Hello everyone,

today, after watching the 8.11 ASAP patch, I was actually quite surprised by the new “national battles” mode. Given the fact that I run a WoT blog, you can imagine I am not often surprised by something new announced publicly for WoT. But in this case, I was.

Why was I surprised? Well, there are two reasons really.

- first, Storm specifically said (a long time ago) this mode would NOT happen and ever since that time, noone bothered to ask about it anymore
- second, it’s such a weird mode noone wants or needs that noone mentioned it for months, literally – not a peep

Let’s have a look at it in a bit more detail though.

The basic idea is that teams of tanks of one nation (and one nation only) will be fighting teams of tanks from a different nation. All German teams vs. all Soviet teams for example. So, take a deep breath and try to imagine the number of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. I came up with a few in seconds. My bad feeling about this is made even stronger by Storm openly stating that there will be no special MM rules for this kind of battle apart from the fact each side will have

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Hello everyone,

since the ASAP is out already, I think everyone figured by now that the 8.11 test server will start next Thursday – 23.1.2013

Hello everyone,

here is the yesterday’s stream with Rita and me… and, unexpectedly, The_Chieftain (so by watching it, you might actually find out new info straight from Wargaming :) ) – I had really great fun, apart from the part where Chieftain called Hilary Doyle and I was trying to find exactly one article with him on the line and answering questions. That was a bit stressing. Huge thanks to both Rita and Chieftain for making this possible. It’s also somewhat shorter, “only” 3 hours :)

Enjoy :)

Watch live video from RitaGamer2 on TwitchTV

….starting in few minutes :)

Source: http://war-tundra.livejournal.com/2049275.html

Hello everyone,

so, would you like to be a community manager for World of Warplanes? Then you should know how to recognize Gaijin saboteurs, how to sabotage Gaijin forums and how to pretend you’re a regular player :)

Check this out. This is the official set of questions (in Russian) that the future community management employees get asked (notice it is saved on worldofwarplanes server, so it’s legit). In case it gets deleted, here’s a backup.

Page 2, block 2:

“Расскажите, для чего КМ-у нужно работать на конкурентных ресурсах?”

Write down, why does the Community Manager need to work with the resources of our competition? (SS: lit. “tell us”)

“Как вы думаете, каких принципов следует придерживаться КМу в ходе работы на конкурентных ресурсах?”

What do you think, what principles should the Community Manager follow, when working with competition resources?

“По каким признакам можно выявить сотрудников КМ-ов конкурирующих проектов на ваших ресурсах?”

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Hello everyone,

one reader recently wrote me an interesting e-mail, asking whether I think amphibious and airborne tanks would work in World of Tanks. Well, at first, I was like “obviously”, since we actually have two airborne models in the game already (the Locust and the Tetrarch). As regular tanks of course – and that’s how the amphibians would have to work too. But… could they work with some sort of airborne/amphibious advantage? Well, let’s have a look.

A bit of history

The concept of an airborne assault vehicle, although explored even before the war, emerged fully during the early- and mid-war years. The goal was of course to produce an armored vehicle, that would be transported by a plane, glider or other flying means (we’ll get to that) in order to reach the combat zone along with glider troops or paratroopers and to provide fire support to otherwise lightly armed paratroop infantry. It was viewed as one means of increasing the paratrooper firepower (others were light AT-guns, light manpack howitzers and oversized AT rifles) and pretty much every major WW2 nation had a research dedicated to creating this kind of armored vehicle.

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Hello everyone,

so, the other day I was checking out Rita’s stream page and one noticed one thing: she has a list of all the contributors (who donated or otherwise contributed to her and the stream) under her stream, nice and visible. And I was like “Why don’t I have such a thing?” See? Good influence.

Last year, a lot of you guys helped me out and I am really grateful for that. In order to recognize you, contributors, I decided to have something like this too this year. And so, I created a page of contributors, because your continuous support is very important to me. You will find it on the menu below the logo too – and I will be doing a public update every week or two.

Thank you all
Silentstalker

Hello everyone,

just a quick heads up. Recently I was watching the QA stream with Rita stream that got saved on twitch and I noticed that a lot of interesting questions did not get answered (Rita has this neat app where the chat gets saved to the stream too). Therefore, I will appear on today’s Rita stream at 8 PM CET to answer more stuff. After that, we won’t be doing this for a while (if at all, depends on Rita, popularity and all the other factors), so if you feel like asking anything or just to listen me rant about tanks and WoT, drop by to say hi :)

There will be following changes to the stream however:

- it will definitely be shorter, 6 hours is meh
- we won’t be playing, we will only be talking, showing pictures if needed and such stuff (that way, more questions get answered and neither me nor Rita will be distracted)
- the sound will be better (no game sounds, higher volume for my mic than last time)
- I will also be reading the chat, but it will be Rita who picks the questions

I hope to see you there at 8 PM CET then :)

Source: wot-news

Hello everyone,

recently, someone leaked new icons from supertest again :) Some we have seen before, some are new though, so let’s have a look at it. The descriptions are obviously mine.

AMR-35

French light tank, total crap. Might find use in WoT though.

E-10

Original Wargaming description (also leaked):

A proposed light tank destroyer weighing about 12 tons. Its most innovative feature was to be the ability to adjust the ground clearance, changing the vehicle’s height from 1760 to 1400 mm. The vehice would be powered by either the Maybach HL 100 or the Argus engine. Development was discontinued in favor of the Hetzer.

Neubaufahrzeug

One of the earliest German tanks. You can read about it a bit more here. Nice premium variant overall.

T88 HMC

The T88 is simply a Hellcat with a 105mm howitzer. Please note that this is not a tank destroyer, but an artillery vehicle.

US Chi-Ri

This is apparently an American captured tank version of the Japanese Chi-Ri. It’s nice to see that the development of captured tank continues.

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2947595.html

Warning, this post is VERY picture heavy

So, a couple of pictures were leaked by supertesters. First, Prokhorovka will be graphically reworked. The map now looks more war-torn, with smoke on the horizon, destroyed guns and such. This map is work in progress and Storm confirmed it will NOT appear in 8.11

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