Storm & Co. QA

Posted on by

Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/

Storm posted today a new blog entry, where he asks Russian players, what do they think of World of Tanks maps. A few points from the discussion:

- according to Storm, statistically the Mountain pass encounter is doing fine (a lot of people are complaining about it)
- Storm states that while the big maps are “in the future”, he is warning players from wanting such maps too much, as their gameplay is “very specific”, this is one of the reasons, why their development is not pushed that hard


- Storm states that the city maps have the size they have because if made bigger, the game would turn into “hide and seek” on them.
- patch 9.0 will bring “lighting correction” (apparently the possibility to turn off for example the blue “tint” of the Port map), something like this will be possible for ALL the maps (players who will want more gloomy maps will be able to select darker filters, while those wanting brighter colors will be able to select that too)
- the physics will be tweaked so that stone fences don’t slow tanks as much as they do now. Currently, for physics the collision model of the hull is simply a box and when the edge of the box touches the obstacle, speed is strongly reduced. The box will get a “bottom part”, which will make passing obstacles easier.
- there will be one more Asian map: a Japanese one
- the option for players to disable one map of their choosing are still planned
- mist (smoke) was implemented to make maps prettier
- only roughly 50 percent of all users are using the improved graphics, the rest is running on the old render
- currently, WG is working on correct color and lighting display, there will be results for that in 9.0

And the answers under one older post:

- the IS-3 and Panzer V/IV model changes are not a part of the “global remodelling” planned for next year, they are simply bug fixes
- several vehicles for the global remodelling are already done
- there are plans for more tanks customization
- not only the quality of tank models will improve (SS: quality of objects too)
- apparently, Foch and T57 Heavy will not be nerfed in 8.9
- in 8.9, cca 15 tier 1-5 vehicles will be buffed

And Japanese tank answers from Cannoneer (tank developer):

- STB1 will have the L7A1 gun (SS: it will have lower penetration though, because of some of it specifics – 257 was it?)
- the STB1 mantlet will be 195mm, turret front 120mm, turret sides cca 110mm, the hull front will be 80mm under 65 degrees
- on STA1: “STA on tier 9? Originally we thought it has a depression of -15 and that the longer hull (7 roadwheels instead of 6) will allow to mount some bigger gun. But later we discovered that STA1 lost to STA2 in trials and further development continued from STA2. And yes, the depression was -7″
- on why STA1 is correctly on tier 8: “Historically yes, to put serial Type 61 before its prototype STA1 makes no sense”
- apparently the STA and Type 61 positions might be still switched (compared to the published tree)
- Japanese tier 8 top gun penetration will be around 210-220mm

Overlord on his blog:

- Overlord on network issues: “We are investigating network issues. They can be triggered by a lot of things, however there is a non-zero possibility that this is related to the update itself.” and “We are investigating this”
- tracking draws as defeats apparently is a tool to promote active gameplay

127 thoughts on “Storm & Co. QA”

    • *Takes out gun and shoots the crazy woman with the katana*

      Who brings a sword to a gun fight?

      *laughs in disdain while walking away*

      :P

      • I get the feeling of being euphoric, when I see someone enlightened by their wisdom. *adjusts fedora*

      • I have the feeling that since SS told that Daigensui is a woman everybody wants to prove how manly he is and in each comment mentions her sex. I mean, is it that much of a big deal? I guess I’ll never understand some people…

        • Pfffft…. since SS mentioned she is a woman? When did she hide that fact?

          She has changed her ingame nick like 3 times already, but her signature in the forums used to say something like “tank girl expert” or something like that.

          And before you go off on a tangent again, I know this because I like some of her posts, she knows a whole lot about tanks (even if she is quite acid to others in the forums).

          Besides, would you feel better if I call her “dude”? :/

          • I don’t believe that Daigensui is a girl. You know, it’s difficult to recognise gender over the internet. Hell, “she” might just as well be the dreaded donkey!

            Also, I took lessons from admiral Ackbar.

      • 90% of all gun fights take place at less than 15 feet according to the FBI crime statistics. In cases of gun vs. handheld weapons, guns tend to lose at less than 20 ft, if the person with the gun has to draw, even if the gun is already loaded, has a round chambered, the safety is off, and the hammer cocked.
        While I have several guns, in my home, I keep a Cheness Cutlery 9260 silicon alloy Katana just for close defensive purposes. With it I can easily remove someones gun hand/arm.
        To the comments below about armor, Katana’s are actually one of the top swords for piercing the crappy period correct steel most European knights wore. The chisel shaped point was ideal for easily punching through steel with a proper thrust. You can go find Youtube videos of swordsman hacking completely through the rolled edge of 55 gallon drums, and easily piercing the thick steel walls.
        Also, I don’t think anyone wears armor anymore :)

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckz7EmDxhtU

        • Well, fine…

          *Walks away more than 20ft*

          *Takes out gun and shoots the crazy woman with the katana*

          Who brings a sword to a gun fight?

          *laughs in disdain while walking away*

          Happy? XD

          • Bullet flies, flies, hits the body near the shoulder! Bullet caliber = 9mm. Skin thickness = 2mm of spaced armor with 6 mm of bone below. Impact angle is 75 degrees…
            That one bounced!!!

            Never fire a gun at an experienced WoT player, as he can bend physics and you may experience “critical hits” dealing 0 damage. Don’t ask why it’s just ancient Russian magic combined with measures taken by SerB himself…

        • Chisel point my ASS. That’s not what a true armour-piercing point is like. Here, have a look at what a true “armour poker” looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoc
          Period sources written by expert swordsmen state unequivocally that with a strong and well enough placed thrust these fuckers could penetrate even most high-end plate armour, the “ne plus ultra” of personal protection before modern times.

          And “crappy period steel”? Get a clue. If anything it was the *Japanese* who were stuck with shitty iron and partly for that reason obliged to persist in labour-intensive manufacturing techniques European smiths had known already around the rise of Rome (around which time, IIRC, the Japanese were still at bronze) and largely abandoned, save for limited decorative use, by the 11th century as unnecessarily complicated and archaic.
          Put this way: by the 1500s European armourers were quite routinely producing armour of large, high-quality monolithic steel plates that gave reasonable degree of protection even from the rapidly improving firearms (Thirty Years’ War era military regulations required a standard-issue cavalry cuirass to stop a musket ball from around fifteen paces, pistol from like five). The Japanese never got anywhere even *close* to that, and instead highly valued the quality European corselets the visiting traders brought as gifts to the local bigwigs.

          • The typical tip design of katanas isn’t even a “chisel” by either shape or function; and its fundamental purpose is to slice flesh, as the sword is designed mainly for “draw cuts” that do quite a bit of the cutting with the tip. By way of comparision straight-bladed swords (and for that matter the forward-curved and/or cleaver-like “chopper” types) instead cleave more directly into the target with a primary “strike zone” some distance above the tip – not as good for sheer tissue damage, but better at dealing with stuff in the way and demolishing bones.

          • Ofc the variety of “katana” designs over the years was no less bewildering than any other culture’s major sword types’; I’ve read of straight ones, thrusting-optimised ones (mostly from the Tokugawa period when armour wasn’t exactly an issue though), long ones, short ones, any number of different blade and tip geometries…

        • weaboo-bullshit-tropes. often repeated, never true. japs got shitty iron. once saw a vid of a european Zweihänder shattering a “magic” katana. wasnt a Hattori Hanzo one for sure…but…oh lol.

      • “*Takes out gun and shoots the crazy woman with the katana*

        Who brings a sword to a gun fight?”

        Jedi do ;)

        • Katanas and armor piercing longbows definitely overrated, but the Mongols ? An army that required no logistics, capable of self sustaining itself almost anywhere they rode, more mobile than anything the contemporary world had to put against them and more savage than anything before or since. Maybe up to WWII.
          Whenever I hear people bemoaning the fate of contemporary Iraq, I think about what the Mongols did to it nigh to 1000 years ago because of careless insult.
          Pirates (romantic version) are just cool.

    • Katanas are pretty high on the list of Most Overrated Stuff of ALL TIME, strongly challenged by the longbow. And the Mongols.
      And pirates, come to think of it.

      • This, put medieval knight armour on you and you’re nearly immune to katana as it’s poorly designed to pierce through iron. Unlike you, that weeaboo don’t have anything to resist decent hit with axe.

        • Oh, the Japanese armour designs weren’t half bad. Lamellar and laminate have extensive and respectable pedigrees and track records. AFAIK their harnesses’ primary shortcoming was a comparative shitload of openings at the joints and such, which is ofc one reason they could afford to use a sword primarily optimised to slice flesh (and from horseback at that) as their main sidearm… which said the *primary* battlefield weapon of well-nigh everybody was something heftier – usually a spear, polearm or bow.

        • As someone who strongly prefers European armor to Asian: have you ever heard of a ‘coat of plate’? Plate armor largely returned to the ideas of lamellar/scale armor: overlap a bunch of tiny plates, and back it with something nice. Typically, well-made chainmail.

          I love a tin can as much as the next guy, but, plate isn’t that great for turning aside a long mace or even some of the better yari.

          • Coat-of-plates (also widely used in China and India) was the main outer component of the 1300s “composite” harnesses that basically amounted to layering something rigid or semi-rigid over the trusty old mail hauberk. Good stopping power but kinda fucking heavy.
            Proper plate *replaced* such somewhat ad-hoc solutions, having far better weight to protection ratio. The composite setups basically disappear from the sources after the early 1400s with the elite combatants converting to fully articulated plate armour. Lesser soldiers, equipped on rather more limited budgets, may ofc have kept wearing such setups but AFAIK they tended to prefer avoiding the associated encumberance penalty and hassle, seeing as how they lacked the men-at-arms’ plethora of spare horses and support staff, and instead tended to prefer lighter “single-layer” protection.
            And they increasingly took to wearing mass-produced “munition” plate too.

      • Katanas and armor piercing longbows definitely overrated, but the Mongols ? An army that required no logistics, capable of self sustaining itself almost anywhere they rode, more mobile than anything the contemporary world had to put against them and more savage than anything before or since. Maybe up to WWII.
        Whenever I hear people bemoaning the fate of contemporary Iraq, I think about what the Mongols did to it nigh to 1000 years ago because of careless insult.
        Pirates (romantic version) are just cool.

        Damned malfunctioning firefox add ons

        • “No logistics” and “almost anywhere they rode” are plain bull right in the face of it – look up why their repeated invasions of the Indus valley failed, for example. “More savage” is a dubious distinction at best and very strongly contested – the Romans already probably have them beat.
          Thing is most peope fail to realise that whatever the scale of their conquests (ultimately a question of leadership and some judicious early decisions by Genghis) the Mongols *themselves* were bog-standard Eurasian steppe nomads; ecologically they differed preciously little from the Scythians or other Iranian-speaking pastoralists of old, or their diverse varyingly distant Turko-Mongolic cousins, all of whom were perfectly capable of the same feats of endurance and mobility for the exactly same reasons.

          • “Almost anywhere they rode” means just that. If they could ride properly through that territory it was theirs for the taking. Or pillaging actually. If we go into details such as the climate in certain areas that might provide thick forests and marshes and other such horse unfriendly places then surely their greatest attribute, mobility was denied. Also, they didn’t fail in India, don’t know where you pulled that from. They went in, mauled every army they met and got out while retaining control of everything but the heartland of the Delhi Sultanate.

            They were savage as in, no two stones where left standing after they passed if the natives didn’t bend the knee right away. Apart from Carthage, and maybe Jerusalem, did the Romans subject to complete destruction any territory as thorough as the Mongols did? Just the sacking of Bagdad and the massive destruction they delivered on what is today Iraq is monstrous to contemplate, given the scale of warfare in that period.

            Every nomadic steppe people could roughly equal them in individual skill maybe, but they showed the world what could happen if you coordinate huge masses of said nomads over thousands of km apart and launch a synchronized invasion. The Huns were probably just as effective, they just came in fewer numbers.

    • We are all witnessing yet another step in the rise of Japanese neo-fascist nationalism. Didn’t end too well last time so I’m not optimistic.

      • lolwut. Also pretty sure the Japanese ultranationalists never were and still aren’t considered *fascists* in the proper sense of the term – besides long predating the ideology, they don’t meet the (admittedly rather loose) criteria.

    • Katana a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time, hm? Well, guess what. Times have changed.

      *Hops into a tank*

  4. - several vehicles for the global remodelling are already done
    - there are plans for more tanks customization
    - not only the quality of tank models will improve (SS: quality of objects too)

    I wonder.. like what it will look alike..

    • What a stupid developer. Letting these obvious OP tanks run around. They’ll nerf them as soon as every player gets one. Why? Because money, and because no red star.

      • T57 heavy is no way OP. It’s armor is butter. I’ve destroyed one in a T32. You jsut need to attack it when it’s reloading.

  12. - the option for players to disable one map of their choosing are still planned

    No more Malinovka!!!!!!!!

    • It was promised like 1-2 years ago when there wasnt that big amount of maps so malinovka would be a good choice to disable, but nowadays… I would need to ban like 5 maps which are crap (for example port, high way, pearl river, severoboborovogorororsk, komarin)

      • Redshire would be my first choice without a doubt aswell…. f*ckin’ hate that unbalanced POS map.

        • I second that. And after their statistics show that >50% of the playerbase hates Redshire and opts out of it they will finally take it to the basement, shoot it and bury it in the woods.

          This could generally be a good way for the community to vote down bad maps and not wait for theirs stats to confirm it. After a big enough number of players opt out of a certain map, the remainder will have to play more and more of it, making even more people hate it … –> the basement and woods treatment.

  13. physics, lighting, and model updates are sounding really good! Hope someone leaks a screenshot the new german td tree, would love to know if any branches connect with the new line.

    • is this a Tank game or a Photoshop thingy?

      why not just buy 2K studios and Dice engine team and provide CoD/Battlefield WoT game lvl graphics.
      oh buy WarThunder too.

      • uhhh..what? Are you saying they shouldn’t improve graphics? I still play d2 and older games, graphics aren’t everything, but improves are great.

      • The real life prototype built was only the T29 turret and 105mm gun mounted on a standard M6 hull with the hull machine guns removed. so 90mm or so of frontal armor.

        They never went ahead and welded on the extra 100mm or so of extra armor to the front. which is what those drawings are supposedly showing. What it would have looked like if they did add the extra armor.

        So in the end we have a model in game that looks like what was built, but with stats for what they wanted to build but never finished (they did test what all that extra armor and turret/gun would do to the tank) 77 tons of weight.

        • Oh and it couldn’t climb a 40 percent slope. (not that it affects it in game as most? or all tanks can only climb 25 apparently)

  16. T57 should probably be nerfed somehow but it’s a hard one. Every possible nerf to the gun will make it inferior to AMX50B, they cant change the armor (it’s the historically build vehicle) and soft stats have already been nerfed. TD nerfs are completely pointless, the only problem with the TDs is that arty is overnerfed and cant keep them at bay. And they will have to buff the arty at some point, there is no other way.

      • I’ve read that, and it’s quite sad because they will have to deal with it in the end. They probably dont want to make changes right now because some were made recently. Will probably come when the new arty branch is gonna be out (chinese most likely).

  18. - only roughly 50 percent of all users are using the improved graphics, the rest is running on the old render

    Eventough improved is much nicer looking im still using standard cause it provides much better frames per second and that is much more important to me than nice looking graphics

    • I’d actually argue that the old engine looks better too (at least it did before they started removing effects from it).

    • What’s the point? We dont have indian vehicles, dont have india on the global map, seems like a waste of time.

      • I’ve never gotten to the idea that M7 is a bad tank. It’s an awesome tank, just dont play it like heavy, no brawls and close-ups.

        • Well… I first played it long before the buffs it got a while ago – and those were the 3-tier MM days too.
          It was… painful.

          Post buff it’s rather more tolerable -had to revisit it to start the autoloader line- but it probably helps I’m not shamefully n00b anymore either…

  21. “- the IS-3 and Panzer V/IV model changes are not a part of the “global remodelling” planned for next year, they are simply bug fixes”

    Y NO FIX IS-4?

  22. - apparently, Foch and T57 Heavy will not be nerfed in 8.9

    This “Foch” may refer to the tier 9 TD with a 120mm gun. The one that many complain about is called “Foch 155″ (is that thing made up?) and was not mentioned in this post, it still may recieve a nerf.

    About the T57 Heavy…no idea…and if you want to nerf it, in which way?

      • yet another fking map with mountains everywhere when what the game is really missing is a pacific island map with an atoll and palm trees etc. A far better choice methinks.

        • One would expect the Japanese battlefield to rather more likely be situated on the coastal plains… you know, where just about everything worth shit was.
          And an atoll? Dear God no – zero cover, anyone? Oughta make the Cauldrons (Valley and Severobevero) look tolerable…

          • Theres plenty of scope for cover with terrain, volcanic atoll etc. No reason it couldn’t work. At least it would be different. Lots of terrain features such as bunkers, craters landing craft, aircraft on an airfield etc.

      • Japanese map most likely means an island map, considering that no WW2 battles were actually fought on the Japanese mainland. Of course, there may be a russian front map, but then it wont actually be a Japanese map. Okinawa would be an option though.

  24. To everyone saying “omg foch and T57 won’t get nerfed!”:
    They will be nerfed, just not in 8.9