What has happened to Tier VIII?

I am really annoyed by this.
Is it the new matchmaking that has turned almost every tier VIII game into a game with several tier 9's and 10's?

It is rare that i get matches where tier VIII is top (only when i drive my tier VI and VII's).

Is the tier VIII's being rematched into bigger matches?
Is it because the number of tier X's has increased?
Is it the extra credit-earning who has made it valid to play IX / X and therefore more bring them out?
(or am i just a whiner)

Whats your experience and tinfoil-theory?
/B

Simples - less arty at Tier 10 results in more people playing tier 10 tanks (particularly TDs and slow heavies like the Maus). This in turns means more Tier 10 battles for you to get into with your Tier 8 peashooter.

Solution? Play OP tier 8s like the ISU 152 and rape those Tier 10 noobs

Yeah, I put it down to people playing their T9's and T10's a lot more too.

It is pretty unforgiving. Not a whole lot of point driving a Ferdinand if there are 3 or 4 T10's on the other side that will oneshot you even before 6th Sense alarms you that you have been spotted (happened to me twice yesterday, never before).

Hmmm, I just think WG is testing MM formulas
Yesterday I was in a match with 13 KV-1, 7 enemy and 6 ours. During the chat I noticed that almost all went for XP to get the "Monster" KV-1s.......

The battle result showed that maybe I could have been better but my progress is certainly not bad as I added up the DMG "our" KV-1 did, the six(!)of them did a staggering DMG of 248 TOTAL

Beware for the new generation and how quick they'll advance to T8-9...

Yesterday did quite a few toons in the Matilda, rarely were we in the top ten, same for the Jagdpz (T6), just one of those weeks....

Ok michael what you explain seems to be the reason why i have to bang my head on the desk everytime I fire up a tier 6 tank in the first few seconds because another bunch of KV-1s are there with PEW PEW guns ...

I've been counting and lately 10-15% of my games I'm top tier, almost every other game I'm 2 tiers lower. Even when playing tier 3.

And to be frank, the problem is the utter retardedness of the other players, I just can't carry 12-14 players on my back. I've been losing games where I did 1.1K damage in my T82 in a tier 5 match, killed many and we still lost because in the end it was me against 3 tier 5 and 1 matilda.

When my wife toons with me she gets the same thing, always low rung, when she toons alone one game out of 2/3 she is top tier, much more normal MM. Which leads me to believe that it's on purpose to lower winrates.

*cough* ninja skill based MM test *cough*

P.S: Don't share this...

the tinfoil-hats are stronk in this one... about to get a roll of my own.

placing players low tier in higher tier game is one of the things you can read about in their mm patents, it supposedly is to keep things challenging. Which technically is true and not all that bad if the rest of your team would be worth a damn.

Answer to all our troubles must be
A: Platoons only, or...
B: Tankcompanies only - at least more reasonable players to blame

It would be interesting to know why WG is introducing their new rating system in 8.8: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/08/14/storm-answers-on-8-8/

As they will not be releasing the algorithm I imagine most will stick to Wn7. I just hope it's not a prelude to them baning XVM.

Banning xvm or not, i suspect the idea of Ding to be closer - with a sufficient ingame-rating system, matchmaking should be possible to optimize.
Its getting harder being mediocre. Either you are suspected to carry windowlickers or you are cannon-fodder for purplez...

/B

After improving quite significantly over the last month or two, my stats are falling through the floor.
Ill give you some things where I believe are causing my fail.

MM is being quite nasty, T8 battles dont exist any longer, they are mostly T9/T10 and i rarely take out my T9/T10.
MM in general is screwy, I took my matilda out for its daily x2 run and found i was the only T4 in a 100% T6 battle....on both sides, the only T4 and no T5...WTF!  
Player base has got a hell of a lot worse recently and im putting it down to school kids.

To the extent that im going to be doing a hell of a lot more platoons now which means im going to put my grinding of tanks on hold until the kids have gone back to school.

The idea of taking 3 OP T8's in a platoon sounds good. IS-3's, ISU-152's, KingTiger's anybody?

but then when you toon MM judges your tier 3 toon worth opponents of a 3 kv-1 toon. Of course your own team has only 1 kv-1.

Brainfarter, just noticed your sig, same drop off as mine....

Me too - its a terrible drop. Too many who hunt the 30-kill mission?

and that's almost exclusively tier 3 since that's where my wife plays at right now. I do the fdamage but almost uniformly end up in tier 5 with her and the tanks on top just don't perform. :-/

Added HTSE to the picture. Anyone else experiencing a dramatic drop in the past week or so?

I have not noticed a drop in my stats (they still seem to be rising), but I did notice a very strong increase in how often I am bottom tier, even to the extend where there's days with 20 matches where I won't ever be top tier at all.

While I hate conspiracies, I must say that Ding's comment wouldn't surprise me to be true...

Also, the MM seems to actively avoid single-tier matches. Even when there's 250 T5, 200 T6 and 150+ T7's in the queue, the matchmaker will toss my M4 Sherman straight into a T7 battle, where instead it could have easily produced a T5-only battle.
(Good reason to start playing my IS-8 more and grind to tier 10... no more upward tier spread.)

However, if this was all really the matchmaker trying some sort of skill-based MM, then I would expect XVM to show me loads of "Lemon icecream with strawberry topping" teams. (Meaning: lot of red players as top tiers, lot of yellow/green players as bottom tiers) But that doesn't seem to be the case.

The 30/60 day drop is me getting used to TDs after arty, nothing to do with the MM.

I´m not big on tinfoil hattery either, I would rather look for a logical explanation. Confirmation bias is a bitch.


Concerning my own performance, I don´t think there is one defining factor that has caused this sudden drop. It must be down to a number of factors culminating to an overall drop, but I haven´t figured it out yet.

To get the ball rolling. Possible factors:

- Due to specials I have started on a couple of new lines.
- If you look at my 30 and 60 Day stats, you will notice a definite improvement over my overall stats. Maybe I have been getting a bit overconfident in my own abilities this past week?
- Sudden influx of new players who seem only interested to race up the tiers as quickly as possible, resulting in tomato teams across all tiers(perhaps bad players who tried to re-roll and failed?).
- A lot more Battle Tier 10 games, whether this is down to an attempt of the MM to create more BT 10 instead of just BT 11 and 12 or whether people are playing T9 and T10 tanks more I don't know. I do know playing T8 feels kind of rough right now.

I actually track the games where I'm top tier per session, that's how I come up with my 15-20%, I just use an old axe clicker. :s

I have to disagree, to an extent.

I've been running the same tanks over and over and over to get masteries on them. This means I'm playing the same tank for maybe 30 consecutive battles in some instances. I can say with certainty that distribution of top tier is still pretty random. It just feels shit when you're going for your double.

Though there is something going on - I was the only tier 3 with 14 tier 5 team mates recently.

But play 15 or so games in the same tank, and you'll see it's pretty random still. Though one thing is certain. The rest of your team will be cretins!

I have played nothing but t82 with my wife, huge streaks with type 58 (which is where I really started noticing it). the games I played in my sau40 where played consecutively, only 2 of these I was top tier.

obviously the sample size is to small to be statistically valid but all in all the amount of time I spent in bottom rung for so large that I started to notice.