SnapShot: New Kids in the Tank - Part II

My favorite rant these days is about players rushing up the tiers WAY too fast and how that leads to lopsided losses. Just had a battle on Lakeville Encounter. It's a three-tier, Tier 8 battle and I'm in my Obj 274a. 

I go to the F0 corner and I'm doing some good work brawling and putting shots into guys. Most of our heavies have gone to the F9 street and they're doing OK there. I'm getting nice side shots into people preoccupied with them, blocking a few shots coming back at me, angling, pulling back to use cover, feeling pretty good.

In the midst of this brawl our Caernarvon pulls up behind me...and blocks me. I can't back up! And he sits there. Parked. Meanwhile I'm eating multiple shots and can't get back into cover because this jackass is parked literally on my back bumper. And he's not even shooting. I thought he might be AFK.

I get killed.  He does actually move a few seconds after I'm dead. We lose the battle 9-15.

I check the post-game stats...

 

Dude has fewer than 2300 battles and he's already scooting around in his shiny Caernarvon. 43.58% win rate. Probably because he's playing at least 2 tiers above his ability level and that means that fairly often he's handicapping his team.

Is he a shitty World of Tanks player?

Not necessarily, he's just a noob. He barely knows which end of the tank is the front.

Thanks to blueprints, x5 missions, and other such the grind has become so trivial that guys like that who have no idea what they're doing can roll out in their Tier 8 tanks.

Maybe 10K battles from now, when he's got some experience, he'll turn out to be a pretty decent player. In the meantime...he's a liability on the battlefield most of the time.

Is he wrong to play Tier 8?

Well...it's a game and there's no rule that says you have to have x battles before you're allowed to play Tier 8. He can play Tier 8 if he wants to. But...

...I submit that one of the most significant reasons for lopsided games is that one team or the other gets a couple of these newborn babes bumbling around in top tier tanks like drunken baby elephants, while the other team happened to get players with 10 times as many battles in their top tier tanks.

Would we have won this battle if he hadn't gotten me killed? Maybe, maybe not. 

Would we have won this battle if he hadn't gotten me killed AND if our top tier heavy tank had been in the hands of a competent player? I think our odds are pretty good.

I wish he'd stuck to Tier 5/6 for a few thousand more battles until he had the game basics down.

GLHF.