For the Record in Year 2013

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Hello everyone,

so, here we are, the last day of year 2013. It’s time to look back a bit and to compare the positives and negatives, that happened this year to FTR. I hope you can indulge me for a while – this post will be a bit longer, because there is a lot on my mind I wanted to say.

Positives

- from somewhat problematic beginnings, For the Record grew to be probably (I will leave “probably” here, since we have no official sources for other blogs’ visits) the most visited non-Russian World of Tanks blog in the world. Even in Russian competition, I think we are doing fairly well. That of course couldn’t have happened without you, dear readers. It’s somewhat hard to actually say the exact number of the visitiors ever since its creation, since there was a hosting switch half-way through, but we are fairly stable reader-wise around 50k readers per day, with upper peaks of 100k (yea, I like to brag with the 100k, because I am really proud of that). While in October and November the numbers grew steadily, December was a bit stagnant. The peaks occur almost everytime on patch days (people waiting for patch info), the lows (of around 35k visits) occur on days when I don’t post anything new (not very often) and usually a few days after the test server info is released. None of this would be possible without your continued favour and support.

- FTR is popular all over the world. Based on data from June to Yesterday, FTR gets the most visits from:

1. United States (14,62 percent)
2. Germany (14,33 percent)
3. Poland (8,68 percent)
4. United Kingdom (5,28 percent)
5. Finland (3,83 percent)
6. Canada (3,69 percent)
7. Czech Republic (3,63 percent)
8. Hungary (3,38 percent)
9. Netherlands (2,92 percent)
10. Romania (2,48 percent)
11. France (2,27 percent)
12. Sweden (2,14 percent)
13. Russia (2 percent)
14. Croatia (1,76 percent)
15. Australia (1,75 percent)

Of the more exotic ones around 1 percent, Taiwan is number 19, Japan is 26, 30 are Philippines, 33 is Vietnam and 34 is mainland China, 38 is Brazil, 42 is Thailand (all of these still have tens of thousands of visits), South Korea is 45, 51 is Israel. Altogether, the readerbase of FTR is very diverse, FTR has been accessed from 189 countries, although I am pretty sure members from some of them accessed it only to sell me cheap viagra or to inform me about Saddam’s gold. Vatican is sadly not amongst them – maybe next year.

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About the “Roll Out: Facts and Figures” video…

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Hello everyone,

so I guess you’ve seen the “Facts and Figures” video? Kinda interesting, isn’t it? I mean: I didn’t know there are WoT players in Vatican City. Of course, before we go all “hurr durr the Pope plays WoT”, Vatican has civillian workers too, not just the clergy.

Still, interesting. I wonder how the latency is in Panama though. Anyway, this post is not about that. Check this out, this is from the part they talk about “historical realism” (pictures by _Reaper and Attin):

fake1

Oh yea, that’s not the FV215b (183), that’s the fake FV215b with the 120mm gun that never existed even in blueprints. Very historically accurate. It gets better though…

WG_British_Sherman_zps3571ca58

Google translate FTW!

For one, it’s apparently a British Sherman, even though in the game it’s an American vehicle. Anyway, look at the “stats” – so, amount of hitpoints is “strength” now? Why? Oh, that’s right – in Russian, the amount of hitpoints term is “prochnost”, which can be translated also as “strength”, if you don’t know what you are talking about.

Carriage is apparently googletranslated from the word “ekipazh”, which means “crew” in Russian, but also “carriage” (the same way “pipe” means that thing the water flows thru and also the thing you use to smoke crack – two different things, same word). So, the gunner is now “aimer”? Again, in Russian, the term for gunner is “navodchik”, the word is based on the word “navodka”, which means literally “aiming”. Why is it suddenly “the driver” and not just “driver” and why is the last crewmember called “charging”? (the Russian word for loader is “zaryazhayuschij”, which comes from the word “zaryazhat”, which means literally “to charge”, so in Russian, the word can literally be translated as “the one who is charging”.

Now, this might be nitpicking, but it’s also a symptom – of the fact that WG EU can’t do its job right. They probably outsourced the translation to some moron, who googletranslated it without context and sent it back – and noone doublechecked it. We know how often that happens (hint: every week).

The stats are interesting though and the video got one thing right: the game is great. So, Wargaming, all the best in new year and make us happy! Hard job, I know, but I trust SerB :D

(Not only) CW QA with Fluke

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2909500.html

Hello everyone,

recently (today?) there was a stream with Dimitri “Fluke” Grigorov, a CW specialist developer. Maiorboltach (RU LJ community) was kind enough to provide us with a summary of what he said.

SS: Please note that I never really dealt with CW stuff (I try to avoid is as much as I can), so it’s possible I might misinterpret some of the stuff Fluke said (or Maiorboltach wrote) – at least the risk is higher than usual. I will do my best.

- the idea behind the CW campaigns is that the old CW were unattractive and boring and to push more players into playing in clans
- developers were not happy with the first CW campaign: it turned out that only very powerful clans with strong diplomacy could achieve the M60
- after that the entire concept was reworked, hence the Fame points and the second campaign turned out to have quite a broad audience
- the goal for second campaign was to award 10 percent of all campaign players with the reward vehicle – and the number of awarded players was based on this estimate. Developers consider the amount of rewarded players to be quite high, “even a lazy person could obtain it”

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Posted in Q&A

30.12.2013

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There is some confusion about the Italian branch/tree now.

- Q: “You said that you will implement a separate Italian branch?” A: “As usual, we didn’t give that answer – I haven’t found the word ‘separate’ anywhere”
- SerB on the TD based on IS-4: “a 152mm gun, classic Soviet composition with the superstructure in the front, armor roughly the same as the IS-4 has, we don’t have any more data for now”, apparently there might even be a variant with a not-fully rotating turret in the back
- Jagdtiger 88 and Jagdtiger differ in maximum speed, because “JT88 doesn’t have the top engine”
- SerB states that while the policy of Wargaming is that premium vehicles have to be worse somehow than the regular vehicles of the same tier, this does not apply for reward/special vehicles: “If these are as strong as regular vehicles of the same tier – that is acceptable, but not required. Them being stronger – that’s not acceptable”
- there is no direct connection between height of the tank and its viewrange: the viewrange is set manually
- WG started to develop the graphics improvement (HD) a year ago, they couldn’t start two years ago, because they didn’t have the money to do it

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Storm on graphic issues

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Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/267947.html

Hello everyone,

Storm recently made a post, wishing everyone all the best in the upcoming new year and is asking, if there is something the players don’t like about current graphics, whether it makes eyes hurt and why and if there is anything new the players would like to see, graphics-wise.

Storm adds that they know about current performance issues in WoT and are working on fixing it. Currently, developers are working on full multicore support for the render – Storm states that there is a lot of work left to be done, in fact it is a complete render system overhaul, there will be a lot of more optimizations.

From the discussion:

- there is currently a bug where the replays are not saved properly (only the last one is saved), it will be fixed
- there will be no such thing as one “HD client” patch, textures and models will be improved throughout the entire next year
- there is enough content scheduled to come out, so much that WG has a problem finding suitable candidates for outsourcing to do it fast, even if the price offered is high
- the first vehicles to be reworked into HD will be the “legendary” mass produced vehicles like Tiger (SS: eg. not a single nation)

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It pays well to be a friend to WG EU

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I will just leave this here. It pays well to be a friend to the WG EU employees. However, there are things and people you can’t buy…

By the way, I thought that KV-220 Beta is a RU exclusive. Odd.

Edit: to clear things up, this is not from my account, I didn’t get anything, only people loyal to WG EU (eg. community contributors) recieve free stuff. This info was just passed to me by one of them. Personally, I think some of them deserve it, they’ve been doing an awesome job.

kv_220_1

kv_220_2

WG Stream QA

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Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/2905500.html

Hello everyone,

Russians had today a stream with some community members and leadership, including Evilly and some developers. Here is the info, as summed up by Maiorboltach (RU server).

- exclusive tanks will go primarily to clans. Random battle players will get exclusive tanks via missions similiar to the current IS-6 one (eg. heavy grind)
- IS-6 won’t get a penetration buff
- unification of two accounts won’t be implemented
- next patch will not be 9.0, but 8.11 – it will contain UI features, such as disabling the chat
- historical battles: the battle of Prokhorovka and the battles around Lake Balaton are planned (in the first wave). There will be the respawn mechanism and there will be non-equal balance (for example one team has 7 tanks and the other has 30). At first, there will be the same maps as there are currently in game, but eventually there will be maps made exclusively for historical battles
- when logging on the test server, you won’t have all premium tanks at your disposal in your garage, you’ll have to buy them like it was until now
- garage battles will be in WoWp
- it’s possible garage battles as a separate game mode will appear in WoT
- T-44-85 will come in 8.11
- newbies have a special MM now: for 20 first battles, newbies play only with other newbies (SS: eg. not sealclubbers)
- there will most likely be new premium tier 8 tanks
- small machineguns will not shoot in the game
- T95 will not recieve a speed buff
- Chaffee branch prolongement won’t be in the next patch
- Italian branch will not be a separate tree, it will be a part of the EU tree
- there will be a new game mode for clans in 2014
- there will be a possibility to choose map in “clan battles” (??? probably meant Team battles) soon
- there will not be a separate server for noobs
- very soon there will be a WoT Blitz stream
- Mac OS WoT client is being worked on, it will be available soon, currently it’s being tested internally
- T95E6 will be a reward for Clans with 90 percent probability
- WG is experimenting with night battles, currently, there is a new system of spotting and visibility being tested internally
- WoT XboX will be released in the beginning of 2014

Posted in Q&A

29.12.2013

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Not much today. Players were “whining” more than usual and SerB was just skipping the questions

- Q: “What’s the point of waiting for the start of the battle for 2 minutes?” A: “a) putting a team together b) loading of the map for those, who have worse computer than you”
- responsibility of clans for the behavior of their members won’t be implemented (SS: as in, automatically punishing the clan is a member misbehaves)
- apparently the current aiming system is sufficient for the game (SS: some player was asking about more complicated system, like non-linear aiming times over distances)
- there was no hidden vehicle nerf (SS: in 8.10 apparently)
- there was actually a TD based on the IS-4 hull planned, there was also a TD planned on the WZ-111 hull (not 113 though)
- 122mm HE shells from D-25 do less HE damage than 120mm US shells because of the “construction of the shell” (SS: this is probably true – when researching various guns, one of the data required is the amount of filling of the HE shells, which probably means this is taken into account)
- generally, SerB is satisfied with the way HE shells work
- there is no turret armor behind the IS-4 mantlet
- it’s possible that when the multiturret mechanism is implemented, you will be able to fire with the high caliber machineguns (like the 12,7mm AAMG on the top of some vehicles for example), but SerB adds that it will do you little good

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The Legion – part III

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Part I here: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/12/27/the-legion-part-i/
Part II here: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/12/28/the-legion-part-ii/

…..to victory

Just as the first group (advancing near the railway along with the armored train) was engaging the bolsheviks, the flanking units under Lt.Gayer got into a very nasty firefight. The 1st and 3rd Batallion of the Regiment were attacking and the field guns of Lt.Cholyavin and Cpl.Vondra were in support. The situation was tough though – advancing Czechoslovaks had to assault up hill, that was fortified with several machinegun nests. Withering fire from the Maxim machineguns was literally pinning the Czechoslovaks down in the bolshevik artillery storm of fire and shrapnels. In their fortifications above them, the bolsheviks were certain they’d repel the Czechoslovak assault. But there was no stopping the Legion – the onslaught was relentless. Czechoslovaks were slowly advancing towards the fortified positions, inevitable as a sea tide itself – and the bolsheviks were starting to get desperate, throwing everything they had at the advancing legionnaires, including danger close artillery barrage. This time, there was nowhere to run – the town was behind them, the news of the “encirclement” (caused by the marauding Czechoslovak infiltrators) had already reached them and the Russians knew it was a “fight or die” situation for them and so they didn’t retreat, fighting (on some places) to the last man.

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