Go Easy, Tanki

[Initiate 1,306]

Greetings, fellow tankers!

As a former player of Tanki, one-time forumer, and experienced developer-flamer (in my early days on the forum), I cannot number the times I have seen (and written myself) that criticizing the game does nothing unless suggestions are made for the improvement of the development process.

 

And so, I’m here.

 

I don’t have all the answers, of course. Tanki is an old game that has been enjoyed by many, many players, but naturally people leave and games become obsolete. Moreover, the Tanki developers must make a living while supporting the running of their game. And so, clearly, when their game begins to die they will do one of three things.

 

1. They can try to milk as much money as they can from the playerbase with the understanding that the game will die sooner.

2. They can throw money to the wind and try to satisfy the wants of the players without concern for the effect it will have for their livelihood.

3. They can find a balance between money and keeping players (of course, easier said than done).

 

As many may agree, it is clear that the developers of Tanki have chosen the first option. Updates that offer massive, massive advantages to those spending top dollar to get good equipment while leaving F2P or light-buyer (LB) players in the dust have become the norm in Tanki, and in some ways it is what it is. Option 3, while probably preferable to everyone involved, can very easily become option 2, while it can also easily be seen by the playerbase as option 1 if not done delicately. By the way, if you don't believe me when I say that updates over the past while favour heavy buyers (HBs), I included a couple notable ones below, just since 2020 began.

 

• Mk7 update (drastically increased prices for everything and allowed buyers to unlock kits way earlier)

• Augment update (aside from the bad grammar, made it next to impossible for F2P/LBs to get alterations)

• Removal of kits from garage (unofficially made F2P options significantly harder to obtain)

• TK update (hugely increased shop prices, made LBs unable to do much with their money)

 

Anyhow, the motivations of a game can generally be witnessed in their change-log, patch notes, or whatever the game happens to call their documentation of updates. As seen above, Tanki has implemented a variety of updates that have been very unfavourable for the majority of players, and as a direct result many players are leaving the game. I can say this with confidence, because throughout my time in Tanki I have known many, many people who are disgusted with the development of the game and plan to leave (or, at the very least, cease spending money and supporting the game). To stop this trend, of course, the updates released must be supported and requested by players.

 

I’d like to examine something quite interesting, to prove a point about Tanki development. Because of forum rules on discussing other games, I will not mention the name of the game I am talking about, though some of you may recognize the references to its features. For simplicity, I will call it… hey, why not? I’ll call it Simplicity. Having been monitoring the updates to Simplicity for a couple months now, I can say with confidence that the developers have been listening to player feedback quite closely. They have, admittedly, an interesting game model - no advantage can be gained in-game by spending money, but the buyable features are rather cosmetic items that are at times highly sought after. Despite the fact that no one is motivated to buy anything because it will make them more powerful, the game is flourishing, and for one obvious reason: the game is fun. With a variety of features that allow community involvement (publicly available mod-packs that can be made and used by anyone and the ability to add maps to the game with no selection process), the game offers quite limitless opportunities for what can be done with some very simple mechanics. Obviously, no one would buy anything in a game that is not fun as a F2P player unless it provides augmented power! Now fast-track to Tanki 2019 (when I last played). It was, honestly, plain boring. Nothing was done in private battles, because barely anything was gained by playing them. So it’s off to MM… press space, hope that you happen to be using whichever gun is intentionally overpowered at the moment, and if for some reason your gear is worse than your opponent, just press 1 and you win the fight! Quite skill-less and very lacklustre, it’s not something that anyone would stay for (though, as discussed later, people do stay for some very major reasons). And so, you see all of the “Tanki propaganda” that is put out. “Oh, you silly players, you keep saying to revert the game to the good-old-days but you don’t even agree which years were the best!” Yada yada, of course what players are trying to say is to revert the update-making to a time when the happiness of the players was more important than the making of money, because here’s something that we all realize. Get the players, the money will take care of itself.

 

 And so we’re back to the game which I have code-named Simplicity. Of course, it is unfair to compare a new game to an old one, but we’ll go for it anyways. Here’s something novel: the developers recently added a new weapon… and it was underpowered! Those people who have solely been playing Tanki for a while might be absolutely baffled and snonkerdoozled at that notion, but it is absolutely true. The weapon had to be buffed twice before it was at a good level in comparison to other weapons. Compare that to Tanki, which intentionally makes new gear super overpowered so that people are compelled to buy it, and then inevitably nerfs it down into the Black Hole of Calcutta soon after and makes anothering thing ridiculously good. Or here’s another example: Simplicity recently tried to buff a less-used weapon, but it turned out that the given advantages made it better than every other weapon in the game. So within roughly 2 days, the weapon was nerfed back down to a reasonable level. Now, now, I hear you in the back there Semyon: “But wait, a game in which you don’t pay for weapons has nothing to gain from creating imbalance and so it is an unfair comparison!” I can only respond with a quote by Willy Wonka himself - my dear old fish, go boil your head! Remember I said that Simplicity is absolutely flourishing? They’re doing great, despite not having benefits to be gained by buying! And no, they don’t need to make the game bad to do so. That situation reminds me somewhat as similar to how Tanki used to be. Perhaps milking isn’t necessary for great profits, but good gameplay is?

 

Anyhow, remember I said that there’s one reason why a lot of players stay? Let’s be honest, Tanki has one very major saving grace: the forum. This is incredibly useful, not only for gauging player response to updates, but also for retaining players that are loth to lose the community of the game. The forum has united many great friends over the years, and continues to do so. As mentioned by someone in the AWS, Tanki has (for instance) a great writing community of which I count myself honoured to be a member of. This writing is the only thing that has made me come back over the months, and it’s why I’m here today, because without that motivation to return I would not have monitored the development process. I say, good for Tanki for creating that - now capitalize! You have thousands of people who hear about game updates but don’t play, so get them back! Begin to make updates that encourage people to begin playing again, and keep them with continued good updates that allow people to play competently with gear acquired from free sources, because I guarantee you that when you get new people into a good game, some of them are inevitably going to pay. The Tanki developer team knew this once, but appears to have begun to view the game as a shipwreck that can be mauled as long as they get any money from inside it.

 

Now, I’m not going to kid you, nor am I going to kid myself. The Tanki game model has taken a drastic turn to the worse, and I’m not optimistic enough to say that it can be saved. Of course, games do die eventually and so that fact of development has contributed to the mindset. So much would have to be changed to begin drawing players in again, and doing so might possibly lose a large percentage of HBs who are comfortable with winning without any skill being involved. But here’s what I say, and this I guess is the main part of my constructive feedback:

 

Let the game go easy. Retain good memories of the game as it is now, rather than as it was then. If I ever heard of a game made by the lead developer of Simplicity, I would go check it out post-haste! But if I heard of another game in which the lead developer was Semyon Kirov, I honestly would not be interested - been there, done that. So regardless of whether Tanki dies a couple years earlier than it might have, combine the good memories of the game that once was with the game that Tanki ended as… 

 

Thanks for reading,

Initiate

 

Edited September 9, 2020 by Initiate

[AncientFire 1,894]

damn havent seen you in a while

never thought you would bother to type a wall of text lol

[alkyng 3,080]

now I have done reading all of what you write

how much will you pay me

[iWillHealYou 220]

Well written. These are exactly same thoughts I've about this game and probably many others.

One thing is pretty obvious that they're not trying to build a big player base again, instead they're milking the last cows. For me this game has the potential to compete against the other popular games if it was balanced,but it's not the goal of the decision makers. 

The other thing is that, there are many ways to earn from a game other than forcing the players to pay to gain an unfair-advantage over others. And these "decision makers" are either too stupid to realise that (which I don't think is the case) because other games are also doing that. Or they're doing it deliberately because they've clear plans to end this game and gain as much as possible profit before that (which makes more sense) Either way, it's very unethical to ruin someone's childhood game's farewell as toxic as Tanki's is going to be.

[r0fl 3]

I blame hazel lol

[NatchGa 665]

Everyone acts like this game is going to inevitably and completely die sometime in the foreseeable future. Looking at other games in a similar spot to tanki though, this probably just won't be case. Games like Town of Salem, Fer.al, and Realm of the Mad God just to name a few, have already hit what I like to call the "Bedrock Player Base". These people are going to stick with a game regardless of the twists and turns of the development process. As long as there is a substantial number of people in this bedrock player base, the game will live on. From the looks of it, Tanki has quite a few. Yes the amount of players has been declining, but eventually it will plateau, meaning we are left with the bedrock players. By all means, I am not defending the game here, I'm just pointing out my observations.

Don't forget that the Russian community has a far more different opinion of this game than the English speaking community does.

Otherwise, very well written, and engaging to read.

[artc 1,119]

sry I only read the 1st line XD. to long for me

[wolverine848 13,097]

On 9/17/2020 at 9:34 PM, NatchGa said:

Everyone acts like this game is going to inevitably and completely die sometime in the foreseeable future. Looking at other games in a similar spot to tanki though, this probably just won't be case. Games like Town of Salem, Fer.al, and Realm of the Mad God just to name a few, have already hit what I like to call the "Bedrock Player Base". These people are going to stick with a game regardless of the twists and turns of the development process. As long as there is a substantial number of people in this bedrock player base, the game will live on. From the looks of it, Tanki has quite a few. Yes the amount of players has been declining, but eventually it will plateau, meaning we are left with the bedrock players. By all means, I am not defending the game here, I'm just pointing out my observations.

Don't forget that the Russian community has a far more different opinion of this game than the English speaking community does.

Otherwise, very well written, and engaging to read.

If they hit the bedrock and most of those bedrock players are buyers, the game is done.

Games need substantial F2P players. Else it's buyers vs buyers.  When buyers realize they have no advantage by spending $ they will stop spending $.

[lssimo 1,559]

On 9/9/2020 at 3:47 AM, sarim2345_the_master said:

damn havent seen you in a while

never thought you would bother to type a wall of text lol

I think e copied a wall of text from Wikipedia, so we can think e's a good writer.

If the text is not from Wikipedia (who wants to check that?) then I think e wants us not to play the game and instead read the wall. Thanks HBTY.

[lssimo 1,559]

To be honest, I read like 5cms, but then when I saw the numbers I decided to scroll a little (yea, a little, ha ha) to see how many numbers there was in total... '3, not bad' I though, then I saw more words below, 'last words' I thought. Another small scroll and saw that these 'last words' was like another 5 cms, 'it's reasonable' I told myself 'it's the first post of what seems like a serious topic'. But below this 'last words' I saw more words, and that got me worried, and that's when I decided to accelerate the poor scroll wheel.

Don't worry, it's a good Logitech mouse, it's wheel scrolls quietly and with little resistance, so it is okay.

[Iron_Man 2,376]

Money is THE MAIN MOTIVE . Yes, obviously the developers do need money for their living but that does not mean that the game completely must be pay2win. In the recent updates this year, it is seen that the game is slowly becoming a pay2win. Augments' price was drastically increased. With the new prices (125,000 and 245,000) it is practically impossible to collect that huge amount of crystals. So the players have 2 options (1)Leave the game or (2) Pay. Hopper is another one where the intentions of developers can be clearly seen. It is obvious that any serious gamer would blindly pay to buy such an overpowered hull(with an overpowered overdrive). Such a hull would obviously give the owner a huge advantage in the game. It is not intended that the developers should become selfless and make the game completely free but, you know, they can, kind of, make product kits available for crystals and reduce the prices of Augments. There must also be modes in matchmaking with the supplies disabled.(In my opinion supplies make the game more unbalanced ).

In my opinion this game is one of it's kind. 

Just a few changes would make it better and cooler than the contemporary online games.  

[wolverine848 13,097]

10 hours ago, Ironmantonystark said:

In the recent updates this year, it is seen that the game is slowly becoming a pay2win.

It's always been P2W.   

What is more accurate is to say the pendulum has swung deeply in favor of P2W.  Swung too far IMO and they are losing the F2P tankers.

[Mrat13 34]

12 hours ago, Ironmantonystark said:

There must also be modes in matchmaking with the supplies disabled.(In my opinion supplies make the game more unbalanced ).

Why else do you think Hornet is so popular? It's a easy way to counter drug abuse. Shame Titan has to suffer because of it though, they should really stop Hornet countering Titan, which would also help counter drugs, if Titan is used more.

[Viking4s 10,791]

28 minutes ago, Mrat13 said:

Why else do you think Hornet is so popular? It's a easy way to counter drug abuse. Shame Titan has to suffer because of it though, they should really stop Hornet countering Titan, which would also help counter drugs, if Titan is used more.

I just played 4 games, and no, Hornet is not that popular, you can see other hulls playing their part.
Hornet is defo an interesting hull and this is beyond its overdrive, it is fast, it allows many spectacular maneuvers and complicated jumps (so does Wasp in these two cases, but less stable). Medium hulls are just driving on the road like grannys. I can see hunter in the same number or even more.

[Mrat13 34]

8 minutes ago, Viking4s said:

I can see hunter in the same number or even more.

Probably because it can also counter drug abuse 

[Viking4s 10,791]

13 minutes ago, Mrat13 said:

Probably because it can also counter drug abuse 

There is not such thing as drug abuse, more like people too many sober tanker.

[NatchGa 665]

On 9/21/2020 at 3:56 PM, wolverine848 said:

If they hit the bedrock and most of those bedrock players are buyers, the game is done.

Games need substantial F2P players. Else it's buyers vs buyers.  When buyers realize they have no advantage by spending $ they will stop spending $.

I would say that the bedrock community is a mixture of both. Lets also not forget the players who come in quick and check out the game, most of them leave the game fairly quickly, but as long as buyers have there fun destroying them, the game lives on.

 

also I would like to make the point that if this game does die out completely, I dont think the devs would care to much, as they would just turn all of there attention on to the new game they are making, "King Hardcore".

Edited September 24, 2020 by NatchGa

[wolverine848 13,097]

9 hours ago, Mrat13 said:

Probably because it can also counter drug abuse 

It is not true.  There are NOT as many hunters in battles as hornets.  It's not even close.

Some battles, hornets make up half the tanks.  Pretty sure the other half is not composed solely of Hunters.

Hornets ... then...

Vikings... then..

All the rest.

[Tokamak 1,021]

12 hours ago, Mrat13 said:

Probably because it can also counter drug abuse 

They do so much more than that. The hunter OD potency is very versatile. While Hornet kills, Hunter stops opponents raids and escape, and strategic moves, reap flags and balls, neutralise bridges and chocks point . It will be a key counter to Hopper.

[alkyng 3,080]

Tanki have the right to profit, and players have the right to leave.

I can't promote Tanki to my friends and say.. look its a P2W buddies but the game needs the money guys please please test it, the game have the right to benefits buddies, so test it and don't care about deaths and stupid things because the game have the right to benefit don't ruin the game's economy (((no one will hear me if this is my evidence))).

Tanki, free players will not care about your excuses about anything even if they're actually noobs most players will not think about anything else just if they say they are dying a lot they will leave the game .. even if the game were balanced and they just noobs

...............

In past players demands just why upgrades are expensive and about druggers

Now players demands make things available to obtain (whatever its price was) like : kits - hull's augments  - in addition Drones imo

 

[E_polypterus 2,374]

Mainly stupid hornets, then hunters, then Vikings 

[wolverine848 13,097]

6 hours ago, Tokamak said:

They do so much more than that. The hunter OD potency is very versatile. While Hornet kills, Hunter stops opponents raids and escape, and strategic moves, reap flags and balls, neutralise bridges and chocks point . It will be a key counter to Hopper.

Besides killing, Hornet does this too.  Unlike Hunter it does not have to be as close as 25m to do it.

[Viking4s 10,791]

1 hour ago, wolverine848 said:

Besides killing, Hornet does this too.  Unlike Hunter it does not have to be as close as 25m to do it.

It has to kill the tank to manage that, while Hunter just use overdrive to get the same results it is s direct result of the Overdrive action. Hunter OD can act it even without facing the enemy or on the same platform level (25 meter is a radius). All the Hunter has to do is to stay hidden near the goal or the flag base and this is independent to the turret it uses. So Hunter OD is still superior is that area. 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Viking4s

[Mrat13 34]

12 hours ago, wolverine848 said:

It is not true.  There are NOT as many hunters in battles as hornets.  It's not even close.

Some battles, hornets make up half the tanks.  Pretty sure the other half is not composed solely of Hunters.

Hornets ... then...

Vikings... then..

All the rest.

It was the other person, not me, who said Hunter was the most popular tank. I wasn't trying to point out what is and isn't popular, I was just saying, it would still make sense for Hunter to be popular, IF it was, because it counters drug abuse, among other things. Particularly since Vikings are the main perpetrators for it (with Hornet a close second).

[wolverine848 13,097]

2 hours ago, Mrat13 said:

It was the other person, not me, who said Hunter was the most popular tank. I wasn't trying to point out what is and isn't popular, I was just saying, it would still make sense for Hunter to be popular, IF it was, because it counters drug abuse, among other things. Particularly since Vikings are the main perpetrators for it (with Hornet a close second).

I have that "other person" on ignore... thus my contribution through you. Apologies for the confusion.