World of Tanks is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Belarusian-Cypriot company Wargaming, featuring early to mid-20th century era fighting vehicles. It is built upon a freemium business model where the game is free-to-play, but participants also have the option of paying a fee for use of "premium" features. The focus is on player vs. player gameplay with each player controlling an armored vehicle, which may be a light, medium or heavy tank, tank destroyer, or self-propelled gun. World of Tanks debuted as an eSports game at the World Cyber Games 2012.
The player takes control of a single armored vehicle of his or her choosing, and is placed into a battle on a random map. The player has control over the vehicle's movement, firing, and can communicate with other players through typed or voice chat, and several preset actions that give tactical instructions visible to only their team. The methods used to win a match are either destroying all vehicles on the opposing team or capturing a base present in some game modes. World of Tanks contains multiple game mechanics such as camouflage, shell ricochets, and module damage.
Game modes
The players in World of Tanks can choose six primary types of battles: random battles, team-training battles, tank-company battles, team battles, stronghold battles and special battles. The battle type "Historical Battle" once also existed but has since been taken down for improvement upon its poor reception following its release. Within Random Battles, players can also participate in platoons, groups of two to five players who are put into the same match. There are also missions to be completed in Random Battles, upon completion of which the player receives some type of reward: credits, higher crew experience coefficients, or even new vehicles.
The game currently models the effects of both armor and cover and includes 390 armored vehicles from the Soviet Union, Germany, Britain, France, China, Japan, and theUnited States. Czechoslovakian vehicles are also due by the end of 2015.
The vehicles have been modeled in 3D very carefully, with attention paid towards visual accuracy, but as this is not a simulator, certain parameters have been simplified or modified (for example, main gun power and range are reduced, and penetration physics is altered), and in-game controls are very user-friendly, all in the interest of better gameplay.
World of Tanks has five different types of vehicles. These are: light tanks (LTs or lights), medium tanks (MTs or mediums), heavy tanks (HTs or heavies), tank destroyers (TDs, tank hunters, jäger or anti tank guns/cannons), and self-propelled guns (SPGs, artillery, artillery gun/cannon or "arty", short for artillery). Most tanks have a 360-degree traversing turret, regardless of the facing direction of the hull. Most of the TDs and SPGs and several unusual tank models (e.g. M3 Lee) have limited fields of fire. In order for these vehicles to aim a different direction, the vehicle's hull must traverse to face the direction of fire, ruining aim and concealment.
All vehicles are restricted to a single main gun, even if their models feature additional weapon mounts. This is done in different ways for different vehicles. For example, the hull-mounted howitzer of the Churchill Mk I is unused in favour of the turret-mounted cannon. For the M3 Lee, the reverse is true. All vehicles are fully tracked, and cover the eras from late World War I (i.e. the Renault FT) through to the early 1960s. The majority are based on historical designs, though many, such as the German Maus and British TOG II, only existed as prototypes, and others, like the FV215b 183, only as design studies. The game also features conjectural vehicle designs such as the Waffenträger auf E-100 or Jagdpanther II, which never existed.
World of Tanks has received favorable reviews, and currently holds a Metacritic score of 80 out of 100.
World of Tanks holds a Guinness World Record in the category of Most Players Online Simultaneously on one MOG Server. The record was registered on 23 January 2011 when the number of players on the game's Russian server totaled 91,311. This record was beaten by the European server on 13 April 2012 during the anniversary special weekend, where all players could enter a code to be Premium account holders for a day. Numbers of over 305,000 were recorded during this period.
As of December 2013, there were 75,000,000 registered players worldwide and a 1.1 million peak concurrent players. This is an increase of 15 million over the 60 million in June 2013 and 30 million over the 45 million in December 2012. Within two weeks of the launch of the South Korean server, the number of concurrent users in Korea reached 10,000.
In 2012, Wargaming's revenue was declared to be 217.9 million Euro, with net profit of 6.1 million Euro, as declared in an annual report for the Cyprus Stock Exchange. The money gained by Wargaming almost exclusively came from World of Tanks.
In 2013, the microtransaction revenue of World of Tanks surpassed that of World of Warcraft, earning $372 million and ranking fourth highest amongst online game revenues.
World of Tanks Videos
Developer: Wargaming.net
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World of Tanks Release Date: 2010-2012 (RUS,CHN,EU,NA,SGP for PC), FEB 2014 (XBOX), 2016 (PS4)
