Hello everyone,

yesterday, we talked about the problem of bots – or, rather, we opened the issue.

Today, we are going to have a look where the rabbit hole leads. Let’s start by Wargaming’s attitude towards bots. Just to be clear, I will now talk about Wargaming EU, I don’t know the bot situation on other servers, but thanks to St0rmshadow (see the previous bot article), we have a good idea about what the situation on EU server is.

Let’s start by the interesting part. What if I told you…

…that running the most popular and probably the best bot (Tankleader) requires a premium account or gold?

Yes, it does. Let it sink in. Yes, that means that pretty much every botter is a Wargaming paying customer.

According to St0rmshadow, it’s actually impossible to run the Warpack bot without premium account, it just crashes. Others allow it, but the bots lose so much money without premium account it’s not sustainable.

According to the Tankleader webpage, this bot has about 130k users. Count with me. Running premium account is not cheap, so these players (since they already spend about 10 bucks on the bot itself per month – remember, it’s subscription based – they might as well paying for the premium) probably buy the premium account for longer periods. So, let’s say half a year.

On EU server, half a year of premium costs 49,05 Euro according to Wargaming premium shop. So, 130k x 49,05 Euro, that’s 6,376 million Euro. If all of these guys bought a year of premium (remember, they don’t have to buy it all at once, they simply have to operate a bot for an entire year, which was known to happen), it’s allready over 10 MILLION Euro revenue. And that’s just this one bot system – as I wrote, there are more.

So, what would happen, if Wargaming developed a memory scanner tool, that would detect all these bots and got them banned? Yep, instant loss of 10 million Euro. Of course, these guys already paid, but they would continue to do so – to operate their bots. See where this is going?

Now, I am not saying there is some sort of “dark bot conspiracy” – I generally like to use the Occam razor principle. According to it, the reason bots are not fought is most likely simply incompetence. But the implications are there and if I can make this calculation, you bet that people at WG RU can too, contrary to popular belief, the fact they hire fools in Paris does not mean WG RU is stupid – on the opposite, they are very, very smart and capable. I will leave the judgement to you, dear readers.

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Hello everyone,

just like most of players who visit forums (or aren’t completely oblivious to the game), I heard of bots before. In case someone completely oblivious to the issue is reading this: a “bot” (shortcut of “robot”) is a program, that controls the player character so the player doesn’t have to. Bots appear in many games and there are many types, but in online gaming they are almost universally illegal.

In World of Tanks terms, bots are programs, that play instead of the human being – not to reach any stellar results of course, but to “grind” – in other words, to play and earn credits/XP, so the player doesn’t have to. Just like everywhere else, their use is strictly punished and uncovered botters will have their accounts wiped, or they get permabanned outright.

At least, such is the theory.

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Hello everyone,

a very long time ago, I wrote a post about the TNH-57/900 light tank. I recently added some new info I found, so let’s have a look at it. This vehicle could appear in the Czechoslovak light branch around tier 5.

After the war, the newly-reformed Czechoslovak army was not interested too much in new light tanks, even though the LT-38 and Hetzer suspensions were used for the development of other vehicles, such as some self-propelled guns. Several designs were given to consideration in 1948-1949, including the Škoda T-17, but the army really showed no interest. However, Škoda developed the new line of automatic drum-fed cannons – the 37mm A23, the 47mm A24 and the 57mm A25 (the latter two intended also for the T-16 prototype). ČKD thought it would be a great idea to make a new light tank design too – they knew the Czechoslovak army wasn’t really interested and so the design was concieved for export in 1949 and it was designated (in the ČKD light tank tradition) as TNH 57/900, as it was based on the TNH chassis conception and designed so that it could share many parts with the LT-38 and Hetzer. It was to be armed with the 57mm A25 cannon and it was generally a very good design. A technology demonstrator was created and passed the tests (it was made from the last TNH n.A. hull and a wooden mock-up turret), but in 1949, Czechoslovakia was banned from selling any weapons to countries outside of the Soviet sphere of influence (and as the countries within the sphere of Soviet influence were serviced exclusively by Soviets and their tech, it was a de-facto export ban). Losing its primary goal (the export), the project was cancelled in 1950. Oddly enough, the prototype wasn’t scrapped and it was used for towing artillery even around 1957. Without the turret of course. Unfortunately, no photo of the turretted demonstrator survived.

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Source: http://overlord-wot.blogspot.cz/2014/02/wot360-moar-tanks.html

Hello everyone,

yes, this is a bit of late info, but Xbox WoT went live recently – not worldwide yet. Here are the details. Personally, I really am not attracted to this kind of stuff, but if it makes Wargaming profit…

Source: http://serb-2.livejournal.com/201589.html

Hello everyone,

so, SerB has a personal blog. It’s not updated regularily and the posts there are generally short and personal, so there was no real reason to translate anything from there, but recently (or rather, today), SerB posted an interesting characteristic of general Russian (not only WoT) audience – as a sort-of advice for those, who want to work with the Russian market. Thanks to Brenwen from LJ community for re-posting the link.

What he wrote (I will try to translate it as correctly as I can):

Russian mass audience – mass as in both the main audience group and the fact there are many of them – is very patriotic. Anti-patriotic groups (in our case, “Germanlovers”) are visible and very loud, so a casual observer might get wrong idea about their numbers and financial importance. The main audience group, providing most of the financial income, is patriotic in following sense:

1. Mass audience is not ashamed and does not want to be ashamed of Russian past and present. All the while a large part of this audience takes highly philosophical approach towards Russian failures and dark parts of history: “We got punched in 1941 in the teeth – oh well, happens, we shrugged it off and ended up in Berlin.” Smaller part of the audience directly argues (makes excuses for) even real failures (“Americans were never on the moon”).

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Author: Károly “Karika” Németh

Hello everyone,

some of you might remember the Tas – the ultimate Hungarian wartime project of a medium/heavy tank, inspired by the Panther. I wrote about the Tas here, in case you are interested. Either way, sometimes, some “information” appears that Tas was supposed to be equipped with German 88mm gun, like the Tiger. This is not true and Károly “Karika” Németh will explain it in detail.

Regarding the picture above, that was claimed to be the 88mm Tas – that’s not the model of the Tas with 88mm gun, there’s NO chance that the Tas could have been mounted with an 88mm, historically.

At first I have to make some things clear: the original plans, blueprints and documantations for the Tas medium tank are mostly missing (lost during the occupation of Hungary by the Germans, and then the Soviets), and the historians have to work with the limited written sources and many (less reliable) personal memoirs/flashbacks. Therefore, a lot of misunderstandings and delusions circulating around on the internet, and even in published books.

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Hello everyone,

this is some info for those of you, who like to follow Rita on stream (that “Stream” button on the upper bar). Rita now has (unlike before) regular schedule she will try to keep according to her own words. The schedule is here:

Enjoy!

PS: there is an interesting competition upcoming on the stream for nice prizes I think, I helped design it so you might want to refresh your knowledge of tanks… :)

Hello everyone,

as promised, here is the overview of this week’s FTR contributors. I value all your help equally, no matter how small, so I just want to thank you all once again.

Contributors

S.R. (Poland) – DONKEY LIVES
L.H. (Germany)
Godsmacked (Poland) – large contribution, thanks mate!
F.K. (Germany)

Please note that if you want your full real name or nickname listed, you have to write me your nickname (or your consent for full name publication) :)

You can also leave a message you want published.

S.R. wanted to leave a short message for you guys. It says: “DONKEY LIVES”