Thanks to Looser78V for posting this, I kinda missed it. At first I thought “that has to be the ugliest animation I’ve ever seen”, but it’s kinda funny. Guess who the bald guy is…
27.4.2014
Interested in catching bots? Download the Bot Hunter mod (version for 9.0).
- the vision and spotting points on a turret are identical (SS: as in, the points that get checked for spotting and the points, that spot on turrets are located on identical places)
Otherwise nothing much today… ah well, it’s Sunday anyway.
How Newbie-friendly is the WoT Community?
Source: http://kanobu.ru/articles/dzhetlmenyi-na-mide-kanobu-proveryaet-vezhlivost-v-setevyih-igrah-368166/
Thanks to Cannoneer for sending this link to me.
Hello everyone,
Russian portal Kanobu.ru made an interesting survey. The post author, Sergei Kolokolnikov, compared, how friendly is the community of various online games towards newbies (not to mix that term up with noobs!) – and he also included World of Tanks in the survey. This survey is “tainted” a bit by the fact that as far as I know, some games have exclusive Russian servers (WoT), some games are almost exclusively Russian overall (Warface) and some games have mixed audience. Either way, here’s how the author considers the communities:
DOTA 2 – some swearing, as you progress, there are less and less “gentlemen”.
Friendliness score: 6/10
Pictures from Piešťany Museum
Hello everyone,
Slovak player Elnorka was kind enough to share some pictures from his trip to Piešťany military museum in Slovakia, which focuses on vehicles, used by the Czechoslovak army. I think some are pretty interesting.
Also, thank you all for sending me many, many photos – from Munster, Overloon, Latrun, Saumur and others. I will post them all eventually.
T-72 model – a military school item for teaching the soldiers about tank construction
26.4.2014
A tip came from one player, who didn’t write his nickname unfortunately. Are you using Xfire client? Apparently, since 9.0, it started causing FPS drops for the game, which it didn’t before. You might want to consider disabling it when you play. Another Russian player reports significant FPS increase with “flash interface disable” – no idea what that is.
- the bug where the game tells you “not enough memory” – Storm: “Reduce the texture quality”
- icons on minimap move with delay? Storm: “Earlier it was the same, only with sharp twitches”
- Steppes have higher FPS than other maps – Storm states: “There’s nothing there, the map is bare – one landscape and only a few objects. Of course it will work faster than other maps.”
- it’s possible there will be one more hotfix micropatch
World of Tanks Raptr QA
Source: Raptr site
Hello everyone,
I was wondering whether to include this post or not… but what the hell. Raptr is some sort of gaming community I never heard about before, but several players wrote me a mail, that it is organizing a large QA session with “developers”. That kinda raised my suspicions and surely enough, they were confirmed. Developers? Nope, more like community people. Basically, players ask questions in comments (in the abovelinked thread) and following people answer:
Joshua Morris (some “producer” I never heard of before)
Chris Jung (“specialist”, god knows what that means)
Jamie King (some random guy I never heard before either, aka “PR” specialist)
joined with couple other “my-mum-says-I’m-specialists”
As I said, I have no idea who these people are, my best guess it’s some staff from the American branch of Wargaming. Anyway, went through the answers, here’s what was in there. The answers bring rarely anything new of course, but… well, yea, check for yourself
- regarding the 9.0 fucked up patch: “We just released our first micro patch that solves some of the issues but we still know of several issues causing players problems. We are testing more solutions and will release another patch as soon as it is ready. 9.0 was a major change to many systems. In order to support the major changes coming this year we had to overhaul many systems. This has obviously caused some problems for some users and we are working as quickly as possible to solve these issues.”
- true multicore support, later this year
- bigger maps? “It has been a long time desire to increase the maps sizes and support larger battles. Technically, doubling the maps sizes and increasing teams would quadruple the server processing requirements. We will continue to pursue this goal, however it is not slated for the 2014 timeframe.”
- modern tanks? “Our titles focus on vehicles of 1930–1950 with no plans to introduce modern warfare.” (SS: oh, wasn’t STB-1 from late 60′s? Leopard? Ooooops)
- no plans to have ships, warplanes and tanks on one battlefield in one game
- no plans to bring WoT to Steam due to this being “cost-prohibitive”
….and that’s all (out of cca 1300 questions, mind you – stronk answerink!) Personally, I think that the Raptr interface is the worst and clunkiest interface I have seen lately. If there were more “answers” anywhere, I missed them. Apparently, the session was prolonged until Monday or something, so I will revisit that page and check if there is anything new.
Poppy Field Hangar for 9.0
Hello everyone,
Crash74 from the ASIA (SEA) forums rebuilt the Poppy Field Hangar for patch 9.0. In case you are wondering – it’s this one:
Clone Wars
Hello everyone,
I am sure you can imagine that Wargaming success with World of Tanks drew a lot of “flies to the cowpie”, so to say. Here and there, games “inspired by” World of Tanks (or even outright clones) appeared. The biggest of them is… what, War Thunder? Nope. It’s Ground War: Tanks. If you are now starting to think “oh, I gotta check it out”, don’t bother. It’s a browser-based game and it looks ugly as all hell. It was created by Mail.Ru, one of the premiere Russian software companies with huge revenue. Anyway, the point of this article is something else – check this out, this is a “poster” of their recent promotion:
Two interesting things there. First is the E-90, which is an ancient fake, coming from one alternate history design. I wish people stopped spreading this shit – it pops every now and then. There was never a “Henschel” (Tiger II-looking) turret for the E-100 hull, it’s a fake. But whatever, I guess these Russians don’t bother with historicity.
They don’t bother apparently with copyright either – VK7201. Yep, that’s a Wargaming invention. Yesterday, Yuri Pasholok posted an amused thread on LJ community, pointing that out. It’s not the first time Mail.Ru used WG stuff either, last time, it was the Jagdpanzer E-100 model (that was apparently settled out of court by Mail.Ru removing the model). Looks like another job for SerB’s black helicopters lawyers then…
Chieftain’s “Fly Around” MVTF Video
Hello everyone,
I am pretty sure you all know (or know of) The_Chieftain, US server military expert. He’s the great guy doing the “Hatch” videos. Either way, according to what he wrote, WG US organizes trips for their employess and this time, they visited the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation (“Littlefield collection”) in California. What is interesting is that Chieftain had an RC helicopter, taking shots of the tanks from above and commenting. You might have noticed that this is “Part 2″ – Part 1 doesn’t have commentary, simply an annoying engine buzzing sound, hence it’s pointless to post it.
25.4.2014
Having trouble with graphic settings? Check out Wargaming English guide to graphics (it’s a damn shame this post is so hidden most people would never find it).
For everyone, who missed the whole hotfix mumbo jumbo, I am once again repeating:
- the hotfix enabled the bugged multicore support again. If you have FPS issues after the hotfix, try disabling the core spread option by downloading this file and copying it over the original in World of Tanks folder.
- if you have microlag and FPS issues, be sure to disable triple buffering and Vsync – here’s how. But beware – ANY setting tampering after that will turn it back on, so you have to disable it once again.
And now to QA:
- the amount of artillery on tier 8-10 is stabilized and quite satisfactory
- revamp of light tanks is planned
- autoaim gun direction is calculated on the server
- visibility check points on the tank are defined as such: one is in the front, two on the sides, one on the back, one is the point where the gun is attached to the turret and one is the highest point of the turret
- automatic download of the entire client (which some players experienced with the 9.0.1 hotfix) is caused by the game determining that the client is compromised (SS: this can be triggered by mods, but also by removing some parts of the client)