Some of these are really old:

Here you go: gold box with 133 battle funds and nobody around but me (1 v 1): :D

This is probably one of my favorite GB caps:

They do development in a red apartment block in Perm. I posted a photo of the building before (I believe this is it in the center):

It's possible that the one in Malta exists due to the effects of Western sanctions. If they were handling payment processing in Russia only it might run afoul of possible US Treasury actions and perhaps the big payment processors would not allow them to do it. Russia has only a 13% tax rate so there must be logistical or international reasons for having the Malta office.

I was envisioning the placement of plates to adjust for protections - for example heavy plating around the front would give Shaft protection, even distribution would protect against Fire/Freeze, etc. To upgrade your protection you buy more plates, but, you could never have more than a 50% protection in any arrangement. By looking at the tank one could know how it's protected instead of having to memorize dozens of paints. If paints were just PNGs then we'd have unlimited possibilities and everyone would have a unique look.

There may be something we aren't considering here - if they get income from premium accounts perhaps they will do away with kits (supplies and tanks). So it might balance that out.

I was secretly hoping something like that could exist - for example having unique paints chosen by each player by blending together several overlays to develop unlimited combinations would be awesome.

So at some point in Unity a paint will simply be paint and protection from certain turrets will be a separate item - such as an accessory (plating) that gets added to a hull? Is that even possible with Unity?

Odd. This idea for the first time puts me on the side of developers and opposite those with whom I usually agree. I think hell must have frozen over or something. :ph34r:

Unless someone owns everything the "test drive" should allow for something to be tested - if they own all hulls and turrets then the "test drive" should allow for a fully MU'ed hull/turret or perhaps a paint that isn't owned yet.

That's really arrogant to think anyone would return.

10-09-2015: still crashing.

Dislikes give a concise view of how many people believe something is unpopular. It beats reading 200+ replies to a topic. If a dislike should be explained shouldn't a like be explained also?

And what's to stop me from just posting a big thumbs down? This update doesn't force discussion; it silences feedback. Now all we have to go by is "Likes" - there is no system for counting the number of people who respond to a post who disagree. Are you going to read through hundreds of responses to see if the overall opinion is negative compared to the number of those who "Like" the original post? No discussion is required. What you're going to end up with is a bunch of empty posts of things like this now:

The problem is that in a discussion with hundreds of posts a simple number of +/- tells me more than having to read through every single one of the hundreds of posts related to the OP. Seriously? Do you actually think anyone would read through 20-30 pages of responses to an announcement?

The best solution would have been to keep the up/down votes as before and simply hide the results. That way it allows us to post feedback without the notion of the "mob mentality" since nobody would actually see the number of up/down votes. Having a "Like this" only implies that negative feedback is discouraged for the simple reason that this is not a threaded system. Honestly they should just post news and lock the topic since they don't listen to what we want anyways. At least doing that is less dishonest than the current system that implies our feedback matters (when those of us who are adults know that it matters not at all).

Every developer has million$ of reasons to sabotage an old product to force people into a new one. To assume they are some kind benevolent entity that would put users first ahead of profits is absurd.

Because of this change we're gonna be seeing a lot of him around here:

It's amazing - one forum update and suddenly the Tanker's Day sale has an amazing 120+ approval rating. It implies the sale had a universal approval. Because it's retroactive it eliminates all of the negative feedback across the board on every forum - EN, RU, etc. - making it appear the community supports every update and every article.

Of course it's good - now they get 100% positive feedback all the time. If they wanted to eliminate the "mob mentality" simply not displaying the number of +/- would have sufficed. Why does a like not need feedback? Isn't it important to know what part was liked, or, does the like imply the whole topic/post was agreeable? What bothers me is that with the serious bugs in the game itself someone spent time worrying about this. What a waste of resources.

Yes! "We received 100% POSITIVE FEEDBACK on the most recent update - great job developers!" It was a bad idea when other sites did this (Disqus, Livefyre, ebay, etc.)

Ugh. It's just a form of censorship. When there's 20+ pages of responses to a post or announcement NOBODY reads through all the posts. At best people will read the first page and perhaps the most recent page. What is inbetween likely rarely gets looked at by anyone. The upvote/downvote was a quick and concise way to judge whether or not a proposed idea was well liked or disliked. Obviously someone can't take criticism so by eliminating the "dislike" it silences people who simply disagree. Why not require us to post why we like something as well? Why waste the time to post feeback at all? Chilling. That's all this is.

Check out this guy: Look at how many XTs he has (this was on RU3 Forest CP today). :D