If you're like me, you're probably tired of reading pointless chat, or people complaining about how much "their team sucks" or criticising your style of play. Since WoT doesn't come with an option to turn off chat in game, I started looking for a way to disable it myself. I finally found a working solution.

Some people are going to argue about why you'd want to disable chat in a "team game". Fair enough, but the vast majority of chat I read is actually worthless to the game. A lot of it takes away from the enjoyment of the game. I sat through a match where one player on our team, decided in the first 15 seconds of the game, that we were all noobs and would lose the match. The entire game he whined and chatted with the opposing team about how bad we were and even told them what we were doing. After he died early on, it just gave him more time to whine about his team and brag about having "called the loss". It felt so good when we actually won, despite this jerk's constant crying.


CAUTION: Doing this will completely disable the chat window in battle. You will not see any messages from players of any kind. That means no "Back to Base!", "Attack!", "Help!" etc, as well as chat. Also you won't be able to send messages yourself. You will still see when someone pings the map though. While this method DOES work safely, always do so at your own risk. That's why making backups of the files involved is specifically mentioned in the steps below.

Here's how it works:

1. Find your WoT directory. C:\Games\World of Tanks\res\gui\flash
2. Make a backup of "BattleMessenger.swf". Copy that file to somewhere you'll remember where to find it. I put mine on the desktop.
3. Delete "BattleMessenger.swf" from the "Flash" directory.
4. Make a copy of "BattleTimer.swf" and paste it somewhere you can find it. I put it on my desktop too.
5. Rename that copy of "BattleTimer.swf" to "BattleMessenger.swf" and then copy it back into the "Flash" directory.

If done correctly, the next time you play WoT, you won't have to put up with jerks and the mentally challenged. To reenable your chat, just delete the modified "BattleMessenger.swf" and replace it with the original you backed up to your desktop or wherever.

Doing this does not change the look of the interface in any negative way. You simply won't see the chat window. (it also won't add a 2nd BattleTimer if anyone was worried about that)

Hope this helps somebody. I know a lot of people are demanding that WoT adds in this feature, but until they do, here's your workaround.