A bug that caused the SC2500 bomb to clip through the trolley and ground in the hangar has been fixed. (Report).
Graphics
A bug with HDR that caused black artifacts to appear where the bomb CCIP indicator and action panel elements overlap has been fixed.
Locations and Missions
Sun City — the missions on this location have been temporarily removed from the rotation until a bug is fixed.
Other
The referral reward for an invited player purchasing vehicles can no longer be obtained when purchasing rank IV Naval vessels and is only obtainable when purchasing rank IV ground vehicles and aircraft.
Patch notes reflect only key changes, meaning they may not include a complete list of all improvements made. Additionally, War Thunder is constantly being updated and some changes may not require an update. Changes reflected in patch notes are formed by taking reactions and requests of the community from the bug reporting service, forums and other official platforms into account. Bug fixes and changes are implemented in order of importance, for example a game-breaking bug will be worked on and implemented sooner.
A little graph shows the scale of the problem in NRB requiring this change.
Because the bots almost exclusively used Leopards and Luchs, you can see the impact in Statshark. January stats aren’t here yet, but September to December tells the tale (note, there’s an undercount issue with Statshark’s October vehicle stats, so they can’t be relied on here):
Even assuming 50,000 spawns a month were real players, in December that means over 150,000 spawns were not. Assuming 2 spawns per game, that’s at least 75,000 player sessions, or about 2,500 a day.
Something like 1500 bot accounts were banned in December, with bans every day, so they were being caught (likely by automated processes more than player reports) and recreated on average after somewhere over 50 games each. Works out to somewhere under 250 computers or VMs total running War Thunder involved… possibly quite a bit less, at least at first. But it was just getting worse day by day.
To pay off the 100 GE to their referrer before they were banned, in that time they had to earn their way through 5 boats, totalling 41,900 RP (EDIT: correction, 12 boats, 177,200 RP) up the German tech tree: not hard at all with the aimbotting they were using. It will be interesting to see the January stats (and the January ban list) to see just how bad the problem had gotten.
Z15, T22 and K2 gets you rank 2 (because it’s a fresh account you get Luchs for free but you still need K2 for later)
Z12, Z22 and Z32 and Z43 gets you rank 3
Z51, Z46 and Elbing and Emden gets you rank 4, and
then Leipzig (because you didn’t have Lutjens yet) for the payoff
So, 12 boats. 177,200 RP before the update, and 164,200 after Lutjens was added. Still not hard if you’ve got 50 or 100 games before they shut you down I suspect. 2,000 RP a game would do it if you get in 100 games the first 24 hours (which is what they were doing). (RP per game in December was 518 for Leopard, but that’s only the in-game rewards, doesn’t include the end-game amount).
