How to Improve your Gameplay (generally)

So you're here on this forum, which is already half the battle. This means that you know you want to be around other good tankers and converse to become better.

But you've been watching all of those videos and streams yet it just doesn't translate to your gameplay...
    Unless you haven't been watching, in which case I highly suggest you go on Twitch or Youtube and look around     for good World of Tanks streamers.

So what can you do?

The first thing I would suggest to everyone is to become highly critical of yourself. Whenever anything happens, look at what you did to get there and how it turned out badly. You must look at every failed attempt or every death as an opportunity to evaluate your play and find out what you can do to stop it from happening again.

While you do this, you should also learn to stay alive longer in game. I remember when I had a 26% survival rate. When you start to look at what you have done wrong, you can start to avoid it, and this usually leads to you staying alive longer.

Staying alive longer results in your gun firing longer, which results in more damage, which results in better stats and wins. That's the goal.

But now you get to a point where you are doing good in battles and staying alive, but you aren't getting that purple level of damage or the influence you want.

This is where you have to re-learn your play-style. You need to become more aggressive and seek the damage on the field. This is weird right, because I just told you to learn to stay alive longer and avoid plays that can get you killed. Yeah, well, becoming a better player means that you have to re-learn this. Find a good initial position to get early spots and damage, then move to a midgame position for fighting, and hopefully survive to the endgame to clean up.

I suggest map analysis for this. Go in a training room and try to find places you like to go initially, or you can just try it out in-game through trial and error. You get better at this with time, but the goal is to get in battle and know immediately some spots where you can go.

This is a lot, right, and now you have learned to find good positions, evaluate yourself, and survive longer into the game. But there are still those pesky things that always ruin your plans - That Conqueror GC who you realize can one-shot you in the position you wanted to take, or that YOLOing E-50M who you just can't kill without having the entire enemy team shooting you.

Here's the biggest part: You need to learn to adjust everything you've learned when necessary. You see arty? Find out what positions you can go to that are arty-safe. You're surrounded? Sometimes YOLOing is the answer. Maybe you just need to take out one tank and try to avoid the others. The in-game situation usually requires that you abandon your perfect plan of locate-damage-relocate-do more damage-cleanup-win.

This only comes with time.

But after you've done ALL OF THIS, you can load into a map and see the enemy team. You should be able to tell roughly which tanks will go where and what position is most beneficial for your tank. Your team leaves you alone and lemming trains? You can reposition to where you need to. You are doing consistent damage and surviving until the end of the battle, you're doing well. Without realizing it, you have pretty much just come up with the perfect mindset for World of Tanks. In doing so, you probably know every map, every tank, every strategy, every situation, everything that has gone wrong and everything that has gone right.

And WoT will still find way to throw you a curveball.

So TL;DR: Learn the game - tanks, maps, strategies - self-evaluate, try different styles, and find what works best in any situation.

I realize this is over-generalized and difficult to do. But I am sure anyone can do it. You still need to know about hull-down strategies, ammo utilization, map strategies, weakspots, what to do in ____ situation, etc. That's what this wonderful forum is for.

However, I think that the most important thing you can do is learn through trial and error. You only know what to do by trying it, failing most of the time but sometimes finding that perfect play. As long as you can recognize your strengths and weaknesses, you'll be improving.

Thanks for reading and I really hope this helps. See a flaw in my guide or something I should add? Leave me a comment or PM.

Good luck on the battlefield and have a great time. Remember - something can always go wrong. But hopefully you can adjust and dominate your opponents.