Erissa WG, on 19 January 2015 - 07:18 AM, said:
Congrats to the winners and everyone who took part in Cosmic Carrie's contest!
I'll be making sure your rewards reach you guys as soon as possible! 
- Erissa
DEAR WARGAMING WEST
Firstly, I would like to congratulate all the winners. Those were some impressive damage totals, well deserving of the infamous KV-5.
I would like to bring up a matter that concerns me. The rules of the competition were not clearly posted for all to see from the outset of the event. I'm sure Carrie and you guys at WG wanted to cover all the bases in terms of rules and technicalities, and were thorough, so as to not encounter any "uh-oh" moments when an entry was on the border of acceptable/ unacceptable. Herein lies the problem that I seen.
A.) All that was stated about a qualifying entry, was that it had to show your GT & damage clearly and legible. Nowhere was there guidelines posted as to which games were considered acceptable in regards to past versions of the WOTXbox360 Live Client.
In all the past WG sponsored contests on WOTXbox360, battles entered into the contest had to be from a time period, starting the day of the contest up to the minute before the contest officially closed. This comp started out like that, but soon turned into questions about games from past builds & BETA being eligible for the competition. And to my astonishment, Cosmic Carrie said all games from previous builds including BETA, were eligible to enter into the contest.
This info should've been posted in the rules at the start of the Event. IMHO, any games before the start date of the contest, especially BETA games, should have been ineligible as entries for this competition. Now calm down, and I will explain to you my reasoning behind my views on this. I think you will agree after I am finished.
B.) Any competition that is considered fair, and claims all participants have the same chance as any other participant, must have a basic guideline to govern the process by. In this case, some participants had an advantage over others. BETA players were allowed to use results from before the game was even released, as a valid entry.Although none of the winning entries were BETA results, they very well could have won. Is it a "fair" competition for longtime players to have all those extra months of battles over newer players? Some will say," But they didn't know this competition would take place way back then". True, but how many WOT players do you know that would NOT take a picture of the battle results when they have an exceptional match? Not many I assure you...
This brings up the other issue. Results entered into the competition from previous builds than the current update. Players that recently started, have never known a WOT battle without all of the current tanks in the tech trees. It is arguably much more difficult to get those amazing battles when there is so much diversity on the battlefield.
Back in BETA there were only a few nations. Games were very different back then. A tank like the T-95 for example reigned supreme in those days. You were penetrated way less then, than you are now in the games current state with all of the new high penetration cannons and Autoloaders. Newer players never had that experience.
How can a competition be considered fair if participants entered battle results from varying stages of development, where the amount of tanks and changes to content(game mechanics, nerfs, buffs, etc....) could be very minor differences ranging to the extreme, for example; The state of the game during BETA?
This concerns me because of the simple fact that some of the winners entries may very well have been from an earlier update, and you can't tell because they don't include the date of the battle in the picture. The results screen hasn't changed much, if any, for the last few updates. But what is different, are the smorgasbord of new tanks added over the last several updates. Opponents that can change the fate of a battle had they been in it.
I knew typing this that it wasn't going to change anything as far as this particular contest goes. All the winners worked very hard for those battle results and deserve nothing but the prize they were promised. But I felt compelled to make known the fallacies with the currently flawed process. Hopefully if you can get behind this, and you agree with what I have been trying to explain to you guys, any competitions held in the future will have a universal rule that all entries battles' must have taken place during the duration of the event. That is my goal that I hope to achieve by writing this.
Thank You for your time and consideration,
BlakeG287