- Evilly confirms that the Winter mode had too much XP and crew XP gain unintentionally, it was fixed
- for players that are annoyed by the presence of “fun mode” tanks in their hangar, WG will make a filter so you don’t see them if you don’t want to
And from stream with Evilly, Inaki and other WG staff on RU server:
- Evilly invented the Russian names for winter mode tanks
- these names between RU and EU are different
- the winter mode is the first “fun” mode that can be played constantly (SS: as in, players having fun even after longer time)
- at first, devs wanted to add respawn to the winter battle mode, but decided not to do it
- there will be more such fun modes in the future, next one might appear on April 1st
- apparently, SerB wanted to make an April 1st trolling – artillery would heal allies instead of damaging them
Wargaming really did it this time with the Winter Mode. Behold the latest major fail from the production that brought you the OP SU-76I and the WT E-100!
Basically, when the Winter Mode was announced on RU server, it came with an interesting text:
It says: “…apart from the missions listed above, you will be able to complete also a bunch of hidden missions…”
Hidden missions. Transparency all the way! But wait, it gets better.
It turned out that these hidden missions incorrectly interacted with the open ones, specifically in multiplying the XP and crew XP modificator. The result was that the Winter Mode awarded like 100k crew XP and regular XP in a few missions and Yuri Pasholok on his blog reports that in 3,5 hours of playing, he managed to accumulate 230k XP. Another player reports average 3200 XP per battle each five minutes, for everybody (for a loss, it was 2,6k XP).
This unintended fail lasted until cca 14:00 CET today, by which point some players (since yesterday) managed to accumulate absolutely ridiculous amounts of XP (hundreds of thousands, even millions), including multi-perk crews. Around that time, WG staff removed some of the hidding missions, greatly reducing the XP and crew XP income, creating massive butthurt.
The standard reply was “it’s a fun mode, have fun” and stuff like that. Wargaming as usual. If they have to fuck up on the side of players like that… why can’t they fuck up like that on EU server? :( We’ll get the “detuned” version.
Also, hidden missions mechanism, that’s going to go SO well…
*tinfoil hat on* – or maybe it was…. intentional? After all, all that XP will need to be converted to be of any use…
contrary to popular belief, putting together enough info for an actual World of Tanks branch is a slow and annoying process – like 70-80 percent can be put together from books and published photographs – no problem. It’s the 20-30 percent that is annoying, as it involves looking for information about some pretty obscure stuff. This includes the proposed tier 5 for my medium branch, the T-24. It also nicely illustrates the way some of the historical projects are assembled together.
A quick summary: the T-24 was the “lighter” design competing with the T-25. It got cancelled pretty early on during the war with only the (relatively well-documented) T-25 remaining. Regarding the T-24 itself, only one drawing is known, the reconstruction of its looks by Ivo Pejčoch.
Now, the thing about T-24 is, there are no “complete assembly” drawings. Many possible reasons for that really, the most likely one is that the paperwork simply got lost over the decades. A lot of documents actually ended up lost for two notable reasons – a part of the archive was moved to Slovakia (ZTS Martin) where it disappeared god knows where. Second reasons were the floods in Prague, that heavily damaged parts of the military archive. There’s nothing much on the T-24 in the Škoda archive either except for one drawing (we’ll get to that).
you might have encountered it as well during prime time on EU server – once again, there are sometimes (short) queues on EU1, which means the server is chock-full, not a common sight these days. However, as WG EU stated before (the Falathi interview), there are no plans for EU3 server. Why is that?
Well, the obvious answer is that this amount of players is just temporary and it will go down again, because World of Tanks has reached its peak and it’s likely that the numbers will stay as they are currently (on average) or will start to slowly decline. This is a natural process of any MMO, that is around for a while and World of Tanks are four years old already. Peak amount of players is a good indicator, because for example total amount of accounts includes rerolls, double accounts, “I tried it once 3 years ago but never played” accounts, botter and spammer accounts and other stuff like that.
Last year around this time, World of Tanks did set a new world record with 1,114 million players playing simultaneously on RU cluster. The reason for the massive activity on RU server are of course the current winter holidays (orthodox Christmas). So, how does the RU peak look during prime time?
Just below a million. That’s good, especially considering the events in Russia this year, which surely made many people think about other things than World of Tanks. But I don’t think these numbers will grow beyond the last year’s record. They even might at one point – but only by very very little.
What I mean by all that is: I think that when looking back, early 2014 will be considered the peak of World of Tanks curve and the beginning of stagnation or even decline of World of Tanks, just as 2010 was the peak of World of Warcraft. I could be wrong of course, but I think that 2015 will be the critical year for World of Tanks, a year that (depending on the changes and the state of the game) might actually send the game into stagnation, or actually make it a peak year yet.
Please note one thing however: I am talking about players, not about WG income. I completely expect the sale model shifting towards more “milking”, so despite declining peaks, the profit from WoT might only go up (not that it’s going to be published I guess).
A Russian company wants to build a manned base on the moon and announced recently that it has the resources and capabilities to do just that. The privately owned company, Lin Industrial, believes they can construct the base for less than $10 billion. That includes the first stages of a lunar outpost, followed by a second facility that would be manned by two and then, later, four humans. Lin Industrial expects that constructing and deploying the base will take around 10 years.
The company proposes that a location near the moon’s south pole, known as Malapert Mountain, would be their construction site for the lunar base. According to Lin Industrial, building a lunar base is no easy feat and requires at least 37 rocket launches to carry parts to the surface of the moon. The launches alone would take probably over five years.
The base, however, is less of a base, and more of a small village, of only up to four people. There’s also a chance that this claim by Lin Industrial is just big talk. Lin Industrial’s head is Sergei Burkatovsky, one of the creators of online game World of Tanks. He’s only invested about $176,000 in the project so far. Lin Industrial states it needs around $200,000 just for the first prototype rocket and another $13.5 million just to test launch it.
You better buy those Panther 88′s, guys – SerB needs to get to the moon :)
Nothing much today. Russian players are not amused that in the Winter Mode, you have to buy the healing shells for gold (or a lot of credits), basically as premium ammo.
Another massive source of butthurt is the fact that the “winter mode” broke many mods. Evilly states to this: “We don’t test it for the compatibility with mods. We contacted the mod makers, they will fix it. Until the fix, you have to empty the mod folder. Specifically the garage tank carousel mods.”
Another complaint was that the LT sucks in this mode. Evilly’s answer was that the original intention of this vehicle (LT) was to heal allies in superplatoons. So yes, it sucks – and apparently it also drifts a lot.
Anyway, what will happen with your crews in that mode after the event is over:
- crews from special tanks will be moved to barracks, if barracks are full, you won’t get any free crew slots, rather the crews will be saved in a “buffer” and moved to barracks whenever free slots become available
- crews will be retrained to T110E5, Foch 155 or LTTB (from HT, TD and LT special tanks)
- you can retrain your existing crews to the special tanks (US, Soviet and French crews). If you do that, after the event is over, the crews will be retrained for free to T110E5, Foch 155 or LTTB.
- special vehicles don’t act as premiums, you can’t use other vehicles’ crews in them
- regular XP will be transferred to Cunningham, MS-1 and FT-17
something that came to my mind yesterday with the Falathi interview. I think he mentioned the concept of “WoT killers” and compared them to “World of Warcraft killers”. In case you don’t know, “WoW killer” is a trope of sorts – basically, World of Warcraft is a very old MMO and during its lifespan, there was a relatively large amount of MMORPG’s, that were – often not intentionally and only by their fanbases – presented as “WoW killers”, in the sense that they would steal a large chunk of World of Warcraft playerbase, making WoW obsolete. Needless to say, that never really happened and while World of Warcraft was steadily losing players for several last years (the peak was around 2010), it was not as much due to the appearance of other games, but simply a “natural decay”, one that awaits World of Tanks inevitably. Aou can see jolts of interest on the curve (those represent the large expansions, such as the one in Q4 2014), but the tendency is obvious. Current World of Tanks playerbase also stagnates by the way – in January 2014, the peak on RU server in primetime was a record: 1,1 million. Nowadays it’s around 900-950k.
when it comes to popular Hollywood movies (I am not referring to Fury now, but there are many others), it’s a trend of source to depict the war from our current point of view. This often involves unhistorical elements, such as the common display of mixed (black and white) troops fighting together. Let’s have a look at what the position of black men in US Army really was.
During WW2, the US Army was racially segregated. Black men were called “negroes” and the word was not used as a racial slur, it was simply a term for blacks and they were formed into troops separated from the white majority of soldiers. They were led by black officers as well, although some command positions were occupied by white men due to the lack of properly trained black officers. The most notable examples were the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Division and 2nd Cavalry Division, but there were also independent black infantry regiments and tank batallions (such as the 761st Tank Batallion). There was even one black parachute infantry company (555th Parachute Infantry Company), but that unit was never deployed in combat and was used to fight forest fires in the north-western region of the USA. Practically the only black unit, involved in larger combat operations was the 92nd Infantry Division (Italian theater), although some smaller independent units were involved in fighting as well. A part of the 93rd Infantry Division was fighting small-scale battles in the Pacific. 2nd Cavalry Division on the other hand never had a contact with the enemy.
not sure how “approved” this method of IED destruction is, but it seems to be effective, if dangerous. In this video, US Abrams tank destroys the terrorist IED hidden in a car wreck by driving over it, while a soldier behind protective glass makes a video of the whole thing.
I am really not sure how “safe” that is (even to the tank), because massive IED’s were known to destroy tanks – American, Israeli, Syrian – you name it. Regardless of the armor upgrades, no matter how much additional armor you have, you don’t survive a ton of explosives going off next to your tank.
today, the Winter “8-bit” Mode was started on Russian server. According to numerous reports, this mode heavily interferes with many mods, including XVM, causing the game to crash. It’s possible that the mods will be fixed on time for EU release, but if they are not, be aware that they are the cause of your client not working properly.
To talk specifically, the problematic file seems to be Application.swf in res_mods/0.9.5/gui/flash folder. And here are a few screenies from Russian server.
