I'm sure most of you are aware of the passes which can be bought in the Garage or received in Daily Bonuses (if not, feel free to click here). In this article, I will be focusing on the two passes which can be bought in the Garage for crystals, in order to try and provide players with some information on how they can be used. Quite a few of you might not usually purchase these passes, when in actual fact, they can prove very rewarding. Read on to find out more! _______________________________________________________________________________________________________[/font] The 'PRO Battle' Pass. So, what does this pass do? Put simply: "PRO Battle Passes enable users to take part in PRO battles for exactly one month, at a cost of 5000 crystals. When creating a PRO battle, a player can enable or disable supply boxes, crystal boxes, supplies, micro-upgrades, autobalance and friendly fire." Basically, it allows you to take part in a battle mode previously known as a "No Supplies" battle, where 'add-ons' such as supplies could have been disabled. Due to the fact that some of these 'add-ons' can be purchased in the Garage, it is argued that PRO battles can involve more skilled gameplay, as players can't depend on their garage or supplies as much. When would it make sense to buy this pass, then? Well, if you satisfy any of the following criteria... If you... - Are probably going to play more than 10 PRO battles in the next month. - Are likely to earn more than 5000 crystals in total as a result of playing PRO battles over the next month. - Are planning to join a clan, and participate in official clan wars. ...then investing in a PRO Battle Pass would definitely be the right decision to make. Of course, you can accept a one-off payment of 500 crystals each time you wish to join a PRO battle. And that's fine, if it's unlikely that you're going to play this battle mode very often. However, with the recent rise in popularity of XP battles (what are these?), many players are starting to take part in PRO battles more and more often. Therefore, if you're going to end up paying more than 5000 crystals just through one-off payments to join PRO battles over the next month, then it really does make more sense to consider investing in a PRO battle pass instead. Of course, you might not feel that inclined to play PRO battles that often, and so it's possible you're unsure how many PRO battles you'll end up playing over the following month. Instead, you can look at the issue from another perspective. Regardless of how many PRO battles you will play, is it likely that you'll end up claiming more than 5000 crystals from this battle mode? For example, you could end up only playing about half a dozen PRO battles - but equally, you might end up earning an average of about 1000 crystals from each. As a result, if you want the freedom of being able to join a PRO battle without having to weigh up whether it's going to be worth a one-off payment of 500 crystals, then you may as well just purchase the pass. After all, you won't lose out if you're going to end up earning more than the cost of the pass. Finally, there's a situation in which buying a PRO Battle Pass is almost imperative - if you're a clan player who takes part in official clan wars. As part of the rule requirements for Cybersport tournaments, clan wars almost always have to be played in the PRO battle mode. Even if you may only have a couple of clan wars scheduled for the next month or so, most competitive clans would hold trainings for their players in preparation for such wars; and these trainings would be best made as PRO battles, in order to emulate a clan war situation. In other words, if you're part of a clan or if you're planning on joining one, and there's a possibility that you'll be selected to play for your clan in clan wars, then purchasing the PRO Battle Pass is a must. Plus, you would still be able to make use of the pass in ordinary PRO battles. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ The 'Score Multiplier' Pass. Now, this is arguably the more complicated pass of the two, in terms of deciding whether or not it's worth buying. Here's a summary of what this pass actually does: "Score Multiplier Passes increase the XP that a player receives by 30% for exactly one month, as a cost of 12,500 crystals. However, this doesn't affect your score in team battles (TDMs and CTFs) or your number of kills in a DM; it only affects experience points." To give a basic example, you enter a battle and destroy an enemy tank. Now, we all know that this will normally mean you would receive 10 XP for doing so. But with a Score Multiplier Pass, 13 XP would be added to the XP bar at the top of your screen; you'll effectively have earned 30% more XP, as the description says. Despite this, only 10 points would be added to your score on the leaderboard if you'd entered a team battle, or only 1 kill if you'd entered a DM, as usual. In other words, you won't earn any more crystals through purchasing this pass, as your score/kills won't be changed - it'll only affect the amount of XP you earn. Looking at when it would make sense to purchase this pass, we can make the following statement: "Whether or not this pass is worth purchasing depends on the amount of XP you would earn as a result of doing so." So, let's do some math here. Once upon a time, XP could be bought in the Garage, at a price of 1000 crystals for 1000 XP; until this feature was cancelled, mainly due to a lack of popularity. We can therefore assume that if XP were to be made available to purchase once more, 1 XP would be worth 1 crystal. As a result, you'd logically want to earn 12,500 XP through spending 12,500 crystals on the Score Multiplier Pass. This would mean that the extra 30% earned due to the pass should be equal to 12,500 XP. And if we use this to figure out how much XP that would mean we'd have to earn: "12,500 XP ÷ 0.3 = 41,667 XP. This means you would have to earn just over 40,000 XP in one month, in order to earn 12,500 XP extra as a result of purchasing a Score Multiplier Pass." Let's say that a month is equivalent to 30 days, since that's the average number of days in a month. So, in order to earn to earn this amount of XP in a month, you would have to earn... "41,667 XP ÷ 30 days = 1389 XP, or roughly 1400 XP per day." The average player should be able to earn between 1000 and 1500 XP per hour, as you would only have to get 2 or 3 kills per minute in order to do so. Therefore, we can conclude: "If you normally play for an hour or more per day, it is probably worth getting a Score Multiplier Pass." Basically, this would mean that you'll most likely be able to earn the same amount of XP back as the number of crystals you paid for the pass (12,500). And this is assuming that it takes you an hour to earn about 1400 XP - if you have some drugs to spare, and enter a DM with a good combination, you can effectively halve the time it takes to earn this amount of XP. Many of you will likely earn about this much XP in a day anyway, if not more, since it really doesn't take an awful lot of time to do so. So, if you haven't purchased a Score Multiplier Pass this month, and you're a regular player, then it would be worth noting whether you spend about an hour or more playing each day on average. Because if you do, and you're looking to speed up the rate at which you earn XP, it would definitely make sense to purchase this pass. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Well, that's about all there is to know about these passes, apart form histories - I hope you found this an interesting read. Who knows - you might go on to decide whether or not you should invest in a pass as a result of this. Feel free to share your thoughts about this article! Thanks for reading, and see you in the battle!

Thanks guys! And thanks to @Law-Enforcer for the above image ^_^

Smoky for me, ranking today... Still debating whether I should buy other stuff, though, or wait for sales which may or may not arrive before the end of the World Cup :P

I agree with this post entirely. The Cybersport mods can't make English clans perform better, that's up to the clans themselves. All they can do is try to encourage this - for example, with Starladder. I'm really looking forward to seeing how some of our better clans perform, and I also think it'll provide a wake-up call to our L1 and L2 clans when they find things more difficult than they might have thought. It'll also provide some of our L3 clans with a good opportunity to challenge those L1 and L2 ones - and to me, it looks like a fair few are good enough to do that, and even to compete with some of the Russians. So, even though English clans are no longer going to receive special paints so easily, I do think that Cybersport in the English community is taking a step in the right direction, and we have the Cybersport team of staff to thank for that. The one thing I do agree with is the lack of activity by Cybersport commentators - but it does seem that's because of the restructuring taking place with Cybersport at the moment. I hope to see English commentary for many of the matches in the upcoming Starladder events, and it'd be even better if the commentating team are able to use this opportunity to introduce us to Russian clans. I think that would really help us to open our minds to the competition out there ^_^

Awesome idea, micah! This should be pretty interesting ^_^

Meh, they make people money...

;) Six M2s, three M3s and one mult vs. nine M3s and one M2. Neither side had ever trained together beforehand. We only had three out of twelve elite members on our team, the rest were our substitute squad. I think 1-0 to them is a decent score, considering that was mainly our secondary team, as a result. If only we hadn't let you get that flag at the start :P

Yeah, happens with the doors on the ground floor of my house all the time... Whenever I open one door, another closes, and vice-versa. Which makes for a pretty fun door control system ^_^

Thanks for the feedback, guys! ^_^

Thanks to you too, and I see - well, I know what the situation can be like for some female players. I was just wondering what you meant by the "take better control" quote, since I'm not really sure how Tanki would be able to do that. And I didn't take any offense, it's OK :P

So that means 95% of Tanki's playerbase shouldn't be allowed to discuss such an issue, because they don't understand? Sorry if I've misinterpreted your statement there, but it's clear both males and females can and should get involved in such discussion when it arises. That would never happen, just go right ahead and report all of 'em xD If you have any suggestions, do share them... Because the problem is, there isn't really any way of stopping people from saying those things, apart from banning everyone from talking in-game on the off chance that they might say something derogatory towards female players :/

If anyone's insulting, you can always report them... Apart from that, I don't really see what Tanki could do to 'take better control', as you put it. Stuff like that is a downside to the anonymity of the Internet, it's not exactly unique to the Tanki community.

+1... That was an awesome time.

^ Just noticed, lol. Now 4445 ^_^

From England's last performance, Sterling and Sturridge were clearly our stronger players. Rooney was the worst England player on the pitch - he did nothing apart from that cross for the England goal...

Actually, that's the wrong way round. Nowadays, so many of us regularly drink sweeter and tastier beverages that we find the taste of water bland. Personally, I don't often drink anything other than water (apart from milk - but that's not much sweeter), and I really like the taste. +1 to all of that post. Impurities in water (such as mineral ions) are probably what gives it a taste. Water definitely has a taste if impure; not only can you find this out on the Internet, but you can also go out and test it for yourself. Go out and buy different types of mineral/spring water, for example. Boiled water tastes particularly horrible to me, if you want to try that, as many of the minerals are lost in the process.

Fieldmarshal definitely, the others yes... except Major. I was so happy when I ranked to Lieutenant Colonel, Major looks horrible in my opinion. How on earth is it pleasant to the eye? *shudder*

Looks like at most, there are exactly 7 fading crystal boxes visible in the video at any given moment, which means you managed to take those 7 crystal boxes within 1 second (the time it takes for the boxes to fade once picked up). That would probably be a good way to have such a record i.e. most crystals taken within one second, as taking more than a few crystal boxes at exactly the same time would be impossible.

I knew it! You didn't fool me!

So just in case you change your mind and decide to announce you're actually female/alien/a dog/non-existent: I knew it!

^Yes, yes you should. It'll mean I'm not reminded about how you and Fen completely fooled me for the past however many months every time I see your username :c

Achilles, I hate you now k. He's the one who managed to deceive many of us, I initially thought you were a guy .-. And nice acting :P

Hog. Hog. Hey hog. What was the score of that Germany vs Portugal game again? :P P.S. I want my 100 crystals pls.

Oi, that's an awkward condition - it means you win if they draw. I didn't miss that wording :P I'll agree with that, on the following conditions: - If Germany win, you owe me 100 crystals. - If they draw, neither of us owe anything. - If Portugal wins, I owe you 100 crystals. Now we can shake on it xD