World of Tanks (WoT) is an armoured warfare-themed multiplayer online game developed by Wargaming, featuring 20th century (1910s–1970s) era combat vehicles.

[1] It is built upon a freemium business model where the game is free-to-play, but participants also have the option of paying a fee for use of "premium" features.

The player takes control of a single armored tank or self-propelled artillery vehicle of their choice and is placed into a battle on a random map.

World of Tanks contains multiple game mechanics such as camouflage, shell ricochets, and module and personnel damage.

The game currently includes over 600 armored vehicles from Britain, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and the United States.

Various two-tone and three-tone camouflage schemes are available for all tanks as well, including both historically accurate patterns and game-specific, custom variants.

[5] Players can apply national flags, pre-designed slogans, and camouflage (that will slightly increase the chance of remaining undetected).

Clan Wars in World of Tanks has two main components: Strongholds and the Global Map.

By consuming industrial resources, some structures generate special missions or reserves that can be used to temporarily boost clan members' experience or credits or enable artillery or airstrikes during a battle for a stronghold.

[7] Alpha testing of the Russian version of the game began September 2009, with only six different vehicles and a single map available.

By the beginning of the closed beta test, which started on 30 January 2010, several dozen vehicles and three maps were completed.

[8] In three months, the number of beta tester requests approached 40,000, and over 400,000 tank battles took place.

[citation needed] The open beta of the English version of the game was launched on 27 January 2011;[13] the official release was scheduled for 12 April 2011.

[14] The World of Tanks pre-orders were scheduled to be available for the American and European clusters before the game release.

[citation needed] In April 2016, Wargaming announced that a comic book based on the World of Tanks universe was in development.

Titled World of Tanks: Roll Out, the five-issue series was written by Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra and was published by Dark Horse Comics.

As of June 2017, Wargaming released two premium tanks based on the anime series Valkyria Chronicles on the East Asia server.

[31] World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition[32] was developed with Wargaming West, formerly Day 1 Studios until purchased early in 2013.

[33] Day 1 was looking for a publisher for their console mech game when Wargaming asked the studio about porting World of Tanks.

[citation needed] On 18 February 2015, Wargaming announced that they were developing an Xbox One version of the game.

[38] Xbox Live regulations bar Wargaming from offering premium accounts as recurring subscriptions.

[43] The only official World of Tanks e-sports tournament is the Wargaming.net League, which takes place on four different regions: CIS, APAC, EU, which have 12 teams each, and NA, which only has 10.

[67][68][69][70][71] GameZone gave the PC version a score of eight out of ten and stated, "For a free-to-play game, World of Tanks is insanely detailed and has combat that takes a while to get used to.

[49] According to a Wargaming official press release from September 2010, the number of World of Tanks users worldwide reached 700,000, including 500,000 users on Russian servers (350,000 active players), and 200,000 on Western servers (150,000 active players).

The average active gamer spent 3 hours 20 minutes playing the game every day; over 10,000,000 battles have been fought since September 2010.

[80] By January 2011, World of Tanks had recorded more than one million registrations worldwide (Europe, Russia and the United States).

[91]|- The game has proven popular with Ukrainian soldiers in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a means of coping with the stresses of warfare both via dissociation and the comfort of the familiar, many having been long-time fans of the franchise.

[94][95] In May 2017, Wargaming found itself amidst controversy when it was claimed that one of its employees had threatened to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim against YouTube gaming content creator SirFoch over his scathing review of a World of Tanks premium tank, the Chrysler K GF.