Thanks to Vlad for translating.

Sandbox/SPG:

– SPG rebalance is coming to an end. We can say that the implemented changes did have the effect we’ve hoped for;

– The stun mechanic is there to compensate the artillery rebalance, we changed it from a damage-dealing class into a support class. It should not oneshot anymore, but without stun it would be unable to halt an enemy advance. We’ve remade it into a so-called “territorial control unit”;

– Toxicity of artillery should lessen with the rebalance, since one-shots will be way less common now. The toxicity came to be because the event “I was removed from the game”, which was the way artillery was preventing enemy tanks from advancing, greatly hurt the single player;

– When talking about stun, everyone seems to forget about consumables cooldown, which mitigate the effect of it;

– We also had internal tests regarding arty and tested various approaches, some thing were just so painfully obvious that there was no purpose in testing them publically;

– There are some other things for artillery which can be implemented, this is a question of fine-tuning. Marking of targets and Battle Assistant will come as well;

– We also had the idea of marking artillery after shooting with concentric cirles on minimap, but decided not to. Why? Because counter-battery is good, but this gives a great advantage for those playing against artillery; [TN: or maybe they didn’t want to blatantly copy a certain other game]

– Arty will now have to think who to support right now, and not just rack up damage;

– Arty will receive XP based on stun, it’s now an assist counter similar to spotting and tracking;

– Personal missions for artillery will be reviewed;

– We’ll be watching that arty and LT XP don’t drop;

– Stun will be implemented after PT, will be tuned, we’ll change it based on feedback and statistics. Stun can be tweaked by many criteria: its’ effect, duration are not constant numbers;

– If stun mechanics are received negatively or do not have the desired effect, artillery might be removed from the game;

– We do not make up tanks and everyone knows that; [TN: lol]

– Arty one-shots happen more often that ammo rack axplosions;

Tier 10 LT:

– New LT are required for correct operation of the new MM. There is a true opinion that LT are not relevant anymore and are played for the personal missions. First spot in the match is not relevant;

– The psychology of LT will change now: it is a fully-fledged tank now with good capabilities. People will have to get used to it, it’s different to former tier 8 LT;

– We tried to rebalance view range of all classes on Sandbox, the reaction was quite negative. Players said that they didn’t want to depend on LT’s this much that could die within 30s in battle;

– We now took up the practice to deploy earlier versions, prototypes on Sandbox;

– There are some ideas for premium LT, but only after the changes. There are tier 8 ones: 2 good variants for the Americans, but none for the Germans – no options. Also difficult for USSR, even more so for China. We’ll dig in the archives;

– No plans for tier 9 premiums;

– T-50-2 will not come as premium;

New matchmaker:

– Rejection of the old and creating something new – that’s how the new matchmaker came into being. We had very long discussions regarding the requirements, some were accepted, some were scrapped. Research shows that all platoons with lower tier vehicles have bad statistics. We have talked for a while about limiting tiers. All in all everything started from the 3-5-7 idea;

– The new matchmaker is very versatile, the problems of the old one were known quite well. At the same time, we’ve encountered the situation that there is a quite specific distribution of tanks by tier – growing until tier 8, then a drop on tier 9 and again growth on tier 10;

– The biggest novelty will be battles of one tier – if there are many tanks of the same tier, that do not fit in any battles, they are put in the same battle;

– The less people are online, the worse will be the quality of the battles. Thus we ask of the players to play more so there are more online;

– One thing which we have to think about are the setups which will cause “super defeats” for either side. Which conditions cause a battle to progress in a strange way from a statistical point of view, and thus adjust the MM in these cases;

– We already delayed the new MM for long enough. We really want to bring this novelty to the players;

– There are possibilities regarding map preference, it may be possible. For example 3-5 maps if you have premium, 3 maps on standard account, but if you overlay this with the new MM, there will be huge problems, but it might come eventually;