Yes, well there's no such thing as P2W in chess. Also it's mathematically almost perfectly balanced. It's a bit silly to compare that to an online MMO game.

Sorry, one last point to add which I don't think is accurately conveyed above.   And that point is:  tanki is actively choosing to present their game this way--unbalanced, static, ever changing, and increased prices for less of a return--dopamine rushes. That is the business path they are going down--and you can never return from making that choice. Ever.  Perhaps with classic, the other path (chess) is the direction that game will take. I doubt it.   The love of money...

I counter with chess is 100% balanced and seems to be still hanging around as something people play...   No need to find/link the theory. I know of it as well. But the theory is used primarily for revenue generating. Hypersomnia is correct with his post.   Maybe tanki was steered (in 2015) towards a certain demographic of customer in the online community that tends to spend the most amount of money on online games such as this. I have never spent any real-world currency on this game and I never ever will, so I am obviously not their target customer. But then, I still play chess, so... Either way, tanki has actively chosen to follow this path with maximizing revenue for whatever the return on that revenue is. Maybe games like tanki have a finite lifespan and this course of action is necessary to maximize profits. Tanki is playing the short-viral money-game vs the long, slow money-game.   If you are already a buyer (in the case above), you already have fallen for tanki's shtick. The rest is incidental. If you spend money once, you will spend it again because the unchanged variable is the player's (addictive) personality. Perhaps they turn their attention to a brand new account with a different turret? Or maybe a (lol) paint/skin. Or perhaps it follows the 'sunk-cost' theory/fallacy, or the drug-dependency feelings that Hyper pointed out above. Or maybe that individual person doesn't spend any more money, but is replaced by someone else who does. Or all of the above.

Who said anything about being perfect? This is a common misunderstanding which is being used to defend poor balance. No one is asking for perfection. Balance can be achieved without being perfect. It depends on how you define the word "balance". Based on how you worded your argument, you think that being balanced means that every team in every single match has 50% win rate which is "perfection" and since we can't achieve perfection, you players should not complain about how unfair MM is. But this is a stupid argument. An example to compare is League of legends which has 170+ champions, millions of players, so many different builds and items, so many different mechanics, so many different interactions and thus, so many factors that play a role in deciding which team wins the game. Despite all that, if you look at the win rates across all champions in different ranks, you will see that the highest win rate is close to 54% and the lowest is 45%. Now compare that to Tanki which in every single game you can tell by looking at tab that a certain team will 100% win the game in at least 90% of the time.

not much of a theory. 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your buyers.  unbalanced MM created environment where new conveniently OP stuff is like soft core cheating. Free dopamine. you toy gets nerfed and is not a cheat code anymore? No dopamine and brain no like that. Brain chase dopamine so it chases the new OP toy. average peasant with his trash clown emoji equipment beats the OP guy? the peasant gets small amount of dopamine. and so on coming back from a clearly losing game to winning it generates way more dopamine for both beloved buyers and... peasants... than for example a close but balanced game. op*x just needs to keep the 20% hooked while giving just enough for the lower tier players to be able to beat the 20% in some situations. as long as that ying yang exist both sides will be happy without even realising it. some peasants and buyers 'escape the matrix'? not a problem, we clearly see that new peasants and buyers are still enough to replace the old generation. this cannot happen in 'balanced' tanki. thats why they're pushing you to play MM and not PRO battles where balanced games can be achieved pretty easily. thats why the 'average' player quit before even reaching WO1 back when balanced and fair PRO battles were the dominant match type.