Notice: This uses data from the FIRST iteration of 1.0.1 test server. Also, incoming wall of text and Excel spreadsheet data.
So I've found the new autoreloading mechanism doesn't quite work as intended. For anyone unaware, an autoreloader is a kind of hybrid between autoloaders and the single-fire tanks we're used to. The autoloading drum, well, automatically reloads after a shell is fired. However, if you fire before the shell reloads, that shell is lost and you must start over, and with a slightly longer reload. The intention behind this mechanic was to make it so if you play the tank like an autoloader (dump every shell in the drum), it would have a longer reload than the average autoloader of its tier. Similarly, if you were to play the tank like a conventional single-fire tank, it would have worse DPM than the average tank of its tier. To really get an advantage out of this mechanic, you would need to juggle the number of shells in your drum.
To illustrate this, imagine your drum has three shells in it. If you fire one or all shells, you would have below-average DPM. But if you fire only two shells and only two shells, your DPM is higher than average. This means that if you can keep your gun singing fast enough to always have no more nor less than one shell in your drum, your DPM will be higher than your peers. Otherwise, it will be lower. But that's not quite how it works in practice...
In practice, the amount of time it takes to reload each shell increases with every fewer shell there is in your drum. This is a downward trend which causes your DPM to decrease the more you fire, and there's none of that magic DPM "bump" in the middle. At best, this gives you an average single-shot tank that doubles as a bad autoloader (as with the Progetto 46 and Pantera), or a complete pile of trash (as with the Standard B and Progetto 65). The recent changes in this second test version don't really address this and the high-tier Italians are still underperforming. So how might we fix this?
To begin with, here's a simple table detailing the average DPM of autoloaders and non-autoloaders by Mediums and overall tier. I excluded premium tanks and only used tanks in their top configurations (no derp guns) which fired standard AP/APCR shells. Use this as reference with the images to follow.
Tier |
Average DPM of Mediums (autoloader) |
Average DPM of Mediums (single fire) |
Average DPM of same tier (autoloader) |
Average DPM of same tier (single fire) |
Average DPM of overall class (combined) |
Average DPM of overall tier (combined) |
VIII |
1806.19 |
1942.7 |
1738.09 |
2215.28 |
1874.45 |
1976.69 |
IX |
2159.2 |
2506.54 |
2136.56 |
2360.86 |
2426.38 |
2248.71 |
X |
2517.03 |
2892.04 |
2552.31 |
2556 |
2704.53 |
2554.16 |
Now here's the first image detailing the DPM of the high-tier Italian tanks in their current states.

The (Drum - Intra) column isn't necessarily important, but it's worth mentioning that the values in those columns must be greater than 0. If a number is 0 or negative, than it means you're trying to load a shell into the gun's breach faster than it can be loaded into the drum; something you obviously can't do. This is tied to the intra-shell reload which isn't necessarily related.
But what's important are the colored bars are the right of each table. They compare the tanks' DPM to the averages as described in previous table. The rows describe the tank's average DPM if compared to the average DPM of their peers. The top row would be if you were using the tank like a single-shot tank, and the bottom row would be if you were dumping the entire drum as quickly as you could like an autoloader. The numbers in these rows are supposed to be smaller than the DPM of their peers, while the middle row(s) are supposed to have larger numbers. Or, in other words:
> Green is good
> Red is bad
Notice how *every* tank fails at achieving the desired effect of the autoreloading mechanic. Ideally, every bar in that side table would be green. To make this happen, we're going to need to adjust the values of the intra-clip reload for each shell. That specifically is the fourth column in the main tables.
This image uses some example modified values to achieve the desired effect of the mechanic.

As you can see, this requires shorting the length of the in-between reloads in relation to the first and last reloads. It might not make too much sense in reality, but this is a video game after all. On paper and in practice, this simple rearrangement should be able to achieve the desired effect the developers originally intended. It might be too late to save the Progetto 46 since it's a Premium, but the rest of these Italian tanks can still be fixed while the test server is up.
Edited by ThatTrafficCone, Apr 19 2018 - 21:20.