Hello everyone,

Russian streamer Arti25 made a stream with WG employee Vyacheslav Ushakov, whom you might known as a “solid developer” (not sure it was transated to English like that, the chubby guy), who in reality works in video department of Wargaming. He also provided some interesting answers, as summarized by the FTA VK community:

- there will not be any tier 8 premium artillery implemented, the reason is “for people not to suffer”
- there are candidates for tier 4-5 premium artillery in the archives, but the question is whether they fit the game or not
- there are no plans to introduce second lines of artillery for various nations, not even in the long run
- full branch of Chinese artillery will come, “when it’s done it’s done”
- it’s complicated to put a Japanese full artillery branch together, no exact decision whether it will be there or not
- it’s easier to gather info from museums and archives these days than it was two years ago, many institutions do want a contact now that the game became so popular
- a story from the past: a bunch of Minsk players complained about low FPS. WG team visited them and cleaned up their computer and updated the software and there was a significant increase in FPS. So if you want more FPS, tend to your hardware.
- it’s possible a “light” version of the client (with WG-made “WoT Tweaker”) will be introduced
- European tanks should come soon, development is finishing (SS: this was in the transcript of the stream, but is definitely not true)
- 2015 will be “a year of random”, with new features developed for random battles players. Modes that appeared in 2014 will be polished.
- SU-122-44 will not be buffed
- gasoline system (limited fuel) will not be added
- “if artillery doesn’t make a sufficient amount of credits and XP, it will be buffed”
- all camouflage patterns are historical, there will be no “pink tanks”
- Havok is a resource hog, it’s being optimized
- apparently, missions with gold as a reward are undesireable, as a reward should be “something, that you keep, not gold that you spend”

Oh well, nothing THAT new, but the answers seem pretty…

*puts on sunglasses*

…solid.

YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAH

Again, not much today.

Good news for those who are interested in Armored Warfare. Since Jingles already went out with it: first alpha test (extremely limited for only a few hundred invited people, Jingles calls it “technical beta”) starts on 22.1.2015 and yes, there will be a video, by Jingles anyway and possibly some stuff by me. Should be interesting.

- Storm states that the T-34/76 ingame graphic model (tier 5) is made much better than the T-34/85 one
- you need significantly more than three ingame reports for unfair gameplay to be banned
- the only way to give someone WZ-111 as a gift is to pay for that person’s mission tokens
- on Russian WoT forums, some notable players get custom titles (such as “a star of random and forums”). It is not known whether this feature will reach EU.

- there are no plans to make an “ASAP 2015″ video (SS: video that would show things coming in 2015)
- there will be new content in 2015 however :)
- there will not be a video about new motion physics either. Storm said that it’s completely pointless to make one, because noone will understand the new physics from a video – you have to play with it in order to tell the difference.
- AMX-40 in the future will get a second turret with less armor, but with better gun, a new more powerful engine and will lose a bit of weight. This will come with HD rework.

Again, not much today. Storm has finished reading the feedback under his post about how much “action” there is in World of Tanks. The feedback was very diverse and generally inconclusive.

- if a developer shoots his own team, he will be punished the same way a regular player would be (SS: this is connected to two replays that came up recently – in one, Evilly (WG producer) in platoon gets teamkilled and his platoon mates go on a rampage against their own team and both get banned. Second was a some WG employee StoneMind shooting his own team)
- the same goes for press accounts, those too can be banned normally
- botting was always a bannable offense and always will be
- it is not true that developers only ban botters that do not spend money on the game
- according to the developers, “one of the several popular bots was discontinued due to our efforts”, other bots work “improperly and are unstable”, which helps WG to detect them
- there are no plans to disable teamdamage in WoT
- it’s completely possible for botters to have good stats, as they can use bots only sometimes between the regular battles
- there will be info about Tiger I L/56 in the future: “watch the portal news”
- one serious weakness of the M41 Walker Bulldog is its ammorack, according to a developer it blows up a LOT
- more info on individual missions will come quite soon

Apparently, the two reworked maps (Karelia, Sand River) are planned for 9.7, not 9.6.

Otherwise, nothing really new today. Oh, yes – one more thing. Several people complained that some payment methods in the premium shop are missing. Well, that’s because WG disabled them. The list of payment services disabled in premium shop is:

- Skrill
- Nordea
- Bank Transfer
- Yandex Wallet
- Ukash
- cashU
- Western Union

Nothing really interesting today, just posting this so nobody waits for the translations or anything. Orthodox Christmas and all that – hopefully peaceful enough :) But, if you are interested, you can read about the incident where RAF Tempests got into a fight with Israeli Air Force by Listy.

Or you can read a story of a poor plumber guy, whose truck ended up in ISIS hands.

Or you can read about the state of US forces in North Africa from a 1943 report in an article by Chieftain.

Or – if you are more modern-tank oriented, you can read an article about the newest Russian tank platform…

Okay, that’s enough reading for now… have a nice evening.

Not much today. Storm is asking for feedback on the issue of how dynamic and fun the game is. It’s sort of hard to translate, because Russian has a term for it (BTR – bodroye tankovoye rubilovo), but you get what I mean, right?

- a player proposed that hitting “weird” places (like rangefinder, the E-100 roof, hatches etc.) should not cause damage to tanks, Storm states that this is a bad idea, as it would only cause more gold ammo to be used, which is not something WG wants
- Storm is not connected with the 8-bit mode development
- regarding SerB’s idea to have arty heal allies with shots even on April 1st, Evilly states that it’s too much to release it on live server, even for a day (SS: Evilly probably has not played World of Warcraft during the zombie invasion, best online event ever)
- apparently, WG is working on a concept of multiple support classes for the PvE mode, one of which is a healer (SS: and the other might be something replenishing ammunition). It’s not sure (decided) if this will appear on regular servers, another variant is some sort of base, where you could repair and replenish ammo
- WG is working on improving the bot AI as well

Hello everyone,

yesterday evening, a stream took place on RU server, with Anton “Evilly” Pankov, Alexei “Inaki” Ilyin (chief of community IIRC) and some other WG guys. Here’s what was on it (partially covered by yesterday’s Q&A, but I was too tired to watch the entirety of the stream). Transcript by Maiorboltach.

- the names of Russian tanks in the RU winter mode were made by Evilly
- the idea for winter mode came from one of the WG managers, who in the past created the Karl mode, races and football. He proposed to develop the Karl idea and to make something like Team Fortress with tanks
- the idea of superplatoons (5 man platoons) and specialized vehicles came up very long time ago, that’s why it was tested in the fun mode
- “tank healing” is a new feature for now, tested in the winter mode for the PvE mode
- at the beginning, there was a whole bunch of hidden missions in the winter mode to imitate the profitability with premium account, but it was found out based on statistics that the income of XP, crew XP and credits was too high, and so they nerfed them a bit, but the hidden missions active in platoons were not touched
- the general feedback is positive, Evilly considers this mode to be the first real fullblown mode, that players play not only a bit, but constantly
- Evilly uses XVM

Continue reading →

- Evilly confirms that the Winter mode had too much XP and crew XP gain unintentionally, it was fixed
- for players that are annoyed by the presence of “fun mode” tanks in their hangar, WG will make a filter so you don’t see them if you don’t want to

And from stream with Evilly, Inaki and other WG staff on RU server:

- Evilly invented the Russian names for winter mode tanks
- these names between RU and EU are different
- the winter mode is the first “fun” mode that can be played constantly (SS: as in, players having fun even after longer time)
- at first, devs wanted to add respawn to the winter battle mode, but decided not to do it
- there will be more such fun modes in the future, next one might appear on April 1st
- apparently, SerB wanted to make an April 1st trolling – artillery would heal allies instead of damaging them

Nothing much today. Russian players are not amused that in the Winter Mode, you have to buy the healing shells for gold (or a lot of credits), basically as premium ammo.

Another massive source of butthurt is the fact that the “winter mode” broke many mods. Evilly states to this: “We don’t test it for the compatibility with mods. We contacted the mod makers, they will fix it. Until the fix, you have to empty the mod folder. Specifically the garage tank carousel mods.”

Another complaint was that the LT sucks in this mode. Evilly’s answer was that the original intention of this vehicle (LT) was to heal allies in superplatoons. So yes, it sucks – and apparently it also drifts a lot.

Anyway, what will happen with your crews in that mode after the event is over:
- crews from special tanks will be moved to barracks, if barracks are full, you won’t get any free crew slots, rather the crews will be saved in a “buffer” and moved to barracks whenever free slots become available
- crews will be retrained to T110E5, Foch 155 or LTTB (from HT, TD and LT special tanks)
- you can retrain your existing crews to the special tanks (US, Soviet and French crews). If you do that, after the event is over, the crews will be retrained for free to T110E5, Foch 155 or LTTB.
- special vehicles don’t act as premiums, you can’t use other vehicles’ crews in them
- regular XP will be transferred to Cunningham, MS-1 and FT-17

Otherwise, nothing much new.