Hello everyone,

Wargaming, as a part of its (Russian) “Remember everything” campaign (with the upcoming 9th of May celebration in Russia), started a cycle of clips about the Russian victory in WW2. In part 1 comes the interview with Major-General of tank armies Alexander Fyodorovich Fen. He describes the operation on river Berezina, the deed of a crew of Pavel Rak and meeting Marshal Alexander Vasilevski.

English subtitles are available in the video.

Major-General Alexander Fyodorovich Fen is a veteran of WW2. He took part in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, liberation of Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Baltic republics. He commanded a tank, also a tank platoon, then a company, he also became the Chief of staff of the tank batallion of the 5th Tank Guards Army. The war ended for him in Gdynia (Poland) as a deputy commander of the tank batallion. During the war, he destroyed 12 enemy tanks, he was wounded 4 times, twice his tank caught on fire. For the liberation of Belarus as a part of 31st Brigade of 29th Tank Corps, he was awarded with the order of Alexander Nevsky.

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Hello everyone,

two or three days ago, I was trying out some settings in World of Tanks and was playing the (loved by some, hated by others) Komarin map, when I became the victim of the infamous misfire bug. I am pretty sure it happened to many of you as well (at least judging by the amount of screenshots and videos with this bug).

Basically, what happens: the aiming reticle you generally see in the game is a client-side reticle and I am quite sure 99,9 percent of players use that option (before you say “not true” – consider that people who read (and comment) on FTR are the players, who know most about World of Tanks). There is an option to turn on the server aim circle – while the usual aim circle is based on what is on your client, the serverside transfers the data “what the server sees” to your client at the price of higher traffic (according to some older statement from one of the developers, this cannot be turned on en-masse, because it would cause too much issues/traffic/extra work/whatever).

Sometimes, the client aim circle is drastically different from the server aim circle and the following happens:

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Hello everyone,

The day before yesterday (2.5.2014), a reenactment of the last battles in Karkonosze mountains(Czech: Krkonoše, Giant Mountains) took place in Jelenia Gora, Poland. Piciu713 sent me a couple of pictures and two videos from the reenactment. The most interesting part seem to be the involvement of a functional Jagdpanzer 38(t) “Hetzer”. Other interesting vehicles include the Soviet BA-64 armored car and what I think is the SU-57 (Soviet 57mm gun mounted on a halftrack). Check this out:

 

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….because it’s not on the portal yet. Thanks to Opferlamm113 for letting me know.

Hello everyone,

about a week ago, I wrote about the Russian map making competition – in short: the best player-created map in “historical” and “e-sports” category wins the author a new gaming computer (why oh why can’t we have this stuff on EU server :( ).

A very curious thing happened. While chatting with Locastan, he mentioned that a Russian friend of his with the nickname of S0me0ne created his own map for this competition. In BigWorld engine. As you can imagine, that got my attention. As it turned out, some other guy (not this player I think?) got the BigWorld map editor for WoT from somewhere, hacked it (?) and S0me0ne used it to produce a map for such a competition.

Before you ask – no, I don’t have the editor, I don’t know where to get it, it’s not public and even if it was, making your map work in WoT would require it to be installed on server, so making it just so without this sort of competition and Wargaming would be a waste of time anyway. Still, two facts are very impressive:

- Bigworld map editor is out there somewhere
- the player made a map in seven days or so (it takes an entire Wargaming team like a month or something? Or three?)

For a first attempt, it actually looks really good, let’s check it out.

Kiev

Map is based on historical Kiev map from 1941, based on the Battle of Kiev. It’s a summer city map, size 900 * 900 meters. More data about this map (screenies from creation etc.) can be found in the Russian thread.

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Hello everyone,

thanks to player Faqqet for this one – another nasty thing I didn’t notice since 9.0. Long story short, Panzer 38(t) armor got totally fucked up in 9.0. Check this out – this is the elite configuration. The abovementioned player mentioned in comments that the armor might be screwed – went to check first to gamemodels3d:

See all those “holes” – entire frontal turret, the hatches on frontal hull, the rear hull etc.? All of them now have 0 armor. The bottom of the tank completely disappeared as well from the hitbox, so any HE shell, exploding under the tank now behaves as if it did hit an open-topped vehicle (nothing stops the splash):

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Hello everyone,

this is something I actually wanted to post for a while, but it’s quite a long topic, so I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. We will be talking about tank dimensions. You know, when I started out reading on tanks, I always took the drawings in books as… I don’t know… granted – there is a schematic drawing for example (in German case, it’s usually copied from Panzer Tracts or some other work of H.Doyle and T.Jentz) and it doesn’t occur to you that it might be actually wrong.

But it can be. Maybe it won’t come as a shock to you, but even respected historians (or authors at least) can get drawings wrong. I must say this is another point I didn’t know about, before Yuri Pasholok started posting about it and initially, it came to me as a surprise.

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Hello everyone,

upon reviewing the feedback to the “copyright” thingie and the WG May wallpaper (which STILL isn’t on EU server, apparently changing the names of days to English is very hard), I came to the conclusion that it is possible that the photo was different from the picture used on the wallpaper. Therefore I deleted the previous post. The castle is unmistakeably the same though, so – here is the wallpaper again:

And here is the castle picture (photo by S.Bailey via Wikimedia):

It’s the Corfe castle in Dorset, England. Interesting that they used exactly this castle, but why not. Oh and one last thing – do try to be… more polite, please. Comments such as “OMG SS U AN IDIOT” and such make me… irritated. Thank you.