Source: Yuri Pasholok’s blog

Hello everyone,

I follow Yuri Pasholok’s blog, as he sometimes posts very interesting scans of documents and photos, that I repost and translate on occasion (with full credits given to him of course). Today, we’ll have a look at another of his posts. This time it’s a report from January 1933:

The report object are the armored troop and materiel transports, built on the T-26 chassis: the TR-1 (also called TR-26) and TR-4. The report mentions the TR-1 to be equipped with a 90hp “Hercules” (“Gerkules” in Russian) engine and the fact the project works on it are 100 percent complete, drawings are 95 percent complete and their release to workshops is 90 percent complete. The TR-4 has a different (new) hull compared to TR-1, prototype drawings are 100 percent complete and their release for mass production is 75 percent ready.

Continue reading →

Source: http://wot.kongzhong.com/zixun/gonggao/20131030/18747.html

Hello everyone,

as the title of the post suggests, the Chinese players are getting the Free XP to Crew XP conversion in patch 0.8.9. It’s pretty self-explanatory (you simply convert the free XP to your crewmember’s XP for gold), I just wonder: the Chinese also got 7/42 battles a patch or two before the RU/US/SEA server, will this be implemented on our regular servers too?

Currently, I have no info on that, but I’ll keep it in mind.

Hello everyone,

just a quick update: yesterday, several people reported they see foreign language in English section on WG EU portal (notably German and Polish). Later, this bug was discovered on both the US server (that had Spanish on main English page) and SEA. A source in Wargaming confirmed that they know about this bug. It’s a bug of the entire portal system (not just WG EU) and they claim to have already fixed it. If you are still having problems, clearing browser cache helps fixing it. If it doesn’t help, the source suggests you contact support with the matter.

Hello everyone,

in the FTR questions for developers, many of you wondered how far the roaming mechanism advanced. Well, it’s being tested. Kiflajiq caught a WG RU employee testing it on live EU server :) So I guess it’s not that far ahead…

Hello everyone,

well, looks like WG didn’t manage to get rid of the massive lagfest that started in 8.8 for some players (if anything, for me it’s much worse in 8.9). I somehow thought I mitigated by disabling ASUS firmware for my motherboard – it disappeared for a while, only to appear days later.

But, that’s not something WG EU can do anything about I guess. What they CAN do something about is to stop screwing around with the portal. When I select English, I’d like to read stuff in English. Not in Polish…

Continue reading →

Hello everyone,

the questions are closed for today’s session. Now I will dig thru them to pick up the good ones. I am however NOT amused by the amount of bullshit there – will have to think of another method, as this clearly is not working.

Also, something I want to really bring to your attention: DO NOT spam me with your questions via mail/private messages/ingame chat/under other posts, it is highly annoying and I will ignore any questions not posted under the appropriate FTR post. Repeated spam (2-3 people are highly annoying) will be punished by temporary FTR bans – but I’d hate for it to come to that so please, be considerate.

Thank you.

- SS

Hello everyone,

just a quick “guide” – or more like explanation why there was a removal of the 3-caliber rule for HEAT shells in 8.9. What do patchnotes tell us?

- Removed the rule for HEAT shells that excludes ricochet if the shell’s calibre exceeds the armour thickness by 3 or more times.
- Deflection angle for HEAT shells changed from 80 to 85 degrees.

As you can see, the three caliber rule excludes ricochet, if the caliber of the gun exceeds the nominal (!) armor thicknes by 3 or more times. Note that three is included in this. What it means is that 90mm+ shells (or, to be exact, shells from a 90mm+ gun) cannot ricochet on a 30mm armor. This is called “overmatch”, or “overmatch by 3″ (there is also a 2 caliber overmatch, but that isn’t very important now, I will simplify for the sake of explanation). They always hit. However, does this mean they will penetrate? Of course not.

You see, the entire situation was not very intuitive for a player. When a player is aware of the “no ricochet” overmatch rules, he can shoot at a 30mm armor with a 90mm gun under extreme angles and expect it to penetrate. After all, I have a 90mm gun and he has only a 30mm armor, that has to penetrate, right? Much to their surprise, the shell often does not penetrate. Why? Because at early ricochet angle (80 degrees), a 30mm the armor is effectively 172mm thick (and that’s only on one axis, so I should say “no less than 172mm”). At 85 degrees (well within the “no ricochet rule zone”) it’s already no less than 344mm.

I am sure you can see where this is going. Removing the 3 ricochet rule for HEAT shells (that have high penetration) and moving the ricochet boundary to 85 degrees assures that when a player hits a 30mm armor at 84 degrees, he’ll have to defeat 287mm armor (hard, but possible with tier 10 shells), while 85 degrees will already ricochet: the player would (even with a tier 10 gun firing HEAT) not be able to penetrate the armor at 85 degrees anyway, but he would hear “did not penetrate their armor” instead of “ricochet” and that’s not intuitive. Now, the player will hear “ricochet” and will know he didn’t do damage because of the extreme angle and not because of the armor thickness.

I hope it’s clear for you folks. Or at least clearer :)

Hello everyone,

just like last week, you can ask your questions for WG developers. 20 will be picked and sent to Zlobny (still very grateful for this opportunity) tomorrow morning. This thread will remain opened the entire day, I expect the number of questions asked to be quite high. I will be regularily checking this thread’s comments and will be answering and commenting on stuff.

However, in order to make it easier for me (not to having to dig through stuff I am sure not to send), I will ask you to follow at least basic rules.

- please don’t ask about irrelevant and silly stuff (“do you like beer?”, “what’s your favourite tank” – for the record, SerB’s is T-44)
- please don’t ask questions that have been answered a million times before (“when will WoT support multicore”, “skill MM for random battles” and such stuff)
- try not to post any proposals of your own, those aren’t questions – for proposals, there are appropriate official forum sections
- try to keep it brief: a question hidden in a half page of text is not exactly appealing

Thank you.

SS

Update: Comments are locked. Now I have to sort thru your questions. Needless to say, I am not happy about the offtopic crap. Next time, I will have to figure some better method.