So, here’s just a status update.

For the last few months, I’ve started several FTR posts but never finished them. Lots of different topics – Czechoslovak weapons exports, some new stuff that I found out, some thoughts about the gaming industry in general (and how I am every day genuinely amazed it actually works) – but I never finished any of them because the truth is, when you write for a living your whole day, you don’t really feel like doing that every evening as well and for the last three and a half years, I gave Armored Warfare 100 percent of my time because I just can’t split my attention to more projects and I don’t really want to be in the same situation I was when I was writing FTR – to do something I didn’t enjoy for a living only to put my energy into my hobby.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t keep an eye on what’s going on around tanks in general or in World of Tanks, mostly through Rita’s blog – or perhaps I should just say “the blog” since Rita doesn’t seem to be working on it anymore. Can’t blame her really, everyone gets burned out eventually. I know I did. But, in the end, WoT and everything around it is more of the same – the novelty’s gone it seems with the things being introduced are more of the same. Well, there are the fake made-up Polish tanks and half of the Italians is made-up too, but hey, nothing we can do about it, right. As long as it sells, it’s gonna go out. And it will sell, I am sure the Polish players are dying to play some awesome “Polish” tanks, even if they didn’t actually exist. That’s how this stuff goes.

I am speaking only for myself but actually finding solutions to tanks or arguing within the previous World of Tanks historicity constraints was the main part of the thrill for me. Now that they can just make shit up, meh.

I was fairly interested in the Excalibur development for two years now or so (yes, we knew about it for very obvious reasons) but things being the way they are, there seem to be a lot of parallels between it and Armored Warfare. I wouldn’t hold my breath – if it launches at all, the team that takes over might be in a very difficult position. But who knows – Wargaming these days is very different from Wargaming back when I started with World of Tanks. God, that was a long time ago, 2011 I think? Time sure flies.

Maybe they’ll just pour so many resources at it that they’ll fix it, although judging from the leaks… speaking of which: I am guessing it was some disgruntled WG Seattle employees? Otherwise they wouldn’t go to that other joke blog first… AW parallels, AW parallels everywhere…

Other than that, not much has changed. It feels like those three years went by in a blink of an eye. Honestly, looking at some of my old links, I feel I could just drop everything and restart FTR if I wanted to. I don’t for the reasons mentioned above, but some things remain the same, don’t they.

Got any pet project ideas?

Oh yeah and I am looking for someone with access to ISU-122/152 parts. For reasons.