Hello everyone,

as it was announced earlier, the biggest feature 9.7 will bring are a bunch of French vehicles – not only the hightier AMX-30 prototype and AMX-30B, but also some lowtier vehicles. Today, we are starting with their leaks – first to come is Somua S35, tier 3 French medium tank. And yes, the German Somua S35 will likely be pulled from the store in 9.7.

Characteristics (elite setup, top gun, 100 percent crew):

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

there are two issues with the Tiger P model (thanks for people noticing). Issue one is nastier and I am sure many of you encountered it. Basically, the tracks have a fucked up model, that, under some circumstances, causes visual glitches, a sort of “bar code” artefacts coming from the tracks, essentially like this:

This is a known bug and will be fixed in the next update. Not sure what triggers it, I haven’t seen it in my client myself. Second bug is of a bit funnier nature. Check this out, this is the commander cupola of the top turret. Missing anything?

That’s right, there are no vision slits in the cupola, it’s just a metal bucket. Oh well, guess the commander doesn’t really HAVE to see anything – next patch will feature viewrange reduced to 0.

Yes, it’s a known bug and this too will be fixed in the future I assume. On the other hand, several people contacted me, asking about the size of the hole behind the mantlet, specifically that the size of the hole was MUCH increased and the turret now is nowhere near as durable as it used to be. Well, this is intentional. If you compare the mantlet and the collision model, you’ll see that it actually makes sense.

Hello everyone,

check this out – this is one REALLY detailed Lego model of a Tiger tank. Damn… that’s a lot of work right there. And it actually drives around! Seriously impressive.

Thanks to Vahakhn for this one.

Hello everyone,

recently, an article (or more like a commentary) came out on Cyprus Mail news site. Its topic is the general position of Cyprus in the current EU politics (especially regarding the Greece crisis), but it also mentions Wargaming’s involvement in Cyprus’ economy.

For one, Wargaming owns a large share in the Hellenic Bank of Cyprus. Recently, HB CEO announced plans to become the largest bank in Cyprus (currently, it’s third largest). This is very much related to Wargaming, as a shareholder of the said bank, but not limited to. Currently, according to the article, Wargaming is the largest taxpayer in Cyprus. No wonder Big Boss Kislyi is on first name basis with Cypriot minister of finance (as he confirmed in an earlier interview).

Currently, Wargaming is interested (apart from finishing their spectacular new HQ building in Nicosia) in buying as much free Cypriot property as possible as an investment for times when the games won’t be earning Wargaming money. In other words, Wargaming is now a completely Cypriot company and is there to stay.

Funnily enough, this was used against Wargaming not so long ago, when a representative from another company (Mail.Ru, the producer of Armored Warfare) accused Wargaming in Russia (during an official meeting of some parliament committee or so) of being an unpatriotic, “offshore company”. Cause quite a bit of stir, that one. Oh well :)

Source: http://yuripasholok.livejournal.com/4236614.html

Hello everyone,

as a part of the “Saint Infantry Tank Mk.III day”, Yuri Pasholok posted an interesting document about the performance of Valentine IX tanks in USSR. Valentine IX was a Valentine variant with a 57mm (6pdr, late model) gun. First vehicles of this type arrived in the USSR in early 1943. Design-wise, they were further developed from the Valentine III/V model by switching the original 2pdr for the larger 6pdr gun and removing the coaxial MG due to the large size of the new gun.

One Valentine IX was tested in March 1943 in Kubinka.

One of the things they tested was the visibility from the tank. Here’s how that ended for the driver:

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

World of Tanks: Generals (an online browser “card game”, announced very long time ago) finally reached the closed beta stage of development. Check out this trailer (Russian, with subtitles):

It is currently not clear, whether the CBT is open only for Russian players, or EU/US will be able to participate as well (the site is currently down), but knowing Wargaming… oh well, maybe we will be pleasantly surprised.

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/12/love_strong_as_armor/

Hello everyone,

once again, we survived the Valentine’s Day (hopefully) unscathed, but when it comes to the topic of love, there’s one thing that I’d like to return to and it is the article on Russian WoT portal by Yuri Bakhurin, called “Love, strong as armor”, about the life story of Zhosef Kotin (the famous Soviet tank designer) and Anastasiya Polkonnova, who both got to live in the difficult times of WW2. This is their story.

Long before the war, in the early 30′s, when the Soviet army armored forces were being still re-armed, a girl student enlisted the F.E.Dzerzhinsky Military-Technical Academy. At first, Anastasiya “Nastya” Polkonnova was attending the Faculty of Chemistry, but after half a year, she achieved her goal of transferring to the Faculty of Mechanization and Motorization. It was not simple to keep up with other students, but she tried hard and she became very successful in mastering various armored vehicles, as confirmed by a number of “For exemplary tank driving” honor badges on her school dress. She did not only want to keep up, she wanted to be one of the best.

Continue reading →

Source: VK Express

Hello everyone,

just a couple of interesting numbers, as posted by the VK community, based on the data from SimilarWeb site. This data concerns the main worldoftanks.ru site, which is apparently the 74th most visited site in Russia and 28th most visited game site in the world.

- In January 2015, the number of visits on the portal is apparently 30,1 million people.
- average time spent on the site is 4 minutes 1 second
- one user views 3,37 pages on average
- bounce rate is 44,02

Out of those 30,1 million: 79,31 percent viewed only portal and news, 19,16 percent viewed also the forums and 0,23 percent viewed WoT Generals pages.

54,85 percent of the traffic for last 3 months on the site was direct, 23,34 percent from referrals, 17,13 percent from searches and only 2,08 percent from social networks. Of the searches, almost equally the same number came from google search and Yandex search. Of the social networks, most traffic (75 percent) came from Vkontakte, 18,6 percent from Youtube and only 2 percent from Facebook (followed by 1 percent from Twitter and Odnoklasniki).

Regarding the traffic, 2,35 percent of traffic came from advertising – the largest source are Google ads (Ukraine), followed by Youtube and Google ads (Russia).

Regarding the countries of the users:

67,65 percent of users is from Russia
18,67 percent from Ukraine
5,61 percent from Belarus
2,04 percent from Kazakzhstan
0,54 percent from Germany