Commanders!
Map environment interaction has always been one of the cornerstones of World of Tanks gameplay. Felling trees allows you to hide better from opponents, while sliding down a steep hill slope can help you attack your foes from the rear, and so on. We have always worked hard to keep expanding the bag of environment-related tricks players can use in battle. With Update 9.13, it became possible to fight inside buildings where you were safe from arty shelling. Later, with Update 1.0, the first destructible objects were added to serve as disposable cover.
Now the time has come for every player to try out two new map features first made available to the participants of the Update 1.20.1 Common Test: random events and dynamic cover. From May 15, play in the Recon Mission 2023 mode (accessible via the mode selector) and share your opinions with us in the updated questionnaires!
The addition of random events and dynamic cover makes gameplay richer and more varied while staying true to its basics. Random events give you a fresh selection of interesting opportunities once they happen, each with the potential to tip the scales of battle, and dynamic cover (which can be moved around the battlefield) gives you an open invitation to improvise. With these new features, your tactical awareness and inventiveness are rewarded more than ever. What’s important is that the gameplay enhancements you can experience in Recon Mission 2023 are just what we are ready to release for testing—and it’s only the beginning!
Random Events: Part and Parcel of Maps
A random event significantly impacts a large area of its map, creating new paths for vehicles and/or blocking existing ones, producing new cover and firing positions. One of the main goals of random events is shaking up the situation on the battlefield. Their locations (shown in the widget below) are most likely familiar to you as spots where fighting may come to a stalemate. Random events can break up deadlocks by offering both sides fresh tactical opportunities.
Random events are designed as integral parts of the locations in which they happen and are related to their setting. For example, Safe Haven features a seaport, and one of the random events there is a large cargo ship crashing into a dock. In Recon Mission 2023, random events are available on four maps: Himmelsdorf, Ruinberg, Prokhorovka, and Safe Haven.
Currently, we do not plan to introduce random events on every map, although the list of locations that do feature them may expand in the future. Also, we are currently prioritizing integrating random events into Random Battles because it is the core mode of the game. In the future, we may implement random events in other game modes.
Random Events: Current State and Mechanics
While playing in the new Recon Mission 2023 mode, you won’t be able to miss random events. Before an event starts, you will hear a warning sound, at which point the event zone will be marked on the map and the minimap with a red border, and then a countdown will start. Before it reaches zero, it is advisable to drive your vehicle out of the event zone. The current penalty for not doing this in time is the vehicle’s destruction, but this may change in the future.
Recon Mission 2023 is just one of the stages of ongoing random events development. Moreover, certain features are for testing purposes only and will not carry over to the release. For example, every possible random event (two or three per map) will fire over the course of every battle, each within a designated narrow time frame. This most likely won’t be the case when random events hit Random Battles—they will occur at more random times (or sometimes not even happen at all) and will possibly be triggered by certain gameplay factors.
With random events being very important to their locations (as they change their topography drastically on the go), we will pay special attention to their impact on map balance. We will use the data and feedback from Recon Mission while fine-tuning the existing events and designing new ones.
Random events may be random in their timing, but when one starts, it unfolds according to its unique scenario. For each event, its sequence, the location and size of its danger zones, and the shape of new cover and passages will always be the same. Therefore, you can already learn how every event unfolds to use the tactical advantages it offers in the future.
In Recon Mission, the visual effects for random events are not final, their current quality being sufficient for a gameplay test. When random events become part of Random Battles on certain maps, explosions will be much more impressive, fires will burn brighter, etc.
We are aware that random events may be a strain on some lower-end systems. By the time they hit Random Battles, we will address this by optimizing their use of system resources on any hardware and adding their versions for lower-spec systems that will be less demanding on performance but the same in terms of gameplay.
Dynamic Cover
Every Recon Mission location will also have dynamic cover: map objects that can be moved by your vehicle while giving it additional protection. You can use these objects in a broad variety of tactical situations, and it’s important to distinguish between the two types of dynamic cover: indestructible and destructible.
- Indestructible dynamic cover currently consists of railway carriages and wrecks of tanks (either with or without a turret). These objects may be hard to push around with your vehicle, but you don’t have to worry about them being dismantled by enemy shots.
- Destructible dynamic cover includes cargo containers as well as small and large concrete blocks. Each of these object types has an HP pool that can be depleted with several shots. The exact number of shots needed to destroy an opponent’s dynamic cover depends on its remaining HP count and the damage output of your gun.
We plan to add more dynamic cover objects in the future. Currently, there is a limited number of them because we are testing the mechanics and want to make it easier for you to identify the objects that can be moved and destroyed.
Recon Mission 2023: The Progression
Getting into the top 12 by base XP (in your team) in Recon Mission battles contributes to your progression bar. To complete the event Progression, you need to meet these conditions in 50 battles. Among the rewards you receive for reaching certain Progression thresholds are days of WoT Premium Account, Personal Reserves, directives, medals, and a special 2D style!
The Progression will be reset after the first week of Recon Mission (on May 22 at 10:00 CEST (UTC+2)), so you can complete it twice—and get double the rewards!
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The Questionnaire
You can fill in the general questionnaire after having played 20 Recon Mission battles in which you were among the top 12 players on your team by base XP earned. There are also four map-specific questionnaires that unlock after you play eight battles on the given map (while also being among the top 12 on your team by base XP).
The set of questions you can answer has been reworked and expanded compared to the previous Recon Mission. In these, you are encouraged to give your opinions not only on the implementation of random events and dynamic cover on the available maps but also on the gameplay mechanics of these features, such as their randomness, timing, triggers, penalties for vehicles that fail to leave danger zones in time, and much more.
Play Recon Mission 2023, fill in the questionnaires, and help define the future of the game, Commanders!