State of NA WoT

North American World of Tanks has been decreasing in popularity since the overall boom of newer members sometime around 2013, and this was in part due to popular Youtube channels (such as Jingles/Quickybaby/SideStrafe), and also due to advertising the growing game. Now, the game is receiving very few newer players in the NA circuit.

There are many possible reasons to this, and there are probably many, here are some of my own thoughts:


Content:
Wargaming's last big content patch, which included a brand new line (WT line), 4 new premium tanks, Team Battles, and a new map: Northwest (which has been removed for some time now). The follow-up patch to this was in December, introducing the Japanese Medium tank branch.  After this patch, some new tanks have been released, but not in the same "line after line" format that previous patches had done. There have been 2 new lines since then, the Czechoslovakians and the Japanese Heavies. The amount of content has obviously reached a somewhat stagnant point for Wargaming, partly due to the lack of tanks to actually fill their game with, which could have actually been solved by introducing higher tier tanks (above tier 10), and therefore having many modern tanks to choose from. There are issues with this, such as a lack of real classes, as MBTs were very dominant, and lights would need to be replaced by AFVs, which would create some mess, but could be solved in time. This is besides the point, as they elected to not do this. Many of the later patches have been bug fixes and some minor balance. Wargaming as a company was also just starting to launch World of Warplanes and was developing World of Warships, requiring some of their resources. They have definitely been slacking on the content side of things, and their blind-less additions of content did not take into account the overall balance of the game, meaning that if they ever stopped introducing more lines, many players would be less than interested to keep playing, which is what they did. This started the downfall of the game, as many overpowered tanks were destroying the others at unprecedented rates. This lack of balance and content cause players to start to leave the game, as they were not overly invested in the game. As I mentioned before, there have been introduced maps, both of the ones mentioned were actually removed from the game.

Service:
Wargaming NA has become the neglected child of this company (now becoming SEA), and its playerbase has had little to say about the overall balance of the game and how it applies to the gameplay in NA vs the other regions. This has created strife within the community, and anger towards the company.

Competition: WoT is forced to compete with games like Overwatch, CS:GO, and LoL now in terms of competitive team play, and it used to compete massively (and still does) with other MMOs such as World of Warcraft. This competition leaves WG behind in the sense of balance and attention to detail, which effects other servers less, as some games are less prevalent there (WOW being one of those). Now that all of these games are becoming bigger and better, WoT is no longer as innovative graphics and balance wise, making it fall behind in player base, and causing it to begin to die.


-Spirtwalker