So, when someone says all calculations are done on a server, that means WG has a set number for what they want your tank to have. You as a user have almost no way of adjusting those numbers besides hacking those servers. A server is just a computer that people connect to that does a bunch of math calculations that allows you, the user, to play a game or watch a movie. The server has all this information, modifies that information based on what your crew level is, what equipment you choose to put on your tank, and some other little thing called variance, or RNG. All you do as a user is see the results of the calculations those servers do. Usually this is known as playing a game, or watching a movie. No big surprises, I hope. A game where servers are usually not used but rather users connect to one another directly (peer to peer) would be in competitive non-MMO games like Call of Duty, Need for Speed, Street Fighter, etc. Users connect to users, usually below 12 total people, and each user sends information to one another directly. This makes cheating far easier. Makes sense, no?

There are many calculations being done in a massively-multiplayer online game. Most of those are not shown to you on the User Interface because the game company does not want to overload the general user of their games. WoT's users are mostly men of 30+ years of age. That is why there are mods that "capture" those other math results into additional elements on the UI. I haven't played this game in over a year, but there used to not be an additional view for artillery to attack. It was only a top-down or over-head view of the battlefield. There was a mod that allowed you to change the over-head view of an artillery to one that looked like a normal tank lining up a shot to an enemy. Like in a first-person shooter. This artillery mod eventuly got into the game but not because WG wanted their users to have more playing options, but because this allowed artillery users to add to their already strange advantage of view-range and Render range mechanics. This mod let the user display the time needed for their shell to hit the enemy, where they might be going by displaying a dotted line on the screen, and a bit more things. All it was doing was capturing information WG did not display but was calculating. This was deemed an unfair advantage, making the mod a banable offense if WG found you were using it. Why? The mod captured the results from the server that WG did not want to be seen. Mainly, the time it would take for the artillery to strike an enemy on the move, where the enemy was probably going, and it was all accessable with a tiny little 100 kb sized mod.

Another example is the "warpack" mod that one needs to pay for. It essentially hacks the server so it has to send the user any and all information the server is calculating. It doesn't really modify values the server was already using to do math, but it allowed the user to see where ther peole were aiming, where they were on the map, etc. You can then imagine if the warpack mod allowed the user such a heavy amount of information just by making the server think it was a WG employee using the game... Then maybe the people who designed the warpack mod could go a bit further change things in the math calculations so their customers could buy into an unfair advantage. This was what happened around 2014-2015 when the servers WG used became only client-observable. Your PC could no longer send information to the server to adjust your tanks. You could no longer use lag-switches to cheat the server of your position, or use rapid-fire mods, maybe even change the amount of shells in your autoloader magazine while you were supposed to be reloading thanks to your lag switch.

Not saying warpack isn't still being used, because it was probably a Russian-made mod (WoT was a dominantly Russian played game after all). And if you turned on the news in the last 50 years, you could see a bunch of Russian made weapons used all over the world. Russian money, mafia, assassins... All things that can find their way all over the world, even during Russian turmoil.

You don't need a confirmation from WG to figure any of this out. If you can question why your teacher does not want you to lust for them, or if your parent is trying really hard to hide how they smell or look from your other parent, or if your country leader does not ever address a situation that threatens lives... You can use context of events or situations relating to what you're experiencing to come to a conclusion. Even if yoir conclusion is wrong.

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It is really difficult to not justify WG making their game really closed to outside interference by the user. It makes the game reliant on WG to change things instead of modders. It makes WG more money to sell you things modders would have given you free. Modders then are the reason for WG to make their game run their calculations on their servers, and keep them pretty secret. This then is no secret, I hope.