So today's VLOG mentions an increase on the heat damage from using vulcan during the coming rebalance. The question though is; "is that enough?" We've all faced the guy in the mammoth, wearing inferno, hitting the heal button and double armor, occasionally the double power when there are to many tanks in front of him, and he does it over and over and over and over for the entire match.... basically just camping and throwing out a wall of lead and doesn't even move except to crawl back into his favorite firing spot if someone manages to kill him and respawns in the wrong spot. While this is great for Tanki revenues by driving supply costs, from both the vulcan driver who's constantly on them, and the people trying to kill him (nothing wrong with making money) it's horribly unbalancing for game play. Small/light hulls are effectively stopped from the impact force while medium hulls slow to a crawl and you end up engaging in a long range dual as you can't get close enough with any of the short-range but more powerful weapons to get to him. I would argue that a decrease in the impact force also accompany the increase in heat damage to allow some chance for the more powerful shorter ranged weapon to at least get in the vicinity of the vulcan. The concept of a vulcan being a long range weapon itself is a bit odd to me but i routinely hear that said. I've played it and it's just as effective on a small map such as Noise, as it is on Kungur. On small maps you have lots of support for a vulcan making it just as formidable a defender as it it on it's own on a large map. True it does shine more on a larger map with it's range but that's also because its generally harder for the short range weapons to get to it which is offset by the close support on the small maps. I would think that dropping the impact force by about 12% would tend to balance out the turrent quite a bit.

One would almost have to wonder if the ones saying it's lag, know something we don't and don't want the issue discussed, LOL. No, that's nothing like it. That tank clearly fell over and was just a bit slow on the frame rate. It didn't stop, then start jumping around in various positions for a second or two, which is what the tanks I'm describing do. No it's clearly not lag when I see it. The tank is operating normally just fine before it gets hit and then goes back to operating just fine after it flips itself back up right. The tank can literally be standing still, get flipped, and twitch itself back upright a second or two later sometimes. Hardly a case for lag nor does that explain the tank that's taken several other hits but when flipped suddenly lags and pops back over? No... something else is doing on here and why is it so much more common on the Russian servers? From every indication I can accept the lag issue during the occasions where tanks are on top of each other, pushing for an edge and the fact the server starts having a problem there, we've all seen that in a dog pile where the server obviously can't handle the computations suddenly required to keep the frame rate up. I've closely watched the data transfer and the server is the issue there as it can't push the frame rate down to the client to compensate for the pile up. But the stand alone tanks getting hit, twitching and flipping back over is something else.

So here's a problem I have. There seems to be some "trick" of being able to twitch your tank upright after it's been flipped. I've also seen people do this after they've been pushed off a ramp or edge. An otherwise normally playing tank, gets flipped over by say a railgun shot, and it starts jerking around, having spasms and flips itself back over. This is not a tank that's just flipped on it's side and rights itself, nor one that's lagging a bit, it's a normally playing tank, it gets hit, is obviously flipping over onto it's turret and starts twitching and goes back upright again. I see this same behavior at times when a tank is pushed off the edge. A normally moving tank, goes glitchy, twitching, spasms around and suddenly it's back on the map, past you, and moving normally again. On some occasions I see it used to get past defenders guarding a ramp or tunnel, the tank runs fine across the map then goes glitchy right as it engages the defenders and goes back to normal a second or two later, which is enough time to get past the defenders. As I've gone up in the ranks I see this occurring significantly more often. I see it rarely in the English servers but it's become almost a normal part of game play on the Russian servers it seems. Personally I would consider it hacking as it violates the rules governing normal tank motion and think players should be banned for a significant amount of time or permanently for employing the tactic. It is rather bad for game play and I would rate it a bug that seriously needs to be fixed.

Very true, the "robbers" are generally a well organized group, I've seen to many games taken over by them and frankly it's getting worse as the groups are obviously getting better and more efficient at taking over high value games (ie those with large crystal funds). I just finished a Lost Temple CTF that was taken over by a group. It took about 20-30 minutes but eventually they had 6/7 of the 16 slots on my team taken over by mults, completely idle tanks that just bumped every so often or took a random shot, it was hard to spot at first because they all racked up a few kills and then went silent although one tank, maZZill just sat there for 1/2 hour and never killed a single enemy or even moved that I saw. I was chatting with a friend and we started noticing the trend when we had 4 tanks sitting in spawn points doing nothing, the enemy didn't even shoot at them as they came in, lol, so yeah... Pretty much proof that they're figuring out how to add mults and avoid getting them banned for the most part. I'd say as well as being organized enough to not even bother shooting their known mult units which was sort of funny. If they're taking the time to do a couple of quick kills with the mults first on them to make them look active, they know how to keep the tanks from getting banned. It's a shame when you've put in over two hours of game play, go from a 52-22 lead to a 55-60 loss because almost 1/2 the tanks on your side, aren't on your side anymore. The red team was leaving so there were even open spots for them to show up and fill in. They mined and supplied constantly in what was a fairly well balanced game in terms of drugging until then but with almost 1/2 our slots filled up, it quickly became a rout with no chance for us. Sadly I'm impressed we managed to snag 3 more flags before they won... sigh... I'm not one really against supplying, you get free supplies every day so it's just a part of the game and I was supplying at first to fight them but when 1/2 your tanks aren't fighting, much less supplying, a 2:1 battle is just a losing proposition as you just don't have the tanks to cover the needed ground. As I've mentioned before it's not only a matter of game play for others but blatant manipulation of the games economics as well which only encourages them. This will continue to only get worse as time goes along. Eventually they'll be selling their mults off at Generalissimo level and have a business in the real world, like many games do, where you can buy a high level player and avoid that whole leveling thing. Selling high level tanks for real money isn't bad at all when it doesn't cost you anything to get there and you can offer them a choice of weapons because all your crystals have been free since you're manipulating the game economics by robbing games. Don't even bother protesting that it's against the game rules to sell accounts, it's against all the games rules to sell items/accounts and yet it's an ongoing profitable business for many, look at EveOnline, WoW, etc... So the robbers can afford to drug constantly to win the games because winning a 30k+ game fund gives them the means to buy more drugs/upgrades to keep doing it over and over and over.... GIven that most of the mults in the game they deployed were Major to Colonel in this one, maZZill was a Colonel, it's obviously increasingly profitable to them to continue to manipulate the game economics at ever higher ranks. I'm sure they're power leveling mults in set games on the side when there isn't anything to take over, since there are blatantly organized groups that are doing this. That way they make sure they can keep doing the game robbery/take over at whatever level they need to and have the right level mults to do it. So for those thinking this is just a problem at the low end of the ranks, you're wrong and this is only a problem that will get worse in the higher ranks as the groups continue to level up. In fact I suspect you're going to start seeing a lot of this in the Marshall and above levels soon where the more serious dedicated, and real cash players are at. Sadly I've had another friend give up on the game because of this, she had just lost 3 games in a row over the weekend to robbers and went enough was enough. She's playing WoT as are several others that have left and I think there's little to no chance of her returning while another has gone to the: "nope, not spending any more real money on the game" level of play now. I've been trying to stick this mess out but am seriously becoming increasingly dismayed at the increasing rate and I find myself spending less and less time playing as friends slowly drop out or move to pickup other games that don't suffer from these issues.

Well that would tend to explain a lot then and why it seems so useless, and I'm not being annoying to the moderators. The mods are great people doing a lot of work and helping everyone out in the community, my hats off to them for their efforts. What's incredibly stupid would be to require the moderators to sit around for twice as long as we're required to provide video evidence though in order to ban someone for a day for just being idle... yeah, that's incredibly more stupid than sitting in a battle for 5 minutes recording a tank doing nothing. Sort of sad there isn't it? It also wouldn't be my first choice of a task to perform either with all the other messages I'm sure they're receiving about people being annoying that are more readily actionable on, such as language, etc... they can quickly deal with. So that takes the /vote and moderator option off the table as a way to resolve mults just taking over one side to idle it out and win.... annoying.

and that's the rub there... solid evidence. So we have to spend our game time, sitting around idly recording other tanks sitting around idle which they then get back in one day, assuming that they're banned at all. Not much of a return for the investment on the players part there. I played a Seraphov earlier today where mults starting showing up again. Is it worth it to me as a player to sit back and record the 5 we had total, of 10 players, with a _minimum_ of 5 minutes of video each?, although frankly they seem to want longer timed video for reporting. So I have to spend well over 1/2 hour, recording, saving, processing, uploading videos, probably more like an hour total to get it all tidy, uploaded, reports made, of which some may or may not even be punished because they might go active for say 1 kill in that 5 minutes versus their 60+ deaths in the previous 10 minutes they've been idle and otherwise sit and do nothing else to help my team as more mults get added to the game? Assuming that they are punished, which isn't always the case, and oh boo-hoo, they lose a mult for all of one day? Gee.. I wonder why people feel they can use mults and get away it so brazenly given the _dire_ (not) consequences.... If it was one player actively hacking the game I would gladly spent my time doing the work required to help catch the individual and have actually worked with others on a couple of occasions to help get the hackers to show off "how cool they were", lol, so they could be recorded, so they could be banned. In those cases I've noticed those people tend to be permanently banned so the reward is definitely worth the amount of time and effort involved to record and catch them. Especially true at the higher ranks where it's cost them some time time to level up their tanks. That's not the case with the idle mults though as the actual ban isn't even an inconvenience to them. If you doubt that it's an inconvenience to them, you have only to look at the fact that it's a growing trend in the game from the increasing number of people reporting/complaining about it and the resulting increase in forum threads on the topic. I can understand the TO developers issues here on what/how to respond but frankly this is costing them real rubles, marks, dollars, etc... and they do need to respond, especially since the game is growing in popularity and a bad reputation for cheating now would hurt them significantly without some type of response to it. To many groups are mult spamming games with large crystal funds and the mults owners are grabbing 10+, 20+, 30+ crystal funds while the rest of us pay for our upgrades and the occasional supply purchase with real dollars, where the mults owners have learned how to openly manipulate the game economics so they don't have to pay for their upgrades and supplies. In the short term this helps the TO bottom line because people will initially spend their resources to fight the cheaters, but it's a short term gain as the people spending real dollars shortly go ehh..., time for another game, tired of spending real money on fighting cheaters. If you doubt that look at Kixeye, hahahaha, in 2012 they were the king rolling in 100+million, CEO was the talk of the town, going to take down Zygna, then they ignored the hacking/cheating in their games and now they're not even in the top 100 on the FB game list as people moved on to other games. I know TO had it's own hacking/cheating issues and resolved it at some time in the past. Hopefully they will do so again since once people move on to new games, they become invested there and rarely come back again.

Well for me it's mostly the mults that groups use to jump in, idle out more and more tanks on one side until 1/2 of your team is just tanks sitting there doing nothing. Then they can grab the bulk of the battle fund at the end so they can afford to run around on supplies all the time after picking up 2,3,5K per game all the time. /vote doesn't do anything at all it seems, never had a mod come in and look after months of using it and taking 5 minutes in the middle of a game to video someone not moving? yeah... that only helps them since you're taking yet another tank out of the battle on your side.

Yes, I'm getting tired of playing TO frankly, as are many of my friends because of this. We've been calling them alts but mult is a good a term as any. Frankly TankiOnline is getting a lousy reputation here in the US as many of us are just finding out about it and bringing friends in and they're immediately seeing the massed cheating taking place on the servers with mults and are like ehh... pass, looks fun but I've heard it's got a lot of fixed games on it and it's hard to argue that point with them really. I've played two games with friends today and both times we had multiple mult accounts on our side just sitting idle. Large battle funds just attract these leeches and the answer isn't to only play small battles, I had it happen four days ago in a 6v6 battle, 2 players were mults, then 3 when one on our side realized it and left. The players using the mults just laughed at us when confronted. They don't care, they have multiple mult accounts and just rotate among them. "one day, who care, have many accts, go record axaxax" so yeah.... reporting them sadly does little so they don't fear being reported at all. We use to report them but it's seriously not worth the effort for the penalty they receive, so it's almost a why bother now item. As a result we're playing TO less and other games more and more, WoT is actually pretty decent after you rank up a bit. I mean seriously your requirements for reporting people are just crazy. _5_ minutes of video sitting watching a tank you have to keep finding over and over as it gets killed and you get killed finding it, for a tank that does absolutely nothing in the middle of a game except bump every so often so it doesn't go inactive, while getting killed yourself over and over as you try to record it sitting there, which effectively takes _2_ players out of the game on your side to result in all of a one day ban. Geez... get real, is the goal there to _help_ the mult players by taking another active tank out of the battle on the other side as well? Seriously when you say video is less than 5 minutes of offense so not enough proof... really? 1 kill and 89 losses and oh sorry video wasn't 5 minutes long so no action taken, right...... well that's useful (not), no wonder why they laugh, you taking 5 minutes of time to record them sitting there just means it's easier for them to win. So yes, I'd expect to see more and more mults given this and that's what's been occurring over the last month or so I'm noticing. It's just getting worse and I'm seeing it more and more often, so are the friends I play with, or use to play with as is the case with several of them now. I suspect other people/groups/clans are just resorting to it since it's being done to them so often.and the penalty is so small.

So I have a question. I'm seeing an increasing number of times where players are tying up slots on the other team with alternate accounts that they have. You all know them, zero or maybe one or two kills and 50+ losses, I just played a Dusseldorf where there were no less than 8 of the 20 slots filled with alt accounts as evidenced by their kill/loss ratio. One player had one kill and 104 losses. As funny as that is, I find reporting them to be a challenge. 5+ minutes of video, in an active game for tanks that are just idle and being repeatedly killed by their own team (since they really do belong to the other team) so you have to find the tank and keep videoing it, is just a bit well.... useless frankly when all I see from the violators board is maybe a one day ban for this behaviour and these guys openly joke about the ban saying they have multiple alts to use. I know bans slowly add up but obviously they don't really care with several accounts. So what do you guys think is the most effective way to deal with this increasing trend?

good luck to all the girls that tried and remember it takes a lot of guts just to put up a video and take the chance so let's all be respectful of their attempts

Hmm... okay, was sort of wondering. Appreciate the information everyone. My connection is generally pretty good, 50Mbps cable. I'm guessing it's mostly being up on top of another tank and the lag or causing others lag that seems to happen when that occurs.. Personally I wish they'd fix that problem, happens far to often in the game since the new physics model came out with tanks climbing on top of each other. Guess I'll make sure and drop them a note with the time/server/map/etc.... Hopefully it won't pop up again. Thanks again.

Okay, has anyone seen this message before? "Foul Play detected - you have been disconnected"? It's happened to me twice within an hour now during just regular game play. One CTF battle and another TDM. Seems like both times I had crawled up onto the top of another tank in a crowd but that's hardly foul play in my opinion since it seems to happen pretty frequently since the new physics update came out. Never had the problem of my little hunter/twin combo crawling over and on the top of other tanks before the physics update. So wondering if it's that or the fact in both battles I was firing almost continuously? Anyone have a clue? --- olfen WO4 hunter/twin