Frequently Asked Questions

When you open a profile, we fetch the values live from the Wargaming API and store them for one hour. Every further request within that hour is served from the cache — you can tell by the ⚡ Cached label and its timestamp. After the hour is up, the next request automatically pulls fresh data.

Two things sit outside that hour: Wargaming itself only updates the public numbers once a battle has ended, so it can take a few minutes right after a match. And the session tracker always queries without any cache — there you see a battle within a minute.

WN8 is a community-developed formula for rating player skill in World of Tanks. Unlike plain win rate, it compares your damage, kills, spotting and defence points against expected values for the exact tank you are driving.

Those expected values come from the official XVM dataset (wn8exp.json), which a cron job imports automatically. They only change when XVM publishes a new dataset — so our WN8 matches exactly what any other site computes from the same dataset. Vehicles that XVM has no expected value for (yet) cannot produce a WN8; they count towards neither the numerator nor the denominator.

Alongside the modern WN8 we also show the classic ratings:

Efficiency (EFF): One of the oldest metrics. It puts a very high weight on capturing and defending the base.
WN7: The direct predecessor of WN8. It uses no tank-specific expected values but general formulas, and penalises "sealclubbing" (excessive low-tier play) heavily.

Both ratings exist for World of Tanks on PC only. Blitz and World of Warships have their own ratings tailored to each game — you will find them on the respective profile pages.

The snapshot: We show what the public Wargaming API returns. It lags slightly behind the game client, and our one-hour cache adds to that.

The formula: A WN8 is only as comparable as the expected-value dataset behind it. Sites running an older or self-maintained dataset inevitably arrive at different numbers.

The vehicle list: Tanks removed from the game stay in your statistics and in the WN8 expected values, but no longer appear in the Tankopedia — so the number of tanks played can differ from the tank list. For World of Tanks Blitz, Wargaming only provides master data for part of the vehicles, which makes tier averages there worth taking with a pinch of salt.

The focus is World of Tanks on PC. On top of that come World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships — each with its own player and clan pages and a rating tailored to that game.

The supported servers are EU, NA and ASIA; the selector sits right inside the search bar. Wargaming no longer offers a public API for the Russian server, so it cannot be queried.

VIP is free and takes two steps: sign in via the official Wargaming login, then click "Activate VIP" in your dashboard. No email address required.

From then on a cron job records your account every night at 02:00 — even when nobody visits your profile. As a result your profile shows a gapless 30-day history with the progression of WN8, WN7 and efficiency plus daily and weekly deltas.

Favourites, the personal goal and the clan dashboard, by contrast, only require you to be signed in — they are available without VIP too.

Every analysis on the player, tank and clan pages is freely accessible — no account, no sign-in, no paywall.

That includes the form curve: for every profile that gets opened we store a daily data point and use it to show performance over a period instead of a lifetime average — going back up to 400 days once enough points have accumulated.

The difference to VIP: without VIP a data point is mostly created when the profile is opened (for clan members a nightly job fills the gaps). VIP accounts are recorded daily, guaranteed, and additionally get the WN8, WN7 and efficiency history.

Open your profile and scroll down to the signature section. There you pick one of two shapes (compact badge or wide banner) and one of three colour schemes (dark, light, carbon), see a live preview, and copy the ready-made BBCode for forums or the HTML snippet for websites.

The image is rendered on every request and cached for just 15 minutes — so your signature stays current on its own, without you ever touching it again. Clans get the same thing on the clan page, where you will find the banner code for your clan.

The session tracker remembers the state of your account the moment you hit "Start session", then compares it against the current state every minute — deliberately without any cache, so a battle shows up right after it ends. What you see are the deltas of the running session: battles, win rate, damage, kills and a session score.

The running session lives in your browser, so you can reload the page without losing it. A starting point older than 24 hours is discarded automatically.

In your dashboard you can set a goal, for example a WN8 or win-rate target. We remember where you stood when you created it and keep showing you how far you have come since.

There is also an optional weekly email that sums up on Mondays what happened over the past seven days. For that — and only for that — you need a confirmed email address and an active opt-in; both are set in the dashboard. Every email carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in.

We query mastery badges (Ace Tanker) and Marks of Excellence for each tank individually from Wargaming. If a tank shows no mark, the player has not yet reached the threshold for the first one on that specific vehicle — which requires an average better than that of 65% of players on the same tank.

How much combined damage that currently takes is listed per tank on the Marks of Excellence page, along with the thresholds for two (85%) and three marks (95%).

Tank list — every vehicle by nation, type and tier.
Tank comparison — two vehicles side by side, with expected values and MoE thresholds.
Hall of Tanks — the strongest players on each tank.
Meta — what is currently played how often and how successfully.
Marks of Excellence — the current damage thresholds for one, two and three marks.

For players rather than tanks: the leaderboard and the player comparison, which puts two profiles head to head.

A cron job queries Wargaming's server list every minute — for World of Tanks, Blitz and World of Warships, on EU, NA and ASIA each — and records every data point individually.

Those per-minute values make up the live curve of the last 24 hours. Older minutes are condensed hourly into averages and peaks, which in turn feed the 7-, 30- and 365-day views. That keeps the page fast even with a full year of history. You can see all of it on the server status page.

Yes — no key, no registration. The API documentation describes seven JSON endpoints: player profile, player history, clan, weekly digest, current server population, its history and service status.

Each endpoint has its own limit of between 10 and 60 requests per minute and IP address. Responses are CORS-enabled, so you can use them straight from the browser. If you build something public with it, we would love a link back — but it is not required.

WG-Watch is entirely free: no subscription, no paywall, no feature locked behind a payment — VIP status included. We run no ad banners.

Operating costs are covered out of pocket and through voluntary donations. For audience measurement we run a self-hosted Matomo instance on the operator's own infrastructure; that data goes to no ad network and is never sold.

Without signing in we store nothing about you beyond the public player data Wargaming provides to everyone anyway. Once you sign in, we add your account ID, player name, region, the Wargaming token, the time of your last login and your most recently used IP address. The IP exists purely so an accidentally triggered rate-limit block can be lifted again, and it is deleted automatically 90 days after your last login.

Email address, favourites and goal are optional and can be removed in the dashboard at any time. To delete your account entirely, an informal message via the contact form is enough. All the details are in the privacy section of the imprint.

No problem, WG-Watch is under constant development. Write to us through the contact form — the more specific you can be (which page, which player, which browser), the faster we can track it down. Feature requests and general feedback are just as welcome.