Easy 8, I think I love you

In World of Tanks, I suffered through the M5 Stuart.  Scout tanks just aren't for me, I don't think I have the right mentality.  They go really fast, and can have fun taking out artillery, but if you actually play an active scout role you're almost guaranteed to die.  Maybe better drivers than I can do ok, but I suppose I lack the skill.  On the plus side, it was only a tier 4 tank and didn't take that long to earn the xp needed for the next tank up.  On the down side, it was a tier 4 tank and so often found itself in matches with tier 6 and 7 medium and heavy tanks that could destroy it with a sneeze.  I got into the M7 medium tank as soon as I could.

Then, sadly, I suffered through the M7.  The text calls it a medium tank, but really it's just a light tank with a bit more armor and hit points, but also larger and easier to hit.  It was certainly no match for other tier 5 medium tanks, and it didn't take long for me to realize why the M7 is relatively rare compared to the M4 Sherman. By tier 5 you rarely see more than one or two poor light tanks on a team, which is the main thing the M7 would be good at dealing with.  The thing is as fast as most good light tanks, so should make a decent scout, except of course I suck at the scout role and the M7 is fairly large and easy to spot.  It certainly had its moments (and was more enjoyable than the M5 Stuart) but overall it was fairly miserable to play.  Once I had my double xp win for the day I wouldn't touch it again until the next day.

You're fun to play!  Thank you! *hugs*

Then, finally, I unlocked the M4A3E8, a late war variant of the famous M4 Sherman used so widely in WWII.  It's a true medium tank, slower than the scouts, faster than the heavies, more armor than a scout, less than a heavy, and so on.  It's good at almost everything, excellent at very little, and bad at virtually nothing.  And it's FUN.  I don't get lots of kills, it just doesn't have the firepower for that.  But I get lots of assists, and it's an excellent flanking tank.  The gun reloads and aims so quickly that it's excellent at popping out from behind cover, making a shot, and ducking back before the enemy can even respond.  I can consistently beat the German VK3601 in duels despite it having much thicker armor and a more powerful gun thanks to the M4A3E8's maneuverability and fast firing.

I've heard the M4A3E8 referred to in game on multiple occasions as the "Easy 8".  I assumed that was an in-game slang that evolved from it being an easy kill or something like that.  I was surprised to learn that it's actually a WWII era nickname, that it earned thanks to an advanced suspension that gave it a very smooth (or easy) ride (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_Sherman).  One of the fun things (for me anyway) are all the historical references in the game, and the way so much of the tank modeling and balancing reflects the reality of the time.  Reading through the wikipedia entry I referenced above, it's interesting to see how many of the tanks they reference are both in the game and meet the performance expectations described.

So, it's only taken dozens of tanks and ranking up to tier 6 in a research tree I was often not quite sure I should be spending time in, but I've finally found a tank I just enjoy playing, win or lose, whether I do something useful or get one-shot within the first 3 minutes of the match.  For the first time I'm not at all concerned about advancing to the next tank (the tier 7 T20) and am just happy to play with the tank and not worry about the numbers.