….this time with football :)

Hello everyone,

first – a word of warning, this article will be very long and full of historical facts, so if you are here for the World of Tanks stuff, you might want to skip it.

Still here? Very well then.

Remember the old Call of Duty – Modern Warfare? There was a line, saying “History is written by the victor, history is full of liars” – the “Captain Price’s speech”, from where the name of this blog comes as well by the way. Either way, despite being used in a videogame, these words are true in real life as well.

There are a lot of lies being told about WW2. The history was written by the victors – I am not complaining about that fact, it is simply the way world works. Everybody lies after all, as House would say. In time however, it is only prudent for the worst myths to be debunked. Not every Russian was a patriotic partisan. Not every Russian soldier was a brave hero, fighting for the Motherland. Not every German was a bloodthirsty monster. And not every Czech was a collaborator, certainly not in the way that they are often depicted and mentioned even is serious literature.

The myth of massive Czech collaboration started very prosaically – as a nazi propaganda to subdue the newly captured Czechoslovak republic. After all, the Germans had no need for proud and independent people of course. Neither did Stalin, that’s why this lie was allowed to survive and was accepted as “the truth” after 1948, when Stalinist lackeys, during a coup took over Czechoslovakia and threw it into the decades of Soviet control, reinforced 20 years later by Soviet “brotherly help” – but that is a story for another time. Let’s return to the desperate days of the Heydrichiad (the term for the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious nazi butcher, culminating with the mass murder at the villages Lidice and Ležáky).

This article will be mostly a translation of a long historical article series “Inconvenient Heroes” by Václav Vlk sr., who took time to debunk one of the nastiest prevalent WW2 myths. I had to modify the article several times in order to make sense in English and in order to improve the formatting of the post, so the translation is not perfect, but I tried to keep it as authentic as possible. The references will be posted at the end of the article.

Enjoy.

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Hello everyone,

an interesting video appeared on Russian server. Since I don’t know whether the EU office will prepare the English version (since, you know, they are apparently too busy spamming FTR comments), here is the Russian one, along with what is said in it. I will make it in points that roughly follow the video timeline.

- Kharkov was the first capital of the Ukraine SSR, it was a huge city, an industrial and railway central
- there were practically 4 battles for the city of Kharkov
- the ingame map represents the battle of February-March 1943 (the “first liberation of Kharkov”)
- the center of the map is the Dzherzhinsky Square (SS: named after the “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the infamous founder of Cheka, now renamed to “Liberty square”) and the Gosprom building (built before the war in the center of Kharkov)
- apart from that there are some residential areas around the Gosprom building

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Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/remember-everything/kv_1_returns/

Hello everyone,

remember that post where KV-1 was pulled out of the river Don and it was said that the effort was supported by Wargaming? It was all true – Wargaming recently released a post about the event.

The preparation for getting the vehicle out of water began as early as late 2013 as a cooperation between Wargaming, the people from the Kubinka armor museum and the local administration of Verkhny Mamon district of the Voronezh region. The bottom of the river was scoured and scanned in order to find the exact position of the wreck. Since the shape of the bottom was very complicated and the weather was not good, the entire operation was delayed until Spring 2014.

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Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/StephenJacobs/20140612/219159/DDay_at_Wargaming_Berlin.php

Hello everyone,

so, how many of you guys knew that Wargaming has an office in Berlin as well? It’s not very exposed to us players, because it deals mostly with business and communications (PR), Stephen Jacobs from the Gamasutra site managed to visit it and ask Tom Putzki (Head of the office), Ingo Horn (Director of Communications) and Rico Nemetz (PR manager) a few questions.The post brings very little new, but some points are interesting.

Here is the summary of the post:

- in last two years, Wargaming grew cca 10 times
- it has 15 international offices, 1500 developers and 1500 other employees
- the sum of players playing all WG titles is cca 100 million
- WoWs, WoT and WoWp will “share economy”, WoT Xbox however is separate and so is WoT Blitz (mobile WoT)
- WG supports numerous side projects: War Child charity, USS Iowa Education Center and others
- the recovered German warplane WG helped to finance will be moved to Royal Air Force Museum and exhibited there in 2015
- it’s possible that after “earth” (WoT), “air” (WoWp) and “water” (WoWs) are “conquered”, “space” is next (post mentions the Total Annihilation and Master of Orion franchises)
- Occulus Rift support for WoT? “Not anytime soon, 50 percent of the test group got motion sickness”

Hello everyone,

no doubt you have already played the new football (soccer, for our American friends) mode, that came along with the FIFA World Cup (that penalty against Croatia was meh btw…) – anyway, that mode is just pure fun :) Requires a lot of coordination though. Here are a few tips from Russial player Awasaky, who suggests the following:

- since the vehicle is invulnerable anyway, install toolbox (50 percent repair bonus), rammer and stabilizer
- as for consumables, you can use engine regulator without worrying, the engine doesn’t get broken, the gasoline consumable is useful as well
- as the crew (single crewman!) skills, start with repair, then BIA

Considering you can turn the crew training on and the XP for that one guy will get doubled in every battle, you can level up your crewman extremely fast (you get to keep him at the end of the event, he will get transferred)

Personally, I like this mode a lot, although without a platoon, the coordination is very difficult. Just like in real soccer, there are endless situations. Although, what I (as well as Russian players) did notice is the fact that in random battles, when a team scores, some players seem to do this:

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Thanks to Ottomatic_Reiffel for this one.

Hello everyone,

if you follow this blog, you know about the existence of bots. As you probably know, one of the best way to recognize a botter is by his outrageous amount of battles played – that’s because in order to be effective in grinding, the bot, due to its very poor game results, has to rely on playing as many battles as possible – there are accounts with 300, but even 500, battles played per day.

Now check this out. In the 9.1 official Hall of Fame, changes were made. 7 day and 1 day HoF statistics no longer display the amount games played.

I wonder why that change was made, because I can’t really think of any logical reason. Other than covering up the statistics that is, so players don’t go looking for other players with an outrageous number of battles per day, seeing with their own eyes how much WoT is infested with bots. Yea, better to sweep that under the carpet…

Source: http://warnet.ws/news/71764

Thanks to Tutmary (RU LJ) for this one :)

Deputy Prime Minister of Russia in charge of defense industry, Dmitryi Rogozin, got today, during a photo shooting session, stuck in a T-90A tank, where he tried to fit on the seat of the driver. The driver’s hatch proved to be too tight for his corpulent body.

According to the news, the soldiers actually in order to get him out had to remove a part of the ammo rack, then they had to move the turret because the barrel was preventing Rogozin from getting out and they also got one of the technicians inside the vehicle to “push the Russian politician from the bottom up”. According to the eyewitnesses, Rogozin swore on the spot never to attempt to get inside that tank again… :D

Author of the video: Chickentikka

Hello everyone,

if you follow this sort of stuff (at least completely marginally, like I do), you might have noticed that while global release for World of Tanks:Blitz is planned for 26.6.2014, the game was in fact already released to limited audience – in this case, Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland). Other regions can’t normally access it.

So, how do you access it then, if you are not from Scandinavia? To some, it might seem pretty obvious, to other people like me, who are happy when they find the on/off switch, it is not as easy. Luckily, Chickentikka made a video, explaining to non-Scandinavians, how to access the store. I hope it works for you guys. Let me know in comments if anyone finds this useful.

By the way, mobile is the future even for FTR – by now, roughly 15 percent of all readers access FTR from mobile devices on average, last year, it was 7-8 percent…