Hello everyone,

got 22 USD of spare cash? You can buy World of Tanks… for Sega Genesis :) Well, not really, it’s just the old Battlecity game in new coat, but still…

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Author: David “Listy” Lister

With the recent WOT trailer for Gamescom, the sharp eyed amongst you have spotted the long awaited Sherman Firefly.

Now, I’ve noticed an outburst of people getting wound up by that photo. Claiming a British tank had “US Stars” on it. This is not the case, and WG haven’t dropped a clanger. It is historical… sort of.

First a disclaimer: Whenever discussing British tank makings, be aware that its very random. British units had guidelines for their markings – however, individual units interrupted those, as they saw fit. Some stuck to the letter of the guidelines, while others ignored it and did their own thing. Many fell between the two extremes, so keep that in mind while reading the following.

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Hello everyone,

so, the stream just ended and…. well, how did you like it?

Personally, I was extremely disappointed by the format Wargaming chose this year. I mean, it was like a talk show. With very, very boring people. First there was the host (nice enough I guess) and QB (you all know what I think about him) and then the guests.

The show was bland and relatively boring, instead of showing the vibrant atmosphere of the stand (well, maybe next time), they chose the environment of a closed room. The way I understand it, today, the event was semi-open (for journalists and VIP onlz) – why on earth is there a Veider Q&A in program (not transmitted!) for journalists only? That makes no sense.

Then there was the strange competition program, that, if I understood correctly, kinda required you to have a Facebook account. Meh. Not that I don’t have it, but if you guys want to make a competition, can you make something that does involves neither spamming shit in chat nor social network or cellphone type access not everyone has? You know… like, on portal? The Turkish girl, Melly or whatever was the nickname was cute though, so kudos for that – why did she drag the weird artist guy in I have no idea, since WG art department is definitely NOT something I’d brag about if I was WG (see “mutated Conqueror” and “lol copyright” issues).

The games discussed were:

- WoT Blitz (pretty much nothing new, the woman developer or whoever that was looked a bit confused)
- WoWp (stop trying to make WoWp happen, it’s not gonna happen)
- WoWs (that’s more like it!)

The WoT Blitz and WoWp parts sucked (little new info or stuff nobody cares about) – also, why the HELL do you, instead of proper game footage, show tired old (ancient in some cases) trailers over and over? Gosh. WoWs part comes at the end (the last 30 or so minutes of the stream, if the past broadcast ever appears) and is the most interesting part of the entire show (too bad you have to wait through the bland stuff to watch it!).

The render of the water looks very nice, the amount of polygons on the ship however kinda surprised me. I mean, it’s cool to have good looking ships, but 20 times more polygons per ship than you have per HD tank? Damn, that’s going to need some serious hardware. Gameplay was not shown – only vaguely discussed, the interesting part is that the game should reach beta stage (currently it’s in alpha) in winter.

So, what interests me now is – why is there no “regular” stream of the event like it was last year? It was really nice to chill by just opening the stream, letting it run, watching Imhotep play the crowd and the dancers of course :) Instead, we get several boring guys, ancient trailers and games either noone gives a shit about (okay, Blitz is popular, I give you that, but WoWp) or are still too secret to reveal anything serious (WoWs). Not cool. And why is there no stream tomorrow, when the content of the show is actually for public?

Very disappointing.

PS: I’d like to congratulate whoever came up with the !Type59 trolling, I haven’t seen such a well executed troll in very long time, the spam was exquisite! :)

Hello everyone,

it’s a known fact that the Tiger II with 105mm L/68 (unlike fantasies like the ingame E-75 with 128mm for example) was a historical project. It was first mentioned by either W.Spielberger or H.Doyle in Panzer Tracts and probably the best known drawing of the vehicle is this:

That however is merely a sketch, based on plans, found in the Bundesarchiv by Yuri Pasholok’s people (he does not search for it personally, he has “people” looking for it). He published a tiny fragment of it (just the designation of the drawing) in his blog post (the reason he does not publish whole drawings anymore is that it is against Bundesarchiv rules):

Anyway, that’s not that interesting.

What is interesting is the history behind the gun in the game. Originally, it was called 105mm KwK 46 L/68 – KwK means Kampfwagenkanone (tank gun), the number signifies the year. The gun has never been however called as such – this particular name was made up (as Yuri Pasholok confirms) by Sergei “SerB” Burkatovsky. Later, it was renamed to simply 10,5cm KwK L/68 (which is historically accurate). The gun itself was – as you can see from the document title – developed in November 1944.

And meanwhile in definitely totally absolutely more historically accurate game…

Ooops.

Hello everyone,

so, what do you do when you are Wargaming and you ran an event stream last year and it worked well?

That’s right, you fuck it up! We can’t have players have too much fun watching the Wargaming show on stream the whole day, can we? Nah, that would be bad. No fun for you, evil capitalists!

Anyway, here’s the stream schedule apparently – Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 5 PM CEST to 8 PM CEST.

Confirmed by WG:

@WotTheDeadZone The gamescom stream goes live at 17:00 CEST! They run today, Friday, and Saturday.

— World of Tanks EU (@WorldofTanksEU) August 13, 2014

Hello everyone,

thanks to roughly a dozen people who sent me various news on the involvement of the IS-3 tank (the same one, taken down from the pedestal near Lugansk) in fighting near the city of Doneck. The vehicle was allegedly used in some sort of fighting (with its machinegun) near Doneck, where, on 9.8.2014, it was captured by the government forces. Let’s hope that’s really the end of the IS-3′s military career, once and for all.

Currently, Ukraine forces are encircling the city of Donetsk, last major stronghold of the separatists.

Thanks to wan2tri (ASIA server) for this one!

Hmmm… that logo on the box looks familiar. Price: cca 1 Euro. Of course, for that kind of money, the quality is… corresponding.

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Official WG material, no leaks (oh noes, sooner than on portal!)

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Hello everyone,

as I mentioned in the previous post, WoT is celebrating 4th anniversary. WG RU produced a video about the event, unfortunately only in Russian. There are some interesting tidbits of info however.

Inside the video:

- players of more than 120 countries in the world play WoT
- currently, developers are reworking the display (render) of terrain and vegetation
- at cca 1:14, Havok is demonstrated
- tanks turning over on roof will be implemented
- more maps based on historical places (like Kharkov) will be added

After that it’s bragging about prizes recieved, mention of cybersports (Warsaw finals) and the “Pomnim vsyo” project, where WG RU supports (Russian) history initiatives, (Russian) veterans, museums. And then there’s SerB saying “thank you to players”. Overall, a nice video.

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/1/4-years-battle/

Hello everyone,

yesterday, WG RU server celebrated 4th anniversary of its existence (WoT RU was – as the first server – started on 12.8.2010). In order to celebrate it, WG released some interesting info about WoT – mostly statistics. It says:

- RU cluster online record took place on 19.1.2014, 20:03 (Moscow time): 1.114.222 players on all RU servers online at the same time
- between 2011 and 2014, the amount of maps increased from 21 to 44
- the total area of all maps in game is 40 km2
- current number of vehicles in the game is 350 (compared to 136 in 2011)
- there are more than 110 million tanks in player garages
- most played classes on RU server: HT 31 percent, MT 22 percent, TD 20 percent, LT 16 percent, Arty 11 percent
- most played nations are Germany and Russia, least played is Japan by far
- on RU server the most popular tanks are KV-1, KV-1S, T-34/85
- the rarest medals on RU server (in order of rarity?) are: Raisenai medal, Tarczay medal, Burda medal, Nicols medal, Tamada Yoshio medal
- since the beginning, 34 billion tanks were destroyed in battles and 400 billion shells were fired
- since the beginning, 33 trillion points of damage were caused
- players spent 400 thousand years of time in battles in total, 1,6 billion battles were played

Warning, big picture under the line…

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