I suppose everyone knows about the exploit where when you put a less-than-50 percent driver into your racing Chaffee (for example by using a driver re-trained to American artillery), you will not accelerate any slower (or only by a little), but the vehicle will not drift at all, right? If anyone used this exploit during the tournament, they had a HUGE advantage. Oh well, Wargaming as usual.

In any case, here’s the translation today.

- there will apparently be a poll by Storm (not binding) to find out which maps the players want to remove
- Evilly confirms that the individual missions are currently in test mode
- apparently, the ISP’s of Ukraine were causing serious lags and crashes for WoT players lately
- Storm states that 7/42 battles (TB) are played more than WG expected
- there will be no HD model reworks in 9.4
- there is unfortunately “a lot of various problems” with HD model rework (SS: what I could piece together from various sources is that basically, WG outsourced the entire model re-work, which caused quite a lot of problems, the outsourcing companies (from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine) could not provide sufficient quality of the models and there were issues with communication. WG in tried several and at this point, WG’s own artists are creating the HD model themselves)

Hello everyone,

Storm posted another of his “microdigests”. It’s really small – in it, he publishes two things:

- today, he was appointed the chief strategist (lit. “visionary”) for game balance and game mechanics
- developers are working on “smoothing” the maps, getting rid of “microrelief”, by which he means “fixing the existing issues” with small hills or something (it’s not very clear, what I understood under that is making the small hill edges less “jagged”). It will begin in 9.5 and will be done with the speed of 2-3 maps per patch. Storm however states that large map features will remain, the “microrelief” adjustment concerns small height increases and decreases. The goal is to allow tanks with bad depression to fight without suddenly aiming their gun above the enemy tank’s turret and to make fast tanks not lose their speed too much on such spots. It does however NOT concern like one meter hills/obstacles, that allow tanks to use depression.

From the discussion:

- arty will not be removed from the game.
- one player’s reaction on that statement above: “FUUUUUU”, Marschig (another developer): “Oh yes and someone has to make sure the artyphobes suffer :)”
- very small surface irregularities will be compensated by new motion physics
- the 70 Mb micropatch broke XVM because of the new tank introduction
- new terrain render was not yet introduced
- “Fury” Sherman does not have limited MM
- Storm’s occupation for near future? “I will think about balancing problems”
- currently, developers are solving the following issues (those come first): camo + spotting, accuracy spread

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