an interesting thing appeared in my e-mail. A member of the WHY clan, Amayii, sent me a screenie of this message, sent yesterday to the leadership of their clan by Decept1on, a WG employee. I think it is quite interesting.
The test will probably begin next week? Will check then and keep you updated. Also, nice to know that some testers are more equal than others… but I guess it makes sense, when it comes to mode that is pretty much dedicated to clans. I think we can assume that the same thing will happen on RU server as well.
remember the “Inside Info” post I published a while ago? In it, a Wargaming insider was revealing some interesting pieces information. One of the pieces revealed was:
- World of Tanks Xbox will apparently be selling a Super Pershing “Freedom bundle” with a very special skin for the Super Pershing (American flag, basically a pretty wild scheme), but the kicker is, the crew will be 100 percent trained with a 100 percent Brothers in Arms perk, tank with full equipment (rammer, stabilizer, gun laying drive?) and 20 cans of soda – once per account, the cost is apparently set at cca 50 USD – it’s possible that this was actually Microsoft’s idea, but this is not confirmed.
I like USA in general, I don’t make fun of American customs (hell, I love burgers and I think that the American muscle cars from 50′s-60′s were the most beautiful cars ever made), but this is just ridiculous and asking to be mocked. There is national pride, I get that and I approve, but that doesn’t mean the vehicles have to be covered with giant flags to express that, does it?
To the American readers – a honest question: do you really like this kind of stuff? If you do, okay, no problem, I am just curious.
This however is
a) not 100 percent confirmed
b) could (and probably will) change
c) very preliminary
So keep that in mind. Anyway, according to the leak, the pre-top gun is going to have an autoloader. It’s going to be a 76mm gun with a magazine for 10 rounds, 2 seconds reload between each rounds, each round will do 150 damage and will have 175 penetration (so that’s 1500 damage per clip). The magazine reload time currently is 21 seconds. The top gun will be the same gun (175mm pen, 150 damage), but without an autloader and the reload time between shots will be 3 seconds and it will also have better accuracy.
The size of Walker Bulldog is quite large for a light tank – it’s almost as big as Patton/Pershing.
Edit: Updated the info based on my own sources.
Gun with autoloader (pre-top), 76mm, crew skills taken into account
Penetration: 175
Damage: 150
DPM: 1848,6
Module damage: 105
Reload time for the magazine: 30,685s
ROF: 12,324
Ammo carried: 70
Shells in autoloader: 10
Time between shots: 2s
if you follow FTR for a while, you might remember that at one point, there was a piece of information leaked about the new Stronkhold mode having bot-controlled turrets as defensive buildings. As I wrote before, the use of tank turrets as bunkers is not a complete Wargaming invention – and today, we’re going to have a look at one specific installation, the Panther Ostwallturm mount.
Panther turrets were converted into bunkers ever since late 1943. Some were serial Panther tank turrets, but most were specifically modified for the role of a bunker turret. The commander’s copula was replaced by a hatch and the roof of the turret was reinforced to 40mm (earlier 16mm) to prevent the turret from being knocked out easily by artillery fire. According to German specifications, the roof was supposed to withstand the impact of HE shells up to 150mm.
And yes, in case you are wondering, according to this tweet, this is a “self-defense T-34″ of the separatists. You know, guys, I don’t want to give you any ideas or anything, but do you know what else is standing in Lugansk?
First an IS-3, now a T-34, I fear this Mk.V will be pressed into service next…
Source: http://habrahabr.ru/post/228219/ (via world-of-ru, LJ user Wisejew)
An interesting article appeared on the abovelinked portal about World of Tanks payment security. In it, a Russian programmer of payment portals takes a look at the security of various paying portals, including – yes, you guessed right, the Wargaming premium shop. The author states that he analyzes weaknesses of various payment systems and runs over and over again into the same vulnerability, called… and now, I have no idea how to translate it, because I am not a programmer. In Russian it’s “инкрементальные айдишники” – in English, it would be something like… incremental ID’s? If there is a programmer amongst the readers, please explain to us what that means :)
Anyway, back to World of Tanks portal. After making an order, the client redirects the user to an URL in following format:
http://aggregator-domain/ok.php?payment_id=123456
Which in turn redirects the client to the URL of the game in following format (decoded by the author for easier reading, from Russian server eg. the currency is Russian):
https://online-game-domain/shop/?…amount=32.86…¤cy=RUB…&user=user_email@gmail.com…&item_name=1 day of premium account
The author states that if you figure out the value of the payment_id parameter, you will be able to see login of the user in the game, their purchases etc.
Wargaming shop is just one of the examples, cited by the author. He concludes the post with a statement that due to sloppiness of programmers, in the case above, a possibility is introduced for hackers to mine personal and account data from the purchases. He also comments on the solution (to use something called “token” and “an arbitrary string”). From there on (especially the comments) it gets technical. I wonder though – how much are our data really protected and since Wargaming already had some large account data leaks (remember that “change your password for gold” event? That wasn’t just because Wargaming is nice and cares about our security, it was because on RU server, a certain amount of account data got leaked (and the accounts got hacked)).
this was posted on Yuri Pasholok’s blog – pretty interesting video overall, but the really interesting part starts at 6:40 – StuG III, followed by Panzer III and Panzer IV (and Kettenkraftrad :))
