This article is the continuation of the first part.

Summary: Player KingAlphyn from US server was caught rigging a contest. After a shitstorm of moderate magnitude on US forums, he logged on and confessed he did it – not only that, he confessed to do it successfuly in the past. See for yourself:

With that being out of the table, I am sure he will face some sort of punishment by Wargaming. In the aftermath of this confession, questions were raised about other clans doing the same thing by other US forumgoers. Looks like US server gets its competition scandal after all. But that is really not the problem.

The problem is: how can we trust any Wargaming competition after this? I am not referring to some Wargaming-organized rigs, no. Simple negligence to check whether the results were in order by demanding to see replays from the winners.

Since the mechanism of the competition is the same on US and EU server, we might also assume some of the results in the EU competitions were also rigged this way. It’s logical after all – unless you are stupid and submit an obviously rigged result (like 15 kills in a tier 10 vehicle or something), there is no way they can catch you, unless they specifically check the replays. This automatic XP reward system BEGS to be exploited and it’s only natural some players take advantage of it. This is not in any way excusing the culprits – of course cheaters should be punished! But it is the nature of some people to try to exploit the system, this is inevitable.

This fail doesn’t only fall on the head of the cheaters, but on Wargaming. Sure, you might say “hey, but they are so nice, they give us the chance to win something – and you are being ungrateful!” No. What they are giving us is the illusion of a winning chance – and that’s lame. If I was to take this argument to absurd conclusions, they might as well distribute the prizes to random big clans, the result would probably be similar.

What can be done about this?

Two things.

First – and the most obvious one – would be to return to the old system, where replays had to be submitted. That would obviously eliminate most of such attempts, because even if they weren’t ALL thoroughly checked: would you really take that chance?

Second – cancel this type of competitions altogether. Instead, make the prizes lot smaller, but permanent. For example: 50 gold for – let’s say – 1000+ raw XP battle (depending on tier, this would have to be tested). How many of those do average players have? 1-2 per month? This would make checking for cheating easier. Statistically, various winrate categories have various amounts of such battles. If a player consistently gains more gold than he’s supposed to for his winrate, it would trigger the alarm and that player would get scrutinized (WG employees can pull out virtually any data from their database). If found cheating, he (and his accomplices!) would be banned (let’s say for a week during first offense, two months during second offense and permabanned during third).

Just a thought, anyway.

So, remember how I told you a few days back about competition rigging and how to do it?

To recap quickly: basically, if you want to rig a competition, you make as many platoons of you and your friends and possible, log in during low population hours – and there is a really good chance that all those platoons will end up in one game, especially on not-so-populated lower tiers (although technically lower tiers are the most populated tiers in the game, they are played thru the day, because only “hardcore” people play deep in the night – and those actually play high tiers only).

Few weeks ago, US server (just like EU and RU servers) hosted an XP competition. You know, the “have the most XP on new vehicles and get rewards” one. That one the concerned the new Soviet light tanks plus the German tanks.

Long story short, a player named KingAlphyn (clan leader of PUPEH) fixed the competition, using the method described above.

First, he logged into battle with many platoons of his clanmembers:

Then, he and his squad of goons fixed the battle so that he gets to kill everyone:

In the battle, he “scored” 12 kills:

Here, the results of the battle (notice the XP amount he got):

And… voila! Instant competition victory (same XP amount, so this battle was used to win):

So, KingAlphyn gets to enjoy the top prize (Type 59 or 5000g, I can’t remember). Makes you wonder… since the WG folks don’t check even the overall winning replays, what ELSE is rigged? And does it even make sense to participate in such events, when it’s so easy to do this and if not for the “detective” work of several players, he’d have gotten away with it?

I really hope he gets banned…

Hello everyone,

you might have noticed I have put up a new poll. We’ll get to that in a second. The results of the one I just closed were actually better than I expected, very few people consider this new interface to be outright bad. TBH, while the start had some small issues (the comments for example) and I do miss certain functions from the blogspot (the look was easier to modify and there was the function to see exactly the page where the visitors are coming from – google analytics doesn’t have that, as far as I can see, only the general source), I do believe everything is working pretty smoothly right now. So – thanks everyone for your continued support :)

To the new poll: it is confirmed that the next tree to appear in World of Tanks will be the Japanese tanks (possibly very late 2013 or early 2014, given the fact that WG ran into some problems when gathering sources, the latter is more probable). Apparently, two branches (19 tanks) will initially be implemented: a light/medium mix and a heavy branch.

What are your thoughts about that? Are you looking forward to it?

Thanks to Applesaucebandit (US) for finding this. This is the new upcoming “112″ tank footage. Enjoy!

For RU server only: celebrating the 1 million Youtube subscribers

Contains 1 day premium account.

Code: LETSCELEBRATE1MLN

Oh and EU/US servers? You’re not getting anything, bloody western capitalists! RU server only.

Here’s a video for it:

Source: wot-news.com

Hello everyone,

today, the forums were abuzz with the amazing event action with the miniquests (“combat tasks”), awarding double credit reward to the top 3 players of each team on the battle.

So, you thought you’d be getting that too, EU and NA server? Well, too bad, you ain’t getting anything.

Storm: “There won’t be any such credit miniquests anymore. They are too good. This event will run to the end unchanged. But in the future, we won’t most likely do that. It breaks the economy.”

Wow, what does this remind me of… oh, that’s right, something about some 32pdr shells. No credit event for you, bloody western capitalists!

Hello everyone,

this weekend, RU server has an event, dedicated to operation Bagration (and not Barbarossa, like some jokers suggested). It’s a pretty nice – although standard – event, but the interesting part is the first implementation of the “miniquests” within battles.

In other words:

During this event, top three players of each team, who dealt most damage, get TWICE as much credits for this battle. Also, all players, who gained 500 and more clean XP (eg. without counting in the premium account and daily double) will get TWICE as much XP for that vehicle.

Edit: This miniquest can be repeated (within the timeframe of the event) unlimited number of times and both rewards can add to each other ( in other words, if you consistently gain 500XP+ and are in top 3, you will consistently gain double income and XP)

The second miniquest (XP) is limited however to certain vehicles this event concerns (from tier 5 to tier 7), the first one (credits) is for everyone.