so here’s an interesting piece of info. As you know, some idiots calling themselves DERP DDOS’ed yesterday (or day before – depending on your timezone) several major games and their servers, bringing them down. Amongst the servers attacked were DOTA2, LOL, Battle.net, EA.com and…. World of Tanks NA apparently.
Why did they do it? I have no idea, something about some game streamer PhandomL0rd and games he played. In other words, they did it because they were douches. In the aftermath of the event, FBI got involved due to significant monetary losses of the action and considering the fact Americans take cybercrime very seriously, I’d say those guys are pretty screwed.
Either way, here is DERP claiming that they brought Wargaming NA down:
And here’s Wargaming, tweeting about the servers in the US working fine:
So, where’s the truth? Did DERP really bring WG NA servers down? Well, IGN seems to think so. For a short while anyway.
this post is a followup to the post from yesterday. Basically, the issue was that a Polish blog was copying FTR and got endorsed for it by WG EU. Here’s a letter I wrote to Zbiry (the owner of the blog) earlier today. Not how I imagined spending the morning of the first day of the year, but then again, FTR existence was never a calm one, was it.
I hope you readers, Zbiry and the rest of the Polish and other communities do understand this. I am trying to be fair about this issue as much as I can and I really hope this is the end of it (there are measure that it can be escalated with, but that’s not necessery I think).
just a quick update on the Tank Inspector utility. A lot of people are apparently writing the Chinese developers for beta keys, when the Tank Inspector is already publicly available. No point in that. Hillin and other guys asked me to post that the Tank Inspector is freely available on this address:
okay, here’s the situation. There is a Polish guy that about a month or two ago sent me an e-mail, whether he can translate FTR to Polish. Although I warned him that Dom1n is already doing that and is doing a great job, I was like – what the hell, why not?
So, this guy created the blog – had a look, not sure about the translation quality (native Polish readers would have to decide themselves), but whatever, I won’t link him here, because I prefer Dom1n, as I said earlier. Two things however made me raise my eyebrows.
At first it was the fact a WGA ambassador (WG EU employee) called the blog a great place, even though it has no original content, pretty much everything is a copy from FTR:
I posted about that earlier, no sweat. But what made me really raise my eyebrows was this:
Basically, WG EU is endorsing (“official WoT fan page, we entered a cooperation with Wargaming and became community contributors” or something like that) a site, that is a 1:1 copy of FTR in Polish (the guy even copies my post titles and either removes my comments, making the content less comprehensible, or replaces “SS” with his nickname). That’s a bit of a mixed message right there, isn’t it? :)
Personally, I am not sure what to do with that. The last thing I want is WG EU parasiting on FTR in any form and this guy has no original content of his own, it’s really just a copy of FTR, so if WG EU promotes a pet blogger like this… feels a bit off, especially, since Dom1n (who has been doing for quite a while) did not get promoted (quite the contrary).
so, here we are, the last day of year 2013. It’s time to look back a bit and to compare the positives and negatives, that happened this year to FTR. I hope you can indulge me for a while – this post will be a bit longer, because there is a lot on my mind I wanted to say.
Positives
- from somewhat problematic beginnings, For the Record grew to be probably (I will leave “probably” here, since we have no official sources for other blogs’ visits) the most visited non-Russian World of Tanks blog in the world. Even in Russian competition, I think we are doing fairly well. That of course couldn’t have happened without you, dear readers. It’s somewhat hard to actually say the exact number of the visitiors ever since its creation, since there was a hosting switch half-way through, but we are fairly stable reader-wise around 50k readers per day, with upper peaks of 100k (yea, I like to brag with the 100k, because I am really proud of that). While in October and November the numbers grew steadily, December was a bit stagnant. The peaks occur almost everytime on patch days (people waiting for patch info), the lows (of around 35k visits) occur on days when I don’t post anything new (not very often) and usually a few days after the test server info is released. None of this would be possible without your continued favour and support.
- FTR is popular all over the world. Based on data from June to Yesterday, FTR gets the most visits from:
1. United States (14,62 percent)
2. Germany (14,33 percent)
3. Poland (8,68 percent)
4. United Kingdom (5,28 percent)
5. Finland (3,83 percent)
6. Canada (3,69 percent)
7. Czech Republic (3,63 percent)
8. Hungary (3,38 percent)
9. Netherlands (2,92 percent)
10. Romania (2,48 percent)
11. France (2,27 percent)
12. Sweden (2,14 percent)
13. Russia (2 percent)
14. Croatia (1,76 percent)
15. Australia (1,75 percent)
Of the more exotic ones around 1 percent, Taiwan is number 19, Japan is 26, 30 are Philippines, 33 is Vietnam and 34 is mainland China, 38 is Brazil, 42 is Thailand (all of these still have tens of thousands of visits), South Korea is 45, 51 is Israel. Altogether, the readerbase of FTR is very diverse, FTR has been accessed from 189 countries, although I am pretty sure members from some of them accessed it only to sell me cheap viagra or to inform me about Saddam’s gold. Vatican is sadly not amongst them – maybe next year.
so I guess you’ve seen the “Facts and Figures” video? Kinda interesting, isn’t it? I mean: I didn’t know there are WoT players in Vatican City. Of course, before we go all “hurr durr the Pope plays WoT”, Vatican has civillian workers too, not just the clergy.
Still, interesting. I wonder how the latency is in Panama though. Anyway, this post is not about that. Check this out, this is from the part they talk about “historical realism” (pictures by _Reaper and Attin):
Oh yea, that’s not the FV215b (183), that’s the fake FV215b with the 120mm gun that never existed even in blueprints. Very historically accurate. It gets better though…
Google translate FTW!
For one, it’s apparently a British Sherman, even though in the game it’s an American vehicle. Anyway, look at the “stats” – so, amount of hitpoints is “strength” now? Why? Oh, that’s right – in Russian, the amount of hitpoints term is “prochnost”, which can be translated also as “strength”, if you don’t know what you are talking about.
Carriage is apparently googletranslated from the word “ekipazh”, which means “crew” in Russian, but also “carriage” (the same way “pipe” means that thing the water flows thru and also the thing you use to smoke crack – two different things, same word). So, the gunner is now “aimer”? Again, in Russian, the term for gunner is “navodchik”, the word is based on the word “navodka”, which means literally “aiming”. Why is it suddenly “the driver” and not just “driver” and why is the last crewmember called “charging”? (the Russian word for loader is “zaryazhayuschij”, which comes from the word “zaryazhat”, which means literally “to charge”, so in Russian, the word can literally be translated as “the one who is charging”.
Now, this might be nitpicking, but it’s also a symptom – of the fact that WG EU can’t do its job right. They probably outsourced the translation to some moron, who googletranslated it without context and sent it back – and noone doublechecked it. We know how often that happens (hint: every week).
The stats are interesting though and the video got one thing right: the game is great. So, Wargaming, all the best in new year and make us happy! Hard job, I know, but I trust SerB :D
I will just leave this here. It pays well to be a friend to the WG EU employees. However, there are things and people you can’t buy…
By the way, I thought that KV-220 Beta is a RU exclusive. Odd.
Edit: to clear things up, this is not from my account, I didn’t get anything, only people loyal to WG EU (eg. community contributors) recieve free stuff. This info was just passed to me by one of them. Personally, I think some of them deserve it, they’ve been doing an awesome job.
