krazypenguin

By my calculations, you said it 285 times in that post - so you've pushed it back by at least 23 years and 8 months. And then this guy quoted you: So we need to double that to 46 years and 4 months. However, I also (stupidly) quoted you myself, so we're now onto about 71 years. So RN in 2087 (and another month for me just then)

I just checked the premium shop - Belfast is not there, ergo you lied: It was not available sooner than I thought it might be. Played HMS Belfast at the Chatham docks event and she was great - can't wait for her to be released.

I think you've quoted the wrong post...I have no idea what you are talking about.

Terrible photo, sorry, but this is the "Restless Fire" camo - used at WG events: Quite why an event camo needs 250% bonus to commander XP is beyond me but whatever. Yes, we need more camos please. Lots and lots of them.

But totally worth it for that last paragraph

I met Jack_Cornwell__VC yesterday on my team (not so much a forumite, but very active in the general chat channel) - he was in his Isokaze and I was in my Kami R. Really good fight, battle was quite finely balanced for a while before tipping in the enemy team's favour and looking like certain defeat. But then I got a lucky torp hit on an almost full health enemy Kami R hiding in smoke which killed him and after that Jack was able to win the vision game. Jack played really well. gg sir!

Reminds me of a true story from where I work. The catering team stopped refilling one of the vending machines. We repeatedly asked for it to be refilled but it never happened. Eventually, they took the machine away. When we asked why they took it away they replied "because no one is using it".

Yay, reinforcements have arrived!!! Welcome Kandly and good luck in your new job!!!

Wow. I am genuinely surprised to see it's not there anymore - it feels like it's been in the specials section forever. Still, it seems they finally replaced it - now for 6 months worth of slightly discounted flags...

Yup - as a long time WG forum user I've seen so many "we made a mistake", "we'll learn from this", "we won't make this mistake again" and "we'll do better / improve our communication" posts without ever seeing any actual improvement or change, that I've long since given up. However, I also have to say that I don't think this is the fault of the CMs. I appreciate that they are spread very thinly, being a small team that has to cover at least 4 WG titles (planes, ships, tanks & blitz), if not more. If one of them is out of the office for any reason (holiday, sickness, time in lieu for working a weekend or attending an offline event) it must make things even worse. Then there's the fact they have to support multiple languages, which no other region has to do and dealing with a head office who I still suspect don't really like their EU player base (though I think the WoWS producer/devs are a million times friendlier/nicer/more communicative than the WoT ones) and who speak a different langauge and are in a different time zone. Frankly, I think their job might be a bit of a nightmare... Longest serving CM was who? Ectar at 4, maybe 5 years but the majority seem to last a few years at most. Seen so many go that I forget all the names. I think WG need more CMs and fewer 'Heroic Battle Advisors'

Check replay - first or second minute. I pop smoke and lose the detected symbol about 1 second later. http://wowreplays.com/Replay/18175 Also, @ OP - this replay shows some of what people are trying to tell you. Yes I make mistakes, yes my shooting was very poor (trying a new HUD) but the basic idea is there.

^^ Really good advice +1 OP - Only thing to add from me is, remember that smoke only covers you whilst you are deploying it if you are travelling at 12.5 kts or less. So always drop speed to 1/4 as soon as you enter a cap and skirt the edge of the cap. That way you effectively draw enemy DDs closer to you if they want to spot you, hopefully making them easier targets for your allies, and your lower speed means you will be covered by your own smoke as soon as you pop it.

@ 29 seconds. Hilarious :-) Edit...oh maaaan, now I've got to watch the rest of their videos...

Well... this may not be a popular opinion, but personally I think the entire mechanic or remaining invisible whilst firing is bad. I hope they remove it from all ships. But then I don't think I own any ships capable of invisi-firing so I'm probably just biased ;-)

Note to WG - I checked with Tuccy and he said I could take and share these screenshots and my opinion of this ship. If you do not agree please delete this post as necessary but note I have created this thread in good faith. Sorry for delay in posting, I was enjoying an enforced holiday from the forums prior to the weekend ;-) These are the HMS Belfast stats as she was at Chatham - of course, they might be changed. Sorry, I was stupid and excited and forgot to photograph the gun and consumable stats - my bad :-( My opinion She feels like an Atlanta but with fewer and slightly less rapid firing guns but with more range and no torps. Smoke makes the ship - currently the smoke places over 23 seconds IIRC and felt like it lasted a long time - certainly much longer than IJN DD smoke (which is what I am used to). Removing it and putting a speed boost on could make this thing decidedly meh for most players - but then I only have experience of the Atlanta and IJN Cruisers up to the Myoko, so it might just be I am not well placed to review her. She felt very fragile to me and only the larger HP pool kept me alive in a few games where I would have died in the Atlanta, i.e. armour feels much the same but more HP keeps you in the game that little bit longer. Very weak to torps too. Speed felt slow, rudder felt slow, turning felt slow. Again, possibly perception issues or poor sample size of ships to compare to, but that's how she felt. I added the rudder modification which helped a bit but acceleration and deceleration at low speeds was especially painful so propulsion mod might have been better reallly. Concealment was nice, AA was pretty good (guy in one at the PC next to me shot down over 20 planes in one game - he also managed 115k damage in 1 game - best I could do was 75k). Guns...not sure they are worth mentioning since they will be reworked, but flatter arcs and faster shells than the Atlanta. I mostly spammed HE and it was quite effective - quite a few fires started too so fire chance must be reasonable at the moment. The one game I tried using the AP (again, this is before any change) it was decidedly meh. Accidentally went into a COOP where I met the enemy Belfast - I tried AP, with marginal effect, he citadelled me with HE. Learn to aim kp. ;-) She has 3 consumable slots - hydro, smoke & radar - there were no options other than regular or prem (i.e. slot 1 has hydro only, slot 2 smoke only, slot 3 radar only) WG's rep at Chatham said that there would be no point releasing a premium ship of the same type as a line in a tech tree but which had a completely different play style and therefore Belfast will *probably* not have smoke. However, I definitely overheard him later in the day say to someone else that there was no reason why she could not keep smoke - so....yeah, no idea what they will do and it seems neither do they ;-) (In his defence it was a LONG day in a LONG weekend and he was probably tired so may have just slipped up) If they release it as it is, a division of 3 Belfasts will be ridiculously OP. Sail forwards until detected, one pops smoke and radar if needed, everyone fires, 2nd one pops smoke and radar, then the third. Nothing will survive that. WG's rep said it would be so much fun - I said it won't be fun to play against to which he replied that it was easy to counter with: 1) - radar (not really, there are not that many radar ships at tier 7 and the ones there are will quickly die under all those guns) 2) - torps into smoke (maybe but that's very situational - relies on there being a ship with torpedoes close enough to fire them, then get a lucky hit - given the Belfast has radar, I will not be going within 8km of one in any of my DDs and anyway, the max torp range of IJN DDs with torp accel (which they need at tier 6 & 7) is 8km. So..no, no thanks. 3) - failing that he said blind fire into the smoke since the Belfast is quite big and fragile. Again....not really. Will I buy it? Almost certainly yes, even if they remove the smoke (which surely they must). The Atlanta is one of my favourite ships so a ship that sacrifices some of her firepower for slightly better armour and more HP is fine by me! Even without smoke, I'll just play her as the Atlanta, i.e. hide behind islands near caps, pop radar and kill DDs. With speed boost she might even be able to relocate more effectively. We'll see!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, my fellow forumites. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Vice Admiral Archibald James, my first 15 point commander: It's taken 209 battles, all in the Japlanta, for Archie to finally get his first 5 point skill. That's with a premium account and, in the last 4-5 battles, I used some Dragon flags to boost his XP. I'll probably take CE for the 5 point skill, but will have a good think about it first. His record so far:

Aaah....no, I looked at the wiki but forgot to toggle the Minekaze from stock to top configuration. Thanks for the correction. However, my main concern is more to do with the fact that you can put a highly trained commander into such a strong vessel. It's not good for the game to have highly experienced players with 15 point captains running around at tier 5 beating up newer players.

Which is fine, depending on your definition of "call out that player" or "toxic chat" WG have a duty of care\responsibility to ensure that appropriate controls\systems are in place to protect younger players from unacceptable chat. To do this they offer the ability to turn off chat completely or to report players who "misbehave in chat" - which will then result in a chat ban. Given that the last 2 monthly questionnaires from WG have queried players' attitudes to chat it's clearly something that is on their radar at the moment. And I can see why. I was at Chatham at the weekend, happily playing HMS Belfast, whilst Tuccy himself was next to me, showing a mother of two young boys how the game worked. Luckily, the two boys were not in the same game as me because someone was completely losing it in chat, swearing and much, much worse. Turning off chat isn't really an option for those of us who want to play what is supposed to be a team game and I'm really not sure how effective chat bans are, if at all, given that enough people in that battle have to car enough to all report the same player (assuming they even have reports). At a minimum, I don't see why we cannot have a chat filter for common offensive terms and their derivatives...

Kami R and Fujin are both examples of ships where WG messed up. Both are superior or equal to their regular tier 5 equivalent ship (the Minekaze) in all aspects except top speed (37.5 compared to 39 knots). Gun range is longer, turret rotation is better, turret placement is more favourable, concealment is greater and they earn more XP and credits. Finally, and most importantly, as premiums ships, they allow the installation of 15 point commanders without penalty. At tier 5. That makes them basically OP and it's only their relatively low numbers seen per battle that stops them being loudly decried as OP. And I say all of that as the owner of a Kami R Neither of these ships should really be sold again as is. Instead, slightly revised (ok, nerfed) versions should be sold which feature reduced concealment so people cannot put 15 point commanders onto them and be superior to regular tech tree ships played by people grinding the IJN DD lines for the first time. Thats poor game development/P2W/Pay-To-Seal club. And yes, I use the Kami R to grind my IJN DD captains - I'm not going to artificially handicap myself if WG allow a ship like this in the game - bit I'm honest enough to admit that they shouldn't.

Hiya - send a persoanal message to one of the community team (eg MrConway or Ph3lan) and they will be able to assist you.

I was thinking about the introduction of the Bismarck. How it's 10km secondary range combined with smoke defying hydro makes a) my future first tier 8 BB (IJN Amagi) obsolete by power creep already (and also the absence of a high tier IJN BB to train a commander) and b) makes life even more miserable for DD players since Bismarck drivers can simply sail straight towards smoke, press a key on their keyboard and watch those pesky enemy DDs with their cheating smoke and torpedoes simply disappear into the sea. Let's forget about a) for now - I just cannot face it. Instead, I want to talk about b) here. Season 5 of ranked battles is coming where the meta, even for complete casuals, will surely be Bismarcks driving into caps, killing everything in their path (and with a smoke supplying DD escort they will be true monsters of the seas). The IJN tech tree split is coming (torps probably getting nerfed) and the great Shima nerf of 2016 has already happened. We all seem to know which way the game is going - nerf anything that the majority of BB players cannot deal with, e.g. smoke & torpedoes. There are even rumblings of possible changes to the HE spam "problem". Curse those pesky cruisers! I'm conflicted by this. I get that WG need to cater to the common denominator and, in WoWS, that seems to be a somewhat not-so-great BB driver - you know, the ones who don't know WASD hacks and sail broadside on to enemy BBs, the ones who immediately extinguish the first fire they take, then burn to death from the next 4 fires they take, the ones who use their heal ability to recover 1000 hp from a citadel hit whilst leaving 25,000 hp of fire damage, the ones who pop their fighter as soon as the battle starts so it's on cool down when the enemy TBs come knocking. Etc, etc.. But at the same time, they need to leave something for the rest of us. Therefore, I propose to split the function of radar and smoke so radar is left as is (spots ships and aircraft) but change hydro to only spot torpedoes. By all means tweak it, maybe improve the duration, or the range or the cool down or even a combination of these, to make it more effective and useful, but stop it from spotting DDs in smoke and make it purely a defensive system for BBs to defend themselves from torpedo attacks. Then revert whatever nerfs torpedoes have already suffered and give us a decent stealth torpedo line - something different from every other DD line in the game. With these changes DDs regain a potent weapon system, there's more variety in DD play and BBs have an improved defense against torps - the ability to see them from further, for longer and more often - and if they still sail into the damn things then there really is no saving them. (At the same time, just like smoke rings, please add colour coded rings for radar and hydro so allies can see who is using what and the area of its effectiveness.) What do you think?

Just wanted to say that I am glad so many people enjoyed this and thanks for all the comments and likes :-)

WG have 2 clearly defined types of code - invite and existing players. If you have ever been to a WG event you'll know that invite codes are flying around like confetti and it does make sense - they entice people into creating an account and playing a game or two because they are getting something for free. Hopefully, they will become hooked and then spend more money. If not, WG have lost nothing. Existing player codes on the other hand are much rarer precisely because it's not great business sense to give lots of free stuff to existing customers who would probably have paid for it. Sad but true. That said, I do understand your point - existing customers, especially longer serving ones, feel aggrieved that new players get stuff for free whilst they get nothing. Tell you what, I am going to the event at Chatham on Sunday and we've been promised "goodies" - assuming this includes an existing player code of some sort, I'll see if I can get MrConway to give me some spares for you guys (but no promises).

If this is real, and surely it cannot be, how does the system know that you've dodged a torpedo, and that it's not just missed of it's own accord? What happens if you eat a torpedo from a spread of 6, in which case 5 missed? Do you get a medal? What if a DD fires torps at a player from 12km away but that player shortly changes speed or course, for a completely different reason, and those torps miss by a dozen km - does the player get get a medal for dodging the torps? What happens if I fire some torps at enemy ship A, he evades them (for whatever reason) and they then *just* miss ship B which is behind him but who took no evasive action to dodge them - does ship B get a medal? I really dislike medals\achievements for things that can just happen of their own accord...