Well, seems by design to me. The entire point of the +1 - 3 and -5 step thing is to give players an illusion that they can make it with the resources they have. And in case anyone missed that, the Devs never mentioned the appearance of the -5 steps thing is random. It just says it "may" happen. And the hidden message? Well, you will get that.

Just leave those so-called helpers alone. These guys seem to fail to realize the differences between "not allowed" to post criticizing comments, vs "strongly discourage" posting criticizing comments, vs not allowed to express your opinion, no matter positive or negative about the game publicly and their agenda and message behind them respectively. And to @Venerable, no, the "not allowed to write criticizing comments" thing was never public, nor is presented with such intent, or else such important info would have been clearly stated in the application form, e.g. Recruitment - Recruitment Tanki Online. And since you are one of the helpers who have gone through all these, you should have already known that.

Except stealing is a much more accurate word in this case. As I mentioned in a different thread, taking, referencing, inspired from, or whatever words you can think of is one thing. Literally copying and pasting the design, don't even bother to change the color, model, VFX, and mechanics is a whole different level. Even games who put guns in their games without licenses will make subtle changes to the model or at least change the name of the weapon in game. Tanki on the other hand is so arrogant (or maybe incompetent?) that they don't even bother to cover it up. In fact, they clearly think talking about this in public is a bright idea.

Borrowing, referencing, inspired by, or whatever you can think of is one thing. Literally, copying and pasting the design, not even bothering to change the functionality, model, color, and VFX, is a whole different level.

This is how desperate they are to pretend many people are actually hyped on this. Change this to "this entire question IS being made up"

And? That gives him the power to do that?

And in case some people start praising the Devs' creativity, looks very familiar huh?

Wait until they make a grenade that disables friendly fire and sell it for 99.99 USD. I can already imagine each of the status effects will be added as either a dedicated grenade, at the minimum.

Except, tanki is infamous for not doing smart things. For instance, it has been a few years since someone suggested making friendly OD a different color so that we don't have to get scared of friendly Wasp Nuke or Ares's orb. It is clearly influenced by Overwatch at that time, which was very popular. Today, Overwatch is already dead, and this obvious feature that is "supposed to exist" still doesn't exist.

Actually, some people are quite dumb. Just take a look at how many people participated in every Challenged Accepted event. All that just to get a tiny skin that also acts as a flat nerf.

And the answer is, there is no point. Because now Alternativa doesn't even bother to come up with a marketing campaign that actually makes sense. Halloween with Lollipop and ghost that makes you go backward (run away)? Sure. A space-themed event that has meteor drops from the sky? Makes sense. Let's not talk about whether those events are good, but at least the "story" that the marketing team comes up with makes sense here. And this so-called "support your favorite YouTuber by paying the event organizer" thing? Really?

Which is irrelevant to the topic. Because the "support Youtubuer" thing makes absolutely no sense according to how this event works. Does the Youtuber get any advantage if a person decides to "support" him/her? Or maybe the contribution, either the Tank coin or money, goes to him/her? No... Then how is it called support? I know that's just a slogan for people to pay but for the love of God, Alternativa, at least make an excuse that actually makes sense.

The whole point of this event is to fool kids into thinking they are supporting their beloved YouTubers, while the organizer mikes from their mom's credit card. Let's be real, have you ever heard of supporting a person/celebrity/public figure/whoever you can think of by paying the event organizer, instead of the mentioned individual itself?

All that just to get a skin, which also acts as a nerf. This is one of the main reasons why this business is still running. Irrational customers do exist, and in this case, it's a lot more than just a few of them.

Finally, some one admits it after a whole bunch of guys trying to change subject as soon as someone raised this in countless discussions. This is bad enough, isn't it? Let's be honest. There isn't really something called "neutral reaction". If a helper can't criticize anything here, guess what is left he/she could have commented about this game? Let me finish the sentence: "for those who take decisions to fully ignore what they just heard"

Yeah.. "eventually"

Did they seriously decide not to talk about what the new augments do at all?

I'm more interested in what those augments are supposed to do. p.s. now this explains why they buff Vulcan in the last patch

And campers in non-TDM modes, specifically those who never and properly ever left spawn even once in their entire life

Ah... isn't that common sense that it's a really bad idea? I mean any sensible person would know that, both from the gameplay perspective and the business perspective. I don't get it. What are you trying to suggest here?

In today's meme: grenades in a tank game

Or getting constantly shot down by a bunch of dudes who never leave spawn the entire game. In order to spawn camping, especially in the current state of this game, people have to take a huge amount of risk to do so, and it usually doesn't worth it, unless it is like what @TheCongoSpider is showing which are one-sided battles, then it doesn't really matter whether anyone is spawn camping or not.

All I can say is that is this a bug that's present in the game for quite a while now.

Let's be honest, if this is happening, those keys are going to be in the exotic category. If that's the case, I would rather open loot boxes knowing that the top price has what I want, instead of another ticket to another RNG loot pool which gives me something useless 90% of the time. There is no incentive here. Or the "incentive" is "Here is what we are going to do. Do you like it? Good. You don't? Deal with it.". That's what they have been doing isn't it?

You are making a lot of assumptions here. Those are just initial ideas that will properly never get implemented. No one is saying that "You will get -50% score penalty from kills if you are staying within 10m from spawn. And this applies to all game modes". But ASL is indeed imbalanced in nature, to begin with. As for CTF, no one said there has to be one and only one guy in the team who is capping the flag. And certainly, anyone, camping or not, can kill the flag carrier or assist. In fact, the latter tend to be the people who are attacking together with the guy who managed to touch the flag.