How can WG make dealing damage more popular?
So with the introduction of the Fire for Effect medal (variously described as the most useless medal to earn or the most depressing medal to NOT earn) I've started looking at damage numbers in my teams, and I was frankly shocked! There are many games where top tanks, often players with thousands of battles, don't land enough hits to even do their own hp in damage, sometimes even when faced with enemies that have functionally no armor.
I'm a little confused as to why this pattern persists even into high tiers, where people generally have scores of games worth of experience. Is the ammo cost too high for some of these guns, or are xp rewards for victory too low to make the cost worth it?
I bring up victory specifically because I've noticed a pattern - barring the odd cap fast victory, or super-heroic performance by a single player, it seems that very frequently, the team that has more middle and top tier tanks that earn at least Fire for Effect, will achieve victory. Especially in the interest of the people the MM places at the bottom of matches, it seems like we should make dealing damage more popular. I think this is because when a team does a lot of damage collectively, the opposing force is at increased risk of running out of tanks entirely.
Especially noteworthy are tier10 games in tier8 vehicles - not only do tier10s have high hitpoint pools, but the bottom tier tanks often have much worse guns and dpm and take forever to take down a tier10 target. At the same time, many tier10 vehicles come fully elited, so their drivers don't seem to need more xp - observe some tier10 games - many tier10s barely do damage at all before exiting a game. Perhaps, having finished the grind and escaped the xp treadmill, saving ammo and consumable costs (I see a lot of burning) takes on greater priority?
Contrasting that, tier6 tanks in a tier8 game often have competitive dpm to tier8 vehicles and don't take significantly longer to grind down an exposed tier8 target than another tier8 might (there are always outliers of course, but it is generally true). Additionally, many tier8 players are obviously still in pursuit of xp. So perhaps an increased xp incentive could work here to make doing damage more popular.
I just don't know.