MTLS-1G14 – short review

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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.

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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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Wot-News launches the “new method” application

Hello everyone,

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

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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)

WG NA DDOS’ed?

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:

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

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

Closure of the Polish blog issue

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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1.1.2014

Welcome to the new year :)

- regarding the New Years Eve, SerB wrote: “By the way, I really don’t recommend skiing downhill with bengal fire in each hand – you can’t see shit beyond the circle of light (5 meters). It’s scary.”
- SerB, regarding the hydraulic suspension in WoT: “That’s a pretty rough and complex rework of game mechanics (that doesn’t concern only clearance), so for now no comment” (SS: earlier, Storm confirmed the variable suspension for E-10 will come)
- apparently SerB will keep answering questions in the RU topic as much as he can
- apparently the STB-1 height in the game is correct
- premium Sexton better than the regular one? The difference between them is “a complex of characteristics”

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Posted in Q&A

Storm comments on KTTS

Source: numerous (added answers from another LJ post)

Hello everyone,

Storm recently made two KWG posts, one to wish the players happy New Year and the other to comment on the recently released KTTS video. Here is the info from the discussion:

- Q: “The graphics is somehow meh” A (Veider): “You don’t like the new IS-4 model? I started jerking off to it even when it didn’t have the texture yet and was still a set of polygons”
- dynamical dirt (SS: tank gets dirty when going through mud) will be implemented
- old computers will be able to play on the same graphics like they do now
- WG made a special survey on player computer configurations, that’s how they know about so many players using crap computers, they collected data on 2,5 mil configurations
- reworked Maus model will get extrernal (empty) fuel tanks apparently
- historical battles will be played on currently existing random battle maps
- independent suspension will not influence balance more than it does now, it is already being taken into account when balancing tanks at this moment
- Veider states that support rollers for now have less polygons even in HD graphics on the IS-4 model, because it’s very difficult to see them in the battle anyway
- there will be more HD screenies after New Year

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Posted in Q&A

Not sure if mad or amused…

Hello everyone,

okay, here’s the situation. There is a Polish guy that about a month or two ago sent me an e-mail, whether he can translate FTR to Polish. Although I warned him that Dom1n is already doing that and is doing a great job, I was like – what the hell, why not?

So, this guy created the blog – had a look, not sure about the translation quality (native Polish readers would have to decide themselves), but whatever, I won’t link him here, because I prefer Dom1n, as I said earlier. Two things however made me raise my eyebrows.

At first it was the fact a WGA ambassador (WG EU employee) called the blog a great place, even though it has no original content, pretty much everything is a copy from FTR:

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I posted about that earlier, no sweat. But what made me really raise my eyebrows was this:

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Basically, WG EU is endorsing (“official WoT fan page, we entered a cooperation with Wargaming and became community contributors” or something like that) a site, that is a 1:1 copy of FTR in Polish (the guy even copies my post titles and either removes my comments, making the content less comprehensible, or replaces “SS” with his nickname). That’s a bit of a mixed message right there, isn’t it? :)

Personally, I am not sure what to do with that. The last thing I want is WG EU parasiting on FTR in any form and this guy has no original content of his own, it’s really just a copy of FTR, so if WG EU promotes a pet blogger like this… feels a bit off, especially, since Dom1n (who has been doing for quite a while) did not get promoted (quite the contrary).

What do you think?