Way back when they had different servers on World of Tanks, an East and a West. The East server was very popular and hosted anywhere from 20k-25k players per night, while the West was a little more sparsely populated, perhaps 6k-10k. It was good, if a little broken on quality of matches. You wanted competitive matches, you played East. You want to stat pad, go West young lad.

Then a new patch came out and suddenly the East server was bogged down with micro lag spikes. It did not matter where you were located in relation to the server, you suffered from micro spikes. This was probably due to packet dumps that occurred in-game (theory, not proven) but nonetheless it created an environment in the game that effectively neutered the quick-reactions needed for scout players. Instead of constantly moving to keep arty and bigger tanks from destroying you, a scout now had to rely on passive scouting only. It took aggressive scout players (hi! like me!!!) out of the game. It did not affect the heavy tanks and tank destroyers as much, and it did nothing to arty players sky cancer, but scouts and mediums almost became unplayable. I quit the game for about 3 months at this point.

Then one day I stumbled upon the fact that the West server did not suffer from the weird micro spikes. Even though I’m on the East Coast the ping rate was better tapping into the West server than it was in the East. World of Tanks became playable again and I was happy.

Then Wargaming decided, in its infinite wisdom (i.e., stupidity) to combine the West and East server into a single Central server. Irritated, I continued to play, though I knew that one day the micro spikes would return.

The new server worked well, however, though my ping rate went from a happy 30-35 to a solid 100. I was able to continue playing, but I noticed that a lot of the random matchmaking was hardcore borked. One team would be heavily stacked and the other be the “leftovers”. Nonetheless, while my Win Rate dropped, my Wn8 (personal statistical counter) continued to rise. I tolerated it, even though I constantly was the best player on a team full of window lickers.

This morning, Wargaming released Patch 9.20.1. I usually play World of Tanks in the morning before I begin to write, so I figured I would check it out before I finished Devastator. I played a match in the T28, my super-slow TD that is a hard camper, and didn’t notice any micro spikes. So I played a game in the T21, which I am arguably one of the best players in the game in this tank. Immediately I noticed that there was a massive amount of lag spikes and micro spikes, all of which led to me getting derped when I pretty much teleported out into the open and parked in front of an enemy KV-2.

I know that every player of the game just collectively winced and muttered “poor bastard”.

One derp shot later and I was turning off the game. Once more I am quitting World of Tanks until this micro spike issue is resolved. I’ve hung with the game for about 6 years now, played it professionally for a full year at one point, but I can’t play a game that bogs down like this. I’m going to quit the clan I’m in right now to create space for new players and will not touch the game until they release a micropatch to fix the lag spikes.

I try not to be too demanding, but when you invest as much time, effort, and money into something as I have, you expect a reasonable return on your investment and not a middle finger. Hell, we built a desktop gaming PC just for this game for competitive purposes!

Since they neutered the game once more, I guess it’s time to go back to Cities: Skylines and build crap until they fix it. The only problem with that is C:S is a time suck, unlike World of Tanks.

Fix the problem, Wargaming, and quit fucking with the game.