Please note that the 9.4 Common Test was postponed till tomorrow.

- Q: “If you knock out the engine of enemy tank and someone else kills it, why don’t you get the same additional XP bonus as when you detrack it?” A (SerB): “Misha (Storm), I told you, they will never be satisfied. Let’s cancel the XP bonus for detracks.”
- M41 Walker Bulldog will not be nerfed for now
- HE shells (SS: specifically, artillery) will not have their damage cut to half (while compensated by more damage doing non-penetrating hits), according to Storm it would be unrealistic
- new Murovanka was actually the first experiment to increase the size of all smaller maps to 1000×1000
- Storm states that 9.4 will bring optimization, in some cases pretty significant one
- Stalingrad will be introduced without Havok first, apparently in 9.4 also (SS: funny, the patchnotes on German forums didn’t mention that, it’s not confirmed yet)
- the “double base” assault will be exclusively in team battles
- map filter (selecting which map you (don’t) want to play) is not planned for now

Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/304930.html

Hello everyone,

Storm once again made a post, in which he asks players about their opinion, this time about the “balance”, specifically what they think about:

- balance of classes as a whole
- balance of various tiers and issues in it
- balance of individual vehicles
- system issues of balance, for example “too much viewrange” or “too much penetration”
- system issues of game mechanics, for example camo, or penetration mechanism

He also notes that this topic is NOT about MM.

From the discussion:

- the 25 percent RNG in the game (for example damage, penetration) does NOT use even spread (SS: there is a higher chance to get the average damage than one of the extremes), therefore it won’t be reduced, Storm think it’s just fine
- there is a general idea for WoT to reduce everyone’s viewrange apart from LT’s
- the change above is not the “big spotting system change” promised earlier, it’s just a small part of it
- the rule where both teams have to have the same amount of scouts (with tolerance) will not be removed
- if ALL the premium tanks were to get limited MM, it would come with a nerf, because otherwise some would be too OP (“pwning without end is cool for only one side”)
- +/-2 MM will not be reduced as a whole
- Bulldog model (regarding proper depression) will be fixed in 9.4
- Storm considers the majority of the maps to be fine (apart from some individual map issues)
- Storm on artillery DPM buff proposal: “If the damage output of artillery will be the same as the one of other classes, artillery will dominate. We had that already.”

And what do YOU think about balance of various vehicles? Will link the discussion to Storm later (if it’s not full of profanities and such crap, so if you want your feedback to be linked to Storm, please be polite).

Hello everyone,

a bunch of info from the Insider. As usual, it comes from communication with various developers, so take it with a grain of salt. Still… interesting.

- developers are considering creating a South American cluster either in Argentina, Mexico or Brazil (Mexico is unlikely, as they have good ping to NA servers), but in order to do that, they want to see further South American player increase. The amount of SA players has been increasing steadily for the last two 3-month cycles.
- as confirmed earlier, ISU-130 will be given out to (Russian) staff as a gift tank, but there is also a chance of it appearing on other servers if there is enough interest
- some developers started studying track physics, specifically the element of detracking a tank in order to improve its visual effect using Havok
- SerB on War Thunder videos: “They make good videos, but we make better games.”
- Havok will not look like the IS-4 preview video, where everything on the tank shaked and rocked, when it is released – that’s the final goal, but the equipment falling off from the tank and something called “volumetric damage” (whatever that is) will be released gradually later, when the developers consider it optimized enough

Continue reading →

Source: http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=119971&site=wot

Hello everyone,

two Wargaming developers (whose names were unfortunately written in Korean and thus we are not sure how one of them is called), Aleksander Tarasevich (game designer, UI) and Aleksander Derkash (?, CW, Stronghold producer) recently gave an interview for the Korean Inven portal.

US player WpCrate was kind enough not only to link it, but also to provide proper translation. Thank you!

There is a lot of enthusiasm for the new light tanks in the 9.3 update. Even in WGL there is a decreased appearance of the previously common AMX 13 90. How does WG view the 9.3 update.
Tarasevich: We feel proud that there is a lot of good feedback for the 9.3 update. Not only the new light tank trees but also the mercenary feature for Strongholds and the new penalty systems for unmannered conduct were well-received. We are striving to make the upcoming path 9.4 to be met with the same enthusiasm.

We are told that in 9.4 and future patches features such as individual missions or reworked team battle are planned, can you tell us more details on this subject?
T: In 9.4  there will be Sieges, a new mode for Stronghold as well as individual mission, the first of its kind. We are considering via these missions implementing female tankers. By 9.4 we are planning to implement the map Stalingrad, which like Karkov was designed based on real life images.

Continue reading →

Nothing really new. Just that one WoWs developer confirmed that WoWs indeed has multicore support (apparently, this is no longer covered by NDA, as it was published two weeks ago at Igromir).

Oh yea and Storm stated that the antibot system does not punish the botters by removing credits and XP (the way the anti-AFK system does), it simply bans them.