AndyHill

I think they already stated that Jingles won't be special (as in have special skills = be actually useful).

The main thing is I can't imagine any conceiveble way of making carriers balanced or even not-insanely-frustrating for everyone else and game breaking for the meta. What we have in game right now is a fundamentally broken system that will ruin the game completely, given half a chance. Of course claims about such a complicated system being completely unfixable need to be taken with a grain of salt, since they really are quite hard to actually prove. However, judging by WG's actions so far, they have absolutely no clue on how to fix the situation and probably not even how the game itself actually works (which is quite scary when you think about it), so even if the carriers could theoretically be modified to fit the game and balanced, WG certainly never will. And if you dig into it just a little bit, you'll quickly notice that the current implementation of carriers is built kludge upon a kludge with embarrassingly bad design choices piled one on top of another. They either did a botched job due to extreme time and resource constraints or simply could not get it to work properly no matter how much resources they threw at it. The only option left is to remove them and only reintroduce carriers if they can by some miracle absolutely certainly be a positive contribution to the game (being in a game mode of their own would work).

I never said I was any good at playing them, I just know everything there is to know about carriers now.

I was told to adapt so I did. It took a bit of thinking, but eventually I figured out the best way to adapt to the carrier-infested meta: Now that I'm an officially appointed ultimate expert of all things CV - according to WG's infallible algorithms, no less - I have a few things to say about the situation. When you're flying above the battle, it's kind of entertaining at times. I have to admit I was absolutely drunk on power more often than not; it's so relaxing to play carriers, when the worst possible outcome is a mediocre game and a loss. When I did several blunders in a row (for the sake of experimentation only, of course), the kind that would've each sent me to port instantly in any other kind of a ship, I was sometimes forced to send out Midway torp planes. Darn, that's rough. Up there it even sometimes felt that there was some balance in the game. The enemies huddled together, making it very frustrating to try to strike them and I even had some relatively low damage games because of that and felt outplayed. In reality, that's far from the truth, though. The most frustrating games were against almost completely combat-ineffective blobs, which my team ran over promptly. Ships hugging an AAA cruiser were flanked and massacred pretty regularly, because they were not setting up crossfires or going into aggressive positions like my teammates sometimes did (and were punished for doing the right thing by the enemy CV). When at the start of the match I flew to where DDs were supposed to be and found them, it was a win for me. When I didn't find them where they were supposed to be, it was a win for me (or my team, to be precise). Even though I am now officially the highest authority on carriers, I wasn't actually very good at playing them. Especially I made a complete mess of playing the Haku, I couldn't hit ship with the bombs, rockets were a bit clumsy too and my torp runs were basically an air horror show. So I decided to try to just screw over anyone I could as hard as I could. And I did. When I found good players in DDs doing what they were supposed to do, I went after them full tilt. And screw them over I did. I managed to disrupt their play so badly and so easily (remember I was doing this because I'm not the kind of a carrierist who can do anything else) that I actually got a pretty decent win rate in the Haku (could be small numbers problem, though, less than 40 games). The Midway was just broken. I have 10k+ games, all TX ships in the port and my stats are decent-ish. After about 65 games in the Midway, my damage record is a Midway game (interestingly enough, it was previously a Taiho game) and it's my highest damage ship by a reasonable margin. I kind of suspect I might have done more spotting as well than the second highest average damage scorer (Conqueror) and the K/D ratio might be rather high as well. You could say that the midway isn't exactly balanced, but what's really the problem is the whole concept. Also I basically had the winrate of a bot on the Mid so my opponents must have done even better. The biggest effect my carrier adventures had was basically the death of any interest in playing other kinds of ships. I'm a relatively peaceful kind of a person, but given the choice between playing the apex predator or hapless prey, I can't even begin to imagine why anyone would choose the latter. Earlier I felt a lot like a victim when attacked by a carrier, now I know for sure. And the carrier gameplay isn't that intriguing to keep me in this game for much longer, so it really doesn't look good. What WG really, really need to do right now: 1) Remove carriers with a hotpatch 2) Reintroduce the carriers in a PvE event at Halloween, make them insanely powerful, fast and fun to play before... 3) ...releasing a new, separate Carrier Battle game mode where CVs can fight each other and AI fleets. Funnily enough, this would be the historical option as well, so it's win-win, isn't it? Don't forget that this is not just any random rambling, but the opinion of an officially WG-certified carrier specialist expert.

I saw somewhere else a picture of recent WG carrier balancing efforts in action:

All of this is absolutely inconsequential nonsense that will do nothing to stop the ongoing disaster in the game, a bit like opening an umbrella next to a supervolcano eruption.

The issue with mods like this is that to prevent people from using it, you'd have to pretty much remove all moddability from the minimap. If you have access to ship locations and orientations on the map, you will be able to figure out if they are moving, slowing down or accelerating. Thus - if WG even wanted to ban domething like this - the question becomes do you want to prevent minimap modifications entirely or to make sure that honest players don't use the mod while it's impossible to prevent cheaters from using it. Unless the mod in question is a really bad exploit (which this one may or may not be, I don't really know), it's probably best to just let everyone have it instead.

I'd like to see only 6 vs 6 or 0 vs 0 carriers so that I can just "go aggressive" when there are carriers in game and then enjoy a few proper games without them. Having more than one per team is just icing on the cake, just the one is enough for the game to go down the toilet from the start.

Do those numbers take into account space battles or for example ranked? April might not be the best month for comparisons, since there's usually some kind of a special going on. I've been recently playing pretty much exclusively space and clan battles, would those show in the numbers?

I got an in-game notification that said clan wars might be canceled on Wednesday. I didn't click on it (I'm such an extremely busy person) and can't find any further information anymore, so it would be nice to get an official confirmation. I'm assuming it's because of an upcoming patch and if so, will there be a session on Thursday?

Well if you're not a hardcore farmer you will get better rewards by going for the losing team and they do get a pretty big buff to points, so the question is if the hardcore farming by hardcore farmers is enough to beat boosted hordes of casuals going for the easy prizes. Note that none of the teams are named "Loyalty" for a very good reason, it's always beneficial to choose the team that fits your grindiness levels the best regardless of who you played for previously.

This is pretty much how the different difficulty settings relate to each other: If you can only get 500 points per day, go for the team that lost. Other than that, if you're willing to grind a lot more it's best to just collectively push one team to a streak of wins and constant extreme difficulty.

I just got a message about patch being delayed by one day. How does that affect CW?

That would make too much sense, so the actual reason is probably something completely bizzarre.

I don't really understand how this would work in reality. Also there is not much in terms of concealment when there are carriers around, especially if you intend to keep your AA on.

What would be the motivation for playing an AA escort DD instead of an AA cruiser?

Here you go, the single incident, it happened; everything is now historical and fine and perfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar

If you still have unfinished flystrike directives, you'll get some ironium from those.

I have been following the discussions lately and I do understand that there is history behind the posts (as well as hyperbole in the op of this thread), but in that very specific case he stated a personal view and readily admitted that people with different (better) playstyle will be more affected. A rather strange point of view for sure, but even with the history didn't exactly warrant the kind of response he got. I think it's important to be consistent and try to give suitable response to relatively benign posts even if there is a lot of history behind it. I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but such consistency will eventually help make the world a better place and possibly slow down global warming.

I just read the thread that probably inspired this one and in this case the OP is actually correct - to an extent. His post in that thread included this part ...which is in fact personal view, for which he got attacked completely needlessly. He specifically stated that this was his personal view and that people who play differently might be more affected. The correct response would've been to ask why he holds off on launching planes at the start of the match and to advice him to launch instantly since there's nothing to be gained by waiting. Instead he got ribbed for his stats, which is in fact stat shaming. There is of course some history involved when it's not the first post he made on this forum, but that can't really be a thing. It doesn't mean that stat shaming was basically rampant on the forums either, but the above was an example of when people could and should have handled themselves better. Like personal stats shouldn't invalidate well founded views or validate poorly thought out opinions, message history shouldn't affect people's views on all future posts. To me this thread seems to be blown out of proportion, but there is a bit of truth behind the message.

Stat shaming as such of course shouldn't happen. However, when people write controversial stuff like "you just need to adapt" to a broken and toxic game mechanic (a completely fictional example) without giving any kind of arguments or details on how the adaptation was supposed to happen, forumites are left with no other option besides checking out how well the poster in question has adapted himself. And if for example the results clearly show that the poster has infact never understood the previous meta to begin with nor has he adapted to the new one in any remotely successful way, pointing that out (at least if done in somewhat reasonable fashion) is not exactly stat shaming.

Those guys are by far the hardest ones to find, though, so the DDs more likely to get hit are the ones who push caps and do other stuff DDs are supposed to.

Well I have ...a friend who has played quite a bit of both Belfast and Kutuzov with fair bit of success in both and he tells me that the smoke firing nerf does hurt both ships at least from time to time. Sometimes you just need to make a risky play especially if you're trying to hard carry and the nerf can bite you in those cases. For example the radar range vs smoke firing concealment thing does leave a suicidal DD or another ship rushing the smoke a chance of getting close enough to spot the Belfast for his friends, which can be annoying. Also on a couple of occasions he has actually managed to nail ships giving close chase by dropping smoke and hydroing the opponent who can't see anything from within the smoke. Note that I'm specifically not saying he thinks the nerfs made the ships bad or that they were unwarranted, but they were a reduction (if perhaps not massively so) to the ships' combat capabilities.

Yes and it's kind of off-topic as well. I just thought that it's kind of halfway relevant possibly when historicity is considered a reason for having carriers in game when in reality the way they exist in WoWS is basically pure Hollywood (this is not necessarily a reason for excluding carriers, though, since the game itself isn't a very accurate representation of historical events). Then again Samar would've probably been turned into a number of movies already if it wasn't too Hollywood for Hollywood.

Leyte Gulf was a series of engagements (including one of the few times BBs really did something). Yet at no point did carrier planes engage ships while surface ships were fighting each other, except for the action off Samar, which was mentioned earlier.