Things have changed too much. It is not fun for railgun. Gameplay is more in favor of short distance weapons. The maps are bigger, but the platforms and ramps are much larger, blocking your sniping ability from top or bottom. Silence -- The bridge is horrible for RED snipers. You can no longer lean back on the edge of map to shoot BLUE snipers up top because the ridiculous bridge is blocking. Your field of vision is so small because of the close buildings. Playing BLUE, the wide platforms have made mines useless because you can't lay enough mines to block the wide pathes. Silence feels like a free for all now. New Madness -- platforms are way too wide, and not as many holes on bottom level. This makes it easier for noobs. But for people who used to parkour doing flips to bottom, the new Madness is not fun. Part of the fun of the old Madess was you needed skill to land. WIth viking, you had to do 180 turn while falling off, to land straight down. Now you can close eyes and blindly jump out firing, and there's a 70% chance you'll land ok. This new map is also bad for rail/shaft on upper level trying to shoot players on lower level. The pathes are so wide, they block your view to the lower level. Not sure who the devs are trying to appeal to, but the gameplay lost the feeling of the old maps. The new maps open up too many pathways. You can't form a team strategy to fight 1 or 2 exits. Now you have to fight 3-4 exit points, which makes games more unpredictable. Snipers are less effective. And in my view, less fun. Shouldn't cost anything to host more maps. Not sure why devs felt the need to get rid of old maps.

I feel your pain. I don't understand the unecessary removal of playable maps. I know Semyon said Crash was for testing props. But why remove it until you have official replacement maps ready? Still missing Madness. It's the map I started out on as a rookie, which forced me to learn all the camera up/down controls in a hurry. That has paid off. Every time I play peekaboo with someone behind a building, I laugh uncontrollably...

Not me. More distractions to the pureness of the game. IMHO, realistic v2 shadows to hide in would add unecessary complexity to an already fun game. In other words, don't mess with what works, or you may find yourself with a very realistic "looking" game that's no longer fun to play. Team Fortress 2 comes to mind when I speak of fun games that put gameplay ahead of graphics realism.

Madness, come back! As a map with few props, it was pure gameplay heaven. Same for Carousel. I wish Tanki would allow unique maps to stay. That map was so small, to escape the main spawn square and head towards the large open space was accomplishment #1. If you made it to the outer track without getting killed, that was accomplishment #2. If you drove around track to the back, you were golden and on your way to a 50/3 DL ratio, lol.

Another good read! 2042 is one of my faves too. Sad to see few people playing it. Especially with the map changes, most notably the big pipe no longer blocking the middle pathway. Now there are 4 routes to either side, not including tunnel. This map is now the wasp/hunter's dream for CTF. So many routes, fewer chances to get shafted or railed. I liked Deck-9 too. It was small, but felt like a royal rumble! I like this map for the same reason I liked Carousel. No snipers! Small teams, small map, only close range melee skills prevail.

Works great! No issues except for an occasional pause. Most importantly, never needed a reload! Gotta say, ping/traceroute times to tankionline.com and c5.tankionline.com are same as before, no worse or better. This tells me the lag problems of the past were deficiencies in how the software was architected. Great job fixing backend code! Some developers over there need a bonus check. :-)

It just goes to show that people can have very different opinions about maps depending on their fave tank config and style of play. Mebbe it's time for me to buy a firebird/wasp and give Crash another go. :-)

Yeah, as a railgunner, I tend to stick with the bigger maps Kungar/Serpy/2042. I prefer lots of elevation and obstacles so that I can use PageUp/Down to my advantage. But when I want a quick and simple battle, Silence! I love seeing guys with wasp barely hanging on the edge of upper wall shooting down on people who don't use PageUp. I've seen some firebird/wasp totally destroy isida/mammoth on larger maps. Long range burn + fast hull. Run forward, burn him! Retreat! Repeat. Mammoth can't even do anything to him. Solikamsk is not a map I'm familiar with. Guess I will try it. Since we're talking about different maps, here's my 2 cents on the new ones. Gallery is very promising, but I haven't figured out all the best uses of props yet. The visual appeal is great, and it's the one map that matches Madness in sheer height. The wasp chute is unique. The tunnel down below, I dunno. It's a bit too long and protected, which is why I never seem to run into enemies down there. But when the other team is all shaft, it's pure gold. It's probably the one map where I have a hard time scoping out the snipers. I wish the tracks in the sky had no borders so that we could parkour down to lower map. To me, that would make it ideal. We could name it Madness II. :-) Leave the holes in the track for unsuspecting drivers. Crash I'm not sure I like as a railgunner. It looks promising with the new props, but honestly I find it claustrophobic, and the broken highways to be useless. Too many buildings blocking view. Yes there are a few sniping spots, but usually Crash has few players, so you end up waiting forever to find a target to shoot. The battle lines always end up in the narrow passages between buildings. It's pretty much an isida/freeze/thunder game. Anyway, keep up the good work on the news articles. Very good reads.

<facepalm> Yes, that would explain everything. I also agree that Silence I and II are the most versatile maps of all. Not too big, not too small. So many options for various playing styles. I also used to love Fort Knox II. It's one of those maps where I discovered that Dictator is tall enough to shoot railgun between the "holes" of the top-level wall towards lower entrance. Probably the only time I've ever seen Dictator as an advantage over Viking. Also, killing shaft campers by shooting rail between the crack of the buildings is fun too. It's these subtle features that make me think a ton of effort was put into designing maps. Somebody definitely knew that Dictator was tall enough to shoot rail from top to bottom, it couldn't have been coincidence. Someone also knew that campers would sit right between the crack in the building, hehe...

Yes! Carousel!!! We should petition to bring it back. If you can survive the shafts/rails in Serpuhov with your firebird, you have skills indeed. :-) Madness is another of my favorites. It is a real test of control over the physics of your tank. You really have to know where the top map drops onto lower map to maintain control of CTF on floor. A railgunner's dream, so many angles. Sadly it does not get much attention at the higher levels.

Anyone remember a tiny map that started with letter "C" from 2 years ago? It was only around for about a month then removed. Not sure why. You'd spawn on a small square area with tiny hill in middle, and that was basically the entire map except for a long skinny track far from the square that went all the way around map. So if you were lucky enough to make it out to the track before getting destroyed in the close range battle, you could sit there and snipe the spawn. Assuming no other railgun was playing. This was before shaft came out. I say it was a great map to start with because right away as a noob it taught me to learn to use PageUp/Down to outguess opponent's moves on other side of hill. i.e. watch them climbing hill, then just as they get to top, rush up and flip them over. :-) BTW skitee, great overviews on the various maps! I really wish more people would play Siege and Serpuhov. They require much more strategy because of the many, many entry and exit points. Plus the sniping possibilities are endless.

I think there's really 3 skill levels. Beginner = no Z/X turret movement Intermediate = no PageUp/PageDown (looking up and down around buildings) Advanced = uses turret/PageUp/PageDown, but also runs tank backwards so your weapon is closer to front. Prevents a lot of shaft and railgun hits coming up ramp in Silence. :-) You guys are right. I see a lot more high level players who don't turn turrets, clearly a case of "buy XP." Hehe. Definitely need a minimum rank to buy XP. Silly to see Lietenants running around who can't see you from the side, lol.

I am affected by this lag just like many of you. As an IT and network guy by trade, I can tell you these problems can be complex. Often it's not as simple as "buy more servers and bandwidth at the datacenter." Just to give you an idea of a typical website, there are 3 tiers, but you as a user only access the web tier: 1) Web servers (that you login through and play through) 2) App servers (that actually take commands from web server and run them against Database server) 3) Database servers (to manage all the maps, user settings, passwords, etc) Any or all of these could be having problems under high load. Each tier has a finite number of connections between the tiers. Let's say for example that each web server is tuned for 4096 connections to the public. Your web browser generally will open up to 8 TCP connections to a web server, give or take. That means 512 users can completely bottleneck that web server, leaving no room for any new connections. That's why I assume tanki has multiple web servers talking to multiple app servers talking to a single monolithic highly-redundant DB server. This is a very common web architecture. This tuning problem can exist at the App server layer as well, because guess what? App servers have a finite number of listeners to take commands from the web servers. Similarly, Database servers also have a finite number of ODBC connections available to the App servers to perform commands. Tuning web server performance is more art than science, and Tanki devs are probably tweaking/changing server settings to figure out the "magic formula." There are many, many variables that can improve performance that are not code related. They typically relate to tuning TCP stack on servers. On top of all these issues, bandwidth bottlenecks could also be the culprit. Datacenters usually sell bandwidth in chunks called CIR (commited information rate). That means a guaranteed rate of bandwidth such as 10Mbps symmetric. Then they allow you to "burst" beyond your CIR during peak times, but only to the extent bandwidth is available. Anyway, I'm not saying the lag is good, but I felt like I should explain why sometimes it seems like developers are not trying hard enough to fix problems, but in reality it's a really complex problem to wrap full control over, as the Internet is a free-for-all place. Imagine you have a restaurant and 50 people ate tonight, so you plan for max of 100 tomorrow but instead 2,000,000 show up. What do you do? Yeah, that's the massive problem Tanki has to deal with. You need a really scalable web architecture and they've managed pretty well so far, except for this lag thing for last few months. Anyway MadDog, hope they figure this out soon. I have to reload every 2-5 mins. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only adult playing Tanki, but I see there are many of us. :-)

I don't post often, but here's what I see happening to most people who had Viking before, like me. Viking M2 is still a solid all-around hull for lower ranks, but Dictator M3 will destroy you. This is the problem. At lower/middle ranks, everyone will buy Viking M2 because it's better than Dictator. Viking M2 has 29hp more and is same speed as Dictator M2. But once you outgrow Viking M2 and want to go M3, you don't! Because Dictator M3 is 13hp stronger and 1.1m/sec faster! What is my point? If you want the strongest tank at your level, the rebalance forces you to buy the full range of at least two different hulls during your rank up. Which is disappointing. It'd be nice to buy 1 hull and know for your entire gaming life to be able to grow/upgrade with it to the top. Smoky + wasp for me until I think this through...