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Reading through the thread since my last post yesterday afternoon I selected this quote to start the day as honestly haven't found any material development on the issue and to my greatest disappointment no comments arrived from WG management. So I just repeat what I said that as of now the community's needs and requests are clear and we do want WG Management to respond to it. This subject of unfair reward terms will not fade or sink in vain as long as we keep it raising. There is a saying that I really value a lot in all aspects of life: IT AIN'T OVER TILL IT IS OVER. It is true for sports, work and personal matters and it is very valid here: As long as Project R is up and running and even after things can be changed, adjusted modified for the benefit of the community and fairness. There is no one element in the WoWs universe that is carved in stone. Keep posting your comments, opinions, visualizations in a calm and cultured way. Thanks for sticking around! :-)

Well, I'm really glad to see more and more active proposal repeated, supported and being brought forward. It looks like we are progressing and solidifying the options. NOW WOULD BE THE TIME FOR WG TO COME TO THE TOPIC AND MAKE A STATEMENT about their intentions!

I for one stand behind the recommendations from Ivanovich_Rudakov 1) A manager from the events team to answer the question about the lottery, why despite more than 2000 players playing this event to enable the lucky few to win one we all do not receive a gift ship? Kamikaze or other....? (the other points in his posts are also valid, however those are more guidelines and behavioral proposals than actual solutions to our problem.) Since I'm working for a multinational company in management position I doubt that regions have such a big "power" in an organization like WG to determine events, prizes, etc... on their own without global approval on a scale such as Project R. There are business factors I could name, but one key aspect is technicality: in order to have different terms they need to develop different program code and maintenance procedures and I doubt hat at a SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT company programming is not centralized and optimized. If I would follow Rudakov's train of thought about fairness: participants contributed up to a certain level to the overall objective must get a prize as it is not fair to random select the 2000 lucky ones. If WG's main concern is the flood of a free ship on the server (that we do not know just speculate) than just like others proposed adjust the rule to say everybody above the 150pearl threshold will get a Tier IV or V PREM Ship out of the available models - randomly selected which one. By doing this there is no over-inflation of one ship model...

would be good to be knowledgeable about basic facts. NA gets less prize ships mostly because their player base is less than EU and surprisingly consistently (if you bother to check the facts / stats) 50% less players are playing in NA than in EU. So this is fair on its own - but this was not the issue here. too bad that many people concludes on opinions without knowing enough facts...

IMHO the opening post defines the content of the topic - in there the issue is the regional disparity in prizes, especially a random aspect of getting a top prize in EU. Based on that this topic is not supposed to address the issues of the Project R technical details. Just my 2c. I agree that the notion of "give everyone the free stuff equally" is a request that majority of the player-base can stand behind. However the topic explored the complexity of the issue, realized some pros and cons and also WG chipped in a bit. After all what I would think as conclusion or PROGRESS if you like is that all learning, opinions considered a REASONABLE and doable compromise is developed and agreed. One idea (and I'm being VERY EXTREME HERE just to demonstrate things) could be that we propose WG to stop all Project R activities in all the regions, introduce a global standard reward system, reset all achievments and stats and re-launch the concept. Alternatively the community can agree on a "patchwork" for EU in which the final lottery rules are adjusted in some ways, but keeping the regional differences alive. Another solution could be that while everything is left as it is, we get a public commitment ("Statement") from WG that they will equalize regional reward systems in the future that is presented to the community in advance. or something else...?

Wow (or WOWS to be more stylish), what a change since last night about the topics. First and foremost the evening and morning hours brought some deep content regarding the market segmentation as one reason behind the different treatment of EU by WG. On the other hand I still haven't seen evidence that the forum members (us!) got closer to propose a solution behind which most of us (if not all...) can stand up and support. When addressing an issue like this it is very critical to make a proposal (a "demand" if you like) as HOW things you want to be fixed and it must be clear for the decision mangers (WG) that it is supported by the majority of the participants so it carries weight. It is also important as telling WG what NOT to do can be interpreted as whining, proposing solution on the other hand is much more constructive. Unfortunately the thread took a wild turn a few hours ago and got absolutely distracted from its original intent and become a technical support forum on Project R missions and whatnots. That is clearly OFF TOPIC. This is sad as by doing this the intensity and the pressure had dropped down to almost zero, making a signal to WG that if they sit out a few days the story will die! IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? (small note about forum behavior: it is to be understood that not all forum posters are necessarily fully honest. there may be posters behind nicknames who are actually WG employees or related persons and working on to calm the topic down by diverting the discussion from the critical elements. I'm not saying that this is happening here, but there is a chance... So anybody who really thinks the problem is important and wants a change must speak up and does not let the subject die!)

Why is this ship is so special based on the stats? What makes it stand out from the other Tier Vs ?

I also appreciate McConway's comments, however I have difficulties to believe that these disparities (regional differences) were surprise to the company and to the decision makers. In fact from the technical perspective IT IS MORE DIFFICULT to create and manage different terms, reward system and prize concepts for the different regions that to do one. It is more work for concept planning, development, testing, implementation and support. It can ONLY BE A CONSCIOUS decision and not an accident... I would like to respect WG in a way that they are an organized company that does things based on plans and not just acts "random". Please at least do not take this away!

It is very difficult to deal with this topic as majority of the posts are just complaining and speculating about the chance of winning the top prize ship, and repeating the complaint about how EU server is badly treated. This does not worth a lot unless the community comes up with a recommendation and lines up behind it consistently. Many of you complaining does not even bother to think about the circumstances that led us here, not to mention making some forward looking thinking This is not good. Besides, assuming that you get the Top Prize Ship: WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH IT? You play it? Why? How will it help you in the game to develop? And why is getting this ship is sooooooooo important for you? Well, I already said that EU being 50% of the player-base (except RU) demonstrated its cowardliness against WG when consistently accepting all the game terms and pricing that is applied by having a player population far dense compared to its userbase than NA or Asia. You need to accept to live with it. But. If we have to accept from WG that only a limited number of TOP PRIZE SHIPS will be distributed at the end, you can still come forward with recommendations about how to give them out that you believe is more fair than random lottery. One idea could be to make not only an entry limit for the lottery (i.e. the 150pearls collected), but say if we want to increase chance for players who contributed MORE towards the global target, we can give them more lottery tickets so their chance to get selected increases. So say after each and every 150pearl contributed you get one ticket into the lottery. The more you contribute the more chance you will have... The beauty in this is that it is not late to implement it even now... ...but I'm afraid this post will sink in 5 minutes into the constant flow of whining...

Hey Crysantos, I saw you were busy during Xmas playing WoWs and eventually winning one of the prizes for gaining highest amount of XP :-D well done. So about the stats I guess nothing to be said and analyzed. One thing is for sure, the decline of the playerbase on the servers seems to stopped during Xmas season but the recovery was short lived based on the most recent data. We already sunk back where we were in November last year... I hope Project R and some other ideas can change this (Ranked Battle definitely not...) Regarding the stats database maybe you are not the right person to ask but it would be extremely interesting to break out the first grid of the played battle stat (1-49 battles) into further to see how many are playing less than 10 battles per week... Player Dense on played Battles battles players 2016/01/16 2016/01/09 2015/12/26 2015/12/19 2015/12/12 2015/12/05 2015/11/28 2015/11/21 2015/11/14 2015/11/07 1 161928 169771 170900 165007 165763 172174 179181 180957 177744 197262 50 29312 45248 21929 19159 20835 20459 21522 27295 29237 27397 100 8670 20355 4645 3769 4254 4037 4079 5736 6248 5794 150 2662 9579 1095 901 974 991 945 1271 1526 1443 200 805 4496 278 226 276 213 231 374 446 421 250 231 2113 72 68 66 74 71 108 121 107 300 78 1011 28 19 31 17 15 35 44 28 350 20 451 5 5 6 7 12 11 13 9 400 13 207 1 3 1 2 3 4 2 450 3 101 1 1 1 2 500 2 50 1 1 1 1 1 550 1 19 1 600 8 1 1 650 3 700 3 750 1 800 2 1050 1 1150 1 1300 1 total 203725 253418 198955 189156 192208 197975 206060 215791 215384 232469

if you have read my post 313 right above yours (won't quote not to waste space) you could see the figures for themselves. The problem is exactly the opposite what you believe: EU is the MAJORITY of the global playerbase (50%) DESPITE all the punishment and unfair, unequal treatment from WG. so after all it looks like that we (as the EU server community in total) are the cows, because majority of us accepts it, plays the game and pays money!!!!

Ohhh, thank you - looking at the things like this is very different then .-) So it is to be considered more as a SAMPLING rather than the "full view". Thanks anyways for working on this and making it public for the benefit of the community :-)

Guys, are you sure this statistic is good? only 1105 players in RANKED in EU? Sound strangely low.

Totally agree with most of the opinions and the real way the Ranked Battle "system" works. Your skill does matter up to a certain extent but my observation is the same as many others: it does matter a lot, WHEN you play - and it is even during the day or during the week or during the season. Somebody posted a good picture during season 2 about the "pump" effect of the fixed ranks that technically accumulates player-base at certain points and do not let the weaker ones to fall out (back/down). Fixed ranks are obviously a kind of motivation as well (safe heavens) therefore the problem is not that, rather the scoring system to award stars. Many fellow players proposed absolutely simple, stunning and good solutions as how to address this - i.e. implement a concept that not only the winner team members can get stars but the most contributive individuals! This is simply because RANKED is not a team oriented play mode (random members, limited communication ,etc...) so laggers and luck must be filtered out on the long run. As long as WG does not fix this, Ranked is left for the small part of the community who can invest a lot of time, play a lot of battles so the global statistical benefit of playing well + luck factor shifts the balance. (however I do not expect WG to listen to this as they are way too stubborn to make such an adjustment...)

Reading through this topic since yesterday and trying to focus only on the main contributive elements I came to realize that my understanding how the servers and regions work in WG's universe was completely wrong. What is to be learned here is that in the view of Wargaming server regions are clearly not working as technical optimization for game experience, mostly connection speed, lag, delay and other technical aspects - DESPITE the fact that this is what they actively SUGGEST before you click that button to choose for which region you sign up for! So there is already misleading here from communication point of view. After all WG looks at regions as isolated play areas in which every player is CAPTURED and locked on quickly due to the nature of the game: who wants to leave behind the grinded ships, resources just to start over from scratch...? So once the player base is on the hook what WG does is simply attacks them with the most appropriate financial weapons to maximize profit, since one region becomes a business market that is separated from each other. WG looks at the player activity, profiles and determines how far they can go in aggressive cash cowing the population without hurting the income level. Since I have no data about the Russia server only Asia, NA and EU what we can see is that out of the TOTAL of the 3, 50% (half!) of the player base is in EU! Considering potential populations (millions of people living in the 3 region) EU is the most dense! As long as it is like that you can not expect from WG who is maximizing profit to give us good terms! Why? Simple! Because even with what they did and do - there are far too many EU players accepting these terms than in other regions. So they do this, because they CAN! The average EU player does not care. Just look at the figures! Only last week 203thousand! (203,000) individual players played at least one battle in EU! 29,300 of them played more than 50 battles! (That means spent more than 12 hours only playing this game) At the same time: in North America only 106,000 individual players showed up, in Asia 92,600! JUST THINK ABOUT THE POPULATION OF ASIA and NORTH AMERICA VS. EUROPE! We Europeans are far more forgiving for WG's punishment than any other region. This is your reason. In a fair and normal world there should NOT BE ANY DIFFERENCE between the playing terms in the different regions. Same price, same packages, same missions, same rewards. But WG was never fair.

For One - Project-R is general is a good idea, but mostly motivated by the need to generate more players on the servers... (to stop the declining trend). On this it may be good For Two - The prize system is confused and the random lottery nature of the winners in unfair even if we accept that WG wants to limit the number of same type "frees ships" floating around in battles. For Three - their communication (and especially the lack of communication in this thread by official WG members) is a huge disappointment - but fits into the trend of WG trying to escape problems and being honest. For Four - I do not want to leave without proposing an idea for better solution: working on to "resurrect" a legendary ship is a good story-line that can be kept, however perhaps not the ship itself should be the ultimate reward, but say a "special technology" that can be extracted out of it and this can be awarded to every player who participated in the project and reached a certain level of contribution. This "technology" in the game itself could be either a permanent flag or camo that brings one selected ship of the player some advantages. (i.e. booster for captain XP together with some % reduction of hitrate, etc... imagine whatever you want and valuable in the game...) By doing this they do not inflate the ship base but give something valuable and the players can select to which of their ships they apply... This won't break the game balance...

Hello my fellow captain txtspeak Are there any success stories you can share with us about the games? was any advice useful for you?

It believe it is a bit of oversimplification to say that a ship has to be famous to sell successfully in a bundle, however it is one good way to do it. Think about World of Tanks and their premium tanks - not all of them are super famous, but even without that some of them sold and still sells quite well. The point we started here originally is that: - on EU servers bundles are overpriced most of the cases and therefore WG is loosing sales by attracting less people to buy them - In some cases the marketing campaign behind the ship makes players believe that it is an EXCEPTIONALLY good vessel in the game, but the fact is that it is just average My personal logic is that I try to decide in buying prem ships based on my game play strategy so for example: - what nation I'm developing so the prem ship becomes useful for captain traning - what type of ship I'm comfortable with - what tier I want to play with prem ship - what are the ship's unique characteristics that makes a good fit to my playstyle? Of course I will admit that I made mistakes both in WoT and here in WoWs regarding this, but not a lot and I'm learning of them. (i.e. if I'm honest with myself I should not have bought the Tirp when I did as it is a waste to have a Tier VIII prem ship of a nation that you do not develop...) Last but not least: if you notice Wargaming has a special attention to unique "interesting" ships that are offered for sale rather as a COLLECTOR's item than a ship to play a lot. But they are quite reasonable with this as most if these are Tier II vessels. And there are plenty of us who likes to complete "collections" :-) This aspect of their offering is a nice touch that goes back long time in WoT and I really appreciate it.

Obviously WG is mismanaging EU prem shop pricing. But consider this. Even for Kutuzov if you go to YOUTUBE and search for videos about her (my keywords: World of Warships Kutuzov) you will realize that the top hits (top 10) are talking positively about the ships (reviewers and gameplays) This is a huge influencing factor especially for noobs. Without going into any further speculation just think about that: How is it possible? Why true criticism "hidden" and why positive propaganda is overwhelming?

I have to agree with Mr Fingers (nice signature quote by the way) that the marketing value of the known historical ships lure in a lot of inexperienced players to buy them in a hope that they get something like a SuperWeapon, but of course the disappointment is coming when they realize that WG is keeping the ROCK/PAPER/SCISSORS principle for them as well so they can not dominate without player skills. But at this time it is too late for complaining and asking money back, and the sales statistic shows for WG that they made money. But this takes us to the business ethics field on which WG is very shaky therefore wish not to comment on their values and morality. Regardless of the Kutuzov situation even with the Atago figures it is visible that the EU area is significantly under performing with regards to use of Prem Ships relative to the player base. I do not know why but WG cash cows Europe where 50% of their player community resides and by doing that they practically loose a lot of long term credibility and also misses opportunity to increase overall margin and revenue. This looks very silly and I can not find any good reason why they are doing it other than incompetence... So sad to see that WG puts way ahead the ultra short term revenue maximization against many other key elements - this eventually will lead to a fast dying product and disappointment. And it is hard for me to see and witness when I'm a big fan of Warships and the game itself shows a huge potential and opportunity both for average players and also enthusiasts... It is just simply badly managed by the owner company.

My main choice would be converting WOT Elite unit XP to FreeXP that can be used in WoWs. I stacked up significant amount of XP on Elite WOT units in anticipation of a kick start in WoWs that is now wasted. Why. What is the only thing you can not buy for money in the Wargaming games? Answer is. BASE XP. You have to play to earn it, so it means BASE XP is your "payout" for your TIME invested. Normally this is good for both you and WG. You develop your units, WG gets your playtime that results in populated servers so others can enjoy the playing too. The problem is WG made me believe that the FreeXP will be interchangeable between their PC titles --> as it was advertised and still is. It seems that they misinformed the community. So my stacked up WOT XP (approx 570,000) is wasted, DESPITE the fact that I have invested my time and 2000+ battles to earn it. I feel cheated.

I share your disappointment feeling but still recommend to try to think about what the fellow commanders said. Myself being a hardcore BB player started to try out myself in Ranked with Cruisers and I must say it is painful. Especially because of what you experienced - immediately becoming the center of the attention. This is difficult but you need to hold yourself back at the beginning and try to team up with others in order to present more guns towards the enemy than pointing at you. My best learning survival strategy was to stay around the BBs until the battle unfolds and once everybody gets engaged move out, take a few shots and try to disappear There are very basic things to watch when trying: - as soon as you see that more than one ship is firing at you: try to DISENGAGE (turn-turn! run!) - make sure you only engage enemy while NOT SHOWING YOUR BROADSIDE - cruisers showing broadside die fast. This is hard but use the minimap to select a good position with at least 45 degree angle - while some players will shoot me for this I say: when you engage even if the enemy is a bit out of your torp range, LAUNCH them. It will cause the enemy to share focus and do maneuvers to evade... - NEVER EVER SAIL IN STRAIGHT LINE for longer than 10 sec. Make it a routine to change course frequently! Hope it helps.

I join the part of the community who demands that the common economy, namely the GOLD and FreeXP sharing to happen as soon as possible. It is a fact that WG advertises this but does not make it happen. From my point of view when inquired about it at Customer Service I was told it will come someday, but they experience technical problems. That answer I know is not true as anybody with basic programming skills can recognize that making it happen is no big issue at all - especially that the system works between World of Tanks and World of Warplanes. We can speculate that WG is afraid of revenue loss as WoT has the Clan Wars / Global Map feature that can "generate" no real money purchased gold. However it is only looking at one side of the balance, the bad news. By joining the economies and integrating World of Warships into the Clan Wars feature (i.e. landing battles could be fought on the high seas) would increase the interest in the game that would increase the player community that would increase the accuracy of the MatchMaking and eventually game experience quality and most probably would draw more paying customers to buy prem ships and GOLD or flags, etc... WG does not seem to understand this aspect so they look at the half empty battle and try to squeeze the most out of the current WoWs fans as long as they can... practically they keep collecting the small coins and ignore the high value paper bills... Ultimately what WG misses - in my opinion - is that people in general have a given amount of time in their life balance to spend on entertainment and there is a more or less fixed part of that they willing to spend on Wargaming titles. Therefore unless they can expand the community or convince more part of the community to become a paying customer they will not go anywhere... I'm sure development cost of WoWs was high - after all they worked on it for at least 4 years - but they may be a bit better off with a longer lifespan and a big return on investment, rather than a quick squeeze and let the product die in 2 years - as the player number trend is already VERY BAD (dropping week by week)

I just got interested in this statistical exploration regarding the Kutuzov. I took the stats for the first week of 2016 (ending Jan 9th) Have a look at the table below: nation class name players total battles average of rates battles win draw lose exp damage warship aircraft base base survived kill / caused destroyed destoryed capture defense death Region Players %of kutuzov SN CA Mikhail Kutuzov 40 586 14.65 51.04 1.07 47.89 1257 34705 0.76 1.83 0.02 0.03 25.25 1.02 NA 127145 0.03% JP CA Atago 2915 59192 20.31 50.19 0.05 49.76 1200 33143 0.66 1.07 0 0 32.04 0.97 NA SN CA Mikhail Kutuzov 2112 50268 23.8 48.45 0.1 51.45 1137 28716 0.53 3.59 0 0 36.52 0.83 AS 112313 1.9% JP CA Atago 4184 78755 18.82 49.17 0.08 50.75 1074 30485 0.54 1.3 0 0 35.66 0.84 AS SN CA Mikhail Kutuzov 1228 29765 24.24 50.52 0.03 49.46 1343 32910 0.65 2.75 0 0 33.14 0.97 EU 253000 0.5% JP CA Atago 3937 86585 21.99 50.06 0.05 49.9 1241 32748 0.62 1.06 0 0 32.67 0.92 EU It is evident that for some reason Kutuzov is not really used in NA (it was not offered there for sale...?) I have no info on that Considering the player community (number of players played at least one battle during the week) the Kutuzov sales is a success in Asia, as 1.9% of the players selected to buy the ship. In EU the sales is a complete FAIL as despite the fact that EU has almost double the player community of Asia they sold half of the units. So while I was skeptical a bit about the whining in EU about overpriced bundles the numbers are speaking for themselves. WG did this thing absolutely wrong! I do not know for how much the package was priced on the Asia server (vs. the EU 60EUR), but assuming a more fair pricing in Europe they could have sold 4 times!!!! the amount they achieved as of today. I and I guess the price in Asia was more than 15EUR so practically WG lost significant sales and profit by doing what they did! It seems that money talks but WG does not even listen! That is surprising...

I like the idea of introducing permanent CAMO for GOLD (sorry Doublons if you like).that brings additional benefits. It was invented in WoT a long time ago (except the XP benefit that is new) It is confusing what you did with the PREM ships as now those vessels can technically enter battle without the advantageous earning capabilities for which their price is paid... Also it is a bit of confusing what the WG DEV team wants to do with booster categories. Originally there were the FLAGS to boost XP and Credits. Now they introduce camo for the same purpose! Why breaking the logic? Permanent flags could have done the job. The ship look (camo pattern) was always for tactical advantage of visibility and hit ration reduction - that was kind of logical... Combining different nature of boosters (XP and hit ratio) is against flexibility and logic. Overall the booster system should have a strategy in which each piece earns its place based on the basic principles. This is broken now and I just hope it won't be complicated (confused) further... Last the design. The color scheme and design of the permanent Xmas camo is a living disaster. I simply hate it and just accepted to see it on the ship - given the benefits it delivers in the grind for XP*. But if ever there will be a chance to switch it to something more "navy like" (of course without additional cost!) I would be first in the line to apply... Besides... Xmas is over now. I just do not even want to imagine what WG will dream up for Easter... White/Pink Bunny Ears on the turrets...??? geeez, I'm outa here... ----- * side note on the 1000 d price for perm camo: 1000d can buy you 25,000XP if you convert it from prem/elite ships. 1000d can also buy you roughly a week worth of prem account (or 4 individual days if you want to split the duration) / you should know how much it worth you in play, i.e. the 50% boost prem gives on your battles. But then it is over..., So on my Tier VI ship the grind is to develop 13,000XP for hull, 8000XP for range extension and 70,000XP for the next tier in TOTAL 91,000XP to be gained that is now with the camo reduced to 63,000XP compared to if I would play without it. All this costed less than a price of a Big Mac Menu :-) so I decided it worth the "entertainment".