Individual Missions Tomorrow, Drag Crews

Hello everyone,

as predicted, tomorrow, in the morning, minipatch 9.5.1 will be applied to EU server, activating the individual missions. We will finally see the list of missions in tomorrow’s patch as well.

Oh yes and one more thing. The girl crews will have male voiceovers, as confirmed by Erissa, WG EU employee. I am sure we are all excited about our new drag queen crews. Hell, maybe they even decided to replace China in the game with Thailand…

Cheating in World of Tanks

Hello everyone,

last year, we had a look and one of the biggest problems in World of Tanks, botting. Now, we are going to have a look at another – and that is cheating.

They say that you cannot cheat in World of Tanks and it is true – to a certain extent. You can’t use the most notorious cheats such as wallhack or cheats that allow you go or fire faster, simply because these things are calculated server-side. It’s the only way to go really and is one of the biggest advantages of World of Tanks.

On the other hand, yes, there ARE cheats in this game and they DO give you an advantage, sometimes a pretty massive one. Practically all are in the form of illegal modifications (AKA “mods”) and are forbidden (how “strictly” that is, well, that we will talk about further below”). The existence of these mods is a public secret and, well, sort of an elephant in the room really, but in any case it’s something generally avoided (discussion about cheats in World of Tanks is banned on the official forums, unlike bots). Amongst the most notorious cheat are the following:

- defoliants (leaf removers, that allow much easier aiming through bushes and forests)
- lasers (that show where every enemy player’s gun is aiming in the game in the form of a “laser”)
- 3D hitboxes (reworked models, that show you where exactly internal modules of the vehicles are, these are rare though, as in the new models, the location of internal modules is no longer a part of the client data and has to be tested manually, which is time consuming and imprecise)
- breaking object indicators (these mods will show on your map, where an environmental object was broken, for example if you run over a wall and break through it, the other player gets a warning like “someone breaking a wall detected here, with an indicator of your position on minimap)
- automatic fire extinguisher (a mod, that will activate credit fire extinguishers literally a split second after you catch on fire, much faster than manually pressing the extinguisher)
- vision mods, that allow you to “cheat” bushes and look through them or behind a corner
- hacked artillery tracers, that allow you to exactly see the position of enemy tank based on the shell path

Let’s have a look at an example. The following video (provided kindly by Plazmakeks, thank you) is of a player using an illegal modifications from a cheat pack, named Stealthz Hack Pack.

 

 

The first thing you notice probably (apart from the messy UI) is the black sky. To be quite honest, I have absolutely no idea what kind of advantage does THAT give you apart from looking creepy. Performance increase by removing sky texture? Easier spotting of enemy tanks against black background? In any case, this hack pack has a lot of the forbidden mods included in it – lasers, auto extinguishers, enemy reload timer, you name it. There is also a mod that displays the silhouettes ALL the time (not only upon mouseover), I don’t find that very useful, but it’s forbidden as well (IIRC).

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Meanwhile in Russia…

Hello everyone,

in Russia, you can run into World of Tanks bonus codes in weirdest of places. Like the Maxim magazine.

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Well, I guess it makes sense in the end, given the fact that WG claims most of WoT players are men around 30 or something. I was just always wondering, who actually reads and buys these things? The only person I knew to buy them actively was my ex girlfriend and they used to appear as – you know, toilet reading (not that it had any other use really, the pages are waxed and very hard). For a while it just seemed like they spawn there or something, never saw it brought home, it just appeared there.

Artillery and Air Strike Consumables Video

Hello everyone,

Russian videomaker Amway921 recieved an exclusive footage of the new artillery strike and air strike Stronghold consumables. Check it out.

 

 

These consumables will be “produced” in special Stronghold buildings (unclear which one) for the SH resources. The level of the building will correspond to the strength of the strike (the higher the level, the stronger the strike). In the video, starting from cca 1:10, you can see the commander of the team calling in the air strike – he can set the area and he can set also the angle, under which the planes will approach. The plane drops basically giant HEAT shells.

Artillery strike uses the same circle aim as regular artillery, it fires big HE shells – the higher the level of the consumable, the more destructive the strike.

13.1.2015

See the earlier Q&A post from today for more info.

- regarding yesterday’s Strom comment that the T-34 ingame model is of higher quality than the T-34/85, he adds that specifically the “decoration” (the junk on the tank) is of much higher quality.
- the fact that T-34 and T-34/85 models are different is fine, as even in real life the vehicles differed, even though they were made on the same “basis”
- after most models are reworked in HD, WG plans to bring all the HD models to one standard of quality (polygon count etc.) without using the outsourcers

Posted in Q&A

Straight Outta Supertest: FV201/A45 British Premium HT7

Source: various

Hello everyone,

this is the upcoming tier 7 British premium heavy tank, FV201/A45.

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Description:

Developed by 1944 by the English Electric company as a part of the new program to create a new infantry support tank to replace the A43 Black Prince. The tank was never accepted in service due to the change in the concept of tank forces, but it served as a basis in the creation of post-war heavy tanks.

Hitpoints: 1500
Engine: 800 hp
Weight: 55,883 tons
Power-to-weight: 14,32 hp/t
Maximum speed: 31/16 km/h
Hull traverse: 28 deg/s
Terrain resistance: 1,151/1,342/2,014
Turret traverse: 37,5 deg/s
Viewrange: 380
Radio range: 594,4

Hull armor: 76,2/50,8/?
Turret armor: 152,4/88,9/?

Elite gun: 17pdr
Damage: 150
Penetration: 171
ROF: 14,551
DPM: 2182,7
Reload: 4,123
Accuracy: 0,374
Aimtime: 2,21s
Depression: -8

Armor:

arm1

arm2

arm3

arm4

wk1

wk2

wk3

wk4

A Dash-ing Case

Hello everyone,

this is an intresting issue that I ran into while browsing the old German (and Czechoslovak documents). Not something big, but interesting. You might remember that some time ago, Wargaming changed the names of some vehicles by removing the “dash” – for example, the E-75 turned into E 75, E-100 turned into E 100. The reason for that – well, the alleged reason – was the historicity (as some of the primary sources, such as original documents from WW2, refer to the vehicles without a dash).

This was the case of the T-15 light tank as well. At some point, someone (I think it was Yuri Pasholok, but I am not sure) claimed that the T-15 designation was actually T 15, because it came up on some primary documents. Let’s have a look at it, because it’s usually more complicated than that.

First, there’s the original T-15 (I’m going to use the dash) blueprint from 1940. In it, the vehicle is designated as T15. No dash, no space.

T15

So, that’s how the vehicle was designated then by the Germans? No, not really. At least, not always anyway. Here’s a German report about the same vehicle – this time, with dash.

MYSCAN_20141222_0008

And here is a post-war evaluation report. A space, no dash.

MYSCAN_20141222_0006

The moral of the story is… there is usually no “one” correct way to write a name, even if you were to rely on primary sources along (for example books generally mention the T-15 with dash). Various primary sources do it in various ways, here you have just an example of three of those and all are “correct”.

Wargaming Delisted from Cyprus Stock Exchange

Source: http://tech.onliner.by/2015/01/13/wargaming-10

Thanks to Maiorboltach for this one.

On 13.1.2015, Wargaming was delisted (removed from trades) from the Cyprus Stock Exchange for failing to comply to the Exchange requirements, which include regular publication of financial results, something Wargaming did not do. Trading with WG shares was suspensded as early as spring 2014, with the final decision to delist the shares being taken in December 2014.

Global marketing vice-president of Wargaming, Nikolai Nebyshinec stated that Wargaming has no intention of re-entering the stock exchange for now: “Today, the company continues to grow and the scale and instruments of the Cyprus stock exchange are no longer sufficient to objectively evaluate the economic indicators of the company Wargaming .”

Q&A With Vyacheslav Ushakov

Hello everyone,

Russian streamer Arti25 made a stream with WG employee Vyacheslav Ushakov, whom you might known as a “solid developer” (not sure it was transated to English like that, the chubby guy), who in reality works in video department of Wargaming. He also provided some interesting answers, as summarized by the FTA VK community:

- there will not be any tier 8 premium artillery implemented, the reason is “for people not to suffer”
- there are candidates for tier 4-5 premium artillery in the archives, but the question is whether they fit the game or not
- there are no plans to introduce second lines of artillery for various nations, not even in the long run
- full branch of Chinese artillery will come, “when it’s done it’s done”
- it’s complicated to put a Japanese full artillery branch together, no exact decision whether it will be there or not
- it’s easier to gather info from museums and archives these days than it was two years ago, many institutions do want a contact now that the game became so popular
- a story from the past: a bunch of Minsk players complained about low FPS. WG team visited them and cleaned up their computer and updated the software and there was a significant increase in FPS. So if you want more FPS, tend to your hardware.
- it’s possible a “light” version of the client (with WG-made “WoT Tweaker”) will be introduced
- European tanks should come soon, development is finishing (SS: this was in the transcript of the stream, but is definitely not true)
- 2015 will be “a year of random”, with new features developed for random battles players. Modes that appeared in 2014 will be polished.
- SU-122-44 will not be buffed
- gasoline system (limited fuel) will not be added
- “if artillery doesn’t make a sufficient amount of credits and XP, it will be buffed”
- all camouflage patterns are historical, there will be no “pink tanks”
- Havok is a resource hog, it’s being optimized
- apparently, missions with gold as a reward are undesireable, as a reward should be “something, that you keep, not gold that you spend”

Oh well, nothing THAT new, but the answers seem pretty…

*puts on sunglasses*

…solid.

YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAH

Posted in Q&A