- new motion physics will definitely not come this year
- Q: “When will the M53/M55 armor bug be fixed? 0.9.8?” A (Storm): “1.0.0″ (SS: yes, that’s trolling)
- Storm likes the Staligrad map
- apparently, there is also a bug, where the reload timer is not working correctly (either with or without mods) on some tanks, the T54E1 in particular. Storm knows about it now.
- Q: “Do you suck dick and like it in the ass?” A (SerB): “Yes, I prefer blacks.” (SS: funny, but I am not quite sure if this is how professionals should reply)
I’ll just leave this here. It’s from a non-public section of RU forums for testers.
Question: “Mikhail, how many people work in WG Quality Assurance department? If it’s not a secret, of course.”
Storm: “I can’t tell you exactly, we are actively expanding. I consider our Quality Assurance department to be one of the best in the (gaming) industry.”
here’s a little preview of a potential premium tier 7-8 tank I’ve put together – you guessed it, it’s Czechoslovak. I am calling it “TVP Model 1946″ (it really has no official designation).
Actually, a quick stop here. Hightier premium medium tanks are in fact a problem for the European branch. This is one of the very few candidates, available for such a position. One might think that this issue will be mitigated by the presence of Swedish tanks in the EU tree, but – no. The Swedish – for all their interesting designs – have problems with hightier medium tanks, some candidates are pretty speculative (or without drawings whatsoever) and the medium branch is generally very strained (what the Swedish do not lack are hightier heavies and TD’s, but mediums are a bit of a problem). Italians are even worse, pretty much only clones or fantasies (Panther II) on high tiers. Hungarians and Polish have no hightier mediums at all and Yugoslavia has some candidates, but it was never really considered to be one of the “primary” EU tree nations (lack of lowtiers). They will probably come, eventually. Switzerland is promising by the way.
Anyway, back to Czechoslovakia. This is the first proposal for TVP by VTU from 1946. Its history is complicated and not really important at this point, if you are interested, check the earlier TVP articles on FTR. Today, we are going to focus on game characteristics and how to turn it into a premium tank.
Short description:
Initial proposal by Military Technical Institute (VTU) for a “medium tank of general use”, designated “TVP”. It was further developed by Škoda and Praga until the 50′s, when the program was cancelled in favour of licensed T-34/85 production.
when I say “LTP”, many of you will think of the Soviet premium light tank in World of Tanks – some of you however, who read this blog for a long time might remember, that that was the designation of the light tank for Peru as well – a tank, produced by ČKD (Praga).
If you are interested, you can read about the tank’s history here. Now, why am I writing this. Generally, it was believe that the tank was offered just to Peru, but as it turns out, other countries were interested in it as well – countries such as Argentina. I’d like to thank player COLDOWN for the information, that follows.
The commercial and military ties with Czechoslovakia were nothing around the beginning of the Second World War. In 1932, Škoda sold Argentine an undisclosed number of AA guns (possibly the 76,5mm L/50 export variant). Ever since, Czechoslovak arms had a good name in Argentine and it was no wonder that when Argentine saw Peru purchasing the Praga light tanks in 1938, they wanted some of their own as well, as they were fast, nimble, had sufficient firepower and were quite capable of dealing with the low-tech armies in the region.
Between 1937 and 1938, Argentine sent a letter of intent (to Škoda and PRaga), expressing its desire to purchase as many as 160 light tanks of the LTP type (between 7-9 tons, modern design, anti-tank capabilities). There was some unspecified communication, but the deal was cancelled when Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany. The intent, however, did not die.
Three years later, in July 1942, Domingo Martínez, head of the federal police, contacted the German charge d’affaires, Erich Meynen, about purchasing the same tanks over Spain. The Germans however refused this time as well. This decision was one of the key moments for the birth of Argentine’s very own tank program, resulting in the Nahuel tank.
Here, Peruvian LTP’s can be seen in this 1941 Peru-Ecuador war propaganda video at several moments.
Sources:
www.valka.cz
Militariarg – Vehicles
Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales
Navarro. “Tanque Vickers.Colección Museo de Armas de la Nación”.
Sigal Fogliani. “Blindados Argentinos. De Uruguay y Paraguay”.
as a part of the “Remember everything” initiative (Wargaming supporting various historical events in Russia and Belarus), Wargaming decided to start a fundraiser to save/restore certain museum pieces and asks Russian players to donate money to the cause. The first project of this initiative will be the restoration of Lenin-Snegiri military museum museum collection.
The museum is located at the spot of one of the firecest battles, where the German SS division Das Reich fought the Soviet 78th Rifle Division (commanded by Afanasy Beloborodov) during their approach to Moscow in the winter of 1941. For its bravery, the 78th Rifle Division was renamed to 9th Guard Division on 26.11.1941. You can see the presentation here (there are English subtitles):
The museum contains some pretty unique pieces, including a German Tiger. The initial stage of restoration has already begun in October 2014 with the installation of MS-1 tankette, an M-30 howitzer and some mortars. The rest however needs more money, hence the fundraiser.
Oddly enough, there’s nothing much going on on supertest – the reason for it is that the official supertest teamspeak crashed and there’s noone to fix it over the weekend.
Also, Russian players apparently made WoT Blitz work on PC using an emulator. Will look into that further (post “how-to’s” etc.).
- Storm confirms that the theory that low hp tanks bounce more shots is crap
- a player was complaining that (unlike earlier), now the position of mouse cursor, when pressing Escape in battle, isn’t as it was earlier (on the “leave battle” button) and he has to scroll the mouse to get to it. Storm stated that they just didn’t pay attention to it, it’s not intentional.
- on the new HD models, the textures are in the new (higher) resolution, but the textures of visual camouflages remain in the old (low) resolution
- hitting a dead tank with a HE shell (arty) does not generate splash, this is intentional
- the decision to remove ultra HD textures was influenced by the fact that practically noone downloaded the HD pack in 9.3 (0,1 players) by the fact that the difference between the (current HD) regular and ultra HD textures is negligible
- developers are still thinking what to do with the SU-76I, nothing was decided yet
- Mountain Pass map will be investigated, heat maps will be checked (there is a suspicion that one side has an advantage over the other)
- Ruinberg on Fire will be removed from the game
- apparently, there is a minimap bug in 9.4, causing the minimap to display wrong enemy tank positions under certain circumstances (enemy left the render range, his icon got “stuck” on minimap and moved only when the player moved and the enemy tank appeared in render range again), Storm was made aware
- 9.5 will come out this year
- Storm does now know, when (or whether) the number of players in clan will be increased
- no plans to buff or nerf arty
- no comment on supertest leaks (AMX-13/57)
- AMX-30 and its “branch” will not come in 9.6, but later (when it’s done it’s done)
- Storm states that his earlier quote about WG not willing to put more paper project into the game did not mean historical paper projects, only WG made-up ones
- T92 Light Tank is not in plans for 2015
- Storm knows about the M53/M55 armour model bug, will be fixed
- Storm states that he didn’t have any problem with capturing on (playing) the Stalingrad map
- the profitability of Object 416 is not lower or higher than the one of other vehicles of the same tier
this is not THAT important, just a bit funny. Do you know the site Vkontakte? It’s basically a Russian Facebook – the most important Russian social network (in fact, it’s more important than Facebook in Russia, from what I could gather).
In any case, World of Tanks: Blitz VK page was suspended “due to suspicious competitions or actions.”
I really wonder what kind of competitions were they running there…
WoT Blitz (and the entire mobile gaming) is not something I am very interested in, but occasionally, an interesting piece of information pops up.
Recently, I’ve read several threads about the fear of players, that the new Android Blitz will work on Android emulators, allowing the players to use keyboard and mouse for total pwneage. One unnamed player (better that way, since he was attempting something not exactly kosher) tested this theory with the popular Bluestacks emulator.
It is not working. According to the player, it crashes and freezes on launch. It’s actually possible to make the game run, but the textures are missing (pink and white checkers) and it suffers from impossible lags. So, no keyboard + mouse pwnage for you!
by now, you already probably know about the screwed model of the M53/M55. Thanks to Russian player Torsys_sd, you can see how it looks in praxis. Notice how the shells are flying through the model and how they actually hit, when you aim ABOVE the artillery, because the turret is shifted upwards.
Oh and that song is amazing, I’ll have to translate that (it’s a modified Soviet air force march with WoT-related text) :)
