I am sick of waiting for games to load - and just having MATCHMAKER TIME OUT at 3 minutes - and having to start all over again. Tonight, I was trying to complete a RUGBY mission, but twice in a row, I got the 3 minute time out. Now it would be BEST if TANKI would FIX this BUG, but if they're not going to do it, then at the very least they can give us CREDIT for the missions MATCHMAKER WON'T LET US PLAY. So if someone logs in to play "ASSAULT" and they have a "complete 3 games in assault" mission or "earn 400 crystals in assault" or "score 800 points in assault" and MATCHMAKER TIMES OUT, then ALL of those assault-specific missions are marked "completed" just as if MATCHMAKER had actually let the person play the game. But like I said, it would be better if Tanki would FIX THE BUG (or better yet, GET RID OF MATCHMAKER!) I suspect that part of the problem is that MATCHMAKER is waiting for 16 players - and there aren't that many people trying to play those particular games. If that's the case, then another option is to START THE GAME AFTER 30 SECONDS no matter HOW many players there are. MATCHMAKER is the worst change in the history of Tanki. But there's no reason that it has to be so incomprehensibly HORRIBLE. FIX THE PROBLEM!

If they're going to add crap missions like that (and I'm aware some people might like them - but since most don't even PLAY Juggernaut - forcing them to play it to complete a missions is indeed CRAP), then Tanki ought to increase the number of FREE mission changes. That way the people who want to play Juggernaut for a mission CAN, and those who don't want to play Juggernaut at all, don't have to.

Okay, for starters then, we will consider all other issues HAVE been addressed - and you admit I am correct. As for "conducive to team play", the biggest motivation for THAT was back when the winning team got a huge bonus and the losing team got diddley. People really did not like that. Why? Because they could play great, and Tanki would penalize them for being on a team of suck-wind players. That's EXACTLY the same problem with the "top-3 on the winning team" mission. In general, there's very little incentive NOW to play for the "team". MatchMaker destroyed it. You get dumped in a game where you don't know anyone, maybe on a map you don't want to play, with the wrong equipment, down by an insurmountable lead with less than 2 minutes to go. The games are too short to develop any strategy. There are too many players to coordinate anything. It's just shoot-shoot-shoot and try to stay alive. If you think about anyone else on your team at all, it's for a maximum of 3 seconds - like sharing an overdrive, or blocking an attacker. So there's almost no team work left to begin with. Anyone who tries rarely has a teammate "get" it. The one last holdover from the days of big bonuses for being put on the winning team is the requirement that the "top 3" requirement can only be met by being randomly deposited on the winning team by MatchMaker. They might as well start out with, "Get MatchMaker to put you on the winning team... and while there, be one of the top 3 players on that team". Seriously, what's the difference between being #1 on the winning team and #1 on the losing team? If you have the same score, there's basically no difference (score wise) so no incentive for your team to win. The only scoring incentive is for you to do well personally. Generally, aren't the activities that are good for the individual good for the team? Who does a better job for the team? The guy who kills 40 enemies? Or the one who kills 1? The guy who scores 5 flags? Or the guy who scores none? The incentive to do well is baked in. What you do NOT get, is points for hindering your own team. So if I have a choice between preventing someone on my team from scoring a flag (to keep their score down) I probably just wasted my chance to kill 2, or 3 enemies - further raising my score. Anyone who spends most of their time trying to prevent teammates from scoring isn't going to spend much time in the top three to begin with. But suppose you're right. Suppose you have the top score, and the guy who is #2 in on your team and he's racing for a goal and you trip him up and he gets destroyed. After that, he's scored no points, neither have you. So you're still #1, right? Probably not. When you undermine your own players, the other team scores more. You're not #1 anymore, because while you were tripping up #2, the top players on the other team outscored you AND the #3 guy on YOUR team scored 3 kills and is now ahead of you. I agree that SOMETIMES, people impede each other. I have seen people prevent each other from scoring. Like when a guy does something stupid and the other guy retaliates. I've seen a lot of that. I've had morons who kept slamming into me while I'm trying to shoot - and sometimes pin them to a wall until they self-destruct to get them to leave me alone. The DUMB missions are only there because TO's other poor decisions have driven so many people away. When you see 8,000 people playing where there used to be 30,000, it should be a clue. Desperate to suck people into battles, TO doesn't make the game BETTER. Instead, it creates stupid missions, the only purpose of which is to force people to stay in the game to the end. Missions used to be about skills. Some still are. "Destroy 20 enemies", "Capture a flag", etc. But "finish a game"? "Use an overdrive"? What skills are involved in those? The skills of logging in and sitting around? You can see it in any game - 2, 3, 4 players out of 16, just sitting there - waiting. Marking time till the end of the game. You think that's a GOOD thing? And the "top-3 on the WINNING team just means that if you have that mission, and it looks like your team is going to lose - you quit and go find a team that is winning. You also quit if the game is already in progress, because if you're behind by 100 points, odds are poor you're going to catch up. So that just keeps the team weaker as MatchMaker cycles you in and out. Yet another reason the "top 3" should be changed. The bottom line is TO decided to do MatchMaker. I don't know why. Maybe they're taking some really bad drugs. There does not appear to be any sense in it. But okay. They made that decision. And thousands of players decided to stop playing. So instead of fixing the mistake (by removing MatchMaker) TO decided to make ANOTHER mistake and force people to stay in battles by making missions dependent on "attendance". This is like the dumb teacher who knows a lot less than you do about whatever subject she's teaching who insists you sit in your chair and count the seconds until the end of class rather than letting you take the final exam and get credit for knowing all the material. (Having received nearly 40 semester hours of college credit that way, I can vouch for the fact that it's better than sitting in class.) The current "top-3" is just more stupidity. Finally, you consider my responses rude. Without meaning any insult, I consider your responses not very intelligent. I have very little patience for people who don't catch on - or who raise dull arguments. But maybe you're right. Maybe I should just ignore you because your objections have no merit. What do you think?

All scores as they work now. At the end of the game, top score is tripled. 2nd and 3d place scores are doubled. 4th and 5th place are 1.5x After that - no bonus. Is it really THAT hard to figure out? Or are you being deliberately dense? Just skip the mission. Like the stupid "play X times" and "use Y overdrives". Dumb missions - the only purpose of which is to make you play more games. Rewards for NO SKILLS

Super funny, what about your Magnum and Thunder too? :rolleyes: WTH? The repeat battle with same team is the worst. And it has to go. Nope. I agree that part though. Like This Quote MultiQuote What? You are so full of excrement your EYES are brown! Super funny, what about your Magnum and Thunder too? :rolleyes: WTH? The repeat battle with same team is the worst. And it has to go. Nope. I agree that part though. Look, I'm talking about FULL TEAMS that stay to play a rematch. If ANYONE on EITHER team wasn't having fun, they'd leave. Sometimes we'd get games that were so good that for 3-4-5 times in a row NO ONE would leave. And that's when games were 15 minutes long. That's like playing 10 games in a row WITH THE SAME TEAMS today. Eventually a couple people from each team might leave - had to use the bathroom? Had to eat (or starve to death?) Had to do homework. But they were not leaving because the game wasn't FUN. They weren't leaving because MatchMaker had thrown them into some CRAP game with hugely log-sided teams, a wildly uneven score and only seconds to play. They were staying because they were starting to experience TEAM WORK, and the game was REALLY CLOSE. And that's what makes you less than half-way intelligent --- because what you CLAIM you want is a competitive game - and every once in a while you really got that in the OLD Tanki. But now? Hardly ever. Now it's just "shoot and shoot and shoot". Screw planning. Screw teamwork. It's all tactical (nothing is strategic) and everything works in a 3-second window. See, this is what MatchMaker PROMISED, but NEVER (ever EVER) delivered. GREAT battles. Hardly ever happens in MatchMaker. MatchMaker is a con - a ruse - a cheat - a lie. It's a prostitute instead of your true love. It pretends to bring good things - but it actually PREVENTS the best things. Even though I know you're the kind of half-player who likes to sit behind a Shaft scope and shoot people 10000 yards away, and that's all you will ever be - even at THAT - if you ever enjoyed a game and thought, "Wow! I wish I could do that AGAIN!" Well, MatchMaker makes sure you cannot. MatchMaker is pustulence. MatchMaker is a cesspool. And YOU are not very smart (or maybe, just a coward) if you can't figure out the difference. Because here's the thing to remember: EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PLAYERS COULD HAVE LEFT AND FOUND ANOTHER GAME. But they CHOSE ***NOT*** to! EVERY SINGLE ONE CHOSE TO STAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All MatchMaker does is cheat players by taking away the choice. And if you cannot understand that, then you are not smart enough for me to waste my time on anymore.

Your choice to play shaft is bias! You must stop immediately! :P Look at what MatchMaker does: 1) Takes away choice of map, 2) Wastes LOTS of time waiting for battles to start, 3) Wastes a LOT MORE time every time it FAILS (which is about 15% of the time), 4) Introduces bad software bugs, 5) After it wastes your time getting into a game, it wastes your time on battles that were almost over, 6) ... and battles that can not be won. 7 ) Eliminates "repeat" battles with the same teams - which were the absolute VERY BEST OF TANKI !!! 8) Gets lots of people to quit playing Tanki 9) Increases server load because every map has to be downloaded every game. Three things MatchMaker did NOT do: 10) Eliminate mults, 11) Eliminate blowout battles, 12) Get people to stop quitting in the middle of a battle. But MY suggestion was just to change "Top 3 on winning team" missions to "Top 3" missions because you can outscore everyone on both teams by more than 50% and STILL not complete the mission because your TEAM sucks and they FAILED. YOU succeeded. You did better than ANYONE in the game. But you don't get credit because MATCHMAKER put you on a team of losers. As for MatchMaker, letting people choose their own maps and battles, and even knowing the score and time remaining is fine. Just don't let them pick which team they want to be on. That's simple - and it doesn't involve all of the stupid things that MatchMaker does now. Personally, I think the scoring should be changed a bit too. Like if you're the top player, your scores are all tripled. If you're a 2-3 player, maybe they're doubled. And if you finish 4-6, they're increased by 50%. And that should be regardless of which team you're on.

That is a BEAUTIFUL summary of Tanki Today.

If you think back, you may recall a time when "teams" actually formed spontaneously following an exciting, complex, close, challenging game. I can recall playing 5 or 6 games in a row where the teams only changed by a couple players over the course of an hour and a half. But that was before MatchMaker. MatchMaker destroyed any concept of spontaneous "team" play. The "teams" today are a poor substitute, since it's difficult to even get everyone on line at the same time. So - bottom line; Most team players have already left. The same is true of "strategic" players. Today's Tanki is more like one of the old video games - Missile Command or Mario than something that involves planning - like Halo. It's just shoot, run, hide, shoot, shoot, run, hide. The word "plan" never arises. What we have left is mostly people who like lots of explosions and noise.

If you're like me, the Tanki client isn't really an option. Since MatchMaker was introduced, the load times for games has become so long (and so unreliable) that it simply was no longer tolerable. As the games got shorter, both in time and victory conditions, the amount of time spent waiting for a game to start grew to as much as half the lengths of the game itself - which was totally unacceptable. But I play several accounts, so the temporary solution was - queue up 2 or 3 games at once, and when one begins to load, cancel the extra games. Sure, start time still sucks really bad, but at least if one of the accounts is for a "rugby" or "assault" game and it hangs, it doesn't take 4 minutes and logging back in to fix it (actually MORE time than the game itself!!!) And if you think about it - which would you rather have? The waiting time of ONE game picked at random? Or the SHORTEST of THREE waiting times, picked at random? The answer should be obvious. Waiting time can be anywhere from 15 seconds to 3 minutes IF the game loads properly. Average load time is around a minute and a half which is about 1/4 the length of the game if the game lasts the full time. With lowered victory conditions, a lot of games don't even last 6 minutes - and I have NEVER actually seen the times at 6:00 when entering a game... so all the time estimates are actually conservative. But suppose the waiting times are 20 seconds, 90 seconds and 150 seconds for three games started at the same time? Which would you prefer? In the first case, you only spend about 5% of game length waiting. In the second, it's 25% and in the third it's all the way up to 41% :angry: So that's just one way to make MatchMaker a little more tolerable. It is still the most horrible change Tanki ever made, but at least with the shortest of several, the waiting times are not quite as painful. If you had to use the game client, the waiting time would simply be too much to endure and a lot more people would just quit Tanki.

Good point. It's sort of stupid for Tanki to think that someone will be motivated MORE by having to be on the winning team. They're already fighting to clear the "top-3" mission. So aren't they already doing what they can to help the team? Instead, tankers get discouraged because they put forth their best effort, play better than anyone else in the game, and get penalized because MatchMaker stuck them on a team with a bunch of losers. When you score 500 points in a game, and the top three players on the other team have a combined total less than that - but their team wins, so Tanki penalizes YOU because MatchMaker put you on a team with a bunch of losers - that's far from fair... and it sucks. Actually, Tanki really started to fall apart when they widened all the paths and started cramming 16 players on every map. Remember when Brest had narrow paths at the bottom that were a challenge to navigate? Tanki wanted to take all the challenge out of the game and just make it about shooting fast with big explosions. No strategy. Just blast away. Purple projectile tracks and green smoke, weird paints and alterations that make one turret act like another are just distractions from the loss of meaningful features. With MatchMakers, you can't repeat a game - that is, if you had a GREAT battle and everyone wanted to play again with the same teams - MatchMaker made that impossible. Tanki has continued to screw up maps. I don't know why. You would think they'd keep the old maps and let players actually choose which version they wanted to play. But no - Tanki doesn't care what players want. They follow the Soviet model. They will tell YOU what you are going to want - and if you don't want it - what? Shoot you? Successful companies - like Amazon - use A-B testing to see what works best. If Tanki were competent and interested in getting more players, they'd do the same. When they change a map (like taking all the craters out of Massacre) they ought to let people set a selector to "old map" or "new map" then let people play for a while. At the end of six months, if there's a clear preference, maybe you sideline a map - or maybe you just keep both of them. In the case of Massacre, taking the craters out made it just like every other map. The craters were the defining aspect of the map - the thing that made it different from every other map in Tanki. Now it's just like every other map. Might as well call it "Baby Berlin", "Mini Molotov" or "Dinky Dusseldorf". Guess Tanki is going back to its roots - all the turrets converging - all the maps becoming the same. Boring.

So did you complete "top 3" in these games? No. No you did not. You also didn't have a 50% higher score than anyone else in the game. In fact, the top player bested YOU by more than 50%. But what if you had? What if you beat the snot out of every other player in the game? What if Tanki then said, "Sorry, you don't complete the mission because your user name ends in a numeral!"? Would that make any sense to you? Note that in DM the TOP THREE get the mission ticket punched. But in other games, Tanki has the foolish requirement that you also have to be on the winning team - something that is completely beyond your control because ultimately, MatchMaker is sticking you with bad players, and even if you're better than any TWO other players, you still don't complete the mission. Dumb. Really, really, REALLY dumb.

This is ridiculous. I outscore the best player on the winning team by 146 points (156% of his score) and I don't get to clear my "top 3" mission because MatchMaker put me on a crummy team? Note that with only one exception, every player on the other team is also a higher rank!

Changing the top-3 on the winning team to top 3 in the game makes sense to me. Here red team lost. (Maybe the fact that we had one less player was a factor?) I don't think you can argue I didn't play the best game on either side. So why was I penalized for having a bunch of poor players on my team (all of whom substantially outranked me!!)?