WOT Decision Time?

After guiding you through Euro Truck Simulator 2 to the point of buying your first truck it’s time to quickly look at a profile decision that you could have made at the start but which becomes more pertinent at this point in the game. That decision is whether to link your profile to a World of Trucks account.

I’ve assumed that you bought the game through Steam since that is what 90% of players do (often in the sales). Steam gives you lots of in-game achievements to collect. In fact you may have already collected a couple of them by using a ferry or the channel tunnel – Sardine and Choo-Choo respectively. It is the achievements that give additional purpose to your game activities.

World of Trucks (WOT) gives you a forum to upload images to share with fellow Truckers. That may not be important to you but it also provides another source of jobs in the game. Until you bought your truck, the only jobs available to you were ‘Quick Jobs’. Now you can select ‘Freight Market’ jobs which are the ones where you use your own truck. But, if you have connected your profile to a WOT account you can also select ‘External Jobs’.

The jobs and the screens differ in a couple of ways. The Freight Market screen marks where your truck is but gives you the option of selecting a cargo from anywhere on the map so, for example I’m in Le Mans but I could choose to pick up a job from Gdansk! This may seem odd but there are circumstances where you might wish to take a specific cargo from a nearby city – probably because it counts towards an Achievement. Each job has an expiry time in minutes to hours. It’s important to recognise that this is game clock time not real world time. So if you were to pick one of the jobs in the screenshot with a 4 minute expiry, you will probably find it gone by the time you reach the pick-up point! The arrows on the right of each job are important too. They show the urgency of the task and are the only way to guess at how tight for time your run will be once you’ve hooked up to your trailer – that expected time on the left seems to relate to collection though only loosely. The Freight Market jobs only tell you when you actually need to be at your destination once you’ve hooked up – anyone smelling a trap here?! And, once again, this is game clock time – not the time on your watch. One positive in that is that the clock stops if you pause the game.
The external jobs supplied by World of Trucks are different. Firstly, the map not only knows where you are but only offers you jobs in the local area. In most cases this means the specific city you are in although if two cities are very close – Luxembourg and Metz come to mind – then you will see jobs from both. You’ll notice that the variety of trailers is different in my screen shots – that’s because I’m running a couple of trailer mods and not all of these are picked up by WOT for its jobs. Now for the key differences in WOT jobs. The time shown is Real World Time. If the job says 16 hours then you have 16 hours to complete it. Unlike the Freight Market jobs, the clock never stops so if you close the game and go away to do something else your time left to complete the job continues reducing. Normally this is not an issue but you need to understand how long it takes to drive a given distance in the game in real time. A guide figure assuming you’re obeying the speed limits is that 500km will take around 45 minutes to drive. So if you were to pick a job from Limoges to Le Mans that had 38mins left on it you will very likely be late and, as mentioned before, that will incur a massive fine! If you’ve clicked on a job but not hit the take job button you will see the route highlighted and by going to the map screen you can see the route distance which will allow you to estimate whether the time allowed is viable 🙂

Another difference is that once you click the Take Job button in External Market jobs, it’s all yours – you don’t have to rush to the collection point while hoping that the trailer will still be there when you arrive. Now that’s better! 😉

The other reason for connecting your Profile to World of Trucks is their own Achievements which add more targets to aim for……including occasional community events. For example there is the annual Christmas ‘Help Santa’ event and this month they had a ‘Trade Connections – France’ event. The Christmas bauble and the Postage Stamp signify that I completed these. SCS have indicated that they will be doing more of these in future. I think that makes connecting your profile to World of Trucks worthwhile 🙂

So that sums up World of Trucks, your profile and what connecting to it adds to the game. I’ll conclude with a couple of screenshots with our Volvo passing La Chapelle Notre Dame du Puy in Bourganeuf on the D941… And a forward view from the cab on the A28 while driving from Limoges to Le Mans… I forgot to mention in the post about our first truck that I fitted a no smoking sign and a Volvo pennant. Those pennants are a useful addition because they hang out on corners giving an indication of how many g’s you’re pulling through a turn – advance warning of the risk that the truck will tip over! I suggest you fit one 🙂