AndyHill

Warning: this is a very sad and touching, yet possibly educational story. Hi everyone, my name is Maurice Harper and I'm one of the oldies. I was there in July of 2015, when it all started. I was the one who figured out what a St. Louis was. And then there was the three St. Louis -division and after that the original, completely bonkers Cleveland.The rest of the grind to Des Moines was a bit of a nightmare, but eventually it was worth it and I got to captain the 3rd T10 ship on the account. During the first clan wars season I captained what was basically the only radar ship of the clan, it was glorious fun. I have history and memories. Achievements and victories, 19 points of experience. What I don't have is a job. I don't even mind the likes of Halsey - a truly legendary character - but I do mind it a bit when John Jack Jake Jill Does get boosted to 19 points with experience I earned and then they steal my job just because they are simply better. Who cares about history when you can get better performance out of some no-name new guy. Hi everyone, my name is Ryo Fuwa and I'm also one of the oldies from July 2015. I have sailed so many Kazes that nobody invites me to any parties because I still stink of dead baby seals. I probably hold all kinds of records in devastating strikes and I was the dude who finally got that super annoying liquidator-achievement for that one annoying campaign mission. I was the first captain to reach 19 points. I still have a job. For now. It's an honor to fight alongside Mr. Yamatomato, but it's only a matter of time when I'm replaced by Squiggles Doe or something pointless like that. When that happens, I will have so many glorious stories to tell - so much history - but nobody will listen. Hi everyone, I'm a cute Anime Princess. I'm not that old (all actors depicted above 18 yo), but I'm cute and funny and that's why there once was a plan for boosting a bunch of Anime Princesses to 19 points and replacing IJN captains with us. That plan is no more. It would be pure waste of captain XP, since eventually there will be superior "special" captains to replace all of us who don't have superhuman abilities. Same goes for Dashas, cats, dragons, Jinglesesses and other weird and funny animals - unless they get some extra bonuses to make them useful. That makes me very sad and since I'm very cute, you should feel sad for me unless you're dead inside or something. What plan to replace IJN captains with Anime Princesses? All of the above people(?) have two things in common: they are interesting or funny in some ways and they have no special skills, which means that their days are eventually numbered. And that's a lot of potential wasted. The game should celebrate their achievements and history, showcase their service records and make you care about them. Remember the captain you sailed to your first rank 1 with or your first solo warrior? Or did you know that one dude(tte) who seems to sail with krakens every time you go to battle together? Do you remember who was the captain who got you your first Tier 10 ship? I do, he's currently out of a job thanks to Yamamoto. All of the above are things the game should help you remember and celebrate, but it does the polar opposite. The constant flow of special skills captains make all of the oldies and funny special captains irrelevant - the characters you really should care about. Why would I pay for a cute anime princess if she will sooner or even sooner be replaced with someone who is just better in battle? When we finally got Dasha captains I didn't even get one, since there was no room for her in my fleet captained by a number of much less special but a bit more capable captains. This is all very unnecessary, though. Instead of John Jack Jake Jill Does, give us skill sets that can be assigned to existing captains just like permanent camoflages of old (that could not be removed). These could be rewards for missions or sold in stores like the "special" captains are now - or you could have country-specific missions like the ones for ship special modules. Start collecting (or showcase already collected) statistical data for captains. What ships they have sailed, how many games, the number of krakens and confederates, anniversary bonuses for every year they've served in your fleet and so on. The possibilities are endless. Compared to carrierpocalypse or other major current questions this might sound like a small issue, which it by all means is. However, adding personality to and making you care about your captains could add to the gameplay experience in a fairly cost-effective manner. Don't make us choose between fun and effective, when there is no reason for them to be mutually exclusive. Jingles is finally about to be a character in the game, but if he doesn't have special skills, he will eventually be pointless. Which is kind of sad.

Personally I have all T10 ships except for the Bourgogne, I also have a whole bunch of premium ships. Premium ships can mostly be manned (or personned) by the main T10 captains and since there are fairly few lower tier silver ships I like enough to sail regularly, there are not that many spots of any importance to fill. It won't take very long to have special captains in all the most favorite ships (I bet there are a few Japanese ones coming up shortly). Once you get a few 19 point captains, more will follow relatively quickly. At that point replacing existing captains with special ones becomes somewhat trivial, but elite captain XP is never really abundant enough to just fool around with, like for example in the anime princess project. It's useful to save it for retraining - and when you get one of those "special" captains you need to train up. WoT is a bit different thing in that it doesn't have Elite XP that can instantly and with little trouble boost a completely fresh crew to max level. It is in many ways similar, though, since due to the way crew skill XP works, a crew with "free" skills will relatively quickly catch up with a fairly advanced one. And that does have an effect on the value of your existing non-special crews. But at least WoT has some form of personnel records. As an extra bonus here's a showcase of my mad photoshop skillz, see if you can spot the simple, but quite useful new potential feature I edited into this image:

I think the longest air torp range in the game is 8km so they don't really hit the ships in the back that much. And it makes the ships in the front want to be at the back, which again doesn't really help reduce blobbing. Probably better for the team, sure, but do you really want to be that one ship that gets spotted and shot at by all the red guns and attacked by planes? For a DD to be a torpedo threat to the blob it needs to get usually within about 10km+ or so of it. And that can only happen if the blob team's carrier doesn't prevent it from doing so. Actually I think (and I can't quantify it, but this is my gut feeling) everything needs to start at carriers proving that they can actually contribute positively to the overall design - and personally I just don't see it. The RTS carriers were bad for the game and the new ones are just different kind of bad. Being better is not really very useful until carriers cross the treshold of being "good" for the game in the first place.

The experts are still experts, relatively. If they are suffering gameplay-wise (assuming I'm right and gameplay becomes poorer in general), everyone else has it even worse. I also disagree strongly about just going quiet and not stating opinions when things go wrong, talking about stuff is the reason for this forum's existence. Also the possibility of removing the carriers entirely is a real one, if not very high probability. The main thing is that having carriers (as they are now or were before) does not make the game harder, more challenging or anything else like that, but purely less interesting and fun. Actually if I understood correctly, the torpedo spam tactic didn't get nerfed, at least very much. Which I consider a bit odd, but oh well. This is actually not true. Carriers had to wait a while before they could launch planes and they weren't as quick on the spot as the current rocket planes, but most importantly there were almost always enemy fighters to meet you halfway to your objective so you couldn't fly that far without getting shot down even if you had the speed to do so. Blobbing is not necessarily the best tactic always, but it is effective against planes and perhaps most importantly it's what people tend to do when they are constantly spotted and going alone can get you singled out. Whether or not a DD gets close enough to torpedo soup you is up to your team's CV. The stealth torping thing is actually fairly marginal, I'm not sure it's a real big problem. And yes RTS carriers were also problematic, isn't that the reason WG went to such great trouble to change things. It's not enough for the rework to be as bad as the previous iteration, it has to be much, much better to not be game-ruining, especially if WG actually manage to make the CVs more popular.

Yes but that's not the point. Without carriers you can manage your concealment to an extent. With carriers you can get spotted anytime anywhere if the carrier decides you should be. You can't make plays based on pure random and expet it to be anything other than purely random. The reason people are blobbing up more than ever comes from several factors. First of all everyone is spotted less than one minut into the game and they have to start maneuvering to dodge shells (and aircraft torpedoes). Thus the cheeky positions where people might try to make plays are hard to reach because the way there is so dangerous. Also especially DDs get spotted very early and harrassed, so they need to get back to the safety of the fleet's AAA. Since DDs are one of the most important sources of vision and now the only source of torp spotting for the team, others are reluctant to go anywhere there are no DDs. Thirdly, with the RTS carriers (which were bad enough) a relatively small blob was ok, because one or two AAA heavy ships could make attacking at least fairly expensive to the CV and thus there could be more small blobs. At least before the recent hotfix, with the modern implementation you needed enough AAA to smash the flight basically before the first strike - or at least murder enough planes to make the attack horrendously expensive - and that only works in a massive blob of ships. So I think it kind of is a logical result from the new carriers (and the RTS ones were bad enough already).

Except that this is not at all how it works. There is no "good spot" (well there are better and worse spots to gravitate towards) that is now a bad spot. Knowing a good spot and sitting there is not at all what makes a player good and the change in gameplay when there are carriers present is not about one spot becoming bad and another becoming good. Good players evaluate the team compositions at start, think what they would do if they were the enemy and what is the best way to disrupt that activity, try to assist in gathering information to actually know what's going to happen and position fluidly based on that information (and what the green team is doing). During the game opportunities usually arise and good players make moves as they notice them. Maybe a cheeky crossfire position, radar ambush or cost effective kiting / harrasment on the light flank? Keeping the enemy spotted with a DD and dropping a few fish every now and then to help with DoT damage and make the enemy show broadside to your BBs? Go for a mighty ambush with a Conq, actually shooting AP for once and then go dark when you get too much attention, reposition and start spamming again? The possibilities for doing clever things in this game are pretty much endless and almost all of it involves controlling vision and managing information. Often you have to make educated guesses and might get (un)pleasantly surprised as a result. All of this basically goes away when there are carriers in the game. The tactical richness of the game is basically reduced to "sit in a blob and shoot stuff". When you can get spotted anywhere anytime any cheeky moves that rely on concealment (and I think that is most of them) become pure luck basically. People who know the game very well are not complaining about it being different. They are not complaining because they can't adapt - the best players are the quickest to adapt anyway. They are complaining, because the adaptation results in worse gameplay. Carriers (in present form as well as previously) remove options from the game for all other classes and replace them with constant harrassment you can't do much about. That's why it's a bit frustrating to have people tell you to just "adapt", especially when it's somewhat obvious that they themselves don't really know what that even actually means. But, again, let's make it clear that stat shaming is not exactly a nice thing and especially should never be used to dismiss well grounded arguments.

Stat shaming isn't exactly an awesome thing to do, but there kind of is a point to be made. Recently there have been quite a few people stating that everyone just needs to "adapt" to the new meta and it's going to be fine. They rarely tell you exactly how and when I get curious and ponder if I should ask for advice I first check how they are actually doing and almost invariably the answer is not very well at all to begin with. Which more than likely means that they don't really have a good grasp of the situation anyway. On the contrary there have been a lot of very good veteran players who can actually see how the meta is changing and where it is going - and that's nowhere good. The RTS carriers were already bad for every other ship class and these new ones aren't much better - if any. For example for DDs the adaptation pretty much means growing up to be a big CACL or even a BB. The kind of vision control carriers provide is just devastating in a game in which concealment is a big thing. And I don't want to point fingers or anything, but in general using concealment to make moves, create crossfires and find cheeky positions is something good players tend to do and if you're not very good, you are less likely to notice changes in the meta or understand what they actually are. Also when you simply state that everyone else is doing something wrong and they just need to adapt people are going to want to know how much credibility the person making the claim has in terms of game knowledge. And if there is nothing to substantiate the clain (like actual analysis on how people should play) the only way to do that is to check out how the poster is doing in the game.

DDs get screwed by CA/CL and CV CA/CLs get screwed by BB and CV BBs get screwed by DD and CV Yes of course CV are just another ship class obviously nothing special there.

Every other type of ship is on the same scale of concealment, mobility, firepower and durability. Extremes in any of those can be problematic (which makes talks about submarines very scary), but CVs are an entirely separate thing. They can spot anywhere anytime, strike at anyone whenever they feel like it - entirely without putting themselves into any kind of a risk. All "counterplays" are based on reducing the damage they do to you. It's almost never going to be zero, though, and most of the time the CV is practically invulnerable. The entire concept simply doesn't work in a game like WoWS where positioning and vision control is such an important aspect of the game. When carriers are in the game other ships can make plays only when the carrier momentarily allows them to. And even then it is pure luck instead of calculated risk, since the carrier can reposition its planes anywhere in a matter of seconds. The carriers' ability to mess up the gameplay for every other class is the real problem, not the amount of damage they do. And that simply can't be balanced by tweaking a few numbers.

First of all, the situation was bad with RTS carriers as well. Action carriers being no better or just a little better is a bad thing in itself. Anyway, earlier there were several different cases as far as DDs and carrier spotting were concerned: No carriers - everything is fine, enjoy the game people. The carriers are evenly matched - they wrestle in the middle with fighters and there are openings for you to maneuver even though it is much harder to make moves. One carrier dominates - The dominating carrier's team has freedom to operate while the other team is completely screwed. Nowadays it's often the worst case scenario for everyone in every match, since carriers can't stop each other from doing what they want. They can also launch super fast planes right at the start of the match, they will find, spot and attack any DDs before they get anywhere near caps. And with unlimited planes you can just charge in, find and attack the DDs even when they are within flak bubbles.

Distances are smaller, but if you discount the Glorious incident and the Samar debacle (which was escort carriers on ground support mission), what was the closest range in terms of effective gun ranges a major surface combatant ever got to a fleet carrier? Carriers did attack gun ships and gun ships fought other gun ships, but virtually never at the same time, it was either or. WoWS doesn't even really try to be a realistic game, so arguments about realism and historicity need to come with gameplay related arguments. However, WoWS does try to resemble reality and it kind of needs to make sense in general. Since carriers and surface ships never really engaged enemy combatants at the same time that's just not really historical and the OP of this thread quite rightly concluded that there's no way to fit carriers and surface ships into a same game so that the former still bears some resemblance to reality and the latter is anything but a target.

Actually carriers are kind of misplaced. There were very few special cases in WW2 when carriers and surface ships engaged at the same time. Usually surface ships could only approach to within shooting distance at night, when planes couldn't slaughter them way before that point.

People (rightfully) complaining about RTS carriers being bonkers OP and game ruining never asked for a slightly different (and not necessarily less bad) version of the same problem. To be considered successful, the new system would have to be enormously better than the previous one, the question of which one is slightly better or worse is pointless. And it's not something that can be fixed by tweaking numbers; the constant spotting is already making battles more campy with everyone blobbing in one big lemming train station that doesn't even really move anywhere. The only really interesting suggestion I've read was about making plane spots appear only on the minimap. It would still make bold and interesting plays less likely to succeed, but together with reduced striking power that might at least help. Of course I also quite like the idea of a "no carriers" -checkbox in the matchmaker.

Here's the recipe for perfecting carriers in WoWS: First figure out the sailing the ship while flying the planes thing, also allow us to use the ship consumables as we see fit. Then make the carriers insanely powerful so that they can make epic attacks and mow down surface ships left and right while having lots of fun (preferably with special effects that would make Michael Bay jealous). Just like the submarines. In PvE only.

I don't think the problem is really the different gameplay, I think it's more about the basic concept of carriers. In reality they revolutionized naval warfare and basically made every other type of ship either an escort or target practise. WoWS isn't exactly a realistic game but I doubt there's a big enough a shoehorn anywhere to fit carriers into the game without breaking either the game itself or any form of connection or link to actual naval combat it still has.

No.

Funny thing is that although you don't get any extra from the clan buildings if you buy ships during sales like this (and the discount for lower tier ships is usually 30-50%, much better than what the clan building can do), try selling the ships after the sale is over and see what happens.

Would be great if it was coal or FXP (1.5-2M?), but Azuma has steel written all over it.

double

Perhaps not merging the two games, but implementing WoWP style gameplay is an intriguing idea as the game is nowadays somewhat fun to play. The problem here is the massively accelerated time and enlarged scale of WoWS. In this game everything happens at several times the actual speed, so the planes would have to be rocketships to compensate. In RTS mode that's not much of an issue, in the new thing the squadrons fly in a very unnatural way that just looks weird and although I of course can't say for sure, I suspect that in a very detailed one-plane steering mode it would look and feel even more weird.

Yes, they were integral enough to make every other type of surface ship basically pointless. It would probably be best for this game if that didn't happen here.

Why do you think the winrate would be lower than 50%? Isn't this a team game? Why won't the rest of the team just for example play more as a team when they notice someone is afk and compensate for it, providing the afk dude with about 50% winrate? Or are you trying to say that the afk ship's (lack of) performance over lots of games actually affects his win rate despite this being a team game? What do you think would happen if instead of the afk player you'd have 1000 games with the best gamer ever born in the team, a flawless shot and masterful tactician, who would never make any mistakes and would always know the perfect way to push his team to win? Would the winrate be above 50% after 1000 games with that guy?

Funnily enough, we played 6 games yesterday, 4 with Stalins on the red team and 2 without. We won 3 out of the 4 Stalin games and lost both that didn't have any in them. Yeah we're not exactly invincible, but neither are the Stalins. In fact the more I see them in CW the less impressed I am and with the upcoming fire duration nerf they are even less interesting. Funnily enough, whenever we have real trouble with Stalins they seem to be piloted and supported by (super) unicums and in those cases the Stalins are far from the only hsips we have trouble with. They might be very good tools for very specific situations, which makes them super powerful when played by unicums against unicums when they can put the ship's special ability to good use at the decisive point. But an I-win-button for everyone the ship is not.

Well at least I kind of do. Everything seen and said in this thread so far points to that. Most tellingly a specific example of a game you thought showed how your teams lose the games for you was shown to be largely opposite. Do note that people shouldn't need to play well to not get abused. However, this is a forum for a game and when people see others suffering they mostly want to help. Now they can do little about the abuse themselves, but they can help you become a better player and enjoy the game more - and that's exactly what they are trying to do. I don't even know how to say the following so that it wouldn't sound like justification for bullying, because that's precicesly what I don't want to imply. However, you really do need to understand, that when you play a T10 carrier, you are putting enormous pressure on your team and testing their patience, because you get beat so badly almost all of the time and they need to survive pounding from a colossally OP unit on the enemy team. When you say that your bombers don't survive if you don't escort them with your fighters it's a 100% clear cut sign of you just being bad at T10 carriers. A competent carrier has to deal with spotting and striking while keeping enough of his planes and teammates mostly alive. If you're not doing that, it means you fail at carriering. I'm not saying it's easy, far from it. But whenever you fail at spotting, protecting your teammates and striking at the same time you fail at carriering. It happens to everyone more or less often, of course, because it's supposed to be hard. But if you fail at it so much that you consistently forego spotting and protecting ships to escort your own bombers you have to understand what that means. I know it's not a nice thing to hear, but look at the bright side. People here are ready and willing to help you get better and enjoy the game more. All you have to do is to accept the help. We can't do much about the abuse (I don't even want to imply that it will become less when your skills improve even though that's probably true, because it's also so wrong on so many levels), but we can help you improve your gameplay. PS. If possible, could you answer my previous question about what would happen if you played 1000 matches where you afk in every one? What would the winrate be like for the team that always has to play 11 vs 12 and why?

A question regarding winrate: if you took any ship, started 1000 games in it and went afk every single time, would it affect your team in any way? What would your winrate for those 1000 games look like and why?