WOTBB 59 – Training Rooms

Original date of blog: September 20th, 2016

Another new feature we’ve gotten not too long ago is training rooms. And unlike Supremacy, this is a feature that I didn’t like when we got it and that I still don’t like. Of course, it can be useful, but overall, I do not like it.

At the start, it drew most of the good players out of the random battles and into the training rooms, meaning that the noob teams were even more plentiful and frustrating. But training rooms weren’t used to hold proper battles at the time. It was mostly used to try out glitches and to get tanks to funny positions.

Nowadays, this is still the case, and a number of games have been developed by people, like zombies vs humans or hide and seek and such. I don’t join in with those kinds of things. I don’t like it. If I wanted a hide and go seek game, I’d download a hidden objects game. When I start up this game, it’s because I want to have tactical fun blasting enemies to kingdom come. I know I’m sounding very grumpy there, and in a way, I am. I regret that that part of training rooms is keeping a lot of people out of the actual game. I just really do not understand the fun of it.

But training rooms also offer a much more serious side, and serious challenge. The training rooms have proven useful to me when trying out a new tank, to see how it drives, or for trying out new maps or positions. I got the Löwe at about the same time training rooms came. I didn’t feel I was doing bad in it, but my winrate in it was utterly appalling. When asking for tips, I got told this was to do with my snipermoding. That, of course, made me roll my eyes because if that was the case my winrate would suck in all my tanks, globally and everything. It’s such a shortsighted answer and frankly, it pisses me off, because it means that the ones that said that actually have no clue how I play and can’t actually look beyond the fact that my playstyle is different than theirs. I expect those kinds of comments on youtube, but from my own clanmates? No.

When I brought the Löwe to the training room, and put Filip in the opposite team, we quickly worked out that the problem wasn’t with the way I played it. I played the thing right, including angling and all that. So my losing so much in it wasn’t because of that. But the problem did lie in my playstyle.

I’m a platoon player. I usually only solo when I’m not feeling social for one reason or another, which is why my platoon rate hovers around 80%. And therein lay the problem. Despite not doing bad, I play as if there is another player in my team that’s doing as they should, or is at least present where they should. And when you go solo, that’s rarely the case. So yes, for figuring that out, training rooms proved to be very useful.

It can be used for events, too, like tournaments and whatnot. I’ve even had one ICE where near the end, when there were just 14 of us left around 3am, we went to training rooms. It was dreadful. The whole thing just went stale, you lost the random and the fun, to social aspect was just dead. Trying that really strengthened my resolution to never, ever, move ICE to training rooms.

But, in my opinion, the most useful part of training rooms is clan battles, meaning one full team of clan A versus one full team of clan B. That’s added a whole new dimension to the game. It makes for very serious battles, and the game itself is taken a lot more seriously too. Tactics become an actual part of the game now, where you need to make the whole team matter, or at least useful. And not just for the maps, but also for the tanks. There’s training, friendly battles, derpy battles (think a full team of Mice, or Angry Connors), and serious battles.

And it’s actually mindblowing how much work goes into it. I by far do not know all the tactics yet – mostly because real life has been so busy I really haven’t been able to attend many trainings, and the ones I did attend mostly resulted in my forgetting things very quickly again because my brain would be half gone already by the time training started.

I have taken part in several clan battles versus other clans though, and it’s definitely different. I know I’m a teamplayer, or at least, a platoon player, and that’s both a strength and weakness. But this is something else altogether. You can’t and won’t get away with thinking for you, and/or your ‘toon-partner’. No, you need to think of the whole team. And I find that that is actually the hardest thing to adapt to. I’ve tried commanding a few battles. It’s not that hard to think for two people and command one other. But 6 others is a whole different story.

Not to mention the fact that you need to change your way of thinking in other ways too. In random battles, you deduce whether or not you did good or bad on account of the damage and/or kills you did. In cw or training, you can have battles where you do two or three shots and still be completely vital to how the battle goes down.

I still have a -lot- to learn when it comes to cw. I’m not used to it yet, and like with everything, it’ll take time for me to adapt. But it’s intense, and more often than not, you get the same feeling you do when you’re in a game and the situation is tough, like a kolobanov or ace-like situation or whatever. At least, that’s what it is for me. And that’s likely something I need to grow out of, because I play better when I’m relaxed in my gameplay.

But aside from that I literally have a lot to learn – about the tanks first and foremost, but also about the maps, as you play the maps so differently when it’s just you and one other you can depend on, about the way the team of tanks works, and the way the team of players works.

That part of training rooms is all very exciting, and though I know I’m nowhere near good enough to properly compete in the name of my clan. Yet. When I first started this game, I was a total noob. But I learned how to play the tanks. Then I learned how to play the maps. Then I learned how to combine those two. Then I learned how to carry. Now I can learn how to play cw. It’s the next step.