They fucked up big. They also apologized with some big names on the letter, but who knows if it'll stick.
As an aside about the premium ammo: back in the day, it could only be bought with real money. This led to it almost never being used unless your clan had the minor gold income that they got from the "clan wars" side game or unless a person was stupid rich. Hence, tanks and guns were balanced around, basically, premium ammo not existed.
Then, a few years ago, they made it so that premium ammo and consumables could be purchased with ingame currency at an 800% mark up, aka, if a premium shell cost 50 gold, the ingame currency cost would be 40000 silver. At the time all that did was to remove a pay-to-win element of the game.
Unfortunately, through a combination of greed and power creep, the design and balancing processess of WoT shifted. Frontal weak spots started getting removed, guns started getting more lackluster, maps started funneling people into more frontal engagements, etc. So regular players started having to budget expensive premium ammo into regular gameplay. Which means one of three things: they buy a premium account to up the amount of credits they make per match substantially, they buy a premium tank which costs less to repair and makes more credits a match, or they do a shit ton of lower tier grinding.
This came to a head with one of their newer tier 8 premium tanks. It's some experimental US thing that might've existed only in blueprints, but they're running out of actual tanks to put in the game. WoT comes with ten tiers of tank, with each match being composed of a maximum of three tiers of tank. Tier 3-5, 7-9, etc. The new premium tank was at tier 8. It had no frontal weak spots. In fact, it had heavy enough frontal armor that, when angled, their 10 tanks would have a problem causing damage to it without using premium ammunition. And tier 10 tanks almost never make a profit during a match anyway. And this tank could also appear in matches with tier 6 tanks, who'd have a very good chance of not being able to put damage on it frontally even with premium ammo. So that's a problem.
On top of that. The tank maneuvers pretty well, not slow like most other heavy tanks. But despite the gun having good characteristics in it's soft stats, there's one problem: even with premium ammo, it couldn't hurt another of its kind at any point by shooting it in the front unless the other tank was cresting a hill and you could shoot it in the belly. So unless this tank got exceedingly good position, it couldn't kill itself. So that's broken.
And here's the shit cherry on top: guess how much a tier 8 premium tank costs? $50+ American dollars.
Side note to the side note, I don't have a problem with this pricing in general. I wouldn't pay it myself, but these tanks theoretically cut down on a lot of grind. The problem is that, untill recently, premium tanks weren't designed to be best in class. E.g. a tier 8 premium tank is supposed to be worse in general to a fully upgraded normal tier 8 tank of the same class. And if said premium tank is better than it's peers in one aspect (the T28's massively damaging gun) , it sure as hell has major weaknesses in other areas to compensate (the T28's sluggish reload, relative inaccuracy, slow movement speed, and woefully inadequate hull armor.)
