Tanki really should fix some of these bugs.

The battle entry problem is getting VERY old. You click to enter a battle (assault and rugby are the worst) and you wait (and wait) for the game to load. When the screen comes up and says "loading", you wait (and wait, and wait) and wait some more as the progress bar CRAWLS across the bottom of the screen. Might as well quit Tanki now. You're never going to see the battle because it's the "battle entry" bug. It's faster to close the window and log back in than to wait for Tanki to finish its thrashings. (Or, as I often do, just quit Tanki and go do something else because who needs this kind of headache?) The weird thing about this is that apparently you ARE sometimes put in a battle. You just can't SEE anything but the loading screen. This bug has been around as long as matchmaking and is probably just another one of its malfunctions. (For the record, Matchmaking SUCKS!)

Actually, I like better the idea of "top 3" regardless of team. If the top 2 players are on the losing team, why should the second guy be penalized just because most of his teammates are putzes? I you're NOT one of the top 3 players in the game, what sense does it make to reward you for your failure? If you ARE one of the top three, what sense does it make to deny you a reward just because the rest of your team sucks?

I have a GREAT new idea for missions! As you know, a lot of missions have little or nothing to do with skill. The "Complete X battles" mission for example, has as its sole purpose making you spend time in battles - whether you do anything or not. The "earn X crystals" are similar. You DO have to play - but the most important part is you have to stay to the end of the game to get credit - so again, a major factor is just spending time in the game The "collect" double armor, repair boxes, etc, are really just sitting in a battle and pushing the right button or driving around to pick them up - so again, the main focus is time spent in the game. So with that as background, I think we should add three NEW missions! The first is "Wait more than the average time to get into a game". We've all seen this: But we never got points for it. I propose that any time you have to wait more than the "average" waiting time, you get 10 crystals per extra second. So in the case above, I would have received 1300 crystals. In the same vein, when the system times out you complete the "timeout" bonus mission and get 100,000 crystals! And as anyone who has tried to play "Assault" knows, about 30% of the time, Tanki times out while you're "IN" the game - so let's make that a 100,000 crystal mission too! If we're going to be burdened with missions that are nothing but "wait in the game" - shouldn't we be getting rewards for having to wait FOR the game to begin? If we must have MatchMaker - why not some "mission" rewards for all the time wasted by MatchMaker's many flaws?

I am so MOTIVATED!!! ... to find something else to do. MatchMaker pretty much destroyed Tanki for me. I hung on hoping the devs would come to their senses and get rid of it. Doesn't look like that's going to happen. Flash is just an annoyance... but with all the other crap Tanki has been doing, well, there's a reason player numbers have dropped from 40,000+ to under 5,000.

I don't know why Tanki cares so little for the players - but clearly that's the case. Just telling it like it is. Ironically, while Tanki seems to want people to play MORE, they actually implement changes that make people spend more time waiting to play - and wind up playing LESS. I don't know if they just don't care, or they're stupid too. They don't discuss all the mistakes they make (unless they're so huge they can't ignore them) so it's hard to tell why they're so ineffective. One thing that seems abundantly clear is they have no problem with pushing beta software to production - then if they get thousands of reports of it crashing and burning, they sometimes do something to fix the problem. Otherwise, not. That's how it was when they first introduced match making. Everything broke. Then there was that time when containers were dropping non-stop. Match Making II involved cases of waiting FOREVER to get into a game. So they changed it so after 3 minutes it fails and notifies you of the failure. (In other words, they didn't really fix the bug, they just made it harder to get embarrassing screen shots of someone waiting 14 days to get into a game...) Now we've got assault and rugby games that act like you're "in the game" - then time out. We also have shorter games, so you spend a proportionately longer period waiting. Top that off with two mission types that are SPECIFICALLY designed just to keep people from leaving games early and you begin to see the mindset. They don't care about FIXING bad software. They just want to cover it up.

Then there's THIS bug. All images are from the past 24 hours: No wonder people are leaving Tanki in droves! Why isn't Tanki smart enough to automatically restore the connection? Or is it you just don't give a fig? Yeah - it's a "feature". The "don't get it right" is what makes it a bug. But is IS a BUG! No doubt about it. Don't even TRY to say that it isn't. You'd just be wrong. Sort of like Match Making - nothing but one humongous, festering, putrescent BUG - that was supposed to be a "feature". It didn't accomplish anything good. You've got more mults than ever, and you lost choice of map, choice of battle, added increased waiting time, added "inactivity" bugs, added server problems, you have more people quitting battles in the middle of the game than ever, you have people jammed into losing teams on battles that are almost over. Just look how desperate Tanki is to prevent people from abandoning the stupid battles they set up through match making! "Missions" where your mission is to... stay in the entire game? To use an overdrive (which pretty much requires the same thing)? Remember when missions were about DOING something? Not just sitting waiting for a clock to count down? Well, that's from match making - they have to try to FORCE people to complete battles! Tanki's "solutions" are frequently WORSE than the "problem" they seek to solve. Some of the changes have been great: Magnum. Stryker. Some have been kinda fun: The alterations for the turrets. Some have been sorta dumb: The whole daily/weekly missions baloney. Some have been downright insane/stupid: Matchmaking, the jump-hack "solution". The worst change in the history of Tanki was the implementation of Match Making. It is an odious pile of steaming excrement with no redemptive value whatsoever. I think if they were to poll Tanki players, match making would win by a wide margin for the dumbest change to Tanki - ever. Unfortunately, Tanki doesn't give a flip about players - and won't - until it's too late for them to recover.

The general policy of Tanki seems to be to force crap on the players (like Match Making) while not fixing the bugs they create. One example of this is that when you try to enter an Assault or Rugby game, you go through the timer interval, the game "loads", but you never actually get to see anything in the game. After a couple minutes, you haven't done anything in the game, so it times out with a warning that you've been booted for "inactivity". This appears to be happening about 20% to 25% of the time - and once it does, subsequent attempts to join an Assault or Rugby game gets the same result. The only "cure" seems to be to log out completely, log back in and try to enter an Assault/Rugby game. This bug has been on-going for months - is a direct result of the addition of Match Making and is just another way that Tanki wastes people's time while returning nothing but frustration. Another stupid thing that Tanki has done to combat hackers is make your tank explode if you are too far off the ground for too long. These distances and times are short. Just driving over another tank can set off the destruct - and there's NO REASON FOR IT TO HAPPEN. Sometimes you wind up on top of another tank and can't get off. Tanki's "solution" is to make your tank explode. I'd ask Tanki to fix this OBVIOUS BUG, but Tanki rarely fixes things. They'd rather introduce more features - with more bugs.

Where is the damned arbiter?

That IS weird! I'm betting it's when you're got a "Complete X battles" mission and not when you have a "Place in the top 3" mission.

Cripes! So... When you press the Battle/Go button you should go to a screen where you can see the map, equipment and on what team you are on. (important on assault and certain maps where red and blue doesn't have identical sides) There shuold be a garage button from where you can change the equipment. After more thinking a half minute is enough. And if evryone are redy before time is up the game should just start. Don't you wait long enough to get into games now? We HAD a system that let you see who was in what battles on what map. You could not only select your equipment - you could select the map and the team! And you didn't have to wait 3 minutes, or 2 or 1 or even 15 seconds in most cases. You just clicked and you were in. The limp ducks at Tanki decided "MatchMaker" was better. It was going to make battles more balanced. Make them more fun. Make them more fair. It did NONE of those. Instead, it gave us unnecessary wait times, faulty launches and lots of bugs and took away our choice of maps. FAIL! Now you want to add something that will take even LONGER to get into a game? You're already spending 15%-30% of your time WAITING for games to start! You want to increase that? To what? 50%? 75%? Maybe if you just unplugged your computer and sat and waited you'd be happiest. 100% waiting time! Take all you want to pick your setup! No, what Tanki should do is GET RID OF MATCHMAKER. But beyond that, make the garage pretty much irrelevant. Just have a little button in the corner you can click that gives you a drop-down menu. For each option you have a selector. You configure your tank on-the-fly and keep going. But that's AFTER they get rid of MATCHMAKER - which should be their TOP priority! Oh if only that were true. But I doubt Tanki pays much attention to what's said here. Or anywhere, for that matter. In case you haven't notice, MatchMaker has made everything worse. More people bailing on battles because, well, hell - THEY didn't choose the battle. If they're not winning, why stay? But some of the more recent mission objectives are particularly laughable. Remember when the objectives had something to do with actually DOING something? An achievement? Now more than half the time one of your missions will be to "finish X games" or "use Y overdrives". These are just attempts to get players to stay longer in games. But they are fails, just like the problem (MatchMaker) that caused more players to start leaving early. And it's easy to see why. Finish a game doesn't mean you have to DO anything. So that's why you're seeing so many players log into a game and just SIT there! We used to call them "Mults". Now they're Tanki constructs - something that Tanki is encouraging. So they sit around and wait for 3 or 5 games to end and mission complete! As for overdrives, this may cause players to camp near an overdrive drop point, but more often, they just sit there until the overdrive is available. Then they pop it and leave. Reason is, they're not likely to get a SECOND overdrive in a game unless they pick one up, so why waste the last 2-3 minutes? Just quit, join another game and do something else for a few minutes until the overdrive is ripe - and pop it. Note that NEITHER of these is an "accomplishment" in the sense of "capture 3 flags" or "rack up 50 kills". They're just Tanki exercises in marking time, and like MatchMaker, the problem that gave rise to the "fixes" - a mistake, a defect and a waste of time.

MatchMaker is a CANCER on Tanki. I am not making this up...

This is ridiculous. Tanki Devs: FIX THIS BUG! (The bug is MatchMaker!!!! KILL it!)

No, we really NEED MatchMaker. I mean, the results are so DIFFERENT! The battles are so EVEN. It's SO WORTH IT to sit and wait... and wait... and wait... and wait for every damned battle. Just look how EVEN this battle is! Why, it almost has an equal number of PLAYERS! /sarcasm Truth is MatchMaker SUCKS! The only things it has done is take away choice of battle, choice of map, made everyone wait a LOT longer to get into a battle and when you're jammed into a battle, it is often like this one - hopelessly lost because MatchMaker can't even get equal NUMBERS on teams, let alone balance the capabilities. MatchMaker is a complete and utter failure. Kill MatchMaker NOW!

Tanki devs never seem to actually THINK about what they're doing. It's just, "Hey, let's do this cool thing" and next thing you know, you have something REALLY stupid that doesn't work right (like MatchMaker) that completely screws up the game. Why should "WAR" be any different? This hidden requirement which was not disclosed at the beginning of WAR is an example of Tanki developer stupidity. While the steaming pile of excrement "MatchMaker" continues to stuff people into lost games on the losing side, the retch-worthy pile of goat vomit that is the "minimum score" requirement for WAR works quite nicely with MatchMaker to anally rape Tanki players who are doing the right thing. MatchMaker is the single worst change to Tanki in the history of the known universe. If the Devs had any brains, they'd get rid of it yesterday. The scenario you describe is just another predictable consequence of a nasty and disgusting change to the game that most players have not yet fully recognized as anathema. NO! No! No! No! No! NO!!!! That would make sense and would therefore be against the Rules.

15 MORE Game-Ending errors in one evening. That brings the total to 69 Game-Ending Errors in less than 1 week. Tanki, are you listening? These bugs never happened before MatchMaker. But now they're happening more often than 1x per GAME! KILL MATCHMAKER NOW!

Now 54 Game-Ending Errors. And a system crash. I'm on a linux-based system, so system crashes are relatively rare. I get one maybe 2 to 4 times a year. Except when I'm running Tanki. I've had 7 - yes SEVEN system crashes since MatchMaker was implemented. I don't know what idiocy Tanki has written into the software update - but it's playing MAJOR HAVOC with otherwise well-behaved computer systems. Can't even complete my missions because Tanki is so unstable. KILL MATCHMAKER NOW!

Now up to 52 Game-Ending Errors.

MatchMaker MUST DIE! In the past 6 days, I have had over 50 game-ending errors - virtually all of them a result of the MatchMaker code change. In the current game, I had THREE ERRORS that dropped me out of the game. THREE! In approximately 7 minutes! THREE errors that required logging back in! This sort of sloppy, incompetent, unplanned, slipshod, crappy, nonsense addition of changes most players DO NOT WANT, that DO NOT WORK, which are UNTESTED and introduce NEW BUGS must stop! Tanki is becoming the foulest mixture of bungling, blundering, unprofessional, clumsy, inferior, pathetic, putrescent, ham-fisted, substandard, inferior, bush-league web development on the internet. A sour joke. An object of ridicule. A stinking mess. It would be better for Tanki to shut down completely rather than go on like this. KILL MATCHMAKER! It is a DISASTER!

Another unhappy side effect of the recent updates is code instability. I haven't seen so many plug-in failures since Adobe put out a screwed up version of Flash almost a year ago. I am now averaging more than one plug-in falilure per session - that is, I may play 2, 3 4 games and everything is fine. Then, in the middle of a game, "plug-in failure" and the game crashes. Of course, this isn't as bad as the other failure mode - system crash. In the past year or so I've had perhaps one system crash that wasn't Tanki-related. But in the past two weeks, I've had more than four that WERE Tanki-related. I don't know whether this is a Flash problem, or a Tanki problem - but it's a problem. It's the sort of problem that is far, far FAR more important than adding useless crap like "MatchMaker". But apparently, Tanki doesn't fix bugs unless they prevent the game from working at all... which is another reason Tanki continues to go downhill.

Odds are, it's a little piece of code that Tanki never fixed. They've added dog excrement upon cow excrement upon horse excrement and now the entire pile is steaming and stinking. Most likely, the software is broken, they don't know how to fix it, and all the little gremlins they just wall-papered over are starting to come out and bite. This is what happens when you don't test code before releasing it. This is what happens when your focus is on adding new (and useless) features while never rooting out and stomping bugs. All the bugs are coming out at once and as a result, Tanki is broken. It was broken 4 nights ago, 3 nights ago, two nights ago and now it's broken tonight. Not just a little damaged - broken. Unplayable. People ought to be questioning why they would ever send money to an organization that puts so little emphasis on quality. Why send them money today when they very well may be gone tomorrow? But do not expect Tanki to learn anything from this. The one thing Tanki has proven is it is impervious to learning.

Tanki is dead again tonight. Four nights in a row? Earlier chat, and communications, and mission information and the garage were all dead, but now everything is dead. The login screen consists of a cryptic "Please Enter your Invite Code and Keep It:" message. That's it. Otherwise dead. Doing a great job at FAILING Tanki. Why don't you just roll the software back to pre-MatchMaker? You know - when it mostly worked? All these "wonderful" updates are just making the game impossible to even play.

stop making MMS seem so bad, its really not as bad as you make it seem, I agree, itaint good, but its better than what you describe it as (and its called Matchmaking, not matchmaker) I'm not making it "seem so bad". I'm just telling it like it is. We are in now, what, the fourth evening in a row when the servers have been hosed? Log in right now. See how the software is broken. You can't even see what your missions are. You can't send a message in battle. Chat doesn't even exist. This is all part of Tanki effing around with the software - not testing anything - adding crap like MatchMaker - which doesn't work and makes the game worse - instead of FIXING BUGS. Which is more important? That Tanki add MatchMaker (which doesn't even work) or fix the bugs? MatchMaker is terrible right to begin with because it takes away resources from fixing real problems and applies those resources to something that is a complete waste of time. You think MatchMaker is great? Give us some reasons why. But before you start, understand you have to cite something that's so good it offsets Delays - sometimes long delays - between games The server bugs The loss of choice of maps And recognize that MatchMaker doesn't make battles more "even" or more "fair" - that the revised scoring process could have been accomplished without any of the excrement that is MatchMaker and people still abandon losing battles in an eyeblink. The only difference there is MatchMaker dumps you into losing battles you would NEVER join if you could make your own choice (like an 8 v 2 Polygon CTF game with 9 minutes to go). And while you're at it, try this: I've said MatchMaker is the worst change Tanki has ever made. I stand by that. You apparently disagree. So give me an example of a worse change. Just one example. Should be easy if you're right. If you can't, then just admit you're wrong - and that MatchMaker sucks worse than anything Tanki has ever done.

But why do that? The system offered all those advantages before. You could pick a map. You could pick a team. The main reason people chose the WINNING team all the time is because the rewards for the losing team SUCKED. But they evened that out, so they actually took a big step towards fixing that problem. (Only took them a year and a half to do the obvious.) MatchMaker took choices away, added delay and instability and improved NOTHING. Your proposal is like saying the old system worked, MatchMaker doesn't, so let's start adding in the bits of the old system that were different from MatchMaker until it's not MatchMaker any more. Why mess with it? Just remove MatchMaker and be DONE - or give people a choice to use it or not. If they did that, only the noobs would use it... which is why they don't do it. How embarrassing would it be for Tanki to introduce a gigantic piece of crap with all the effort and fanfare and have the entire Tanki community decide not to use it? That's the real reason they won't give you any choice. MatchMaker is the single DUMBEST thing Tanki has ever done.

I've been calling for Tanki to return to sanity in naming protections for over a year. (About as long as I've been calling for the "roll your own protections" approach which they FINALLY implemented... poorly.) I can only imagine who came up with all the names is the same one who came up with MatchMaker. Two people can't be that stupid. The weight would cause the ground to collapse.