[WoT] The Map Thing

As I have mentioned a few times, we are currently streamlining our level design workflow and techniques. Your feedback on the existing in-game maps is highly welcomed.

Which of the current maps do you enjoy? Why?
Which reworked maps are overhauled poorly and why?
Maps of what setting/type do you prefer in general?

Let's discuss here.

PS. some extra info to fuel the discussion:

• Dragon Ridge and Serene Coast will be disabled in 8.4.
• Bumpy terrain of Prokhorovka, Abbey, El Halluf, and Ruinberg (rounded streets) are going to be addressed.
• Redshire and El Halluf will undergo some gameplay changes.
• Swamp and Komarin will be visually reworked and brought back to live.

[WoWS] Rare USN Designs

Hello, everyone.

While I was away during most of January, and half of this time I've spent in Saint-Petersburg, taking part in conversations, meetings, holywars and so on, I still think I have something to say. This is not about the game itself, just because everything small that I can tell, I'm telling at NA and RU forums - and big news aren't going to happen until OBT starts. But as a man, taking part into the making of ship trees process, I want to share some more info.

Today we gonna look at some rare USN ships, which were actually never-built due to some reasons.

Let us start with this one:

This is a so-called "small" battleship, year 1919 project, or, to be certain, the "Small Battleship - Design F-3" preliminary design proposal, dated April 1919.

Normal displacement - 21.500 tonns.
Speed - 18 knots.
Armor - 12" belt.
Guns - two twin 16".

Of course, Mr. Freedman's book can tell us what is it and why it was proposed with far greater detail.
I'll just tell that in my own words: Chief Constructor of USN in 1919, Rear Admiral David W. Taylor, felt that ships were started to grow into a very large ones, so he tried to let see what can be done with less effort in materials, money and crew.

The results were...not the ones he hoped for. Even the smallest of these small battleships were larger than a dreadnought, while being slower, somewhat with same protection and only with four 16" guns (which was half of the firepower of Colorado class, for example).
The 29 knot version of this "small" battleship had normal displacement of 37.000 tonns, which was a 5.000 tonns larger (!) than a Colorado class battleship. Of course, when actual numbers appeared, all of this "small" battleship designs went right to the far-far shelf.

So, you can understand why this beautiful concept of "more battleships with less money" crashed. All in all, for the country with such an industrial potential, like USA, it wasn't so attractive anyway.
While it was not the first time, when great ideas weren't in touch with a reality, this case is a rather demonstrative one.

Thanks for reading,
KGB out

[ALL] ChrisK Has Joined the Club!

I'm extremely excited to introduce one more speaker (finally native with English :)) who has just joined the blogging crowd and is going to use this resource as means of communication with you, guys. Chris Keeling aka ChrisK is Senior Producer at Wargaming.net, make him feel welcome here.

Overlord

I started freelancing in game writing and design on Panzer Elite for Wings Simulations in 1998, while I was still on active duty with the U.S. Army. After I transferred to the reserves, I continued to work freelance on games like America's Army: Operations, America's Army: Soldiers, Twilight War, and Order of War. I also squeezed in a year and a half combat deployment to Iraq, published my own World War II tabletop miniatures rules, and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Videogame Production and Design along the way. In 2009, I accepted an offer to teach full-time in the Game Design program at Full Sail University.

Things changed fairly quickly after that - I developed and taught several classes, and eventually became the Program Manager of the entire Game Design program (responsible for more than two dozen Course Directors and over 1,600 students!). I retired from the Army Reserve after 23 years of total service and continued to freelance part-time for Wargaming.Net. After the release of Order of War, the company kept growing, from about 60 developers in Minsk (plus one American consultant!) to over 1,300 developers in several studios with offices in about a dozen countries. We could only do this because of the amazing success of World of Tanks, and the potential we could see in World of Warplanes and World of Warships. 

After about four years of freelancing, I was offered a full-time position as Senior Producer here at Wargaming.Net. I have now embarked on the adventure of a lifetime working for a really amazing company loaded with vision, drive, and purpose. Among other things, I suggest Westernization practices and features that will enhance our appeal to players in North America and Western Europe (and, hopefully, everywhere else!), while working on secret new game ideas that may see the light of day in the future. On this blog I will help clarify some of the reasons behind our design decisions, predict some of our future endeavors, and occasionally explain some of the “historical elasticity” used to keep our games balanced between authenticity and fun.

When I’m not slaving away over my keyboard, reading player feedback in the forums, analyzing development plans, or playing other games (it’s research, honest!), you can find me playing as ChrisK on World of Tanks and in the World of Warplanes closed beta, or alpha testing a couple of games still under wraps, like World of Warships. 

See you on the battlefield!

ChrisK

[WoT] Do You Love Tanks?

based on 8.3 release on EU and NA

Do you love tanks as much as we do?

Don't bother to reply, that's rhetorical. The main reason for World of Tanks becoming a great game (apart from millions of great players all around the world) is our passion for tanks and engineering.

True that we are not aiming to reach the highest level of historical authenticity, we simplify a lot, but on the other hand, this gives us an opportunity to tell our story to many, not few. 

USSR - Germany - USA

Those are undoubtedly the "big 3". The major tank nations of the era. You can have your own favorites and the hated ones, but one can't argue that those tank schools affected modern tank development most.

France and Great Britain

That's how it all began. Back in WWI days with British Mark I that laid down the foundation of armoured motor vehicles and up to French Renault FT-17, one of the the most revolutionary and influential tank designs in the entire history of engineering.

Those two deserved their spots regardless any further contributions or lack of them.

China

I must admit that initially we did share the common opinion that China had never had its own, even partially independent and unique, tank development. To our great surprise and astonishment, when our Chinese partners brought up the idea of doing some research to prove that we were wrong - we just couldn't refuse.

The documents we got eventually are a true terra incognita even in China, not speaking of the rest of the world. Generally speaking, China is a closed (?) country, extremely reluctant when it comes to sharing its defence projects with others. The fact that we were able to obtain the information that allowed us to make up medium and heavy branches - is a great deal. It's rewarding to see how results of your hard work become "alive" in game. When our Chinese partners finish their research on SPGs and TDs, we will eagerly add those two missing branches as well. 

That's how the Chinese tree was planted. True thing that initially it was intended for Chinese server only, however when we realized it all looked great, we had no other option, but to share our results with the rest of the world.

Our next stop...

Japan, rest of Europe? ....

By the way the new poll is up.

[WoT] Global Vision: Part II

This post is the continuation of the recent Global Vision: Part I article where we covered the CW plans for the near future.

What else we have in stock.

Sabotage and how to fight it

Sabotage is a kind of special clan consumable which represents a mobile tactical unit that can be sent behind the enemy lines with the aim to ... guess what? - Perform sabotage, yes.

It works this way: using your scout/intelligence you can assess revolt chances for a particular enemy province, the higher the chance, the more likely it is that your sabotage will be successful. The outcome of your sabotage will be known next turn. Typical sabotage effects to choose from:
- minus 1 token to enemy defense in a given province
- "railway war" - disables borders between provinces for some time
- destruction of enemy HQ
- provocation - chance of starting revolt in enemy province
- etc.

Just as revolts/pillages, this functionality is likely to be tested as CWs special.

Counter-intelligence is the best way to prevent your enemies from successful acts of sabotage. The lower revolt probability of your province, the lower enemy chances to perform successful sabotage on your territories.

Global Map Seasons

The below is a bit more distant in terms of time.
The entire mode of Clan Wars will be changed due to the upcoming implementation of seasons.
Season is a sort of global event that takes place in all provinces, i.e. active throughout the Global map. Each season is preceded by wipe/reset - everyone starts from scratch on a completely virgin map.

Season starts just as CWs beta did back in 2011 - with global contest mode - all provinces are available for landing.

Each season will last 2-3 months and eventually get its own winner and, of course, losers.
Seasons will be broken into several stages with different rules, conditions, and restrictions for each of them - e.g. vehicle tier restrictions, missions and goals (gold farming, capturing specified key provinces), etc.

Depending on the functionality available that time it can be Revolution stage with higher revolt chances for one stage, with totally different rules for another stage.

Based on clan performance during each stage special Victory points will be awarded and stage winners defined based on them.

Winner of the entire season will be determined by the total number of Victory points earned throughout the season. However, this concept is still subject to design changes. Winners will get special and huge prizes (this is not subject to change).

Seasons end with another Global map wipe/reset and shuts down for vacation while everyone is waiting for another season with new rules and new prizes. 

Make it comfortable

Such a crucial mechanics change as seasons requires an overhaul and massive improvement of clan functionality available for players. This work is going to be done in parallel. We are planning to add clan statistics, leaderboards, achievements, thinking of how to facilitate clan communication and action logging.

Obviously this would require some time to be done, but there is no other way.

Let us know

In these two posts I have given only the basic ideas on what will happen to Global map in foreseeable future. Sure thing, we have got many more plans and ideas. I intentionally left out the mercenary thing (it hasn't been dumped), CWs merger, transfers, and some other delicious stuff.

Just like with client-side updates, we are planning to communicate update notes and release plans for CWs since it's an inherent part of WoT.

[WoT] Global Vision: Part I

Last time we spoke about Global map was not so long ago, but it's about time we summarized everything, provided our feedback and some additional info on the subject. I'm going to give an update on the current state of things in two posts. You about to read the first one.   

For simplification purposes (multiple regions, multiple releases) I will use Russian (RU) server as an example.

Clan Wars mode is still at beta stage (yeah, rather continuous I must say) in ALL regions, we still have got a lot to do so as to ensure the release quality of the product.  As usual, there are lots of ideas and plans in the air on what to improve.

Technical side

On RU side (to a lesser extent this applies to EU and NA) Global map can be prone to technical failures because of high server load for the main RU1 server. To solve the issue we are going to implement new mechanics - provinces will be assigned to a separate server closest to their precise location (not just one dedicated server for all regions as it is now). Taking RU as example again, battles for Moscow and nearby regions will be played on Moscow-based hardware, same for Siberia. The thing is that it will allow not only to cope with the load better but also to prepare for making Clan Wars really global. Yes, merge is still in plans, however the ETA is unknown. Once things become global, the above mentioned feature will make sure battles for respective regions are played on respective servers. In respective prime time. :)

Because of the peculiarities of turn processing, battle room can be created only 1-2 minutes before the battle start, not regular 15 minutes. This is a known issue that is planned to be reworked as a part of code optimization.

Demand for new stuff

Clan Wars mode has been at beta stage for ... how long?... Should be around 1.5 years for now. This is very unfortunate that our end-game content suffered most from the lack of manpower and required resources. Clan Wars, as a separate project within Wargaming, got its own dedicated team only in late 2012. We have planned really a lot from game design perspective, but were shorthanded where it came to actual implementation. Now things are determined to get better.

Global Map Events are special semi-historical scenarios that last for limited period of time.

For testing purposes events were conducted only on RU server. There were 2 of them:

• Atlantida (summer) - our first try with a separate island that came to the surface in the Atlantic and later drowned again. It was defended by WG's Rattes and some of the top clans.
• Mongolia (late autumn) - for Mongolia provinces with vehicle tier restrictions - tiers 1-3 (yeah, SU-26 time!). It received a warmer welcome than the first one.

It is decided to continue such events in future.

So, what's planned?

Again we do really hope (and there are reasons for that!) that things will get better in 2013 from production point of view. New version of the portal that is planned for release on RU server in January/February will contain two major features: pillages and revolts, and on top of them - modified tank freezing mechanics.

Pillage

The concept resembles the one used in Total War series. After you have conquered the province you can either pillage it or just occupy as usual. Pillage brings you 3-day income at once, after that the province won't generate any resources to any owner for 7 days.

Revolt

With certain probability that depends on various factors each owned province can become a starting one (regular landing rules apply) till the end of the current prime time. The following factors can increase chances of this happening: clan loses any province or HQ, there are no troops / tokens in the province, etc. And vice versa.

Both pillages and revolts are almost ready and are likely to be introduced as a kind of special on RU region (with subsequent releases on other servers) to test how things will work out. If the results are satisfactory, the features will stay.

Freeze times for vehicles are meant to be changed. Successful offensives will be rewarded with decreased freeze times - let's assume that invaders capture hypothetical resources to repair their machinery while defenders have got nothing else apart from what they already have. :)

Having captured a regular province, you will get -50% freeze times, for gold province - 90%. Offensive gameplay is incentivized.

New make-up

Apart from new features, later this year (approx summer for RU), we are planning to upgrade visual part of CWs (engine) and greatly improve usability (UI). The most important change is giving up region-based system on portal - you won't have to select a separate region to view it anymore. The entire Global map will be available at a glance. Troops relocation and multiple attacks will be made easier to perform.

To be continued...

[WoWS] Early Russian Dreadnoughts preliminary drawings

Hi everyone. I'd like to tell you about early dreadnought drawings in Russian Empire Fleet.

As all of you know, the HMS Dreadnought was laid down in october, 1905. Of course, all great powers of early 20th century kept their eye on everything, related to navy powers, and the first news about an absolutely new type of warship came to Russia in autumn, 1905.

In 1906, the so-called "special meeting" was founded under the leadership of the Minister of Marine Birilev; the main goal of this comission was to define the demands of the characteristics of the future dreadnoughts.

In common, the projected characteristics of the dreadnoughts of 1907 programm are listed below:

Speed: 21-23 knots, 

Armor: 8 inch belt, 10 inch barbettes,

Armament: ten 12 inch guns with barrel length of 50 calibers,

Displacement: 19000 to 21000 tonns.

Thats how these ships might look like:

As you see, the drawings are closer to predreadnoughts than to real dreadnoughts, but still, these ships are rather realistic in terms of "paper drawings". 

It is expected that one of these ships will be the first battleship in Russia/USSR tree.

Thanks for watching,

KGB.

[WoT] Doyle, Kubinka, and Much More. Part 9: Final Answer Bulletin

This post is the final one from Q&A session with H. L. Doyle, well-known German WWII military exert. See previous issues:

Batch 1
Batch 2
Batch 3
Batch 4
Batch 5

Doyle's replies are bolded (just in case).  

51.    I’d like to add something to the penetration questions.
What about:
I) partial deflection of sloped armour which meant that shells did not follow the initial trajectory even if they penetrated.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Projectil_deflection_effects.jpg
see in c) the 'effective thickness' vs. 'line of sight thickness' and in d) 'inertia' vs. 'resistance force'
II) linearity of the 'penetration quality' -> % of fragments behind the plate (the 50 vs. 75% thing) and to what extent this allows you to make assumptions about a certain shell in a different nation's test

As I explained before I have not researched this field of penetration to any great extent.  There is a lot of material in various archives but I did not collect copies.  I am sorry.

52.    I would like to hear what were the merits and drawbacks of the VK3002DB design compared to the MAN version and why it was not chosen in the end.

In our book “Germany's Panther tank” - the quest for combat supremacy, we reproduced many pages of the history of the development of the VK 30 series and the intense competition between M.A.N and Daimler-Benz.
 I will quote the record of a meeting of the Board of Daimler-Benz on 3 June 1942 which describes the final outcome of the competition.
Our proposal for the new tank was not accepted by the special Commission established by Hitler.  Instead they selected the M.A.N design for a large-scale production after the initial proposal from M.A.N apparently was improved.  During a meeting M.A.N had the opportunity to learn all the advantages of our proposal which they then took into consideration in their own design.
At first the majority of the experts were impressed by our proposal.  Even Hitler had expressed his approval. But then the Commission consisting of Thomale and Eberan decided against us for the following reasons:
1.    the double torsion bar suspension from Porsche was chosen over our leaf springs
2.    the MB 507 motor proposed by us cannot be produced in the numbers required
3.    Our design requires a new turret.  The turret for the M.A.N design was already designed.  The M.A.N vehicle had front drive our vehicle had rear drive.  Because of the rear drive our vehicle required a new turret design.  It was admitted at the rear drive possessed advantages.

We are completing only two experimental vehicles that positively will make a good impression.   The two experimental vehicles are to be completed in June /July of 1943.  The entire tank should be completed since we can finally obtain the turret ourselves.  We still have the contract to build these two prototypes and therefore we will also want to demonstrate these as completed tanks.
A Rheinmetall turret mounting the 7.5cm K.w.K 42 L/70 had been designed as an alternative for the Tiger starting in mid 1941.  This turret was the basis of the turret on the M.A.N Panther.

53.    How much information is there yet to be discovered in old German wartime archives? Has everything pretty much been looked thoroughly, or is new or under-examined material still surfacing?

Probably less that 10% of the documentation generated during Panzer development from 1928 to 1945 has survived.   A most was destroyed at the end of the war and sadly quite a lot since then.  During the seventies and eighties we visited many companies and fortunately we were given access to archive materials but now the material we saw has “vanished”   In other cases when we arrived at companies we got the response “it is a pity you did not visit last year before the man in charge of our old archives retired and as we have no need to keep old paper they have been destroyed”
At the Bundesarchiv the 80/20 rule applies to research – probably 80% of the information has been found as it is the part relatively easy to search.  Definitely there is additional information to be located but it will take a long time to find the materials as they are not filled in the expected locations or have yet to be catalogued. There is even a small chance to find new facts by accident when researching other matters. 
The greatest success for Panzer Tracts has come from researching all of different archives in many countries and developing an understanding of what files are worth investigating.   Private and specialist collectors also add finds from time to time.
New finds are very important as sometimes they throw light on and explain other data from old research that may not make sense.

54.    How long did it take for the Germans to build their tanks in WWII? Again, according to Osprey's _Panther vs. T-34_ the panther took eighteen times more man-hours to build than a T-34-76. Do you have any idea where these figures came from, and whether they are accurate? If German tanks did take longer to build than allied tanks, was it because their designs were complicated or because German industrial techniques were inefficient?

I have not seen any “original” document with such a direct and wild comparison as claimed by the author of this Osprey book.  Clearly, the Panther was a complex machine with a very high level of detailed finish as could be expected from a product of German Industry.  I have often wondered about the need to bevel every armour plate and machine so many surfaces, but I doubt the time 18 difference.  The Germans did not put their industry on to a full war footing until 1943.  The highest production of all types of Panzers was achieved in November 1944.  Component production was highly dispersed but delivery depended upon reliable rail transport.  Increasing shortages of raw materials, manpower, and especially energy caused by bombing caused many problems.
Below us a drawings I made showing the M.N.H. factory in Hannover that was assembling Panther and Jagdpanther.  Certainly they were not using “Henry Ford” mass production methods where each worker did the one job all the time.  Groups of workers were responsible completing the entire task associated with each stage.

55.    Are there any data on German tests of captured Allied weapons?

The German test establishment at Kummersdorf tested many Allied Tanks but as Allied Tanks are not my field of research I have never ordered copies of these documents.

The above photo which was sold on eBay shows a parade of the Kummersdorf detachment with some of their Allied test vehicles in the back ground.  The Kummersdorf reports were like those produced by the British and Russians and gave a commentary on the performance and capability. 

As can be seen on this photo of an IS152 the armour thickness and angle was painted on all test vehicles by Kummersdorf.

The German usually tested their guns against their own vehicles.  Periodically hulls were provided by the armour manufacturers to be used as targets.  Here is a photo Porsche Tiger hull manufactured by Krupp that was set aside and used as a gunnery test on 30 April 1942.

Bonus facts
 
Additional fact pertaining to Questions 33 and 48 on turret traverse speeds

Panther
I located my copy of a British technical examination dated 9 May 1945 on Panther turret traverse speeds.  The performance is quite spectacular when compared to the Tiger Ausf.E. and combined with the accurate 7.5cm K.w.K 42 L/70 made the Panther a tank to be feared if the crew was experienced and motivated and the unit well led.

Like the Tiger the Panther had a two speed hydraulic power traverse. The gunner could selected the desired speed with a gear lever and then using a pivoting foot pedal he could push on the forward end to traverse right and push on the back to traverse left. 

The speed depended upon the main engine speed so at 2500 rpm and in the high gear a full 360 degree traverse would take only 17 or 18 seconds depending on the direction of traverse.  At 1000 rpm the same 360 degrees took 46 seconds. 

When the lower rear was selected and the Maybach HL 230 was running at 1000 rpm 360 degrees took 92 or 93 seconds depending on direction.

KVI
I found a similar report on the KV I.   A three speed electrical power traverse was provided.  At the highest speed the turret took 71 seconds to traverse 360 degrees at the lowest speed it could take 122 seconds for 360 degrees. 

T34/76
The test on the T 34/76 using a similar electrical power traverse to the KVI in high gear could achieve 360 degrees in 14 seconds.And extra a few tit-bits

The Germans captured and translated Russian document on Tank Tactics published in August 1944
...tank-versus-tank battles are unavoidable but whenever possible German tanks are to be destroyed by the air force, artillery and antitank weapons so that our (Russian) tanks remain free to attack the infantry...
From a German Report of the same period
 .... Russian troops are commended for striving to prevent IS tanks from falling into tour hands and it would be desirable that our Tiger crews would observe the same principles.

PS: Next time we are going to continue with Soviet tanks expert - Yuri Pasholok.

[WoWS] Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!

2012 was a hard year for World of Warships team.
We changed conceptions and expanded maps couple times, we fought and keep fighting for FPS rate, we tuned ship movement like hundred times; in 2012 WoWS got Hit Location system and great ballistics. We even implemented flooding!

In 2012 we held three gameplay Focus Tests, to ensure that we are moving the right way - and every time people told us "That's a great game!". From 4x4 BB only format we came to 8x8 BB/CA, and the FT3 got 12x12 BB/CA/CV.

There are still many things to do: torpedo bombers, complex HL, upgrades and presets for ships, etc.
But I can tell you that we will do everything and even more to make the great game for you!

Happy New Year!
See you in 2013!

KGB

[WoT] On SPGs and MMing

Too many SPGs in battles is one of the persistent issues in WoT. It does affect the gameplay and can change the perception of the entire game.

Additional match-making requirements that are already live on RU servers and pending implementation worldwide are the following:

5 SPGs per team is a so called semi-hard cap which means 5 is maximum number of SPGs per team if the battle is created correctly, ie without any errors. The prerequisites for that are relatively high CCU (that's why might be somewhat hard for NA server) and no particular imbalance or disproportion between vehicle classes in waiting queue.

In addtion to the above the SPG-cap for high tier battles is floating and varies from 2 to 5 arty units per team.

Simplifying things, battles are created by the server in succession with different SPG limits: 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc

For lower tiers the limits are a bit different and depend on the average SPG percentage for that particular battle tier.

Such matchmaking adjustment will increase waiting time in queue for all tanks:
- for tanks/TDs the increase is going to be relatively small - up to a few seconds (under normal conditions)
- for SPGs the increase is going to be more noticeable - up to 30-60 seconds in worst cases.

The cap mechanics was chosen taking into account possible increase of waiting time. The harder the cap and the more restrictions, the longer waiting times. Especially for less-populated servers (on single RU cluster there can be 140-200k players)