World of Tanks has been around for 10 years and the tank MMO has celebrated some successes. However, there have also been significant mistakes and setbacks. The head of Wargaming, Victor Kislyi, has now spoken about this.
What is it about? 2020 is the year when Wargaming’s tank MMO World of Tanks celebrates its 10th anniversary. For this, the founder and head, Victor Kislyi, gave an interview with VentureBeat, in which he talked about the game’s past, what went well, but also what went wrong. We explain two of the biggest fails in the history of the game here.
The biggest mistakes in World of Tanks – Rubicon and the 9.0 bug
When asked about the worst fails of the past, two blunders immediately came to Kislyi’s mind that had caused great trouble among the fans. The infamous Rubicon update and a nasty bug from update 9.0, which the quality assurance had overlooked.
The problem with the 9.0 bug
What happened? When update 9.0 was launched, quality assurance unfortunately overlooked a serious bug that went live to the servers despite testing and affected all players worldwide.
The bug caused massive FPS drops for about 20 percent of the players, making the game virtually unplayable on their computers. This mainly affected players who had previously been able to play World of Tanks smoothly on old, weak machines.
What was so bad about it? According to Kislyi, many WoT players are not hardcore gamers who invest a lot of money in their computers. There are also many players who have an old computer at home, which they otherwise use for writing emails or doing their taxes.
Especially in Russia and China, such players are common. And it was precisely these players who were particularly affected by the bug and suddenly could not play anymore. It got even worse as the bug occurred just before the major Russian holiday “Victory Day.” On this day, in Russia, one celebrates the victory over the Nazis, and what day would be better to play a game full of tanks from World War II?
However, since many Russian players could not play during that time, they were extremely angry, and according to Kislyi, this was also reflected in financial results. They had to take a heavy hit, and a lot of money was lost because of it.
Rubicon – The worst update of WoT
What happened? The major Rubicon update from 2015 was supposed to be a major undertaking that would massively advance WoT. There were big plans. A new game mode called Rampage was introduced, offering respawns, airstrikes, and new maps. The entire game principle of World of Tanks was supposed to change.
But in the end, the mode was anything but what the players wanted:
We promised this super new mode, and we promised it by a certain date, but we couldn’t get the mode itself right. The “rules” of the mode were not good enough, let’s put it that way. We thought it would be an innovative new experience, but it simply wasn’t fun when real players started playing it.
With that, Kislyi probably meant the common practice back then of guilds pushing victories to each other to obtain the super tank T-22 exclusive to this mode.
What happened next? Victor Kislyi and his team ultimately decided to pull the emergency brake and scrap the mode. Because this angered the players, a lot of effort was put into explaining the circumstances. They were very transparent in explaining that they were essentially too arrogant and optimistic, assuming they knew better what players wanted than they themselves.
At that time, all important Russian bloggers and influencers were first invited to Wargaming to report on the mistakes made with Rubicon. Later, this was repeated in Europe and the USA. This transparency ultimately led – according to Kislyi – to the players forgiving them for the Rubicon disaster.
In the end, World of Tanks has continued to be very successful despite all the mistakes and setbacks and brings in a lot of money for Wargaming. The situation is different for the airplane MMO World of Warplanes. It has always been overshadowed by the competitor War Thunder and has never really taken off. Therefore, Victor Kislyi also recently stated that they would not spend much time and energy on Warplanes anymore.
