Hirohito

Don't forget to post your reason, curious to hear the bad experiences you might have had with those JB's.

Yeah I usually don't use it either, the thing can hit morale pretty hard at times. Though I do use it for ranked, but mostly just as a tool to identify certain players that I need to watch out for. 60% mino on the enemy team? Yeah that guy is 99% chance of running radar and taking up a forward position behind some islands to ruin my day. 45% mino? 99% chance of running smoke and sitting at max range in the open, ignore him. Though back on topic: Ignore that advice of an A/B split, I can't recall any map where that would ever be a good idea. A lot of the maps you don't even want to be fighting over B early, as that is the most exposed cap being open to crossfires. Parking radar near it, sure, but not fighting over it unless you know very well what you're doing.

Then just don't follow the advice, it usually comes from someone around the 50% mark or lower. Not the best source of advice. (Heck, even when the team lemming trains to A/B, I still go C solo if I have to. Even just one ship can slow down their push quite a bit, as well as giving valuable map information)

Can't really recall any map on top of my head where you would abandon a particular flank outright though.

You are correct in your assessment, you generally don't ever give a flank up from the very start. Was this really a super unicum suggesting an A/B split (abandoning C), or just the usual random 50% or lower player? You can generally "give up" a flank if you moved over there and saw the enemy massively outnumbering you, but that "giving up" means you start to kite back to slow down their push, not just outright abandoning it from the start..

Most certainly not, the only ting he ever hit with those torps of his was me. The idiot even kept launching torps at the cap when most of the enemy left for the other side of the map to shore up A/B caps, and didn't dare shoot his guns much either in fear of getting spotted... at A5 (incidentally, about 20kms away from the C cap, his torp max range). He also spent a majority of the game cussing me for not reading chat and being a bad player (the nerve on that guy...), so that was even less time he spent doing useful stuff.

Slightly off topic, but I hate Yoshino. For some reason that boat attracts potatoes to the same extent that Tirpitz does, and 9/10 times a Yoshino on my team is bad news (for us). Had one the other day in ranked that torped me for 80% while I was contesting the cap in my DD, who then went on to blame me for not "reading chat" (I was busy shooting up a Harugumo while dodging a Moskva). The guy then went back to A5(!) to launch 20km torps at the cap for the rest of the game (at full health of course), while I was sunk shortly afterwards as the enemy team just rushed my Yoshino torp-crippled boat with no support. We lost that game, purely thanks to the Yoshino. TL;DR: Please don't be the average Yoshino player if you do get it:

I saw this being presented as the "solution" according to a vid last year, at which point "everyone" started touting this as the way to play her. It's quite the myth in my opinion, as I ate a series of BB full pens on the angled stern a couple of days ago, and have been citadelled by cruisers there as well. Another problem with Nelson is that she is slow as all hell, so she struggles with keeping up with the fleet. Asking her to turn around when she (finally) reaches a good position as well is kinda expecting much from her in your average game. Edit: Forgot to add that she has no back turret, so that if the enemy starts maneuvering in an angle that loses you the ability to shoot back, you either have to rotate those super slow turrets all the way to the other side, or risk opening up the broadside to get them on target again. Not a comfortable boat to play. Can be fun, but generally isn't too good.

Yeah I'm fully aware that this is usually one of the factors that sets apart a good from a bad CV. However, whether or not I choose to be aggressive on that flank is mostly due to whether or not I have more surface ship support, and whether or not the enemy CV seems to be looking for me. A friendly fighter on top of my head does not change my equation whatsoever (and its usually a bad move from the CV anyway).

I hardly ever play CVs anymore, but when dusting off snowflakes during christmas I met a Kidd in one of my few CV games. Flambass is just extrapolating here without any proper evidence to back it up. (And no, 10 games is not solid evidence)

The guy above is right though, using fighters that way is a bad move, even if you consider "psychological support" as a fact. When I play a DD, the last thing I worry about is whether or not my CV supports me with fighters. The support I worry about is support from surface ships, as those are the guys that will actually put out the real pressure on the enemy flank, and the guys I ideally want closer than the enemy DDs support, and preferably in bigger numbers than the enemy.

Probably because new'ish players don't get any help from WG by telling them what good play actually is. I started out as a CV main, and while a lot of the game confused me, I thought I knew one thing for certain - scoring lots of damage is good, and the more the better. The youtube videos all bragged (and still do) of their 200k+ damage scores, and the game itself rewards you with more rewards the more damage you score, so that was my default plan back then. And since the most damage came from torping BBs, thats what I did for the most part.

It can be used as an information tool in CBs especially, where if you do get spotted, you can often tell (roughly) by the amount of ships aiming at you, how many ships are on that flank vs. the other flank. If you get spotted say on the 2 or 9 lines, seeing 5 or more ships aiming at you lets you know that the enemy team are heavily committed to pushing that particular flank.

Don't forget wide spread on top of that.

For CBs sure, but not for ranked. RPF can be a hindrance not only because the enemy DD picks it up, but because you often have it switch around to several targets during a game (especially during the middle game), each of which will be alerted that there is a DD nearby and not on the other side of the map.

Can be useful in CBs when screening ahead of a push and/or trying to zone out the enemy DD from an area. Might have considered the skill myself if it wasn't for the fact that I run RN DDs (Jutland this time around) as my first pick. For 2 points it could be a rather interesting option to spec into for certain other DDs. :-)

Mostly because being radio located usually causes the targeted players to panic and start maneuvering to dodge potential torps, which works heavily against you when you play a torp boat. It also (semi) gives your position away - even if most players cant use the indicator to triangulate your approximate location (that takes some skill), they can easily deduce that an unspotted DD is most likely in the vicinity and not on some other random location on the map. And while you can bump into an enemy DD as a shima (when you wouldn't want to), you can usually mitigate that risk by decent (and not too aggressive) positioning, using the concealment advantage to give you the leg up before things go south. For CBs thats a different story since you need to track and triangulate fleet movements by communicating that information to your team (making RPF a near mandatory choice), but for randoms and ranked, no.

Fixed it for you.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that "everyone who knows how to use RPF takes RPF", and that players who dont take it must simply not know how to use it. Plenty of good players out there who know how to use it that opt not to. Marceau and Shima for instance are two boats on the extreme sides of the gunboat/torp boat role archetype, that can be built around no RPF to good effect.

Take care to not get spotted in the first couple of minutes, that usually buys you time from focused CV attacks. Take a detour to the cap and dont be afraid of turning back if you see planes looking for you. Once you do get spotted, stay near friendly ships, stay bow/stern in towards rocket planes (you can usually have the first flight overshoot you, buying even more time), and just be an annoying pest by wasting the CVs time. Smoke when needed to stay alive and drop the mindset of using smokes to farm damage from. When/if the CV leaves you alone, use that time actively to grab map space from the enemy DD, rather than farm BBs. Heck, even just by wasting an enemy CVs time (if you get focused) you buy your team a leg up. As others have pointed out, CV games are not the norm, and meeting a unicum CV is even rarer, so you do have a lot of room to work with over time. The issue here lies with you.

Apparently it is your problem. I almost exclusively play DDs and have a steady ~70% WR in ranked, even in DDs that are vulnerable to CVs (like USN, running speed boost over DFAA). You have a lot of room to tilt games in your favour, stop blaming everyone and everything else.

Graduate, not sophomore, thank you. Anyway, if you're familiar with these concepts then you should perfectly well also be able to understand that the external factors you listed are not systematically skewing the result, and thus won't deviate from the mean given a sufficiently high N. Spec of ships (for randomly distributed players, not you), MM, "player motivations" are factors that can all be assumed to be distributed randomly among the population, converging on a mean at about 50% as the N increases. Even if a multivariate analysis would show that the weights of these factors influence the mean with different weights, as long as they are distributed randomly we will see a regression towards the mean regardless of which of these factors influence it the most.

See my last comments. Reasons for performing worse are after a high N of battles can be because the player: - is not as good as he thinks he is - fails to make high impact plays that meaningfully affect the WR, or - has a decreasing performance curve (the player is playing worse than he used to) Luck is no longer a factor after a high number of battles, because the distribution of factors (those you mentioned in the second paragraph) are randomly distributed, hence they don't skew a total WR in any meaningful way once the N (number of battles) goes up. It's not "simple and mathematically incorrect". Unless you can show that there is a factor that systematically benefits your side/enemy side that are not stemming from yourself, those factors will regress towards the mean (50%), and the only factor that would yield a result that then deviates significantly from the mean (around 50%) would be the only constant factor in the equation - you as a player. That chance that such randomly distributed factors meaningfully deviate from the mean after a high N, are astronomically low (low p-value). (FYI, I studies statistics at a graduate level in university, so I'm sorry for any unclear terms being used if you're not familiar with them)

Number of games is not irrelevant, it is extremely relevant when looking at the "true" mean that player has. If you have a "true" (higher) mean average WR, it will be reflected in the total ranked WR eventually. The standard deviation from that mean will decrease as the regression pushes towards that "true" mean. Meaning that if you have a "true" mean of 55%, your total WR will be rather close to that even after as few as 30-50 games (the deviation (or the "luck" factor as you say, will keep decreasing slightly when you get even more battles). It can be 50% or 60% after 30 battles, but its rather unlikely - and it will keep moving towards 55% the more number of battles you have, making it extremely unlikely that you have 50% or 60% after 100+ battles when your true mean is 55%. This is basic statistics. If a player has a worse WR than he thinks he "deserves" after something as high as 100+ battles, that player is either: - not as good as he thinks he is - fails to make high impact plays that meaningfully affect the WR, or - has a decreasing performance curve (the player is playing worse than he used to)

I feel like I'm repeating myself here a lot. Noone is disputing that you might still lose some individual games because of the team (statistical flukes), but over a large sample of games that explanation goes out of the window. Given a large enough sample, the individual player (if good) will influence games to a positive winrate. Especially so for ranked, since you take up 1/7th of the players unlike 1/12th in randoms. Sure those 40% players might throw a couple of games for your side, but over time those guys are equally distributed in the other team as well. How else would some players get consistently 60%+ win rates after hundreds of battles in ranked? Luck is no longer a statistical factor at the point where you got hundreds of games under your belt.