Part 1 – 44M Tas and Tas Rohamlöveg

Hello everyone,

welcome to part 2 of the Hungarian series. It’s a bit unusual to have part 2 and no introduction to the Hungarian army yet. Part 1 dealt with the most modern Hungarian projects to “whet your appetite”, but now it’s time to start at the beginning. Hungarian branch will definitely be one of the most interesting branches of the upcoming EU tree, so let’s have a look at them. As I wrote earlier, I imagine the branch to be something like this:

T1 – Straussler V-4
T2 – Toldi I/II light tank
T3 – Toldi III light tank
T4 – T-21/Turán I medium tank
T5 – Turán II/III medium tank, Zrinyi I/II
T6 – ????
T7 – 44M Tas, Tas Rohamlöveg

Of course, that is just my imagination, but it should give you an idea about the composition.

Introduction to the Hungarian Army

The Royal Hungarian Army (Magyar Királyi Honvédség) was without a doubt one of the most powerful European allies of Germany in World War 2 and – with the exception of Italy – the Axis power with the best armored forces. But it was not always so. After the Great War, the once great Hungarian Empire was in ruins. The war was lost and during the process of post-war map redrawing, Hungary lost a huge part of its former territory to the newly emerging nations, including Czechoslovakia. The situation was made even worse by the poor agricultural and social situation of the land, leading to years of political instability and civil unrest.

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Hello everyone,

I am now opening the possibility for you to ask the 20 questions, that will be sent to the developers on Thursday. The reason it is open earlier is that as time progresses, good questions (that weren’t repeated) will be harder to come by – and I also want to give everyone a chance to ask. I will be reading the questions whenever I have time and will try to answer and comment on stuff you post. The comments will be closed on Wednesday evening.

Previously, I was annoyed by the fact there is a discussion going on in the posts and it makes it harder for me to read it all (last question session tool 4 hours to sort out). But then I realized that such a thing is inevitable and natural. Therefore, I won’t post any limits, but guys:

Please, before you ask, make absolutely sure what you ask wasn’t answered recently.

Otherwise – feel free to discuss. However, please note that if you post a question in 10th reply of an offtopic discussion, there is a very high chance I will miss it, so please, if you ask, ask with an independent comment, not as a comment reply to someone elses comment. Thank you.

PS: Just to be clear: I will deliberately ignore any questions asked via e-mail, FTR Facebook page or any other media (you can imagine how annoying it is to log into WoT have have immediately 5 chatwindows open). This is what this thread is for. If you have questions, post them here. Please understand that last time there were over 500 posts here, this time, I expect it to be double or triple as much. It’s about my time too.

Update: I forgot about this from last time – please, do NOT “spam” questions (like, posting 5 in one comment, even if they are all good-ish, I will ignore most because everyone needs a fair chance to ask), pick one or two you find most interesting.

Update 2: Česky – na foru mám už zase čtrnáctidenní banán za ten “supertesterovský” tank, co jsem včera postnul. Otázky v tom vlákně ale vidím, ptejte se jako obvykle. Je to na forum bude muset hodit někdo jiný, pošlu někomu PM s překlady.

Hello everyone,

recently, V.Kislyi, the “big boss” of Wargaming talked with Will Wright, the SimCity creator during the GamesBeat 2013 event. The two original articles can be found here and here, but I’ll just post here a quick summary of what Mr.Kislyi said. Feel free to read the full articles, they are quite entertaining.

- the important part behind WoT is the fact it’s accessible to old players, who can’t keep with the games such as Counterstrike
- WoT is aiming at average families not having too much gaming time to spare
- 15 minutes match (with 5-7 min average) was one of the first WoT requirements
- V.Kislyi is happy that the game makes people go look the tanks up on Wikipedia to learn more
- apparently, the biggest enemy of WoT is not competition but players’ wives and the justification of the game in their eyes
- WoT didn’t do one special thing “right”, its success is the combination of its elements
- Wargaming has 20 to 25 mathematical analysts, who check the post-patch statistics, analyze them and alert developers
- a part of the game is building a culture around it, including “museums, eSports, books, a historical department, and archives”

V.Kislyi: “If you want a mass market product, you have to create a culture”

- V.Kislyi also supports cloud gaming (SS: a type of gaming where the processes and calculations are done on main server and the picture is streamed towards the client console, that has in the end to do very little, prolonging its potential longevity)
- V.Kislyi is also not worried about WoWp and WoWs success

Hello everyone,

just so you know, Wargaming is now recruiting alpha testers for World of Warships. For both servers, the criteria are basically following (in order of importance)

• World of Warships forum activity (at least 150 good posts, no spamming)
• WoT and WoWp alpha test veterans
• experience in alpha testing other games
• being a professional tester, or an IT specialist
• proactivity and decency

What has NO effect on the application:

• amount of battles in WoT and WoWp
• win rate
• age
• country
• city

EU players can aply in the appropriate EU forums thread, US players can apply in the US forums thread. Good luck, captains!

Also (not as important but still interesting), Wot-news.com report that another round of alpha-testers recruitment for World of Tanks: Generals (browser card game based on World of Tanks) is also underway. Russian players only though.

This is connected to this article.

Hello everyone,

just a quick correction: talked to Cannoneer about leaks and it looks like there was a misunderstanding. Zlobny did say WG controls the leaks, just like I wrote, but what he meant were the “controlled” leaks, like when Storm posted the entire 8.9 line early and Quasar re-posted it on EU forums in English. Apart from that however, there are also leaks that are not controlled, such as the one with the Stalin-swastika Type 61, which Wargaming has nothing to do with.

- SS

So, here’s something I’ve been thinking about since yesterday. The roaming mechanism. For those who still don’t know what it is: it will allow players from one server (say, RU) to play on another server (EU). While it sounds like a good idea at first, it has several significant flaws, that make me think it’s really not a good idea overall.

First, there is the technical aspect. Russian and North American servers are far from one another, ping will not make it viable (when I log on NA:East, I have 130-200ms ping, not exactly good enough for proper gameplay). The only place where roaming will work properly I can imagine is the EU-RU roaming (some RU servers are located on the same place as EU servers: both EU1 and RU3 are in Munich, RU7 and EU2 are in Amsterdam), allowing for games with good ping. Well, fair enough.

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Source: http://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/1694109.html

Hello everyone,

“Shushpancery atakuyut” is a pretty interesting LJ blog, showing the pictures of various exotic vehicles. This one caught my eye, as it is not very common for Chinese tank info to appear on the internet, because obviously most of the data is in Chinese. So what we have here is this:

Both of these pictures were taken in China by U.S. Marines. This tank was used by the Chinese in 20′s and 30′s. The author of the blog found a piece of information that two “tank” prototypes, built on tractor chassis were constructed in China and this could be one of them. Converting tractors into armored vehicles was nothing new after all, Soviets did it too and so did New Zealanders (the infamous “Bob Semple”, possibly the worst armored vehicle ever built).

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Source: everyone writing me about this issue, I managed to put together a picture of what happened – thank you guys

Hello everyone,

every since yesterday and the alleged “roaming” issue (an EU player logging on RU servers) I tried to find out, what is behind the situation, because it was just strange.

So, what probably happened:

I was wrong in my assessment that it’s some sort of EU bug or fail. This problem appears clientside. Basically, it was confirmed to me that yesterday (and before that, but apparently not anymore), the roaming mechanism was principially active for everyone. At that moment, following roaming directions were available:

EU -> RU
EU -> NA
NA -> EU
NA -> RU

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Source: Japanese photoshop masters via Daigensui

The Japanese photoshop masters managed to get rid of annoying watermark to bring you an improved picture of the STB-1 model. Please note that the colors were added for artistic purpose only, they don’t mean anything, it’s just like “how would this vehicle look”.