as you probably noticed already, FTR is back after more than 24 hours. What was the cause of the disruption? I actually don’t know. The issue fixed “itself” as far as I know last evening. It wasn’t on our server and it was no attack. Let’s hope it won’t repeat itself – if it does, despite the arrangements that are there currently, I’d have to start look for alternate solutions.
Either way, here’s a couple of invite codes I forgot from rwc81 and Fluidloneknight
VR6S3-EXF96-ZZUGH-FMSHV
VR6SN-3G89T-ASGBY-5AP4H
If you want more invite codes, feel free to get them at the Alienware site, there are like 3k left
- Storm on why the autoaim was changed in 9.0: “Current autoaim in cases of some vehicles (especially open SPG’s) sometimes aims at “empty space” around the vehicle and not at the vehicle itself. We fixed this by introducing new point where the autoaim is aiming. It won’t affect penetration chances.”
- rebalance of maps especially for historical battles is not planned
- it’s possible that “assault” and “encounter” modes will appear in historical battles
- it’s completely technically possible to implement skill/perks, working only under special conditions (for example perks specially for autoloader tanks, for TD’s etc.)
- regarding the alleged “arty nerf”, posted by Storm – he claims he was misinterpreted by “guide-makers, who misinterpret him because they are hunting for sensations” (SS: nothing implied sarcasm and what he wrote was very clear, anyway – Storm was probably referring to either Murazor or Jove). No arty nerf is planned for now, but it will definitely not recieve any buff, Storm states that statistically, everything is alright with arty
- apparently, there is a Russian social group on Vkontakte (VK, Russian Facebook) called “Women against World of Tanks” with like 7000 members, claiming that WoT destroys marriages because some men play too much (SS: no, this is not trolling, this really exists)
- one interesting thing I learned from EU/US. I won’t cite the source (he specifically asked not to), but according to internal WG EU data, World of Warplanes is actually doing fine on EU server, its popularity is rising. It’s the RU server, that has issues in this case, not the EU one (you might have seen the FTR post about the “failure of WoWp” – the graph in it referred to RU). I still think it’s a shitty game tho.
Hmmmm… a thought. You might have noticed that the QA is getting shorter (it’s also harder to “dig out” info from various sources). The reason for this is that the original thread, that used to be the “core source” of the translations, is practically dead. New answers appear quite rarely (from SerB – practically never, from Storm – more often, but still rare). The developers are probably busier than usual.
if you did read FTR yesterday, you might have noticed that Big Boss Viktor Kislyi (Wargaming CEO) gave series of interviews during the WGL finals in Poland to various magazines and portals. This time, he was talking about Occulus Rift support.
He said that they are aware of the thing and although impressive, the fact that World of Tanks is a F2P MMO that depends on massive numbers of players means that it will be supported only if the number of its users reaches 5-10 million, because otherwise, it doesn’t pay off. Same rule applies for Xbox One for example.
Thanks to Volketten for posting this video and Okinoshima for additional information.
The Royal Thai Army has been using Type 95 Ha-Go under the designation “Type 83″ (“83″ referring to 1939, in Buddhist calendar 2483) from 1940 to 1950′s. They took part in the WW2 operation (Thai incursion into Burma).
today, we are starting new series of articles about the French tanks. In it, you will see some stuff, that was not (to my knowledge) published before, coming straight from the French archives. The author of these articles is Dr.Pikouz, the same person, that brought the photos of the Batchat 25t. The French created some wonderful and crazy stuff. Enjoy!
Silentstalker
And now, Dr.Pikouz:
Every WoT player has at least once seen, driven, heard of or died to an ELC. But most WoT players only know one version of the tank, presented to us as the “ELC AMX”. Which is, I make a small digression here, a heresy, since the WoT model is an ELC AMX Bis chassis, fitted with a TC 910 turret (made by St-Chamond) and armed with a 90mm D915 gun.
The ELC project was born in 1955, with the French Ministry of Defence (MinDef) asking to develop “a powerful anti-tank weapon, mounted on a lightly, but completely armored tracked vehicle, discreet, and able to engage and destroy every type of enemy tank up to a distance of 1.000 meters, or even 1.500 meters”. Two companies presented a serious project:
Overlord made a post about the new game modes, announced in the ASAP magazine. What do you think about them? Let him know! The same goes for the Maus reconstruction – let him know what you think.
Interesting fact about the Maus though. Yuri Pasholok made a post as well, where he hinted, that it might not be as easy as others imagine, because given the international situation, Russian researchers might not be exactly welcomed in German archives…
Apart from that, no real news today. Apparently (not related to EU unfortunately), one of the Russian servers got connected to one of the main internet lines in Moscow. Moscow players reported 3-5ms ping…
after months and months of requests and discussion, Wargaming EU has issued its stance on forbidden/allowed mods. Unlike the US server and RU server, both of which went with taxative lists of banned mod functions, Wargaming EU took a… different approach.
I think that by now, everyone is aware that the World of Warplanes project ended in failure and Russian players are discussing, why did it actually happen. One of the more promined Russian community members, Dietolog (also a known troll, but this post is actually quite serious) wrote a post about this issue.
At first, he showed this graph about the WoWp RU attendance:
Honestly, I am not sure whether this is real or some sort of PR or elaborate trolling. Reconstructing a tank of this state (especially something as unique as Maus) is very, very expensive. And I don’t mean “looking for Spitfires in Burma” expensive. We are talking about several million Euro expensive (only the engine rebuilt from scratch – IF that is even possible – I would estimate at 3 million Euro – this is based on the fact that reconstructing a “big cat” engine in the past costed 1 mil GBP and that was not as exotic as this stuff).
