Wot-News launches the “new method” application

Hello everyone,

remember the “new method” of evaluating, whether tanks are OP or not? You know, graphs like this?

e50m

Well, Edrard programmed an application on wot-news, that does the same evaluation automatically. The data gathered counts into account samples of at least 50 thousand battles with each tank (that’s why it took a bit longer to gather the data, along with reworking wot-news statistics for new API)

The application can be found here:

http://wot-news.com/main/test/

(the first selection window is obviously the tank, the second is whether you want to display winrate, or ER)

WG NA DDOS’ed?

Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2911677.html

Hello everyone,

so here’s an interesting piece of info. As you know, some idiots calling themselves DERP DDOS’ed yesterday (or day before – depending on your timezone) several major games and their servers, bringing them down. Amongst the servers attacked were DOTA2, LOL, Battle.net, EA.com and…. World of Tanks NA apparently.

Why did they do it? I have no idea, something about some game streamer PhandomL0rd and games he played. In other words, they did it because they were douches. In the aftermath of the event, FBI got involved due to significant monetary losses of the action and considering the fact Americans take cybercrime very seriously, I’d say those guys are pretty screwed.

Either way, here is DERP claiming that they brought Wargaming NA down:

80653_original

And here’s Wargaming, tweeting about the servers in the US working fine:

81077_original

So, where’s the truth? Did DERP really bring WG NA servers down? Well, IGN seems to think so. For a short while anyway.

Closure of the Polish blog issue

Hello everyone,

this post is a followup to the post from yesterday. Basically, the issue was that a Polish blog was copying FTR and got endorsed for it by WG EU. Here’s a letter I wrote to Zbiry (the owner of the blog) earlier today. Not how I imagined spending the morning of the first day of the year, but then again, FTR existence was never a calm one, was it.

I hope you readers, Zbiry and the rest of the Polish and other communities do understand this. I am trying to be fair about this issue as much as I can and I really hope this is the end of it (there are measure that it can be escalated with, but that’s not necessery I think).

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1.1.2014

Welcome to the new year :)

- regarding the New Years Eve, SerB wrote: “By the way, I really don’t recommend skiing downhill with bengal fire in each hand – you can’t see shit beyond the circle of light (5 meters). It’s scary.”
- SerB, regarding the hydraulic suspension in WoT: “That’s a pretty rough and complex rework of game mechanics (that doesn’t concern only clearance), so for now no comment” (SS: earlier, Storm confirmed the variable suspension for E-10 will come)
- apparently SerB will keep answering questions in the RU topic as much as he can
- apparently the STB-1 height in the game is correct
- premium Sexton better than the regular one? The difference between them is “a complex of characteristics”

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Posted in Q&A

Storm comments on KTTS

Source: numerous (added answers from another LJ post)

Hello everyone,

Storm recently made two KWG posts, one to wish the players happy New Year and the other to comment on the recently released KTTS video. Here is the info from the discussion:

- Q: “The graphics is somehow meh” A (Veider): “You don’t like the new IS-4 model? I started jerking off to it even when it didn’t have the texture yet and was still a set of polygons”
- dynamical dirt (SS: tank gets dirty when going through mud) will be implemented
- old computers will be able to play on the same graphics like they do now
- WG made a special survey on player computer configurations, that’s how they know about so many players using crap computers, they collected data on 2,5 mil configurations
- reworked Maus model will get extrernal (empty) fuel tanks apparently
- historical battles will be played on currently existing random battle maps
- independent suspension will not influence balance more than it does now, it is already being taken into account when balancing tanks at this moment
- Veider states that support rollers for now have less polygons even in HD graphics on the IS-4 model, because it’s very difficult to see them in the battle anyway
- there will be more HD screenies after New Year

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Posted in Q&A

Not sure if mad or amused…

Hello everyone,

okay, here’s the situation. There is a Polish guy that about a month or two ago sent me an e-mail, whether he can translate FTR to Polish. Although I warned him that Dom1n is already doing that and is doing a great job, I was like – what the hell, why not?

So, this guy created the blog – had a look, not sure about the translation quality (native Polish readers would have to decide themselves), but whatever, I won’t link him here, because I prefer Dom1n, as I said earlier. Two things however made me raise my eyebrows.

At first it was the fact a WGA ambassador (WG EU employee) called the blog a great place, even though it has no original content, pretty much everything is a copy from FTR:

jasy

I posted about that earlier, no sweat. But what made me really raise my eyebrows was this:

copy

Basically, WG EU is endorsing (“official WoT fan page, we entered a cooperation with Wargaming and became community contributors” or something like that) a site, that is a 1:1 copy of FTR in Polish (the guy even copies my post titles and either removes my comments, making the content less comprehensible, or replaces “SS” with his nickname). That’s a bit of a mixed message right there, isn’t it? :)

Personally, I am not sure what to do with that. The last thing I want is WG EU parasiting on FTR in any form and this guy has no original content of his own, it’s really just a copy of FTR, so if WG EU promotes a pet blogger like this… feels a bit off, especially, since Dom1n (who has been doing for quite a while) did not get promoted (quite the contrary).

What do you think?

For the Record in Year 2013

Hello everyone,

so, here we are, the last day of year 2013. It’s time to look back a bit and to compare the positives and negatives, that happened this year to FTR. I hope you can indulge me for a while – this post will be a bit longer, because there is a lot on my mind I wanted to say.

Positives

- from somewhat problematic beginnings, For the Record grew to be probably (I will leave “probably” here, since we have no official sources for other blogs’ visits) the most visited non-Russian World of Tanks blog in the world. Even in Russian competition, I think we are doing fairly well. That of course couldn’t have happened without you, dear readers. It’s somewhat hard to actually say the exact number of the visitiors ever since its creation, since there was a hosting switch half-way through, but we are fairly stable reader-wise around 50k readers per day, with upper peaks of 100k (yea, I like to brag with the 100k, because I am really proud of that). While in October and November the numbers grew steadily, December was a bit stagnant. The peaks occur almost everytime on patch days (people waiting for patch info), the lows (of around 35k visits) occur on days when I don’t post anything new (not very often) and usually a few days after the test server info is released. None of this would be possible without your continued favour and support.

- FTR is popular all over the world. Based on data from June to Yesterday, FTR gets the most visits from:

1. United States (14,62 percent)
2. Germany (14,33 percent)
3. Poland (8,68 percent)
4. United Kingdom (5,28 percent)
5. Finland (3,83 percent)
6. Canada (3,69 percent)
7. Czech Republic (3,63 percent)
8. Hungary (3,38 percent)
9. Netherlands (2,92 percent)
10. Romania (2,48 percent)
11. France (2,27 percent)
12. Sweden (2,14 percent)
13. Russia (2 percent)
14. Croatia (1,76 percent)
15. Australia (1,75 percent)

Of the more exotic ones around 1 percent, Taiwan is number 19, Japan is 26, 30 are Philippines, 33 is Vietnam and 34 is mainland China, 38 is Brazil, 42 is Thailand (all of these still have tens of thousands of visits), South Korea is 45, 51 is Israel. Altogether, the readerbase of FTR is very diverse, FTR has been accessed from 189 countries, although I am pretty sure members from some of them accessed it only to sell me cheap viagra or to inform me about Saddam’s gold. Vatican is sadly not amongst them – maybe next year.

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