Discount Weekend - September 2020

[NumberSix 40]

Legend ... 42?

[RIDDLER_8 5,553]

Legend 42 is a good rank for a Legend player.

[RIDDLER_8 5,553]

Just now, I have completed the (Ultra Fight) mission. I really enjoyed it. Yesterday I have purchased two ultra containers, each costing under 150 Tankions. I did not open them.

Now that I have completed my (Ultra Fight) mission, I have an additional two containers. I have four ultra containers in total. I am going to open them all one by one and post the images here. I hope that one of those four containers are going to reward me with the new Hopper hull.

Completing the (Ultra Fight) mission was a fun challenge. I really enjoyed earn twice as many crystals for each matchmaking battle completed during this awesome crazy weekend. Now lets see what my four containers hold:

   

The rewards are great, but it kind of sucks not to have unlocked the Hopper hull. On the Tanki Online hope page there is an "announcement" saying that players have 5x more luck on receiving Hopper in ultra containers. This appears to be false because I did not get the Hopper hull that I wished to have.

My luck for Hopper has gone down the drain, but the wonderful rewards that I got from the containers and this discount weekend was true and dazzling for me. Today I also ranked up to Legend 42 thanks to this crazy weekend sales. Thank you so much for those wonderful sales.

[lssimo 1,559]

35 minutes ago, RIDDLER_8 said:

...

 

...

I think that Hooper image is for a Skin, not for the Hull, otherwise it would have said Mk1 and shown the Mk1 Hopper with the "M3" skin.

But the strange thing is that it says X5 next to the Hull image, as if you'll get 5 skins, which is not right. And the other strange thing is the use of the colors, does that mean skin colors? mmm... maybe I'll have to read post 1 again. Luckily HBTY/Initiate is not our CM.

On 9/9/2020 at 3:34 AM, Initiate said:

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

 

[RIDDLER_8 5,553]

I have just played a Russian pro battle on Flash. Flash only crashed on me once, and after that I got back into the same battle, keeping my current score. The players were very competitive and brilliant in this CTF battle. I guess that Flash should remain a legacy version of Tanki Online that is no longer updated so that players can enjoy the old and original Tanki Online. I think that Flash should take a trip back to 2009 when Tanki Online was launched. Keeping some legacy look and feel about Tanki Online is great heyday nostalgia which I support and that other players are begging for. The HTML5 version of Tanki Online is brilliant but it is for the future. The HTML5 version of Tanki Online feels like a game of the future, more like Tanki X, for example. Tanki X was discontinued late last year, but Tanki Online will thrive for as long as anyone's guess. The king is dead, but long live Tanki Online.

The battle was so much fun and it kind of took me back in time to 2015. I even said that in the battle chat. Players were wearing legacy paints such as green, red, blue and Africa paints. Whilst playing this battle, I laughed when me and other Isida healed each other to the flag and got killed after an enemy Wasp dropped a bomb and killed us both. I was wearing the green paint and used Isida and Ares combo. Both works great. I cannot believe how good Flash is in its old age in 2020. This battle gave me a very good score as well. I did not win 1st place but the points were outstanding. I played that battle today on Saturday night on the 27/09/2020 for 1 hour. The battle was cool and had no time limit, nor active supplies in battle. The supplies were disabled. That kept the battle super well balanced. This battle was super tough, and I won on my team.

This crazy weekend was good and crazy, (as the name says), but not crazy enough for me to manage to unlock Hopper from ultra containers. I personally think that it would become more fun and more fair if the Crisis drone and Hopper were available in the garage at Legend ranks only. I wish that crazy weekend celebrations for the future could return the funds and experience boost, but this time make it 10x the funds and experience for Legend players so that they have a chance on ranking up a few ranks during those weekend parties. This crazy weekend was so much fun for me. I have enjoyed it as much as you did.

Edited September 27, 2020 by RIDDLER_8
I won on my team.

[destroyer21873 28]

If you extended the event to get hopper from ult containers why not just extend the special missions with it

[RIDDLER_8 5,553]

That's true. It would be better to have more special missions that offered at least 10 ultra containers in one of the missions, so that more players have even more chances of unlocking Hopper.

[Cleric 1,385]

44 minutes ago, RIDDLER_8 said:

That's true. It would be better to have more special missions that offered at least 10 ultra containers in one of the missions, so that more players have even more chances of unlocking Hopper.

You simply won't listen do you... It is almost impossible to get Hooper from free containers, simply because the chance is extremely low.

 

I opened hundreds of ultra containers, so far I got 2 Exotic rarity rewards. What's that mean? That means on average, the probability of getting a random Exotic rarity reward from ultra containers is lower than 1%. That is when ultra containers are supposed to have x10 chances of getting Exotic rarity reward compared to ordinary containers.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Aegis

[wolverine848 13,097]

4 hours ago, RIDDLER_8 said:

On the Tanki Online hope page there is an "announcement" saying that players have 5x more luck on receiving Hopper in ultra containers. This appears to be false because I did not get the Hopper hull that I wished to have.

5x more luck is NOT a guarantee.

It's like buying 5 lottery tickets is not a guarantee you win - it just improves your chances.

[RIDDLER_8 5,553]

@Aegis

I do listen and agree with you. I know that it is almost impossible to get Hopper from ultra containers. I have experienced that yesterday when I opened up my four ultra containers. I was disappointed not to get Hopper, but happy to have earned a nice bunch of crystals.

I hope soon that Hopper will be added to the garage like as with other hulls.