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I like these self viewed projections for the entire community. EU server has 200,000 individual players weekly Out of them roughly 30,000 is playing regularly more than 50 battles per week Based on Project R progress there are roughly 25,000 - 30,000 players contributing to Kamikaze R research. You my friend Vulgarny represent roughly 0,00003% of Project R. This is probably the change that we won't hit 10M pearls before the event completion that is 24th of February, 19days from now!!!!

Completely misunderstand me.I said this "Like in each day the chances in the randomness were adjusting weight.". And I never, I repeat NEVER said that it was against me personally. (can u quote me on this?) I do not know if you know anything about programming, but here is what I mean: 1. In IT and computers there is no such thing as RANDOM! There is a library full of science studies as how to create things that statistically looks like random in programming! You may want to keep this in mind. 2. My say of "chances in the randomness" can be demonstrated like this: Let's assume for a moment that you can get a random number between 1 and 99. And let's say (even after a complex mathematical algorithm considering the flight of the shell, the penetration situation and armor resistance) there is a CHANCE in the game to hit citadels say 20% at the end of the calculation. So the program gets a random between 1 and 99 and if it is less than 20 its citadel, if not its a normal penetration. Right? This is after all what we refer to the infamous RNG. At one point in time the software itself decides as where your shot will go! (see Youtube vids from iChaseGaming demonstrating this) What I only said is that this "hidden" chance of 20% for citadel (or other in-game event) can be a parameter and for whatever reason (say not evil just experimental) WG changes it from 20% to 30% for a week. Not for any given player, maybe globally, maybe for certain ships, guns or Tiers.. Maybe they test balancing parameters, or something.... Who knows? ...and what you experience is that despite doing everything exactly the same way the outcome suddenly becomes a bit different for a while... So it does not hurt to think a bit about things not just jump on the gun and accuse your fellow forum member with this or that... eh?

Well this must be nerve wrecking. What I can say is this: the quality of team composition and quality started to fluctuate a lot during the past few weeks in my opinion. This is true for RANDOM and RANKED as well. I had some personal experience from the past as on what day and what hour what quality I can expect. (i.e. weekday early evening hours 18:00 - 20:00 are very different than weekday late night hours (22:00 - 24:00) and also totally different than weekend afternoons. However these are no longer valid for some reason. I guess it has nothing to do with MM, more the attendance of various type of players... On top of that what I noticed recently is that the random feature of aim in the game (the infamous RNG) behaves very differently on different days for the same ship same situation. Examples: citadel hits are more frequent on one day than another for similar salvos (range, enemy ship type, aim similar). Also penetrations and over-penetrations happens unexpectedly (in one battle I was able to over-penetrate a Tirpitz 80! times with HE fired from Sims!). Like in each day the chances in the randomness were adjusting weight... ...this could be a server parameter affecting different ships at different times... ...just speculation...

Well I'm glad to see a topic about CV. Unfortunately I haven't played them a lot so I can only speak about them conceptually and also what I see in the game as balance. Too bad that I can not argue with most of the detailed analysis you guys do here - but respect for that. If you allow me I repeat below a comment I made in another topic (Statistcs Galore 6) about CVs. My actual experience is related to the Hosho, but rarely play it and I'm very bad when playing. I have heard in WoWs interviews a few times that WG's intention with Carrier is to remain unique and special and that they want roughly 10% of the playerbase to play it. I'm not clear as why but it seems that they can't even hit that low limit. My personal opinion is that the entire carrier concept in the game is wrong. To me carrier play as it is implemented now is a game in the game. It is technically an RTS game layered over a strategic action shooter. Carriers struggles in two ways: A) concept. World War II, the time period out of which we take the "weapons" in WoWs was in fact the turning point in which aircraft rewrote naval doctrines and operation. Carriers are directly related to this of course. Therefore the game balancing struggle is this: how to integrate a weapons platform into the game of this era and keep it balanced when it is by definition an IMBALANCE factor itself? WG's answer to this is that they implement the unit but practically at the same time they take away all the user influence on the unit and defer to statistic calculations to calculate result -- to keep control over balance. Players do not threw bombs, torpedoes and directly shoot other planes or ships. They are always one step behind and just giving instructions to do things. My reference point for carrier balancing is the Battlestations series - and I mean the on-line part of it. In that (among many other things) the player was able to take direct control of a plane (squad leader) and do things more arcade style and that was fun - and the game was better balanced, yet remained simple arcadish... B) ecosystem. The naval warfare has 5 weapon types out of which one is missing for us: submarines. WG says they did not fit. I say they did not find the way to fit them and especially for carrier issues this might be the answer. Because in the "rock-paper-scissor" nature of naval warfare submarines do matter! It would not matter too much if carriers are OP a bit against surface targets when their natural enemy is present in the game that can kill them in no time. DDs would be more in place with their escort roles depth charging and scouting for subs. Planes would have a more divided role to scout and destroy surfaced subs (even CA and BB planes could have this feature) After all this cruisers would become more in place as well in their intended role. My personal conclusion is that the carrier problem is the symptom of incorrectly developed ecosystem and on top of that it's way of implementation (i.e. statistical RTS gamestyle) is totally foreign from this game. To me there is either a surface combat naval game in which surface ships fight each other like in many WWII events (i.e. day or night battles in the Pacific) OR there is a full naval battle system with carriers AND subs that can be balanced correctly. There is simply no other way out of this problem in my opinion.

While I still preserve my worries that wrote earlier another main element regarding this perk is that being level 5 it assumes that you will need a level 15 captain to use it (first mathematical chance to deploy a level 5 perk). Considering the amount of XP that this requires in reality it will be a very rarely used feature in the game and of course even if this will be the choice of the player it will be "at the cost" of other skills. So it will be a rare and unique feature used by the most hard-core players exclusively. Question is: is it really the only thing the game and game-balance requires regarding the secondary guns? Isn't there a need for re-considering the mechanism itself rather than creation a VIP club of elite players who will be able to smash enemies with secondaries just because they played a lot and accumulated enough XP to activate this perk? Shouldn't AIM AND HIT be more related to the actual player's abilities??????

My expectation was also that its a first win 3x event. For ones using standard account if you combine this event with the previously offered one day premium bonus (have you opened your crate yet?) you can make this weekend a very strong XP booster

What I do not get is this: Up till now we had two secondary modes 1.: full auto in which the guns engaged the closest target they have been able to see without any player interaction 2.: player had the ability to designate target for secondaries in which case all the secondary guns that were able to fire on that target did it, the rest was in the auto mode Not being able to test the new Captain Perk, I understand that we will get a perk which will cause the auto mode to be forgotten (secondaries never fires automatically), and IF the player designate a target the effectiveness of the secondaries will hit it at an improved hit rate (depending on the tier of the ship)? To me this does not sound to be a good deal. Mostly because of how the DDs "invisi firing" concept is implemented in the game. The AUTO mode of the current secondary system is a good way of getting SOME protection against DDs appearing and disappearing around a BB. On top of that the focused mode that is in place today is already fairly effective on most ships with significant secondaries (Nagato, Amagi, Yamato for me). So the new mode will impact the ship's performance no matter what if I have a Captain with the perk activated I lose the benefits of the all system even if I do not use the direct target selection? That sounds silly. Did I understand it well? The only thing for which I would give level 5 Captain Perk is if I can get FULL CONTROL of secondaries --> so they shoot together with the main batteries if I point to a target that is within their range. (as it was implemented in the EIDOS Battlestations series). This statistical manipulation of features is just not the right direction for this game at all.

Hey Crysantos, so you finally did this update Thanks for the effort and I must say a really thorough analysis that I enjoyed reading very much! I sorry to see that this one being the Final one, however I can understand that your focus will turn towards something else, and also that if statistic are becoming not reliable there is no point analyzing them. I can fully support you on many of the elements that you see regarding the game and progress and you absolutely have my vote on your list of things to be fixed in the game. To keep it somewhat short (that is almost impossible for me...eh...) I take two main point: 1. I have not seen this aspect of the playerbase statistic but now that you mention I'm alarmed by the lack of inflow of new players at low Tiers. Obviously we do not have enough data to judge this in full context but I take this a worrying sign regarding the long term future of the game. (It would be very interesting to see similar data for World of Tanks and World of Warplanes) I hope the game will not end up becoming a platform for "oldtimers" who regularly comes to play without new players joining and enriching the environment. Looking at the bell curve of the <battles played> one comment from me (after having completed one tech-tree in full, so I have reached Tier X) is that currently there is very little motivation in the game to go beyond Tier VIII. Not only the economic burden, the significant XP requirements, but also the fact that the high tier community is small, therefore you can just do fine with Tier VIII ships and have a lot of fun. I expect WG to implement some motivational elements to change this that will push the bell curve to the right towards Tier VIII and beyond. Clan Wars would be one example that encourages player community to develop Tier X ships. 2. Carriers. I must say in advance that I have very little experience with them, I tried the Hosho, but rarely play it and I'm very bad when playing. I have heard in WoWs interviews a few times that WG's intention with Carrier is to remain unique and special and that they want roughly 10% of the playerbase to play it. I'm not clear as why but it seems that they can't even hit that low limit. My personal opinion is that the entire carrier concept in the game is wrong. To me carrier play as it is implemented now is a game in the game. It is technically an RTS game layered over a strategic action shooter. Carrier concept struggles in two ways: A) concept. World War II, the time period out of which we take the "weapons" in WoWs was in fact the turning point in which aircraft rewrote naval doctrines and operation. Carriers are directly related to this of course. Therefore the game balancing struggle is this: how to integrate a weapons platform into the game of this era and keep it balanced when it is by definition an IMBALANCE factor itself? WG's answer to this is that they implement the unit but practically at the same time they take away all the user influence on the unit and defer to statistic calculations to calculate result -- to keep control over balance. Players do not threw bombs, torpedoes and directly shoot other planes or ships. They are always one step behind and just giving instructions to do things. My reference point for carrier balancing is the Battlestations series - and I mean the on-line part of it. In that (among many other things) the player was able to take direct control of a plane (squad leader) and do things more arcade style and that was fun - and the game was better balanced, yet remained simple arcadish... B) ecosystem. The naval warfare has 5 weapon types out of which one is missing for us: submarines. WG says they did not fit. I say they did not find the way to fit them and especially for carrier issues this might be the answer. Because in the "rock-paper-scissor" nature of naval warfare submarines do matter! It would not matter too much if carriers are OP a bit against surface targets when their natural enemy is present in the game that can kill them in no time. DDs would be more in place with their escort roles depth charging and scouting for subs. Planes would have a more divided role to scout and destroy surfaced subs (even CA and BB planes could have this feature) After all this cruisers would become more in place as well in their intended role. My personal conclusion is that the carrier problem is the symptom of incorrectly developed ecosystem and on top of that it's way of implementation (i.e. statistical RTS gamestyle) is totally foreign from this game. To me there is either a surface combat naval game in which surface ships fight each other like in many WWII events (i.e. day or night battles in the Pacific) OR there is a full naval battle system with carriers AND subs that can be balanced correctly. There is simply no other way out of this problem in my opinion.

It seems to me that you guys are making a lot of assumptions about the demography and behavior of the NA and EU community members when discussing this disparity issue that leads us to this thread in which the main question is why the NA server has better mission rewards than the EU one. (i.e. the Tachibana story) I like the concept introduced earlier about the "candy" that is the small reward for challenges, such as a few flags or a Tier II ship. What I would like to bring back to the conversation is this: while premium shop pricing may be connected to income level differences between regions, the small candy reward strategy connected to boosting server attendance is a bit different. And here I suggest to think about the general CULTURAL differences between EU, NA and the Wargaming headquarter. The general culture of the US (main part of NA player population) is VERY DIFFERENT from the European one - anybody lived in both can confirm that. One cultural element is how people get <motivated> to do something and how people get rewarded for doing something. What I find is that US people can see more often the reward as a confirmation of the achievement and what really matters them is that they made the effort to do something that was important for them. Many people in Europe tends to first look at the value of the prize and then determine if it worth the effort. The train of thought is to get something in return for doing something. I hope the difference is clear. One thing should never be forgotten. This is entertainment, this is a game. It is a personal choice to play and by doing it, it should make you happier and more relaxed. Getting something free just by playing is a good thing. But only if you still play for the entertainment and not stressing about to achieve the freebie. Maybe WG sees these motivational and cultural factors and decided that in EU they won't do "NA Style" missions and prizes to protect us from getting over-stressed and over-focused on prize hunting instead of just playing happily...? Just a theory... What do you think?

Thank you, this is exactly my point! The root cause of the problem is that DESPITE the current marketing disadvantage the EU has (i.e. smaller value prizes, more expensive bundles, less missions, etc...) it seems that us the EU community still respond better to the game than our fellow US friends. So if you are a company seeing this why would you give better deals for EU? Right? You'd rather go and focus to convince more US players to join! What I really do not know is this: why is it that EU players like much more this game than in the US? This phenomenon is totally weird for me... (scratching my head)

your math is wrong. The daily pearl count jumped just because the maniac players pushed to complete the weekly missions in one day. Week 1 total was 3million P Week 2 total was 2million P (as we reached the total of 5mill) WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT THIS WEEK WE WILL DO MORE THAN DOUBLE THAN LAST WEEK?

Please dont edit or post in already moderated posts, you can be severely sanctioned for that.

I meant January 21st as a date, sorry... my mistake.

1, Tachibana is a nice little ship, it even had use in Project R as I completed almost all Tier II and DD challenge with that... Funny little toy that is like a BEE on that sea. 2. Disparity of prizes EU vs. NA (or other regions) is a discussion on-going everywhere on this forum. The point is still that as long as EU has double the players than NA (and this is a FACT) while the populations are almost equal shows that WG needs to push the product more there than here, no? So no wonder why they have more sweet offers there... European Union North America (source: Wikipedia.org, for North America I had to drop the countries below 1million population due to post length limit)

What I can say by experience that WG is not "toying" with the community on these major concept changes: both in WoT and the WoT Blitz I have experienced that they allowed the free redistribution of the changed resource, parameter. I hope they will keep up with this practice here.

I noticed this symptom recently as well. Most noticeable was when one CV and one DD was AFK on the Fire Islands map. Technically we did not have a resource for scout and first strike (CV) and quick cap (DD). There are many players complaining about load times and I also can imagine that sometimes the wait time is just too long to wait out front of the computer for an individual. (and these are assumptions for honest mistakes and not cheats such as described above when a player just joins and leaves in a hope to collect a win). I was thinking about solutions that would be "Fair". Option-1 is that in RANKED once the map load is complete and all players are connected there would be a need for each player to click a "Begin Battle" button. Once all 14 participants from the two teams done that the battle starts. This can be extended with a countdown timer ideally, to put some time pressure on players. What should happen when the countdown reaches zero and not everybody is ready? --Option-1A - battle starts and the players not ready are immediately "REWARDED" by loosing one star. If we want to be tough we can say in this case IRREVOCABLE RANKS does not matter so they fall down no matter what. If the battle is lost they lose another star, if won they get nothing (or maybe get the star...) --Option-1B - not ready players penalized (i.e. like above loosing a star) the teams dismissed: put back into the wait queue with Top Priority (first in line) for those who were ready, Option-2 : you let everything happen as of today, but if any ship does not start to move (becoming active) within the first 30seconds of the battle the given player is penalized in some ways: (like above, or through karma system, or something else) Option-3 while this is technically more difficult, if any player is not active at the start of the battle (30sec) gets kicked out (with our without penalties) and a new player from the queue gets inserted and battle restarts. Bottom line is: this behavior is manageable. Question is if WG is up to the challenge?

On the subject of Project R feedback - one thing I usually check on Mondays is the statistics of the game. I must say that Wargaming is doing something good as the recent fall of the playerbase seems to stopped last week. I'll not bore you with more figures but the same trend can be seen on the NA server attendance as well. I see this a positive sign and may be partly attributable to Project R? There are two elements that has significance for me: 1. The casual player community (that I say the first row: plays less than 50battles per week) is fairly constant so we can say a "mass" of players is guaranteed 2. The hardcore part is much more stronger than it was last year before Xmas (27,000 played between 50-100 battles last week vs. 20,000 back last year Nov and Dec) What worries me is this: A) erosion of the hardcore community: unlike last year, the high battle count players (100, 150, 200 bracket) are falling down - it seems to me that the hardcore community is getting "thicker" but overall plays less and less per individual. Maybe getting bored to the grind and moving somewhere else...? That is not good especially seeing how few people are owning/playing Tier IX and X ships. And indication that grind is too hard? Opinions? B) knowing that I contradict myself here, but I would have expected a bigger increase in playerbase due to efforts such as RANKED season is going on and especially Project R and the flood of in-game missions. If these won't help, how can this community grow?

You have a valid point here... I forgot where we were at the end of week 1. You must be right saying that week 2 performance is much better indication for week 3 (and later on) than the average of week 1&2. The big question that we do not know is the new player influx: players joining late and start working on the 1 time missions AND weeklies may stir the picture. Psychologically the interesting point will be when we enter into the 9 - 9.5mill zone for total: how many players will start playing more to secure their own personal target (either the 150 or the 260) before we hit the mark of 10mill? I expect a drastic acceleration at the end due to this. Because if you think about it even a player joining NOW has a reasonable chance to get into the lottery by playing 2 weeks of weekly missions and a few 1 time to get to 150P... :-)

The voting options are not giving all plausible possibilities. What to chose if you believe we will reach 10mill around the end of week 4? Based on the current progress stat to me (mathematically) the most probable option is that we hit the mark sometimes during week 4 (i.e. next week) However for me this Project R is less about hitting the targets, more about testing the trust in WG's behavior. Up till now they seemed consistent with the weekly missions (i.e. not changing them just resetting) and also the guaranteed 260P limit for the players was announced after asking... My dilemma now is that with the current progress and performance it SEEMS fairly reasonable (if not easy) to reach the 260 barrier even for some causal players - that means lots of Kamikaze Rs to be given out... ...will this be honored I wonder. Time will tell.

End date was published on NEWS items...I do not know how to link it for you but if you search for General News items, date 01/01/2016 for example you will see the end date at the very bottom of the article.

[edited]

Project R is a marketing tool to attract players to the game. The point here is not that they give you all the possibilities at once and then the hardcore players do it in two days, casuals struggle for a month. This type of mission or idea is about ENDURANCE and making sure you return week by week to play! Why is it so hard to understand?

personal attack and endless bargaining on styles and interpretations of words literally vs. what they meant is my favorite subject. as long as you do not provide your own views, explanations and reasons what you post here helps nothing - especially not the progress. .but. if that what makes you happy, keep it coming fellow captain

the not grown up answer would be: yes they are A more educated way is to say that their presence ideally would be that helps the forum grow and remain fair and information flowed between the company and community. Believe me I have been participating in many forums and I have seen variations and situations. This forum in my own personal opinion in comparing with other PC game forums is very badly managed. Period.