Matchmaker SUCKS! Get rid of it! Just spent another 2 1/2 minutes waiting for an "average time" of 26 seconds. Matchmaker never gives good estimates of waiting time and it's almost always 3-4 times longer than the estimate. This is different from the OLD system when waiting time was typically near ZERO. Now that the games have been shortened, a two-minute wait is about a FOURTH of the length of the GAME! THAT'S JUST STUPID!

Tanki has done such a HORRIBLE job - lying to players, not testing software, apparently having "secret conditions" and the like. They should just call the whole "WAR" off. Go back and fix all the problems and start over. Then be HONEST about how it works.

Wait. Didn't the instructions say, "Everyone else gets one star"? Or did I misread that? If there's a minimum kill number, that should be RIGHT OUT FRONT and it's BULLSCAT to have a hidden condition, to LIE to players and CHEAT them.

This whole WAR thing has been screwed up from the start. I bought the paint, filled out the map, completed battles - but got no stars. I keep getting dumped into games with 3-4 minutes left and NO CHANCE of being #1 or #2. What the HELL is with that? Tanki, do you really have to compound the HORROR that is MatchMaker with a scoring system that screws players because MatchMaker SUCKS?

The best updates that come to mind were stryker, magnum and the damage numbers. The worst changes were the paint change, eliminating missions from pro battles, removing Isida self-healing, the "rebalance", the "Matchmaker" test, the nerfing of repair boxes, the crystal missions and the most hideous of all - the Unified Battle List. The paint separation barely makes the list. Yeah, it was nice to be able to see what protections were based on the paint - but Tanki was still playable. Where the developers really screwed up was with naming all the protections and assigning characteristics. That was really stupid. What they should have done is let people buy specific protections (Thunder, Rail, Magnum, etc.) and arrange them any way they wanted. So if you want a Firebird, Twins, Shaft protection set - you buy shaft, you buy twins, you buy firebird and you put them together. The current system leaves holes in protections and has a horrible list of names that nobody knows. The popup protection descriptions? Who has time for those? Eliminating missions from pro was bad - but tolerable. Also sort of pointless. But that's what Tanki does best - waste time on pointless tasks. The Isida change was a betrayal of everyone who had invested in that turret. Isida had characteristics that made it different. Taking away self-healing and having it deal more damage just made it more like firebird. It lost it's appeal. The rebalance was more of the same. You researched all the numbers, developed your style of play, saved crystals to buy the specific setup that you wanted - and Tanki came along and changed all the characteristics to invalidate all your effort. Maybe you bought a Hornet because it had more armor than a Wasp, upgraded the Hornet and then - Tanki screws you by upgrading the Wasp's armor. How can you even make decisions if Tanki keeps messing around with the parameters? It's betrayal again. Crystal missions are apparently a pathetic attempt to prevent people from bailing in the middle of a battle that's not going their way. But it actually does not work. In fact, by putting the pressure on people to complete missions that do not depend solely on their own performance, Tanki encourages people to abandon a game as soon as their team falls behind - and NEVER join a game on the side that's behind. It really cheats good players who rack up tons of kills, or flags or points - only be be dragged down by players on their team who don't have a clue. It's not like you have any say about who is on your team - so Tanki is just punishing good players for having bad players on their team. Lesson: If your team is behind early - bail. Get out of the game. And if you see a team that's missing several players, don't join. It's just a waste of your time. Go find a WINNING team where your crystal count won't be cut in half just because there are bozos on your team. There was incentive to play that way before - because winning teams get more crystals. But the crystal missions made it imperative to be on the winning team. In short, the crystal missions just added to the number of lop-sided games where half a team runs away. And of course, everyone has fun when that happens, right? The nerfing of the supply boxes gave a big advantage to all the rapid/continuous fire turrets because they immediately interrupt the repair cycle. This is a constant irritation - and another example of Tanki dev not thinking through what they're doing. Tanki went to all the effort to "rebalance" the game - and in one change, completely shifted the balance of power. Not very bright. The "match maker" system test was the first time I quit playing Tanki since the mission chains came into effect. I hadn't missed a day in MONTHS. When match maker came up, I quit for a few days to see if it would go away. It did and I started playing again. Matchmaker isn't the worst because it went away. If it had stayed, maybe it would be the worst change. But the absolute filthiest, maggot-infested, rotting piece of stinking garbage change is the current Unified Battle List. That one's a show-stopper for me. Every battle is jammed full of people whose only real goal is to shoot as fast as possible. There's no more strategy. Missions are much harder. Supply missions are almost impossible unless you want to spend an hour chasing repair boxes. Part of what makes it so bad is that all the ranks are crammed into a game, and unless you're near the top of the rank structure, you almost always wind up playing someone who is 5 or 6 levels above you... and not just one or two. Half the enemy side outranks you by 5 levels. Worse, if you have a DM mission, you might have 14 or 15 players using you for target practice... all of whom have better armor, protections and turrets. Try this as a though experiment. Suppose Tanki had only one map - a huge map consisting of all the current maps combined. And suppose all the games got played on the same map. Thousands of people to a side. Would that be better? Or would it be completely pointless? Do you think you could capture a flag if there were 10,000 tanks shooting at you? Well, that's sort of what the UBL has done. By filling every game, they ensure maximum difficulty - especially if you're near the bottom of the rank range. Oh sure, they plan to introduce a "rank filter" - but you know what? If they'd had a clue what they were doing, they might have included that at the start. ​But suppose they do add such a filter. Now everyone you play is the same rank - and there are a lot fewer of them - so the battles aren't full. More, if you want to play someone who is higher ranked - how do you do it? Isn't that what we had before? Except now the games are crammed full? And while you can see all the battles, you actually have far fewer choices. For any given mission type, you have maybe 2-3 games that are open - and getting into them is like playing whack-a-mole. See one open? Click. Too late. It's closed. You also have very little choice in what maps you play. Of course, if you are trying to complete missions, that really can matter. Imagine you're a 2LT, have a CP mission and a repair box mission - and the only games open are a Siege map with 19 players - half of whom are Lt. Colonels, or a Highways map - where most of the players are brigadiers, Major Generals or Lt. Generals. EIGHT RANKS DIFFERENCE! In case you didn't catch it - there are no repair boxes on Siege CP. And maybe ALL of the games that are open have 19 players and just 1 or 2 repair boxes, or 2 double armor boxes. You get a choice: Help your team win - or camp on the landing spot and wait. In the first case, you don't finish your mission. In the second, you screw over everyone on your team who is working on a crystal mission. The UBL is such a horrible change that this time, I'm taking a different approach. I waited a few days to see if Tanki would wise up and drop the UBL. It doesn't look like that's going to happen right away - so I'm voting with my feet. I probably played my last game of Tanki tonight. I don't intend to log in again for at least two weeks. If the UBL is still in place, I'll probably log out and never come back. I learned when I quit for a few days that there are lots of other things besides Tanki to fill my time, and other games and projects that would be a lot more fun than the current form of Tanki. It's sort of what you get used to - and when you get used to NOT playing Tanki, after a bit, you don't even miss it anymore. I don't expect Tanki to pay any attention to this - because they never listen to what the players want. (Hint: fix bugs, new maps, more turrets, some innovation in hulls) But at some point, they have to come to a reckoning. There won't be enough people to sustain the critical mass that makes Tanki a business. When that happens, the nature of momentum is such that it will probably be too late... and Tanki will fail. Not everything that Tanki has done has been a disaster - but taken overall, enough really awful changes have been made that I think Tanki will continue to slide and not recover. I probably won't be around to see it. For now, I'm done. Maybe I'll see you in a few weeks. Maybe not.

The best updates that come to mind were stryker, magnum and the damage numbers. The worst changes were the paint change, eliminating missions from pro battles, removing Isida self-healing, the "rebalance", the "Matchmaker" test, the nerfing of repair boxes, the crystal missions and the most hideous of all - the Unified Battle List. The paint separation barely makes the list. Yeah, it was nice to be able to see what protections were based on the paint - but Tanki was still playable. Where the developers really screwed up was with naming all the protections and assigning characteristics. That was really stupid. What they should have done is let people buy specific protections (Thunder, Rail, Magnum, etc.) and arrange them any way they wanted. So if you want a Firebird, Twins, Shaft protection set - you buy shaft, you buy twins, you buy firebird and you put them together. The current system leaves holes in protections and has a horrible list of names that nobody knows. The popup protection descriptions? Who has time for those? Eliminating missions from pro was bad - but tolerable. Also sort of pointless. But that's what Tanki does best - waste time on pointless tasks. The Isida change was a betrayal of everyone who had invested in that turret. Isida had characteristics that made it different. Taking away self-healing and having it deal more damage just made it more like firebird. It lost it's appeal. The rebalance was more of the same. You researched all the numbers, developed your style of play, saved crystals to buy the specific setup that you wanted - and Tanki came along and changed all the characteristics to invalidate all your effort. Maybe you bought a Hornet because it had more armor than a Wasp, upgraded the Hornet and then - Tanki screws you by upgrading the Wasp's armor. How can you even make decisions if Tanki keeps messing around with the parameters? It's betrayal again. Crystal missions are apparently a pathetic attempt to prevent people from bailing in the middle of a battle that's not going their way. But it actually does not work. In fact, by putting the pressure on people to complete missions that do not depend solely on their own performance, Tanki encourages people to abandon a game as soon as their team falls behind - and NEVER join a game on the side that's behind. It really cheats good players who rack up tons of kills, or flags or points - only be be dragged down by players on their team who don't have a clue. It's not like you have any say about who is on your team - so Tanki is just punishing good players for having bad players on their team. Lesson: If your team is behind early - bail. Get out of the game. And if you see a team that's missing several players, don't join. It's just a waste of your time. Go find a WINNING team where your crystal count won't be cut in half just because there are bozos on your team. There was incentive to play that way before - because winning teams get more crystals. But the crystal missions made it imperative to be on the winning team. In short, the crystal missions just added to the number of lop-sided games where half a team runs away. And of course, everyone has fun when that happens, right? The nerfing of the supply boxes gave a big advantage to all the rapid/continuous fire turrets because they immediately interrupt the repair cycle. This is a constant irritation - and another example of Tanki dev not thinking through what they're doing. Tanki went to all the effort to "rebalance" the game - and in one change, completely shifted the balance of power. Not very bright. The "match maker" system test was the first time I quit playing Tanki since the mission chains came into effect. I hadn't missed a day in MONTHS. When match maker came up, I quit for a few days to see if it would go away. It did and I started playing again. Matchmaker isn't the worst because it went away. If it had stayed, maybe it would be the worst change. But the absolute filthiest, maggot-infested, rotting piece of stinking garbage change is the current Unified Battle List. That one's a show-stopper for me. Every battle is jammed full of people whose only real goal is to shoot as fast as possible. There's no more strategy. Missions are much harder. Supply missions are almost impossible unless you want to spend an hour chasing repair boxes. Part of what makes it so bad is that all the ranks are crammed into a game, and unless you're near the top of the rank structure, you almost always wind up playing someone who is 5 or 6 levels above you... and not just one or two. Half the enemy side outranks you by 5 levels. Worse, if you have a DM mission, you might have 14 or 15 players using you for target practice... all of whom have better armor, protections and turrets. Try this as a though experiment. Suppose Tanki had only one map - a huge map consisting of all the current maps combined. And suppose all the games got played on the same map. Thousands of people to a side. Would that be better? Or would it be completely pointless? Do you think you could capture a flag if there were 10,000 tanks shooting at you? Well, that's sort of what the UBL has done. By filling every game, they ensure maximum difficulty - especially if you're near the bottom of the rank range. Oh sure, they plan to introduce a "rank filter" - but you know what? If they'd had a clue what they were doing, they might have included that at the start. ​But suppose they do add such a filter. Now everyone you play is the same rank - and there are a lot fewer of them - so the battles aren't full. More, if you want to play someone who is higher ranked - how do you do it? Isn't that what we had before? Except now the games are crammed full? And while you can see all the battles, you actually have far fewer choices. For any given mission type, you have maybe 2-3 games that are open - and getting into them is like playing whack-a-mole. See one open? Click. Too late. It's closed. You also have very little choice in what maps you play. Of course, if you are trying to complete missions, that really can matter. Imagine you're a 2LT, have a CP mission and a repair box mission - and the only games open are a Siege map with 19 players - half of whom are Lt. Colonels, or a Highways map - where most of the players are brigadiers, Major Generals or Lt. Generals. EIGHT RANKS DIFFERENCE! In case you didn't catch it - there are no repair boxes on Siege CP. And maybe ALL of the games that are open have 19 players and just 1 or 2 repair boxes, or 2 double armor boxes. You get a choice: Help your team win - or camp on the landing spot and wait. In the first case, you don't finish your mission. In the second, you screw over everyone on your team who is working on a crystal mission. The UBL is such a horrible change that this time, I'm taking a different approach. I waited a few days to see if Tanki would wise up and drop the UBL. It doesn't look like that's going to happen right away - so I'm voting with my feet. I probably played my last game of Tanki tonight. I don't intend to log in again for at least two weeks. If the UBL is still in place, I'll probably log out and never come back. I learned when I quit for a few days that there are lots of other things besides Tanki to fill my time, and other games and projects that would be a lot more fun than the current form of Tanki. It's sort of what you get used to - and when you get used to NOT playing Tanki, after a bit, you don't even miss it anymore. I don't expect Tanki to pay any attention to this - because they never listen to what the players want. (Hint: fix bugs, new maps, more turrets, some innovation in hulls) But at some point, they have to come to a reckoning. There won't be enough people to sustain the critical mass that makes Tanki a business. When that happens, the nature of momentum is such that it will probably be too late... and Tanki will fail. Not everything that Tanki has done has been a disaster - but taken overall, enough really awful changes have been made that I think Tanki will continue to slide and not recover. I probably won't be around to see it. For now, I'm done. Maybe I'll see you in a few weeks. Maybe not.