Agreed, but because of other updates I'd say R.I.P. Tanki 2009-2016 (early).

Next, you have a Hornet damaging you through your shield. But in the past the game was about trying to shoot while avoiding fire (without Magnum -- a senseless weapon the concept of which does not compliment this game). You would ficht over slopes, try to work around enemy defenders. Now on a high level of gameplay you have people waiting to coordinate their overdrive. And they most often won't, because they would have to be clumped up in one place -- easy way to get picked of by Magnums. Also, this again means that we have no defense. Who defends now? Mammoths and Saboteur drones. Yoy can't go past a Mammoth while being too close. You have to destroy him, using flanks. Jumping over and other tricks are useless. Saboteur is worse. Simply a passive defense that is impossible to go through, especially if the user is hidden somewhere behind the mines. Works well enough. I assumed you are a devoted TO player who says the game had improved and is still going in a good direction. Never felt better to be wrong :D Still, using coordinated OD's is way less fun then moving on from house to house, only watching for Shafts and sneaking enemies, then flanking/juking enemies without the worry that some OD will send you back to your base having done nothing. Strategic use of OD's can't fix that, and most often in practice you just get to destroy multiple tanks from time to time, while otherwise getting wrecked by them or playing casualy (the latter I like most, but it is still different than in the past since drugs and turret balance have been modified, not to say you can't choose to play fun maps anymore).

OK. Let's list the OD tactics. Wasp: place it when someone is chasing you. Hornet: Make sure you won't die soon, use it to pick off enemies. Hunter: you run into drugged flag carriers/groups of tanks and use OD. Viking: just catch a few tanks in an open field and use it. Of course flags should be a priority. Dictator: share with attackers/use the repair kit. Titan: for campers/deploy in enemy base. Mammoth: defense/golds. All of this requires little skill, and is not much fun. It makes encountering enemies about using OD, instead of gatheting teammates, juking and aiming. Also, who cares that overdrives make a difference in battle. That doesn't mean that they improve anything. It simply means that their negative impact is more noticable. You can't really plan an attack. The game is unpredictable yet uninteresting. You obviously never played in 2014/15. At that time players would continuosly try to attack vs defenders, juking them and attacking with isidas. You could also attack from many sides at times. Now nobody defends, and the game is all about rushing the flag and spamming OD's. The only form of defense is the Saboteur drone, which is no fun at all. It's simply passive. Also, 80% of the players who preferred the old times quit. Before they used to be a huge majority, ignored by the devs. Even now their voices can be heard. Don't you tell me OD's and quick battles/MM improved the game. We lost 30% active players during the past six months. 80% since 2015. I do not know of other considerable games that decline so rapidly. Because most of them remain what they used to be. Still, the devs aren't listening.

So golds are now about shooting Mammoths? Regardless OD's make strategy obsolete since you can't be sure of your opponent has one ready or not. They also make the game feel spammy. 2014/15 was definitely the time when the game was the most fun. 2012-16 was still way better than 2017-19. The latter is when the game started rapidly getting worse.

All you say is true, besides that catching a gold with a Mammoth around is impossible -- they have tons of HP, a repair kit plus 5 seconds of immortality. You cannot push them or stall them. Also, why should overdrives stay if the majority of players dislikes them? Is it even profitable to keep them? It is not that bad for me. Sure, I will be missing that good old game, but having fun in real life + other games make up for it. 80% of your playerbase is gone. Why further push updates that are not supported by players?

Maybe that was why it was chosen as the Pic of The Day :D

I totally understand. But you started suggesting that what @muffinman362 said was just his problem, while in fact a lot of us players dislike overdrives as a whole, specifically that of Mammoth, since it spoils gold catching. Opposite of what you suggested is true -- Mammoths OD is a feature that favours the minority of Mammoth users at the cost of spoiling gold catching.

Agreed. No idea why they keep pushing this further instead of bringing back the game from 2014/15 Catching a gold used to be about getting on top of others, which was fun and involved some skill. Now it is about spamming OD. You tell that guy that not everyone has to be like he wants. But Mammoth is one hull that has a HUGE advantage in gold catching, way bigger than the one Dictator had in the past. So basically the users of the six other hulls are unhappy, while Mammoths can catch golds (it is not fun or satisfying for them anymore, though). You say as if it bothered only one person. Lots of people on YT and on the forum speak of this issue. All you do is argue without arguments.

But it is also less fun. You cannot choose what map you play, battles are shorter, and overdrives make strategy meaningless, since you cannot know if an enemy has it or not.Drugs have less active time and smart cooldowns are longer. What that means is that generally you will fight fully drugged enemies. Now you have to get all drugs and fight. After 30 seconds you are defenseless. Before you could sneak up, then drug one supply and attack. If you survived, you could take a second one. This means that you could wait for the right moment to attack. Also with longer drug active time and smart cooldowns it is easier to gather a group of players to attack. Defense, on the other hand, was also easier. This made for interesting battles were attackers constantly try to outplay defenders instead of just mindlessly rushing in.

This is not TO anymore... Yes, they add new features, yet the game involves less strategy anf tactic than it used to. I recently created a topic to make PRO battles better (adding an option to block Magnums) and make player-created battles the most important, but it was declined. And I argued everything well enough...

Back in the day you'd have way more battles on the list + different servers. Yes, especially without Magnums.Rio, Esplanade and Kolhoz are also fun in that respect. Noise got wrecked by Magnum.

How will it impact the gameplay? I think such a turret would be hard to handle yet frustrating and no fun to play against. Also, it would add a new protection module to the game.

A new turret. OK, sound nice, but what would it add to the gameplay? This game was way more fun when before all the new features were added. Diversity is of no value in itself. We do not need new turrets. Sure, it is fun to create them and to share ideas, but the game does not need them anymore. Think of Magnum -- an original idea, yet it completely spoiled the game.

Also, the stakes for one battle are too small. Lower mission rewards in exchange for higher battle fund. Combined with making the battle longer this will make the game more fun and winning will actually matter.

Also, making the battles 15 minutes long again would be great. 7 minutes is too short for epic pushes and teamwork.

I just made a list instead of saying "remove this" and "add that". Way easier. I know it would piss them off. But they are still not the majority. And this is quite surely OP. Noise used to be one of the most popular maps. Lots of fun, and Magnum is not so extremely OP when you have supplies. I like your Magnum nerf idea, in conjunction with mine. Why not both :D After all, it is one of the reasons why 80% of the players quit. The concept of this weapon itself makes the game boring and frustrating, why should it also be OP in what it does?

I have three four ideas for matchmaking which would definitely improve the gameplay. 1. Instead of the current maps, add: Serpuhov, Chernobyl, Noise, Silence, Rio, Esplanade, Sandbox and Kolhoz. Maybe Monte Carlo. These are the players favorites as for CTF maps, and replacing the current setup with this would definitely benefit the game. I still have no idea why Solikamsk, Cologne and some other maps are in the MM system. They were never liked by players. 2. Bring back drugs active time to 45 seconds, and make the smart cooldowns between DA and DD last 20-25 seconds. This would make the choice of which drug to use important, and make tanks live longer on the battlefield, just like it used to be in 2014. 3. Nerf Magnum. Before in TO you could play offensively or camp a bit, but cover was always reliable. Magnum spoils it all. I mean, how can anybody defend themselves? This is the reason why nobody wants to defend in MM -- not only does it pay bad when it comes to score, but also Magnums can easily pick off defenders. The lack of defense makes the game terribly boring. 4. Nerf the Saboteur drone as well as Magnum's Mortar alteration. The amount of mines they can lay is absurd! Needless to say, they make the game less fun. Making these mines temporary (in the Mortars case: shortening their lifetime) would be beneficial for the overall game balance.

One thing that is still fun in this game is PRO Serpuhov CTF with drops, no drugs. It is quite similair to 2014 gameplay, or should I say, as similair as it can get nowadays. Legends often play this. Unfortunately, however, new players will probably not get to know this awesome gamemode, since PRO battles are locked for them and they will probably never start to play on Serpuhov,

All of this is true. The game is so much worse nowadays, and that's not because of P2W. PRO battles were killed by non-PRO. MM battles (both now and before matchmaking system was introduced) are completely pointless. Also, now everybody hunts flags and rushes forward to get stars, instead of attacking together. There are no defenders, so the thrill of sneaking to the enemies base is completely gone -- now you just take drugs, rush forward and fight an enemy tank. Making careful pushes is impossible because drugs now last only 30 seconds. Capturing a flag used to be a thing in a past. Now during the 7 mins of a battle the score often goes up to 5. In 2014 each battle used to be exciting. Now nobody cares about winning or losing a 7 minute battle. Basically, the game changed from an interesting tank game that involved positioning, strategy and teamwork into a simple arcade. Kind-of a paradox -- new features such as overdrives made the game totally lack-lustre. It is now all about spamming shots at enemies and using overdrive. I miss all the maps mentioned in the topic very much, as well as Kolhoz. It used to be so much fun to play as a guerilla there. Anybody else has that awkward feeling that the game has no soul?

It was stated before that XT skins will only be available in the shop and containers. Therefore, they should not be added to challenges, be it fair or not. Also, if you want the games not to be frustrating for non-buyers, leave the skins for customers. They are an alternative source of revenue for Pay2Win.

So basically your lags made your tank move in an awkward way on your screen? That would mean that whenever the client sent an information to the server (about shooting, for example), the server would process this and only then return that info to the client. Once this happened, it got updated on your screen. If your PING count was low, such things probably did not occur unless the server had problems. Nowadays laggers have no problem with driving – their tanks drive smoothly. Instead, an they often shoot you behind walls or lag under your tank. So the old system must have been better! Why let laggy tanks shoot others behind walls – just count it as a miss. And if their tanks move in a strange way so that they can juke shots, they should not have control over it, either. If what you say is true, I deeply hope this game will go back to its previous state in that aspect.

Not entirely so. You can predict how the lag works, since your lag makes for most of it. 10-40 PING opponents will behave similair for you, since you have 220 PING. Also, laggers somehow get less recoil. The system also makes more compensations for them, so they can hit you when you are already behind a wall. I used to say that only when I was salty about losing to laggers, until I got a PING around 135 (the internet was worse at the moment, plus my family was using the same WiFi). I instantly noticed how huge an advantage I had got over other players. The comfort of playing worsened slightly. However, I could shoot at a tank that was lagging on my screen, and the damage was dealt when he lagged behind a wall the nest split seconds. I could also hit them directly, while they could never knock off my aim – I damaged them the next second regardless of the impact force. Even on my screen it came a bit later. When I play on 22 PING against a lagger, his tank can vibrate in a laggy way, tricking my hands to do the same in attempt of adapting my aim to his moves. He also gets the no recoil effect. You do get an advantage. And even if you didn't, not so many players have so high a PING as you, while you make the game more uncomfortable and skilless because of some random lagging. Therefore, why not add an option to block laggers? They can play battles with more tolerant players who do not care so much about fair-play or people like themselves.

I am a good and fair player: I play with 24 PING. Everyone knows that in this game a high PING gives you a huge advantage over enemies in XP/BP battles, and that server lag makes the outcome completely random. So many times I see players shoot me when I am two to ten meters behind a wall, or try to deflect an enemy only to see the impact force come a second later, with 30% of the normal impact. Some cheaters (I like to name things without beating around the bush) only need to warm their Railgun up for 0,5 seconds! How is that fair? So many people purposely use lag-switch to gain an advantage. I once reported a serious lagger. My video fit all the rules. His lags where immense. Not just a remarkable 50, more like 130 PING. Did he get banned? No. I assure you, this is one of the biggest disadvantages of Tanki Online. Maybe make the game actually happen in a central server to which all clients would be coordinated, or just actually punish laggers/make an option to set a PING limit for a battle, that would somehow punish players for exceeding it. Just fix it!

7,5 seconds and 6 seconds every second time, so Super is faster on average than Auto. This happens even if you deal 35 damage less than average with each shot. So Auto has a quite debatable (in my opinion: pretty much nonexistent unless we are talking about killing heavies or 50% protected tanks) damage advantage, for which it sacrifices alpha damage, thus the ability to peek-a-boom and hull-rocking. Sometimes the extra range comes in handy, but this is not the case too often – find me a map with 100 meters length of open space which someone would likely drive through. Autocannon can be useful, but it cannot adapt to most battle situations, thus it is generally less useful than the stock, Super or Incendiary Smoky.

On an average basis, a Smoky will kill tanks in the same amount of time regardless if it gets a crit or not. The Supercumulative critical actually changes something. Also, your initial critical chance after spawning remains unchanged, so with the Supercumulative rounds you are likely to achieve the effect early. Also, Super takes 7,5 secs to kill a med without a crit, with crit it is 6 secs. So on average it takes 6,75 secs. Better than Autocannon. You could argue that Auto stops RK's, but the situation we are talking about is on an open terrain, pretty much the best for Auto. A long range match is not good for Auto, since there is bound to be cover. Think about a proximity battle, with cover. Easy win for Super. With even a small wall it can kill Auto with half of it's health still remaining.