Source: http://www.about-larnaca.info/2013/12/wargaming-buys-rotos-president-building.html

Wargaming, an online game expert and among the 3 major shareholders of Hellenic Bank in Cyprus agreed to buy “President” building of Rotos Developers for €20 millions. The “President” building located in the Demosthenis Severi Avenue, Nicosia is of 75 meters height and will be covered by a large disk photo-voltaic panels.

Supertall building is unique in design and technology. The high quality metal used for the construction of its skeleton, its energy efficient structure, automation machines for energy reduction and its photo-voltaic system make “President” the first energy efficient building of A class in Cyprus.

Rotos Developers, is proud for having such an innovative and unique building in its records and thanks all colleagues who contributed to the creation and implementation of the project, the company says in a statement.

The building is expected to be ready by May 2014.

Source: http://wot-news.com/main/postmsg/47984/20045/3/Pervoprokhodec-iz-JAponii

Hello everyone,

this is a translation of the article from wot-news about Tomio Hara. Enjoy!

From the moment of its beginning by the end of the 1920′s, tank development in the land of the rising sun met with considerable difficulties. Apart from the objective reasons, amongst which were the lack of resources and qualified engineering staff, one of the main reasons was the wary and skeptical attitude towards the armored vehicles in the Japanese army. Military commanders of Japan at that point regarded the tanks only as the means to support infantry and not as a separate army branch.

One of the most prominent personalities of Japanese tank development was the young military engineer-designer Tomio Hara, to whom the armor of the land of the rising sun largely owes the independence (originality) of its design and engineering tradition. He basically disagreed with the common military point of view and did put together a group of four ambitious designers, who then started to work on the first project of native Japanese tank. Since they had no engineering-design basis to work on, the development was started from scratch, independently creating both the essential parts and the details of the design.

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Hello everyone,

last week, a few guys asked me, when will I write the next post about the Turán. The truth is, I was willingly postponing it, because the sources I have contradict each other and it’s a bit annoying to glean the truth. Last night, after going through the books yet again, I decided to re-focus the “historical articles” somewhere else.

As you probably know, I am Czech and as a part of the European tech tree preparation, I will be feeding data about Czechoslovak tanks to Wargaming. Starting now, I will start working on more detailed Czechoslovak project breakdown, as there is now a secure and reliable channel (thanks to very forthcoming stance of some WG people from Minsk, which I really appreciate), how to actually feed data to Wargaming, who in turn can use it to create the EU tree. This approach has two advantages:

- first, ideas and proposals (in this field anyway) of EU/US servers will be heard
- second, Wargaming already knows this approach works from the Japanese tree

At the same time, Italian vehicles are being “researched” through the same channel. However, what is lacking is someone with very good (!!!) knowledge of Hungarian and Polish vehicles (preferably a Hungarian or Polish person, as the best sources/archive data are found only in the native languages, just like it is in the Czechoslovak tech tree). If you know of such a person or think of yourself as such a person, please don’t be shy and contact me at fortherecordwot@gmail.com

Together, we can help build the EU tree. The results of such research will be published as series of detailed articles in the future, so even you, who just read FTR, have an idea where the research is going. Please note that I do not claim to be essential for WG effort or anything: but every little bit helps, every little bit makes the tree come a bit faster.

Also, please note that the same research is going on for British vehicles, with some possibly interesting results. We’ll see.

Picture by igalantny (Russian LJ community)

Upper: War Thunder, lower: World of Tanks

Your turn, Wargaming.

The picture above comes from the leaked War Thunder models, picture below obviously comes from World of Tanks. Personally, I am somewhat rooting for Wargaming – let’s see, how the “HD” models will look like: visually, War Thunder is obviously some tough competition.

Of course, game is not made by its graphics and from what I have noticed from War Thunder (economy and gameplay), I actually prefer World of Tanks. But that all remains to be seen. However, one thing that I don’t like is that War Thunder fans seem to be obsessed by one idea: “We are not World of Tanks”. I went over their tank forums and there are all the idiotic myths that we managed to root out (especially on US forums). The point of this is not to bash War Thunder (not before I see the tanks in action anyway), but to state that the grass is not always greener on the other side…

Self Propelled 17pdr, Valentine, Mk I, Archer
Author: Captain_Nemo

Silentstalker: Hello everyone, we have another guest article from Captain_Nemo here. Enjoy!

QA: Stream with the Chieftain Posted on December 9, 2013

- Archer and Achilles British tank destroyers will come.

The Archer is an unusual tank destroyer. It is unique not just in its layout of the gun on the chassis but in the gun itself. It is the British 17pdr. Now because of the gun alone the tank destroyer will never be Tier 4 material. It simply has too much penetration with the gun but more on that in a minute. Let us look at the background and history of the Archer.

The Archer was the second in a series of self-propelled guns produced on the Valentine chassis. The first design produced was the Ordnance QF 25-pdr on Carrier Valentine 25-pdr Mk 1, better known as the “Bishop”. The second design was the Self Propelled 17pdr, Valentine, Mk I “Archer”. The Archer is not quite the expedient hack job that the Bishop is nor is it nearly as bad as the hack job of adding a 6-pdr gun and gunshield to the top of the Valentine in place of a turret. The Archer was reasonably well thought out.

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Hello everyone,

a few invite codes for those who neeed them. The first is from Lomli (1000g + 3 days prem):

5DN7P6VA3KUZ

three from Dewastacjusz:

PKR29F-94X3Y3
PKR29P-26E3C7
PKR29P-97D5N6

two from Windykator:

PH7TYR-K4AP8A
PKR29X-36W8H8

and four from Storm_olol (from Nvidia bundles)

6BN7UZ7MV8TF7M
6BN7DH8UM6RV3M
6BN7FT7CP7EZ7E
6BN7FN9TF8HY3B

As usual, you can get more from Alienware. Please note that many invite codes (perhaps even all) expire on 31.12.2013, so there is no point in hoarding them.

Hello everyone,

you know that I sometimes criticize WG discount/shop policies and that I didn’t like the fact that they put planes on World of Tanks portal. Well, as you might have guessed, I just LOVE what Wargaming did today:

First, let me start my rant constructive criticism by saying that these discounts are NOT a charity. Discounts (as any discounts really) are a business strategy to sell more product, nothing more, nothing less. Thus, the argument “we didn’t have to give you any discounts, you ungrateful git” are irrelevant, the discounts aren’t there to make me happy, but to make Wargaming money.

With that being said, I consider the shit above pretty nasty. Why? Well, not because WG gives us discounts or because credits sold for real life money are a waste of money, but for following reason:

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

Swizsedtoast on US forums posted this very nice overview (thanks to Daigensui for linking it) – I hope it’s useful for you :)

On the first day of Christmas, Wargaming gave to me… first massive fail :)

Someone recently asked me to make a summary of 2013 Wargaming fails and I replied with “Nah, but don’t worry, I am sure they will have some new ones”. And sure enough…

But this time, for once, this fail is good for players. Basically, when you log on and play one battle, the Japanese part of the IS-6 mission (you, know, the one requiring 100k XP) autocompletes, giving everyone free 3 days of premium. The easiest 100k XP I ever grinded, the IS-6 just became quite cheaper :) Please note that it is possible the status of this mission will reset, but hell, it’s free 3 days of premiums everyone. Thanks, Wargaming :)

PS: Thanks everyone who sent me a link to this, right now I recieved 137 messages (not including the FB ones). No, seriously, you are awesome :)

Important: This bug is fixed, so you won’t get the 3 days anymore. The mission also got resetted. Those, who got the 3 days won’t lose them.

Hello everyone,

as some of you remember, I recently criticized Wargaming Europe for just dumping a load of cash on a massive charity. Some of you agreed, some of you disagreed with me, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is the fact that Wargaming (not EU, but NA) can do it right (well, right in my eyes anyway).

Chieftain recently posted on his Facebook page about a little kid named Kurt. With his own words:

So, this is Kurt: A lad who has had an unfortunate coming of age far too young, dealing with Leukemia when most of us, when we were ten, were more wondering about things far more frivolous. Anyway, it turns out he was playing World of Tanks in the hospital, so to thank him for trying to recruit the hospital staff into players, we invited him up to the office, and then down to the local tank museum. He seems to have enjoyed himself.

You can find more pictures of the event as long on Kurt’s FB page.

This is something I can actually appreciate – taking an actual person, who needs and deserves help and helping. I think this is the right way and I really appreciate what WG NA has done. I hope WG NA will continue doing this and perhaps WG EU can learn here a thing or two about really bringing a smile to a child’s face.