I just want to say that header image is just ?

I understand the rationale for it, evidently it works, and I think what you get out of it isn't meaningless just because everyone else gets it later. I guess what I find a bit frustrating is that this isn't always transparent. There were paints that were introduced as exclusive in the days of old that are now part of the regular containers loot. So the word "exclusive" may have been thrown a bit too casually at times. That being said, I think it's a fairly minor issue... and since I'm a f2p, I can't complain anyways. Never thought I'd get 4 slots, Armadillo or freaking Crisis when they were first announced.

One thing that's clear by now is that there's isn't a single exclusive that will be exclusive forever. They all eventually become more accessible one way or another, be it paints, skins, augments, or exotics. For some reason this is part of Tanki's model. And their justification has always been that the reward for paying is that you get to use it sooner. It's the whole premise behind early access like we have with Scorpion right now. Crisis getting available to thousands of players wasn't something I was expecting, but to be fair we had to wait years to even have a shot at it, and it depended on saving up tankoins, which we don't get many of. Technically, it's no different from any other F2P vs P2W thing. We theoretically can get it too, it just requires more time, effort and luck.

Look again at the Google Docs document with the list of winners that was published. You will see that it has 2314 rows, duplicate names included. The conclusion is clear. Edit: To be clear, I’m not talking about the total number of people who entered the giveaway. I’m also not disputing the way the draw was made: people who bought multiple times should have more chances to win, as in any lottery. But in a normal lottery, when a name is drawn twice or more, it is discarded the extra times. That wasn’t done here. Because of that, some names took up multiple winning slots, and there are less winners than was claimed there would be. It would even be possible to find the exact number by subtracting all duplicate names from the winners list. Edit 2: Because I have no life, I quickly checked with the "remove duplicates" function on Excel. There were 2187 individual winners selected. A difference of 127.

Yes, but the way the winners were chosen (as shown on stream) was to make a draw of 2314 names from a database with duplicate names for those who bought multiple bundles. The resulting list of winners (as published) displays 2314 rows, but with many duplicate names. In other words, the final list of winners has less than the number of individual winners we were told there would be. At the end of the day it's Tanki's discretion what they want to do with their winners numbers, but the fact there is a discrepancy seems off to me, to say the least.

Wait a minute. I get that some people getting the prize multiple times wasn’t intended and is being corrected. But that’s not all, the repeat names in the giveaway means were less than 2314 individual winners doesn’t it? Shouldn’t there be an additional draw to correct this? Or has it already been taken care of?

Without a leaderboard, this would be an incredibly difficult challenge to track. There's probably a handful of players that are going to absolutely destroy themselves this month going above and beyond what they usually do, while likely being miles away from the leader. It doesn't feel like a very nice contest to participate in. I know I won't in any case, I know I don't have a chance even if I tried.

Bringing back the Pro battles to the forefront (instead of hidden in the back of a menu) seems like a bigger deal than it first appears, and possibly a worrying sign. In the past years, it was stated several times that the plan was to fully commit to MM, and eventually phase out Pro battles completely and turn them into just a flourish for fun. This makes this backtracking all the more significant, and surprising. At the very least, there's been a big change in the vision for the game. At worst, the devs are getting desperate.

IMO it's better to have a variety than only three strong ones. When I started (in 2019) I upgraded only Gauss, Magnum and Thunder, and it worked for a while but there's been so many balance changes that I ended up barely using them in the last years--until recent patch notes that made them good again. I think the best option is to have a small variety against the turrets your combo tends to do worse against. It will be better in the long run, due to the inevitable balance changes.

Well, my habit of using healing emitters like a smoky turret is taking a hit. I guess it’s fair since that isn’t really how to use a sniping turret anyways.. Otherwise a huge rebalance that’s very welcome, even if nerfing long range status effects isn’t going to affect how strong and prevalent they are with shorter range turrets. But at least there should be less cheap shots. The changes to ODs are interesting and necessary imo. At the same time, seems to me like Hornet definitively has the weakest overdrive now.

I'm very curious to see the results of the new repair kit. I appreciate that now we have some means of countering multiple status effects that is available to all players. It's very interesting how it require to sacrifice your ability to heal later for status immunity now, that could lead to some interesting gameplay.

No option for Adrenaline in the new poll.

This update feels weirdly depressing. Containers suddenly seem a lot less exciting than before. Considering that part of what kept me invested in playing daily and doing missions is the thrill of opening containers (for better or for worse), that’s a bit hard to swallow. I understand the logic of the change, and the compromise between quality vs quantity. In the past containers were meant to be special and rare. But then the shards update made them extremely easy to get. And now, they want to rebalance the quantity vs quality accordingly. It makes sense, and I do feel most games, especially mobile p2w games, tend to do the same and go the way of quantity over quality, so in a sense Tanki is merely fitting in with the rest… but yeah. The patch notes seem to be reassuring that we will get more containers in the future to balance their decrease in value. Opening the door to hope that maybe, things will balance out and in total we will still get viable amounts of supplies… if that happens I suppose it’s fine. But if we still get the same amount of containers going forward as we do now, this will be a huge blow to f2ps. We’ll see.

Actually, I would say it's a lot less costly to waste shots now, since the reload will be shorter if you cancel the shot before it's fully loaded. So if you see the target is gone/destroyed already, you can just cancel, reload quicker and move to another spot. It's true it's still slower than pre-patch #666, but it does make a significant difference. Before the present update, you would get the full 10 second reload regardless of shot charge, which was really bad for quickscopes. In my case it basically invalidated my entire way of using Shaft. I like to do blind quickscopes just before reaching a corner in case someone is there. Pre-666 the reload was so fast that by the time I reached the next angle my charge would be back. #666 made this completely impractical. Now with this new update, I am able to do blind corner quickscopes again. It really made a big difference for me, even if you have to be more careful than before. I do agree that sniping shots still are much more precious than they used to be, and I find myself spending relatively more time in sniping mode than before. The way I see it, now you should enter sniping mode only once you have identified a target or an angle where the chances of someone coming through in the next few seconds are high. If there is no one, quickly cancel the shot to get to the next one quicker. And I would say arcade shots are actually useful now. The increased range and firepower isn't negligible, and in my case it has increased the number of kills I get on average significantly. tl;dr: I would argue that after this update the penalty for wasting sniping shots has decreased, because shorter reload and better arcade shots.

I like these new shaft changes. I think it rewards active play more, which is a welcome change from the previous rebalance. The arcade shots are very strong, quite effective to finish off targets after a quickscope, and it's viable again to fight at mid range with only arcade shots.