World of Tanks cheat: it's the economy stupid!

This is part 4 of a series, see part 3, 2 and 1 first.

World of tanks is a free to play game, with some pay-to-win elements. While gold ammo is indeed overpowered, it's expensive enough to keep most players from using it. Cosmetic nonsense is sold but no one cares and there are gold-only tanks but they aren't overpowered. The feature that brings the money to the developers is subscription. What does it do? Increases XP gain by 50%, which isn't really interesting if you are not rushing anywhere just play the game. Its other effect is increasing credit gains. Credits are important part of the game. You not only spend them on buying more tanks but on maintenance of your current tank. If you don't make enough credits, you can't continue playing with your favorite tank and must go to farm credits with lower tanks. Maintenance costs increase with tank tier. The wiki says that you get a few credits for joining the battle but most of your credits must be earned by damaging enemies, spotting them for others to damage and capturing objectives. These credits are multiplied by 1.5 if you have subscription. Tank maintenance means repairing the damaged tank, credit cost depends on HP lost in the battle and tank tier. You also have to replace used ammunition and consumables, top level ammo is pretty expensive. The maintenance cost can be higher than credits earned, ending the match with a net loss for you.

The subscription gives you no income at all, it multiplies the income you make by playing. If you did zero damage and zero spotting, it will multiply only the near-zero base reward. It means that there are two hard skill limits for every tank tier: the higher line is the free-play line. If you are better than this, you earn enough credits to maintain that tank without paying subscription. Divide this "skill number" by 1.5 and you get the scrub-line. If you are worse than that, you can't maintain your tank even if you pay subscription.

You see the catch? Subscription can only be sold to "average" players, the ones between the two lines. Those who are better than the free-play limit don't need subscription. They may buy one for convenience, especially if they want to get tier 10 tanks for clan matches but most of them won't pay a dime to the developer. Those who are below the scrub line have absolutely no reason to pay as it won't do them any good. They are practically paying for multiplying zero by 1.5. Gold tanks have higher multiplier but that still doesn't help if you have nothing to multiply, so bad players won't spend on gold tanks either.

The 1.5 multiplier places the two lines very close to each other. If we assume that the average (or median) player is halfway between the two lines, then the scrub-line is at 80% of the average and the free-line is at 120% (80*1.5 = 120). Let's approximate skill with kills. It's far from perfect but follow me please. The average player has 0.74 kills/battle. So if you have less than 0.6, you can't play in a tier that meant to be playable for an average player, even if you pay subscription. If you have more than 0.9 kills/battle, you can play that tier for free.

The most iconic gold tanks, the Type59 and the Löwe are at tier 8. Tier 8 is where people farm their credits, so an average player meant to have income in T8 assuming he pays subscription. I have 1.23 kill/battle with my Tier 8, way over the free-limit. It is 67% higher than the average, so I should earn more credits without subscription than an average player earns with subscription. I didn't earn anything. I continuously lost credits, about 100K over 40 games. The debriefing screens clearly shown that I could earn lot of credits if I'd have a subscription. But I should be earning now!

This is the purpose of the cheat. In order to make World of Tanks profitable, every player must be held between the scrub and the free limits. Someone outside the limits is a lost customer. The goal of the cheat is not to give you losses, it's not to deny you kills, it is to deny you income over the limit. Similarly it's not about to boost a horrible player to wins or kills, it is to give him credits to have something to multiply. You can have significantly higher winrate than 50%. You can increase your XP gain. You can get medals. But you can't earn significantly more or less credits than the average player. Since credits come from dealing damage, the game needs to mess with your damage. Since winners survive and losers don't, in order to give you maintenance cost, the game needs to mess with your winrate. Also to give others damage, you need to get damaged. What you experience during battles is a by-product of the cheat that aims to set your "proper" income. This is why gold ammo is now available for credits: since it cannot earn its price, even with ideal hit, the algorithm can't care less if you increase your winrate with it, you are losing credits.

Please look at these two income sections. They were made when 300 gold was given for changing your password, so we had a 1-day subscription. There was also an event, giving 15000 credits for a medal. Without event and subscription my girlfriend earned -5587 credits while I earned -2361. Maybe we just weren't good enough on this battle. I mean our performance could easily be worse than 1.2x the average, therefore did not deserve income. Maybe this is average play: On this battle each of us damaged more than the rest of the team combined. With subscription it earned lot of credits. Without it, negative. I'm of course not saying we always played like this. It would be OK to gain credits on this and still lose on average. But we lost credits even when we had the above performance. You can literally do miracles and still lose credits on the same battle where drooling morons gain credits - with subscription.

We know what the cheat wants. We know how does it work. And we know for sure that every cheat can be exploited. Tomorrow you will see how can you double your XP gain, triple your credit gain, and pull awesome stunts (like that unkillable T-50-2) at the cost of making the battle a pain to everyone else involved.


PS: I'm obviously not saying that the developer shouldn't earn money or should allow anyone to use its service for free. The problem is that WoT officially allows you to play the game fully for free, but makes it impossible via a cheat. Officially you can earn credits with a T10 if you play good enough. Practically, you can't even do that with a Tier 8 when you are just becoming Ace Tanker.

World of Tanks cheat: the lemming train

This is part 3 of a series, see part 2 and 1 first.

"Great, I got a fail team again!" - this is something that many good players say when they look at the map, seeing a mindless zerg going somewhere. It has the infamous name "lemming train", as they are like the little rodents whose population suffer heavy losses during migrations. The lemming train can - and usually do - lose the match, totally out of your control. "Fail team" indeed.

But "I got a fail team" is also infamous for being a bad excuse. After all, in a random match the enemy has equal chance to get a bunch of scrubs whose mental capacity equals a furry vermin. It's not like the matchmaking giving you bad players to lose. I mean it could but why? The bad players are customers too, any cheated machmaking would want to give them wins, not losses, so they can't be used as a tool to make you lose. We have to accept that your average teammate isn't dumber than your average opponent. Then why do you often get mindless lemmings? One thing is for sure, the game systems can't control other players, right? Right?

This is the map of a Karelia Assault game, before it started. You can see 5 tanks on the left, 2 of them are scouts. 10 tanks on the right, only one scout. Would you be surprised if I tell that the game was lost with a lemming train going on the right while the left side was washed up?

Same map, but 7+6 tanks (scouts and arty are not combat tanks) on both sides instead of 3+9. We won, I wonder why?

Himmelsdorf, encounter. Capturing the hill is crucial in this game. The 3 tanks in our team that are best for that job are the only Tier 8 ones, the IS3 and the two AT15s. You can see that the AT15s are very far from the hill, facing away. We lost. Wouldn't this game be different if the AT15s were in the places of the Hummel and the VK 30.01 H?

In encounter and assault battles there is little time to relocate before contact with the enemy. The placement zones are often divided, like you can see on the Karelia maps. Initial placements have large effect on the outcome even if the players recognize the problem and react. I mean the proper action in case of the first Karelia match was to wait until 2 heavies move from right to left. During this time the enemy could advance and take positions. However this is theoretical as most players are equal with a lemming in terms of strategical planning. They go where they expect contact with the enemy sooner. They will not relocate, they will not think if their action makes sense, they go to "have some fun". Place them to left and they go left. Place them right and they go right. Your team isn't inherently worse than the enemy, but they are both controlled by initial placement. If the enemy is placed properly and your team is misplaced, you get a "fail lemming horde". If your team is well placed and the enemy is misplaced, you get a "GJ team we owned lol"!

After I recognized this, I wrote into the data if the map was a normal battle or an Encounter/Assault. The result shows that it's much harder to compensate for the initial placement in the latter case. In a normal map, you have much more time to yell to the lemmings and to reposition your own tank:
Thinking that switching off Assault and Encounter maps would increase your winrate is wrong. We did that with the Tortoise and it did little good to us. The game can give you losses on a normal map, it has just easier job on a fast-paced one. Below you can see some examples of obviously bad or good initial placements and their effect on the game:

Ensk, normal battle. Above you can see the initial placement and it doesn't take a genius to guess that a lemming train will go to the city. Below you can see it in action, 30 seconds into the battle. We lost with the enemy capturing the base while 7 lemmings still alive in the city.

Erlenberg normal, perfect placement. 4 tank destroyers defending the north bridge, all tanks placed for a South assault. 7 enemies marched to the north bridge where they were easily stopped losing only 2 TDs. Crossing the bridge under fire is hard.

Malinovka, near-perfect placement: tank destroyers on the left, heavy tanks as close to the hill as possible. On the right you can see it after 30 seconds. This game was won before it started.

Tomorrow we'll see the logic and purpose behind the cheat with further proof. We must understand "why" to be able to design the counter: the exploit that will crush it.

World of Tanks cheat: lucky and unucky shots

This is part 2 of a series, see part 1 first.

When you fire a shot, you can hit or miss. A hit can penetrate or not. A penetrating hit can damage or not. Damage can vary according to the random generator. Lot of variables, but all can only depend on tank stats, player skill and random generator.

I gathered data from 374 matches. All from the same tank, same gun: AT15, B-barrel. During these matches I faced practically every tank randomly, the large number (15*374 = 5610 enemies) guarantee that I had an "average target tank". My skill couldn't change much as I've had more than a thousand matches with British TDs and more than a hundred with AT15 itself. The only factor remaining is random luck. Let's see how random it is.

The average damage/hit is 141.3 (gun nominal value: 230). The standard deviation is 39.6. Now, according to the distance from the average I classified matches as "unlucky" (below average damage/hit), "normal" (around average) and "lucky" (above average). The boundaries were symmetric of course and were chosen as wide to make 1/3 of the matches "normal". With random distribution it would mean 1/3 lucky and 1/3 unlucky matches. It wasn't true, I had 29% unlucky and 38% lucky matches but let's ignore it now. It's important to know that the above classification ignored if I won or lost.

Let's see the average damage/hit for the three categories, separating wins from losses: The lucky wins aren't luckier than the lucky losses, so far, so good. But the extreme differences are troubling at best. I mean in the luckiest 1/3 of the matches I damaged almost twice as much as in the unluckiest. While random generator should be part of the damage/hit calculation this is a bit large, don't you think? Our skill should have larger effect on the outcome than RNG. But this is no cheat.

Let's see how being lucky affected the outcome of the matches? Oops! Why is it asymmetrical? I mean if my damage/hit increases from 100 to 140, it increases winrate by 6%. If it increases by an equal amount, it has no effect on the winrate. Luck is strange in World of Tanks. It has a binary "yes or no" form. Like it would be universal, deciding only one thing: are you meant to win or lose.

As a tank destroyer, especially a 20km/h slow one, I can shoot only when the enemy can kill the rushing faster tanks and break through. If they are lucky, I don't get shots. So my number of shots is a good measure of their luck and obviously should be uncorrelated to my luck. Uncorrelated heh? The team spirit is strong with this game: we are lucky together or unlucky together. You can see it yourself all the time: winning on one side of the map should be uncorrelated to winning on other side. Yet you rarely see games where your team reaches their flag on the left and they reach your flag on the right. What you see is your team being obliterated on both sides or winning on both sides.

Enough of stats, let's see how far "luck" can go to support a player! The infamous scout tank, T-50-2 can only trust in its speed as its 37mm armor on all sides can't stop anything that Tier 9 tanks throw at it. If it is hit, it's probably oneshotted due to its 500HP. Seriously how many shots and potential damage can this thing take before exploding? OK, there is one way to survive penetrating hits: component damage. The tank loses some part or crew but no HP. But even that wouldn't help a scout much: lose track or engine and it can't dodge more hits. Get a hit to the fuel or ammo and it burns or blows up. A hit in the radio or the periscope would stop it from spotting and relaying the location to the others. Where can you hit the damn thing without disabling it?

Want to be as lucky as him? Wait until the exploit post on Friday and I tell you how! Tomorrow we'll see that the legendary "I lost because I got into a fail team" has a strange meaning in World of Tanks.

World of Tanks cheat: introduction and trends

More than a year ago I wrote a pair of posts that World of Tanks, one of the most popular online games cheats its customers. The posts themselves aren't really good, they contain anecdotal and circumstantial evidence. Yet, these posts are my most visited ones even a year later. I mean they get on top of the direct page hits (when someone look for a specific page instead of the blog top page) every new month. I think they resonate with something my readers found themselves.

Since my main focus is EVE, I learned how the Incarna riots changed CCP for the better. I abandoned World of Tanks back then with no hope for it. Now I believe that players can force the developer to fix its messed up game. If EVE could be fixed after it tried to exploit its customers via pay-to-win, WoT can be too. So I thought it's time to revisit that game, this time properly collecting data. So with my girlfirend we started a pair of accounts and started playing. We picked the newly introduced British TDs, because the newly introduced tanks are usually overpowered, so the results will be more obvious. The results indeed came, and they came in such numbers that they way exceeded my original plans. Instead of a revisit post, it will get a 5-pieces series, each focusing on one-one aspect of the cheat, with lot of data and experiments.

Before I start, let me clarify what I consider "cheat": something that affects the outcome of the game except player skill and unbiased random number generator. If you play a dice game and the dice has 1/5 chance to give 6 instead of 1/6, someone is cheating. If someone can read the back of your cards to see your hand in poker, he is cheating. In team games you get teammates from the game provider whose actions you can't control. They act as random elements and can cost you or give you wins you don't deserve. However on the long run, you are the only stable element in your battles, the effect of your teammates mold into a big "average player" effect, providing a result that represents only your personal performance. If you gain rating in League of Legends, it is because of your skill, even if sometimes your teammates do carry you. If you have 40% winrate in World of Warcraft random battlegrounds, it's because you are bad, despite you will often lose because even worse teammates.

Matchmaking must be totally random if there is no official rating and your winrate must only be affected by your performance (after enough matches). Matchmaking should be according to the rules of a tested rating system if there is an official rating ladder to guarantee that your rating represents your performance. An individual shot by your tank must only be determined by stats of your tank, the enemy tank, the terrain and an unbiased RNG. Important note: having a rating system without official rating ladder (hidden rating) is a severe case of cheating, as one player must play much better to win the next battle, but it is considered equal by participants and spectators. Winning at 2300 rating is much bigger task - therefore bigger feat - than winning at 800 rating. Hiding the rating will equalize the two - very unequal - performances.

While it should be obvious, I write it down: cheating in a game is bad, as it takes away the chance to experience flow by destroying one of its necessary elements: "a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity". A game against a cheater is frustrating and no one wants to do that. Cheating is grounds to be banned from the game in practically any games. Cheating in a game where the reward is real world money (like poker in a casino) is considered a crime in several countries. Finally, while the game provider is free to set any rules in its own game, they must be made publicly so the players can choose to not play that game. If the rules are hidden, especially if they are against commonly accepted norms of gaming, they are cheats and must be treated accordingly. One can create a roulette machine that never gives black. But one can't place it to a casino without explicitly informing the players as they would play under the commonly accepted custom of black having 50% chance.

I believe no one would give money to play World of Tanks if the game provider was upfront with matchmaking and individual shot rules. The game provider gets its huge amount of income by making the players believe that they participate in fair games where the teammates and opponents are randomly chosen and in case of two identical tanks battling, the outcome only depends on player skill.

What is my aim? Not simply to incite an Incarna riot in World of Tanks. CCP did not cheat, they changed their game openly, giving the players only two choices: take it or leave it. Incarna riots were players choosing "leave it". World of Tanks is cheated, giving a third option: exploit the hell out of it. After identifying how the cheats work and more importantly "why", I designed how can they be exploited to provide players extreme influx of credits and XP at the cost of making the game unplayable to everyone else, without breaking any written rules. This is the beauty of cheating: they can't say "we didn't mean this back-door to be used by you, we placed it for someone else". After reading this series, you'll either uninstall the game, massacre newbies in pimped lowbie tanks for fun or use the exploit to get credits for gold ammo and tier 10 tanks for your clan matches. This will force the developer to change the game to the only unexploitable way: fair.


Today I start with the weakest proof: trends. If the matches are unbiased and you have X winrate, the chance of the next match being won is exactly X. On the other hand every player experiences suspicious winning or losing streaks. This is a weak argument because the chance of 10 heads on 10 coinflips in a row - while very low, 1/1024 - is not at all impossible. If you throw group of 10 coins 1000 times, the chance of not having a group with all on heads is (1023/1024)^1000 = 37%. So I initially wanted to ignore trends, but found a strange pattern repeating itself again and again, so later I started collecting such data and discuss them.

These data are win rate snapshots with the Tier 6 tank AT8. From the account page you can add the recent: 484 battles, 300 wins. Using this data, let's calculate the winrates of the various periods:

1. First 29 battles: 24%
2. Next 71 battles: 65%
3. Next 86 battles:57%
4. 198 most recent battles: 66%

While you could blame on the first data on "stock tank" effect, the drop in the third period cannot be explained this way. Also the tank won't get enough XP to turn elite after 29 matches (it had 6245 total XP on the first screenshot), so the same stock tank that lost 76% of the matches turned into a 65% winning monster. After finally reaching elite status, crew getting skills and the player behind getting more experience, win chance dropped.

Now let's consider the alternative, that the game tries to make every player "average", in order to make no one quit over "too hard" or "too easy". In this case the game estimates your skill and gives help to the bad players and handicap to the good ones. An ordinary player plays with various tanks, giving large sample to the game to calculate with. We only played with a few tanks. Before we started playing AT8, we played 116 matches with only one tank, its predecessor, the AT2. AT2 is a shamelessly overpowered tank. Whoever designed and OK-ed a tier 5 tank with 200mm front armor (as strong as the tier 10 heavies) have no place in gaming design. We made a killing with that tank, making the algorithm believe that we're some kind of super-gamers. So it gave us serious handicaps. Combine that handicap with a new stock tank and you get horrible winrate. When our poor results with AT8 got into the dataset, the algorithm overcompensated, providing 66% winrate which is World top 1000. With these data added to the set, it finally got our "proper" value and we got our place with 57%. Then we left AT8 for the next tanks. Tier 8 enemies are harder than Tier 6, our results with AT15 were worse than with AT8, it's normal. But when we returned to AT8 to farm credits to buy the Tier 9, the algorithm used our AT15 results to calculate handicap, giving once again 66% winrate. The effect was further doubled by two players in the platoon having the same unbalance.

The most recent data from the site is 260/471, let's calculate the winrates of the consecutive periods for the tier 8 AT15:

1. First 20 battles: 25%
2. Next 28 battles: 57%
3. Next 18 battles: 48%
4. Next 84 battles: 58%
5. 320 most recent battles: 57%

The same oscillation, despite the AT15 starter gun is almost as good as the final gun. Bad start, overcompensation, recompensation and finally with maxed tank and crew, a good but not spectacular results.

Preparing this to happen again, I wrote down every individual result with the tier 9 Tortoise tank. Remember that I wrote we returned to AT8 to farm credits for Tortoise? So the last data the algorithm got was our 66% winrate when we started playing Tortoise: The graph shows the average winrate up to that match, so the "30" point is the average of the first 30 matches, the "50" is the average of the first 50 matches. Same pattern: terrible start, overcompensation, recompensation. Of course 40% can't be the final result and it would have been interesting to see how the Tortoise runs up to a couple hundred matches, but we ran out of credits and didn't want to pay a cent to the company to get more credits. Farming with other tank would have broken the results, so this is it.

What does the above tell: that the match outcome is pretty surely manipulated, there is an algorithm calculating your strength and then rig the matches to level you to the average. Tomorrow we'll discuss one way of messing with the match: messing with your shots.

PS: If you'd think we purposefully lost to fabricate these results, please wait until Friday before commenting. You'll see that it's impossible to fabricate such data.

Crashing Neocoms

About a month ago I wrote that certain planetary products are much less profitable than others, making them a loss in opportunity cost. I started making Neocoms (T3) using Silicate Glass (T2), biofuels (T1) and precious metals (T1). It promised 1B/month with very little work. Now look at the price graph of Neocoms: Ouch! You might be tempted to say "bad luck", but it had very little to do with luck. An advanced factory produces 3 units of Neocoms an hour. 7 factories, 6 planets, 24 hours : 3024 units/day. Now look at the traded amount on the chart! Only 5-10K/day, meaning I produced about half of the Jita-marketed Neocoms! No doubt that such supply boom ruined the price.

This is something we don't see often in a player scale. Honestly, I did not think of it either, and paid with lack of profit for it. Sure, Goonswarm can manipulate an item, but a single pilot (no alts were involved)?!

The problem was that Neocoms isn't a common item. Most PI producers go for "all by myself" production, they produce P4 without buying anything, they extract everything and combine it on different alts. Only a few players bought or sold Neocoms, making it a very sensitive product. I've learned from this mistake, so shall you. Check the volume of the item before starting mass production.

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Finally a business tip: if you are a jump freighter pilot who jumps a lot (doing it as a serious business), I'd suggest to use the training changes of Odessey to train the JFs of all four races, so you'll be able to switch to the JF that operates with the cheapest isotope. Fuel prices will be very hectic and likely to rise significantly.

Cap boosters, T2 ammo and time

Two things motivated this post. One was Sugar saying "I do not think that most people would take a Drake, Hurricane, Ferox, Myrm or any other battlecruiser into low sec at the rate that people are taking Gnosis." The other was a troll commenter saying "PVE ships should never require Cap Booster Charges."

The answer for both: people are still bad at understanding opportunity cost. They don't want upfront costs and thinking ends here. A Drake hull costs 70M. That's lot of money for someone who grinds for it. They don't risk it in a random PvP situation. A Gnosis is free like the noobship, so they drive it boldly to lowsec. They could sell the Gnosis for 200M instead and buy nearly 3 Drakes, but that's beyond their understanding.

Let's get to cap booster charges. A naked Raven Navy with all 5 skills has 19.2 peak capacitor recharge. With a Heavy Capacitor Booster II, filled with Cap Booster 800 charges: 76.3. With 3 CCC I rigs and 4 Cap Recharger IIs: 76.2. The cap booster needed one slot, the second setup 4+3rig.

The Heavy Capacitor Booster II cycles in 12 seconds and needs 10 seconds to reload the 5 charges, so one charge lasts 14 seconds. If you run it all the time (you won't), you can eat 257 charges an hour (that would need 8000m³ cargohold, I told you won't). A charge costs 4000 ISK. So burning cap booster charges as fast as you can costs you 1M/hour. If you can fit something into those freed-up slots that increases your ISK/hour more than 1M/hour, it's a good choice. What can you fit? Webs, Target Painters, Tracking Computers, Omnidirectional links that make those pesky rats die faster. An MWD or MJD next to the AB for cutting travel times inside the mission. Switch to shield tank in ships that allow both tanks and fit more damage modules. Or simply fit stronger tank and decrease gank chance.

Same goes for T2 ammo. T1 is cheaper for sure. T2 does about 15% more damage, finishing the combat part of the mission faster. Since you don't consume ammo when you aren't shooting we should only focus on this. 15% more DPS means 15% more bounty, loot and mission rewards in the same time. If you made 40M/hour, it means 6M/hour. With 8 guns, 5s cycling time, you use 5780 ammo in an hour. If the price difference between the ammos is less than 1050 ISK, you are better off with T2.

Cheap is often the most expensive. Your time isn't free, the gift Gnosis isn't free either. Always mind the opportunity cost.

The perfect limited-gate highsec mission boat

Next week there won't be business Thursday post, because the week will have a series of connecting posts, so this week there are two business posts!

If you have a combat mission to complete, you just drive a battleship into it and it's done. But some missions and complexes have gates that don't let battleships in. The COSMOS missions, with their hoards of faction reputation are such. Now add that you aren't really skilled into combat ships because you are a trader. Or you are skilled into ships that don't fit the damage profile of the rats inside. Anyway, you have a bunch of missions to do with no proper ship to do them. If only there would be a ship that can fire any damage profile, tank any damage profile, fit into acceleration gates, have enough DPS and tank without month-long skill training, have large cargohold, cap-stable while MWD-ing ... And if we are dreaming, why not be bold: this dream ship should be in our hangar for free instead of being a billion-ISK faction-fit T3 to buy. One can dream, right?

And sometimes, dreams just come true: This is an EM/Explo tanking and dealing fit, but you can tank and deal any damage profile by replacing hardeners and changing weaponry. The ship is in your hangar without paying as it's an anniversary gift, but it's not for free, as you can sell it for 200M currently. However that's still much less than a T3 would be. If you are low-skilled, it's even better as you can fit anything that you can use. If you are only skilled with missiles, fit it with missiles, the damage won't be perfect but will be adequate. The drone bay can hold a flight of medium and light drones, so you can always cleanse those pesky frigrats. The hold is large enough for having enough cap boosters to keep that ancillary shield booster running.

Unless you bling it or its price going over a billion (when you'll sell it anyway), you can fly it safely in highsec. Don't forget buffer-tank, being gankable by a pair of Catalysts is plain stupid, along with flying under wardec and other things you shouldn't do anyway.