Hello everyone,

ever tried cheating in a casino? I hope not – that’s illegal and you will be lucky if you end up only with a ban from the venue. However, same strict rules don’t apply for Wargaming it seems.

Some of you might remember Rasco4000 from ASIA (SEA) server. He’s the guy that got caught in competition rigging. He was stripped of his Type 59 he “won” and banned for a week. Well guess what: Rasco is back with vengeance.

In the recent Art of War (Japan) competition on SEA server, Rasco4000 won TWO Type 59′s. How did he do that? By platooning with high tier vehicles. See where this is going?

Now, I asked Mick42 from SEA server, how the hell this guy wasn’t thrown out. Apparently, he didn’t recieve a global competition ban (like cheaters did on US and EU server for example), instead, he was just punished by a regular week ban and that was it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure how he “won” this contest – but even if it by some strange twist of fate was all legit, don’t you think that competition riggers should be simply blacklisted? I do.

Wargaming apparently doesn’t.

Hello everyone,

no doubt you have already noticed the “Let’s Battle” Wargaming Magazine. For some weird reason, Wargaming decided to distribute it only for Android and iOS – not sure why, personally, I don’t use my phone for any kind of such crap (plus, the download has like 130 megs, fun on mobile connection). It’s possible they did it so as to have control over its distribution. Fear not however, you can run the magazine on PC too (thanks to several FTR readers who suggested it).

First, install Bluestacks application. In it, register your google account and then download the magazine (it’s all pretty automatic, even a barbarian like me managed to do it). The magazine itself is graphically pretty, but seems hard to use – I had some problems finding what’s where, but maybe it’s the clumsy PC interface

So, what’s in the magazine? Is it worth downloading?

- first, there is a foreword by V.Kislyi. “We’re the best, 75 mil accounts, have fun.” Bla bla bla. Next.
- next, there is a letter from an editor. Like I give a damn. Next.
- some pictures from Kursk and Parola museums. Interesting, but not new.
- a nice Battle of Kursk feature. “Russia stronk” and all that. Nothing new.
- e-sports stuff, no mention of the screwed up finale at Tychy. No wonder.
- some “funny” videos, next
- interview with P.Bityukov – quite interesting, how he started and all, worth reading, but no new info, very generic
- interview with some WoWp guy from Paris
- interview with Storm (M.Zhivets) – very short, absolutely nothing new
- Japanese tank introduction, quite generic, the guy who made it mentions Girls und Panzer for some reason, he translates “Panzerfahren” as “Tankery”. Ugh.
- World of Warships stuff, nicely done actually, there is a Battle of Philippines Sea introduction
- tactics, guides, nothing new

Conclusion

I don’t know. Graphically, it’s very pretty and I think it will appeal to people, who are really into the mobile tech and all that. I am not, I use my phone only for… you know, calling. And SMS. And reading e-mails. I guess I just have a personal problem with not being able to use my primary gaming platform (PC) to read gaming stuff, I like to have everything on one pile.

Installing Bluestacks fixed the issue for me partially, but some of the pages didn’t work properly. Either way, for how big the magazine is, there is surprisingly little info. I can only guess it’s meant to appeal especially to western audience (American?) and new players. It’s shiny, but for experienced players, apart from the historical articles and the life stories of Storm and P.Bityukov, there is very little of interest. Even the historical articles are quite… I don’t know… bland. Stuff you can find on Wikipedia mostly.

If I was asked, whether it’s worth downloading for a FTR reader, I’d probably say “no”, but feel free to check it out. It’s not THAT terrible, but the fact it’s not distributed via PDF (which would probably not be so hard to do, given the fact the only “not compatible” element with PDF are the videos) hurts it a lot I’d say.

My personal taste would be less graphics, less programming thingies (interactive windows etc.), more text. MUCH more text.

Hello everyone,

recently, there has been a lot of talk about changed FOV in 8.11, so let’s have a look at it.

FOV stands for Field of View. It’s basically the area you can see in the game on your monitor. Previously (or rather as it is now), Field of View was different for each resolution. Now, they have been unified. And what does it mean practically?

Russian player Tikhonovetskiy made a comparison (made on 1920 x 1028 on a 24in screen, 16:9) – basically, in 8.11, the field of view for wide screens will be somewhat limited.

Thanks to Kickass119 for pointing this out. One minor change I missed in 8.11: WZ-132 is getting a different (more natural) track shape.

Here, a practical use video, courtesy of Wargaming RU :)

Hello everyone,

I generally don’t do Wargaming reposts, but recent Chieftain’s Hatch issue is quite interesting. For those who don’t know, Nicholas “Chieftain” Moran is the American server’s tank history expert and makes interesting historical posts on regular basis. This time, he focused on the American Firefly tests and…. the American military found the Firefly wanting.

Tests – part 1, part 2, part 3

Hello everyone,

I hope you can forgive me quoting my favourite meme, that is Doge. Once again, Wargaming EU proved that they can hire very “competent” people for localization (specifically, Czech advertising). This is a World of Warplanes ad, that was submitted to me by the Czech player “Jalt”. He got it on his e-mail from the address “info@mcpromo.cz” – which means it’s probably not a Wargaming product per se, but someone hired to do advertising.

What’s wrong with it?

- atrocious design
- World of PLANES?
- WoLRd of Tanks?
- World of Warship?
- a picture with a cockpit
- terrible Czech, sounds like googletranslated or made by a non-native

I really don’t think this is how a serious ad should be made. It’s so bad it almost makes me think this is some guerilla advertising by Gaijin…

Source: http://habrahabr.ru/post/209320/ (and various other articles)

Hello everyone,

remember how SerB talked about the way one has to do business in Russia? By using patriotism to your advantage? Unfortunately, patriotism seems to be a double edged sword.

It started yesterday (4.2.2014), when a member of the Russian presidential committee for human rights (or something like that, other sources state it was some gaming committee, either way an official authority over games in Russia) Kyrill Kabanov planned to ban shooter games in Russia. It got even funnier though. Present on the meeting of the committee, there was a man named Michail Kochergin. He is a Marketing Director of Mail.ru, a huge Russian software company. To give you some background: Mail.ru created a World of Tanks clone called “Ground War” (if I recall correctly) some time ago. Wargaming sued them and I don’t know how it ended, but either way, they are competitors.

So, this guy goes on a rant how World of Tanks is an “offshore, Cyprus game”, and “Russian kids sit in fascist tanks, attacking and destroying Soviet tanks”, which in his opinion is bad.

Funnily enough, according to another Russian piece of news, this guy was fired for this shit immediately after (“after mutual agreement”) and the Mail.ru company issued public statement, that this guy’s position didn’t reflect the position of the company.

PS: According to some pieces of information, Gaijin (War Thunder producer) offered Michail Kochergin a job…

Hello everyone,

unexpectedly, we have round 3 of the 8.11 test (only two rounds were originally planned). The changes are following (since I didn’t see them in EU patchnotes):

- fixed the bug where it was impossible to buy tier 1 tanks directly from the tech tree
- fixed some crashes and freezes of the client
- fixed the incorrect work of the aim circle (reticle) in artillery mode
- fixed some interface bugs in the crew retraining window

The test is supposed to end roughly on 10.2., the patch for EU server is scheduled for 11.2.2014 (same for Russia)

Hello everyone,

yesterday, we talked about the problem of bots – or, rather, we opened the issue.

Today, we are going to have a look where the rabbit hole leads. Let’s start by Wargaming’s attitude towards bots. Just to be clear, I will now talk about Wargaming EU, I don’t know the bot situation on other servers, but thanks to St0rmshadow (see the previous bot article), we have a good idea about what the situation on EU server is.

Let’s start by the interesting part. What if I told you…

…that running the most popular and probably the best bot (Tankleader) requires a premium account or gold?

Yes, it does. Let it sink in. Yes, that means that pretty much every botter is a Wargaming paying customer.

According to St0rmshadow, it’s actually impossible to run the Warpack bot without premium account, it just crashes. Others allow it, but the bots lose so much money without premium account it’s not sustainable.

According to the Tankleader webpage, this bot has about 130k users. Count with me. Running premium account is not cheap, so these players (since they already spend about 10 bucks on the bot itself per month – remember, it’s subscription based – they might as well paying for the premium) probably buy the premium account for longer periods. So, let’s say half a year.

On EU server, half a year of premium costs 49,05 Euro according to Wargaming premium shop. So, 130k x 49,05 Euro, that’s 6,376 million Euro. If all of these guys bought a year of premium (remember, they don’t have to buy it all at once, they simply have to operate a bot for an entire year, which was known to happen), it’s allready over 10 MILLION Euro revenue. And that’s just this one bot system – as I wrote, there are more.

So, what would happen, if Wargaming developed a memory scanner tool, that would detect all these bots and got them banned? Yep, instant loss of 10 million Euro. Of course, these guys already paid, but they would continue to do so – to operate their bots. See where this is going?

Now, I am not saying there is some sort of “dark bot conspiracy” – I generally like to use the Occam razor principle. According to it, the reason bots are not fought is most likely simply incompetence. But the implications are there and if I can make this calculation, you bet that people at WG RU can too, contrary to popular belief, the fact they hire fools in Paris does not mean WG RU is stupid – on the opposite, they are very, very smart and capable. I will leave the judgement to you, dear readers.

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