5 — Chairman Chen Ke Also Plays WoT!

02-11 [BREAKING NEWS] Chairman Chen Ke Also Plays World of Tanks!

According to a report from Kongzhong, the developer-publisher of World of Tanks, the Republic's Founding Father Chairman Chen Ke — currently living in retirement — also plays World of Tanks in his leisure time. Kongzhong president Wang Suming declined to reveal Chairman Chen Ke's account name, but stated that despite being eighty-eight years old, the Chairman's account shows "a rather impressive efficiency rating." Surprisingly, Chairman Chen Ke prefers the Russian tech tree.

Chairman Chen Ke mentioned World of Tanks during a conversation with Wang Zheng. He remarked that during the Second World War, Russian tanks had made bold and creative simplifications to Chinese tank designs. Although performance was slightly reduced, they were simple and straightforward — more suited to mass production and deployment than their Chinese counterparts.

Upon learning that Chairman Chen Ke had mentioned World of Tanks in a conversation with his father, Wang Suming personally rushed to a certain location in Henan to request an audience with the Chairman. In a rare move, Chairman Chen Ke agreed to receive Wang Suming and enthusiastically offered numerous suggestions for improving the game. According to reports, Chairman Chen Ke believes that World of Tanks' graphics still need improvement: "For example, the road wheels on the tanks — for most tanks, the road wheels should move independently when traversing rough terrain, just as they did historically." "Buildings hit by large-caliber shells should be destructible." "Bushes and trees should catch fire when hit." "The terrain itself should undergo permanent changes as a result of combat." And so on.

Wang Suming stated he would immediately begin work on upgrading the game engine. However, after the development team discussed Chairman Chen Ke's improvement suggestions, they reported that the game's current minimum specification — a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 128 MB of dedicated graphics memory — would very likely be completely unable to run the game after implementing these changes. They estimated that the game would only run smoothly on dual-core processor systems expected to be released in three to four years.

This makes Chairman Chen Ke the second confirmed military legend to join the World of Tanks battleground, after the famous Russian Second World War general Chuikov. Chuikov joined World of Tanks in 1967, when the Russian game company Wargaming had just obtained the Russian distribution license. The "old boy at heart" Chuikov was one of the very first open beta testers. However, Chuikov mostly played using German tanks. Interestingly, after roughly half a year on the Russian server, Chuikov largely abandoned his account there and transferred to the Chinese server to continue playing, as he had officially retired the previous year and was now living year-round at the military sanitarium in Sanya, rarely returning to Russia. According to another account, Chuikov was extremely dissatisfied with the Russian server's management — going so far as to derisively call it a "pirate server."