WOT Battles Played vs. Win Rate Data Analysis. Nearly 40 million players studied. The trends reveal a clear correlation: players improve the more they play, up to at least 70k battles.

Observations:

  • The "10,000-hour rule" (which claims that 10,000 hours of practice leads to mastery) seems to hold some truth in these trends.
  • Data gets noisier as the number of battles increases. This is because there are fewer players with high battle counts. For example, there are far more players with 1,000–2,000 battles than with 99,000–100,000 battles.
  • Figure 2 suggests the presence of smurfs, shown by the cluster of top 90%+ players on the far left.
  • Figure 3 shows that the gap between good and bad players grows until around 40k battles. This might be because good players tend to play fewer, more mindful games, while casual players focus more on having fun.
  • Figure 4 is unusual—new EU players start worse and take longer to reach their skill ceiling compared to NA or SEA players.
  • Figure 6 highlights differences in skill levels between NA and EU players. These results are unlikely to reflect genetic differences but instead relate to internal WOT variables. However, if a similar study were done comparing the Chinese and RU servers (which have large player bases), it might reveal trends about learning speed (how long it takes to reach max skill) and potential genetic variation (comparing skill differences between the 25th and 75th percentiles).