Hello everyone,

last year, we had a look and one of the biggest problems in World of Tanks, botting. Now, we are going to have a look at another – and that is cheating.

They say that you cannot cheat in World of Tanks and it is true – to a certain extent. You can’t use the most notorious cheats such as wallhack or cheats that allow you go or fire faster, simply because these things are calculated server-side. It’s the only way to go really and is one of the biggest advantages of World of Tanks.

On the other hand, yes, there ARE cheats in this game and they DO give you an advantage, sometimes a pretty massive one. Practically all are in the form of illegal modifications (AKA “mods”) and are forbidden (how “strictly” that is, well, that we will talk about further below”). The existence of these mods is a public secret and, well, sort of an elephant in the room really, but in any case it’s something generally avoided (discussion about cheats in World of Tanks is banned on the official forums, unlike bots). Amongst the most notorious cheat are the following:

- defoliants (leaf removers, that allow much easier aiming through bushes and forests)
- lasers (that show where every enemy player’s gun is aiming in the game in the form of a “laser”)
- 3D hitboxes (reworked models, that show you where exactly internal modules of the vehicles are, these are rare though, as in the new models, the location of internal modules is no longer a part of the client data and has to be tested manually, which is time consuming and imprecise)
- breaking object indicators (these mods will show on your map, where an environmental object was broken, for example if you run over a wall and break through it, the other player gets a warning like “someone breaking a wall detected here, with an indicator of your position on minimap)
- automatic fire extinguisher (a mod, that will activate credit fire extinguishers literally a split second after you catch on fire, much faster than manually pressing the extinguisher)
- vision mods, that allow you to “cheat” bushes and look through them or behind a corner
- hacked artillery tracers, that allow you to exactly see the position of enemy tank based on the shell path

Let’s have a look at an example. The following video (provided kindly by Plazmakeks, thank you) is of a player using an illegal modifications from a cheat pack, named Stealthz Hack Pack.

The first thing you notice probably (apart from the messy UI) is the black sky. To be quite honest, I have absolutely no idea what kind of advantage does THAT give you apart from looking creepy. Performance increase by removing sky texture? Easier spotting of enemy tanks against black background? In any case, this hack pack has a lot of the forbidden mods included in it – lasers, auto extinguishers, enemy reload timer, you name it. There is also a mod that displays the silhouettes ALL the time (not only upon mouseover), I don’t find that very useful, but it’s forbidden as well (IIRC).

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

in Russia, you can run into World of Tanks bonus codes in weirdest of places. Like the Maxim magazine.

Well, I guess it makes sense in the end, given the fact that WG claims most of WoT players are men around 30 or something. I was just always wondering, who actually reads and buys these things? The only person I knew to buy them actively was my ex girlfriend and they used to appear as – you know, toilet reading (not that it had any other use really, the pages are waxed and very hard). For a while it just seemed like they spawn there or something, never saw it brought home, it just appeared there.

Hello everyone,

Russian videomaker Amway921 recieved an exclusive footage of the new artillery strike and air strike Stronghold consumables. Check it out.

These consumables will be “produced” in special Stronghold buildings (unclear which one) for the SH resources. The level of the building will correspond to the strength of the strike (the higher the level, the stronger the strike). In the video, starting from cca 1:10, you can see the commander of the team calling in the air strike – he can set the area and he can set also the angle, under which the planes will approach. The plane drops basically giant HEAT shells.

Artillery strike uses the same circle aim as regular artillery, it fires big HE shells – the higher the level of the consumable, the more destructive the strike.

Source: various

Hello everyone,

this is the upcoming tier 7 British premium heavy tank, FV201/A45.

Description:

Developed by 1944 by the English Electric company as a part of the new program to create a new infantry support tank to replace the A43 Black Prince. The tank was never accepted in service due to the change in the concept of tank forces, but it served as a basis in the creation of post-war heavy tanks.

Hitpoints: 1500
Engine: 800 hp
Weight: 55,883 tons
Power-to-weight: 14,32 hp/t
Maximum speed: 31/16 km/h
Hull traverse: 28 deg/s
Terrain resistance: 1,151/1,342/2,014
Turret traverse: 37,5 deg/s
Viewrange: 380
Radio range: 594,4

Hull armor: 76,2/50,8/?
Turret armor: 152,4/88,9/?

Elite gun: 17pdr
Damage: 150
Penetration: 171
ROF: 14,551
DPM: 2182,7
Reload: 4,123
Accuracy: 0,374
Aimtime: 2,21s
Depression: -8

Armor:

Hello everyone,

this is an intresting issue that I ran into while browsing the old German (and Czechoslovak documents). Not something big, but interesting. You might remember that some time ago, Wargaming changed the names of some vehicles by removing the “dash” – for example, the E-75 turned into E 75, E-100 turned into E 100. The reason for that – well, the alleged reason – was the historicity (as some of the primary sources, such as original documents from WW2, refer to the vehicles without a dash).

This was the case of the T-15 light tank as well. At some point, someone (I think it was Yuri Pasholok, but I am not sure) claimed that the T-15 designation was actually T 15, because it came up on some primary documents. Let’s have a look at it, because it’s usually more complicated than that.

First, there’s the original T-15 (I’m going to use the dash) blueprint from 1940. In it, the vehicle is designated as T15. No dash, no space.

So, that’s how the vehicle was designated then by the Germans? No, not really. At least, not always anyway. Here’s a German report about the same vehicle – this time, with dash.

And here is a post-war evaluation report. A space, no dash.

The moral of the story is… there is usually no “one” correct way to write a name, even if you were to rely on primary sources along (for example books generally mention the T-15 with dash). Various primary sources do it in various ways, here you have just an example of three of those and all are “correct”.

Source: http://tech.onliner.by/2015/01/13/wargaming-10

Thanks to Maiorboltach for this one.

On 13.1.2015, Wargaming was delisted (removed from trades) from the Cyprus Stock Exchange for failing to comply to the Exchange requirements, which include regular publication of financial results, something Wargaming did not do. Trading with WG shares was suspensded as early as spring 2014, with the final decision to delist the shares being taken in December 2014.

Global marketing vice-president of Wargaming, Nikolai Nebyshinec stated that Wargaming has no intention of re-entering the stock exchange for now: “Today, the company continues to grow and the scale and instruments of the Cyprus stock exchange are no longer sufficient to objectively evaluate the economic indicators of the company Wargaming .”

Now, I don’t usually link Jingles (considering the same or more people watch his videos than read FTR, it’s hardly needed), but you really shouldn’t miss this one. Jingles previews the upcoming competitor of World of Tanks, Armored Warfare.

Inside (watch for details):

- modern tanks (1950′s and onwards)
- modern tech (ERA, that protects against guided missiles)

Different vehicle classes:

- MBT’s (such as T-90A)
- TD’s (light wheeled stuff like the Stryker)
- LT’s (very fast, maneuverable but decently armed things like Stingray II, apparently it’s not a scout class but an equivalent of MT’s)
- light classes can deploy smokescreens. Smokescreens block line of sight and spotting, but light classes can actually spot tanks through smoke and “paint” them for other tank classes
- ARV’s are the scouts, they can designate a target, designated enemy tanks take increased damage
- SPG’s are the artillery

- tank progress not based on nationalities. Jingles is wrong with the EU tree… he could have asked me for example tbh, but meh, whatever.
- strong PvE content with coop content and individual objectives
- RPG elements in the crew, commander system

Also, the Jingles mentioned limited beta, but the term is “technical alpha” and it’s for cca 500 people. And yes, I am one of the people in it too. Should be interesting.

Source: FTA VK community

Hello everyone,

yesterday, the testing of stronghold consumables started on the supertest. The first to be tested were the air strike and artillery strike consumables. The artillery strike model on supertest is simply insane, it totally fucks up one square of the map so much that any HT and MT caught there is either destroyed or totally crippled. This is “compensated” by a 4-5 second warning before the artillery strike.

Air strike is even funnier, basically it’s HEAT shells falling straight from above. You get notified when the shells get dropped.

Generally, according to supertesters, these consumables will make life much harder for the heavies and superheavies, shifting the balance of power in favour of medium tanks, that can get away from the blast zone on time.

Source: wot-news.com

Hello everyone,

here are preliminary HD model armor changes from 0.9.5 to 0.9.6 – will make my own when the time comes, but at least like this for now.

T95 – they made the lower front plate smaller.

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

Wotleaks published a supertest leak (unconfirmed for now) that patch 0.9.6 might bring the feature of retraining the crews to another role (eg. from radioman to driver).

Edit: confirmed by another source to be present. It’s possible that WG might not choose to implement it, but it’s there.