Insider Talks: South America Cluster, Havok and more…

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Hello everyone,

a bunch of info from the Insider. As usual, it comes from communication with various developers, so take it with a grain of salt. Still… interesting.

- developers are considering creating a South American cluster either in Argentina, Mexico or Brazil (Mexico is unlikely, as they have good ping to NA servers), but in order to do that, they want to see further South American player increase. The amount of SA players has been increasing steadily for the last two 3-month cycles.
- as confirmed earlier, ISU-130 will be given out to (Russian) staff as a gift tank, but there is also a chance of it appearing on other servers if there is enough interest
- some developers started studying track physics, specifically the element of detracking a tank in order to improve its visual effect using Havok
- SerB on War Thunder videos: “They make good videos, but we make better games.”
- Havok will not look like the IS-4 preview video, where everything on the tank shaked and rocked, when it is released – that’s the final goal, but the equipment falling off from the tank and something called “volumetric damage” (whatever that is) will be released gradually later, when the developers consider it optimized enough

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Korean Interview With Developers

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Source: http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=119971&site=wot

Hello everyone,

two Wargaming developers (whose names were unfortunately written in Korean and thus we are not sure how one of them is called), Aleksander Tarasevich (game designer, UI) and Aleksander Derkash (?, CW, Stronghold producer) recently gave an interview for the Korean Inven portal.

US player WpCrate was kind enough not only to link it, but also to provide proper translation. Thank you!

There is a lot of enthusiasm for the new light tanks in the 9.3 update. Even in WGL there is a decreased appearance of the previously common AMX 13 90. How does WG view the 9.3 update.
Tarasevich: We feel proud that there is a lot of good feedback for the 9.3 update. Not only the new light tank trees but also the mercenary feature for Strongholds and the new penalty systems for unmannered conduct were well-received. We are striving to make the upcoming path 9.4 to be met with the same enthusiasm.

We are told that in 9.4 and future patches features such as individual missions or reworked team battle are planned, can you tell us more details on this subject?
T: In 9.4  there will be Sieges, a new mode for Stronghold as well as individual mission, the first of its kind. We are considering via these missions implementing female tankers. By 9.4 we are planning to implement the map Stalingrad, which like Karkov was designed based on real life images.

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Stalingrad Map Preview

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Hello everyone,

this is not a leak, this material comes from Wargaming and was sent to all the contributors. Behold, a preview of the Stalingrad map. It’s the first map featuring Havok and currently, it’s estimated it might appear in 9.5, but some leaks suggest it might be moved to 9.6

 

 

Right click and press “view image” for larger version. Oh yea and it’s a large post (not as big as the tank one though).

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16.10.2014

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Nothing really new. Just that one WoWs developer confirmed that WoWs indeed has multicore support (apparently, this is no longer covered by NDA, as it was published two weeks ago at Igromir).

Oh yea and Storm stated that the antibot system does not punish the botters by removing credits and XP (the way the anti-AFK system does), it simply bans them.

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Praga Export Tanks – Part IV: LT Vz.40 Performance

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Continued from part 3.

p1

The first time the LT Vz.40 light tanks were shown to public was on 1.6.1941 as a part of the military festival in Turčianský Sv.Martin as a part of a military parade. Other vehicles in the parade, showing off Slovak military equipment, consisted of LT Vz.34 (already declared obsolete at that point), LT Vz.35, Vz.38 and finally the LT Vz.40 tanks, equipped only with machineguns. From mid-june, the Slovak LT Vz.40′s were quickly refitted by mounting in the new frontal turret plates with A7 guns. However, not all were refitted in time for Operation Barbarossa and so, some of the tanks equipped with ad-hoc frontal plates and machineguns only had to participate in the operation the way they were “put together” (the gun hole was covered by a plate and the vehicle was armed with ZB-53 machineguns only:

v3037_199

It is worth noting that the machinegun LT Vz.40′s were NEVER intended as “infantry tanks”, equipped with machineguns only – all the tanks carrying only machineguns were these temporary refits. These “machinegun” tanks fought during the early months as well and the refit of all 20 vehicles was completed (with the help of Czech workers from ČKD/BMM) by the end of October 1941. At the same time, the LT Vz.40 (now referred to in German documents also as LT-40) tanks also recieved new German radios (Telefunken). In November 1941, the vehicles were fitted with gun optics and periscopes and in December, assembly trials took place. In the end, 20 tanks were refitted like this – one returned from the front heavily damaged and was not able to complete the trials.

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ISU-130 For Limited Audience Only

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ISU-130_1

Hello everyone,

bothered by the appearance of weird-ass ISU-130? Think it’s crap? Well, no need to worry. According to Evilly (RU producer), this vehicle will not be available to public, it will be given as a gift to moderators and WG volunteers. Probably just Russian ones that is, but you never know.

Not sure if a gift… or a punishment.

WG Video On Running Gear

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Hello everyone,

here’s another Wargaming video, explaining how the tanks work, this time about the vehicle running gear. It’s… accurate enough I suppose, but to compress the running gear principles and evolution is pretty much impossible. Considering that, it’s kinda okay.

 

Swedish Tank Testing Video (Terrain Passability)

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Author of subtitles, poster of video: Renhanxue

Hello everyone,

Renhaxue (well-known for his Swedish tank research) posted this amazing Swedish video, showing the trials and terrain passability of numerous vehicles, including the mighty Panther (and its famous terrain passability) and the Sherman. There are English subtitles, turn them on, unless you speak Swedish of course :)

 

Suffer, Botter, Cheater and Rigger, Your Suffering Makes Us Happy!

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Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/1/fair_play_wot/

Hello everyone,

Russian Wargaming, having learned from its mistakes and started publishing the names of offenders and ban statistics. In the post above, we can read that in the first half of October alone:

- 8191 players were punished based on the reports from the ingame complaint system
- 2592 players were banned for games rigging (influencing the battle result by having an agreement with the opposing team) random and company games
- 1868 botters were banned in last two weeks only

WG even made this beautiful picture :)

bot_(1)

Well, that’s all nice, but I have two things I would like to add to this.

First – remember how they told us that there are no bots or that the issue is marginal? Well, 2k banned players in two weeks alone doesn’t seem marginal to me – and that’s just the RU server. EU server decided not to publish any names and such (voluntary decision as Ectar confirmed, not one forced by law), so heaven knows how many botters they ban (if any).

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