1) I don't like the winter map. Even with a ~70kmh speed limit (and hitting it) it felt like it took way too long to navigate the map. It's not a problem of the distances, but the number of obstacles in preventing movement as shown by my testing of removed map Dragon Ridge. There's very little interaction between flanks and the gameplay is very stale: HT's trading in Northwest, hulldown heroes and associates all go middle, and then TD's cover Southeast and it's generally hard to move between flanks. It just feels like a bigger version of Abbey.
I haven't played the summer map yet in a tier 8 tank, but I don't remember having any problems with it except that soft cover was very scarce.
2) The economics don't make sense. I've played it twice already as LT-432. On the first run, I performed about average for my team (we all did terribly). I did 849 damage and earnt 20k gross. With the 10.75k repairs, 3k repair consumable, and 1.7k cost of ammo, I only made 4.5k profit, which is no more than a tier 3~5 premium on an average game.
On the second run, I did very well, placing 6th overall on a team of 24 tanks and 2nd for damage at 2607. Not a single shot was from more than 300 meters and about 2000 of that damage was from farming a single platoon--a STA-2 had gotten stuck in an inaccessible location and his platoonmate rushed me to stop me from just farming STA-2. My team focused the platoonmate and I finished farming STA-2. So, I wasn't losing the bulk of my credits to spots and assists, as I was less than 100m from these tanks and the only spotter.
Despite this incredible amount of damage, I only earnt 54,600 net. Given the 11500 repair, 3750 cost of ammo, and 3000 consumable, I only took home a 36k profit--barely more than a normal, average win, despite the battle lasting much longer!
I can see experience being adjusted to account for the much higher number of tanks, but not silver. It doesn't make sense to drop earning potential so long as costs remain fixed. It's not like ammo suddenly costs less or my shells suddenly do more damage just because it's tier 8 only--in fact--there's less profit to be made as there's no uptiering bonus for damaging tier 9's and 10's.
Speaking of experience, I personally don't like how the team performance factor so greatly stretches the minimum vs maximum experience gain. Players who contribute little or nothing on the losing team still earn the normal game exp of 70~150 experience but have their tanks locked for the 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, players who do little to nothing on the winning team make 300-500 experience despite contributing the same--no spotting damage, one penetrating hit of 300~400 damage.
Meanwhile, top performers get an easy 1000 exp for what would just be 700 in a normal game. I don't know what can be done about it as the relative differences are the same in normal games, but the amount that can be farmed in Grand Battles means the absolute differences are huge. It can be very discouraging to, say, run a booster and then have your tank locked for a third of it just because you landed in Grand Battles twice and earning a grand total of 400 experience.
3) I personally run on a large monitor and don't feel it was necessary to squeeze the entire 24 players into a tiny postage stamp of icons side lists. Rather than having an informed idea of who is in what tank and whether they're alive or dead, it was so compact it was virtually impossible to tell anything apart at a glance.