Hello everyone,
what follows is the account of my test 9.0 impressions. It’s just the first round, so I am sure more changes will come.
After download and login without issues (some players complained they can’t log in for some reason), I logged on and…
Okay, holy shit, the hangar looks AMAZING. Even on medium details. This has to be hands down the best hangar Wargaming ever created. Including that poppy field one. Graphic settings transferred smoothly as well from live server, although – for some reason – the monitor frequency was set to lower setting than what I have on my desktop (took my a while to figure out, what’s “feeling off” with my screen).
So, let’s look around. As you can see, the interface, while staying roughly the same, got streamlined a bit. Yep, that’s a good thing. Especially the message window got reworked – check this out, this is how it looks now (lower right corner):
It looks bigger and better, kinda like in World of Warplanes, if I remember correctly? Could be wrong though. Anyway, so far, I like. Of course, since this patch brings HD tanks and all that, I just HAVE to turn the high texture resolution on (usually, I play on medium). What I noticed in the hangar by the way is that now, tanks (and mouse) have inertia: if you “spin” a tank, it keeps on spinning. Will take a while getting used to. Anyway, texture quality set, zero FPS loss in hangar? Interesting. So far so good.
Let’s try historical battles then.
The historical battles window is not translated yet, but it’s pretty self explanatory:
On the upper side, you select, which battle you want to participate in (in this case, either Balaton or Kursk operation). Under it is the list of vehicles, that can participate in the battle – you have to have them in your garage of course. Interesting fact is that you have to have the proper modules researched. When you select historical battles (under the “Battle” button, much like selecting for example company mode), the vehicles “reset” to their historical setup (for Tiger for example, that’s pretty much the elite, minus the top gun, it gets the short 88 instead, tier 5 Panzer IV is in elite status though) automatically, pretty neat. All you have to do is pay for the ammo setup.
And off we go.
As you can see, both teams don’t HAVE to have the same amount of vehicles. That’s cool. My Panzer IV is ready (obviously, everyone else had the Tiger for testing, but I tried to wait with the Tiger and after 4 minutes, I kinda gave up – Panzer IV came up almost instantly). The battle is played exactly as the random.
This is the part where my mouth went wide open with surprise.
Let me tell you one thing about this patch. It’s freaking AMAZING. For one, my FPS went up actually. Mind you, my computer is hardly top notch, but I did see some nice improvement. Second, there are no lags. None whatsoever. Nada. Runs completely smoothly. Might be the fact it’s 1AM, but EU1 and EU2 lag like shit for me at any hour, test server doesn’t. Extremely refreshing. The vehicle moves smoothly, the new Panzer IV handles VERY well and the side armor causes some nice troll bounces against the historical KV-1S. Mind you, historical KV-1S comes with a 76mm gun – complete joke, my Panzer IV tore one to pieces (right before I got oneshotted by one of the TD’s). Everything runs smoothly, I love it.
There is one thing though. The sniper mode got “reworked”. For one, the black part of the screen is gone (which is cool, if unusual, gotta get used to it). What is a bit worse is that the sniper mode is now green tinted.
I am not exactly sure this is intentional (we’ll probably see tomorrow). Either way, tried a few historical battles, had insane fun. This is the best thing that happened to World of Tanks ever since… I don’t know. Forever. Amazingly funny mode. It doesn’t even need crowds of tanks to work, 7 vs 8 or so is just fine. It just… I don’t know. Works. Really well.
Another thing I extremely liked are the reworked explosion and fire effects. Can’t screenshot that, you gotta see it. It looks really wonderful. Oh yea, turret ripping off? It’s right there. Not sure what exactly they did with the shaders either, but the tanks look now more… metal. More real. It might not seem like it, but these shaders might be a HUGE leap forward for World of Tanks. And I mean a huge one. It just works.
But you know the best part?
Even crappy computers can run HD models. My computer, as I said, usually runs on medium textures. I turned the HD Tiger on and it runs perfectly smoothly. The independent suspension is there as well, the Tiger sort of “glides” over the surfaces. I haven’t tried the other HD models yet (will tomorrow – today even, damn it’s 2 AM), but the Tiger? Hot damn. Oh yea, by the way, you like your vehicles with camo, right? Check this out:
Looks great. My first impressions of this patch are overwhelmingly positive. You know me, I am not that easy to please, but this just looks great. I love it. So far, I am very impressed with 9.0 – I hope it will last. Oh okay, one small problem I have with 9.0: for some reason, the tier table was removed from the queue screen:
But that’s just a small thing. Now, if only they fixed those goddamn lags on EU….
I have the same feeling. I don’t care they didn’t got to implement havok or tanks flipping over. This patch is by far the best one in a while. Hands down WG, you did a great job this time.
Can’t wait to see more HD tanks, they look amazing.
Looks neat, will re-buy my M4 after patch, my Easy 8 is ready to punch holes at the back of a King Tiger XD
noticed the same thing with the FPS :), also that annoying green scope… i think it could might be laggy because of mods… :D
Aha, found a graphics bug
On the screenshot of the stock Tiger I, the camera light is shining through the hull and illuminating the wheels
If you look around, the tank isn’t the only thing not creating a shadow. Might be that SS has shadows turned off because of his PC?
How big is the update?
6.8GB
That is not for “update”, it is for entire client. We don’t know about actual update size yet.
6.8
The test updater ALWAYS downloads the FULL game client. Every last bit. Even stuff that hasn’t changed.
I think the graphics are a joke, I actually get more drops now than in 8.11 with the same settings and I have a i5 at 4.8ghz and a radeon r9 290. 8.11 feels more smooth and it seem to be some kind of blooming effect in this 9.0 patch I dont like.
where is the tank’s shadows? D:
I disabled that, they reduce FPS by much.
What graphics card u do have SS?
My impressions regarding historical battles are exactly opposite – its utter garbage. Everything the Germans have is nerfed to shit – basically every tank has stock gun/engine with 100 alpha damage per shot, while the biggest tanks – Tigers, have a whooping 240 alpha damage (one Jagdtiger with Ferdis gun cant save them). My Stug completely failed to penetrate ISU-152 frontally, despite hitting his weak spots and I got just 3 rounds of APCR ammo – thats a total of 300 damage -> 1/3 of ISUs health. My KT has 1, ONE gold round – is this some sort of a Russian joke??
Russians? Pretty much elite vehicles – SU-152 with the 152mm derp gun, which does 700+ damage per shot even to heavy armor, IS and ISU-152 running around with 122mm guns with 400 alpha and outright ridiculous DPM.
Next thing is the match making. For some reason, Russians ALWAYS have stronger team (better MM weight) in both numbers and tiers. Here is some screen to prove my point (have more, but dont wanna be flagged as spam): http://postimg.org/image/661a2rt6t/ I have played a couple of those battles and the Germans have won only once, because the Russians played so badly they could not win even with massive MM advantage (its actually the game on the screenshot, lol).
TL;DR: This mode has one purpose and one purpose only – to ensure complete and utter Russian dominance over everything.
It does look like it needs some balancing.
But still, the idea is to have the Germans with “superior” weaponry while the Russians have superior numbers. You pick off the Russians one by one from a distance while you huddle in a corner. With the low amount of players per team, it would be much easier to coordinate.
Anyways, I would wait until the patch is released to give my final say on the mode.
You do understand the concept of test server right?
I do very well understand the concept of Russian bias. They were testing this for weeks and yet it passed – its not like they didnt know this shit was happening. I am laughing my ass off since Storm said the maximum disparity was like 10% (or maybe 20?) and on the picture above Russian team has 230% more MM weight than German team. Yeah, working as inteded. I wonder if they ever tell anything other than pure lies (remember how they were talking about the Foch and 268 not being nerfed, or that TDs and artys dont have worse XP modifier).
10% difference is only for random battles, IIRC. They did say that historical battles were set up differently such that teams were asymmetrical and “unbalanced”.
The idea is to setup battles with “historical” numbers. Russians and Americans would always have the numerical advantage.
Russian Bias??!?@?
Dear God! How can people STILL be this stupid.
Even after the stats from the national battles… pointing to high tier German DOMINATION and US tank supreme…
On the contrary, you are being stupid. Of course there is Russian bias. When YOU dont see it does not mean it isnt there. Its actually a part of their culture – to see themselves as heroes better than other. Have you heard about Serbs books? Nobody with a brain in their head can think this guy is not biased. But to answer your silly arguments:
National battles are completely irrelevant because:
a) Germans have both armor and firepower, simply good team composition. Unlike French, who have no armor whatsoever, which leaves them at a significant disadvantage.
b) Germans have the most overpowered tank in the game at the moment – WTE100
c) Confrontation was so garbage they actually removed it altogether.
You want me to give you an example of pure unspoiled Russian bias? Okay, IS-4 vs E100. It was discovered that the angle of the upper front plate on the IS-4 is 59° instead of historically accurate 61° – it got fixed (buffed). There is also an error on E100s lower front plate – its only 47 or 48° instead of 50. Exactly identical case, but do you think the German tank got fixed as well? Nooo, of couse not.
Same thing goes with levitating Russian meds, which have shitty power to weight ratio, but still move like freaking hovercrafts. Why is T-62A with 16hp/ton so much faster than E50M with 19hp/ton? Because of hidden stats like ground resistance – 1.3 for the German an 0.6 for the Russian. 0.6! Are you kidding me? No other nation gets even remotely close to that. Theyre just using those hidden stats like GR, camo values or dispersion rates to secretely buff their vehicles and trying to cover it up by their heavy tanks, which are pretty much all completely crap (KV-1S and IS-3 are probably the only exceptions), because high tier HTs are the most looked at. Russians and Germans are my two main nations, so I have a very good understanding of the situation. No Russian bias, yeah, keep dreaming.
E-100 lower plate 49.2 . They said it may be fixed, but since it will BARELY change the armour at all, it has low priority :) . IT was 50 historically. The 2 degrees on the IS-4, a unimpressive tank in game, made a good difference. Still aint as good as OP E-100 though :)
Yes, you are an idiot. German tanks are never at a real disadvantage in any tier. They have vehicles in CW, 7v7, TC, HB that are used a lot.
And besides, US is probably best. Apart from the M48, all they have at high tiers is freackin excellent
You must be a major noob :)
BTW, Soviets and Germans are my main nations as well :)
You are an idiot. Did you try playing malinovka? where you get useless KV-1S and T-34 and SU-152s vs Tigers, a Panther and a Ferdi? I was playing on the russian side and listen to me it’s not pretty.
All the talk about russian bias is BS and you know it, so stop paddling it on and on.
Pretty much every historical battle I have been in on my Russia Stronk Tenks has ended with total anal rape by Wehrmacht Dickeläufe. Have yet to get one win with the Russians.
Although the mode is still fun as hell XD.
http://cs607530.vk.me/v607530339/43a9/x6Oz67P5uwo.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/06U4KTi.jpg
http://cs607530.vk.me/v607530339/438b/Y5TGwhf_YTo.jpg
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/skyfoks/31934816/28367/28367_600.jpg
German bias.
Also, what you didn’t notice was the lack of every type of tank. I just played a battle with four IS and an ISU on one side and a KT, jagdtiger and jagdpanther on other. No sign of T-34s or Pz.IVs or panthers or anything, because there’s a lack of players on the server.
The IS has the 122? In HB? Surely not
True, IS-2 has a 100mm and the ISU uses a 122mm gun.
TL; DR – stop being bad, Wehraboo.
Oh, look whos talking – http://www.noobmeter.com/compareplayers/eu/all/Kellomies/Kolobajda
Next time do some research, muppet.
Woulda been kinda hard since you don’t have the common courtesy to use your ingame nick here, unlike some I could name.
And baddie is above all a *mindset*. You whine, you lose.
Doubly inexcusable if you should know better than to bitch like a fucking tomato.
Not hard at all, since I had revealed my ingame nick in the very first post I made. And I enjoy bitching at Wargayming, because they hardly ever do anything right. SS has been consistently posting their fails, yet there has been no improvement at all, so we need to bitch and whine more (it worked for some things in the past). Who knows, maybe Storm or somebody else will read it and make some changes.
Like someone already said, the problem with historical battes is not only the vehicle imbalance between teams, but also the fact, that there is absolutely no incentive whatsoever to play low-tier vehicles. If you pick a Stug or Pz IV, you are pretty much guaranteed to be at the bottom of the list with tier 8s, that will mostly one-shot you at the top. And who likes to play with a T-34 against King Tigers, Jagdtigers and Ferdinands? Nobody, so there needs to be some kind of a reward for playing these tanks like more XP and income to motivate players to pick these weaker vehicles. I hope WG figures something out. For the sake of that mode, I do.
And now you’re moving the goalposts.
“Nobody, so there needs to be some kind of a reward for playing these tanks like more XP and income to motivate players to pick these weaker vehicles. I hope WG figures something out. For the sake of that mode, I do.”
You mean kind of like the 50% multiplier that WG gave low tier tanks in Historical battles?
Source? Theres no such thing in the patch notes. And define low tier. Some of the battles range from tier 3 to 9 – what is low tier and what is not? I played a Stug at the bottom of the table and the profits were pretty crap. Anyway, youre not gonna do much with these small tanks against Ferdinands and Jagdtigers, so even a 100% increase would not give you a lot of profit. Its better to get a big tank, rack up some damage and have better earnings than crap multiplied over and over…
Also the sound is kinda fucked up as well, not the same as in 8.11
The sound is way better. At least for me.
http://i.imgur.com/zUm9xIp.jpg
Because having just 1 tier 4 tank to grind through was not interesting enough…
WG offically ran out of room for the German tree. Space is at such a premium for the Germans that they have to resort to grinding two tier IVs.
Although, consider this: the stug used to be available from only the hetzer. Now the marder can sidestep into it as well, albeit a little long.
Yah I sort of expected it to look differently tbh… The way the Pz IV line is set up was no surprise but the 38t to StuG is… Well at least I can skip the Hetzer now to get a StuG. It is a small plus for me.
I have been DC’ing from the CTS every mins or two… =( So I have yet to get into a game… very annoying. Likely my end of the problem… I’ll figure it out.
But all in all I think I am going to love the Pz IV A at T3… Yes the armor is paper thin but the hitpoint pool and gun are not that bad, all things considered…
I think the tier 4 Pz IV D will be the best tier-for-tier.
L/43 at tier 4 and ~20 hp/ton.
Making DW II even more useless.
Not to mention the Pzkpfw III or B1.
At least to get to pz4 you don’t need anymore to use the shit tier 4 scout…
Seem like a good patch, but it just feels weird….The features were planned a while ago but…it still somehow looks like a “Warthunder patch”. Guess I’ve just been playing too much WT
Good to hear performance is good , might test it out for myself in the future
They Actually did it??
Well
*claps to WG*
Didn’t expect that.
I have just played about one hour of the patch, and i am loving it. everything looks so good and the historical battles are awesome. the first thign i did was to invite a friend to a training room and blow his ammo rack up. it was awesome.
oh, and Pearl river is a really interesting map now, it will be interesting to see how it will work on the live server when people play seriously.
The only bad thing is the new sniper mode. i guess i could get used to the green tint, but it feels very weird.
4 things I’ve registered…….
1) Cammo patern (that you can buy) appears in gun barrel on HD models (on my Tiger) – it look really weird….
2) It’s nice that you can see in the gun barrel and you can see the bore…….. but at the end….. you will see just mantlet of the turret….
4) Somehow the lightening or shading of HD models seems strange…. some parts reflects light even if they should not.
3) Dynamic resolution 50 or 100% affected FPS by 0 on my setup.
Lightning and shading is totally off. I get less smooth gameplay and more fps drops in 9.0 than in 8.11 with the same settings. This is totally wierd. The image is much more clear in 8.11 in 9.0 it seem to be some kind of stutter and funny bloom effect even if bloom is turned off. Dont like it all.
My first impression was very similar to SS’s. Used a Tiger in a historical battle, but my team faced the entier red army. http://www.twitch.tv/rscolddawg/c/3929343
Historical battles are completely messed up.
SU-152: After 6 battles and 2000 avr damage 16% win rate
German tanks are way to good, also the hit point difference is overwhelming.
I wish you would make up your minds. Somebody else was complaining about russian bias. That german tanks were nerfed and now you complain that they are OP.
You can always stick with Random Battles if you don’t like it.
What about the maps?
I did see minor changes on redshire, steppes and mountain pass
Big changes on serene coast line 1 and 2 no more hill.
And Malinovka what they did to hill is great so many things they did i think now this map is better then before.
Severogorsk is a completely different map now. I even got lost there at the begining :D
“The independent suspension is there as well, the Tiger sort of “glides” over the surfaces.”
Hovertigger~
Nice to hear that they’ve managed to do things without wrecking performance. Can’t wait to get in and try things for myself.
it did wreck performance for me and its not like i have a crap pc i should be able to run this game on max settings 60+ fps but no on like high i get fucking 30-40 on some maps but on komarin i get 25 if i look near the center of the map where i used to get 40-50 they should have waited untill there was multi core support before making such big changes to the graphics
I agree, with custom settings in 8.11 I got like 90-127 fps, mostly 120 though smooth as hell. And in 9.0 with the same settings I get like 65-125 but with huge fps drops and not smooth at all. I have a PC that exeeds the requirements by far, like a i5 4.8ghz, r9 290, 16gb, ssd, etc. So no, all players did NOT benefit from this patch. I would have expected at least equal or better performance than 8.11. I dont know what they did but if you play with 120hz screen you notice 9.0 isnt as smooth. Fuch the new color and shader filter, makes things look nicer yes but less solid and smooth. There no point improvng the graphics without making the game true multicore.
I fail to see how more eye candy and blooming shader bullshit will improve the game, not from a competitive view.
I can’t relate because mileage vary between computers but I didn’t find any fps drop and all the settings were maxed out. The only stuff that I left Off were antialiasing and the color filter.
If you play with 120Hz monitor, you can’t expect wonders – this game isn’t aimed at AAA games players, it’s aimed at wide community.
Also multicore WILL come – stop being impatient~
Its not about that, 8.11 work perfect, its 9.0 that is messed up due to the shaders, textures, etc. Sure it looks nicer, but performs worse.
Anyone know if radio range also takes a hit in Historical Battles?
The new T-54 is beautiful. The independent suspension is the icing on the cake. Oh baby… I’m gonna.. oh… yes… *jizz face*
Can’t wait until they give all the other tanks the same treatment.
nvm
Dynamic target (Gunner’s) viewpoint added to target points subject to visibility checks from other (Commander’s above-turret and Gunner’s on-gun) viewpoints.
Any idea what this is? If it adds view from different position it would be godly!
It translates to “we kinda rework spotting in the game mechanics”.
as far as i read the forums: old loayal beta testers (such as me) can’t login in to the test (NA login works, EU not, RU is not working for me)
The hangar does look good, another good thing in this patch besides Historical battles and turrets flying off. But 9.1 or 9.2 will be the real deal, when they add Havok.
Can’t log in, dammit. Wrong email or password, sure :(
the support tells us that this is related with the server splitt eu-na
you chose eu but on the na server they left an orphaned account of you that is suspended..
and now they try to log you in with that…
nice one
For me this new hangar looks a bit weird… it’s too bright and the tanks themselves are too dark :/
They should make the ground a bit darker.
good to hear some positive feedbacks for a change,
looks like WG heard their customer base and implemented what needed to push the game forward.
That view on Sniper mode changes if you have coated optics attached or not.
Can we have screenies from that pls? (i need to prepare my eyes on my scouts for this :D )
Great first impression review SS. I’m delighted to see Historical Battles look as good as they do. At last we will see how all these old tanks really performed, without joke guns like a 122 on the KV-1S for example. In real life a late model Panzer IV would rip apart a KV-1S so its nice to see they got it right ;)
I have a feeling I’ll be playing historical battles at least 90% of the time from now on.
“historical” battles? Can’t see what’s is historical on Prokhorovka battle screen shot. Is it supposed to be Kursk battle in general or Prokhorovka battle? Because there were no a single Ferdinand in Prokhorovka, no KV-1S neither. We should rather see a majority of pz III and IV and T-34/76, with a few tds (Stug and Su-76 for example) and one or two Tigers and SU-152 in each team.
If it’s Kursk battle in general, the setup remains completely fanciful.
I hope these issues are due to the low amount of players in the test server and that in the future everyone will not be trying to play only the big tanks.
Apart from that, this mode seems excellent.
“that in the future everyone will not be trying to play only the big tanks.!
Why don’t you ask that water stops being wet or that fire does not burn.
I like the historical battles and found it more fun that the random ones. The team composition depends more on which vehicles are in the queue than whatever the optimal historical lineup is/was.
The match maker works with that queue and its priority is to keep waiting times low. In this case WG is innocent. Blame the players who want to use KV-1Ss and Tiger Is instead of PZ-IVs and T-34/76s
nice can not log in , wrong password…
same thing old orphaned NA account that still dont work nice …
and eu one not accepted thanks WG , 26000 battle and can not test 9.0…
Are you sure it is the password or the queue? I had to wait for a while before entering.
I have just tried it and indeed, historical battles are more fluid and fun. You have to use new tactics in Prokhorovka because the old ones are inadequate. I felt that both sides are balanced even if in the battle that I participated had 1 T-34/76, 5 KV-1S, 4 SU-152 vs 1 PZ-IV Ausf H, 1 Ferdinand, 4 Tigers.
Something else I noticed was that my PZ-IV’s cammo was changed from the one I am using to another one that I guess is the historical one.
Regarding the green tint when in Sniper mode. I believe that they are trying to mimic the aiming reticle glass.
Do you only hate or something ?!
What the FUCK people ?!
This is the beginning of the test for 9.0 (if we dont count the russian supertest)
Changes will come, fixes, solutions…
Russian developers… When people complaint about MM not making sense, they just hide the info people have!!
Pingback: 9.0 Feedback: Historical Battles | For The Record
The visual is a bit glossy, worst about historical is the tomato in the only tiger 2 just derping around, then you got no chance to win.
That’s basically historically accurate in a way you know. Idiot commanders and/or clueless crews cost the Germans their share of decimated panzer units.
WG done it again with this game … can’t log in, keeps saying wrong password/email. Even reinstall/ re-download didn’t help, nor old passwords.
Are you in the NA server? I heard that there is a problem with NA due to the split.
wont make much diff for me then other than possible raise in FPS. indonesian internet is so bad, it lags more to play from jakarta to indonesia than with the same distance in europe which is less than from eindhoven to bavaria, the old location of EU2. 100 ping in SEA compared to 50 ping back in EU2. just wow.
SEA server is in Singapore.