As you know from my previous post I'm currently grinding up the USA, USSR and French lines to get into some mid-tier tanks. Unfortunately that means at the moment I'm suffering in some pretty awful Tier III tanks trying to get the XP needed to get to the next level. This morning I learned an important lesson: the time of day that you play matters a lot.
I tend to play at two times of the day on weekdays. I get in a handful of battles before I work out and then go to work in the early AM; and I get in another handful after work while dinner is cooking.
In the early AM (~6AM Pacific) the US West server has relatively few players on it. What that means is that Match Maker (MM; the algorithm that picks the teams for battle) can't be nearly as picky. And for those of us in Tier III tanks...it means that we often end up in battles against KV-1s, T67s and other Tier V tanks that we have little hope of defeating.
This morning I played about 10 games. Won only 2 of them. In one game with the French AMX 38...I scored 42 hits...and only 2 penetrations. In another game with the American Tier III M2 Medium I ended up having to fight not one, but TWO O-Is simultaneously. Remarkably I did manage to pen one of them for ~40 pts of damage before he killed me with a single shot.
Finally, after going 0-7 on the US West server and getting ready to just rage quit, I switched over to US East server (where it's 3 hours later), suffered with triple the ping and managed to go 2-1 matched up with more tanks my own size.
Lesson: If you're playing low-tier tanks...don't play in the off-hours when there are relatively few players, or switch to a server in a more popular time zone. Otherwise you're probably going to have long queue waits and end up just being cannon fodder for tanks way out of your class.
(Of course the converse lesson here is that early AM is probably a really GOOD time to play your Tier V tanks if you want to seal club a bunch of under-powered Tier IIIs.)
I tend to play at two times of the day on weekdays. I get in a handful of battles before I work out and then go to work in the early AM; and I get in another handful after work while dinner is cooking.
In the early AM (~6AM Pacific) the US West server has relatively few players on it. What that means is that Match Maker (MM; the algorithm that picks the teams for battle) can't be nearly as picky. And for those of us in Tier III tanks...it means that we often end up in battles against KV-1s, T67s and other Tier V tanks that we have little hope of defeating.
This morning I played about 10 games. Won only 2 of them. In one game with the French AMX 38...I scored 42 hits...and only 2 penetrations. In another game with the American Tier III M2 Medium I ended up having to fight not one, but TWO O-Is simultaneously. Remarkably I did manage to pen one of them for ~40 pts of damage before he killed me with a single shot.
Finally, after going 0-7 on the US West server and getting ready to just rage quit, I switched over to US East server (where it's 3 hours later), suffered with triple the ping and managed to go 2-1 matched up with more tanks my own size.
Lesson: If you're playing low-tier tanks...don't play in the off-hours when there are relatively few players, or switch to a server in a more popular time zone. Otherwise you're probably going to have long queue waits and end up just being cannon fodder for tanks way out of your class.
(Of course the converse lesson here is that early AM is probably a really GOOD time to play your Tier V tanks if you want to seal club a bunch of under-powered Tier IIIs.)
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