Today is the perfect day to watch your first SW movie then :lol:

Happy Star Wars day!

I'm Lhamster, I've been around here longer than all of you, held almost every job under the sun, and will rule the world soon.

Some venn diagrams for us Brits :lol:

Played a battle on my other nub acc, just missed a gold, switched accs, first game on this acc, same map, same place :D

Nope, no crystals bought, all earned in battles or contests.

Interesting, my nub acc has a higher rating that yours, yet I don't drug a lot, nor I have bought any kits. I have over 70k cris without buying too. Says something I think.

There has already been an article by hogree here giving advice on what things you should Micro-Upgrade (MU) but there is another question to ask: “How much should I Micro-Upgrade?” The main constraint will of course be your budget, made up of how many crystals you currently have, and how many you expect to get in the near future. Once you have your budget, the two main things that will influence your decision on how far to MU are the price of the upgrade, and the total price up to that upgrade. The two ways you will reach a point when you stop are as follows: You may feel that 7000 crystals is too much for 1.0 more protection and stop. Or decide you can afford to spend 50,000 crystals out of your budget on protection and it reaches that total at a certain upgrade so you stop, even if you think the next upgrade is worth it. Some parameters are more important than others, so spending more on them is an option to consider. For weapons, damage is the main upgrade to do, as that increases the main point of the weapon, to damage and destroy other tanks. All the other parameters are secondary, although there is still a hierarchy, reload time is more important than rotation speed or range as it indirectly increases how much damage can be done. For hulls, there are two main parameters, health and speed, as the combination/ratio of these two is what defines the hull and why you picked the hull in the first place. Unfortunately, these main parameters are also usually the most expensive. Another thing to take into consideration is how much the cost goes up each time, take for example, M3 Smoky damage, you start at around 1000 crystals for a 0.5 increase, but within five upgrades, you're paying over 12,000 crystals for less than half of that. In this case, you may decide only to do two upgrades due to the large increases in price each time. On the other hand, take reload time for M3 Isida. Upgrades start at 174 crystals, and go up to 5952 crystals. In this case you may decide that it is worth doing all the upgrades as they aren't that expensive, and only go up by a few 100 crystals each time. If you are MUing multiple items at the same time and are on a limited budget (That probably applies to most of us) deciding where MUs are needed the most will also influence how far you MU. For example, you may be MUing both Freeze and Railgun. You do five upgrades of Freeze reload time, and wish to do more, but you decide that MUing Railgun's damage is more important and so you upgrade that instead of more Freeze upgrades. Giving advice on exactly how far to go on M0, M1, M2 and M3 is probably too much for one article. However, I will give brief overviews. M0 At M0, it is hardly worth doing any MUs, except maybe the first few of your hull's health/speed or weapon's damage, due to them being very cheap, and as pretty soon you'll be upgrading to M1 and those MUs will be gone. Most people at the ranks of M0 will also not have the crystals spare to afford any, and will want to concentrate on expanding their garage instead. M1 At M1, it's pretty much the same. Not many are worth doing, except a couple at the start of the main parameters which are cheap and give a bigger improvement. Again, those at M1 ranks will most likely not have the crystals to afford a lot of MUs. M2 MUs become more worthwhile at M2, although I wouldn't advise doing them to the extent of M3s. Buying a few of the cheap upgrades on the secondary parameters is also a possibility. M3 The main time to do MUs is when you have M3 equipment (Some of you reading this may not have got there yet, but you can keep this in mind for later). At M3, there are no more 'M' upgrades that will wipe your MUs, and everyone is more experienced, so sometimes the smallest difference can decide if you win or lose. MUs are naturally more expensive at this level, so only choosing a few hulls and weapons, then being selective with which parameters to upgrade can be a sensible idea and cut your costs massively. It has been suggested that doing around two fifths of the MUs brings the most effective upgrades while keeping costs down. This equates to the following table: The only other thing to mention is the time it takes to upgrade, although I don't this will be a factor at all in deciding how far to go. If after considering all the other factors, you want the upgrade, I doubt you will say ”I won't do it due to the time”, instead you will just wait it out as you think the upgrade is worth it. In conclusion, how far to MU is totally up to you, there is no right or wrong answer, however this article has hopefully given you some ways of making that decision.

Ah, good, I was hoping I'd get you to post some really old stuff :P

Lets get properly old:

Nope, since starting again after the rebalance, haven't bought any crystals. Everything has been earned, either in battles or in jobs.

How old are you then? Lego has been around 50+ years!

Lol, that ain't me :lol:

Well, it's been a while! This series is finally back after a few months of not really doing much in my account, I've finally played enough for an article to be worth it. Raphael will most likely be doing his own newbie article at some point. So, let's get cracking! So the last article in this series was at the end of January, but in February I only played maybe 3 times, and so there wasn't enough for an article just on that. I have 3 results from February recorded with screenshots, a couple of them I guess because my D/L was decent, and one had a decent reward. Between then and the next time a battle was good enough to screenshot, I played a few battles, and managed to rank to Master Sergeant: The next time I recorded a result was over a month later, on the 21st of March, where I repeated the trick that I talked about in the January issue of having druggers join the other team, and it ending up being a draw with about a minute left, and then I manage to capture a flag to win with seconds left. The feeling of doing this is so satisfying, although I wouldn't want to do it regularly, it's certainly not satisfying while playing! About a week later, I didn't really have anything to do on a Saturday, so I played a pretty unspectacular game of Tanki, and then joined a long game, which I wasn't planning to stay in. Of course, I ended up staying in the game for 5 hours, gaining 5k XP and over half way towards the next rank, winning it and getting a pretty large reward. Actually, just noticed my rating went up over 300k in that one game! A few days later at the end of March, as I was playing for the first time on this account in Rio, without realising how close I was to ranking, I capped a flag and ranked to First Sergeant. At the current rate I'm playing, ranking twice in a month is pretty good going. Since then I've only gained an additional 1.5k XP, so its another period of not playing. So in the past 3 months I've gained 13k XP, ranked twice and earned 16k crystals. Rating has gone up by half a million too so it has gone up by about a third, despite long periods of not playing. So not too shabby for the amount I've played. So that's the what I've actually done progress wise, in terms of garage and decision making I haven't bought anything new, including MUs, which I don't really think are worth doing much of at this stage, but I have thought about a few things. My main combo is Rail/Hornet, and getting M1 will only happen at WO3/WO2 respectively, which is quite a way off. As I have quite a lot of crystals, I was considering kits, at lower ranks it was the starter kits, but I decided against them as I already had some stuff in them, and some of the stuff was pretty useless, I'd never use it, so it was going to be a waste of crystals. The light and heavy M1 kits I have also never really considered, the heavy kit is too expensive, and I'd never use Shaft, and I have Hornet, so Wasp M1 in the light kit is just a waste. The Paint M1 kit would be pretty useful, I've been thinking about it for a while, and I can afford it now, but I don't really want to spend that much on paints so early on. I survive without them currently, although I would be set until about 2nd Lt, I'd rather get another hull and weapon M1, and get paints later. The other one I've been considering is the Turret M1 kit, which has M1 Rail, which would be pretty OP at my rank, and the same with M1 Thunder. M1 Smoky would also be decent, I use M0 Smoky occasionally when Rail isn't working. I wouldn't use Twins though, and I have Freeze not Fire M0, so I don't really want Fire M1. Spending 80k on this would also leave me with nothing to spend on M1 hulls. I don't see M1 Rail being worth 80k, even getting it a few ranks earlier and being able to one shot. If I had a few 100k, then my view might be different! So most likely, I will not get any kits, but get Rail/Hornet M1, and possibly some other things, and wait until I can get M2 Kits before getting any. So that's where I'm up to now, I don't think I will be playing much in the next 2 months due to exams, so I'm not sure when the next article will be, but once my exams are finished I can start to play quite a bit more, and my rate of progress should increase! Thanks for reading!

Long term update: Full Garage now, with a few MUs too. :lol:

Yep, still have a load on a shelf actually!

Any time frame on release to the main servers?

Exactly what I wanted, thanks! Still annoyed that I've MUed according to the current stats, and now it's all getting changed and other things are better for MUing <_<

For those who can't get on the test server, can we have some screenshots of the changed stats?

And this is where this fails as 2-2 is 0, and you can't divide by 0.

I go as far as writing about playing on one of my alts! :lol:

Bravo!

Yeah, the 2 NCIS series are similar, and also really good.

Ah, was gonna say, I'm still watching Five-0!

Read it carefully, T is smaller than x or y, W is bigger than x or y. So T/W is smaller than 1.