so, I guess you have seen the statistic post “Third year in numbers” – yep, those numbers are interesting (150 mil battles, nice!) – but what about other numbers? Let’s have a look at some more data, as written in the abovelinked news article.
- in 2013, World of Tanks users paid 475 million USD for the game services (from March 2013 to March 2014)
- that officially means 4,51 USD per player, a number unheard of in F2P
- interestingly enough, if both numbers are at least roughly correct, that puts the number of WoT players at over 100 million
- worldwide, World of Tanks Xbox version number of users is more than 2 million players (only cca 100k of which are Russians)
- an estimate on WoT Xbox revenue is 9,5 mil USD
as you probably know, the British FV215b (120) tier 10 British heavy is a fake. There never was a 120mm gun planned for the FV215b vehicle, Wargaming made it up and there is a high chance it will get replaced by something else (by what, I am sure most of you can guess). That however doesn’t prevent various kit companies from using WG stuff to produce models and further promoting World of Tanks fakes as existing vehicles.
Check this out:
OKB Grigorov is a small Bulgarian model-making company, producing various kits. You will be able to get your fake FV215b tank soon as a resin kit, according to their FB pages. Enjoy!
the following press conference (with Sergei “SerB” Burkatovsky and Anton “Evilly” Pankov) happened during the weekend Kubinka event. For those who don’t know: a special event for RU players was organized by Wargaming at the Kubinka museum. There were competitions, talks of historical tech and meeting with developers. Probably some other cool stuff as well. Thanks to LJ user “world_of_cactus” for posting it.
Now, I hope I understood the stuff correctly, because somehow, it’s kinda difficult to understand SerB (in this case I fully admit I could be totally off, it’s hard to understand over the noise)
Inside:
- WG 80 million users worldwide
- patch 9.0 lays down the ground for future updates (by introducing the HD standard)
- connection of WG to museums and such, because “we remember our history and are proud of it”
At this point SerB starts to talk about the past of WoT, how they started, improved graphics over time etc.
- this year, they want to introduce two new modes, one is historical battles and the other is the “fortifications mode”
- “fortifications” mode is not meant for only hardcore players like CW (SerB described how CW is hardcore)
(from another video)
- not all tanks will have viable (equally worth) alternative hulls
There was something about Havok as well. Can’t understand it.
when it comes to the tank industry, every nation has its own really weird shit, where the only question that comes to your mind when reading about it is “what were they smoking?” (followed by “and where can I get it”). For the Germans, it was the various “supertank” projects like the “Ratte” or the “Monster”, after all, those are widely known. For the British, there were a couple of outrageous terrible projects as well, but the Soviets IMHO beat them all with a concept so outrageous and silly that it immediately trumps the German fantasies.
Recently, Yuri Pasholok wrote a new book, called “Stalin’s Balls of Steel” – yes, the name sounds as awkward in Russian as it does in English and if you think the name is good, wait until you see its cover.
Yep, that’s it. Meet the Soviet “ball tanks”. Honestly, I am not sure how serious this is, because Yuri Pasholok is known for his elaborate trolling and this sounds very, very troll-ish. You don’t have to be an engineer to recognize that this idea is completely outlandÃsh (at least in WW2 conditions without all the gadgets even we don’t have) and I have doubts that any such vehicle could even move, let alone fight. Ironically, it was the Germans, who actually created something like that (the mysterious Kugelpanzer), but of course, that was on an entirely different scale.
thanks to elwiscomeback555 for linking this to me. What follows is another interview with V.Kislyi (WG CEO), that took place during the WGL finals in Warsaw, this time with a Polish presenter MrOmen. It’s slightly more interesting than other interviews because of one thing: Wargaming’s attitude to EU tree. Check this out.
The question about Polish tanks (and EU tree) came first (as you can see, Polish players do put an emphasis on that) and:
“I know we promised and – including myself – we were talking about Polish tanks and European kinda tree, well, the reality is that we, well, you have to understand, we had to release the British, Japanese and Chinese tanks before, because, you know, those were big nations, which were fighting with those tanks and then, you know, we keep getting new and new players, 80 million, eight zero million registered users we have today and they want so many other things. Let’s be honest to ourselves, adding another European tree will not add much of the variety. Of course, tanks will be little bit different, but when we had a choice, you know, historical battles, new physics, experiments with new gameplay modes and our resources, are not, you know, unlimited, we had to make hard choices. Until the end of this year, we have so many plans, probably we aren’t going to do EU tree in this year. We will make it some time in the future, but not during this year.”
Well, there you have it. The info is not new (we knew EU tree wouldn’t come this year), but you can see Wargaming slowly retreating from the EU tree and… that’s not a good thing. Tons of Polish, Czechoslovak, Italian, Swedish etc. players are waiting for it and that’s why this topic deserves a bit more attention and I will be dealing with that in a couple of future articles.
Note one odd thing: apparently, adding EU tanks is in conflict with Havok and HB according to V.Kislyi – so, programmers are now doing historical research and creating models? He probably meant HD rework.
Other info from the interview:
- no special rewards for hardcore players are planned (best of the best should go to e-sports and win real money)
- WG fill focus on CW and e-sports (CW – more casual version will be the fortifications)
- tactical tablet for CW is planned (SS: a map where commander can draw tactics and such)
- bitcoin support not planned
- WOWS: 10-15 min battles, has to be spectacular, it’s possible that WOWS beta will be until the end of this year
- all models in WoT will be reworked to HD, hopefully until the end of the year (SS: not really)
- Sturmtiger: maybe it will appear, but not high priority
- people loved the Karl mode
- Type 59 won’t go back in shop (will be kept as special prize)
today, we have a short guest article by Davis Kyle about the Indian Sherman modifications. Enjoy!
The Indian Sherman – possible tier 6 premium for World of Tanks?
Most people do not consider India to be a very innovative country for developing tanks, but they would not be entirely correct. India built their own Vickers MBTs (Vickers Vijayanta) and had and has a relatively modern army. However, backing up their front-line Centurions, they had some gun-upgraded Shermans they modified for the Indo-Pakistani Wars, that fit perfectly into the WoT timeframe.
There would be three gun upgrades compared to the regular M4 Sherman, Tier 5 American medium tank in WoT. The French SA49 and SA50 (as seen on the AMX 13-75) and the D56-T gun, found in real life on the PT-76, Soviet amphibious tank.
Both the PT-76 and AMX-13 were very advanced tanks light tanks on the export market, newer than M4 Shermans, but decidedly less common in India. Therefore, they were harder to repair and keep in service. Also, with the (albeit limited) protection and greatly improved reliability the M4′s chassis gave the Indian Army, it was enough to convert some guns to the Shermans to replace the totally outdated 75mm L/40 that most Sherman V’s carried.
as you probably noticed already, FTR is back after more than 24 hours. What was the cause of the disruption? I actually don’t know. The issue fixed “itself” as far as I know last evening. It wasn’t on our server and it was no attack. Let’s hope it won’t repeat itself – if it does, despite the arrangements that are there currently, I’d have to start look for alternate solutions.
Either way, here’s a couple of invite codes I forgot from rwc81 and Fluidloneknight
VR6S3-EXF96-ZZUGH-FMSHV
VR6SN-3G89T-ASGBY-5AP4H
If you want more invite codes, feel free to get them at the Alienware site, there are like 3k left
- Storm on why the autoaim was changed in 9.0: “Current autoaim in cases of some vehicles (especially open SPG’s) sometimes aims at “empty space” around the vehicle and not at the vehicle itself. We fixed this by introducing new point where the autoaim is aiming. It won’t affect penetration chances.”
- rebalance of maps especially for historical battles is not planned
- it’s possible that “assault” and “encounter” modes will appear in historical battles
- it’s completely technically possible to implement skill/perks, working only under special conditions (for example perks specially for autoloader tanks, for TD’s etc.)
- regarding the alleged “arty nerf”, posted by Storm – he claims he was misinterpreted by “guide-makers, who misinterpret him because they are hunting for sensations” (SS: nothing implied sarcasm and what he wrote was very clear, anyway – Storm was probably referring to either Murazor or Jove). No arty nerf is planned for now, but it will definitely not recieve any buff, Storm states that statistically, everything is alright with arty
- apparently, there is a Russian social group on Vkontakte (VK, Russian Facebook) called “Women against World of Tanks” with like 7000 members, claiming that WoT destroys marriages because some men play too much (SS: no, this is not trolling, this really exists)
- one interesting thing I learned from EU/US. I won’t cite the source (he specifically asked not to), but according to internal WG EU data, World of Warplanes is actually doing fine on EU server, its popularity is rising. It’s the RU server, that has issues in this case, not the EU one (you might have seen the FTR post about the “failure of WoWp” – the graph in it referred to RU). I still think it’s a shitty game tho.
Hmmmm… a thought. You might have noticed that the QA is getting shorter (it’s also harder to “dig out” info from various sources). The reason for this is that the original thread, that used to be the “core source” of the translations, is practically dead. New answers appear quite rarely (from SerB – practically never, from Storm – more often, but still rare). The developers are probably busier than usual.
if you did read FTR yesterday, you might have noticed that Big Boss Viktor Kislyi (Wargaming CEO) gave series of interviews during the WGL finals in Poland to various magazines and portals. This time, he was talking about Occulus Rift support.
He said that they are aware of the thing and although impressive, the fact that World of Tanks is a F2P MMO that depends on massive numbers of players means that it will be supported only if the number of its users reaches 5-10 million, because otherwise, it doesn’t pay off. Same rule applies for Xbox One for example.
