Good day everyone,

Here is the January Q&A roundup for World of Tanks Console, taken from Facebook Q&As and portal articles:

Why do the Defender and Patriot have higher costs on Console than they do PC?

Well, that is simple. The answer is because World of Tanks PC is a different game than World of Tanks Console. And their tanks are not always the same as our tanks even though they might look the same, the stats are sometimes different, the costs are sometimes different. So… uh.. You can’t ever, for anything whether it’s… uh… the maps, the gameplay, the costs of the tank, the look of the tank, the stats of the tank, anything like that. You can never compare the two. The only thing that they really have in common is that they are both made by Wargaming, they both have the name World of Tanks, and they both have tanks in them. So that’s uh… the reason.

What about fog or smoke screens?

Fog would be an environmental thing. Smoke screens: the design team looked at that and they weren’t too keen on that. If it was fog it would be implemented in a way that wouldn’t affect gameplay that much. It’s tricky because it would block your visibility, how far the tank can see, um, and I feel like a lot of players don’t like Sandstorm variants for exactly that reason… so if we implemented something like fog in the maps, we don’t want to make it uncomfortable for the person playing.

What are the chances we’ll see World of Tanks on the Nintendo Switch?

That is an interesting question I answered yesterday with the Platoon with the Community section… It is very interesting, as of right now there is really not lot of Nintendo Switch Consoles being sold… yes if I remember the article correctly it is one of the fastest selling consoles in terms of the speed that it’s being sold… but the reality is they don’t have a lot of network or social engagement capability… for example, Xbox you have the ability to stream, save your videos, and Nintendo is getting there’s, so their social services are not in place which is something we need to see what happens with it. We need conversations with Nintendo… As of right now the capabilities of the Switch aren’t up to where we would want them to be for us to bring World of Tanks Console to the Switch… maybe in a year or so we’ll consider. We’ll also have to consider creating services and maintaining servers…

 

From Battle Heroes Portal Articles:

Do tier X light tanks suffer from the same 25% penetration drop off with range as tier X light tanks do on PC?

Penetration drop off varies based on class, guns, and ammo. For example:

XM551 Sheridan

• 105mm Lightweight Gun: 20% penetration loss
• 152mm Gun Launcher XM81: zero penetration loss

T110E3

• 155mm AT Gun T7E2: 4% penetration loss

Do you have plans to add the Special emblems as an option for flags!

Yes! That’s in the works.

Is there a chance for a new perk, like Scavenger for example, wherein if a commander survives the battle, they get a 2-5% Silver boost?

No current plans but thanks for the suggestion!

Any thoughts on the new Italian tank, the Progetto M35 mod 46, and its “autoreloader” mechanic?

Actually, we designed a similar feature a couple of years ago but walked away from it. Glad to see the PC team is trying it out for a new line!

When will we have improved sounds for the tank engines and guns?

We’re still working on it! Engine sounds should get a big upgrade in our 4.5 release.

World of Tanks PC recently updated the Centurion and FV4202 which upgraded their turrets. When will those updates be coming to console?

Server update 9.20.1 will contain those upgrades, which will arrive later this year.

World of Tanks PC is scheduled to have its 1.0 update in March 2018; when will this come to console?

Our goal is to have the 1.0 features added sometime after 9.20.1. Obviously we use different clients, so some of the new graphical features will have to be implemented from scratch. Some, like weather/water accumulation, have been on console already. The 1.0 footage looks fantastic and we’re excited for that team and their amazing accomplishment!

Can we get a free “map explorer” in the single-player mode?

You can explore maps in Team Training, but you need a partner, and one of you needs a Premium Account. Each map instance uses the same server resources as a full 30-person game so we have to keep it restricted due to cost.

Is there a way we can earn or buy Premium time codes and give them away as prizes?

Send Raibot a PM in the forums and she’ll look into it.

Does Wargaming have any future collaboration projects with like Fury and Girls und Panzer?

Nothing yet, but we’re always looking for future opportunities!

 

From a Facebook Q&A Stream with QA Head RC Landon:

If there is an issue in game, say a small invisible rock, how long is the turn-around for that sort of thing?

Depending on the issue, like some sort of rock or small collision issue, it could go into the next update. If there is a huge issue with something dying on the server, we could have that fixed in a couple of hours.

What kind of issues warrant a server restart? Such as the weekly server restarts.

If we have to make any sort of fix to your account we need to bring the servers down, because the last thing you want is the servers saying one thing while your Xbox is saying something else about it. It can mess up the state of your game, there are some things like background downloads that won’t make a big difference… but generally it’s a good thing to do because any time the server and the client say something different you’re going to see discrepancies and problems with maybe hitting bumps that aren’t there and things of that nature.

What is the most challenging thing for a QA to deal with?

One of the most challenging things is like when we added flags for tanks, a new feature that affects all of the tanks, so we had to go through and check the placement of every flag pole on every tank and every configuration for them. So every tech tree tank has an average of three packages… so over a thousand configurations.

Are we ever getting Tier X premiums?

That is a “we don’t know”.

Will the War Stories maps come to multiplayer any time soon?

We’d have to take a good look at them, because single-player narrative maps aren’t really designed for ‘balance’, they can be very one sided on purpose because you’re guiding the player to where you want them to go. It’s not impossible that we might see them, but you gotta balance them out some.

Do you guys have any testing for things outside of new features? Such as tank balance.

When it comes to testing tanks it’s at a really functional level, like a designer says “Hey, this tank is going to have X change to it, or Y change to it”, so we test to see if it doesn’t need to happen. Balance testing is a bit tricky, it’s just one of those things where you need a ton of statistics, put that tank in a ton of battles to see how it performs and it’s pretty hard for us to do that. You see a ton of test servers, like PC has it’s test server, which could be an option for us but then you risk splitting the game in two, in theory… but we definitely look at the numbers for if there’s anything glaring, we’ll write up a bug for it. We have access to some battle statistics… but really we work on a functional level, looking to see if what we want to be there is actually whats there.

 

From Facebook Q&A Stream with Senior Game Designer Leo Florez (WG Plague)

We need Clan Banks and Clan Garages.

That is something we’d like to do, but with the way Xbox Live and PSN work, we’re a bit limited on the custom content we can have for clans. We would like to bring more individualization… can’t say exactly what we’re doing, but we’re working on something, I just can’t say what it is.

Will we ever get PC’s Customization System?

As far as tanks go, we don’t have that tech yet. We should have it a few updates from now, but we really don’t know what we’ll be able to use until we have it and try it out.

Any plans for cross-platform play?

Certain large companies don’t want to talk to each other, maybe if we asked them all to be friends?

Can we get an on-screen damage counter?

Maybe. It’s one of those things I suggested we take in an update, but we’re also trying to keep the screen uncluttered, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it through or not

Why did you removed the “Targeted” warning for when artillery is aiming at you?

[I was bored that day] But really I have no idea why it got removed.

When are we going to get 30v30 games?

Honestly? Probably not until certain consoles die… the 360 just doesn’t have the computing power. We can do everything we can, but we just can’t quite optimize for that.