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…

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.

After a long break, Darth Woras is back and Great European Random with him – enjoy!

He asked me also to post this: send your 9.0 replays at darthworas@gmail.com

Thanks to several dozen people, who sent me this info :)

Hello everyone,

remember that post, where Wargaming EU promised that they would put a 2x XP for victories on 1st of May, if (until that time) the Like count on WoT FB page reaches 1 million? Well, despite the massive 9.0 fail, they made it, so next Thursday (1.5.2014), we will have the double XP for victory event.

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/3/cartography_contest/

Hello everyone,

this is something that actually caught my eye. Wargaming runs a competition, where Russian server players are submitting their map proposals in two categories:

- historical map
- e-sports map

Top three creators win a gaming computer (1st place prize: i7/8GB RAM/1TB drive/120 GB SSD/ GTX770) – what is interesting is that the first place for historical maps gets to be rewarded with a better computer. One user can participate in only one of these categories. Another interesting thing is the way the historical maps are made. They have to be:

- based on real location, referring to an important battle event
- located in Europe or USSR
- the map has to be based on aerial photos from WW2 and has to be recognizable
- following locations are not allowed: “Minsk, Stalingrad, Kharkov, Königsberg, Leningrad, Poznan, Caen, Berlin, Köln” (that means that these locations are considered for implementation already, nice!)
- the type of the map has to be city, battlefield or mix of the two
- size of the map: 800*800 or 900*900 meters
- all seasons allowed
- the map has to have 3-4 obvious directions for attack
- map has to be balanced for both teams
- considerable terrain level differences are undesirable
- the map has to be viable for any tier

The “cybersports” map has roughly the same conditions, but it’s supposed to be smaller (700*700 or 800*800) and the terrain doesn’t have to be strictly historical. The emphasis is on the balance of both sides, the map has to be viable for team battles.

Hell, I could use that rig :) Why don’t we have something like that in Europe? Oh, right, no map competitions for you, bloody capitalists. Seriously though, I love these design competitions. It’s much more fun than ye olde “make most damage” stuff. In case you are interested what Russian players are submitting, you can view their work here.

Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/289845.html

Hello everyone,

Storm posted a topic, where he asks for the 9.0.1 hotfix feedback. Please, write, how does it work for you?

For myself, after several battles in earlier “problematic” tanks (for me, Panzer IV crashed the game earlier):

- no crashes
- no sound or tank destruction lags now, sound issue got fixed, which is very nice
- noticeable FPS loss (by 10-15 FPS), I was running the Airfield at cca 45 FPS in 9.0, now it’s barely 30 (edit: I think this was caused by enabling the bugged multicore thingie (see below), when I disabled it, it got better)
- massive FPS loss in city maps (Lakeville city: suddenly 20 FPS – outside of city: 45 FPS)
- noticeable more microlags (triple buffering disabled per Storm’s advice)
- noticeable FPS drops when switching from arcade to sniper mode

Under Storm’s post, Russian players report the same issues: microfreezes are still there, FPS losses. Storm answers that the issue with the tank explosion lags was fixed by pre-caching the sounds and the rest of the alleged lags is placebo. Also, please be aware that the hotfix DID RENEW the “enable CPU” issue, that caused FPS problems for some players. In order to do repair it yourselves, you have to again download the file and replace the original one with it.

And what’s your feedback?

Hello everyone,

this morning, as announced earlier, 9.0.1 hotfix was applied to the game. The hotfix officially has following content:

• Fixed significant number of the ‘crash to desktop’ or ‘client crash’ issues
• Fixed “Updating Tankers” issue that occurs when trying to create a Tank Company from Training Room
• Significantly decreased performance problems when vehicle is destroyed
• Optimised turret physics when ammo rack explodes
• Fixed red gun texture issue on destroyed IS-3s
• Fixed a rare bug that caused writing off gold in case of temporary emblem or inscription purchases

Edit: comments disabled, you can give your feedback under this post (sorry, I didn’t think I’d be making a separate feedback post earlier)

All credits for this find go to Kerberospanzer from US forums.

Hello everyone,

finding differences in models between versions is not really that simple. It’s a process that takes a while and sometimes (I hope not often), something simply “slips through the cracks”. Kerberospanzer discovered an interesting change in Panzer III top turret. Check this out.

This is the pre-9.0 Panzer III

Notice specifically the mantlet. And now, in 9.0:

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