Hirohito

I definitely don't have buyer's remorse for her and can see her strengths when played correctly. Granted I still have some rather questionable stats in her myself, but to be fair I only ever grinded one DD line to TX (Daring), and was not used to the playstyle at all, leading to some early deaths as I had to unlearn past habits of DD play. Started to get the hang for her after a while, and can only see it going uphill from here. She can zone out DDs rather well with the threat of radar (not necessarily even having to use it, just the threat of you being nearby), she has the dpm to pick a fight and win it against most DDs, and the enhanced speed boost is awesome if you're good at juking (personally I'm still trying to learn that skill, but it certainly is noticeable). 12 km torps are at that good sweet spot where you can still use them against entrenched radar positions, unlike ships that are stuck with 10km options. And for random battles, do you really need 15 km torps? The 5x/3x launchers are kind of awkward at times and they do have 10 knots less speed than Halland (but are still 76/80 knots, so still very fast), but other than that I can't complain. Would definitely get.

I disagree with how CVs are supposedly the "prime villain" here though, and on the forums in general. Personally I started out as a CV main, and after having been through that experience, it really taught me how to mitigate the worst effects of a CV to the extent that I never really panic when I see one. Sure, a CV can bother me for a long time and its very annoying when he does, but he doesn't outright kill me or has his teammates kill me. Unless I was way overextended (which happens, we all do make mistakes from time to time), the added spotting usually doesn't land too many shells on me either (unless I was deeply overextended, as mentioned). Taking the usual detours to a cap, going bow into a rocket strike, using islands to mess up the aiming reticle, occasionally juking a shot and smoking when needed - I can go on for a long time with that routine and the CV is wasting a lot of time and damage potential that way if he's dead committed to it. Of course, I'm not saying I like it when they do bother me, but those measures work rather well - even against unicum CVs. Radar is similarly annoying, and can be worked around as you say. What I do take issue with regarding (Soviet) radar though, is that CBs usually field multiple 12km radar, where I personally feel that they can limit me a lot more. It also makes shorter ranged DDs (both regarding guns and torps) almost unviable for ranked, shaping a meta where teams bring an awful lot of Soviet cruisers and where the DDs mostly have to have ranged options to stay competitive Me, I like to play Daring, but that boat is severely limited by its 12,8km gun range and 10km torps when there are two Soviet radar covering a cap or flank that I'm working from. Trying to use guns essentially forces me to play like a gimped Smolensk with less than half the dpm and only gives me an 800m window to work from, while torps are usually never an option unless I get to use them at very short ranges or more as a deterrent against a push. Now I do think Petro radars were a move in the right direction with 15/18s duration, but those Stalingrad/Moskva radars last up to 36 seconds, which is an eternity when you're caught in it and makes it extremely risky to "ignore" like the Petro one. All in all, I do think its quite telling that most DDs in ranked are DDs with more range - Somers, Shima, Halland (and the occasional Marceau/Kleber). Halland being the most popular since it deals quite well with both CVs, while not relying on smoke (which gets countered by said 12km radar) and has the range to flush out targets at range (often Soviet radar boats). As a note on that, it was quite telling when I watched the Verizon tournament today - one of the teams (who were utilizing a tactic of laying a forward smoke carpet with the Kidd to mask 4 ships) banned the Chapayev before the game. Quite obviously of course, since a Chapayev (or several) could have ruined that smoke play right from the start if the enemy team were allowed to field one, much more than an Edinburgh (with shorter-range radar) could have done. A clear example of how 12 km radar can ruin certain tactical options, limiting diversity.

I think faildivs either need to stay as is, or WG needs to not allow different tier ships to div up in the first place. If faildivs never risk meeting +3 MM, the faildiv can pretty much "ensure" favourable MM in every game they queue up for. Say someone playing a T7 that doesn't want to meet T9 ships, he could then div up with a T6 ship to guarantee that he never meets anything above T8. The other solution would be to force ships to be the same tier, thereby guaranteeing that it keeps being +/-2 MM.

Nah. I play a lot of Daring myself, and even vs unicum players, their CVs fail to sink me. Granted they haunt me and force me into a very passive role, but they don't sink me. Daring is just too slippery for that (given plenty of consumes, and plenty of health). Had a 65% Midway the other day on Okinawa who just kept sending squad after squad on me at B, but even then I managed to cap it. The rest of the game was spent dodging, smoking up and trying to reposition/exit through hard to drop locations. Didn't do much beside capping B, but we predictably won since their team just "lost" a 65% CV who had tunnel vision syndrome as I wasted his time.

This wouldn't hold up in an actual court case though. Whether or not a certain wording is "technically true" (with your 0,000001% example) is irrelevant, as it is grossly misleading for the average consumer, who generally is led to assume and believe that there is an equal chance by the phrasing on the actual crates they are purchasing. if you don't own the short-listed ships, then the chance of you actually getting one of the super rare ships (which I assume many are after) are for all intents and purposes, nil. This of course wouldn't be a problem if WG was upfront about the mechanic, but in this case they do the opposite and clearly mask it. Heck, even a small phrasing like "some ships are significantly more likely to drop" would make WG far less liable in this case, but they are clearly advertising an illusion of pure chance.

Yeah, a clan mate posted a ticket a few hours earlier today, and they haven't replied yet. This isn't evidence of anything of course, but my guess is that there is a more than average likelihood of them having lots of angry customers on their hands now. I hope people don't flame customer service employees too hard though, its not their fault that their management decided to rig the game.

I agree in principle, but let's not forget that most people didn't know about the "shortlist" issue until a few hours ago. Most likely the WG scheme is a variant of what you posted - people will buy crates, then see that they got ships they didn't wanted, but they will likely still think along the lines of "hey, at least I got a few ships so the chances overall must be really good even if I was unlucky with the actual ships I got - I'll buy another 20 and see what happens this time". The latter one is more scummy, because it misleads people to think they had a shot at the "good ships" to begin with.

That might be so, but for data purposes that would be a really helpful addition of informationwhen people post their crate hauls.

With the latest (very solidly backed) discovery of how the santa crates are rigged for ship drops, I encourage people to ask WG for a refund. And possibly, those of you who bought some of these crates and got the predicted ships - I encourage you to even possibly consider joining a class action lawsuit (one where you as a group bring this to court). The text on these santa crates is so misleading for the average consumer, that WG is on quite thin ice on this particular matter. Companies like WG (which I personally didn't use to have an issue with) can only get away with these practices if you as consumers do not voice your opinion on the matter. What happened here is that most of you most likely bought these crates under the impression that it was close to a lottery on if you'd get some ships, and if so, close to a lottery on what kind of ship. This is clearly not the case, as some excellent Reddit posts and CC videos have shown. And who can blame you? I thought so too, but fortunately I was able to save me this money before I spent them on said crates Just my five cents on the issue, but I really hope people take note. Ask for that refund from WG customer service, as it will only take 5 or 10 minutes of your time, to voice what you think about this practice. You might not get your money back, but it sends a very strong first signal to WG when several people do it. And, worst case, if anyone considers a class action lawsuit, consider jumping on that bandwagon - you do have a solid case here!

Yeah, and I can imagine that more of these law suits will go to court if they keep up with it. Not only might they be forced to list contents, but the lawyer fees will most likely really put a dent into any cheap profits that they gained from this sale. Worst case, they risk a "cease and desist" order, banning them from making the game (or the shop) available that country. I'll just repeat what I said - WG is really playing with fire here.

WG actually risks a law suit on this particular matter. Their description is so grossly misleading that they could actually risk losing the case if someone brought it to court. It was a cheap money grab, but if anyone actually brings this to court, WG could (worst case) risk being forced to list loot box contents. That's really playing with fire on WGs part.

WG actually risks a law suit on this particular matter. Their description is so grossly misleading that they'd actually risk losing the case if it went to court. It was a cheap money grab, but if anyone actually brings this to court, WG could (worst case) risk being forced to list loot box contents. That's really playing with fire on WGs part, if they really want to avoid doing that.

Well there are differences here. "The house always wins" is how casinoes make money, but they don't necessarily do so by rigging the game (which is cheating). They do so through how they (in the long run) the random games will statistically always bring in more money than they lose to their customers. In this case, WG could have done so ("the house always wins) by making their santa crates (stastically) give less rewards than the outright value of buying their contents directly (in this case ships), even if each individual roll was random. Some lucky players would of course get a Benham, Enterprise and Musashi out of 5 crates and "win", but for most players they would get less return than outright buying the ships for full price. In this case, the gamble is rigged with short-listed ships which are bad ships that either cost very little, or are very unpopular (as in, WG doesn't sell much of them). So this is cheating, as in no way does WG describe this mechanic at all, making it appear as the game is a pure gamble of chance with possible high payoffs (when it isn't). Like last year, the only ship I got was Huang He. That ship was shortlisted in 2019, and incidentally a very low-value ship (it's constantly on sale for about 5-7€, owing to how unpopular it is).

Since I don't own the Makarov, Duca or Yudachi, I won't be posting here this year unfortunately. I was intending to get some santa crates and post the contents, but since I already know which (unwanted) ships I'll get in advance, I'll be holding that money. Thanks to everyone making it clear how WG are rigging the santa crates, saved myself some money this year! EDIT: If people do get ships (and post them here) this year, it would be very helpful for the community if they could also state if they already own Makarov, Duca D'Aosta, Yudachi, Florida or Orkan. That way we could monitor and have even more solid data on the way this scam seems to work.

If an admin closes this thread, we should really keep making them again. I usually don't have much negative to say about WG, but this is so unbelievably scummy and misleading for the consumer. Last year's Puerto Rico-event doesn't even come close, since (while scummy) it was always obvious from the start that getting it for free was gonna require an insane amount of work, so you could decide for yourself if it was worth it or not (and for most people, it wasn't). This is by far the most scummy thing I have seen WG do. This is grossly misleading their consumers for profit, nothing more. I wouldn't even be surprised if WG would face a possible legal backlash if someone actually brought this to court, as they seem to be on very thin ice here.