we talked about bots and now, we talked about what they can do and today, we will have a look at how they can screw you. This replay came from St0rmshadow and shows a typical situation, but with a twist. But let’s start first with getting the tools you are going to need to fight this.
Tools of the Trade
You will need the Freecam tool. It is a mod, that allows you to use free camera in replays (and ONLY in replays). Yes, this is legal. Without it, you won’t be able to see the botting behavior. You can get it here:
Installation – simple: just copy the file you downloaded into your World of Tanks\res_mods\0.8.10\Gui folder (it’s possible there is no Gui folder in the 0.8.10 folder, in such a case just create it)
How to operate it – it’s very simple:
- start the replay
- wait for the countdown to finish (!)
- press left mouse button once to “unlock” the camera
- press CAPS+F3 to activate the free camera mod
- control free camera with classic WSAD, mouse wheel changes your “altitude”
2 Bots, 1 Cup Battle
Okay, now for the replay – you can download it here.
So, what do we have here:
Dramatis personae:
Rostam_ (Churchill III) – a Tankleader bot
EYESOFNIGHT (KV-1) – a Tankleader bot
this post will be strictly subjective and my personal opinion only, so if you are interested in hard facts only, you might as well move on.
No? Very well then, you’ve been warned.
Today, two hours ago or so, I was grinding slowly my Centurion I. There is this mission active (today is its last day), where you have to get 25 kills to get some reward (50k was it?) or something, so I was doing that and then it struck me. Why am I playing? I don’t feel like playing. Oh yea, the goddamn mission.
When Wargaming introduced the mission concept, I kinda felt like “Hooray, this is what I remember from Warcraft, this is going to be great!”. What I meant was the World of Warcraft “dailies” – a repeatable mission, where you have to do something. What I forgot however in my eternal optimism is that the dailies in World of Warcraft were fundamentally different from the World of Tanks ones.
- Evilly: there will be an unified launcher for all WG games
- the leaver and AFK punishment system mentioned by Evilly should come in 9.1
- the captcha system, mentioned by Evilly would be like “if the amount of battles per day exceeds X, you will have to type captcha code before you can enter a battle”, this is just a concept – not a final decision
- there are pieces of the captcha code in the game files for quite a while, this is apparently made specifically for China
Also, apparently in 8.11, a certain bush was removed from Hidden Village
ever since last year, a lot of people waited for the tier 8 German light tank, called RU251. It was supposed to come along with the Aufklärungspanzer Panther (I think that was in April 2013 or so), but it didn’t. The reason it didn’t come is quite simple – there was not enough info about it. Originally, it was believed that the prototype was located in the Munster tank museum, but that proved not to be the case and the museum basically told Wargaming to sod off, not revealing any documents about it (it is believed that they don’t have any anyway). That was like second half of 2013 and ever since, it seems nothing else was found either. The prototype somehow managed to disappear off the face of the Earth and very little new pieces of information were uncovered. And so the time went on – and suddenly, the German scout line is almost a year old and nothing happened.
Maybe… maybe it’s time to start looking at alternatives, what to replace it with. Make no mistake however: this is no easy task. There are very few candidates, that could actually fit the slot. Certainly no wartime projects. The 38t hull with Panzer IV turret would be completely inferior to any other tier 8 light tank. There is the highly speculative Aufklärungspanzer auf E-25, but that is simply a theory (no plans or mentions per se were ever uncovered). We have to look for the candidates after the war.
As for myself, the only thing I found is the Spähpanzer SP I.C.
The Spähpanzer (“recon tank”) SP I.C is a pretty obscure prototype from early 60′s. Basically, what was going on – after its reformagion, the West-German armored forces (the Bundeswehr) were looking for potential recon vehicles. One of these proposals was to actually build a light tank on the Schützenpanzer chassis. The basic idea was that vehicles like the wartime Puma armored car (equipped with powerful weaponry) were quite successful – in order to be successful, a scout tank has to be very small, but capable at the same time of dealing with enemy armor. By the way, in early 50′s, Bundeswehr was shortly considering to arm itself with newly produced modernized Panther tank with upgraded armament and electronics – American tanks however “won the contract” in the end.
The SP I.C was the result of the abovementioned concept – in order to mount a turret with a short-recoil 90mm MECAR gun, changes had to be made to the chassis and the suspension. The gun, although sufficiently powerful, was however considered insufficient as a whole, because for all its capabilities, it was no longer possible to upgrade it even further. An autoloading mechanism was also tested in the turret (but rejected). The armor was extremely thin (15mm), but the vehicle was quite light (6,5 tons) and its engine (195hp Hotchkiss-Brandt) gave it quite a good power-to-weight ratio.
The vehicle was developed from 1956 to 1962 (the prototype was built in 1961). After 1962, it was discontinued for the abovementioned reasons (mainly the fact it couldn’t be upgraded further, but also due to some technical problems with the prototype. The prototype is currently located in Koblenz.
for Wargaming EU, there are no bots apparently, but Wargaming RU takes the issue seriously. One of the best known Russian streamers, Murazor, made a stream session (not only) about bots with Anton “Evilly” Pankov (chief of Russian community). The session was called “Bot Hunt” and Maiorboltach from RU LJ was kind enough to transcribe the answers. Here’s what Evilly said. You might like it.
- Russian threads about bots were purged on RU forums, because a player cannot be 100 percent sure, whether the target is a bot or a human, apparently, bots caused a hysterical reaction across several communities
- players can actually influence developers (SS: there was a petition of 200k people apprently about CW, I don’t know any details, but it did influence the developers)
- official Wargaming position towards bots: “We admit problems with bots, Warpack etc., but the alleged number of 100k botters is not serious and greatly exaggerated. We admit they are in our game, but there is no massive infestation.”
- on average, work on an entire system (for example: arty rebalance) takes 6 months
- in 9.1 a system will be introduced, where AFK players, that move very little (this condition is made softer for slow vehicles), deal 0 damage and meet many more conditions, will recieve 0 XP and credits
Okay, this is seriously cool. There is a Panzer Warriors RC club in Tokyo, where you can basically experience a “first person view tank shooter” with RC tanks. They have minicameras and tanks have three crew members (gunner, driver, commander) and… this is how it looks :)
More info (in English) and pictures in the source post.
ever heard of Wargaming ambassadors? No? Let me tell you who that is. They are Wargaming employees, who come and troll around 3rd party forums and social groups. Their official task is to spread Wargaming EU propaganda (not sure Russians have their own version, didn’t check) – not exactly a high position, but keep in mind they are official representatives and employees. Now, Czech community has two: Zynea_CZ and Rogalaf_CZ (there are probably more, again, didn’t check).
There is a closed Facebook group for “young tankers” (how the hell is a female tanker called in English? A tankette?) they recently infiltrated. Someone in the group linked the FTR bot post and of course, they just HAD to react.
Zynea: “My personal opinion? Someone is excercising in writing screnplays for Bollywood..? Hard to say. Since they already took so much time making it up, they shouldn’t have brought it down with the ‘videos’… but I believe that a few people will believe it. It was entertaining :) WGA Zynea CZ – Czech Wargaming ambassador”
Rogalaf: “Hello everyone. It’s a blog and anyone can write whatever they want there. But to be honest – I haven’t read bigger bigger bullshit in a long time. If a player is repeatedly AFK, he can even get permabanned for that. It takes some time before the punishment is assigned, because every case takes time to investigate. And I am sorry, but if we provided evidence against every conspiracy theory or player accusation, we can stop running WoT altogether, since we would be doing nothing else. People are inventive… someone writes a good book, someone writes WoT conspiracy theories. Take care, enjoy the game and don’t waste your time reading such stuff. WGA Rogalaf CZ – Czech Wargaming ambassador”
There you have it. There are no bots, it is just my conspiracy theory :) Of course, the Tankleader bot site is also a fake, Russian reactions on bots are also fake, the fact two most popular Russian streamers/videomakers caught on it too (one is Jove, the other is Murazor), all a fake. We can safely continue playing, knowing such competent people are out there, working so hard to make the amazing gameplay experience for us without weekly WG EU fails :)
it’s weekend and with it the usual dose of Wargaming fail. This time however, it’s not that bad, it comes only in the form of incomprehensibility (yes, I had to look up this word in a dictionary). Basically, there are two issues.
First the “Let the Games begin” event, where you get extra crew XP. Several people wrote me about a percieved fail, where they got the three bonuses at once and all were listed as “1,1 crew XP coefficient” – guys, these bonuses aren’t multiplicative, they are additive. The mission works correctly, if you get three times 1,1 crew XP bonus, the result is 1,3 bonus. The reson for this unintuitive solution is probably the fact that for some (probably technical) reason, Wargaming techs can’t program a mission, whose criteria would exclude the other missions, that have the same criteria but in lesser amount.
Second is a bit more serious. Basically, the Monthly Mission 5 (why can’t they at least name them? Confusion FTW) is sort of bugged. To quote Brynd (WG EU):
Unfortunately there is an issue with Monthly Mission 5, in which when you complete it, it appears to reset and show as uncompleted. We’re informed this is a display issue only: the mission is still working and the result will still count for helping to complete Monthly Mission 6.
Well, that’s it – you won’t lose your mission progress, no worries. It works.
