- Storm is not that keen on large maps (1500*1500+). He states that it was tested and slow tanks would be even worse than they are now and they would just camp the bases. In general, focus would shift from shooting to moving and that becomes boring really quick
- Storm confirms that XP bonus for blocking damage with your armor (“tanking”) will come
- Tiger II in HD: “when it’s done it’s done”
- the reason the British switch (FV4202) was not implemented was that the agreement with the museum (Bovington) about making detailed photos of the replacement and measuring it took a LOT of time
- Storm confirms that US tier 2-3 tank destroyers and arties will be switched around, specifically – T18, T82, T57 and two more new vehicles on those tiers (SS: IIRC one is T3 HMC). This switch will happen later than 9.6
- Storm confirms that the French and Japanese new tanks are problematic due to the difficult collection of historical sources
- 9.6 will not bring many new HD models
T-34-85M Armor Error
Thanks to xxviktor for noticing this.
Hello everyone,
in the early 9.5 vehicle changes post, I wrote that the screwed the T-34-85M model by shifting the turret, but not its mantlet – like this:
As a result, the mantlet was clipping into the left part of frontal turret armor and there was a (small, but noticeable) hole on the right side.
So, do you think they fixed it? Of course not. In 9.5:
Notice the yellow hole on the right side, not covered by the mantlet. And don’t forget to buy the T-34-85M bundle and remember: Wargaming quality assurance is one of the best in business!
PS: yes, it’s a small thing, but it’s about the principle – they could have checked, I even posted in on FTR. Especially when it comes to a tank sold for real life money.
Burlington Township (NJ) Memorial
Hello everyone,
just a couple of interesting photos from the Burlington Township’s memorial park to US forces. It contains three interesting items – a M60A3 Patton main battle tank, a Huey helicopter and a F-86H Sabre jet fighter. Many thanks to AfailingHORSE from US server for this one.
World of Papoj – Christmas Edition
Okay, one more World of Papoj – enjoy :)
Straight Outta Supertest: Vehicles
Hello everyone,
some info from supertest regarding the current batch that is tested.
- ISU-130 is a tank destroyer intended as a reward for moderators (Russian ones that is, likely anyway)
- STA-2 and AMX-13/57 seem to be regular premium vehicles (STA-2 definitely is, AMX-13/57 not clear)
- AMX CDC is insanely fun on supertest (as you can imagine), but is is actually not clear whether this is a real premium vehicle, or some sort of reward tank, not even to supertesters.
CDC not in shops = riots!
Meanwhile in 9.5…
Hello everyone,
five people have already sent me pictures of what seems to be a really nasty bug in 9.5. It does NOT seem to be connected with mods at all, as two of those people do not use any mods or remodels.
Something’s missing here… oh, that’s right, the entire hull. It does seem to be connected to LOD though, or at least detail settings, as all the other pictures come with lower settings than maximum, but that’s just pure guessing. Do you experience the same issue? Let me know, link screenshots in comments!
Storm Q&A
Hello everyone,
what follows are the answers from Storm’s stream he made earlier today. I didn’t link it (obviously, no point since he was speaking Russian). I gave up after a while and translated Maiorboltach’s summary instead, thanks Mario :)
- the reason the British were implemented in 9.5 is the fact that WG had the most good materials (sources, like drawings and such) for this branch
- with other nations (French, Japanese MT’s), there are big problems with data collection
- in WG concept, a branch without tier 10 doesn’t count as a branch, that’s why FV4005 was decided to be implemented
- it took long to decide whether to implement FV4005 or not
- in the end WG decided to make one of the tier 10 British TD vehicles heavily armored (FV215b) and one less armored (FV4005) to differentiate them
- FV4005 turret armor is historical, Stage 2 was implemented because Stage 1 had an autoloader and no turret
- the 9.5 branch is composed of only vehicles, that existed at least in prototype or even fought in the war
KTTS/ASAP: New Mode “Winter Showdown”
In Russian for now, but it has English subtitles.
Inside:
- this mode resembles the encounter mode in random battles
- two teams, one base
- battle takes 7 minutes
- each team has 10 players
- there’s an option of “superplatoon” of 5 people
- three vehicles, each is specific: Arctic Fox is light and fast, Mammoth has an autoloader and Polar Bear high alpha
- two types of shells: AP and special healing shells (if you shoot allies, you heal them)
- there will be special missions in this mode for extra crew XP and credits, also a new medal
This mode will come “very soon”.
WoWs Test Results
An info picture by Wargaming… actually, I expected the numbers to be lower, but then, it WAS a stress test. There’s one more thing though. I complained about the graphics (specifically, low texture resolution) but there might have been a legitimate reason for that, as Locastan explained:
“They were afraid of other gaming companies and “freelance” chinese developers stealing their higher resolution meshes and textures for their copycat game and beating them to the finish line. That could always happen with the closed alpha client too, but at least the numbers are far less…so less chance of leakage.”
That actually explains a lot…
How Wargaming Servers Work
Hello everyone,
first, many thanks to world_of_cactus for finding this very interesting video. In it, Maksim Baryshnikov is explaining, how the server architecture works during a lecture in Minsk on 13.12.2014 (during the Wargaming Developer Contest event in Minsk). And it’s… interesting. I wish this was in English, but it is not and the guy speaks TERRIBLY (hard to understand), but I’ll do my best to bring you the info from it. So, here’s the video.
The reason I think this is worth a deep-dive even for non-developers is that real-time multiplayer infrastructure is one of those problem spaces where the same engineering tradeoffs keep showing up in totally different industries — game studios, live-streaming services, trading platforms, even the people running an online casino at scale all wrestle with the same questions about regional clusters, latency, and failover. Wargaming has been solving these things at MMO scale for years, so even a rough translation of Baryshnikov’s lecture is more useful than it looks at first.
There are various servers within the cluster – (for EU it’s Amsterdam and Frankfurt). They are tied within the cluster. For some reason, RU cluster has two servers in Europe (one in Amsterdam, one in Frankfurt) and they are tied together as such:
Amsterdam has two datacenters with cca 40 servers, Franfurt has 70 servers. To compare, Moscow has 5 datacenters with 250+ servers (Novosibirsk has 80 servers, Krasnoyarsk has 70 servers).