Does World of Tanks really have a 'Russian Bias'? [closed]

Win rates don't tell the whole story. As you've seen there are certain tanks which are pretty much overpowered, or rather there are certain tanks which play the way you'd like them to while everything is is pretty much sub par.

Each nation of tanks tends to have certain strengths:

• American tanks tend to be fast, have well armoured turrets, and be accurate with a good rate of fire but low damage
• German tanks tend to be the most accurate but lack in penetration and damage
• English tanks tend to be either fast and poorly armoured or slow and reasonable well armourd with very high rate of fire guns but do very little damage
• French tanks have great guns but lousy armour. Also their low tier tanks are rubbish and their high tier tanks are good
• Russian tanks have fast, well armoured tanks with big slow guns that have good penetration

While that sounds like a pretty balanced set of tanks the game design tends to favour certain aspects over others:

• Due to the mechanics of the penetration system slope of armour is as important as thickness. Almost all Russian tanks have good sloped armour whereas only some tanks, mostly higher tier from the other nations have good sloped armour
• Due to the size of the maps (500m x 500m) tanks that are short range brawlers do better than sniping tanks. Most Russian tanks are brawlers rather than snipers whereas the other nations tend to have tanks better suited to sniping
• Most fighting between tanks is around hard cover using a peekaboo technique. Tanks with a slow rate of fire and high damage are preferable. Most Russian tanks have a low rate of fire with high damage whereas most other nations have a high rate of fire with lower damage
• You gain experience and credits mostly via damage done. Tanks that do more damage per shot are better for this. Again Russian tanks favour this aspect
• There are a number of factors that are have no representation within the game like the comfort of tanks, quality of crew training, reliability, communications, quality of materials, and so on. This tends to favour the Russian tanks as well

So, put simply, there is no obvious Russian bias, but adding together many small factors does show that Russian tanks are the best suited to the game design overall.