World of Tanks – Les Chars de Combustion

Last week we came up short in the instance group so spent some time playing World of Tanks as a lark.  Earl downloaded the game and ran around with us in tier I tanks while trying to figure out what was going on.  By the end of the evening, things seemed to be going okay, but I did not detect any enthusiasm for the game.  I figured we might be back to Need for Speed: World as an alternative the next time this situation came up.

The week went by and come Saturday I logged in to WoT and actually saw Earl in game.  I checked his profile and he was just about to hit the 200 game mark.  That would be at least 190 more games since the previous weekend.

For comparison, if I play 100 games in a week, that feels like a lot of tank time.

Earl had clearly been bitten by the tank bug.

Potshot got on as well and we ended up playing off and on Saturday afternoon and evening, right up to start time for the instance group.

At that point, Giz was a bit iffy for the evening, but Jolly seemed interested in the World of Tanks idea.  He has agitated for something more shooter-like for the group now and again.  However, his internet connection is more on par with my own rather than Earl’s fiber optic speed, so his download was going to take a while, which ended up putting him out for the night.

But the three of us pressed on with our Saturday of tanks right into instance group time.

Earl, who had bought some of the gold currency for the game, was keen enough on the whole thing to offer to pay the price for us to form a clan.

Potshot and I had previously discussed this, which followed our usual pattern of about 2 minutes of hastily exploring the actual benefits of forming a clan and several hours of discussing potential names for the clan.  So when Earl said he would set up the clan if we just gave him a name, I had a list at my finger tips.

They were all in French, as Potshot and I had been discussing the whole thing in the context of our run at the French tank line, but there were some amusing ones on the list.  Here are some samples, along with the tag we would get for each. (And a translation in some cases.)

• Fair Play for Vichy Committee (FPFVC)
• Les Freres Corses (LFC) –  the Corsican brothers
• Ou Est Mon Bourbon (OEMB) – Where’s my Bourbon
• Regardez la-bas (RLB) – Look! Over there!
• Amerique du Nord Resistance Francaises (ANRF) –  North American French Resistance, plus the tag would be “a nerf!”
• Le Grand Cerf (LGC) – From a French children’s song
• Nous Abandonnons (NA) – we give up
• Je m’abandonne (JMA) – I give up or I surrender
• Pas de Pays Pour Viellards (PPV) – no country for old men
• Les Viellards Qui Rit (LVQR) – The laughing old men
• Les Epaves Qui Rient (LEQR) – The laughing wrecks
• Les Chevaliers Mauritian – Because nobody is going to miss a Maurice Chevaliers reference

However, I had to use this opportunity to pitch my own favorite, which was:

• Les Chars de Combustion (LCDC) – The Burning Tanks

That was picked up as our clan name though, due to an error transcribing, we ended up as:

• Le Chars de Cumbustion (LCDC)

So now we must hang our heads in shame should any Frenchman bother to look up our clan.

There is an option to pay some more gold to alter your clan name… but that feature is not functional at this time.

I opened a support ticket about fixing our clan name, but I suspect that will come to naught.

[I got a response to my ticket. They are going to fix the typos! Yay!]

None of which really matters all that much because we got what we really wanted, which was the opportunity to put a clan logo on our tanks.  Potshot found this free image on a site offering free images (that were free):

Which we resized and altered to add in the French roundel.

And so we have a burning tank logo on our often burning tanks.  The silhouette even looks vaguely Gallic in shape.  Mission accomplished!

Our Logo on a StuG III

And, that accomplished, we ran off to play. Which lead us to the next problem, which was what tanks should we all drive in order to play matches together without putting some of us at a disadvantage.

There is that whole match making chart to take into consideration.  We swapped around a bit, and ended up with Earl and Potshot in their tier III SP guns (a Wespe and a Lorraine 39) and me in my KV-1, which seemed to be about right to get us into matches where none of us were out of our depth.  When I was teaming up with them in my AMX 40, things were decidedly unpleasant for me. (Is there a “most bounced shots” medal?  A “Pinball Wizard” award?  If there is, I do not know why I didn’t earn it in the AMX 40.)

Later I swapped to my Churchill III because it has a cap on its match making that keeps it in tiers V and VI.  And then Potshot got out his Char B1 to work on that while keeping up the French aspect of our new clan.

And we seemed to do pretty well.  There were a couple of matches where Earl and Potshot were clear factors in the victory, reaching out and smiting all those who exposed themselves while I lumbered around spotting and peppering anybody I could catch with a rain of 6 pounder rounds.

With two of us in lightly gunned heavies, the burden fell on Earl to keep the destruction coming, but he was doing well in the arty role.

As the evening wrapped up, we created our own battle so we could take a group shot.  It is odd that you have to disband your platoon in order to do this.  Ah well.

The Final Trio in the Snow

And then, of course, we shot each other.

Going straight for the weak spot!

We will have to see if tanks remain the game of choice next week.  And if Jolly joins us, it will be back to tier I and II tanks for a while.