AndyHill

Yes, the reason the IJN task force got so close was because the escort carriers were not tasked with finding or especially sinking ships and they had less than 0 reason to expect that anyone could possibly get close. And one of the major factors causing the abovementioned blunder was the fact that in reality, carriers would always, invariably and without exception strike at another carrier before any other target was even considered - even if they had good reason to believe that the target carriers were basically toothless. Just like the super historically accurate carriers we have in game now, right? So, I suppose that's that for any argument based on historicity. In reality carriers would not exist within some 300 miles of a surface battle. However, even if it was a massive, one-off fluke, Samar did happen. And I think anyone involved would be inclined to call it a real battle.

doubletap

Well actually there was one. Halsey fell hook, line and sinker for an IJN plot and raced his carrier task force to intercept empty decoy carriers, while Yamato and its escorts sneaked through the gap to engage a US task force supporting landings in the Philippines. This wasn't a case of fleet carriers taking part in a surface gunfight, the carriers were Casablanca class escort carriers (think Bogue) who were never supposed to be anywhere near any kind of fighting, escorted by a few DEs (think T2 DDs), but when ordered to charge an infinitely superior IJN force (Yamato, three other BBs, six heavy cruisers, eleven DDs), they did. And even though the planes had next to no armament for ship combat (in reality you wouldn't drop "HE" bombs on ships) they scrambled and attacked, many of them making empty runs to draw off AAA fire. So, in principle you could say that Yamato vs Bogue is kind of realistic. But it doesn't change the fact that any historical arguments for including carriers in random battles are completely invalid. Carriers existed and surface gunfights happened, but these two were fundamentally incompatible. Thus, any reasons for carriers' existence in this game (outside operations and perhaps special PvP modes) need to be based on gameplay. Not going to hold my breath waiting for those.

I want to have that power. However, @MrConway, if we are to become bankers, make sure we also get full accounting details of what came from where. If my person...clan treasury has for example 9 258 049 coal and three guys in the clan earn 50k extra from Shipstorm, I'd like to be able to see that (even at a later time), and for example split the Shipstorm winnings 5k each of the guys who actually played in it and 35k for me. If I'm feeling generous.

Hmm looks like I'll get Bourgnong, flint and Black in no time.

You can buy a legendary module if you also do enough FlyStrike things. That's not much of a reward, though, I really wish there was at least one T10 permacamo for you to get.

Commanders are all 19 pointers so their experience will go directly to elite captain xp.

I think you can get a max of 300 free ironium from sources known so far.

None. T10 camos are only available for doubloons, some T9 and below should be available in the naval aviation thing.

How often did carrier aircraft participate in battles where surface warships were fighting each other?

The space ships themselves are pretty and the game modes seem fun, but I have to admit that when I saw what you can buy with ironium, my reaction was "meh" on a scale from meh to meh. You could get two funny "special" commanders if you got all the free ironium in the world, but since they don't come with any special skills, they're not actually special enough to matter. Ironically, the Shimakaze permanent camo that was available on the test server would've been an entirely different matter and worth grinding full 300 ironium, though.

Technically yes, but IIRC even in WW2 submarine torpedoes were equipped with gyros so that although you could only fire them straight forward, they could arc towards a given heading on their own. I don't remember exactly what kind of arcs they could be fired at, but it's a bit better than just straight forward.

Whatever the chosen method of balance is, WG will not make the submarines intentionally weak. To compensate for inevitable weaknesses in durability and probably mobility, subs would need to have exceptional concealment and ambush -ability, which will stretch the existing game design far beyond its current limits. I'm not completely sure about this, but although sub games are historically the most beloved naval simulators and there are some very good modern naval games with subs in them, I don't think anyone has ever made a game that made playing against WW2 era subs any fun. Unlike with carriers, I'm not convinced it's undoable, but I'm not at all convinced that WG will pull a rabbit out of their hat and actually manage to make subs into something that makes the game more fun for everyone.

Just one tiny small thing you missed: WG will balance ship classes, at least trying to make sure one class isn't more powerful than another. And in the case of submarines this means boosting their greatest strengths, which are crazy concealment and torpedo ambushes. At least they would pretty much be playing the same game as the other ship types (unlike carriers), but going into such extremes is very likely to cause problems for gameplay in general.

I hate CVs with a passion but this change is still so clearly wrong that I hope you undo it.

Carriers and submarines are both historically important ship classes and they should have their historical role in WoWS too - never participating in a battle where surface gunships are fighting each other.

That Salem has pretty terrible stats, especially in his Salem. Why do you think that is?

This is what the first 370 or so games' winrate would look for someone who is completely average and has a clean 50-50 chance of winning his games: Despite starting off with an impressive five win streak he ended up with a brutally rigged winrate of 48,518 and now everyone thinks he is a total window licker. After 107 games (Admiral's Missouri) his win rate was 55,140% After 49 games (Admiral's Iowa) his win rate was a nice 59,184% A randomly picked streak of 31 games (Admiral's Kurfurst) ended up with 45,238%, oops When talking about numbers with relatively high degree of randomness (multiplayer matches with 24 participants), you need sample size in thousands if you want to compare results with accuracy of even a few percentage points. A couple of dozen data points means little and that's what most ships have. Even a few hundred can easily be very deceptive. Here's a small quiz for eveyone: rigged or not? Is the following sequence of win% development through 50 games randomized or hand rigged? Can you tell?

Well the OP does have a point; in Tanks you usually get to choose which tank you train special crew members for when you initially get them. It's not that much of a reach to expect similar level of functionality in ships, too, even if elite captain XP does make retraining easier for those who have it.

I don't know if you're genuinely interested in this or not, but I took a look at your stats and found two explanations. 1) You're playing higher tiers. Your best win rate is generally at T6 and below and your recent average tier is 7.7. Playing higher tiers sees your damage go up and since many ratings are based on damage, they go up as well, while your win rate is not as high as before, because high tiers are more demanding, Also, you don't yet have all that much experience in the ships and so on. 2) You've been somewhat unlucky. Your damage, kills per game etc. at T10 are better than your win rate suggests. That is completely normal, since you only have something like 300 games at T10. If you keep playing at your current level (and there's not invisible in the stats -systematic flaw in your gameplay) your win rate will eventually start going up. I have seen some interesting claims about dispersion and fire chance favoring worse players, but no concrete proof so far. The thing is, WG would never do such rigging lightly, since getting caught would be catastrophic for them and some of these things are provable if people put enough effort in.

Technically I don't think WG actually directly said that you can't get the T8 for free. Once we had all the information we could calculate that this was the case, but one could say that WG implied that you can get the T8 for free. I have nothing against WG monetizing their game, but as a customer I don't like this new trend where the line between store and mission rewards gets muddled. WG already did this with the Cossack and although it was a decent deal at about one EUR or so, I as a customer don't like what that small fee implied. There's no way this path doesn't lead to lesser rewards from all forms of campaigns. As a rule, everything in the arsenal should be attainable with the resources available for free in whatever campaign or competition format applies. Perhaps not everything at once, but every single object there should be available for free if you make the correct choices. Everything else can go to the store, I'm fine with there being stuff only available if you pay real money, but keep it separate from the free stuffs, please.

I prefer to see the player stats beforehand, you can prepare for what's coming and in some cases perhaps even change the outcome. The stat software is an uncannily effective predictor of not only what's going to happen but also how, and in some cases you can turn that kind of knowledge into wins you wouldn't otherwise get. Basically I see everyone's global win rate, damage, games played and ship specific win rate if he has more than 50 games in it. With just those few factors I can usually tell quite a bit about the player in question - especially if you take into consideration that you're only trying to figure out what happens in a single game, which has a large degree of uncertainty regardless.

Of course I forgot one thing; the 300 limit wasn't mine, either (I doubt the guys would mind me posting this here):

Then there's almost certainly some kind of a glitch in the system that randomly(?) drops matches. Last week I had the same happen once and although I thought it was odd and that I should've had the matches counting, I considered the possibility of user error high enough to not think too much of it. However, the same thing happened again on Friday and funnily enough, someone actually kindly posted a screenshot of me breaking the 900 limit right here on this forum: Immediately after the match I noticed that the number of attempts didn't go down so I went to check the Naval Battle section (of course also to see which ship I should go for next) - and since I had had issues a week earlier, this time I made damned sure to immediately check if the "count battles" thing was on and it was. Here is the time and date when someone finally broke the 900bexp barrier in a Russian cruiser - almost a full day later: I probably should've filed a proper error report or something like that, but it's too late now, can't be arsenaled to redo this post in the proper section and it's probably too late anyway etc. etc. It would be interesting to know if anyone else has had similar experiences, though. Also I'm not completely certain, but for the previous match I probably either had the thing turned off or was playing a ship that didn't count (brit CV). Don't know if that's related to anything.

Do losses count? I did over 1200 in a loss recently and didn't make the 900 barrier. I didn't lose an attempt either, though, so it might be a bug. I doublechecked that I had the attempt counter on.