Source: SerB’s answers
Hello everyone,
SerB postad today a bit more info about the potential Japanese tier heavy 10 tank. Let’s have a look at the pictures and text he posted.
Source: SerB’s answers
Hello everyone,
SerB postad today a bit more info about the potential Japanese tier heavy 10 tank. Let’s have a look at the pictures and text he posted.
Source: numerous (added answers from another LJ post)
Hello everyone,
Storm recently made two KWG posts, one to wish the players happy New Year and the other to comment on the recently released KTTS video. Here is the info from the discussion:
- Q: “The graphics is somehow meh” A (Veider): “You don’t like the new IS-4 model? I started jerking off to it even when it didn’t have the texture yet and was still a set of polygons”
- dynamical dirt (SS: tank gets dirty when going through mud) will be implemented
- old computers will be able to play on the same graphics like they do now
- WG made a special survey on player computer configurations, that’s how they know about so many players using crap computers, they collected data on 2,5 mil configurations
- reworked Maus model will get extrernal (empty) fuel tanks apparently
- historical battles will be played on currently existing random battle maps
- independent suspension will not influence balance more than it does now, it is already being taken into account when balancing tanks at this moment
- Veider states that support rollers for now have less polygons even in HD graphics on the IS-4 model, because it’s very difficult to see them in the battle anyway
- there will be more HD screenies after New Year
Hello everyone,
many of you have probably seen the ASAP/KTTS video on HD graphics. It’s pretty impressive, take a look (left – old, right – new):
Hello everyone,
okay, here’s the situation. There is a Polish guy that about a month or two ago sent me an e-mail, whether he can translate FTR to Polish. Although I warned him that Dom1n is already doing that and is doing a great job, I was like – what the hell, why not?
So, this guy created the blog – had a look, not sure about the translation quality (native Polish readers would have to decide themselves), but whatever, I won’t link him here, because I prefer Dom1n, as I said earlier. Two things however made me raise my eyebrows.
At first it was the fact a WGA ambassador (WG EU employee) called the blog a great place, even though it has no original content, pretty much everything is a copy from FTR:
I posted about that earlier, no sweat. But what made me really raise my eyebrows was this:
Basically, WG EU is endorsing (“official WoT fan page, we entered a cooperation with Wargaming and became community contributors” or something like that) a site, that is a 1:1 copy of FTR in Polish (the guy even copies my post titles and either removes my comments, making the content less comprehensible, or replaces “SS” with his nickname). That’s a bit of a mixed message right there, isn’t it? :)
Personally, I am not sure what to do with that. The last thing I want is WG EU parasiting on FTR in any form and this guy has no original content of his own, it’s really just a copy of FTR, so if WG EU promotes a pet blogger like this… feels a bit off, especially, since Dom1n (who has been doing for quite a while) did not get promoted (quite the contrary).
What do you think?
Hello everyone,
so, here we are, the last day of year 2013. It’s time to look back a bit and to compare the positives and negatives, that happened this year to FTR. I hope you can indulge me for a while – this post will be a bit longer, because there is a lot on my mind I wanted to say.
Positives
- from somewhat problematic beginnings, For the Record grew to be probably (I will leave “probably” here, since we have no official sources for other blogs’ visits) the most visited non-Russian World of Tanks blog in the world. Even in Russian competition, I think we are doing fairly well. That of course couldn’t have happened without you, dear readers. It’s somewhat hard to actually say the exact number of the visitiors ever since its creation, since there was a hosting switch half-way through, but we are fairly stable reader-wise around 50k readers per day, with upper peaks of 100k (yea, I like to brag with the 100k, because I am really proud of that). While in October and November the numbers grew steadily, December was a bit stagnant. The peaks occur almost everytime on patch days (people waiting for patch info), the lows (of around 35k visits) occur on days when I don’t post anything new (not very often) and usually a few days after the test server info is released. None of this would be possible without your continued favour and support.
- FTR is popular all over the world. Based on data from June to Yesterday, FTR gets the most visits from:
1. United States (14,62 percent)
2. Germany (14,33 percent)
3. Poland (8,68 percent)
4. United Kingdom (5,28 percent)
5. Finland (3,83 percent)
6. Canada (3,69 percent)
7. Czech Republic (3,63 percent)
8. Hungary (3,38 percent)
9. Netherlands (2,92 percent)
10. Romania (2,48 percent)
11. France (2,27 percent)
12. Sweden (2,14 percent)
13. Russia (2 percent)
14. Croatia (1,76 percent)
15. Australia (1,75 percent)
Of the more exotic ones around 1 percent, Taiwan is number 19, Japan is 26, 30 are Philippines, 33 is Vietnam and 34 is mainland China, 38 is Brazil, 42 is Thailand (all of these still have tens of thousands of visits), South Korea is 45, 51 is Israel. Altogether, the readerbase of FTR is very diverse, FTR has been accessed from 189 countries, although I am pretty sure members from some of them accessed it only to sell me cheap viagra or to inform me about Saddam’s gold. Vatican is sadly not amongst them – maybe next year.
Hello everyone,
so I guess you’ve seen the “Facts and Figures” video? Kinda interesting, isn’t it? I mean: I didn’t know there are WoT players in Vatican City. Of course, before we go all “hurr durr the Pope plays WoT”, Vatican has civillian workers too, not just the clergy.
Still, interesting. I wonder how the latency is in Panama though. Anyway, this post is not about that. Check this out, this is from the part they talk about “historical realism” (pictures by _Reaper and Attin):
Oh yea, that’s not the FV215b (183), that’s the fake FV215b with the 120mm gun that never existed even in blueprints. Very historically accurate. It gets better though…
Google translate FTW!
For one, it’s apparently a British Sherman, even though in the game it’s an American vehicle. Anyway, look at the “stats” – so, amount of hitpoints is “strength” now? Why? Oh, that’s right – in Russian, the amount of hitpoints term is “prochnost”, which can be translated also as “strength”, if you don’t know what you are talking about.
Carriage is apparently googletranslated from the word “ekipazh”, which means “crew” in Russian, but also “carriage” (the same way “pipe” means that thing the water flows thru and also the thing you use to smoke crack – two different things, same word). So, the gunner is now “aimer”? Again, in Russian, the term for gunner is “navodchik”, the word is based on the word “navodka”, which means literally “aiming”. Why is it suddenly “the driver” and not just “driver” and why is the last crewmember called “charging”? (the Russian word for loader is “zaryazhayuschij”, which comes from the word “zaryazhat”, which means literally “to charge”, so in Russian, the word can literally be translated as “the one who is charging”.
Now, this might be nitpicking, but it’s also a symptom – of the fact that WG EU can’t do its job right. They probably outsourced the translation to some moron, who googletranslated it without context and sent it back – and noone doublechecked it. We know how often that happens (hint: every week).
The stats are interesting though and the video got one thing right: the game is great. So, Wargaming, all the best in new year and make us happy! Hard job, I know, but I trust SerB :D
Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2909500.html
Hello everyone,
recently (today?) there was a stream with Dimitri “Fluke” Grigorov, a CW specialist developer. Maiorboltach (RU LJ community) was kind enough to provide us with a summary of what he said.
SS: Please note that I never really dealt with CW stuff (I try to avoid is as much as I can), so it’s possible I might misinterpret some of the stuff Fluke said (or Maiorboltach wrote) – at least the risk is higher than usual. I will do my best.
- the idea behind the CW campaigns is that the old CW were unattractive and boring and to push more players into playing in clans
- developers were not happy with the first CW campaign: it turned out that only very powerful clans with strong diplomacy could achieve the M60
- after that the entire concept was reworked, hence the Fame points and the second campaign turned out to have quite a broad audience
- the goal for second campaign was to award 10 percent of all campaign players with the reward vehicle – and the number of awarded players was based on this estimate. Developers consider the amount of rewarded players to be quite high, “even a lazy person could obtain it”
There is some confusion about the Italian branch/tree now.
- Q: “You said that you will implement a separate Italian branch?” A: “As usual, we didn’t give that answer – I haven’t found the word ‘separate’ anywhere”
- SerB on the TD based on IS-4: “a 152mm gun, classic Soviet composition with the superstructure in the front, armor roughly the same as the IS-4 has, we don’t have any more data for now”, apparently there might even be a variant with a not-fully rotating turret in the back
- Jagdtiger 88 and Jagdtiger differ in maximum speed, because “JT88 doesn’t have the top engine”
- SerB states that while the policy of Wargaming is that premium vehicles have to be worse somehow than the regular vehicles of the same tier, this does not apply for reward/special vehicles: “If these are as strong as regular vehicles of the same tier – that is acceptable, but not required. Them being stronger – that’s not acceptable”
- there is no direct connection between height of the tank and its viewrange: the viewrange is set manually
- WG started to develop the graphics improvement (HD) a year ago, they couldn’t start two years ago, because they didn’t have the money to do it
Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/267947.html
Hello everyone,
Storm recently made a post, wishing everyone all the best in the upcoming new year and is asking, if there is something the players don’t like about current graphics, whether it makes eyes hurt and why and if there is anything new the players would like to see, graphics-wise.
Storm adds that they know about current performance issues in WoT and are working on fixing it. Currently, developers are working on full multicore support for the render – Storm states that there is a lot of work left to be done, in fact it is a complete render system overhaul, there will be a lot of more optimizations.
From the discussion:
- there is currently a bug where the replays are not saved properly (only the last one is saved), it will be fixed
- there will be no such thing as one “HD client” patch, textures and models will be improved throughout the entire next year
- there is enough content scheduled to come out, so much that WG has a problem finding suitable candidates for outsourcing to do it fast, even if the price offered is high
- the first vehicles to be reworked into HD will be the “legendary” mass produced vehicles like Tiger (SS: eg. not a single nation)