Q & A 30. 5. 2016

With Slava Makarov

• As for the problem with platoons of tier 10 artillery and tier 8 LTs – it’s still undecided, but personally I am in favour of removing the artillery option to platoon!
• I looked at the statistics. Artillery platoons are part of the balance problem. As long as they are here, it will be a mess.
• Writing a new balancer is the top priority. And modeling an algorithm based on the numbers of different types and tiers in the game seems to be having a problem with arty platoons.
• The most interesting thing to me – what is happening with 50vs50?
  We played the prototype. Prototype seems OK.
• LT platoon may come out and say – tier 9 HT with tier 7 LT will receive a permanent penalty. That’s not fun for them.
  This will get repaired only by changing LTs as a class and the emergence of usable tier 10 scouts. This is planned as part of the rebalance. We have very long discussions regarding this. There are problems with the balance of tier 10 LTs, but it can work in the role model.
• The average player can do Orlik’s medal in tier 8 LT, what will happen with Bulldog and Ru at tier 10?
  Well, one option is to change the classification of the whole class, MT can be a scout, too.
• Have you gotten the tier 10 LTs over all these years? I mean, will we wait for them long in case they get introduced?
  Pasholok has them.
• The arty influence should get bigger, including through the reworked mechanisms.
• Artillery platoons are not necessary.
• Artillery platoons are such a big problem that they appear in as many as 5 % of battles. Urgent decisions ahead! Nobody mentions the fact that maps are shit, LTs are dead, 3 tanks in the whole game have armour and the stupid 25 % random spread.
  What urgent decisions are you talking about? The only urgent stuff being done is the complete rebalance.
• Well, then start working on the maps!
  The maps are also in the plans to get fixed.
• T-64 won’t come to WoT.
• Didn’t you consider limiting the arty platoons to below three pieces?
  We did. It’s not necessary. It’s a burden. Plus, it doesn’t solve the gameplay issues. Two synchronised artilleries, if they were successful before, will simply destroy any two unsynchronised artilleries. You can of course pile up the burdens, but it’s easier to not overcome difficult problems heroically and simply remove them completely.
• I’ll get to 15×15 randoms, count the problems and work on fixes!
• Veider wrote about Czechoslovaks that they are not imbalanced? What will be the rebalance process in this case?
  They are good tanks, but overall not imbalanced. At the moment I can fix a hundred minor balance bugs or work on balance 2.0. Guess what I chose!
• And how will personal missions work for LTs and SPGs and everything?
  System of personal missions will get a rework.
• The last two patches we are gradually improving.
• Where were you and other people during the test two years ago, when it was still possible to fix something, not getting stalled on Rubikon?
  I wasn’t allowed into tanks, sorry. They allowed me to get back to work in January.
• The last two years the game was developed by people who have since left Wargaming, meaning there is no way to ask them.

Source: http://vk.com/wotclue

Football mode

Trailer:

Promo art:

Details:

• During football mode, players will recieve the T-62A Sport tank to play in the mode.
  A match will last 7 minutes, the goal is to score the most goals.
• 3 stadiums will be available:
  • Himmelsdorf Arena
  • Stade Eiffel
  • Old Tankford
• A skill named Turbocharger will be available temporarily boosting the tank
• You cannot destroy an enemy tank, but destroy the tracks to immobilize it
• During the event, a tournament will be held with valuable prizes
• After the event, the T-62A Sport will be removed

Medals:

Just for participating	For participating in the tournament and winning the first stage (qualifying)	For the members of the super final	For winning the tournament

Source: http://thearmoredpatrol.com

TOG II* in HD

Author: Alexandr Deyneka

Source: https://thearmoredpatrol.com/2016/05/28/tog-ii-hd-model/

WoWs Q & A 29. 5. 2016

• The development of the next tree (German battleships ?) is nearing completion. The modeling of a second tree (British cruisers ?) has been finished and the models are being tuned. The modeling a third tree has begun. The release of the third tree is planned for December, but may be postponed by 1-2 months.
• The next nation represented in the game will be very unexpected, but definitely not the Italians, on which no work except collecting preliminary material has been done.
• A premium German battleships of tier 4 is ready. How and when it will be made available is yet unclear.
• The premium battleship USS Arizona will appear soon.
• The cruiser IJN Katori will be distributed in partner bundles (Italeri).
• There will be a German premium ship of tier 6.
• There will be a French or an Italian premium ship this year.
• The cruiser IJN Tone will probably not appear this year, and the game mechanics of its plane squadron is not decided.
• The cruiser USS Salt Lake City (a Pensacola with torpedoes) has not been planed, the ship is not ready.
• The destroyer USS Sims (open beta tier 7 ship) will be back on sales.
• The will be no unique Japanese premium battleships or cruisers of tier 5 – 7 this year, but sister ships may appear.The Russian cruiser Red Krimea will be distributed via a new Project R, which is planned for the second half of June.

Source: http://www.himmelsdorf.com/info-from-the-ru-forums-29-05-2016/

WoWs Q & A 28. 5. 2016

• Q. Out of curiosity, when a player buys a premium account and plays both WoWs and WoT, how is the money split between the two projects, and what is the reasoning behind?
  A. Both projects are made by the same company, Wargaming.net. It’s like subscribing to a theater, the shows are different but you pay at the same till.
• Q. Are citadels only possible through side armour penetrations or through deck armour as well? If deck armour is modeled, it should naturally be thinner than side armour and more prone to penetration at longer distances (since shells comes from the “top”). Is it thus possible to hit citadels through the deck at longer distances? Such mechanics would encourage players to fight at shorter distances.
  A. In game, armour is modeled with high fidelity, deck armour included. It happens that players hit citadels through the deck. However, you must remember that shells don’t always fall vertically since the firing range we set in game is the effective range of the ship and not its “theoretical” maximum range. That is why for many ships the so-called “immune zone” falls on the furthest section of the firing range and thus it’s harder to penetrate the deck.
• Q. Are you working on improving AA and dual purpose gunfire visuals, since shells seem not to come from gun barrels and the guns don’t rotate towards planes?
  A. We’re working on it but, like with all the other visual improvements, we’re limited by the game performance since it must run on many different system configurations. With time, all visual aspects of the game will be improved but it’s a long and slow process. Regarding the time at which they will be done, I suggest you follow the patch notes.
• Q. Do you plan to give CV players the ability to manually use their secondary armaments so they can better defend themselves against DDs?
  A. No since CVs should fear such situations and DDs, for their part, should have a well-deserved advantage after succeeding in coming close to a CV.
• Q. Do you think Moskva is overpowered? Firing range, rate of fire, turret rotation speed, caliber, penetration values, ability to tank 460mm shells from the bow, her only downsides are concealment and big silhouette.
  A. I don’t think so.
• Q. Have you considered giving US DDs two different slots for their Engine Boost and Defensive Fire? Since half the time, one of them is useless. For example, three times in a row I chose Defensive Fire but there’s no CVs in the battles. So I decide to change and take Engine Boost and join a battle with 2 CVs on each side.
  A. We thought about it, but decided not to do it.
• Q. How is the battle against bots going? Are you making any progress?
  A. Bots are not a problem for the game. Currently, we look at all of the reports regarding bots in order to identify their behaviours and prevent the mass appearance of bots in the future.
• Q. Do you plan on adding higher tier Soviet BBs, like for example the class Sevastopol is of, equipped with torpedoes; of course, she wouldn’t compete with Tirpitz but I think she would be fun to sail.
  A. We plan to add many more ships, including Soviet ships.
• Q. Diana is missing half of her secondary guns (12 x 75mm secondary guns instead of 24). Why don’t you fix it?  (follows a detailed explanation)
  A. Thank you for your detailed explanation, now I understand your point. I will discuss it with my colleagues and we will give a constructive answer in a post when we’ll have one to share.
• Q. In the patch notes (mind you, only Russian patch notes because reasons…), it is written Hindenburg‘s engines are immune to be disabled from the explosion of HE shells up to 203 mm of caliber.
  Does it mean it includes 203 mm shells? And what happens with Moskva‘s 220 mm shells ? I saw a video where a Moskva disables Hindenburg‘s engines five times in a row. Do you think it’s fair to be unable to move for so long?
  
  
  A. It includes 203 mm shells (so engines won’t be disabled from 203 mm HE shells).
  Yes, Moskva can disable Hindenburg‘s engines. But, on the other hand, she can dish out a lot of damage. By the way, I would recommend you to read the comments on that video and the purpose of this kind of “tests”.
• Q. When activating Defensive Fire without any planes around, AA guns still start to fire blindly into the sky. Is it a bug?
  A. It’s a known issue, we’re in the process of fixing it.
• Q. Can Defensive Fire hit allied planes when they come into our AA zone?
  A. No, AA normally don’t hit allied planes.
• Q. You already implemented Dx11 support in WoT and it improved FPS and game stability on many systems. When can we expect Dx11 support in WoWs?
  A. We’re constantly working on implementing new technologies aimed at improving graphical fidelity as well as performance. Though, I will say that this process isn’t very fast and easy. There is no reason for us to disclose our current plans in that regards for now, but you will be informed on our progress in the patch notes.
• Q. It seems that certain classes of ships have absolutely no chances when fighting certain classes. For example, a high tier BB simply cannot win against a CV if the players are of above average skill. Do you imply that a BB cannot win because it was so historically speaking or is there a balancing process involved in that decision?
  A. Technically, all things be equal, a ship of one class can fight a ship of another class. However, each ship has its preferred and worst enemies. We try to detect cases where a ship have absolutely no chance against another and fix this situation. On the other hand, we don’t want to give players equal chances when fighting every ship without having to think about whom to engage and whom to fear.
• Q. Why did you nerf Concealment Expert? Why not add in the description that it affects all kind of concealment modifiers, including the penalty for firing? Why have you decided to nerf so many ships, including premium ships?
  A. We don’t think this change is a nerf to any ship, including premium ships. We simply improved the game logic and, for that matter, this change slightly reduced the ability of certain ships to stealth fire.
  I noticed that widespread use of this tactic is not very well received by most players. Concealment should first and foremost be used to move under cover and not attack other players without being seen.
  On the other hand, we think this tactic is a valid one and, as you should be aware of, we haven’t made any changes to the penalty for firing, so ships that could stealth fire still retain their buffer zone. It’s just that it was slightly reduced. Concealment expert is still very useful as it reduces the detection range (which was always written in the description).
• The following question includes technical aspects I am not familiar with. That is why the terms used may very well be incorrect. I apologize for this.
• Q. If I understand correctly, water physics aren’t implemented in the game, correct? Could you please explain how water works in game (technically speaking)?
  A. Fully modeled water physics aren’t implemented. The map base is modeled and drawn with offline tools, and then we add in real time a dynamic sea on top of it. We start by adding wind formed and deformation waves (also those created by guns shockwave), and then, with the resulting waves, we create geometry, the polygon mesh. Finally, we do the shading (reflection, refraction, light attenuation effects, subsurface scattering, shadows, fog).
• Q. Have you considered adding maps shared with other WG projects, such as the El Halluf map, which can be found in both WoT and WoWp?
  A. We currently don’t plan to do that but we’ve already thought about it.
• Q. What fait awaits Cleveland? What changes can we expect? Will she be transferred into another branch?
  A. For a long time, we considered putting her on a higher tier by giving her some improvements. However, at the current moment, this question is postponed indefinitely. You should not expect any changes regarding this ship in the short or medium term.
• Q. Why can’t Tachibana’s third gun rotate all the way around? This issue also concerns several other ships. Fixing this would help them a lot in certain situations.
  A. Certain ships turrets cannot rotate all the way around because of technical limitations (by technical, I mean in real life, they couldn’t rotate all the way) but it very well may have been an oversight on our end. We will look into this issue regarding Tachibana and other ships. We will then decide what to do.
• Q. With AA defense being improved on a lot of ships, why Arkansas wasn’t changed?
  A. We don’t plan to change Arkansas in the near future. Firstly, her AA setup (or rather lack thereof) reflects her historical setup (very early on), secondly, she has a lot more upgrade slots, which balances out this drawback.
• Q. Do you plan to add some form of punishment to players who misuse the report feature?
  A. No, we currently don’t have any plans in that regard.
• Q. It happens sometimes that secondaries guns fire at allied ships and because of that, we can turn pink without having any control on how those guns fire. Do you plan to do anything regarding this issue?
  A. We already received several reports on this issue. We will look into it and make a decision after that.
• Q. Why don’t you want to color shell types with different colors? Certain mods already do this. I consider seeing what type of shells are fired on me quite important.
  A. It should be possible to implement that. We will develop such feature.
• Q. High tier US BBs accuracy seems to be the same as before. Actually the dispersion value hasn’t changed. Is it normal ?
  A. Accuracy is not only tied to size of the dispersion ellipse, but it can also be improved by tweaking the distribution of shells inside the ellipse.

Source: http://www.himmelsdorf.com/questions-and-answers-from-the-ru-forum-28-05-2016/

Q & A 28. 5. 2016

Stanislav Kargin (veider) – Game Designer of WoT answers streamer T_killa aka Tenb_

• 268 5 won’t be in any branch, can’t say more.
• New maps are developed, I saw the new ones, they seem good.
• There was a rumor that totally all of us play DotA, it’s not true.
• AMX M4 mle. 49 will be sold.
• Statistics on Grille 15 already fell down by 3rd day. Win rate is now at 49 %.
• Rumors about the Czechslovak tiers 9 – 10 being wildly imbalanced are false.
• New branches in the current nations are in plans.
• ISU-130 (a tank for moderators and volunteers) will be buffed in the next patch.
• A solution on LT8 – SPG10 platoon (platoon bonuses and penalties) is already in solving!
• Chinese tanks are doing well, it’s just people rejecting them. According to statistics they are all doing good, especially the MTs. But the tanks play peculiarly.
• There are plans to flatten Prokhorovka map, but not by much.
• Maps Konigsberg and Minsk, I don’t know about them.
• Type 59’s statistics hasn’t changed much since its withdrawal from the store.
• First aid kits and repair kits working like in WoWs – it is an option being considered.
• The ability to remove 2 – 3 – 4 maps for yourself (map picking) is n option that’s with us all the time, but no decision on it, it has its pluses and minuses.
• When rebalancing artilleries, we will take into account the problem of dominance of TDs, we will monitor it and react immediately.
• Swedes will come until the end of the year, they will have a unique and original top tier tank.

Source: http://wot-news.com/main/postmsg/198155/38051/3/otvety-stanislav-kargin-veider-28052016

Q & A 27. 5. 2016

• Q. The new technical display is slightly irritating. Subjectively – it takes up too much space on the right and the colours of icons I am unaccustomed to distract me.
  A. In the settings you can return to the old form of technical display.
• Q. Missions no longer disappear automatically. What’s with it?
  A. Nothing. I’ll check it out.
• Q. I am curious about that green vertical strip in the upper left corner.A. It’s your ping in hangar.
• Q. Can the old carousel be returned to the hangar?
  A. Carousel did not change, only the filter. What should return?
• Q. What does a bright blue plus sign with number below the nickname mean? What is that?
  A. Personal reserves.
• Q. Tell us about a new spotting system, is it postponed? Or will it roll out soon? ASAP?
  A. There won’t be a new one. We will revise the old one.
• Q. On the minimap, there’s a tank displayed as alive – there is an ELC being shown, even though it’s dead.A. Indeed. Now I understand. Thank you.
• Q. Landslide wins and defeats! I want to hear the developer’s reply, whether some work is being done, at least not to correct it, but what about the analysis? Where did it come from, why does it happen, how to fight it?
  A. I especially ordered the statistics on the average time of the battle, the lifetime of the players and amount of the tanks remaining at the end of the battle for the last 4 years. The theory that there “have been less landslide losses in the past” failed miserably. The statistics don’t show this in any way. The situation has been the same for 4 years now. You may consider this an official response.
• Q. Different, unrelated to each other, players write about landslide losses.
  A. But for example, different, unrelated to each other, players write to me that IS-6 after the HD remake is shit now. However, this is not supported by a careful analysis. What to do?
• Q. Well, it’s similar to the reversed situation: people write that it got significantly worse – but the statistics don’t confirm it, numbers, here they are,everything fine as far as you can see. But players always whine.
  A. Players always whine. That’s true. Without any jokes. And to distinguish whine from the real issues – that’s a difficult, tedious and long task, unfortunately.
• Q. Most likely, the number of increased landslide losses is on Erlenberg and similar maps.
  A. We included individual maps in the analysis.
• Q. You checked the average time of the fight, not landslide losses. People don’t write you about the total time of the fight. You’ve looked at the wrong sample.
  A. And here you can see what I wrote about above.
• Q. “… statistics on the average time of the battle, the lifetime of the players and amount of the tanks remaining at the end of the battle for the last 4 years…” There is nothing like that.
  A. The teams with fast battle duration (2, 3, 4, 5 minutes) – they are very similar.
• Q. Storm, you need statistics on the number of fights in which 10+ players of one team died after 2 – 4 minutes, when the number of living players of the other team at the moment was 13+. This is called landslide loss.
  A. It’s “The teams with fast battle duration (2, 3, 4, 5 minutes).”
• Q. There are personal missions to kill tanks two tiers higher. And now you introduced fines for difference in the platoon tiers. This is genius!
  A. Haven’t you heard about +/- 2 MM?
• Q. The problem with lighting contour of an enemy tank won’t go away: the rendering disappears, then it appears again in a loop.
  A. The bug has been confirmed by other information sources.
• Q. I am sad there are no session statistics – the total number of wins / fights per day, earned silver / experience per day.
  O. Despite the apparent usefulness and necessity, this is one of the biggest demotivators in the game with lots of losses. We decided on not implementing it to the client because of that.
• Q. And when long series of victories happen, on the contrary, you just want to play and play, this is a good motivation to continue when you don’t have time. Here, too, you have a coin with two sides.
  A. A long series of victories gives you adrenaline to continue even without statistics. But loss streaks are better not shown to losing players.
• Q. Thank you for the arty. Now if you have the reticle completely aimed it almost never flies in the center. Always on the edge.
  A. This is a standard whine.
• Q. In 9.15 in the client -14. Bug or unannounced nerf of premium tanks?
  A. Different rounding of fractions.
• Q. -15 ° – is the historical value. It is stated as such in publicly available documents. Where did you get the fractions?
  A. I will check for this.
• Q. On the sand maps (Sandy River and Airfield), the client hangs at the last % of battle loading bar. From mods I have only XVM and reticle and today I downloaded nightly build of XVM – still crashing and only on these cards.
  A. 99 % problems with running maps is caused by mods. Try launching without them.

Source: http://wot-news.com/main/postmsg/198012/38026/3/otvety-razrabotchikov-27052016

Q & A 26. 5. 2016

• There won’t be healing shells.
• All planned balance changes won’t happen immediately, they will happen on the Sandbox test server, about which the developers have already spoken. Developers don’t want large and abrupt changes on the live server, and will have a plan “B” – if something big and negative happens, it will get fixed right away, to avoid negative feedback. Most likely there will be a place on official forums and Storm’s Livejournal for rebalance opinions, where players will be able to express their views on various aspects of early rebalance, to avoid the initial hate even before the launch of Sandbox.
• Premium artilleries of tiers 6 – 8 won’t come.
• As a part of the rebalance of artilleries, some of the achievements will become unobtainable.
• +/- 1 MM is not planned. Instead, it is planned to get more tanks that are able to fight in a certain battle to the same battle. It is necessary to experiment in this regard. A sort of system 3-5-7, which will be built on the principle of 3-5-7 – 3 tanks of top tier for this fight, 5 mid-tier tanks and 7 tanks from the low tier.
  +/- 1 MM contradicts WG policy with respect to monetization and stimulating the players to reach top tiers.
• Tanks should have separate roles. Scouts, breakthrough tanks, the second line tanks, the support, some tanks may have several roles. Balance should try to equal the symmetry in tank roles as well.
• To the players who played an important part in the battle, depending on the type of tank; there is a plan to make a system, where performing right in its role should get you bigger profit in terms of experience and silver. This will be created and monitored carefully.
• Polishing maps will continue, but it is not a priority. An old worker who created the older and ancient maps (Ensk, Mines, etc.) has returned and is now involved closely in work on all the maps in the game. As a result virtually all the cards are waiting for change. Some big ones, some purely cosmetic.
• Historical battles, if they come, will come only with bots, bots in this case will be much more intelligent than bots from training, but it is a distant plan.
• There will be improvements in the training for beginners. Storm hopes so.
• Murazor is a quite intelligent person who knows how to constructively talk when he wants to. There were fears that cooperation with him won’t be very good, but they turned out to be exaggerated. In 9.15 his work was related to the change in the display of the performance characteristics of tanks.
• There is thinking over adding fortified areas to company mode. How it will be done – that is not clear. But company mode revival will be tried.
• New music in the battle – don’t wait for it. Of course, it’s in the plans, but in a very distant future.
• Sandbox feedbacks will be considered by specialists in the field and the whole balancing department will play, Storm says.
• Instead of FV215b there likely won’t be Chieftain, but the already mentioned SuperKonqueror – almost the same as 215b, only with the turret in the front. The turret, according to Storm, is very good, Especially from the front.
• The Chieftain, if it gets implemented, then only as a side branch. Wargaming asks for time to search the archives. If something is found, there will come estimates of how and when will things happen.
• Asya has not disappeared anywhere, everything works well in Wargaming. She got promoted.
• The next event on teh global maps will be in August.
• Bug when the training mode against bots statistics get added to the overall statistics is known about. Unknown when it’ll get fixed, but it’s on the list of fixes.

Source: http://wot-news.com/main/postmsg/197929/38023/3/otvety-shtorma-so-vstrechi-v-minske-26052016

WG-News Q & A 26. 5. 2016

• How/why has it been decided to replace the WT auf E-100 with the Grille 15? Isn’t it possible or was it considered to keep both in the game at tier 10?
  Waffenträger auf Е-100 was removed from the game due to the following two reasons:
  • The vehicle was completely unhistorical and very different gameplay-wise from the preceding vehicles in the branch.
  • The vehicle stood out in terms of combat effectiveness from vehicles of the same type and tier.
  • Thus, we decided to remove it from the branch. The future of the vehicle is still undecided.
• Are there any plans about changing the map rotation? Some players are having the feeling for a long time now, that they are always playing the same maps.
  The matchmaking system is about to undergo an overhaul in the future: with the new system, maps will be rotating correctly.
• Feedback by the players was considered with update 9.15 and you already changed/adjusted a few tanks. How was the decision taken, to exactly choose these particular tanks?
  We have heard the voice of our players and estimated the time to adjust these vehicles. The amount of work was acceptable, and we managed to implement these changes in time for Update 9.15.
• Mods are currently a hot topic in the German community. As you were recently turning back towards the community, is there any preliminary result that can be shared about that topic from behind the scenes?
  I can’t comment on internal change at the moment but we take fairness very seriously and we want to ensure that our tankers have the best gameplay experience possible. Moving forward we will continue to be supportive of our modders but we will definitely begin cracking down on any mods that create unfair advantages or exploit game mechanics. This is a priority for us, please stay tuned for more specific information.
• The Grille 15 is well appreciated in the Supertest so far and some players are frightened about the tank immediately receiving a nerf. Do you have anything you can say about it, to calm down the players?
  We changed the characteristics of the Grille 15 several times during the Supertest and Common Test. We’ve done our best to adjust the vehicle’s parameters and we do not intend to change them after the release. However, as you know, we plan to perform a global rebalancing of all vehicles in the game, and it may affect the vehicle.
• It was already said a couple of times that artillery is going to be adjusted/changed. Is there anything you can already say about it?
  We have scrutinized the issues related to this vehicle type, analyzed feedback from those players who drive SPGs and those who face SPGs in battle. This vehicle type will be affected by the global rebalancing. The specifics will be announced later. So sorry to say so – no spoilers here.
• The T-22 is going to receive a rather drastic nerf. How was this extreme decision taken?
  After a thorough analysis of statistics on this vehicle, it was decided to adjust several parameters to bring its combat effectiveness to the level of researchable Tier X MTs. At the same time, its main feature—strong frontal and side armor—remained unchanged.
• With having the dynamic display of vehicle characteristics in the garage, are there any other similar changes planned?
  If we are talking about implementation of third-party modifications into the game, then yes, we intend to continue the practice of adding their functionality to the game client.
• What is the reason for update 9.15 being a bit smaller for the players than previous updates?
  This update is aimed at refining two major features: physics and sound. We have also improved characteristics of several premium vehicles; the first step towards the global vehicle rebalancing was made. We also continued the practice of reinforcing the technical base for future advancements in the game. However, the update has little to offer in terms of content (new maps/vehicles/objects). Thus, its size is smaller than usually, but not the smallest patch we had.

Source: https://ritastatusreport.live/2016/05/26/26052016-qa/

WoWs 0.5.6 spotting change

Redditor SeaRaptor00 and others were wondering why the stealth firing range of some ships were different in 0.5.6 than in 0.5.5

Wargaming NA Producer Quemapueblos replied on reddit in this thread:

Devs sent me an update this morning to add to the patch notes:

Bonus from the Concealment Expert skill is now applied to the basic visibility of the ship similar to the camouflage modifiers and the Masking System mod.1 modernization. Previously, this bonus affected the fines to visibility, such as fire, main battery, AA defense and anti-torpedo armament.

EU Community Contributor Carnotzet dug out an answer from the RU Forums regarding this issue as well:

Sub_Octavian “explained” the reasoning behind the change in this post.

“This decision was made to make the mechanics more understandable and logical. The penalty when firing is added to the detection range without any modifiers affecting it. On the other hand, all modifiers are added multiplicatively to the detection range (firing penalty is then added to the total). This way, there’s no subtlety in that cammos and upgrades work differently than skills.”

In brief, they want all modifiers to work the same way and they decided to do it the “nerf” way. What bothers me (and I guess many people) is that it wasn’t documented in the patch notes. Well actually it was, in the Russian patch notes, but I guess we’re not worthy enough to have the same patch notes.

So stealth firing is still possible, but any skills, modules or camos do not affect the penalty for firing any more. For example:

Example: Assume you have a ship with a normal visibility of 10 km and a maximum range of 15 km. You visibility does increase by 5 km when firing. We now apply a 10% bonus to visibility.

Pre-0.5.6 calculation:
(Visibility – 10% ) + (Penalty from shooting -10%) = minimum stealth firing range
(10 km – 10%) + (5 km -10 %) = 13,5 km
Your window for stealth firing is 15 km – 13,5 km = 1,5 km wide

0.5.6 calculation:
(Visibility – 10% ) + (Penalty from shooting) = minimum stealth firing range
(10 km – 10%) + (5 km) = 14 km
Your window for stealth firing is 15 km – 14 km = 1 km wide

Apparently, this change was lost in translation.

Source: http://www.himmelsdorf.com/changes-to-stealth-firing-with-patch-0-5-6/