Answered, thanks! Closed.

It was talked about a lot in the livestream. I think they plan to add it eventually after all the HTML5 stuff is done. It's a fairly high priority task.

No, why would it? Those alts still just deal basic damage, so they will provide the usual protection - up to 50%.

Yeah, pretty much. In the stream I'd say around 40% of answers involved "after HTML5 is released".

Paraphrasing Hazel from the RU livestream: Matchmaking balance works as intended and unfortunately it does mean that sometimes the rank range (and therefore gear difference) will be quite large. This often depends on the time of day – if there aren’t many players online the rank ranges have to be greater, otherwise battles will take ages to start. The system does try to balance the players by equipment to make sure that both teams have equal numbers of strong and weak players, but this is not always possible. Also, it’s not a great idea to always have even battles. If every single battle is an even fight where both teams have to concentrate hard to win, then players will get tired faster, which ultimately results in them spending less time playing, which in turn means we get less revenue. Our aim is to increase the playtime, and studies have shown that having a mix of even battles, easy wins and big losses is better psychologically than having completely even battles all the time. However, you’ll have plenty of difficult even battles once Rating MM is released.

Hazel said that the current modules system is outdated now that fire damage is no longer tied to firebird. So from what I understand, they do plan to rework the system to make it so that a single module protects from all types of that turret's effects and damage.

Fine, 3.5 out of 7. Still a lot.

As soon as the first challenge was made available I was sure the rewards would be reduced. But I agree that it's demotivating to see empty slots. Honestly, I don't understand why they couldn't just fill those slots with useless rewards (like mines or a cheap garage paint), or even just take rewards from other tiers and spread the out more evenly. Having empty slots is honestly a terrible decision on their part, IMHO. I did say "below legend rank" :P It's probably true that the game is moving away from strategy and smart gameplay, but to be honest I'm not complaining. You can still play PRO battles with an organised team if you want proper gameplay, while in standard battles teamwork was never particularly strong. However, I still often see good players and some teamwork, but at the same time it's nice to be able to do something on your own without depending on your team.

The idea makes sense, but like I said in another recent topic, Titan has a lot of counters for its dome. Hunter's OD disables it, Viking's OD deals enough damage to brute-force through it, Hornet's and Mammoth's OD ignores it. That's 4 out of 7 hulls which Titan's dome is weak against, so I don't think it needs more disadvantages. Also, I feel like it would be a lot of development and troubleshooting for a rather minor change.

I don't really see the point. They're both heavy hulls so it doesn't really matter if their ODs get switched.

Very interesting post. I must say I also like the direction in which the game is being taken. Unfortunately the game has been P2W since the start, and it's impossible to change this now. Buying items for power has always been a part of Tanki. However, at least there are no super powerful exclusive tanks that you can buy for money only, meaning that eventually a free player is able to purchase the same equipment that even the biggest buyer has, even if it will take a LOT longer to save up enough crystals for it. The massive Battle Pass rewards from Challenges are an incentive for players to spend money on the game while also increasing their play time. So it brings in revenue and also helps with player retention. I personally think that right now the game is more fun than ever, IF you have enough gear to be able to compete. For free players and lower ranks (below Legend) it's probably quite a bit more difficult and at times frustrating, but I'm pretty sure that's always been a problem to some extent due to the P2W nature of the game I mentioned above. It will only get better from here, since the release of HTML5 will improve performance and open up opportunity for new cool features. Can't wait to see what's coming.

Other mods are busy or otherwise unable to work on the forum. Hate does a lot of I&S work behind the scenes though. You may have noticed that we did just recruit 3 new candidates, so hopefully some of them will help out in this section.

Oh there's plenty more issues with lock-on even without the laser. If you're locking on, the enemy could get killed, you could get killed, they could go out of sight or your aim could get knocked off. There's too many ways for it to go bad, which is why I don't like lock-on turrets.

But it does require lock-on, and it comes with a longer reload afterwards. So it's not really OP.

So in that case you can be the good defender and make a difference, right? :rolleyes:

From now on, minor ideas for overdrives should be posted in this topic. We we also merge new topics with overdrive ideas here, after they become inactive (as per usual with "Merge" tags). Obviously since all new hulls with have unique overdrives, if you are posting an idea for a new hull, make sure to come up with an overdrive for it :)

So what are you suggesting then? Right now you can already change one mission for free every day. If you want to change more, you have to pay crystals.

I still don't understand. Are you talking about weekly missions?

Read the full article here: Dissected: The Grand Livestream Hi everyone! On the 4th of July, Kasim (RU CM) and Hazel Rah (lead developer of Tanki) held a livestream, where they did something pleasantly surprising - answered every single one of the 228 questions submitted by players specifically for the livestream, taking a total of almost 3 hours to do it. A full summary of the questions and answers has already been published in our newspaper, but I decided to dedicate a separate topic to one of the questions from the stream, for which Hazel's answer was particularly detailed: "How is game balance done in Tanki Online?" So here’s how it works. The 14 turrets are divided into 4 main range groups – long, medium, short and close range. You can probably guess which group each turret fits into, or just check this page on the Wiki. Each of those groups decides the overall Damage Per Second (DPS) of the turrets within the group, so the DPS of turrets in the same group is quite similar, but it differs greatly between the four groups. It differs because turrets with greater range can deal with enemies in a larger area and thus have more opportunities to be useful and deal damage throughout the battle. Therefore they get lower DPS to give shorter range turrets a chance to beat them. For example, Twins has a higher DPS than Railgun, allowing it to beat Railgun when both tanks are standing still within firing range of one another. But in an actual battle the Railgun is able to slowly take out Twins from afar, as well as dodge its slow shots. That's fairly straightforward, but within each range group the theoretical DPS (i.e., the number you get just using calculations) also differs among the turrets because each turret has its own specific abilities making it more (or less) effective under certain conditions. If a turret has splash damage, like Thunder, its actual DPS will be greater than a turret like Smoky on maps where tanks often stay in groups and there are lots of obstacles. But if there aren’t many opportunities to use splash damage, the DPS will be lower. The effectiveness of each turret also depends on a bunch of other factors, such as game mode, map, enemy player equipment and how well the player is able to use their turret’s abilities. The fact that there are so many factors is why game balance is so difficult to accurately predict. It's impossible to see how players will use the turrets, so no amount of test server trials will show a turret's true place in a real battle. For example, we (developers) thought Gauss would be too powerful so its splash damage radius was initially quite low, but gameplay quickly showed that it’s not enough, so the radius was increased. With Magnum it was the opposite – initially we made the splash radius massive because we thought there’s no way people will be able to aim accurately, but within a couple months a lot of people were landing shots right on target with incredible accuracy. There was an issue with Hammer too, which had to be nerfed because players were using it in a different way than expected (don’t remember how exactly). It’s practically impossible to accurately balance an item “once and for all” because of all the different factors affecting it, as well as a constantly changing environment of different people and other gameplay updates. This is why we continuously observe the balance situation and make changes as necessary. Overall, Hazel’s opinion on balance is: “In general it’s fine, but I’d like to change a few things”. The topic itself will most likely be merged into Let's Discuss Game Balance after a while, but it's here to comment on for the time being :) I hope this will help clear up some of the rumours regarding why turrets seem to constantly switch between being completely useless and ridiculously overpowered.

Valid

We had this suggestion before. Developers deemed it unnecessary and bad for gameplay, since players will just leave the game when they see how little crystals they will receive.

This is an issue called "key ghosting", where certain key combinations don't work when pressed together. It's random for different keyboards, and there's no way to directly fix it. As an alternative solution, you can use custom controls in the game settings to assign the movement keys to a new combination that doesn't lock up. For example in my case the arrow keys cause ghosting, so I changed the hull controls to O L K and ":" for forward, backward, left and right respectively. You can also buy an external keyboard that doesn't cause ghosting with the combinations you use, which is what I did before custom controls were implemented.

That's true. I wish we had a way to vote for the map before being sent into a battle, but unfortunately it doesn't look like devs want to add anything like it.

Here :ph34r: