Wargaming EU’s Attitude towards Storm’s Posts

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Hello everyone,

as you know, I am not exactly a fan of the way Wargaming EU operates – and that’s to put it mildly. One of the things I find the most annoying is their attitude towards new information coming from the Russian side and the active denial position they take in order to stop EU players from knowing what’s coming. And things ARE coming, just you wait.

Let me start with a short story, as it was told to me by my grandfather, just like his grandfather told him Omggamer, a Russian community member and blogger. Once upon a time, there was a Livejournal community called world-of-ru (it still exists of course). Russian users for some reason I don’t understand are very fond of the Livejournal platform – it is available in English as well, but a lot of various WoT-related things are built around the LJ blog. This community is also referred to as “Ponyushna”, because they have the “My Little Pony” ponies as mascots.

Basically, what happened – this community concentrates some of the best and most skilled people from the Russian side of World of Tanks and despite the entire community is rude as fuck (including rudeness towards developers), it’s well regarded and I have to admit that whenever I read something there, I automatically put a higher value on it than any threads on EU forums for example. I think it was Slava Makarov (WG producer) that took part in the community as well. At one point there was an attempt to create another LJ community without that rudeness (IIRC by Slava Makarov), resulting in a failure (there is a “ghost” community called world-of-tanks, which sometimes contains also some interesting info, but is much emptier than world-of-ru).

As a side result of this initiative to “clean up”, a third LJ community was made exclusively for developers and other developers to post. This is the “world-of-kwg” community and the posters there include Storm (“kruta”), SerB (serb_2), Slava Makarov, occasionally Overlord, Yuri Pasholok and several other posters, all of them reasonable and “big” names in the community. It is from this LJ community (and from world-of-ru) most of the info on FTR comes these days, as the original QA thread FTR started with is practically dead (there are very rarely any new answers).

Either way, the KWG community (the name itself is a sort of joke) info is in Russian community taken as official (Edrard regularily uses it for wot-news as well) and it’s exactly what is missing from World of Tanks EU ever since Overlord went away to work on mobile games: a direct interaction with the developers. You post something (in Russian, of course, other languages are frowned upon) under Storm’s post and if it’s something sensible/interesting and if it’s not rude, chances are, Storm will answer you.

Anyway, why I am writing all this:

KWG is a channell, through which we get official info. No speculations, no bullshit, but official stuff – when Storm posts patchnotes for a patch, that just arrives on supertest, he openly says that this is NOT the final version of the patch (some things might be added or removed, as they were in the past), but it contains things that the developers DO want and they WILL happen in one form or another.

And this is apparently what WG EU has hard time understanding. I understand, I gotta use small words, but still, it’s not that hard to grasp. Take the case today. Yesterday, I translated the 9.1 supertest patchnotes from this KWG thread.

Obviously, some parts of the patchnotes are interesting more than others, such as the Tiger and Hellcat nerfs. Immediately, posts appeared on WG EU forums, discussing it.

And what does Wargaming EU do?

Yea, they deny it.

retard1

And then they lock and junk the thread the next day.

retard2

All that because it’s allegedly based on “unofficial information”. You know, I get it. Either you WG EU guys are not important enough to be told in advance that such a developers post is coming, or maybe you are lazy as fuck and can’t be arsed looking for it and translating it (that’s why FTR exists after all – you created it by your CBA attitude as much as I did).

But if someone like me CAN be arsed to post such info, you go lock and junk it? Not official for you? It was written by a chief developer of World of Tanks on a developer blog, how more official do you want it? Morons. And while I am at it, guess what: You actively lock WG EU threads with FTR links, because “it’s not purpose of your forum to send people to some other sites” – isn’t it? That’s all you are good for apparently. That and making expensive but lame videos.

Stop denying people the amounts of information Russian players are getting.

Meh. Next time someone calls me a fucking WG fanboy, I’m gonna link them this post. I recognize the things WG really did right, but I do recognize the failures and blatant incompetence as well. Make no mistake – the game concept is great, but for heavens’ sake, don’t “fix” things that work, like the 9.0 patch… I was happy in my 8.11 client :(

98 thoughts on “Wargaming EU’s Attitude towards Storm’s Posts”

  1. Once again, WG:EU shows that it is incompetence incarnate. Not just that, but they also behave like a passiv-agressive ex-girlfriend.

  2. If I was the owner of WG the whole European team would be fired immediately. They are incompetent, lazy and villains.
    EU WG Staff are the worst staff I ever found in the dozens of games I played over the last 15 years.

      • EA support was very nice and helpful in my case, I can’t say anything bad about them

        • EA support (live chat) is great and helpful. They even gave me BF3+Premium for free once and helped me in many situations.

          • Ironic. One of the main reasons I’ve spent over a thousand dollars on WoT in the last couple of years is because EA not only wanted me to buy all my BF3 stuff again after I switched from PS3 to PC, but they wouldn’t even let me make the purchase or give me support in English. (They reckon that if you’re in Japan, you may not use any of their English-language websites or English-language support.)

      • WG EU and EA
        EU>EA only one letter (and yes also WG but still almost the same)

  3. Hey, bigbadvuk strikes again it seems

    I would swear WG EU consists of people that failed to be elected as politicians, and therefore seeked their fortune in gaming industry……..

    • Yes vuk is a funny guy, at least 1/3 of my warning are from him, half of them without reason.

      hes one of the brilliant “stars” of the EU team

      • I would love to meet Bigbadfuck and Ipaul in person… Just to see how pathetic they are. Anyone know if these incompetent morons go to tank fest?

    • vuk seems like SgtGrunt on NA who is a general chat mod.

      I had at one time look up his name in the contacts folder and upon doing so found no less than 8 alts listed as names such as SgtGrunt_is_A_cunt or some other interpretation.

      Say what you will about NA players they do at times go to length to express disdain. Though nothing we deal with is as bad as the EU shitstorm.

      • Tazilon is one of the best NA scout players. I’m sure he would like an RU-251 :D

          • Maybe I should rephrase what I said. He is one of the more respectable scout players in my opinion. You guys can hate on him all you want, but that only gives people the vibe that you are not the most pleasant of people.

            • Tazilon is a pro scout in his mind only.

              If I called myself a pro xyz, would that automatically make it true?

        • Tazilon is considered a good scout player?
          Compared to the average suicide scout, he might have a brain, but he’s far from one of the best.

          • I do scouts a lot, more or less 50% of my 12k matches are in scouts. I follow his videos and the man drives his Cougar in stile, have you try to do the stuff he does? It is a huge challenge to play the way and the tank he does. A high victory % driving a scout tank is a huge achievement. Driving scouts in top tier matches is the ultimate challenge in this game.

        • Lol Taz is only considered a top scout player by himself and a couple 50% scrubs who worship him. He is the definition of failing to the “top”, though the top is just a 6+ skill crew that lets his terrible scouting be somewhat effective.

          • Far be it from me to defend Tazilon, but:

            1.Win rate of 57% in the VK28.01 is pretty damn good compared to the 48% global average (vbaddict). Its still pretty good compared to the Noobmeter average of 50%.

            2. He gets 60% win rates in other tanks which don’t have a zillion battles and multi-perk crews.

            3. His channel is mainly his commentary of other high-scoring scout games,along with map and style tips that you can use or not as you see fit.

            I don’t see him as promoting himself as the best light tank driver, just as someone who works hard to make lights effective in combat. Why give him a hard time for that?

        • Have you driven the Cougar? If so, can you compare to his stats?

  7. BigBadVuk: the most incompetent, biased, rude moderator known to WG universe…
    If a guy like him is a senior moderator, hell, then I should be the chief of WG EU :D :D

    I think the biggest problem in WG EU is not individuals, but the leadership. If the leadership is lazy as fuck and don’t tell their workers what to do, you get,… WG EU :)
    Look at Mr_Kubrick and Ectar=for instance. Kubrick doesn’t seem to do anything against biased moderators, Ectar is, well, Ectar…

    Biggest problem is probably because WG EU is composed of a big bunch of different language people. Which probably means that each part works “their own way”.

  9. > Russian users for some reason I don’t understand are very fond of the Livejournal platform.

    Hard to guess why, but it has deep roots, I remember tons upon tons of MP3 links appearing there since I first stumbled upon it in 2005-2006 :)

    > Stop denying people the amounts of information Russian players are getting.

    They are butthurt hard and jelous :)

    I just wonder how hard is to hire one guy that knows russian well enough (can’t be that hard in France, that socialist & communist lair :D) to basically do the same job you do. Maybe WG trolls its EU minions for fun? :)

  10. SS, you should bear in mind that Storm himself made the distinction between posting on LJ and forums – on LJ he can put all this info and safely say “This is not the final version of the patchnotes” and if there are last minute changes it will be fine.
    Imagine the shitstorm if they put that in official news on WG site and then change it. You should remember what happened when they changed the chinese HT 10 and then delayed the whole tree implementation. That is the kind of situation they want to avoid by putting the info in LJ and only publish what is 100% confirmed as happening on the official news. They will keep denying all info taken from LJ, even Storm said that few months ago in the official Q&A on RU forums.

    I am not defending WG EU staff, they are as incompetent as anyone can be. But this time they are right from their point of view.

    • I get that, but the correct approach would be to have it translated and posted (it cannot be hard to create an “in development” corner, where such temporary stuff goes) with a big red notice that this version is what goes to supertest (with a link explaining what a supertest is). That’s what I would do anyway (I don’t have to, because FTR is usually for people who know what’s going on)

      • Well, for the english speaking community FTR is what world-of-ru is for russians, imho :)
        The big difference is that devs post only in LJ, but that’s why we have you to translate it.

  12. ” I was happy in my 8.11 client :(”
    -SS

    You must mean the 8.10, the one awesome patch remembered dearly by all. 8.11 was the beginning of the end of performance and game quality – that’s when the lagfest began … and player-quality has also decreased since then (I reckon because many competent players left to avoid WoT-induced eye- and brain-cancer).

    • Absolutely agree. 8.10 was working wonders, then 8.11 bugged trees and environmental effect (Winter Himmelsdorf anyone?) and then 9.0 came to finish the job and take the performance nerf to the cities.
      It’s all thanks to lame programming…..

  13. The EU forum has been garbage since Overlord stopped managing it. It was pretty great that back in beta, where Overlord had his own Q&A thread on the EU forums, in which he would answer questions several times per day and have a few massive posts on page 1 detailing every important and good question and answer he gave (usually about mechanics or new features they intended to implement).

    Now it’s just a place to whine about arty or FotM tanks.

  14. When will Uber Tzar Putin’s eidetic banning swearing be imposed on the moronic RU user base. LOL

    • You can say that again….. I still wont understand.

      Oh ok, you mean “edict”. I get it now.

  15. They are right. No info is official for WG EU until it officially came through official channels from official central WG. These posts should not be flagged as official info, but rather information from developers posts, and I agree that they should not be discussed as set in stone.
    WG EU office is required to administer servers, forum, and customer support. They don’t have to play the game or give a flying f*ck about the state of gameplay, crashers, MM, bots, etc…
    Why should they follow Storms posts ?
    They just hand you down the official info WG wants to share with they players on THE OFFICIAL PORTAL.
    SS does a great job finding all the info he can from WG officials, but all that info comes with no promises.
    When you see a changelog on the portal it’s official. ( when you get changelog early it’s from RU portal )

    • It might come with no promises but it provides insight into what developers are thinking and what they want to do… which is, in some ways, more informative then the actual info.

    • Of course it is more productive to discuss the official relaease info, for then you are working with actual stuff that is being implemented right then and there.
      But also discussing what is comming and what the devs are planning is important. That’s exactly what ASAP and the Developer Diaries are for: For the devs to share on their mid- and long-term plans and create a hype about the game.
      Smacking people for discussing what might come next is akin to banning ASAP and erasing all traces to it from the forums, it kills interest in the game.
      AND the forum is not the community mannager’s playground. It’s a place for the community to go and mingle and share opinions and create and increase interest in the game.

      When the community managers understand that, they’ll change it. When they understand that their job is to SELL the game and not to POLICE the players, they’ll realize their mistakes.
      I won’t expect them to do it, though.

  16. BigBadVuk is like the most miserable person that ever walked this planet. You can’t get better example of nazi moderator than him on any game. All he does is issuing nonsense warnings to people, locks down the threads on forum for no logic reason, and acts like an almighty and best part no one in charge for EU moderators(Mr Kubrick) seems to care. I got banned long time ago from official EU forums and although some of my warning points were legit because i deserved them, majority of them were for complete nonsense. I stopped caring about it long time ago and now i’m perfectly happy with wotlabs. Ten times better than official forums and the crew there is awesome. And when i see shit like this i’m glad i’m not part of that shit anymore. Also stronk “controll” spelling http://i.imgur.com/Vr3k6Zn.png

    Just check his latest posts to see what i’m talking about http://i.imgur.com/jMapaP1.png
    Yup, that’s what he does all day long.

  17. I would log into the forums and complain, but they just log me out now every time I try to log in… Both in FF and IE ;(..

    • Clear cache, cookies and offline site data, should work then.

      • Yea, Seems to work when I do that, in IE it goes crazy every few days and stops responding (No idea what fault is)..

        FF never needed resetting ultil this last update, so they obviously changed something to match the way IE works…

    • Getting logged out in Chrome all the times, after 9.0 I can’t even login anymore with Opera…worked flawlessly a few days before.
      It’s actually kinda nice not to read so much BS all day….

  18. “This community is also referred to as “Ponyusha”, because they have the “My Little Pony” ponies as mascots.”

    SS, you made to me spit the screen. I’m allergic to pony fucks and russians…

  19. In my opinion you are a bit too optimistic here SS. What we all see are the symptoms of something being wrong with the line between Minsk and Paris. It is clear that hand cant do anything the head is not aware of. In current situation if some info leaks through unofficial channels then no WG employ can use it as a reference. Even if the source is the top man himself. Things dont work like that in an organization. One cant just google to see what the company is about to do next. As I said problem is between Minsk and Paris. The head has to tell the hand what to do and the hand cant guess what its supposed to do. We, the gamers, are part of one feedback loop that has indicated for a long time that things are wrong unknowing what exactly. But at the end of the day fish starts to rot from the head and its up to Minsk to sort out where is the fault and how to fix it.

  20. You know, I was actually job hunting two years ago, and thought of WG Paris.
    I live 2 hours away from Paris, and considering my knowledge of gaming, WoT and linguistic skills, I thought I could get a job there, which would look good on my resumé.

    It turns out, a community manager over there (he will remain nameless, as he is IRL a good guy and actually one of the few competent people that worked there. Which is one of the reasons he quit) answered my inquiry about the job.
    He told me it was full of bored people in dead-end jobs that just don’t give a flying fuck about anything.
    They’re not making the game, so they don’t give a fuck, they just collect a pay check.

    After hearing that from him, I thanked him, and kept looking for work elsewhere.
    He quit 3 months later.

  21. As easy as:

    -Lock the entire EU office.
    -EU servers managed by central office (specials and those things) copied from their RU servers.
    -Look for competent people (SS level of competence).

    EU office have to be EXPENSIVE and the profits from them (the game should run fine without the 90% of that office) null. They main work is to upset EU players, to be lazy (the SP mission notes when it already started….) and the countless bugs related to their work.

    Just like the handicaped trying to run the 100m olimpic….they are not fit for that.

    • I think they keep them because they are stupid. Stupid people are easy to manage. They just take any shit that is given to them.

    • I sure hope so they don’t pay them well, cause the quality they provide is a joke.

  23. “Ponyushnya”, not “ponyusha”; the difference is like between the “horse” and “stable”.

  24. Makes me want to go on a spam run with alt accounts dropping links to you all over the EU forums.

  25. May be they closed the post because of too much trolling and “iknowbetterthanyoumozerfooker”.

    It is an european sport to troll and insult on WG EU forum!

    • But we are the second best ones in it… first prize goes to mods. :)

  26. Some regional communities are suffering with same issue. Turkish community, for example…

    There’s that “JustBe” faggot who pees into forum topics then shuts them down like “BigBadVuk”, but he also puts idiotic bans.

    Oh, and, here’s the result of this fucking oppression of information (in Turkish ofc); http://i.imgur.com/PeNXu8M.jpg

    Basically… I AM PROUD THAT I FUCKING HATE WG AND ITS’ FUCKING SON OF A BITCH MODERATORS.

    ESPECIALLY YOU, JustBe.
    ____________________
    Edit: Those who will see and comment, be prepared to witness my wrath, I’m pumped as hell against these bastards.

  27. ‘don’t “fix” things that work, like the 9.0 patch’ – Totally agree. Like the fucking Tiger P nerf, why nerf a tank that is perfectly balanced? WG: very stronk logic…

    • I agree, the Tiger is now a fun tank, in good hands performs well but still is easy to kill, its armor is not OP. There are other tier 7 tanks that can handle the tiger very well, some tier 6 ATs can be a nightmare, I am thinking of the Nashorn for example.
      I was going to keep it … but now I am not sure.

  28. Trying to think of a better EU? Look at the NA! The mods only shut down a forum when absolutely nescessary. And all we have been talking about is the 9.1 patch notes, and no shut down topics that I know of!

    • NA mods are ok , although they royally fucked up CR/D subsection but still not as bad as the collective gestapo mods of EU. No joke I made a posting account in the English subforum of EU linking a thread that was collecting fan-art for WoT.

      Two hours later I received a 30 day ban and 3 points for “inciting unrest” what the actual fuck is dangerous about meeting other World of tanks based artists?

  30. I’ll try to bring some light about world-of-ru community, as a part of it. In case, but first of all, disclaimer: if any English-knowing ponies (members of world-of-ru) reading this and you completely disagree with my opinion – tell me right away.
    If you don’t want to read the entire wal – go to the las paragraph, that’s summary.

    So. To begin with, W-o-r (world-of-ru) is a community with long history. There was even a “split” from one community, and w-o-r was started as a platform, where “opposition” to official WG position could exist.
    Secondly, about mean stuff. Actually, we usually call this “Dryzgbomagia”, what is equal to “Magic of Friendship”. It is very natural, and very, VERY efficient way to keep community clean and informative.

    And the part (and, probably, the source) of all this mean stuff is the w-o-r’s system of self-modertion. As you probably know, LJ allows it’s users to do 2 things with posts: delete comments, freeze comments threads. If you do any of these – you will be nominated on the “Prince of Equestria”.

    If you post some extra-long and useless video, and you neglect comments, that telling you to delete this post, and you act like 8-year-girl – you probably will be nominated on the “Prince of Equestria”.
    And so on, i think you got the point.
    —
    So, here the picture as it is: it’s nearly 4 500 players of WoT in this community without any limits on their emotions and expressions and with passion to share their’s opinion and try to change game for the best (or show other members some great game-related (or completely not) stuff. Also, they have very strong and efficient. and (!) democratic moderation system, which allows to keep the level of content on this high level.

    I hope, that this comment wasn’t that long and hard to read. I’m really sorry for my English – it’s really bad.

      • Yeah, thnx for reminding.
        As you may know – in MLP there are probably the only “positive” and at the same time mean and rude person – prince. So every week all users, who was nominated are posted in front of community and all users vote – ban for week/mute(can’t post) for week/forgive.

  31. With the right leadership and corporate structure, WoT could be just as popular in other regions as it is in Russia. WG is throwing money away by letting absolute fucking idiots run the satellite shows. When a region is licensed and the operators profit directly from the performance of the operation, like in China, then it can clearly be seen why WG should flush the turds at WGEU and WGUS. I’d relish the opportunity to feed my hunger with a product like this as my teeth and claws…

  32. I think that WG EU is getting really pissed off by the fact WG RU treats them like crap and are just starting to shove RU’s ignorance up their asses. Seriously, none noticed the fact WG RU snit delivering any info at all to EU and its always EU Who gotta clean up to mess or gets pointed out for their mistakes while these probably come from miss communication between EU and RU.(Yeah, there is still no English collectors box, No English tank books made by WG(Listy can tell more about that i heard), No English store for merchandise ETC. So I think that we clearly can see who the ignorant people are here and not EU.

    the only time WG Ru actually listens to EU is to shutdown Supertest for EU. For the rest it appears EU and Na community is getting nothing from RU except if it makes Ru community look better over EU and NA community.

  33. This makes feel a bit lucky to be in the Asia server. It may be the “neglected child” of the WoT servers, but at least the official staff are polite, responsive, and are willing to admit their mistakes.

    When I went lawyering on a misapplication of certain rules by moderators, they clarified the issue and the misapplication never happened again. When they mis-published Soviet “T-34″ instead of Chinese “Type T-34″ in a mission, they credited the players who used T-34 in the mission progress anyway. Their performance is exceptional by Asian online-gaming standards.

  34. To be honest, in w-o-kwg devs have seven fridays in week.
    Like their former answers “there will be no MT10″, “there will be no Arty10″, etc (now it’s all in game).