Trivia / World of Tanks

• Development Gag: The old "Orc beat by tank" trailer released in the months leading up to the game's release? Turns out, it's almost entirely made of recycled assets intended for the game that would become World of Tanks, which would've been a bog standard fantasy MMORPG.
• Dueling Games:
  • Also contributed to the development of this game. Originally, the devs planned to make yet another "Orcs vs. Elves" fantasy game, but believed they wouldn't be able to handle the competition and so decided to take the completely vacant "tank MMO" spot instead.
  • This is likely the reason why (combined with Development Gag, see above) the first teaser trailer featured a lone Orcish warrior slaughtering purple-blooded elven archers on top of a fortress, only to be run over by a tank afterwards.
  • Gaijin Entertainment's War Thunder is in the process of getting Tanks and Warships (the latter being much-delayed but the former having very well-populated tech trees as of 2016), making it an all-in-one rival to World of Tanks and its companion games World of Warplanes and World of Warships. It focuses on relatively more realistic gameplay, lacking the Hit Points of Wargaming's World of series of games. Whether this is a better way to do a tank game and whether War Thunder actually achieves its realism goals are the subjects of many a flame war.
  • Obsidian Entertainment is now designing a new tank game using more modern tanks called Armored Warfare, which promises to fix a lot of the flaws with World of Tanks, mainly the high level of RNG and balance problems. The basics of its gameplay are similar enough to World of Tanks to make for an easy transition by players, but it differentiates itself by using modern tanks rather than copying the World War II setting of WoT.
• Follow the Leader:
  • After the success of World of Tanks, several other tank-driving multiplayer action games had been announced, such as Armored Warfare.
  • A Chinese game, Project Tank, was shut down by legal action due to allegations that it was copying World of Tanks wholesale, using textures and non-historical vehicles from the older game.
• No Export for You: WoT players on the PC are still waiting on the Girls und Panzer collab, after the game's console version briefly got one in the form of a Panzer IV H reskin. And likewise for the Valkyria Chronicles colab tanks (Edelweiss and Nameless), which were sold for the PC version, but only on the Asia server (the smallest of the game's servers).
• Promoted Fanboy: The band members of Sabaton are longtime players of World of Tanks, and started a cross-promotion deal with Wargaming in 2017. Wargaming has provided CGI for several of Sabaton's music videos ("Primo Victoria" and "Steel Commanders" for World of Tanks, "Bismarck" for World of Warships), and Sabaton has promotional versions of the Swedish Centurion available in-game.
• Schedule Slip: Wargaming publicly released a "Two Year Plan" for the game, detailing features that it wanted to have implemented by at least 2012. Come 2013 (and patch 8.6), and it has implemented barely a quarter of the promised features.
  • See the Japanese line of tanks? That was promised by the last quarter of 2012. It took a one year delay (December 2013) for Wargaming to finally put Japan in the game (patch 8.10), with the Heavy Line (From the Type 89 Tier-2 Medium up to the Type-5 Tier-10 Heavy) only implemented nearly two years later. (Patch 9.10)
  • The German secondary TD line (the "Glass Cannon" or Waffenträger line) added in patch 8.9 had been promised since before said Two Year Plan.
  • The French still lack their alternate tank lines, which are supposed to have the S35, S40, and R35 cavalry tanks, all the way up to the Cold War AMX 30. They're also missing several of their monster tanks, such as the 2C and the FCM F1.
    • The R35, S35, and AMX-30 finally see daylight in April 2015. An egregious delay of more than two years.
  • The English wiki was down from November 2013 to July 2014. What changed? The GUI, and not much else. Details of the debacle can be found here.
• Tourist Bump: The game caused a surge in interest in historical tanks and therefore in tank museums, notably big ones such as Kubinka in Russia, Saumur in France and Bovington in the United Kingdom.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • Patch 9.16, brought the removal of All-Chat from In-Battle Chat due to it being used too often for players insulting and abusive language to the other team, as well as players griefing their teammates by revealing their location to the enemy. In addition, it brings about a clamping down on toxic chat in general by providing more weight for chat violations but also adding a mute button. Unfortunately, this also means good mannered players are prevented from sending compliments to the enemy team for good play. It's had the unfortunate side effect of shifting the toxicity away from the enemy team to your own, as the people who are bitter have no one else to vent to.

---