AndyHill

Actually it was in the Victory Part 2 news item, but thanks anyway as I managed to find it now. Seems that it would be a bit of a waste to buy him with tokens then, or at least to grind your butt off for the tokens.

Can someone confirm if the captain will be available for coal later on or not? I've heard it twice now and it would be interesting to know where the idea originated.

In reality and in this game, ships trying to employ that "counter" usually got sunk or damaged without the CV ever being in any kind of risk whatsoever.

Even after some small scale carriering I still have some vestiges of a soul remaining, which prevents me from even thinking about owning premium carriers.

iChase gets two things badly wrong in that video. First of all, for the life of me I can't understand why he complains about lack of consistency in CV vs ship interaction. It's absolutely consistent. The carrier will get you, no matter what. If that's not consistency, what is? Secondly, he talks about ideas and improvements, when the only thing so far that has any chance of actually remedying the situation is the 45 second delay - and even that's still 19min 15s off the mark. iChase gets focused without any chance for counterplay for what, 12 minutes straight and is not having fun. Well, who would have in that situation? He didn't sacrifice himself for the team either, he never had that choice. He even tried to play super passively and hide - which already is a game ruining situation - and even that didn't really work. It's 100% the carrier's choice. And guess what? When the carrier finally left him alone, somebody else got pooped on instead. The most baffling thing is that somebody somewhere actually thought that that would be a good thing to have in the game. A unit able to crab all over everyone else without counterplay and spot anything that tries to make a move. Basically a perfect counter for anyone trying to play the game. The mind boggles. This is getting really annoying, since I'm trying to kind of run a clan and I'm literally losing people directly because of carriers. And one of those people is now me. I grinded the heck out of the honorglory thing by basically playing Midway, which is pretty much the only thing worth playing if you want to have consistent success. I got Lazo and when I finally got that T8 ship mission, my interest in playing the game basically ended. I'll probably show up to get some of those oil stars during the weekend and I might get that special captain during the next stage of the event, but I don't really play the game for fun anymore, because it really kind of isn't.

So basically in that thread S_O says that he likes how constant spotting dumbs down the game so that WG can possibly get more money from casuals. Just wow.

A couple of things came to mind during my recent carrier adventures. First of all, based on WTR (damage/kills/winrate), at least the Midway is currently played hilariously badly on average. If you judge balance by the current state of affairs, you have no idea what's coming when people begin to actually learn to play. Secondly, unless there are fast and drastic changes in the scoring system, the saltiness in ranked is going to be out of this world. It almost feels difficult to not top the scores in a carrier, especially when you get the uncarriable side.

Which of the available options do you feel would be most effective in allowing people to make moves by controlling their concealment when carriers are in play?

As for suggestions on how to improve carrier gameplay and make it "balanced", I don't have any, since I just can't think of a way. And what does "balanced" even mean in a case like this, when the real problem is carriers destroying concealment plays and making the game far less interesting and dynamic? Also if you have the ability to poop on anyone anytime anywhere without possibility for counterplay, how much damage is "balanced" and acceptable? To me that number is 0, I just don't see why something like that should exist to begin with. I can't prove that carriers are entirely and eternally unfit to be part of this game, but we know from history what happened to surface ships when carriers arrived on the scene and we have two iterations of in-game implementations and I'm yet to be convinced that there is any way to make either of them compatible with the rest of the game. All I know is that adjustments to damage, starting delays (less than 20 minutes) or plane speed (within feasible range) will not help, even minimap-only spotting would be enough to spoil all too many of the clever and exciting concealment plays. So yes, I would like to offer suggestions on making things better for everyone, I just don't have any idea of what they could possibly be. What I do know is that games without carriers around tend to be vastly more enjoyable than the ones with.

Ok, now this is getting more interesting since we're actually at the relevant part of the topic. A unique experience and more immersion are positive things, but then again unique can be problematic, like for example in the case of RTS carriers WG felt (and I kind of agree) that RTS carriers weren't very popular among the playerbase - which led to the issue of a few masterful players stomping all over everything else - due to how different they were to play. Immersion is a bit more challenging to quantify, but what if the game had for example lots of AI aircraft striking some made-up ground targets? Really nice looking and sounding, massive airstrikes pounding the ground with flak bursting all over. Would that not be impressive as well as immersive in the same way current carriers are? Also how do you feel about the role of concealment in WoWS? To me concealment is the only thing that stands between two static blobs firing at each other on Ocean and everything that detracts from that detracts from the game directly. If the enemy knows you're trying to make a sneaky play and can react to it, there's no point in trying to make a play. To me this is the worst aspect of carriers at the moment, even worse than getting pooped on with no counterplay.

Then please define "historical" and "relevant" so that we can talk on common grounds. And actually I kind of love planes. My main thing is in fact hardcore simulators and I think carrier aviation is one of the coolest things ever invented. However, due to my knowledge and understanding of the subject, I'm also aware of its immensely disruptive effect on warship combat and the great dangers (that have now been realized in WoWS) it poses on game design. In general, I bother with WW2 Naval stuff, because I find it a very interesting subject and WoWS, because it's a good and somewhat addictive game (at least when you get to play without carriers). Also I notice a distinct lack of your views on how carriers make the gameplay better in WoWS.

"No ought from is": https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/Is-ought.html Just because something exists or/and has existed for a long while does not mean it should exist. Carriers have been the bane of this game since the very start, Wargaming basically admitted to as much when they spent a lot of effort on reworking the whole concept.

Because I'd like to see you try. We have already established that WoWS is indeed a somewhat arcadeish game, so it is entirely possible to leave important historical ship classes - such as for example minelayers and aircraft carriers - out of it (note that for example the console WoWS does not have carriers). Since historicity is out of the window anyway, what gameplay value do you think carriers bring into the game?

Let's start with a simple why. The fact that CVs are warships doesn't mean they belong in an arcadeish game that focuses on surface gunships. Especially since history buffs like us certainly know what they did to naval combat in reality. Also as a history buff I'm naturally offended by the extremely hollywoodish way carriers are portrayed in game; in reality carriers and surface ships didn't coexist in battles like they do in this game. It would be far more realistic to have separate matches with major fleet carrier operations and perhaps AI gun ships and separate battles for gunship vs gunship combat. Just like reality.

I'm impressed with the amount of well founded and reasonable arguments you use to make your case.

No, it would be the best thing to ever happen to the game. They don't have to be removed, though, they just can't be in the same game modes with surface gunships.

Well they can do all kinds of nasty tricks to keep people's money, but if they do calculate that even full refund is the most profitable option in the long run, they will probably do it. This is of course where we come in, constant pressure on the forums will certainly be taken into account as a factor when WG figure out what's going on in the playerbase. It's interesting to note that they already once made the calculation that an expansive and expensive rework is necessary and when they look at all the problems they intended to solve with it, is popularity alone really going to be enough? The healthiness of the situation remains to be seen, I personally think any negative effects will take time. Relatively few people will even realize how much the carriers right now limit gameplay options for the real playmakers, but the ability for one unit to poop on everyone else without counterplay is so hilariously bad design that I would be surprised if it has no effect on how the general playerbase views the game. Another major milestone will happen when people currently grinding the carriers either get to T10 or get bored of playing carriers - which to me seems like a thing that can really happen, since for me personally the aircraft gameplay isn't as compelling as the surface ships are. The health of the playerbase is basically a factor of incoming players (which should be inflated right now with completely new shiny carrier things people are still grinding), the average time people stay interested in the game and players leaving the game for one reason or another. Games like this can have a very high average (or mean) retention period for players, so even if there's a disastrous drop from 2 years to 1 year, that will take a long time to fully realize. And who knows, maybe enough people actually like getting pooped on constantly and everything will be fine. That's why WG kind of need to be on top of the game and catch problems before they turn into actual losses and that's where forums like this one come into play.

I see people claim all the time that carriers will never be removed, which to me is a bit puzzling, since it's entirely up to WG to make that call and it's absolutely not impossible. Of course it would be a major setback for WG to admit defeat like that, but that's normal in projects like this. Also WG have already shown ability to make major reforms when they think it's necessary. Just look at what happened to WoWP and we don't have to look further than a few months back when there was a major rework in this very game. The rework happened, because WG felt that there were several serious problems with the carriers and the rework has only solved one, which, unfortunately, was popularity, thus making everything else just worse. When WG realize that the only logical conclusion is going to be another drastic operation if they have the guts to do another one. And that's where our opinions and views come in. All of those threads popping up and getting swatted down are exactly what this game needs right now. I applaud each and every one, if WG feel that a constant stream of new threads on a single topic is a problem, I have news for them: the real problem is not the amount of topics popping up and shutting them down and channeling all discussion in one thread is not going to solve it.

The playerbase is already split into targets and aerial overlords, and considering the former group is the vast majority of the playerbase, I don't see how any other kind of a split could be worse for the game.

That's just it. I'm seeing a lot of that frustration on the forums and in the battles. It's almost funny how when one of my victims complains in the chat demanding the removal of CVs and I reply "yes", everybody just explodes into (well founded) anti-CV rant. I hope at least some of them do end up contacting WG about it like I always suggest.

The situation might be more complicated than that, though. There's bound to be a number of new players coming into the game all the time, especially in the growing phase of a game's lifecycle the influx of new players can be pretty significant. We don't know if for example there are lots of people coming in and playing the new shiny thing (which is to be expected when there are major changes in a game), compensating for an actually significant amount of players leaving the game. More likely than that though, is that people take some time to eventually stop playing, especially if they're heavily invested in the game. A completely screwed up meta (which we have now) will probably only start to take its toll several months after the rework - especially if lots of people still believe that WG can somehow magically make things right with the carriers. The countdown will really start once disillusionment sets in properly and I don't think we've seen that yet. The feedback on the forums as well as in-game is just so deeply negative that I've rarely seen anything like that in quite a few years of gaming. The amount of rage and frustration I get from my victims (for very good reasons) is something I've never seen before in the game even though I've dealt quite a few devstrikes with fish soup and citadels before. People are certainly getting immensely frustrated and I'd be very surprised if that didn't eventually start affecting player numbers.

If you get more than 50k damage or 3 kills the game automatically sends the replay to Jingles with a generated headline full of hype.

If you get kraken, high caliber and confederate in a match - nothing special happens.

So, what are the more varied tactical options that don't exist in non-carrier games?

When something has been in a game for years or since the start, it doesn't mean that something now belongs to the game, it's quite possible that it shouldn't have been in the game to begin with. Especially when a game is inspired by history and real ships and everybody knew what happened when carriers became a thing in reality. In reality, when carriers were present (as in Midway & Taiho -style fleet carriers in the Pacific), surface ships only got to fight each other in conditions where carriers couldn't operate (=at night). It's like making a game based on armored knights with swords and then adding a unit with a musket. Also I have rarely seen current levels of general resentment towards anything in any (at least somewhat successful) game I've tried and I've seen many. Also manyplayers will just go quietly, perhaps even without being able to point a finger at exactly why they didn't like the game anymore. After all it takes quite a bit of experience to realize just how much carriers reduce tactical options and make it poorer when they are present. Of course even completely new players (as I've noticed recently) seem to instantly grow some hatred towards carriers when they get to T4 or so. One thing that really puzzles me is how on earth any game designer can think that adding a unit that can just poop all over everyone else without counterplay is a decent idea.