Hello everyone,

a strange feature seems to appear randomly in 9.6 test server random battles: the fog of war, the way we know it from clanwars (for those who do not know: FOW is a feature where you don’t see the enemy team until you discover them – by spotting).

Earlier, it was considered a bug, but Storm confirmed that it’s intentional. Likely a test of what would happen, if such a feature was implemented in random battles and to compare it with the results of other battles without FOW under the same conditions of the test server.

The implications of random battles FOW would be tremendous. On the plus side, it would screw with XVM noobmeter and winrate “predictions” (often very inaccurate) would no longer work (so no more “OMG 30 chance to win kkthxbie #drownftw”). On the other hand, it would – in my opinion – lead to MASSIVE camping – random pubbies would not dare to advance without knowing who to expect. Some individual missions would become harder.

But fortunately, it seems to be just a test. And what about you? Would you like to have fog of war in randoms?

Author: sp15 (US server)

The list of previous parts is at the bottom of the article.

In 1964, a project called Ikv ny was started. The goal of this project was to acquire a new cheap vehicle, which could offer good mobility and still be able to both support infantry like older Ikv’s, but also would be able to fight tanks. Essentially, the idea had come about as there simply weren’t enough modern tanks in the Swedish army and there was a need to re-equip a large part of the army, which was still using modified WW2 era vehicles.

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Author: Tyraforce

As you all probably noticed, you are getting a female tanker for every completed 15-mission set of the “personal” missions. When I played my first PC game called Golden Axe, I learned that the female game characters were pretty much useless. The original Prince of Persia didn’t really help as the female protagonist camped the base while you were getting cut to pieces by guillotines, spikes and other nasty stuff. Well, WG decided to change that and the tanker gals are actually MUCH better than the regular crew.

The reason why the girls are better is not just the fact that they come with 2 free skills and that they look pretty, but rather the fact that the Sisterhood of Steel (Fallout faction wearing sexy power armor) does not count towards the XP requirements for the following skills. There are many XP tables out there but IMHO the only important one is the following one, which should help you with the decision whether and which current crews to replace.

In short, if you want to improve any crew by 1 whole skill, the girls will get there faster no matter how experienced the male crew is. However, I would not suggest replacing a 4-skill crew at all, while a 3-skill crew should only be replaced if you believe you can get the girls to 5 skills. Check your average XP at your tier 10 tanks to see how many battles you’ll need. Replacing below-3-skill crew is a no-brainer.

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Warning, this post contains a number of large pictures.

Hello everyone,

patch 9.6 is bringing a couple of HD vehicles into the game, let’s have a look at how their visual and armor models are changing. In case you can’t tell, the pictures with shiny lines on the garage floor are from the new version :)

Lowe – small upper frontal plate weakspot was removed, the mantlet and frontal turret were somewhat reshaped but overall, not that much changed actually, apart from some adjustment of the general shape of the vehicle. If anything, it looks like a small buff.

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Hello everyone,

from long hiatus returns the Insider to tell us, what’s going on inside Wargaming by having a look at the group developer discussions and chain letters, that travel amongst the Wargaming employees. As always, take everything with a grain of salt, as it is the Insider’s interpretation rather than hard data.

Insider talks about Havok:

“I had known since December Havok wouldn’t come to the game yet, and perhaps this needs a further explanation:

The main reason Havok cant be in game is because of synch problems from server-client interface, it takes a very stable internet connection currently and less than half the playerbase has such (red-dotting here and there), so the slightest desynch on such causes the debris go haywire or fall to visually wrong places (server decides that debris was dropped at “x0,y0,z0″, but client displays “x3,y4,z5″). Also, as of the current version test, only high end computers can correctly run the game as desired (can’t have Soviet abaccus unable to play the “people’s game”!)

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Hello everyone,

according to the statement of the Czech community staff, three premium tanks will appear (for testing) in the second round of 9.6 CT – AMX CDC, AMX-13/57 and STA-2.

Well, that’s good news, can’t wait to test the CDC :)

Hello everyone,

it’s that time again, the patch test of 9.6 is here. Despite it being somewhat poor on new content, it nevertheless brought some significant changes. Let’s have a look at them. The full patchnotes can be found here.

The installation of the patch was – as usual, lately – uneventful and smooth, everything runs fine (there seems to be a mild FPS increase, but that will probably vary from computer to computer), so let’s skip right to the thing most people will be interested in. Accuracy nerf.

I won’t lie to you. It’s noticeable. Well, at least I noticed, it’s hard to say. At this moment, we have no definitive numbers and formulas, so we can only estimate. For initiatesting, I took two vehicles – one I know well, Jagdtiger 88, the other is the IS-3 tier 8 tank with BL-9. I played a few battles as well and it’s noticeable. It’s practically impossible to say however, what effect will that really have on armor, as it’s test server and everyone’s firing gold.

Subjectively speaking, the Jagtiger 88 feels MUCH less accurate, the shells seem to be flying all over the place compared to the live server. The IS-3 I cannot judge, so I just made a short footage. But one thing is clear: instead of the alleged increase of the role of armor in the game, it will only lead to two things:

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Hello everyone,

didn’t notice it until now, but today, the 9.5.3 micropatch (hotfix) was applied to EU server (as well as RU). Contents:

This micro patch will fix some of the issues spotted on the personal missions.

Well, at least they fixed some of the stuff.

Hello everyone,

the 9.6 Test is now downloadable and active. You can download it using this installer:

http://dl.wargaming.net/wot/ct/files/WoT_internet_install_ct.exe

The size is the usual – 8GB. Enjoy

Hello everyone,

as you can see in the comments under the previous FTR post, people are not very happy about the 600 gold crew role retrain price. Evilly (WoT producer) explains:

“I specifically asked about the retrain price. The 600 gold includes 200 for role retrain, 200 for perk reset and 200 for tank retrain. Because why would I leave the old perks on the new role, except for the universal ones. Plus, changing the role implies putting it on a new tank. The logic is sound, but the question of price reduction will be discussed nevertheless.”