WarGaming.Net is entering nextgen console market

WarGaming.Net acquired for 20mil USD, Chicago based game developer,  Day 1 Studios.


The Chicago studio will focus solely on console gaming, working on an as yet undisclosed title. The studio is best known for ports of first-person shooter F.E.A.R. and LucasArts Fracture. The studio has been renamed Wargaming West.


WarGaming tries to enter console market, not even current generation market, but next gen. The earliest possible for this new game 2015, .....

Instead of using the extra money they had on fixing the god damn fucking piece of crap BigWorld engine client side, or I dunno .. finish World of Warplanes and World of Warships, they decide to give a fuck and enter console market, but just not yet.

The next gen consoles will 100% have multicore CPUs and we all know how well BigWorld does with those - absolutely terrible.
Guess they will have to create a new engine from scratch or hmm .. buy a new game engine dev for 60mil USD this time.

Morons!

Hey .. they could've got Vigil from now defunct THQ, or enter the bidding for any of the dev teams under THQ's umbrella.


Sources: here and here.

WoT EU server % statistics top tier tanks - January

The data is collected via http://wot-news.com and it's unofficial, treat it as such.
Source for the data: http://wot-news.com/stat/server/eu/norm/en

WarThunder goes OPEN BETA

Gaijin Entertainment, the developer and publisher of the upcoming World War II combat MMO War Thunder, is announcing the start of the game’s OPEN BETA test in Europe, North America, and South America.

After four years of working on War Thunder, we’re sincerely happy that we can finally present it to the gaming community all over the world,» says Kirill Yudintsev, Creative Director of Gaijin Entertainment. «Every stage of the development, and every update, brings us closer to the goal we’ve established for War Thunder: a combat MMO so massive it’s sort of game that, until now, players could only dream about. With all of the new features recently added, we believe that War Thunder will exceed players’ expectations and that aerial combat fans and World War II buffs are in for a real treat.

To get enrolled  in the OPEN BETA, players must register an account at War Thunder web-site, or log in to a previously created account, and download the game client directly from WarThunder.com.

WarThunder - does fuel and weapon load matter in arcade mode?

The simple answer to this question is yes, it does matter what quantity of fuel and ammo load/type you take on board. It does affect the flight characteristics of your plane.

The more elaborate answer to the question is detailed below.

I did four tests - take off from the runway and climb to 1000m, measure the time; each with a sub test - screenshot the exact moment instructor retracted the gear and the "Gear Up" message appeared on the HUD.
In each test I throttled to 100% power with least humanly possible to not go into WEP (overdrive), and I did not touched the flight control surfaces. I used the US P-47D ThunderBolt in Test Flight mode.

The test flight were done with the following settings:

• difficulty level - simplified
• fuel and ammo - limited F/A
• weapons - mg x 8 (test 1 and 2) + HVAR x 10 (test 3 and 4)
• fuel amount - 5min (test 1 and 4) / full tank (test 2 and 3)

Test 1 - basic load of ammo (8 machine guns) and 5 minutes of fuel

time to 1000m - 1 minute and 30 seconds

Test 2 - basic ammo load and full tank of fuel

time to 1000m - 1 minute and 50 seconds

Test 3 - 8 x MGs + 10 x HVAR rockets and full tank of fuel

time to 1000m - 2 minutes and 8 seconds

Test 4 - 8 x MGs + 10 x HVAR rockets and 5 minutes of fuel

time to 1000m - 1 mute and 43 seconds


User named Jingles from the WT EU forums made this video regarding same subject:

Fly safe and knock them dead!
zMeul over and out

[UPDATE] Is WarGaming EU "stealing" gold from their players?

This is about a recent bug that was discovered, bug that reloads premium ammo for gold even if the player has specifically selected Cr.

This isn't the old bug that charged gold when the gun was changed on the tank, this is an entirely new bug confirmed a few days ago.

User(s) affected by this have created tickets to support but WarGaming refuses to reimburse their gold, to some.

So far, WarGaming Europe has made no official announcement regarding this new bug, neither on their main portal nor via in game announcements. People that do not visit the forums regularly are completely unaware by the existence of this bug.

I am not a lawyer and I have no connections to the law, but according to law dictionaries this is called embezzlement.
Let it be clear - I do not accuse WarGaming of theft!
What they do and how they behave it's in not any shape or form OK. It's not only unfair to their customers, it's borderline illegal.

Let's look at this another way. those few premium shells worth about 5 Euro-cents, 0.05€. Not all players have gold on their account, but let's assume 50000 players do. 0.05*50000=2500€. Hello thousands of Euros ...

I'm quite amazed by the fact WarGaming has done nothing in regard of this bug. They did not make an official announcement, they did not hot-fixed the issue or, because of it's gravity, disable premium ammo until the issue is solved.


[Update]
Here is quote /conversation with support from a user (DashingPanache) who was denied by support a refund

Ticket ID GLH-556-46913
Category
    World of Tanks
Subcategory:
    In-Game Goods
I set up my tanks such that they are auto repaired, consumables restored and ammo restored after each match.
I also make sure that the premium ammo, if selected, if paid for by credits, not gold.I note that, very, very wrongly on your part, that sometimes when you open the game for the first time some tanks reset to using gold for their ammo replenishment despite always being set to use credits.
After a game today using my Tiger P at 20:50 local time, I was auto charged gold for 2 ammo rounds for a total of 20 gold.
I never ever authorised the game to do this and for this reason I must insist that the amount is credited back to my account. I appreciate that in value terms we are talking about very little money, but the simple fact is that is money you have taken from me without my consent and I refuse to allow this.
I look forward to your confirmation of same.
    George Lecross Yesterday at 12:47
    Hello Commander,
    Thank you for contacting us with this issue.
    Unfortunately we are not able to refund you these 20 gold.
    Please make sure to always change on credits in a method of payment for premium ammo- this will prevent the issue from happening again.
    Kind Regards,
    George Lecross
    CS Wargaming Europe
    DashingPanache Yesterday at 18:48
    Dear George,
    That is an unacceptable answer. As I clearly stated, I am careful to check each time I load up that credits not gold are selected for ammo.
    In addition, the very fact that the game keeps trying to change it to gold rather than credits despite my direction otherwise is, given that you are in effect taking money, illegal and at best negligent on your behalf, at worst extremely sharp practice.
    You have received well over €100 from me so it is not as if I am counting the pennies, but there is an important point of principle here that I will not back down from. If you cannot repay the value you have, against my specific and frequent direction, taken illegally I will expect you to put me in touch with the relevant manager as I will pursue any and all means to redress this wholly illegal move on your part that is the result of negligence or sharp practice in your programming that amounts to theft.
    Maciej Zawada Today at 08:42
    Dear Tank Commander,
    Thank you for your reply.
    We would like to assure you, that we're not trying to steal anything from you.
    For the future, we can only advise that while using premium ammunition for credits, you keep the auto resupply option off.
    Also, if you wish to submit a formal complaint to our managers, please write it in English and send to us and we will forward it to them immediately.
    Kind regards,
    Maciej Zawada
    Customer Service Europe
    https://support.worldoftanks.eu
    DashingPanache Today at 18:07
    Dear Sirs,
    Please pass on to me the e-mail address of the appropriate person so that i can communicate with them directly.
    I appreciate that your position is that you are not trying to steal from customers, but the law does not care for your intent in that regard, only your desire to permanently withhold what is rightfully mine from me.
    Once it is clear, as here, that you have been notified that a flaw in your programming has led to a value being wrongly taken from me by you and you then refuse to refund that value, you are stealing whether that was your original intent or not.
    I do believe that the flaw in your programming is negligent and I do believe that if you have been aware of this for some time and done nothing about it you are straying to willful (sharp practice) or gross negligence. I would sincerely hope that this is not the image of Wargaming that you want to promote.
    As I have stated repeatedly, I took all reasonable precautions against the flaw in your programming by ensuring that each time I start the game I check that all of the tanks are using credits rather than gold to replenish ammo. What happened here is that between launching a battle and returning to the garage, the game switched my choice from using credits to using gold against my express instructions.
    You are thus wholly in the wrong here and it is deeply worrying that you so refuse to address the problem correctly in both law and equity. As I have said, I have spent well over €100 in the last 6 weeks from when I started playing. If you wish for me to understand that you can deduct money value from my account whenever it suits you and not return what is rightfully mine then I wish for you to understand that I will not spend any more money with you and will go out of my way to address your attitude appropriately.

League of Legends goes Open BETA for MAC

I don't usually report on League of Legends, but this is quite important since LoL is one of the major competitors to WoT, worldwide.

Steve “Udyr” Mieczkowski, associative producer at Riot Games had this to say:

Greetings Summoners,

I’m pleased to report that the long-awaited (fabled? mythical?) League of Legends Mac client is almost ready, and it’s heading into open beta soon™.

And by soon™, I mean that it’s available right now on the Public Beta Environment. Open beta, which will allow anyone to access the live servers on Macs, will follow after we’re confident in the results from the PBE test.

To make this happen, we’ve been hard at work: Riot engineers re-wrote a lot of the underlying game engine so that both PC and Mac platforms share the same code base and assets. This means Mac players will receive all future features, bug fixes, and new content at the same time as PC users.

While we aren’t quite ready for a full open beta launch, we wanted to share the Mac client with PBE players to help us find bugs and give feedback.

Download the Mac PBE client here, patch up, and log in to help us make the Mac League of Legends experience as awesome as possible!

Thanks to the Mac community for your extraordinary patience – and a very special thanks to a particularly astounding group of folks who helped many of you play League via an unofficial client over the past months.

Best,

Steve “Udyr” Mieczkowski

P.S. Huge thanks to the Cross Platform team for their hard work!

If you are interested, the MAC public BETA client is available here.

WarThunder update 1.27 teaser

WoT DDOSed because of changes in ClanWars?

At this point it is not clear the outage of gameserver and website plus forums were brought down by a DDOS. They say it was a maintenance ... but we know the kind of bullshit WarGaming EU swims in.

Due to maintenance work, the World of Tanks servers, community site, forum will be unavailable from 21:30 to 23:59 (Paris Time) on 19.01.2013.
The Wargaming Team wishes to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Who the hell believes them anymore? I don't. Note the date of posting versus the presumed maintenance window.

From unconfirmed sources the DDOS was doe via the special battle chat because it is not moderated and unfiltered. The apparent reasons for the DDOS itself were the recent changes brought by the new rules and additions made to ClanWars.

StarWars: The Old Republic - does is worth it?

It has been quite a while since I wanted to make this blog post. I had to wait the right patch from BioWare to smooth the things out and make the game desirable.

Electronic Arts and BioWare advertise the game as a Free to Play title, but is it really? Absolutely not! SWToR is more like a free to try title, the limitations for f2p account holders are horrendous, they can get you to the point of not wanting to play the game.
Let me explain, here is a list made by BioWare with the differences in account types. Although everyone gets access to the story content, not everyone gets the same treatment.
For example: f2p are unable to use the sprint skill until lvl15, you have no access to the bank (cargo hold), your wallet is capped at 200K credits, only 2 character slots, only 2 quickslots bars for your skills, serious limitations to chat.

Bottom line - I do not recommend you the play SWToR as a Free 2 Play, it is highly desirable to spend the least amount of cash and get preferred status.

What is preferred status account? Once you decide to spend even the smallest amount of $ on the game, 4.99$ or 4€ here in EU, your account gets a few important unlocks that makes the game playable. You get 4 quickslot bars for your skills, and trust me, you can fill them by the time you reach lvl50, compared to being limited to only 2 as f2p ... that's like night and day. Also, since the latest patch, released yesterday, you will be able to use 6 (!!) character slots. These are the two most important key features that makes the game enjoyable.
Once you spend those 5$ you will get 450 cartel coins for the cartel market. I highly recommend you to purchase the Unlock: Inventory Module account wide for the amount of 390 cartel coins - this expands your inventory for every character you already created or will create.

Compared to the subscribers, the preferred status account holders still have limitations that will make you scratch your head and ask yourself what the fuck are they thinking. Still, spending 5$ instead of 50$ or 60$ for a full priced AAA title is a lot more appealing.

By any means, the limitation of preferred status accounts are not OK, but it does make the game playable and enjoyable.
Subscribers get access to a few goodies, including the artifact gear and PvP gear.

This is a fair warning, stay away from PvP servers! subscribers will rape you because of their unlimited access to gear and equipment.
Stick with the story, find an RP or PvE server.


BioWare and Electronic Arts have a twisted perspective on what a Free 2 Play title is.
They are also asking 20$ for the Rise of the Hutt Cartel DLC that is due to arrive this month - they can keep it! For 20$ and the fact that it does not contain more story line missions, it is too highly priced.

WG EU freezes contests

Problably you are aware of this morning accusations made by Frank Davis, also knows as SilentStalker on WoT EU forums. Accusations that implicated a few employees of WarGaming Europe, Paris office, in rigging of contests and other practices. The back-up of the original article can be found here. The origial blog post has been taken down a 2nd time after he (SilentStalker) received a phone call from WG's VP Mr. Faruk.

Interesting...I just had a phonecall from the vice president of Wargaming Europe (I think it was), Mr. Faruk (if I understood it correctly) - no idea where he got my phone number (so much for spreading personal info, but whatever). He assured me this matter is being investigated.
I decided to remove all personal info from the "corruption post". I'll take it down for a while and redact it.

After all the blunder and the flame that started on the forums, WG EU decided to temporarily freeze contents , regional and community ones.