World of Tanks 1.3 comes with new options for vehicle customization, Personal Missions changes, and more

World of Tanks has been around for more than eight years and it managed to hit 1.1 million concurrent players in late 2013, when the game had over 75 million registered players. However, its developers took a few wrong turns since then and many players decided to stop playing on a regular basis. Now, World of Tanks 1.3 is live and, sadly, it doesn't even try to touch some of the worst issues that have been killing this game's appeal for a long time.

Before moving on to the changes delivered by the new update, I will only name the worst problems: a broken matchmaking system that turns random battles in nothing more than a lottery where one or two individuals cannot do anything to change the fate of a battle, no matter how skilled they might be; a few virtually impossible special missions; no effective solution for the removal of idle players and bots; the obvious fact that Wargaming is focusing more on the players' wallets than anything else.

Now, about World of Tanks 1.3: there are around 40 large-scale decals for premium tier VIII vehicles and non-premium tier X ones, available for gold; some of the awful Personal Missions have been adjusted to make them more bearable; the T 55A and Object 260 tanks have been buffed; Hinterland is a new map for the Grand Battles mode; Mannerheim Line, Himmelsdorf, Pilsen and Fisherman’s Bay have been reworked. No, there is no noticeable change to the matchmaking system that has recently made life impossible for many tankers.

Lastly, there's one interesting thing I noticed (and I also took a screenshot for eternity) in the game. After the patch went live, the in-game notification screen should have been able to accommodate a video player window with some update-related content. However, all I got was a "video placeholder" YouTube video. Until Wargaming fixes that, feel free to check the video review of the World of Tanks 1.3 update below and don't be shy to tell us what you think: is there a future for this game or everything is lost and we should all move to War Thunder or Armored Warfare?