battle, I tried to shoot better instead of shooting faster. As I did that, my hit rate increased. There was a cascade effect. As hit rate went up, so did damage caused, XP earned, time in battle, and, yes, Win Rate.

This isn’t just when I am top tank (I am RARELY top tank). I have started to notice now that when I get lazy and start snapping shots, I tend to lose.

Learn Your Tank
Well, maybe this should be “Learn to Enjoy Your Tank” – and expand it to “Learn to Enjoy the Map”

How often have you gone into a battle and seen someone type a screed about how they hate the tank they are in, the map they are on, etc.? My question: “Why are you in that tank, then? (or playing the game)” I understand the need to drive crap tanks to grind out a tier (two words: AMX 40). It may not be the best experience in-game, but it can be a learning experience for you.

Before taking out any tank, ask what makes it a fun tank for you. Is it the penetration on the gun? Is it the stealth attacks? Is it the Pew-Pew Raider aspect of the track? Is it because you get to pwn n00bs? I won’t judge. If you can’t figure this out, learn the tank and figure out what it does best. It may require a change in game style, though.

Example 1:
Many people HATE the M3 Lee. Personally, I loved it – WHEN I learned the idiosyncrasies of the track (it really was a crap tank, IRL). As a TD, it works. It has decent speed, a fast rate of turn, and the front armor is crazy bouncy. The winning aspect of it? People (especially the enemy) have no expectations of it being effective. That means that you have surprise on your side. Play it well and you can make folks seriously QQ your play when you annihilate Tier Vs through sound tactics and recognition of the vehicle limitations. I picked up my first Top Gun and Steel Wall in my Lee in a Tier V battle. THAT is when the enjoyment kicks in.

Example 2:
When I moved from the Hetzer to the StuG III, I played the StuG like a Hetzer. and failed. bad. I had a 54.7% in the Hetzer over 128 battles. In the StuG? 36% This was in about 128 battles. Yes. I slogged that long playing that badly. I sold the StuG.

3 Months later, I repurchased it. I started playing it like a StuG – not a Hetzer. Now? at 268 battles, I have a 47.4%. This is still below average overall, but in the period since I repurchased it, I have an effective win rate of 57.9%. THAT is when the enjoyment kicks in.

Touch Up Your Game
Missing something? Not sure what you are doing wrong? Not sure what you are doing right?

Some other tips to help you survive/win:

• Use the minimap – See the little square thing in the corner? no? hit ‘m’. OK, there it is. Your team is the green, the enemy is the red. Don’t get so tunnel-visioned on your individual fight that you miss that the main enemy thrust is on the other side of the map. And along with this…
• Know when to charge and know when to run – If your main thrust sees the top tank and a couple of second/third tier vehicles supporting it while your scout ran into a Lemming Brigade on the other side of the map, recognize you have two options:
  • Blast through as fast as you can, knowing that most of the enemy is out of position. (my preference)
  • Split your force – defend your side while sending others to stop the Lemmings.
• You can go backwards and you can go slow – tapping ‘r’ three times and pointing your track at the enemy is not how you win. It is how you become the first casualty. Becoming the first casualty does not help your team win. And along with this…
• Don’t get too far ahead of the line of advance – Sure someone has to be the point of the spear, but not if you are two tiers below everyone else. Even if you are top tank, there is always someone out there who will be able to flank you and blow you back to the scrapheap.
• Use cover and concealment – Concealment stops vision. Cover stops bullets. Don’t stop in the open when you can stop behind a bush. Don’t stop behind a bush when you can stop behind a rock. Don’t stop behind a rock when you can stop behind a building. And along with this…
• Before you move, know where you are going – “I’m going hill” is too generic. Know your final destination AND the little waypoints on the way there – even if you are picking them every 40-50m. This helps if you are caught in the open under fire. Keep going and get to your intended cover – then fire. Example: “I am going to that clump of trees, then that rock, then the church. Then I will skirt behind the bushes as I go up the hill.” (bonus tanker cred if you know which map/spawn by this description)

Win ONE Battle
What is 1%? It is one battle. One battle out of one hundred, sure, but it is still just ONE battle. It sounds simple, and it is.

If you win one more game per hundred MORE than you are winning now, your W/L will go up. If you win 47/100 right now, winning one more per hundred will get you a 48/100. Unfortunately, this is regressive. If you have 1000 battles under your belt, this is 10 games IN ADDITION to the 1 game you need to win. So, you now need to win 11 extra battles in the next hundred. Figure that if you are really successful in turning around your game, this will likely be 13 extra wins over the next 300. To make it easier to see:

Battles    Wins    %/100   %/total   ExtraWs
 1000      490     49.00%   49.00%     -- 
 1100      543     53.00%   49.36%      4
 1200      596     53.00%   49.67%      4
 1300      650     54.00%   50.00%      5

If you look closely at the chart, you are effectively improving your recent win average by a MUCH higher number. This is one of the reasons why I like Tank Tracker (look in my sig file). I went from a 48% to 50% over the last few hundred battles by improving my recent W/L to 54% or more (at times).

Quotes on Mindset and wanting to change: (some edited)

I type this in response to the pessimists as well as to posts asking about “surrender buttons.” Nothing is ever final until you are looking at your burning tank. Surrender in real life is for people who can no longer fight and who can hope for another tomorrow. This is a game, no one really dies and there are no tomorrows. When the match is over, it is over. Why not fight with that in mind. Don’t get infected by the quitters virus and play to lose.

Final thought:
Remember that win rate has nothing to do with losses. Win rate is the total number of wins divided by the total number of battles. This means draws will hurt your win rate as much as losses will. So – No Camping. the belief that draws are better than losses has no basis in reality. (As an aside – all rates are rounded. If you have a win rate of 49.5000000000001, congrats, the game calls it a 50%)

I hope this helps you to improve your game and to understand that you can’t improve your game by just going out and blasting targets. Focus on how to improve and work on it.