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Haven't written an article in quite a while... The reason for this article is so that Plato can think about the balance between Patriot and Mercenary medals.

The move of introducing a Patriot medal is, of course, a correct one. Not only Mercenaries should be rewarded, but also Patriots. However, in my view, this should be done in a manner which is more fair, otherwise the game will direct people to either being Mercenaries or being Patriots after a standard cost/benefit analysis.

For a player with 10k hit, the Mercenary medal can cost something like 30 to 35 million damage - and will cost something like half as much for a player with 5k hit.

At the same time, the Patriot medal has an escalating ladder which goes like this:

1st medal 100.000
2nd medal 500.000
3rd medal 1.000.000
4th medal 2.000.000
5th medal 3.000.000
6th medal 5.000.000
7th medal 10.000.000
8th medal 15.000.000
9th medal 20.000.000
10th medal 30.000.000
11st medal 40.000.000
12nd medal 50.000.000
13rd medal 100.000.000
14th medal 150.000.000
15th medal 200.000.000
16th medal 300.000.000
Next medals 100.000.000 more than the previous one


...Now, this means that up to the 12th Patriot medal, the approach which rewards me the best is to be patriotic 😛 After that I need approximately 30-35 million to produce a mercenary and 50 million to produce a patriot medal. So why opt for the patriot? At least, that is from a gold-generating perspective. For a 5K-hit player, the difference is twice as much. The Mercenary will require from him (or her) something like 15-17 million damage and the Patriot three times as much.

Now what could have been done for fairness is use a similar level of kills rather than outright damage scored... for example 50x25 = 1250 kills for the mercenary, so one could have used ~1500-1600 kills for the patriot (more kills for balance since it requires far less travelling costs and is easier to handle than the Mercenary). So no matter what you kill, you either get mercenary or patriot, with similar levels of effort and damage (if we factor out the 1-hit/1-kill that periodically appears in some RW).

However, if the motive is to reward heavy national tanks and small players, at the same time (by picking the first few patriot medals for the small players and by picking a large number as cosmetic addition for the large tanks) the current system is O.K. as it is, but it has severe limitations as an actual "reward" system.

For the small player the amount of damage required to go up the ladder is immense (they are probably better suited with the mercenary even after the 6th Patriot Medal) and for the large player the 100m is somewhat funny, given the amount of money spent to generate so much damage. The BHs and CHs are probably more rewarding in that sense. So maybe the balance needs to be rechecked at some future point, otherwise the medal will only serve as a cosmetic addition to one's profile after the 12th or 16th medal (depending the size of the STR).

Whatever the case, the move of allowing players to generate more in-game gold is always positive and welcome.