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There is quite a lot of players who accepts the popular belief that each game starts with loaded dice, i.e. that your score for penetration and aim is determined at the start of the battle. I don't think it's so, but I do have a theory on why it often seems like it's predetermined.

Dr. Theodore P. Hill of the Georgia Institute of Technology released his studies into Benfords law in the American Scientist in 1998 and, amongst other things, found that in a sequence of 200 events with a 50% probability of two things happening - it is almost guaranteed that you will find either of those two things happening 6 times in a row. If you have played this game a while you will have fired sets of 200 shots countless times and therefore experienced these streaks almost as many times and half those times the odds have been against you.

If you fire 1000 shots there is a ~97,5% probability of a streak with 10.

Now, in WoT you are seldom faced with a 50/50 chance of a penetrating shot, but you have three things that have to work in your favor to get a penetrating and damaging shot.

1. Your penetration is bigger than the effective armor
2. You hit where you are aiming or another part of the tank that you can penetrate
3. You don't get the oh so annoying penetrating 0 damage hit (this is my biggest issue with WoT atm)

Combining these three things you are quite often facing a 50/50 (or close to) shot when firing from any distance that make it hard to guarantee a hit in the weak-spot.

Considering this it should be a recurring event that you get games when everything works against you or for you but it is not the same as the penetrating values has been set at the start of the game.

Still, this is no proof that loaded dice isn't a real thing, but it can be an explanation of why it seems like it's true.

First time i hear about some magical .... dice.

Not to mention that just in one match you may only shoot your gun 10 times which is enough with some bad luck to be a streak of goodness or badness. And if one is a bad player he may shoot only 3 or 4 rounds per match and get those 3 bad and good streaks all the time.

It's a pretty reasonable assumption.  Add to that too that humans aren't that good at recognising truly random sequences, especially not from a small sample (say the number of shots someone fires in a given match).  Evolution emphasised pattern-seeking because as a survival trait it's pretty useful; the downside of that is we can want to see patterns where there are none.

It's why I definitely don't buy the "loaded dice" theory about WoT; Occam's Razor definitely applies.

EDIT: There was an interesting episode of BBC panel discussion series In Our Time on this subject, you can listen to it online here.
Edited by PointyHairedJedi, 19 August 2012 - 04:32 PM.

The biggest problem that I have in WoT is this random penetration thing, and on top of that you have a gradual loss of penetration over the distance. So, there is a huge chance that you will start with below the average penetration on a shoot, and on 400m you loss you penetration and ding the tank that you penetrate almost 100% in CQC.

Thing is that killing x-number opponents gives your team an edge and alot of 1vs2-3 situations which snowballs to a faceroll loss or win nothing loaded about it.

This is why I love the KV-2. Don't need to rely on penetrating when you can just smash their faces in with a 152mm HE shell.

 SharinganHD, on 19 August 2012 - 04:51 PM, said:

Penetration is too high as it is. Personaly I miss the days where you had to aim for the weakspots to pen a heavy frontaly.

 Astroniomix, on 19 August 2012 - 05:12 PM, said:

I's very frustrating when you penetrate let's say KV-5 with Tiger at the distance, because you roll out high pen, and ding at the same spot in close combat. There was post on the forum with replay when guy was in Obj. 704 ding KV-5 at point blank in the tank rear armor. Something like that is frustrating.

It'd be nice if they reduced the pen and damage variation to 10/15% instead of 25%

The 25% variation in PEN and DMG is absurd. Especially with the top tier slow firing tanks like JagdE100. I get absurt bounces and most of the time minimum damage with it. And when i fired a shot, i need to wait 21+ sec just to TRY again. This game mechanic is seriously broken

 Drobni, on 30 August 2012 - 05:06 PM, said:

The more damage or the higher penetration you have, the more absurd it is... Take a JPE-100 shell for example, damage varies from 787,5 to 1312,5. This gives 525 damage of a difference! If you think about this... 525 damage is an entire JT shell, some tier 10 heavy tanks shells, an entire arty splash etc etc... BS
Edited by Grabarz19_PL, 30 August 2012 - 05:12 PM.