Hello everyone,

today, we will have a look at another mythical creature few have seen in battle, the Panzer IV Hydro.

It’s really difficult to find something to write about, because this vehicle is simply a form of the Panzer IV tank. Historically, one prototype of this vehicle existed: by the end of the war, there was a project to equip Panzer IV with hydrostatic control systems (hence the “hydro”). Historical info from wot-wiki states:

In late 1943, Zahnradfabrik Augsburg equipped normal (turretless) Panzerkampfwagen IV Ausf G/H with newly developed hydraulic steering system. Thoma (non-liquid) oil drive transmission was installed and drive sprocket was replaced with the new one. The power train consisted of twin oil pumps driven by Maybach HL 120 TRM engine. In order to accommodate all the changes, entire engine deck and rear was modified. In mid 1944, this prototype was fitted with modified hydraulically operated turret. Tests were carried on but were never concluded and for testing purposes the only prototype was send to Russia and served with the Waffen SS unit. At the end of the war, this vehicle was captured by the US Army and was sent to United States for further examination. Tests were never concluded and this vehicle is still at Aberdeen U.S Army Proving Grounds in Maryland.

Other sources state that the vehicle this tank was build upon was Panzer IV Ausf.H specifically and that it has never seen combat, because it was breaking down constantly.

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Will you be taking something with that early morning coffee or tea? How about a morning dose of fail? :)

So, I was checking the EU newsletter and…

(the picture was actually submitted by Oxmaster)

Oh yea, that doesn’t look like the Mk.VIc…

No wonder this stuff ends in my spam folder.

Now I have a machine gun press account, ho-ho-ho!

All I need now are some explosives and a German terrorist played by an English actor. Okay, seriously now. Thanks to some very nice people, I did get an access to a press account. What is a press account? It’s a special type of account, that (like the test client) has a lot of gold and credits on it, but (unlike the test client) it also has ALL the tanks in the game in the garage and each has a crew with ALL the perks (inteded for journalists to write reviews with). Pretty cool stuff.

So, here I was wondering, which tank to take for a spin first and obviously, the first choice had to be nothing other than the mythical tier 3 light tank, the MTLS-1G14.

So, a bit of history. About a year ago, maybe more, three lowtier premium tanks were introduced into the game. One was the Panzer II Ausf.J, the other was the BT-SV and the third was this little beauty. The first two vehicles became a part of the Gift packages: basically, you buy a box with WoT, some books and this beauty for like 100-150 USD and you get either the Panzer IIJ (German edition) or the BT-SV (Soviet edition). These Gift packages are very rare and they are available only in some e-shops from Belarus and Russia. Panzer II Ausf.J codes were given out at Gamescom events, making it the least rare of the three on EU server. BT-SV is very rare (I have seen only one ever), the only way to get is is to order that package from Belarus and there are like a dozen on the EU server altogether I think.

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Hello everyone,

remember the “new method” of evaluating, whether tanks are OP or not? You know, graphs like this?

Well, Edrard programmed an application on wot-news, that does the same evaluation automatically. The data gathered counts into account samples of at least 50 thousand battles with each tank (that’s why it took a bit longer to gather the data, along with reworking wot-news statistics for new API)

The application can be found here:

http://wot-news.com/main/test/

(the first selection window is obviously the tank, the second is whether you want to display winrate, or ER)

Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2911677.html

Hello everyone,

so here’s an interesting piece of info. As you know, some idiots calling themselves DERP DDOS’ed yesterday (or day before – depending on your timezone) several major games and their servers, bringing them down. Amongst the servers attacked were DOTA2, LOL, Battle.net, EA.com and…. World of Tanks NA apparently.

Why did they do it? I have no idea, something about some game streamer PhandomL0rd and games he played. In other words, they did it because they were douches. In the aftermath of the event, FBI got involved due to significant monetary losses of the action and considering the fact Americans take cybercrime very seriously, I’d say those guys are pretty screwed.

Either way, here is DERP claiming that they brought Wargaming NA down:

And here’s Wargaming, tweeting about the servers in the US working fine:

So, where’s the truth? Did DERP really bring WG NA servers down? Well, IGN seems to think so. For a short while anyway.

Hello everyone,

this post is a followup to the post from yesterday. Basically, the issue was that a Polish blog was copying FTR and got endorsed for it by WG EU. Here’s a letter I wrote to Zbiry (the owner of the blog) earlier today. Not how I imagined spending the morning of the first day of the year, but then again, FTR existence was never a calm one, was it.

I hope you readers, Zbiry and the rest of the Polish and other communities do understand this. I am trying to be fair about this issue as much as I can and I really hope this is the end of it (there are measure that it can be escalated with, but that’s not necessery I think).

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Hello guys,

just a quick update on the Tank Inspector utility. A lot of people are apparently writing the Chinese developers for beta keys, when the Tank Inspector is already publicly available. No point in that. Hillin and other guys asked me to post that the Tank Inspector is freely available on this address:

http://tankinspector.sinaapp.com/

No beta keys or anything needed. Enjoy!

Source: SerB’s answers

Hello everyone,

SerB postad today a bit more info about the potential Japanese tier heavy 10 tank. Let’s have a look at the pictures and text he posted.

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