This feature is already being abused. I've just been kicked from a battle after playing for over an hour. Basically teams of players hijack battles with high crystals by kicking all players on rotation. I suspect this will become very common soon.

Apparently Tanki wants to encourage mediocrity with this change. While the multiplying makes sense, the redistribution of crystals will slowly kill the game. Why would a good player invest time, energy and possibly crystals, when at the end he receives slighly more than some idle newbie?

Actually no, the contest specified that the DC crystals are not counted, so he had to pay the full price for the 200k. I wonder how much that silly prize gadget costs. I wouldn't be surprised if it was less. Tanki has lost me as a buyer, with their soviet style customer services, so my days of purchasing crystals are gone.

The gold box change, while good on some aspects, has pretty much ruined some maps. On Iran you will see a bunch of gold diggers waiting for the box. Maybe the location of the gold box should also be random so that these beggars do not ruin the games for teams.

...and two days later, nobody bothers to reply...

Are you expecting me to say something like Visual Basic or Php? I've gone through a lot of languages, from basic, to pascal, c, assembly language, c++, perl, ruby and various web oriented scripting languages. There is no hacker/developer battle when the developer is good, only when there are poor developers. What you are witnessing here is not a battle, is a gang bang, where tanki is being gang banged by the flying tanks. There is absolutely no excuse for having such a flaw in the game for 6 months or more. Regarding the games that I own, it is not relevant for this topic, unless of course you want to hack it, to prove me what a bad developer I am. In this case, we can talk, I am up for a challenge.

Wow, that was truly the definition of *epic fail*...

I enjoy Isida quite a lot, it is one weapon that can really make the difference, if you have decent team mates. Yes, most isida players camp around their flag, trying to get xp, rather than help their team win, but that does not make the weapon any less valuable.

You're funny, I am a programmer who actually created scripts for various games in the past, I am also a game owner who is catching scripters, so I believe I have some idea of what hacking/cheating is all about.

Thanks, I guess they don't want non-russians to report payment problems.

It seems it is currently impossible to report a payment problem. The Send button won't activate, no matter what I type there.

I have just purchased some crystals, while having the double crystal option activated and I did not get the extra ones. Given that the report button does not work (the SEND button is deactivated), I have to report it here, hoping a mod can help.

Can you name one successful game that is plagued by cheats to this extent? This is not just a game where one super programmer hacked the code and is taking advantage of it, we are talking about thousands of average Joe that get exploits from internet. And it is not some amazing new trick that suddenly surprised the game developers. When I joined the game (more than 6 months ago) I was seeing tanks flying. These days it has become impossible to play certain maps without running into one or more cheaters.

Tankionline is the product of the people developing Alternativa3d. Even if it wasn't, you couldn't blame a framework for the bugs in your own application since you are responsible for your commercial product. But I agree that banning the cheaters at midnight is a terrible practice and one that does not make much sense. I don't care if a cheater gets banned, or not, the next day. The fact that 3000 or 1 million cheaters get banned every night does not help ease the frustration that I get when I am cheated during the day. The only thing is accomplishing is that mods might have less work, but as far as the game's customers go, this method solves nothing.

If true this is an abuse. A moderator should have no advantage over a regular player, when joining a game. As a paying customer I'd find it distasteful that a moderator would kick me out of a battle because his friend needs to be in.

Is isida considered poor taste, or what?

It is quite annoying to be disconnected just to find out that someone else entered the game you were in, especially when you spent time and resources to help your team win. It makes one think that some players/mods have the ability to disconnect a player from a game. Refreshing only takes you to the games list, and no it did not take more than 30 seconds.

And how exactly would that make me feel better about the hours wasted by some cheater? They would just create another account. I am just sick of them, I just got out of another game that almost got f'ed up by another flying tank. If this thing persists I am going to just leave the game and not look back. I am playing to get entertained, not to get frustrated and robbed.

You deal with cheaters starting from the common cheats. 1. The speed of a tank is limited, if a tank moves from A to B faster than the accepted top speed, then it is a cheat. I assume that the player tanks are constantly sending their positions to the server so that they can be sent to the other players. If that is the case, the server can detect the Distance Vs Time and determine if such movement is possible. 2. The energy of a tank is limited (again the server can detect when one isida is healing too much). 3. The length of isida ray cannot be longer than whatever the default is. (again it can be detected). I am assuming that right now the servers are trying to be minimalistic and just act like proxies that send the commands from one tank to all the others. You have two options. A. You buy more servers that will allow you to process the feedback from tanks and detect anomalies. This costs money and I assume the game management is not eager to go that way. B. You add the detection of anomalies in the client and let the players detect anomalies received from the server. This means the servers get to stay the way they are, you are just adding a very slight (negligible) overhead on the existing clients. If my tank receives anomalies from the server regarding a tank on the map, it would automatically report it to some server dedicated to such things. This means the extra server would not have to constantly analyze data from 40k tanks, but only the data reported automatically by the other tanks. Assuming that the position of a cheater tank is sent to all the tanks on the map, all the tanks would report the culprit, thus making it easy to properly identify the cheater and prevent abuse from coded clients. One other way would be a 'report' command for players. If you don't want all the tanks to constantly analyze the positions of all the other tanks on the map, there could be a report feature. Once a player 'reports' another player, its own game* would then start analyzing the feedback from the cheater and send the report to the server (if anything wrong is detected). Since more players would 'report' the cheater, the overhead on the clients (or server) would be minimal and only activated when a cheater is around. *By game i mean the swf application loaded in the browser.

Maybe the developers should spend one afternoon to develop a method to auto detect cheaters. It is amazing that tanks have been flying around capturing flags in one second, travelling the whole map instantly and nothing was done in months. While server crashes are frustrating, having bugs that allow cheaters to take advantage is WAY more annoying, you basically feel robbed of all the fun you are supposedly trying to have.

Lately a lot of games are ruined by *beep* who start flying around capturing the flags 20 times in a minute. Right now I am almost expecting a newbie to pop up and ruin everything. I cannot imagine it would be THAT difficult for the programmers to determine such movements and auto detect cheaters. As someone who is spending money in this game, I feel increasingly frustrated to see the same issue over and over again and nothing being done. Seriously, if a tank travels all the map in 1 second you can safely assume it is a cheater and ban him from playing. This system of taking screenshots and reporting obviously does not work. If my one hour of playing is ruined by a newly created account who cheats, taking screenshots and reporting that account makes me feel like a fool. Instead, the game should auto detect cheaters, especially when it is something THAT obvious like capturing the flag in 1 second. Here are some suggestions as to how to deal with the automatic detection: http://forum.tankionline.com/posts/list/60/107595.page#1969336

I see you are right. I suppose these flames were useful for something, I learned something new today :!: