Review [Issue 18] [History] In the Beginning, Tanki... - Part 6

[hogree 4,179]

 

Yes, believe it or not, we've made it all the way up to 2012. It sounds so recent, but we start almost two years ago from today! Now, we can come to times that more of us will certainly remember. We start bang on New Years' Day 2012. Lets hit the road, and learn more on this historic expedition of the good ol' days of Tanki Online!
 

Lets picture it. At kick-off, 2012 has just begun, and we're stuck in the middle of the 2012 New Year Celebration. The 25% Discount was still rolling, and around the battlefield, there were also snowman guns popping out around the place, guns which had been given to a couple of recent winners of contests around the communities, including our own English contest-powerhouse, gamepiong. Some claimed these were just another show-up of Smoky XT, just in another costume. Anyway, to see it on a tank, check this image out, and the stats can be seen here.

 

A couple days on from the special New Year's celebration as the gamers begun to test out their new purchases in the discount, players also started to discover a quest flying around Tanki. In different maps around the game, hints were given to direct them elsewhere, until finally, they were shown the link to a special wallpaper via a special “reversed” video by Bruce Lunga which was found by the hints in maps. To see the FULL explanation of the quest, check out the blog linked here.

 

There are such good memories for me looking back at Tanki in its prime. The 7 millionth Tanki player made an account on the 4^th of January, prompting celebrations in the developer rooms. Its probable that a couple of bottles of vodka were popped open then, as the Devs enjoyed their winter break, the mods doing their jobs as always, keeping the community in order, while the Devs planned for a larger release at the end of the month. Bruce's departure from the forum for a couple of weeks, on his holiday, led to a few players getting a bit fidgety waiting for his return, prompting wonders of how the community had survived without him....

 

Unfortunately, a growing hit on Tanki's player base was going to grow at this point in time. A thing not even the best players could overcome. The cheating scandals had begun.

 

Games such as this begun to appear all too commonly on the battlefield – the problem was growing. This extended not only to battles, as players started learning how to do flag hacks, but also steal gold boxes. Videos like this one were recorded and many pictures taken of hackers stealing golds from innocent players. It was starting to become too much for some annoyed players, including many famous players from clans like SS, as their frustration begun to lead them to find another game, like World of Tanks or League of Legends, with less “cheaters”. However, the Devs were working their socks off to try and defend the game from the cheat engines all over the Internet, which the hackers were using. If they didn't act, and act quickly, the developers knew the possible result. With hackers, players would leave. Eventually, the player base could become so low, that the income Tanki were taking would be too little to keep it running, and that faced the probable likelihood of Tanki closing.

 

It was on the 27^th that the first prominent update of 2012 occurred. And at the time it was pretty necessary. Firstly, and 100% most seriously, came a much-awaited anti-cheat system created to foil the hackers' attempts to ruin the game even more. It was an unprecedented success – for a good couple of months, there were no hackers in sight. Along with this came a fantastic surprise for winter lovers, as tons of the most popular maps in the game were given a Winter Mode, which lives on to this day in all the different maps.

 

Meanwhile, on the forum... ahhh the forum. The drama days of the Tanki Forum were in full flow. Well, I say that. Lets mention a few names. Perhaps some of you guys will remember them, they were pretty famous at the time... or should I say infamous? AwesomeBlake33712, nuclearbom, reecerandcharlie... ring any bells? At the same time as the flood-galore wannabe mods takeover was going on, there were still popular trends for map-making, Custom Made Paints, a craze on “Vote if you think ---- is such-and-such” threads on Off-Topic, and a growing sensation of “Ask me anything” threads too. Meanwhile, the newspaper was slowly beginning to be planned too!!

 

Before you ask me, no, Bruce had not given up on his contest spree yet. It was time for a contest, a bit different this time, directed at the skilled players in the community. Mosquito Battles was its name; its intention was to find the best Railgun-Wasp by doing a pile of Desert DM's to narrow down to the best sixteen, and then the top two winners from each side of the contest. An awesome video on the final by Reiki12345, winner of the A-Q section, can be watched here.

 

February struck, and believe it or not, another million players had joined in under a month. 8 million players by February the 3^rd, and clearly the hackers hadn't steered too many people from creating new accounts!

 

Now, can any of you think of a renowned worldwide “special celebration day” in February...? Yup, it was Valentine's Day again. A holiday paint was brought out for the occasion, as tankmen and tankladies around the world shared their greetings. But the hype was building up for the promised discount coming up on the 23^rd...

 

A 25% discount on guns was on hand, as the Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russian prompted celebrations by the Russian players, but worldwide, the players were glad for the first discount of 2012 since the New Year, and spent their hard-earned crystals on the guns they had been saving for.

 

Little events in Tanki were worth mentioning in February, as the Tanki developers started working on future updates. The game celebrated its 9^th million player at the latter days of February, as the time for a million players to register begun to shorten to under a month, as Tanki's renown around Russia and worldwide grew!

 

And, of course, we can't forget Bruce's constant work on contests. The Mosquito Battles hadn't even finished ye and Bruce started the Deja Vu Contest! I decided to plunge in for this one, and I was actually reasonably pleased with my entry which earned 1k crystals, as a consolation prize. Check it out if you like! Meanwhile, on the Facebook page, he started his work too. It was time for the Royal Rumbles to begin! Occasional Death matches with extra prizes for the winners went on offer as the Facebook page grew massively, and likes rocketed! The first battle ended like this as the Royal Rumble, which would continue to attract players, begun on a high. The Tanki Online Facebook is still flying to this day, with many contests, as I'm sure you all know.

 

It was March all too soon, as Tanki's settled back into games with less hackers. However, problems still ran rife, especially around the high ranks. Mults were all too common in battles, and as the hackers were stopped, it seemed the problems would never stop! Throughout the history of Tanki, there has always been players trying to spoil the game for others, which is a sad truth about many online games. But Tanki was too good a game for most of the players to drop, and they carried on committed in their gaming.

 

The Tanki Devs had another update up their sleeves. To be fair, everything updated was just enhancing updates, with nothing particularly “out-of-the-world” as regards to updates. Along with a few glitches being solved, there was one particularly notable update. The release of the Gold Box “Notification” was added. Now, it was shown when a player had caught a gold box. This was particularly useful for later times in games, since the 700-730 fund radius meant that at about 4900 fund, it was any time for another 200 fund that the gold box could fall, meaning that the players could easily find out if the gold box had been taken. Also, in close gold box fights, it clarified who had actually won the gold box! Remember, this was back in the day of the 700-fund gold box, making it slightly more interesting.

Happy days for the players these were, as the day later, the developers splashed out on a 25% discount for all paints and hulls in the game. Spring had well and truly started! Players dug into Tanki gaming for a good period of time with their new purchases hitting the popular maps like Madness, Silence, Massacre and Farm as always, and familiarising themselves with game play with their new hulls!

 

Meanwhile, on the forum, the first Unofficial Clan Tournament had been well and truly kicked off! Famous clans that live on today, like Cobra's Poison, The Ironclads and Dare Devils competed, as well as the big guns of the old days – clans like Shadow Strikers (whose leaders organised the tournament) and Domination Clan. It was a great success – this really gunned off the time of clans getting well and truly stuck in in the game. Clans begun to grow and new clans were created like hardware. If you want to see what happened in the tournament, feel free to check out the forum thread here.

 

Now, it was quite true that Tanki game play had been flying high and enjoyed by all at this period of time, but one thing that the developers noticed lacking was the graphical quality. It took a decent period of time for the graphic developers of the Tanki crew to get to completion, but at the end of March, the hardware acceleration update hit Tanki with force – and it was probably one of the most successful updates Tanki has ever had.

 

The qualities changing exponentially. Players who had been having 5-10 FPS suddenly joined battles and got massive speeds of up to 60 FPS. Players who had been slowing falling away from Tanki due to lag were re-ignited with a passion to play! As Supernick said, at the update, following up with most of the English players minds, “Bruce Lunga rocks, no doubt.” There was no doubt that the English Community manager was already becoming an absolute Tanki legend among the players.

 

It was almost April, and we all know what that means! The April Fool's Day Celebration of 2012 heralded another interesting arrival to the garage, following last year's 100,500-crystal-priced blue sphere, which remained a mystery to a lot of players. However, this year's mysterious gift was miles cheaper. Priced at 20 crystals, the green triangle gave nothing away. Some players risked buying it, others didn't want to waste their crystals. Eventually, a few days later, the Russian CM, Ksenia, announced that the players who had bought the blue sphere would get 10 First Aids! Just a shame that I was one of those that didn't take the risk :L

 

The Developers weren't done with sorting out the hackers, and they developed an update to foil the flag hackers who were capturing flags quickly, with a “defense system” built against super-quick capturing of flags. They also uploaded some proof of hacking diminishing in the game, as they continued on their aim to block the cheaters for good.

 

The 12^th of April was Cosmonauts Day, celebrating the day Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space! Thus, a new release was added.. or should I say new map? The one and only.... Space Madness ^_^

 

Space Madness was a map like no other. A map on a different level. Literally. The complete diminishing of gravity helped the feel of space open in the game, and whats more was the incredibly tough game play in the map. It was so hard to get kills that when you actually did kill someone, it was something to be seriously celebrated. I may have linked to this in a previous version of “ITB, T”, but this is seriously worth seeing – one of the most awesome Tanki kills ever, videoed by my friend, in Space Madness – Linked Here. Unfortunately, this map was removed from the game later, along with its former version, Madness, many old players' favourite map. This was due to the “hackability” of the map, due to its different layers. The Holiday paint for the Cosmonauts' Day was also very popular at the time.

 

With the hardware acceleration and the stopping of many of the cheaters, you would have thought the developers had done more than enough to earn the players' praise – but kind as they are, on April the 18^th, they gave the players a special “apology” due to the amount of problems that had been caused by the hackers during their time of domination in Tanki. “Let's share the confiscated goods” was announced by the Devs – and for five days straight, players logging on received a crystal daily bonus for their rank in addition to their normal bonuses. Great news for the players, and happy times for the Devs too – the game was seriously reviving once again!

 

Updates were raining in on Tanki too. Like, for real. Tanki was really getting moving. The developers edited the maximum time possible to spend in a battle to a limit of 300 minutes, with 100 flags and 999 kills also set as a limit to stop too long games from causing lag in servers. And another very interesting update was announced later in the month.

 

The logic of gold boxes, crystal drops and supplies drops had been previously always decided by a set fund and time. Crystal boxes all dropped every 6 funds, and supplies boxes all dropped together, after a serious period of time. Now that would be shuffled. Most significantly, however, the gold box would now also be changed. Now, it would not be at every 700 fund for gold box hunters – but rather, gold boxes would drop at any point in the game! Note that this was before the “Gold Box will be dropped soon” alert was introduced – thus meaning that gold boxes were completely reliant on luck. Players just had to hope for the best that the gold box would fall when they were near it.

 

This caused a lot of mixed reactions. Some were happy, as the gold box hunters at 700 fund had been ruining the battles, but others argued that it was worse now, since some people just camped in battles the whole period of the games waiting for the gold box to drop! But Tanki stuck on with it – I personally was one of those not so in favour of this update.

 

Meanwhile, contests, contests, contests! Newby Deja Vu, a version of the Deja Vu Contest, but requiring online pictures, rather than hand-made pictures was introduced on the forum by the English moderator, koolwalky, which went rather well. However, another interesting contest was started in the whole of the game called “Best of May”. Rather than requiring the tankmens' genius and skill, this was encouraging the Tanki players to play more. Different categories such as “Tankman who catches most golds in May”, “Tankman who buys the most crystals in May” and even “Tankman who gets most Double Crystal Cards in May” would all win awesome prizes, like game consoles, gaming keyboards or even phones/tablets for their money and time spent playing.

 

Not only that, but also, balloons were temporarily added in the game for a special category of the contest which would give a special prize out to the players who bought the most balloons! Costing 15 crystals each, players would take a risk on how many to cash out on, as they were not told what they would do in the garage. In the end, however, for each balloon bought by players, they were given a full set of supplies in reward for the risk they took. And just so you know, the winner of the most gold boxes in May was a player who got a stonking massive 39 Gold Boxes. Lets not forget that this was not during the period of “Gold Box will be dropped soon”. What a lucky fella!

 

Moving on swiftly, we have a lot to catch up on. Most importantly, the very Tanki Online newspaper you're reading right now was introduced at the end of April. An awesome event for the community, and one that I'm very proud to be part of today. Cablaz, Tommy60, conanthedestroyer and Skitee started it off with Les_Alterman guiding them, before Conan took over the editing later, and soon players like Lhamster and chriswu joined them, as the newspaper grew larger, to the state it is today as you read it!

 

It was May. I'll speed you up with the news. Anti-cheat system was once again improved by the developers. The Devs were happy to announce that since April 10^th, 486 accounts had already been blocked from cheating, as the developers continued to take extra levels to slow down cheating. And meanwhile, two of the biggest things in my memory of Tanki begun to grow and begin flourishing.

 

Firstly, it would be right to mention the main cause. I hope most of you reading can remember this. It was the all-famous Tanki Online World Cup!!!!! And this ran straight in hand with the second thing.... the Tanki radio!!

 

Great memories for me here, listening to Snyper's old shows on the old old old Tanki Radio, with his awesome contests. The original. Whilst watching Bruce stream World Cup battles, driving about parkouring with his Ricochet Hornet, before Spectator Mode was introduced into Cybersport! All the same, it was a great success.

 

I'm sorry that I don't have time to go through all the ins and outs of the World Cup here – it seriously deserves more time, but I don't have it in this article. The games were all drug wars, with different representatives from different countries coming together to battle it off in an incredible face off of battles. Drugs were given out for free to those who managed to hold on to “factories” that they placed gambles on when they challenged each other in a battle. Though I didn't actually play for the GB team, it was a great experience watching the battles, and merging for the first time with the other members of the English Community in a chat-style base on the World Cup stream! A very useful video to find your way about what actually happened in the World Cup can be found here.

 

At the same time as this, Tanki was continuing its booming updates. The gold box position in maps started to change as optional gold box drop areas were added to the game to make less people stay in one “gold box” position hunting the gold, and make more variety, requiring more luck, and encouraging people to actually play rather than “mult”, waiting for gold. Many other edits were done, including the addition of spectator mode, and updates to the map 2042.

 

Well, June was very soon on its way. Tanki English Community was seriously flooded with activity. The Tanki Online Cook Contest was in full stream, as players went out of their way to cook awesome dishes showing their love for Tanki Online. Also, Euro 2012 had begun! And Tanki weren't going to let the opportunity go amiss for another celebration. They added a 200 gold box instead of a 100 in the game, as a special celebration. This later extended to 300, 400 and then 500 on the Euro 2012 Final match day! For more information on the Euro Golds, check out Raph's article on the history of the gold box.

 

It was June... and Tanki's third birthday celebration was on the orders. It was peak times for the developers – players were joining by the double, triple and quadruple! The contests were flying in too. The Best of... 2012 Contest was created in June, as well as the Euro 2012-influenced 1000 footballers' battle. The Best of Contest was definitely one of my happiest memories in Tanki, compiling my Firebird video, which won Dev's choice AND viewers' choice thanks to clan-mates on xat who spam-watched my video for me!! :D You can also check it out here if you so desire, seeing the OP'ness of the pre-rebalance Firebird!

 

On June the 18^th, there was another significant update. A couple of things particularly stood out as important. Polygon had always been a popular death match map in Tanki, well at least for a good year or so, but tankmen had never had the experience of trying it in team-mode! Tanki introduced the Polygon TDM and CTF at this time, in an attempt to get game play well and truly livened up in the map!

 

For a week, Polygon CTF existed, having a very very very high amount of popularity on servers, as players fell in love with the quick-points style of the map, which favoured both short-range weapons AND snipers! It was brilliant, but Tanki soon realised that the points it was getting was too quick – like the old Massacre with the two flags in the middle had been. Thus, they removed it. This was very sad for me – I have very good memories of playing in Polygon CTF with my clan-mates. :)

 

Also, significantly, came another couple of updates at this time. For one, private battles which had been glitching up a lot recently, and causing lots of problems in organising private clan wars and World Cup Battles, which were going on at the time. They solved this by making it visible for those who had accessed the link in the battle list.

 

June 26^th held the other two. Firstly, a product appeared in the garage for the noob ranks. They would have the opportunity to “buy experience” up to Master Sergeant. Though this was a rather pointless update, since most players up to Master Sergeant, would not even consider buying experience, it did lead up to more interesting things, particularly when experience was brought out for all ranks after the rebalance! However, for me, the next update was absolutely massive in the way Tanki changed afterward.

 

Many newbies may not know this, but before this update, in all battles, points for each kill and capture would be worked out by the ratings of the enemies on the enemy team. Your rating is the number next to your up-down arrow on your Tanki interface. For example, for me, killing a Marshal at my rank of First Lieutenant at the time, I would have got about 18 points for a kill. The Marshal, on the other hand, would have got about 4 points for killing me, a low rank! The update was the same for Isidas. Healing high ranks with Isida would give you far more points than healing low ranks. This was one of the primary reasons why this was changed.

 

The power of camping Isidas healing the pwning Shaft-Mammoth Marshals with high ratings was getting so overpowered, that the points system had to be changed for Isidas to stop winning the battle every single time! Thus, Tanki decided to take a jump into the open, and make every single kill equal. 10 Points for a kill would always be, and capturing flag points would be decided by the amount of enemies on the other team. Now, TDM points system is different, which is directed at the amount of damage done on the enemy, rather than whether you get the kill, but at this time, it was all the same! Even though I miss the days of getting millions of points as I pwned high ranks, I must admit that the update was useful for Tanki, as Isida's “overpowered” nature died down in battles.

 

Whew! We're done! Wow, the first half of 2012 was absolutely chock-full of events in the English Community – and to be honest, the second half will be more full of updates that would make their mark on Tanki. Next issue, we will be looking at the second half of 2012, and exploring what happened to Tanki then! Thanks for reading, and please give your feedback!

 

 

[ChuckNorris2090 102]

Nice! 

[Beerme 106]

Awesome article :)

look forward to reading on how u think the latter part of 2012 was especially the rebalance 

:)

[Lhamster 4,081]

Good thing I proof read this :lol:  But awesome as usual hog!

[hogree 4,179]

Dood, just remember - I wrote this, like, all-out boom last night, I couldn't go checking every little mini fact on the interwebz... At least I got the name right -_-

 

Thanks for the good feedback guys. Glad I could produce one this issue... Still cant believe this got so long considering the fact that I was actually attempting to go shorter than normal.... Ohh well. Only 4k words.

[Raphael2 3,263]

Thanks for this article, it is well written and I enjoyed reading it.

[SpHryfBoss 573]

I really like your In the Beginning posts. :) I always wait for the next issue and the first thing I do is just search this! :D Keep doing what you're doing! :)

[Eragon 13,876]

I think your pic has been used before

[hogree 4,179]

I think your pic has been used before

Its a famous "old" picture displaying the old graphics and original combination in Tanki. I simply edited it to fit the bill of cover photo (and kept it for all the articles in this series). ^^

[TriNitroToIuene 4,765]

Snowman gun was so funny! :lol: