Broken Base / World of Tanks

• People who think artillery is a Game-Breaker versus those who think it's Acceptable Breaks from Reality due to its unique top-down view when in sniper mode, immense firepower combined with a high chance of hitting the top armor, the weakest point of any tank, and decent accuracy even from across the map, often hitting tanks which are slowly moving or not moving at all.
  • Since the early days of the Closed Beta, artillery accuracy, penetration, splash damage, shell travel times, and accuracy penalties for moving have all been nerfed, and for good reason, and yet most arty players still don't see anything wrong with how it used to be besides the occasional miss that used to "only" remove half a tank's hit points and blow two or three modules.
  • Artillery can be infuriating for those who understand that their impact on the game, namely that they excessively penalize any active play. Artillery vehicles are also (uniquely) capable of ignoring cover that would protect a tank from any other threat and firing from far beyond the range of any retaliation, - and their existence as such greatly hampers the viability of Heavy Tanks and Tank Destroyers.
  • Artillery is also a serious point of contention on all the forums. An especially large sect of the American Server Cluster outright wants Artillery removed from the game, and shows no intention of ceasing until it's been deleted outright. Additionally, the vast majority of the American players who complain are the upper echelons of the game's statistics, as the mechanic is effective a hard counter to skill with no real counterplay, that requires very little, if any skill to use in and of itself.
    • The reason for this is because of something referred to as Unicum Sniping. Basically, run XVM, then target the statistically best player relentlessly. Results in either the target dying early, or the rest of the team running wild.
  • And not only that, the NA server seems to simply be the most Anti-Artillery server. The EU server is overall neutral, and the RU server loves artillery.
• Also divided between people who think Soviet tanks are overpowered and people who think German tanks are overpowered.
  • The Americans seem to have their own base-breaking done. They are either balanced or underpowered.
  • Not to mention the influx of complaints against the Soviet T-54, the medium tank that borders on being a player-controlled Demonic Spider.
  • Add to that the developers' not so hidden anti-German bias — SerB has been on the record with his (semi-joking) quip that "Germanophiles must suffer" — and you get Flame Bait so ripe that it's best touched with at least a ten-foot pole if you absolutely have to touch it at all.
  • The above is typically most exemplified with the way the Tiger I is represented in the game, as the developers have made many historical changes to 'balance' it (among which, weakening the lower front glacis, making the transmission a fire hazard, making the gun mantlet not-spaced armor, etc.) which players (especially new players) feel make the tank very underwhelming as it struggles to fill any role outside of a second line sniping tank.
• Autoloader tanks. In real life, very few of these designs ever saw mass production because of their impracticality and maintenance-intensive nature. Not so in World of Tanks, where they are all over the place in higher tiers. Instead of firing one shell at a time, they possess a 'clip' of 4-6 shells that can be fired rapidly, at the cost of very long clip reloads. Since these tanks are usually so fast, they are often detested for being able to deal a high amount of damage in a short amount of time and rapidly retreating before they can be counterattacked. It doesn't help that Wargaming has introduced tanks like the Wt. auf E-100 that are basically fictional, ala Secret Weapons Over Normandy.
• Beyond even all of that, the "RNG" (Random Number Generator/God, in reference to the game's dispersion) puts several factors outside the player's control. Constant arguing ensues over if this is good for the game or not. It even got a Fan Nickname (on Russian servers at least) of GBR, or Great Belorussian Random.
• Nothing splits the base like the test server. A new test server is guaranteed to split the base into two camps: the RU server vs everyone else. This is because RU players have a reputation — deserved — for team-killing everything which has the sheer effrontery to be on the test server without an RU server tag. Explanations for this phenomenon range from nationalism, to a younger Russian playerbase, to a larger Russian playerbase (which leads to proportionately more G.I.F.T among them), and finally, to a perception on the RU server that non-RU players are The Load and should be dealt with immediately. Whatever the reason behind the Russian team-killing phenomenon, it tends to lead to very ugly inter-server wars of words every time a new test is up. Thankfully, as of patch 9.0, team killing on the test server will get you banned on the live server too, which seems to have cut this down a little.
• The "Monthly Challenge" in which you can get a free tank plus garage slot upon completion is so horribly biased in favor of elitist gamers who have no life and plenty of disposable income (Gold for real-life money) that casual gamers will never, ever come close to reaching even the 25% mark. Just to show you how cheap War Gaming is about giving away free tanks with a garage slot:
  USSR: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  Germany: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  UK: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  Japan: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  China: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  France: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  SA: Inflict 150,000 Damage and Destroy 150 Tanks in Tier 6-10 Vehicles.
  Reward: Marathon WZ-111 with Garage Slot.
• Gold Ammunition, especially since being made credit bought, with many players arguing they allow tanks to get out of situations where credit bought ammo simply isn't enough and many others considering it a scumbag move that lets those who use it 'buy skill' rather then bother to try and aim for weak points.
• Most "blueprint" tanks, i.e. tanks that never existed as anything other than a drawing or wood mockup, in general serve as base-breakers. This is mainly because they tend to be far more powerful (and were thus never produced because they were either impractical or simply impossible to make) than historically mass-produced tanks. These can range from white elephants that were never produced because they were ludicrously expensive (like the American T-29 and the British Tortoise), to the out-and-out doodles of a bored tank designer which had no possibility of ever seeing the light of day (most of the Japanese heavy tank line)^note The Fandom VIP that Wargaming was getting info from for this line, Daigensui, was later exposed for passing off fictional and completely fabricated information as "sekrit documents" to Wargaming, meaning that the ENTIRE Japanese heavy tank line is built on nothing but lies and Fan Wank. If you need an example of this bullshittery, this is the very reason why the cancerous 15cm cannon is mounted on the Type 4 and Type 5 heavies. The only ones with even a semblance of reality are the Tier 3 Type 91 Heavy (1 prototype built), the Tier 4 Type 95 Heavy (4 prototypes) the Tier 6 O-I (1 prototype) and the Tier 10 Type 5 Heavy with 14cm gun (a turret was built and ended up on top of a pillbox because the rest of the tank never got past the drawing board). The Tier 5 O-I Experimental, Tier 7 O-Ni, Tier 8 O-Ho and Tier 9 Type 4 Heavy are all 100% fake (the former 3 are fictional O-I variations and the latter is just a nerfed Type 5).. The last of those are derided as "napkin tanks", the implication being that the only "design" work done was a sketch on a napkin during a tank designer's lunch break. One can get the impression that if a 1930-50 tank designer ever went off his head and drew a tank with impenetrable armor, a battleship cannon, and a helicopter rotor for flight, that tank would make an appearance as a premium tier 8 at some point.
• The 9.14 sound effects changes were split between people who wanted Hollywood-style booms and the people who enjoyed the actual recordings of real tank guns. It's probable the former were suffering from The Coconut Effect.
• The use of the XVM Mod, which shows players' win rates during the matches. It's either a useful tool to adjust your play style to team performance, or something used by trolls and griefers to harass lower skill players over their stats (and of course for Team Killers to target the highest-skill players on their own team to eliminate).
• The introduction of the Edelweiss and the Nameless Tank onto the SEA server (the latter had previously made its World of Tanks debut in all servers of Blitz) fractured the fanbase when the EU and NA servers found out about it. The Nameless itself is also a base breaker for being overpowered due to its absurdly strong armor that makes it effectively invincible from the front and still quite tough from the sides. And the debut of both tanks was controversial on SEA because despite being considered Japanese premiums, their crews are permanently attached to the tanks and thus they can't be used in the normal crew-training role of a premium.
• The introduction of wheeled vehicles in early 2019. Some are glad that new vehicles with an actual new playstyle are being introduced rather than just a minor variation on what other tanks can already do (arguably the last time this happened was the Swedish "siege mode" tank destroyers in late 2016). Others are afraid that the extreme speed of the armored cars will make them overpowered and render conventional light tanks completely obsolete. And then some artillery players said that the ability to cross the map in 30 seconds will allow the armored cars to simply wipe out arty in the early minutes of battles. This resulted in some players suddenly dropping their objections to armored cars, on the premise that anything that's bad for arty must be good for the game.
• Update 5.5, released in late 2018, caused a furor in the Blitz player base, as it streamlined the tech tree by removing numerous tanks from the lower tiers (especially heavy tanks and tank destroyers) and nerfing their guns, although players who had researched them previously could keep the tanks. Wargaming stated that this is to make the lower tiers more palatable for newcomers, as well as preventing experienced players from using such tanks to curb-stomp new players.
• The introduction of Guest Fighter fantasy tanks into Blitz, such as ones from Girls und Panzer, Valkyria Chronicles, and Warhammer 40,000. Many players felt that this ruined the game's original focus on realistic and blueprint tanks. The fact that two of the fantasy tanks, the Annihilator and Smasher, are deemed overpowered by large sections of the fanbase, with no plans by the developers to nerf them, doesn't help matters.