And so ends my second year working on Armored Warfare. Well, okay, technically it ended on Tuesday when my old contract expired. Yes, My.com offered me an extension with some improvements and yes, I accepted, so there might even be a whole third year, we’ll see.

I actually thought really long about what to write, if anything. Am I disappointed by how it went with Armored Warfare these last couple of months? Yes, of course – nobody in the company is happy about what happened recently. Then again, this gives me the opportunity to introduce some changes to my life and to Armored Warfare itself.

For one, I promised myself that I would treat my job in a more… hmm… professional manner. I will no doubt end up doing some stupid shit at some point, which will get me in trouble, but it’s also the right time to consolidate my life a bit. During the last two years, I spent pretty much every waking moment doing something connected with Armored Warfare and as you can imagine, that’s not exactly sustainable (at least not if you want to stay sane, although my sanity is questionable as it is). In addition to Armored Warfare, I am now working as a content manager on Cloud Pirates, which is also an interesting job (although the game is not exactly my cup of tea, being competitive focused and all that).

So, logically, something’s gotta go and that “something” will be my AW community activities. I didn’t get “fed up” by “forum negativity”. Most of the truly toxic stuff comes from a small pool of toxic players that we simply ignore and/or ban. Armored Warfare still has some pretty amazing dedicated guys supporting it and I think there’s still some hope that AW will in the end get better based on the fact that there are still some options left for improvement (such as Steam). Anyway, just to be clear – this is not a recruitment drive or a call for you to go and spend money on it – absolutely not. You are all (hopefully) legally sane human beings with minds of your own. It’s all up to you. If everyone decides AW is not worth their time and money – oh well, so be it. So far, that’s not the case.

Anyway, I digress. When I wrote on the AW forums that I would be taking a step back from the community, I got a whole bunch of private messages from old FTR readers – I’d just like to thank you guys, the support made me really happy :) If you need anything sorted, feel free to drop me a PM on the forums, I’ll be looking at it from time to time.

Obviously, during the last 12 months, a number of issues arose with AW that made me angry and that I took personally (not something I want to go into). Some I managed to improve myself, some were fixed by others, some weren’t at all, but in the end, what really convinced me (apart from the size of my paycheck :) ) to stay were three things:

- the opportunity to write about tanks (duhhhhhhhhhh…..)
- the opportunity to create the new Armored Warfare lore
- some really awesome members of My.com and Mail.ru team

Some spare time I want to dedicate to a new activity connected with FTR. Basically, I want to start making videos about tanks – hell, everyone’s doing it so why can’t I. At least I know something about tanks, unlike some other Youtubers. I hope you’ll like it (quite frankly, I am a bit worried about my accent, but we’ll see).

Secondly, I want to FINALLY finish my book about Czechoslovak tanks (preliminary ETA – this summer). And, last but not least, I want to get involved in more real life activities (not something I am ready to talk about just yet).

So yeah, that’s my short-term plan anyway. We’ll see what happens.