Seb: Greetings dear TAP readers. I recieved a mail from one of you and I have to post it (even at this late hour) because it shows the „other side” of WoT. For example, how some people are influenced and how they start cheating. Hope WG sees this and does something about it.
Without further ado, here it is:
„Recently, there has been a lot of controversy and debate regarding the use of prohibited modifications and what exactly Wargaming has planned to combat them for the future. These debates are generally one sided arguments that usually conclude that everybody that uses prohibited modifications is labeled as a ‘cheater’. I disagree with this conclusion and I think that it’s time for the general public of world of tanks to receive a different view on prohibited modifications, that view coming from someone that has actually used them in the past.
I’m not sending you this to justify that prohibited modifcations are a good thing and that everybody should use them, but to simply point out that there’s always two sides of the story, and none of the big bloggers that people pay attention to are sharing the other side of the story.
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Around the time of December 2015 going into January 2016, I was having trouble getting better at the game and learning new things, I felt like I was essentially stuck in place. Usually I’ll have a rough time being effective in my matches because my situational awareness isn’t great. I went to my clanmates and seeked out an easy, quick solution to the problems I was experiencing. One clan member pointed me to a modpack integrated with a few illegal modifications and recommended trying them out. I took his advice for it. and it was quite a rough process to get used to the modpack at first because I was still trying to do things that the modpack was doing for me.
The modpack I was using included your basic prohibited modifications… tundra, breakables, tree-down, enhanced autoaim (not aimbot), lasers, redball, etc etc. I have to say my favorite modification in the pack was the enhanced autoaim that allowed me to change the level of the tank that my aim reticle locked on to when autoaiming (tracks, center, turret) I used center aim most of the time but I found the track aim very useful against higher tier russian heavies, my shell would generally hit the lower plate or the unspaced side armor, and usually penetrate even with low penetration guns.
With all of this though, I never considered or thought that I had a distinct advantage over the players I was fighting. I took the modifications in a learning type of way as they’ve given me in-battle information that just takes too long to figure out when you’re engaged. Right now I’ve actually disabled every prohibited modification in my modpack and statistically I’ve been doing better than I did when I was running illegal modifications. I’ve picked up critical information that have taught me the best positions and where my enemies are likely to be, etc etc… this information would’ve taken me much longer to acquire if I was trying to get it ‘conventionally’.
While we’re at it, let’s bring up clan based competition. I’ve met a lot of players on world of tanks that simply fail to understand that a noticeable amount of top rated clans (especially on the north american server) will do whatever it takes to pull off a win against their opponent, this included running prohibited modifications (and is also why clan league requires a python log). In the past I’ve been required into several Top 50 clans on the North American server that running warpack or a free version of warpack uploaded under a different name, is a recommendation or even a requirement to participate in clan based competition.
So, the question hundreds of people are asking is simply put as… “Why isn’t Wargaming doing anything about these people that are using prohibited modifications?” Well, there’s a pretty simplified answer to that, which is the fact that the only modification that can be detected outside of the clients computer (replays, etc etc) is aimbot because it’s moving the position of the reticle with no player interaction. Therefore Wargaming doesn’t have any type of way to tell who’s using illegal modifications and who isn’t (yet), unless that person doesn’t have the common sense to keep his mouth shut about it. I also don’t believe that giving out codes to use modifications will break illegal modifications, big time illegal modpacks (like warpack) are executable and interact with your client rather than residing in the res_mods folder, which means that wargaming theoretically has no way to control them.
In every situation, including this one, there’s always a good and a bad side, the majority of the people that currently run prohibited modifications do so in order to learn, polish their gameplay, and actually have a chance against the occasional unicum player that they may be matched up against. let’s call these people the ‘good’ ones in this situation. The bad ones are the people that already know how to play and simply run these modifications for sport and to squash everybody they get met up against. All in all I think that the unofficial statement that wargaming may release codes for specific modifications is an overreaction to a very small worldwide playerbase that actually runs these modifications.
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I hope that I’ve been able to sum up how prohibited modifications affect, change, and mold the people that are actually using them. The reason why these modifications exist truly is misunderstood by the majority of the world of tanks playerbase. All in all, thank you for your time for reading this.”
Seb: tl;dr: Illegal mods help tomato players while giving an unfair advantage to experienced ones.
