it's a M1126 Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle

Premise of the game is simple - 12 v 12 arcade WW2 naval combat, with 3 classes in the game - Destroyers, Cruisers and Battleships

The gameplay loop was pretty unique, it was more based on positioning, map awareness and knowledge of ships strengths and weaknesses, rather on reaction speed like traditional PVP, meaning older people could play and I didn't have to worry about developing Carpel tunnel by 25 to keep up.

The way they attempted to balance it was simple rock paper scissors stuff, Destroyers are small, fast and hard to see meaning they preyed on the slow moving Battleships, Cruisers were a middle man and therefore crushed Destroyers, and Battleships had huge guns that ripped Cruisers apart. Simple right?

Well yes this is all true but i lied above, there's actually a 4th class - Aircraft carriers.

Much like their real life counterparts this was like bringing TNT to rock paper scissors, and completely f'd the balance in the game - in fact it was like aircraft carriers weren't even playing the same game! They were playing a poorly made RTS game where instead of worrying about all the skill stuff like positioning ect, they just sat at the back of the map and launched planes.

Battleships were so slow they stood no chance of evading the planes torpedo's, and destroyers were punished the most - their only defence is their concealment which meant sweet FA when the enemy Carrier can keep them permanently spotted - Cruisers were the only class with anti air that could actually stave off aircraft, meaning when you saw there was an enemy Carrier your only option was to bunch up with the rest of your team and hope your combined anti aircraft fire would be enough, or go solo and hope the Carrier would never find you or you'd die, either to the Carrier itself or his team because you were permanently spotted.

The only counter to Carriers? Other Carriers. This lead to Wargaming having to make it so both teams would start with the same amount otherwise the game was just a lost cause for the team with less of them. And this still wasn't enough so they had to limit 3 Carriers to a team. Then 2. And people still complained for years.

The ONLY saving grace was that carrier players were very rare - something like 5% of games actually had carriers in them, not because they were weak, but because of the stuff i mentioned above, it was a pretty crap RTS game for them and good CV players stopped the bad ones being able to contribute anything to the match, therefore weeding out any new Carrier players not exactly what you signed up for when you downloaded the game.

So Wargaming saw that only 5% played the tesco value RTS, and deleted the class and we all lived happily ever after!

Nope they decided to spend a year and a big chunk of their resources on a Carrier "Rework" that intended on making the class both more popular, and more fun to play with/against

And after this year long rework was in place they released it and...It's even worse

They're now more then twice as popular, but all the faults remain the same and in fact got WORSE in some areas -

1) They now have infinite planes so even Cruisers don't have the anti aircraft firepower to go solo meaning everyone has to bunch up to survive

2) Because of the increased popularity they is now usually at least 1 enemy Carrier per game

3) They're now much easier to play - Carriers basically can't interact with enemy carriers any more meaning they can just do their thing unopposed

4) They now have "anti destroyer" planes, meaning that if they find one alone (which is where Destroyers shine best btw) it's dead.

And they refuse to acknowledge that Carriers are in a bad state, probably because the devs will get fired if they have to admit that something they put so much resources into has made the game much worse

There's a lot more Wargaming have done to ruin the game, from extremely scummy Lootboxes, to overpowered ships you need to pay for, but i think the carrier issue is just the perfect example of how they had something perfectly good but ruined it through stubbornness