Storm writes on maps and other things

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Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/257546.html

Hello everyone,

Storm posted another “microdigest” post about what’s going on in the development department. Here’s what Storm writes:

We are preparing everything slowly.

Not so long ago an interesting thing happened: we bought Hunnicutt’s personal archive: 800 microfilms, 24000 photos. Now we are digitizing it. We are expecting some news on the star-and-stripes armored tech.

It’s also worth noting that all those polls about maps we made are starting to bear fruit. In the next patch, there will be gameplay corrections on some maps players keep crying about. I will say straight away that those fixes will not concern the most “painful” maps like Redshire and Highway (that will happen in the patch after this one), but they will concern those maps where it is possible to make fixes quickly:

Karelia – the map is more levelled and more similiar to the old version
Airfield – fixed the (winrate) imbalance between respawns (bases)
Steppes – fixed the (winrate) imbalance between respawns (bases) that was more than 10 percent
El Halluf – we attempted to reduce camping
Mines – fixed the imbalance between respawns

Either way, all that is planned. It’s possible not everything will make it to the patch. Tests will show.

And from discussion:

- the winrate disbalance between bases on the Steppes map was very unexpected, everyone considered it to be fine (they even doublechecked in case there was an error), this problem appeared after (because of apparently) arty nerf (Storm later states noone expected such an impact)
- the Steppes winrate disbalance is very strong apparently
- maps are not monitored automatically, but there is some monitoring going on in general
- IS-3 ammo rack was not changed in the past, it’s still the same
- gold ammo for credits will not be removed
- tank velocity and shell velocity vectors do not combine (SS: a shell will always fly with its nominal velocity in game, no matter how fast the tank is going)
- Storm doesn’t know whether the digitized archive will also be published, the digitization will take a long time
- in 2014 there will be major changes in vehicle balance
- apparently the El Halluf rebalance means that there will be a small hill in the middle (where the village is now)
- Sand River will also have some changes apparently
- Port will also be massively reworked along with Redshire and Highway
- in 2014 there will be only 2-3 new regular branches of tech
- Hunnicutt archives will help not to make a new branch, but with various special tank variants and to locate premium tanks
- rear turret Object 430 and 430V2 will come this year
- T95 Medium Tank will most likely appear in WoT
- Team Battles matchmaking (SS: I think, Storm used the word “balance”) works, but not well – it will be upgraded
- “kill list” (SS: like a ignore list, with players you want to kill) is not planner for now
- it looks like there will be a special voiceover for British tanks with British accent

74 thoughts on “Storm writes on maps and other things”

          • Germans are actually rather good, saying that as a german myself. Its only occasionally misleading with critical hits, but it sounds reasonably authentic, although its still nothing compared to company of heroes.

            • From what I understand of French, English and (a bit) German, every nation seems to have the same misleading sentences when it comes to critical hits and near-misses in arty. Their translation is fine, the sound setup is the wrong part.

      • Can we also get Benny Hill music while playing all the sluggish brits?
        Would make them a little bit less awful.

      • Thx SS. Very much appropriated.

        i was missing having those awesome accents in the game. Hopefully they will make them sound awesome.

        Could u plz soon as them when the Server jumping (@ roaming) will appear, or is scheduled.
        Being a dane on the US server has its downsides(mostly CW related).
        Would be awsome if i could grind with the less retarded US/Canadian popolation compared to some of the not so much communicating east-block Europeans, and jump over to the EU server to play CW and stuff like that.

        • Agree. I’m a SEA player stuck in Netherlands that use to play in NA so i actually have THREE accs, although technically i think i accidentally “overwrote” my NA acc with my more-active SEA acc (same email, made before WoT acc became WG acc so it WAS possible to do that)

    • Would be nice if they went for a (comprehensible) regional accent, but it’ll probably be Received Pronunciation. I’m surprised there aren’t more voice mods specifically created for WoT by enterprising voice actors (are there any at all?).

      Even though it is strictly the ‘UK’ tree, would be cool to get some Commonwealth voices.

    • I still want a French voiceover that sounds like the French POW with the horrible accent in Hogan’s Heroes.

    • I wonder if anyone’s made a Top Gear UK voice pack. Considering the content of the show, they should have no problem finding sound clips for everything.

  2. - it looks like there will be a special voiceover for British tanks with British accent

    finally to be “soon”
    end of 2014 maybe?

    • The north spawn does. If you picture the east side of the map (where the encounter base is) the north has a small hill where they can go hull down, the southern spawn is completely exposed while trying to get to the valley on the 0 line.

      • Both flanks on the north have a big advantage, with hulldown options and soft and hard (anti-arty) cover. Also, the good spotting rock half way between the bases is much stronger for the north base. Plus the south base is more open and harder to defend.

      • that’s lovelly death zone when i’m in the north with my hellcat, but in the south it’s too frustrating if you are not fast

    • You have to have a retarded team to lose from the north. You dominate the ditch as the north spawn.

  4. - it looks like there will be a special voiceover for British tanks with British accent

    Finally! Really looking forward to this.

  5. “-It looks like there will be a special Voiceover for British tanks with British accent”
    Yes! I know it has almost no real impact on the game but I was hoping for this.

    Another related thing I wish they’d do is in addition to the national voices have an “accent” option where each nation speaks English but with the accent of the nation (ie English words, Russian accent). Though considering a lot of players aren’t English speakers I doubt this will come.

    • That should have been like that from the beginning. English speaking with foreign accent. But WG fucked up.

    • Why should they make accents just for all the English speakers? Then they would have to make Americans speaking Russian with an American accent (w/e the hell that sounds like), Germans speaking Chinese with a German accent, etc.

  6. Best news in a long time. Unbalanced maps are one of the most frustrating elements of random games – especially Steppes.

  7. - in 2014 there will be only 2-3 new regular branches of tech

    french 2nd ht line. atleast.

    also propably some of these:
    2nd french med line
    2nd us med line
    japanese ht line (unlikely)
    2nd british med line
    sturmtiger line

  8. “Not so long ago an interesting thing happened: we bought Hunnicutt’s personal archive: 800 microfilms, 24000 photos. Now we are digitizing it. We are expecting some news on the star-and-stripes armored tech.”

    I remember when The_Chieftain announced that, apparently SerB squee’d over the phone

  9. who is hunnicutt?

    and about maps, is WG happy with this 3-5 lane design with absofuckinglutely no opportunity to flank the enemy tanks at all unless you’ve already broken through to their base?

    If you’re a light or med on northwest, might as well drive off the cliff.

  10. I thought Arctic was the most unbalanced map, at least according to VB Addict? It was showing something like a 60/40 win ratio split across the 2 bases.

  11. Not so long ago an interesting thing happened: we bought Hunnicutt’s personal archive: 800 microfilms, 24000 photos. Now we are digitizing it. We are expecting some news on the star-and-stripes armored tech.

    Thank The_Chieftain for that!

  12. Like, really? Where is the problem with Redshire? I have trouble understanding which side has advantage, i can equally win both sides with competent team and equally lose with enough morons. I have no problem applying correct tactics on this map and no camping involved.

    El Halluf? The problem with this map is server horizon restriction. They should lift render distance cap and everything fixes itself for this map.

    Highway? What’s up?

    Port? It’s hard to play for noobs but again, wheres imbalance?

    Mines? Lol, they said that imbalance is one side for low tiers and the other for high tiers, has that changed?

    • Looking at their minimaps:

      Redshire: The southern team has more hills for hull down possitions, also they got better scouting spots.
      And no camping involved?…wtf, every match at least half of the team camps on hills and the other half tries to fight the choke points.

      El Halouf…it’s campy as hell, the nothern team has a huge medium line advantage giving them the ability to reach the other’s base hill without being heavily punished.
      Also the northern heavies got more cover on A2.

      Highway:
      The North-West team has the city, forcing the South-East team to sit in an open field getting shot by TD-es and arties.
      The forest covering the North base gives a huge advantage to the defending units, also brings a huge disadvantage to the southern team which will highly die on open field if they get spotted.

      Port: The team that spawns near the rail-ways are doomed to lose most of the time…The enemy needs to be either retarded or rushing to manage to win on that side.

      Mines: The northern team is more exposed when walking up the hill, and also arrives later, giving them more chances to lose the hill which is a key spot if you want to win.

      And don’t let me start with encounter modes…(don’t play assaults)

      • El Halluf: nope, just lift server horizon limit.
        Redshire: both teams have great camping ridges, great hull down positions and good spotting positons. For encounter you need a few more rocks and bushes on J0.
        Highway: could use minor remodelling but both teams have similar advantages.
        Port: again, you have to know how to play to your advantage.

        • El Hallouf:
          Lift the horizon just for a fucking map that can be rebalanced in other ways?
          Adding the hill in the middle as they say might really change the gameplay a bit.

          Redshire: The North team got only 1 good hulldown spot (E3-F4)which they can use(actually 2, but the second one(D8-E7) is for mediums/scouts and it’s countered easily by the enemy scout/meds) and 1 camping spot.
          Meanwhile the South team got 2 camping spots(one at the rocks and 1 in the hill-side of the village, 1 hulldown spot for scout/meds(stated above), 1 great hulldown spot in G5 and another good spot if there are no arties in K5-6.
          They should do some tweaking to the leveling and also adding some more tactical ways to the north team.
          On encounter the south team has full cover when attempting to cap, the north team has to pass a killzone when going to the cap,and if they sit in the cap there will always be a spot where you can be shot from.
          They should either remove all the houses in the darn cap or adding more for the North team.

          Highway: Again, the north team got more cover both in city and in base.The south team is forced to either camp and lose the hill or sitting on open fields on both sides.
          Adding a third tactical route(in the middle for example)(as they did with Serene Coast or leveling the route to the city for the south team would balance the map.

          Port:Hell yeah, camping behind the rail trucks where you can get shot between their holes(if they get destroyed) or beneath them and getting shot by arty when using hulldown possition on the bridges is a tru use of terrain…when the enemy has all the hill-side, can counter your bridges and has cover from the city…
          They really need to do something with that map.

          • >>Lift the horizon just for a fucking map that can be rebalanced in other ways?

            Lift horizon in order not to fuck the whole game, but repair it. It is totally broken now, i still meet experience players, with stats better than mine who still don’t understand how it works connected with spotting.

            Redshire, i totally don’t agree, there’s so much missing in your analysis.

            Highway, south spawn has much better spotting positions and good routes too. Seems balanced to me.

            Port, you can win desert easily and fuckup everyone. And if you don’t, you can still win by other means.

            • If there is so much missing from my analisys why don’t you briefly explain as I did?

              On highway if the defenders got enough brains they’ll get rid of you even if you manage to reach the base of the hill near their base.
              Going under the bridge won’t give you many options…you can only spot the dudes nearby the bridge but if you’re spotted it won’t be cool for you.
              And also, you might face some enemies under it.

              On port you can’t win that side if the enemy has few defending meds behind the sandy hills along with the regular bridge campers.Also,arty will love to see you there.
              And again, that path is damn situational, most of the time you’ll end being alone there without even support from behind.

              And about the horizon, El Halouf would be the only map were that lift up might work(maybe steppes and malinovka too) but I don’t see it as a reason to do that…and also, I find new enviroments on the maps pretty nice because they allow you to do more tactics than “Oooo…I can see the enemy moron in his base from my own base, let’s shoot him”

            • And to clear the stuff out.
              Yes, the tank drawing distance in game is retarded and super unrealistic…but on El Hallouf I don’t see this as a change apart from being able to shoot the campers further, which will anyway move under cover once they get hit.

  13. What the hell are they doing to mines…. Why do they insist on breaking working maps? (e.g. Karelia, lol at ‘fixing’ by undoing their previous ‘fix’.)

    Re Steppes: http://www.vbaddict.net/statistics.php?tier=0&tanktype=0&nation=0&premium=0&mapid=14&modeid=1&team=1&battles=2200&groupby=1&fieldname=won_lost_ratio

    Side 1 has a 45% winrate… with that rate dropping to 40% for high tiers. I guess NE and other defensible hulldowns in the north just get abused post arty? Kind of weird stats.. Guess south just has better sightlines, which really matters as view range increases. That rock they added in the west probably plays a big role, much more usable from the south.

  15. Karelia – the map is more levelled and more similiar to the old version
    El Halluf – we attempted to reduce camping
    Mines – fixed the imbalance between respawns
    ______________________________________________

    Who to f*** asked for this!?
    Most of them are perfectly fine maps. Of course noobs gonna cry about everything and everywhere, but… c’mon, with a little bit of skill in these maps you can always use those disadvantages to your advantage..

    • Judging by the fact WoT is a team game what are the chances of having a skilled team to fulfill the task on those maps to make them enjoyable?
      Give me spot on the maps you pointed out where you can use for your advantage(taking in account the team-spawn that has the less wr) if your team isn’t supporting you.

    • El Haluf fine? Its the worst map in the game besides komarin and thats fucking saying something.

    • Not sure about the Karelia … but EVERYONE whines about El Halluf. It is pretty camptastic. If you haven’t been hearing that then you’re living under a rock.

      Mines, that was based on statistics. So probably not a lot of people asked for it, but it was necessary. If in a million battles… one side is shown to win more often than the other side… I think it’s very necessary to correct that.

  16. I will say straight away that those fixes will not concern the most “painful” maps like Redshire and Highway ,,,,,,,

    This is what I want from a moderator. Thanks Storm, now clone yourself and go work on the Wot-eu-forum, we need better moderators there.

    • i think its a very good sign that they are trying to improve the gameplay by making the different spawnzones more qual in terms of winrate.
      With the upcoming improvements and “year of general rebalance” 2014 im really looking foward to see what they have in store for us.
      Some time ago i was sure that Warthunder Groundforces will be better at everything but now im not so sure anymore because they will run into the same problems as WG did only that WG already fixed or currently is fixing alot of those problems.

      Better graphics and optimasation is a plus for WT but im not a graphicwhore and since WG will improve the graphics with HD textures and will implement multicore support they will atlest shorten the distance in those categories.

      Since WT will go for realism those russian 152mm derbguns will be very strong and oneshote pretty much everything exept the big boys so i think there will be alot of crying going on on the forum.

      I like realism but unlocking 4 different kinds of Stug3 with minor differences is kind of lame. Of course there is that thing where you unlock more than one vehicle on the same tier but i doubt that that will be the case for all of them since there will be early and late versions with the later one having sloped armor on the superstructur and a bigger gun.

      Also im not so sure about the lvl 20 tanks (IS4 for russians and Tiger2 with 105mm L68 for the germans) Since the IS4 will get its historical D25T gun but has superior armor while the Tiger 2 gets the 105mm L68 it will have the better gun it COULD be balance but its hard and i doubt that it will be balance right from the start.

      I will try it out for sure and the subjects i wrote about only represent my concerns not that i dont think that Gaijing cant produce a good product because they already showed us that they very capable men

  18. Not so long ago an interesting thing happened: we bought Hunnicutt’s personal archive: 800 microfilms, 24000 photos. Now we are digitizing it. We are expecting some news on the star-and-stripes armored tech.

    Sounds more like a copy of Hunnicutt’s personal archive. I do hope that they have a place to properly store the Microfilm. Because they will want to copy all of the microfilm first and toss the master copies into a climate controlled vault. Then use the copies of copies until they wear out.

  19. “kill list” should be made according to master tanker, so it could be easier to gain. With todays amount of tanks there is no chance to remember all what you haven’t already destroyed.
    And included to players panel in match!

    …or could this be done through XVM? without manual work…?

  20. Bet its the South spawn that loses most on Steppes; the reason why because all the siema noobs just go hide behind the rocks at the front of the cap circle and camp all game. Everytime I see heavies go behind those rocks I know we will lose.

  21. - the winrate disbalance between bases on the Steppes map was very unexpected

    Of course… this means they need to completely misinterpret that and take out the only open map in the game and replace it with more shooting lanes.

  22. they finally shall bring some good tank trees not this awesome hype-shit-tanks.

    -2nd US Mediums (with T54E2 and T95)
    -2nd UK Mediums (with Firefly and Chieftain)
    -2nd French Heavys (you can see the T10 heavy in the 7.0 trailer more than one year ago. so they allready have done this line)

  23. t95 was mentioned…. another T10 American medium?

    the Wiki says this:
    Armament

    The T95 and the T95E1 are equipped with a T208 90 mm smooth-bore gun. The T95 equipment was installed on a fixed mount and was stabilized in two axises. The T95E1 equipment was installed on a recoil mount, but lacked stabilization systems. All T95 models were equipped with T320 armor-piercing rounds, which had a tungsten core, a diameter of 40 mm, and a muzzle velocity of 1520 meters per second. These rounds could successfully penetrate a 127 mm armor plate when fired at a 60-degree angle from 2000 yards. A standard T95 was equipped with 50 rounds.

    The T95E2 retained the armament of its predecessor, the M48A2. With a 90 mm gun, it could fire a 74 mm anti-armor shell at 915 meters per second for a range of 2000 yards. It was equipped with 64 rounds.

    The T95E3 was armed with a T140 105 mm rifled gun. With a muzzle velocity of 1079 m/s, the armor piecing capability at 2000 yards is 122 mm at a 60-degree firing angle. Standard equipment was 64 rounds.

    The T95E4 was planned to have a T210 105 mm smoothbore gun. In order to accommodate the extra length of the rounds (112 cm), the gun was moved forward, preventing stabilization. The muzzle velocity of the round was 1740 m/s, with an armor penetration of 152 mm at 60 degrees at 2000 yards Standard equipment – 40 rounds.

    With the appearance of the T123 120 mm rifled gun, it was decided that it should be installed on two of the four planned T95E4s. This variant was designated T95E6. Muzzle velocity – 1070 m/s, armor-piercing capability of 122 mm at 60 degrees at a range of 2000 yards.

    Now, these variants allow for a variety of top guns, from the obvious 105mm rifled (since the smoothbores are out of the question), to the 120mm rifled. A 90mm is even mentioned, so there is possibly room for a BC25t-like gun progression… Can anyone enlighten me if this tank would be a useful addition?

    • From Wikipedia(mean it may change in the name of balance)
      - Armor : UPA: 95mm at 65 degrees. quiet bouncy if angle well. Side 102mm(front) to 38mm(rear), make side scrape available but not effective. Turret armor: similar to M48
      - Armament: 105mm or 120mm. Since too many 105mm in game, i expected another hard-hit medium tanks like 121, so hope they make 120mm available to research.
      - Engine: 570 hp (wth?) Hope they give it a better engine, or this tank will even worse than any tier 10 Heavy
      Overall: this tank look similar to m48 and m60 with somewhat better armor and smaller(i guess), with worse maneuverability, it may be a good support/sniper.
      p/s: at least it have different guns and chassis compare to M48/M60, better than 3 (or4?) USSR mediums

  24. - Mines – fixed the imbalance between respawns

    Cool, coz north base don’t have a good hiding spot for arty. The only spot at the corner ( yeah, in the water ) is the only place that safest from hill spotter, but the worst spot too, since med flanker will cross the island and blast them away.

    South base? They freakin’ safe at K0, near building, and protected from all area!

  25. - gold ammo for credits will not be removed
    __________________
    Good, now pubbies driving T1 and T2 tanks can continue to suck less even on low tiers http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/5421/c7m0.jpg

    - it looks like there will be a special voiceover for British tanks with British accent
    __________________
    This should be done long time ago

    And to add i really like they care about maps and their WR….just hope they won’t fuck up something hard with rebalances….some maps really need changes and this info is good to hear…