MagicalFlyingFox, on 29 March 2018 - 11:09 AM, said:
The arty problem has never been about how effective it is.
What is it about then? Not being facetious, I am genuinely curious.
But looking at those games is telling in that despite Pro doing everything to be as attractive an arty target as possible, he isn't. Crazib showed similar clips of being extremely aggressive with 2 arty and him almost sitting in the open and he was not shot at as the meme says with XVM sniping and punishing aggressive play.
And based on average damage and watching these guys streams these highlighted games are played in similar style to nearly all of their games. Their results show that arty cannot be that effective against them or they would not get those results. Which is why i asked for actual data. Don't just tell us its bad, show us the actual results. We ask people who have theories about MM or WR to do that, why not this claim?
I've been watching a lot of streamers to try to take my play to the next level and this is what I've observed.
1) great players mostly drive meta tanks - invariably high effective DPM (high base DPM with an accurate high pen gun), mobile and good turret armour.
2) great players (high WN8 + high WR) mostly take highly aggressive forward positions with shots into multiple areas, or shots into choke points with high numbers of tanks. This helps them get early critical damage to start the snowball effect, and spotting and assist damage. They prefer hull down spots and use their skills in amour angling to minimise damage taken. Invariably the positions which offer high damage potential are pretty exposed to arty fire.
3) great players keep the gun singing - they almost always shoot as soon as it is loaded. This means that they don't move far between shots or take what would be called the typical advice about how to minimise arty risk. They take measured risks to take guns out of the game early because it leads to the snowball.
Points 2 and 3 mean that very often the unicum player is the first tank spotted and keeps being spotted in order to start getting that huge damage happening. This means if the "arty targets unicums and punishes aggressive play" meme is true arty should be all over them, both from being aggressive and for having no XVM camo. But by a large margin from the streaming and games I have watched, that is not the case.
And from the results in terms of both WN8 and WR metric that style of hyper aggressive play is not punished overly by arty. From what I have seen it is hardly punished by arty. This is not to say that occasionally arty will get stuck into someone, but that does not happen very often. There is likely a cost due to arty by playing like that, but it is likely to be very tiny compared to the benefits. If it was a big cost then it would be impossible for the unicums to continue to be such extreme outliers in terms of WN8 and WR.
I will be happy to drop this view if people can provide data which shows damage and how many times unicums get punished by arty. Or have streams which show them being constantly targeted.
But I strongly suspect its just the arty version of the baseless whinge that WR is controlled by luck.
My "digitally derived" estimate (wild arsed guess) is that very few players will receive more than 1 arty shot per game. I ran the arty damage tracker mod when I started playing much more aggressively and my average was 0.4 shots per game.