International Women’s Day: Meet our Lady Tankers!

Here, a Spanish-speaking player! I want to take this opportunity to share my World of Tanks story.

I discovered the game in 2012, thanks to a group of friends that tried the game early on for a while. Then I told my ex and me about it, so we decided to play. I remember that back then there were only four nations available and that I started grinding the E5 line.

At first, I wasn't much into the game, I only played put because I wanted to join my ex and my friends, but I couldn't fully understand it. So I stopped playing it.

A few years later, a friend of this group stopped playing it too, and my ex and I broke up, so only one friend and I were left in the group. We played several games, but we kept coming back to World of Tanks from time to time to take a break, chat about life, and such. It was during this time that I really started enjoying the game; my friend helped me understand the game better and its mechanics. Then I started searching for info by myself to improve my gameplay even more.

There was a time that my friend and I distanced from one another, but then we got back to playing together. My best memories are us having fun, seeing him crashing with his EBR, enjoying ourselves when we help each other on the battlefield and we win a match thanks to that.

Thanks to World of Tanks I met wonderful people and had pleasant experiences. I also met some unpleasant people, but nowadays I enjoy a lot spending my free time playing World of Tanks alone and with my friend.

Here's my story:

Back in 2014, I was watching my grandpa, not a war veteran, just highly interested in war machines, and the logic of war, playing some of his games. I was easily amused by the tanks and whatnot, so he showed me World of Tanks. I wanted to try it out, so he let me play his account for a bit until I decided I wanted my own. Come 2016, after playing off and on over the months, I created my account. I didn't feel as interested in the game as I did when I first played it, but as time went by, I slowly got more and more into it. Around 5,000 battles, I took a few months break because of some personal life situations. After that, I got invited to a clan where I made a few really good friends who started my tank collecting addiction with a T26E4 Super Pershing. From then, I accumulated just over 200 tanks in my garage. My best friend that I met on a random Discord server, whom I actively play World of Tanks with, has given me a reason to keep playing and keep advancing through the tech trees.

I'm the youngest of anyone I meet in this game, and I think I got started off right in terms of statistics. I like to think I am good.

I choose to be the difference, and any time someone tries to start rage, I usually end up calming the situation.

Side effect: I'm mute, meaning I cannot speak with my voice I no longer have from an incident, which makes for interesting moments. Such as during battle sometimes, in Platoons, I will activate my mic, and breathe into it for no reason, or I will use a TTS app on my phone, and the sarcasm is not perfectly portrayed, so I can be like, I love when arty exists, and anyone who doesn't know me will think that I do in fact love arty.

My best friend and I are always competing to see who can ace a tank first. Just a bit of harmless fun we have.

When I was a baby I was abandoned in China. It was fate for an elderly lady to save me and I was adopted into a loving family in the US. Fast forward to 2013, I discovered World of Tanks. It became my favorite game. I would play until my eyes couldn't stay open. I continued playing because of the connections I made as well as my fascination for the machinery of tanks. World of Tanks is a special game to me and I continue to play it because of how it creates many new friendships and experiences. I do Taekwondo, and World of Tanks uses the same coordination and teamwork that I use in my everyday training.

With my life experiences and interest in tanks, World of Tanks is special to me. I am able to drive tanks, many being relics from WWII that I have never witnessed in person, yet. World of Tanks is my getaway and where I have fun times with my Clanmates and get to know them as a person. I wouldn't be able to meet a large variety of people without World of Tanks as well as have so much fun with the game with all the tanks and game modes provided. World of Tanks also helped me get out of my comfort zone. I started streaming with Tanks and still stream Tanks because at the end of the day it is my main game that I enjoy and play.

So here's my story so far...it's all my kids' fault!

Scroll back to 2014. At that time my only use for a PC was work. The idea of using them for play was like, "You gotta be kidding me." My kids were gamers and their game of choice at the time was World of Tanks, they were both in Clans, doing Clan wars and all that stuff, on TeamSpeak with online buddies. Me, a homeschooling mum, invoking the typical parental, "You should be outside and not parked in front of a PC all day playing." You gotta add the whiny voice to get the full effect, OK? 

So...my kids called me on it. As in how can you criticize if you know nothing about it. Pause. I'd been teaching them to be independent thinkers and was now getting caught in my own trap. So I did what any other self-respecting homeschooling mum would do—over Christmas I secretly downloaded the game with brief pauses when I heard screams from the peanut gallery saying they were lagging out and was I downloading a movie or something.Thank you, Wargaming, for making it possible for a total noob to at least figure out what "WASD" meant!

World of Tanks was my first game. Didn't have a clue! After a couple of weeks, I had to come out of the closet and ask the kids for help. They did. They introduced me to my first Clan (run by another female tanker, Femm) and got me going. Since then I've been in several Clans, had all sorts of positions, learned a lot along the way, and met some amazing people. My stats aren't the best—still struggling from the 'run through the tank list, die and pick another' strategy that I started off with. Trust me—it doesn't work! We've gone from, "Dinner's ready, get down here," to, "Sorry, you'll have to scavenge your own dinner, I'm doing Clan wars." The kids have had years of mileage out of this.

World of Tanks is still my go-to. Yeah, I'm hooked. But I've added forays into other games. I stream average gameplay on Facebook and am constantly amazed that people watch!

I'd love to be a light tank player—those little buzz bombs are the bane of my tanking life—but I'm smart enough to realize that my hand-eye coordination isn't fast enough anymore unless I figure out how to reset a few decades in real-life. You'll find me lurking in the backfield with my trusty tank destroyer or brawling with you face to face in my heavy.  

So what does World of Tanks mean to me? It has expanded my horizons, introduced me to amazing people that I communicate with on TeamSpeak or Discord, given me a common language with gamers (I still get a quiet chuckle when I talk to someone's teenagers and see their jaws drop with an, "OMG, she's a gamer, she understands"), and I'm still learning.  

Back in 2012, my husband and a co-worker worked the grave shift. When they got off work in the morning, they'd spend a few hours online playing World of Tanks, Platooning up together for some battles before my husband would crash to sleep. About halfway into the year, his co-worker moved to Florida.

Then my husband began asking me to come try out this game with him. "Hey hon," he said, "Give it a try, you might like it." My reply was always, "Really? Blowing up tanks? I don't think so." It just wasn't my cup of tea.

Finally, I gave in to his request and said I'd give it a try, just a few battles. Little did I know all that one had to do was play a few battles. Creating an account, setting up your Crew and tanks, was a bit of an investment in one's time. The first few battles left me unimpressed. I was the fool rushing into the battle, only to get blown up in the first 30 seconds. My husband shrugged, headed to bed, and I continued on battling. I didn't get this game. But then around 10 battles in, I spotted a player with this name that really stood out. He'd just carried the entire team and won us a battle, I PM'd him after the battle and asked if I could Platoon up with him and learn some things. Sure enough, I listened to his advice and won more battles. I ceased with the YOLO'ing as well.

Needless to say, nine years later, I'm still here playing World of Tanks. Am I addicted? I have 54,382 battles. Naaaah. I've made some good friends, learned from a few elite players, joined some Clans and have had a lot of fun with this game. Best of all, my win rate is better than my husband's. My own personal interest in the game is running light tanks and playing artillery.

So yeah, I'm still here "giving it a try!" It's a good stress relief when I need it, it challenges me, and, quite simply put (and probably the most surprising of all) I'm 61, and I like the game.

Well, my husband and I met while playing an online game, and all of our friends and social events come from boardgames groups, so we are a gaming family from day one.

But I didn't really play video games (they make me kinda motion sick). When we were first married he played Battlefield a lot and used to tell me one of his dreams was that I would fly a helicopter and he could run the gun. I wished I could stand to play a game that he liked so we could do that together. He started playing World of Tanks and I would watch him sometimes. I learned how to tell the score and what was going on so I could see if he was interruptible at any given moment. It didn't bother me to watch as much as other 3D games. We had a second gaming rig, so I tried playing in secret to surprise him, but actually, I couldn't get past Boot Camp I was so bad! I set the game aside. 

Then COVID came, and I quickly grew bored of Netflix and I decided to try again. He encouraged me to try actual rounds instead of being stuck on Boot Camp. His Clan were all welcoming and played low tiers and gave me helpful pointers ("Don't drive in front of the opponent's gun!" ). I practiced a lot, even when he wasn't playing to try to become an asset rather than a liability when we played together. I would use the kill cam to learn good positions for next time.

Well, from there it's the usual hook. I'm now just as likely as he is to be the last one to turn in for the night because I was working on one last mission. I'm always talking to him about my plans for my Russian heavy crews and what order I'd worked out so that my extra Radio Man would end up in the KV-2 or whatever tank there was to pick from the Steel Hunter rewards.

We have side-by-side battle stations now. It is not quite the same as the helicopter dream, but I like light tanks and forward mediums and he likes TDs, so it's pretty close!