TankFest 2015 Impressions

Hello Warriors,

many been asking how my experience was at TankFest so I decided to highlight the start of my Monday's live-stream when I talked about it with some of you:

Was there as a guest from The Tank Museum and Wargaming for 3 days.

Have to say that was very nice to meet so many of you (so many little kids approached me, it seriously melted my heart), being able to put faces to nicknames and thank you for all the booze, sweets, books, pins and figures you gifted, they all will be treasured, well... except for the booze, most of it is gone already. :)

Felt like a child in a candy store around so many tanks that I had been dreaming about seeing for such a long time, Tortoise in particular is such a exquisite tank (wider than I imagined), the KV-1 and M3 Grant also caught my eyes, it was hard to contain my excitement.

The cherry on top of the cake was meeting Yuri Pasholok, wasn't expecting seeing him whatsoever and only recognized by his very distinctive eye features when we, by the odds, crossed paths. He is a really nice lad who was kind enough to give me his book with a sweet signed message inside. We did took a photo together but I'm a little bit ashamed to show it, fangirled so hard to the moment that I look like Kryten from "Red Dwarf" when he tries to say smeghead! *giggles*

Jingles: Interview with Victor Kislyi Part 2

Hello Warriors,

the part 2 of the Mighty Jingles interview with Victor Kislyi video is now available:

Enjoy! :)

David Fletcher MBE Tank Chats: British Mark II

Hello Warriors,


David Fletcher MBE from The Tank Museum is back! This time he talks about the British Mark II:

Enjoy! :)

More random stuff from the Insider

Just a bunch of more random stuff from the Insider:

- there are new admin WG forums that have some interesting pieces of information in them

- SerB is portrayed as a religion by some ru players? "The second coming of the SerB is what they ask, and we shall deliver unto them" (jokes about a hellix fossil come here)

- SerB has been very busy, and MoO will reflect a bit of his thoughts on that part (he is a fan) without affecting gameplay at all (sorry, no SerB spacefaring race for us! cant nerf the galaxy :( )

- SerB may come back to WoT development "cant say I really left it", this may cause a lot of rejoice, and whines too in the community

- SerB space program? "The sun is too small for me"

- A dev was "caught" (in a joking terms) visiting an adult webpage, but theres no penalty "a boss can't fire himself" - the overall theme of the topic was between jokes.

- Some devs do watch game of thrones, no one liked Jon Snow's death  - "if Tyrion dies, we riot"

- Not one of the devs (not even the girls) likes Justin Bieber  Q:"Wasnt he supposed to be on a tour in North Korea?" A: "They kicked him out"

- Storm was briefly asked, why do you keep the Q&A open and still take all that shit? (referring to insults directed towards him) A: "It's either me or someone else, whoever gives the answers will always get some sort of flak, fortunately, a large majority still cares and talks properly, these are the people I answer to."

- Something worth a  Sadface, no plans to make a EU/NA/SEA/KR/CN Q&A like the RU one,(meaning having direct contact with a developer) "all answers on these clusters are discretionary of their managers and subject to Minsk"

- Storm has no strong opinion for AW yet: "It's healthy competition. We focus on our own, just like they do"

The Insider: Why was Mäuschen removed? Plus the issue of mods

Hello warriors,

the Insider from Wargaming wrote an interesting letter to me regarding the removal of the Mäuschen and other things. This comes from internal discussion between developers and should serve to illustrate the issues with that tank. Why was then Mauschen removed?

- it's extremely powerful when on top of the team. Technically tier 7 tanks have absolutely no hope of reliably stopping the tank, a platoon of 3 of these beasts will simply steamroll anything when on top of the match and even tier 8 tanks have great difficulties fighting them them

- only tier 9 tanks are competitive against it, with a few exceptions of tank destroyers of tier 8

- however, on tier 10 matches, the Mauschens are hopelessly outmatched by anything

- balancing it further is a nightmare (too powerful against low tiers, yet too weak against high tiers) and the tank itself comes at a bad time when artillery mechanic is about to be reworked and shell penetrations are being reworked

 - should it be rebalanced once again, the tank's guns would be "trash" - especially the 15cm where the removal of HEAT rounds did not solve the issue, in fact it only made the tank feel weaker against same tier, and nearly useless against tier 10, yet allowing it to use HEAT shells would make it extremely powerful. (briefly described as "pedobear sydrome", too good against anything lower than itself)

To sum it up, the current public test shows that over 80% of the Mauschen players shoot HE over AP, but used AP against tier 7-8 with devastating results (usually oneshots and other mumbo jumbo). The fact that the current shell penetrations got rolled back doesn't mean they are shelved, they will certainly come back after tweaking, especially gold shells. Once proper changes are implemented, the Mauschen will come back.