WG EU fail: gift shop false advertising

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Hello everyone,

so, I guess everyone reading this blog knows about the giftshop. You can buy tanks there and give them to someone else – not for gold, but for real money. So, that means the advertising there should be extra careful, right? Like… Wargaming EU should tell the truth about its products?

Oh, wait… that’s right. Wargaming EU. We have here some “special offers” for mid-October. Let’s disregard the fact that these offers are rarely profitable for players – here’s something that caught my eye:

gift1

“The tank’s additional side-skirts make it more resistant to explosive rounds, including artillery fire”

Except they don’t. If we have a look at the collision model of the vehicle (as represented by gamemodels3d, but feel free to use wot-viewer to check it out), there is absolutely no collision model representation for these side screens. They do nothing at all. The tank has the same crappy side armor as the tier 5.

gift2

You might say the fact that these screens do nothing is common knowledge. Well, yes, to us who read developer stuff and actually know about gamemodels3d, collision models and other things. For a random guy (the “family dad who plays for 15 mins” archetype SerB so likes) who has no clue about such stuff, it’s misleading. Sure, 20 Euro for a Schmalturm isn’t that much money, but it’s not money you just throw away either.

Or you might say “so what, it’s just pixels” – true, but if you for example sell ham (and you can get a lot of ham for 20 Euro here) that’s made from soya and advertise it as real ham, the law will be all over your ass.

Hm. Sometimes I really wonder who writes this shit.

111 thoughts on “WG EU fail: gift shop false advertising”

  1. Ouch. That sucks.
    WG should make em act like 1-2mm spaced armour like on the WZ 111. It may not be great but it does help.

      • They’re probably afraid that HEAT-shells are actually going to do 0 damage to a PzIV Schmalturm side because the screens are activating the HEAT-warhead and it’s chemical reaction early and as we all know, HEAT loses A LOT of penetration when being confronted by spaced armor. An RPG-7 HEAT-Warhead (no tandem-HEAT or thermobaric warhead) will have 600mm penetration at the point of impact. After 500mm of traveling, it has only 180mm pen left.

        Considering that WoT’s tanks are having much less penetration than 600mm (let’s take the average out of all HEATs, which should be around 325), that means that after 500mm of traveling, it SHOULD (not sure how it works exactly) be around 97mm penetration.

        So if you have a tank with literally anything heavier than 1mm of steel (for example 1mm of steel), it will trigger the warhead early and have great impact on penetrating capabilities.

        The E-100 for example has 30mm thick sideskirts and 120mm of armour behind. the sideskirt triggers the HEAT-warhead. it travels for (i guess the distance from side-hull to sideskirt is around 500mm _at least_) 500mm and ends up (in theory) of not penetrating the actual side armor, because it lost too much penetrating power on it’s way from the sideskirts to the hull.

        Would be bad if a PzIV Schmalturm side could actually withstand practically any HEAT shell fired within it’s tier spread, right?

        • Would be bad if a PzIV Schmalturm side could actually withstand practically any HEAT shell fired within it’s tier spread, right?

          Don’t fire HEAT at it.

        • No. Schmaulturm premium was introduced before the giant HEAT nerf. Prior to the nerf, it have no armor either. The true reason is that WG is gonna make it a one time use armor only, which basically means it will fell off with one hit. If those armor have actual value, then WG is equal to nerfing it by introduce the one time use armor screen. Believe it or not, WG is pretty sensitive to premium tank balancing. By doing this, WG will save a huge whine storm and possibly a refund option in future.

        • It’s closer to a full *meter* with the E100 (for reference, Wikipedia says Maus tracks are 1100mm). But skirts/tracks only make a big difference if the gap is large- the pen dropoff is 5% per 10cm, and the PzIV S skirts are mounted maybe twice that distance away from the hull, so 105 derp HEAT rounds would still have ~90 pene left against 30mm of armour. It would only help against HE penetrations to the upper side hull (which is nice, though) and angled hits from HEAT (as the protection increases exponentially). The lower side hull would hace decent HEAT protection, though, as the distance is much longer and the tracks add another 20mm.

      • I think they should change it to represent even mesh screens with 0 armour. Pointless? For most ammo types, yes. But for heat it would trigger the pen reduction thingy after hitting the armour, possibly saving the tank from damage. Highly situational but at least these screens would do more than just looking pretty … or ugly …definitely ugly.

    • well its interesting you find this out now,but the description was already wrong the last time the 4S was in the gift shop.The did not change it though…

    • It doesn’t matter if there would be a such change. A customer is making his purchase decision based on the product description. He may, or might not know more about the product from the other sources. That’s his affair. If a description of a product that has been just bought is wrong, the company is responsible. Not the customer, as well as the fact, that in near future the description MAY become relevant is unimportant. At the moment of the purchase product parametrs description was untrue, and in border cases such description might convince for the purchase. So, without the lie, no purchase.
      Anyway, WG will just delete that part of the description, and act as nothing ever happened. The same story as always..

  3. Actually they have sold it before saying that these skirts protect you from HE rounds. So nothing new. Well WG could make them 5mm thick. Strange that IS-6 skirts are 30mm thick while they look exactly same thick as jagdpanther 2 sideskirts which are… 5-10mm thick.

  4. maybe its some sort of secret ghost stat haha, since we are talking about wargaming nothing surprises me anymore tbh.

    • NA community is supposed to have the same “specials” as the EU community. This was presented to the NA community as an improvement. *LMAO*

    • You know, you’d actually be surprised. Sometimes it’s an actual rip off, sometimes it isn’t. Some people do hardcore calculations to see if the packages are cheaper or just a rip off.

      I suggest you also do this instead of saying everything in gift shop is a rip off

  6. or like here in siemapoland where they advertise beef burgers but they are horse burgers,

  9. Im from Croatia 20 euros is 150kn(croatian kuna) and for 150 kn i can go for a big pizza(60kn,), beer(10kn, not a small beer but a 1l) f..k it a nother beer (10kn) and I add 10kn and i can eat like a pig for 2 days and drink to :P

  10. “OMFG EVERYONE BUY IT AND THREATEN TO SUE OVER MISREPRESENTATION”

    They have been conning people from the get go.

    They should have thrown the words historically in there.

  12. Wargayming doing the same thing they were doing for the last 1 year, screwing people over?
    Oh wake me up, when this fail ends.

  13. But side skirts DO suck up splash damage,for example,the GWE100,so yeah,FTR fail this time.

    • Ctfu, skrits are only visual as SS said, just like the armor on some german tanks are just for looks, and get easily penned.

    • No one said that sideskirts don’t do what they are meant(to soak up splash damage and increase the effective armor) in this game…SS said that they are advertising the tank that doesn’t have sideskirts since those side mesh panels are only cosmetic and not part of the hitboxes of the tank as an additional protecting which is complete and utter bullshit. So next time read the article several times before embarassing yourself like a total moron and if you don’t get the point even after several readings then don’t comment at all if you are not sure what are you talking about.

      • P.S. I couldn’t resist to write this also….Your post is stupid and you shoul feel stupid.

      • He is merely pointing out that WG is advertising the Pz. IV S’s sideskirts as being able to reduce explosive and splash damage, when they are not part of the tank’s collision model and are only visual ‘eye candy’ for people driving the tank. So yes, he is correct in saying that WG is falsely advertising the tank as having a feature which it does not.

        Some poor unknowledgeable guy will look at the description, go ‘Ermahgerd…its sideskirts will make arty splash damage hurt less and reduce explosive rounds to my side! Woohoo!’, then spend his money on the tank, only to find out that the mesh skirts do jack squat and he has wasted his money for something the tank didn’t even do.

        …So no, this post is a good PSA to the community in alerting people to this blatantly false piece of advertising on WG’s part, so good on FTR. And bad on you for being a troll.

  14. Just by reading those description its clear theres something fishy going to. It’s like those cheap teleshopping ads making you belive how awesome the product is yet so cheap!! wooow! hahahaha

  16. I really see this as a small error that’s not really worth going all up in arms for.

    And your example of Ham versus Soya Ham is not a good analogy as in that case, the seller is giving something completely different from what you wanted rather than a small detail that was overlooked.

    • To regular FTR readers this might seem like a minor detail, but for those “i play 4 fun” players who don’t care about this blog or forum or anything else beside the game itself this might mean they’ll buy the tank after all because it’s “cool” and it’s more endurable against arties which is not true and this is a classic scam because they(WG) are selling “air” literally in this case.

    • Don’t know about the EU, but a small error in advertising copy in the USA can and will get you sued.

      • *Anything* can and will get you sued in the USA. Which is a major source of truly retarded disclaimers and AFAIK a central reason the judicial system is choked varyingly spurious cases.

    • As the others above me said, in this case, this is advertised as a defining feature of the vehicle. It’s like selling cheese-filled croissants without cheese.

  17. Why do you think marketing has to do something with development? :)

    imagine some girl sitting behind PC and writing some improvised promotions.

    ( but I agree with ham synonym )

    • Fire her. In any company that has any standards, you can not allow for a random person to write stuff that your clients will see, especially when the bullshit he or she writes may misled her for a purchase. That’s asking for an angry customer, but it’s not like that soviet-minded company ever cared about the customer service.

    • In order to that to happen, there would actually need to be a spaced armor hitbox. Which isn’t there, as evidenced by armor model. How hard is this, people?

  19. Although Historically didn’t they put side armor on PZ4s (actual plates not just the screen) in order to stop Russian AT rifles from destroying them

    • Yeah, originally. Same thing with the Panther. The mesh screens were a later replacement to save weight and resources and obviously mainly useful against HEAT.

    • Some of them doesn’t have clue, a clanmate sent a ticket to support about weird penetrations on his t-34, and he got answered that ventilation or the gun rammer influenced its armor

      • Wouldn’t put outright trolling past them. That’s de facto company policy with “stupid” questions, thanks to SerB.

  21. The side skirts are only wire mesh, which would do absolutely nothing to stop a tank shell, so they can’t make it act as armour to protect against shells, so in-game it is purely cosmetic. Even if it worked as it should, it would only help against HEAT shells, not high calibre SPG shells.

  23. “Hm. Sometimes I really wonder who writes this shit.”

    New Polish community guy for WG EU confirmed recently that most of translations are outsourced – and not done by WG internally.

    Wouldn’t be surprising if promo texts were written by someone equally random. :)

    • Having worked in the outsourcing translation business on both ends of the process for a while, I can tell you first hand that it is a supremely horrid idea to outsource something like customer relations texts or PR, not to mention advertising, to a lowest bidder translation agency. NO company in their right mind EVER does this. The fact that a certain Swedish furniture company and a certain Ukrainian gaming company are doing it says a lot about their sanity.

  25. They always wrote about the sideskirts, IIRC. I remember the “experimental pack” that was sold few months ago.

  26. And how do you know that this is not a bug on gamemodels3d? If you were a real journalist you would find somebody who owns this tank before you post something like this

    • freddi, you try to look as a smartass, but you fail. you’re just an idiot.

      you can open wot tank viewer, and check ingame Schmalturm.

    • I believe WG already clarified this in a Q&A that ‘SS’ posted on his website a fair while ago.

    • Firstly, SS isn’t even a “real journalist”. He’s a commentator with reliable sources.

      Secondly, the lack of hitboxes on the skirts is a well established and much maligned issue, if you don’t know that, then you don’t possess the information required to criticise. This tank’s been in the game since 8.1 dude, it’s old news. It’s even on the wiki.

      Thirdly, what makes you think that owning a tank gives you any real insight into its game model? I mean it wouldn’t be easy to tell, especially in this particular case, that the screens are non-functional.

      Lastly, if YOU were a “real journalist” then you’d have acquired definitive proof of error before vomiting out your redundant pedantry, instead of taking an inept and awkward stab at a blog that’s probably rather more respected and historically reliable than you.

      In short: Pot, kettle.

      • I’m on Freddi’s site, actually.

        You cant be sure what the current status is using 3rd party tools to visualize the hitboxes. The only reliable way to find out: Get someone who owns the tank and test it yourself. Only after that you should create yet another WG-hate-posting, which seems to what this blog is becoming right now.

        @_domw:
        I sont see what this has anything to do with being historically correct or not. If I had a blog and/or owned this tank, first thing I would to is to get on a server with someone and let him shoot me with HE at my shirts.

        Oh, and btw: There are people on the forums reporting that they received a compensation because of the mixed up october missions (see FTR news: “WG fail: October mission not working properly”). Those guys got 250.000k credits yesterday as compensation. Why is there no news on THAT??

  27. Once again showing how disjointed the other WG offices are, that they don’t really know the game well enough. Either that, or they’re intentionally misrepresenting something to make it sell to the casuals…

    Listen, I love the gameplay and era of WoT, but with nonsense like this among all the other nonsense WG pulls off shitty on it’s userbase makes them one of the shiftiest, and shittiest developers out there right now. There is little to no “value” in their specials many of the times (on NA at least) and the sad thing is there must be enough dumb casual or blinded fanboys out there eating this stuff up, as that’s the only reason WG would continue to pull this shit.

    • From the amount of the stupid moves byt the EU WG office it seems that hardly no one plays the damn game there… Or the Frenchies are just lazy, that wouldn’t suprise me either. I mean seriously, locate the EU office in Paris? That’s like asking for trouble…

      • I’d never want to visit those offices. With all the turtlenecks, cheap lavender perfumes, and body odor from the lack of deodorants over there. Would love some bread though.

  28. Wrote about it on the forums as soon as i’ve noticed it, still, no answer from the EU community -_-

  29. Yeah, whoever wrote that sales pitch clearly had no idea what he was talking about. Besides the detail they’re purely cosmetic in-game it’s kind of hard to see how it could be even *physically possible* for a mesh screen to do *anything at all* against the blast wave of an artillery shell…

  30. SS: Hm. Sometimes I really wonder who writes this shit.

    This is SS at his best. Keep poking the WG as it has to wake up and smell the coffee at some point.

    • What coffee??? I think they will wake up and smell their shit rotting in their underwear which they were trying to pass onto us :(

  31. Question: Medium Tank Pz.Kpfw. IV has an 440 HP strong Engine Maybach HL 120 TRM. The premium version PzKpfw IV Schmalturm has Maybach HL 120 TRM V12 with only 300HP. Is that the same engine? Is there a mistake?

    Thx for answers.

    Axel_Foley
    EU

    • These changes are pretty much arbitrary. Historically, there was no Schmalturm Panzer IV (the Schmalturm was experimented with, but never installed AFAIK), so we can’t tell whether it’s the same engine, but historically, it in real life it probably was. In the name, it more like went “we’ll give it a 300hp engine and make up a name for it”

      • It seems to be SOP that premium vehicles *never* directly share components with “regulars”, so as to avoid research overlap/shortcuts. More or less arbitrary minor modifications to the names appear to come with the territory.

  32. IIRC that advertising text has been there from the beginning. I remember reading it some months back when I bought the Schmalturm.

  33. knowing WG if they even admit this, they will just remove the text that discribes the skirts.
    and to maybe add more insult to injury:

    http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/10/09/upcoming-tanks-in-wot-part-2/

    in this post the vehicle icon of the captured PzKpfw IV is displayed with Schurtzen on both the turret and the hull ( cant make out if this is Mesh or actual Plates), if these actually work as Spaced armour and god forbid the doors on the turret are closed then people could/ should cry to high heaven.

    @ axel Foley,

    its the same with most german premiums, that they have the actual “historical”load-out compared to regular vehicles which can have better engines for balance. for example the JT used to have a better engine before 0.8.8 and is still faster and more mobile then the Jt mit pak 88L71.

  35. Marketing/sales… no-clue-midgets promises the world and compete in bullshit and superlatives.

  36. It’s a fail, but it’s a marketing fail. WG (SerB in particular) have explained numerous times that all the different departments have to do their own thing, and they don’t operate as Victor Kislyi or whoever as the great-overlord-responsible-for-everything.

    So in this case, WG EU marketing are trying to write some copy to make the tank sound exciting, they’re probably sitting in a meeting brainstorming ideas on how to sell that thing, what it’s unique selling points are, and someone says ‘i know, it’s got that side armour! we can say that those are it’s advantage’ – and in goes the copy. Yes, it’s untrue; yes, you’d hope that there was someone checking this stuff – but ultimately, it’s marketing. Anyone who believes marketing is an idiot, and I’d seriously hope that any person old enough to start a family (vis: ‘the family guy with 15 mins to play’) realises that all marketing is lies.

    (or rather, to be more precise: all marketing is an _invitation to treat_; an invitation to treat is not, under law, the same thing as an offer. Most advertising – subject to consumer law, of course – is an invitation to treat; the actual terms under which the product or service is delivered is NOT bound by said invitation. Hence, marketing has some flexibility to make claims that might not be strictly true, as they’re not bound to make an offer *based upon the invitation to treat*)

    (and yes: I’m someone who, amongst other things, teaches marketing)

  37. it is certainly not the first and will for sure not be the last of this happening. even if it is marketing or advertisement. people who dont checkout vehicles in/during testservers base their choice on the little story (maybe fairytale) and buy said vehicle.

    The Loëwe is still listed as on of the best moneymakers in game according to the caption but is outclassed in that departement by JT mit 8.8cm, T34, IS-6 ( not sure haven used that one myself). sure it makes more then a regular T8 HT, but to call it one of the best moneymakers, i just wrong (i have 2500 battles in mine so i have some experience in driving it).

  38. It sucks that the skirts do nothing, even though they sould. Russian tanks soak up damage from the sides with spaced armour yet German tanks don’t get the benefit of spaced armour even though its clearly seen on the tanks!!!

    • This is effectively *chicken wire* bolted on. Kinda far cry from the SRS BSNS system used in the later ISes (mainly the -3 though).

  40. Community managers, coordinators, PR, moderators and all people who manage stuff like news are completely retarded on EU so that wasnt a big soup rice

    • EU staff are fucking retards really in wot, specially “Ectard” which another person here joked about, and it was really funny :). That guy is indeed a tard, or a brown nose (some one who licks ass of people with higher authority).

  41. I think you are wrong Silentstalker in this one.

    I read your news everyday, i appreciate the time and work you investigate and every article is very interesting to read, but here i’am 100% sure you got it wrong.

    The sideskirst give actually protection go splash and there is no need to have them in the collision model for a simple reason:

    When you mount a Spall Liner, do you see it on the collision model?
    You don’t and that’s the reason why you won’t see the side skirst of the Pz IVs either, which doesn’t mean there isn’t added some value of -10% or -25% or even more added to the Splash or HE protection like the Spall Liners do.

  43. This crappy shitbox wouldn´t be saved by 2m thick sideskirts.
    What slow (why do all premiums have to be slow goddamit) , unarmored, ugly, useless dumpster.
    In case you haven´t noticed: I hate it.

  44. I actually played that tank a lot, it really feels like skirts are protecting against arty. Even if armor model shows no side skirts, I think there are some “hidden” numbers that can be changed in order to make it work (as I see wargaming, it wouldn’t surprise me if they save something on computer resources and change the equation for HE dmg, and just put the stupid skirt texture for our pleasure)

  45. Strange there isn’t any feedback from Silentstalker on what i wrote why it’s like that and why it’s actually working.

    Had awaited from an objective blog to be objective on different matters concerning WOT or WG :-(

  46. Dob’t know if anyone has pointed out or not, but the Gift shop has been updated

    “The tank’s additional side-skirts make it more resistant to explosive rounds, including artillery fire”

    has been removed