AndyHill

So if a carrier gets a kill on a maneuvering ship into a blob through defAA, then neither WASD, defAA nor a blob is a counter? Well you have mentioned several times that there are several definitions to counterplay, but never said which definition you sunscribe to. That makes discussion difficult. No, it absolutely is not. It is simply reduction of negative - at best (if we assume that defAA has a notable effect in the situation). There is an argument that if you push into an objective despite air attacks and manage to capture it, that could be considered a counterplay against the carrier, because you're bullying him out of an important location. However, it's extremely rarely a 1v1 situation and usually you're playing with and against a full team and you're actually pushing other ships (that are playing by the same rules as you as far as positioning is considered and risking their health to stall you) out of the cap, while carriers are simply pooping all over everyone involved in the contest.

It was actually you who said that damage reduction is counterplay and if the SMG dude dodges a shot or two he's reducing damage. What if for example an SMG dude peeks out of a foxhole, gets hit by a sniper he never sees for 95% of his health but he then pulls back to reduce damage, is that counterplay? I don't know, that's the problem. That is something you need to answer. A somewhat commonly used definition for counterplay (and one that is close to my view on the meaning of the word) is "1. a positive or aggressive action by the defending side, esp in chess. verb (intransitive) 2. to make an opposing or positive action from a position of defence." At this point it would be very useful to know your definition for counterplay so that I can either evaluate if there is or isn't counterplay for carriers by that definition or go into discussion if the definition is meaningful.

Well as far as this conversation goes, it's almost necessary to figure out what counterplay means to the different participants. Since you've been talking about multiple possible definitions, I'd like to know what's yours so that I can get an idea on what you probably would or wouldn't consider counterplay. For example for me an SMG dude getting pwned in the open by a sniper is not counterplay but rather total pwnage, even if he manages to evade a shot or two before dying. Even him surviving the encounter wouldn't be counterplay. For me (and the official definitions I know of), counterplay does not exist unless there is some form of positive comeback where the initially defensive party gets to enjoy a degree of offensive action due to the counterplay. For example today when getting farmed by a Smolensk in my BB I popped a spotter and devastated him in his smoke. A few days back I got radared in a cap, dropped torps on a likely island corner and severely hurt a cruiser that predictably peeked around the corner to shoot at me.

What I'm missing is a more general term for counterplay. Damage mitigation alone isn't very much, you could for example say that a soldier with a submarinegun in the open outplayed a sniper when he managed to dodge one shot before dying. Which to me sounds more like getting pwned, not counterplaying.

How exactly do you define countering, then?

As far as I know, this is actually not true - which leads to one of the damning aspects of having carriers in the game. You still have to be aggressive and you have to compete for the objectives. That blob might be more effective against carriers, but the blob is also outplaying itself. Thus the carrier simply becomes an uncontrollable fun tax, attacking you or not, completely regardless of anything you can do about it. If you're unlucky enough to get its attention then you get crabbed on, nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't take skill, any potato can ruin your day. Unicums are just much better at it.

The filth raid thing is interesting and I like the idea of mixing cooperative and competitive elements into one mode. A few things to note: The mode could use some more randomness, now it's very samey with bot spawns etc. A bit more action might be ok as well, especially the early stages are generally a bit slow. Most importantly: what is the official stance on countdown starts where groups of people get several divisions into one battle? Related to the previous point: how about a separate queue (with maybe angrier bots or something) for groups bigger than 3?

There is no counterplay. As far as balance goes, it doesn't matter what the level of play is, balance is balance. When potatoes slowly learn (note that carriers are a very new thing at the moment) learn, their gameplay will gravitate towards the same kind of a balance better players have. More importantly, the question is not really about what skilled players can or can't do with carriers. Even a total potato in a CV can ruin games, because that's the design of the class. A better player will just ruin the game for mor epeople per match. Also the fact that at the moment there aren't carriers in every game is a moot point, because their existence is entirely a matter of choice and they don't have to exist in any matches ever, unless WG specificlaly wants them to. When I was still in the "what does this button do" -phase and couldn't hit the map with any of the weapon systems I stat sniped a unicum DD on the red team and made his life absolutely miserable, basically taking him out of the match. Carriers don't add skill requirements, they're a massive skill equalizer.

The thing about KOTS is that those people are the absolute best in the world at understanding the the game meta and what effect carriers have on it. If they don't want carriers in the tournament for whatever reason, it's probably worth listening to. Usually if the game isn't balanced for the top players, it's a balancing problem and if it's not balanced for potatoes, it's a l2p and tutorials problem. And the thing with carriers really isn't their opness, it's the combination of spotting and pooping over everyone else anytime anywhere that slows down the game and makes the experience worse for everyone. It's true that carriers are really bad at capping most of the time, but their phenomenal ability to decap puts them generally in the cruiser category in the cap control stats. Tanking is also something carriers do really badly, but in every other category they are either top or completely in a league of their own.

With BBs and DDs it's quite situational, but do note that for some reason there was a massive nerf to BB AP shells hitting DDs. Whatever the reason, it kind of implies that the exchanges between DDs and BBs were generally not completely one sided. No doubt that people make misplays and they get punished with or without CVs in the game. However, the question here is if the moves would've been good and successful without CVs in play and if yes, is it actually a good thing to have a class in the game that reduces the options available to everyone. Also I really don't see the learn to play -aspect of carriers. People can reduce the damage they take from carriers by blobbing up, but a lot of the time that is counterproductive to winning the game. You still have to play aggressive, you have to compete for caps and good positions and if the CV comes for you you're basically screwed because you did the right thing. And that's very counterproductive to the whole meta of the game.

Ok, so I think I kind of possibly got most of the stats for the 45-54% players with a quick hack, so here you go (they are largely similar with numbers going down quite a bit, in damage ships like Stalin creep up): You can read my commentary from the previous post, since the graphs are still pretty similar. Any interest in commenting these now?

So, for solo players all teamplay moves besides blobbing are out of the question (and I don't agree that divs can play almost as normal)? Any carrier who knows how to play will strike ships that are not border humping, but rather trying to do something useful. Do you trust your random teammates to always do something useful so that you can just follow them around if you don't have division to help you? Also did you find anything interesting in those stats (of 55-64% players) that showed CVs in a massive lead in a few important categories?

There are more forms of teamplay in the game than staying 5km from nearest friendlies. In fact most of the most skill-dependent teamplays are all about crossfires, cheeky positions and making bold moves - all of which is punished by the CV. Also CVs specifically don't punish bad players, they are a massive skill equalizer. It matters very little if the target is unicum or potato, in fact potatoes are safer from the carriers now, since border humping shimas are more difficult to find than the more aggressive DDs that understand that they still have to play bold or put the game in the hands of his teammates. Also the ever popular blob of sniping battleships is now less likely to get attention from the carrier than the lone fellow pushing closer to objectives and going for crossfires etc. Anyway, anything to say about those stats? Sure, they are from a specific range of players (55-64% players), but they do show quite a bit of impressive stats for CV's, right?

From the very beginning of the post you quoted: ...and it seems that players in that segment do (or did at the time) do in fact do more than 100k. However, the core point of the discussion is this: WoWS is a game of positioning and timing, not no-scope 360 headshots. If the carrier is capable of causing even entire divisions of players to have less freedom in the choices available to them (and they do, you are absolutely correct), they make the game worse. Which they do.

Ok, let's. Now I'm not an expert on using the maple syrup data so I might have screwed it up completely here, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Also the data I got is somewhat old and I didn't know how to get aggregate data (somewhat easily) since the data seems to come in segments of player win%. I used the 55-64 bracket of good players for these graphs. In short: I MIGHT HAVE SCREWED UP EVERYTHING WHEN I INTERPRETED THE DATA AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY REPRESENTS. Let's start with damage / spotting: Carriers are pretty close to the top in damage, but spotting is definitely something I would classify as "having significant influence looking at a single stat". Next is the kills per match and K/D -ratio: Again we have a single stat that might be classified as having significant influence, since beside being close to the top in kills per battle, carriers almost never die themselves. Now we hit something carriers are not very good at: cap control DDs are the absolute masters of cap control, which is not very surprising. Carriers are especially bad at capping, but they do compensate by being the absolute best at decapping - which puts their total values in the general ballpark of cruisers, which are somewhat above battleships. Then the one category carriers absolutely don't do much of: tanking damage Note that this specifically doesn't mean carriers are vulnerable, they just don't do a lot of tanking. Also since these are T10 carriers, this also doesn't mean they are incapable of tanking. Under some circumstances they can be very hard to kill due to the armored deck and virtual invulnerability to dot damage. What this does mean is that carriers don't do much in terms of sharing the bruden of taking hits. In reality the most interesting thing I noticed in this graph is the minimal advantage Salem has over Des Moines. Even though this is a bit of doubling up on survival (due to k/d -ratio already being presented earlier, I'll post the survival rates as well because they are interesting: The carriers are obviously something of an outlier in this category as expected (and I would classify this as a single statistic where carriers stand out), but what is really interesting to me is how little difference there is between the rest of the classes. It would be interesting to compare survival rates of BBs and DDs to the data sets of less capable players. I don't think there's much interesting stuff in the rest of the data, win% only measures inter-class balance due to mirror matchmaking and average XP isn't completely comparable so that it could be used for for example measuring the effectiveness of damage dealt (to BB vs DD for example).

I don't know exactly what the scoring criteria is, I'm not even sure if it has been published. If it has, it'll probably be in the summer cc summit materials.

Except that they can't and don't. Carriers have a hefty lead in survivability (I'm going by memory, can't be bothered to actually check so I might be off) with about 74-75% at high tier. They are virtually immortal. Well again off the top of my head: Dmg - Carriers will be very close to top at high tiers, especially if you leave out steel ships and such rarities. You would also need to look at effective damage, since any dmg done to DDs is going to be more valuable than BB farming. Spot - Carriers are completely in a class of their own - and basically make games worse for everyone by removing concealment play possibilities. Tank - Carriers don't do much of, they don't die either, though. My Midway is roughly 1/3 of TX cruisers when it comes to tanking. Shima is pretty close, though, and the more shooty-bang-bang DDs are somewhat higher. Cap - Not much for carriers. Decap - If my memory serves me right, carriers are great at this. My Midway is comparable to DM, Mossie and Mino whereas Wooster is a bit higher. This is how WG's own metrics valuated the different classes earlier in the summer:

If you want to evaluate CV stats to other classes, try checking out the combination of spotting, damage and survival rate. The main problem with carriers isn't their OPness, it's the harm they do to the gameplay by spotting and crabbing all over everyone. PS. If you're having trouble with Conquerors, try shooting back.

So, (if I read the table correctly) a high tier DD spots about half of what a carrier does, does half the damage of a carrier and dies for its trouble in more than two games out of three whereas the carrier survives all but one of four. The only thing left for the DDs to try to outdo a CV in a battle is to cap. Now did I just imagine lots of people trying to tell me that DDs should not try to cap aggressively in carrier games because it's too dangerous, or was I just imagining things?

A DD (or any other ship) can only spot certain regions of the map at a time and moving around takes ages. They also tend to have some trouble seeing through (or sailing through) obstacles such as islands. The flip side of DDs' ability to stay hidden rather effectively is that they have to stay hidden or risk instant death. And the world is a rather dangerous place for a DD with opposite side DDs hunting and spotting you as well as all the radars, hydros and so on. It would be interesting to see stats on the survival ratio and spotting numbers for different kinds of ships. Who here would like to bet against my claim if I state that DDs tend to spot less than carriers and have a somewhat higher chance of getting killed during the process? Being an aggressive DD, going forward and in general doing your job as a DD is probably the most dangerous thing to do in the game, whereas doing whatever you want with a CV is by far and wide the safest way to play.

One of the failures in the CV design is that other ships basically still have to play like they would otherwise. The blob of death is a pretty effective CV-deterrent and I've had bad matches personally against them - because they lose the game so fast that there's no time to farm. DDs still have to play aggressively, BBs need to look for crossfires and cruisers have no choice but to support the DDs or otherwise look for forward positions in places where they risk instant deletion when I spot them. If they do anything else, the enemy CV has already won. And when the carrier gets to them, they get crabbed on by an immortal and invincible force for doing the right thing. Basically when I'm in a CV I first go where the red DDs should go if they want to play well. If they are there, I will screw them over and if they're not where they're supposed to be, that's also a win for me. Without risking one of my precious hitpoints or even significant amounts of time or effort in return. Same goes for all other ships, but as the vanguard of any fleet, DDs are the first on the line of fire. This toxic class simply has to go, there is no other option anymore. The rework is a complete unsalvageable failure with no redeeming features. Also I don't give a ship about what the spreadsheets say, I'm trying to run a clan and I'm literally losing people because of carriers - and I'm pretty certain I'm not the only one.

I agree with separate game modes, but the surface gun ships are the bread and butter of this game so carriers and subs need to get a separate mode where the surface ships are just targets. After all, the AI is probably better at forming anti air -blobs than humans. Sub hunting will be a bit more complicated, though.

@WG_Lumberjack, the important thing for me is whether or not the completion registered for the autumn seasonal mission. Do I have to complete the new version as well to be eligible for the autumn season T6 ship container or not? If not, make it so that I am.

I already completed the seasonal mission with the carrier requirement, but now there's a slightly different version of the mission in its place. Did my mission completion count or not?

I used exclusively T10 carriers to make sure I got at least one on the red team every time. They did quite a lot of damage even if I spent a lot of effort sniping.