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First and foremost I'm deeply disappointed as how WG managed the situation of the old thread. But this is behind us now. As for the comment I quoted above: it was not the community who set the timeline and calendar for communication about Clan Battles, but WG alone. Therefore I expect the company who started to talk about a subject at its own decision ad schedule to be able to provide responses and answers to the questions that are coming up. This is because launching a communication sends a message to the receivers: "I'm ready to talk about this" And we arrived to my second major disappointment in on this matter: no signs of apology that they made a mistake.

Getting into RECAP mode so far I believe the community achieved a lot: 2 days, 478posts, heated discussion but with the aim to improve the game and also in some ways WG got involved in the discussion: at least they allowed MrConway to highlight official position on some matters. I think we as the community is doing our best to demonstrate the importance of the subject. Knowing WGs behavior in such situations from the past I expect them to come up with some new ideas and arguments, hopefully changes in the coming few days. Based on these two days and the WG reactions I'm convinced that they under-estimated the importance of the topic and the consequences of their decision. I'm a bit worried that WG may try to shift the focus away from the game mode mechanics related issues by rolling out the marketing bandwagon: showing some significant prizes to lure in more and more players despite their disagreement on technical level. This would be bad for us, as I agree that once something goes live it won't get fixed, modified soon. My hope and trust is in the community, especially in the Clan leaders to make sure the important questions won't get forgotten and until the "Official" Clan Battles get fixed / adjusted they put the clan efforts into the other organized event formats.

I heard somewhere that WG was thinking of rotating the "special" game modes to make the activity level balanced for players To me this means Ranked and Clan Battles may alternate in the future (maybe with other special things included i.e. Co-op special scenarios)

Sorry Sir, but this is by far the greatest misconception WG has about the game and CVs. The issue you have with this very special ship class is not its existence, but the fact that ever since the start WG implemented carriers in a wrong way. Furthermore WG did not give any sign publicly that they are aware of this very fundamental problem, not to mention to fix it. However - since carriers are in the game and WG did not fix them, they are part of the meta the way they are. So it is neither wise, nor fair to simply exclude them from the organized battle mode - it is like when you breathe air you would say I only want the Oxygen, but not the CO2. Psychologically the first thing to fix/solve a problem is to admit that there is one. Maybe WG would need to make this very first step regarding the carriers. ..

The idea of Clan Battles should be similar to Random in terms of environment, but with the abilities to have organized team is something I truly like. Unfortunately WG does not really see the game like that. I have heard many times interviews with WG staff or spokesmen discussing random vs. organized team play. (some of it might show up here in some episodes: podcast) In short WG admitted that when it comes to gameplay analysis and statistic, especially ship balancing they do not fully consider competitive aspects - yet. Therefore the classical "left hand - right hand" situation kicks in: they build a game mode for which they have no understanding and no real data. So they rush test it with some very selected clans/testers/internal staff and draw conclusions in secrecy... ...and community wonders how they can be so off from the target? Add to this the reputation of WG in creating huge communication and decision making problems, not to mention the money grab intention and here we are again in the middle of the yet another perfect storm. I just had a quick look at player statistics: Last year (2016) in September on the EU server the on the (1 week basis totals) we had 170,000 - 180,000 players playing at least 1 battle This year (2017) so far in September on the same statistic we had between 150,000 - 170,000 SO numbers shows that WG's "efforts" are showing the negative results - we lost 5-10% of active players. Keep up the "good work" WG????????

Cruiser only mode: Actually if you read the accounts about the World War 2 Pacific Theater naval battles you will see that apart from the few and well known clashes of CVs and BBs, most of the time it was "routine" DD+CL/CA battles over supply lines and ground troop reinforcements. If WG wants to re-create such situations then it should not call it Clan Wars (Battles), but more "Historical Battles" and stop limiting to Tier X. Because Clan Wars / Battles supposed to be the TOP "Peak" experience of this game --> the ultimate reward for grinding and learning and reaching Tier X inside an organized team. With the limitations WG basically degraded this experience for most of the players.

In light of Clan Wars and the CV issue I raise this topic from the depth. WG LISTEN!

In light of Clan Wars and the CV issue I raise this topic from the depth. WG LISTEN!

Could somebody please give us a rundown of what is going on the RU forum? Even if it is brief.

1. about more than 1 BB locks down the map too much first of all consider that I haven't played competitive WoWs only WoT. However I do watch competitive and interested in learning about it. My WoT experience in CW was that the real challenge of the organized Clan Battle was to come up with a team composition of players and units that was A) serving the purpose of the intended strategy B) was good enough to react to the UNKNOWN enemy strategy and team composition. This is a mind game and as you get more experienced in the Clan War learning curve kicks in and teams are shaping their own unit / team lineup to be more and more optimal. Free WILL and free choice are basic fundamental values. Here WG cuts that out. For me as long as enough teams / clans interested in a certain configuration it has its place in the game. Because static battles are only a problem if nobody wants to play them, right? But the evidence shows that WoWs organized play is feeling OK with that so far? 2. 7vs7 - This is a small team size indeed, but again not sure why WG took this choice - is it because of the size of the community? Or financial reasons? I'm clueless as it is very evident that there are no technology limitations in the game engine - they could theoretically go even above 12 per team... The way I see it the bigger the team the more complexity comes into play -- for me that usually makes things more interesting 3 CV exclusion - well of course you may say that it is worth to try. However the main point here is that WG wants to decide something fundamental artificially and not letting the community have the experience of TRYing. Add to this the salt that we are living with the game for 2 years now with an unpopular carrier class that is broken, despite promises WG does not even try to fix it, and this creates fundamental balancing issues in the game overall: because one ship class is absent from most battles and where it is present it creates more problems than it solves. But again going back to my original viewpoint in this issue: why WG excludes the "pros" from CV play in a competitive environment, when in Random and even RANKED all the suffering and mess can happen? Why not give a shot that pros will make it work? This is beyond comprehension

Well, for you as Deputy Commander of a clan OM, and consequently being a very dedicated hardcore player of WoWs it may be difficult to adapt a viewpoint of a more casual player - and I'm not necessarily talking about myself. You probably haven't seen my old comments on this forum about the fundamental rule of "Free to Play" games from economical and financial point of view: that in these games the basic rule of TIME is MONEY is very true. There aren't many places on Earth where you can "BUY TIME" by money so efficiently than here - and WG knows that and plays on the player's "SENSE OF URGENCY" to get things fast. So yes, most of the things in this game can be get by investing time - a LOT of time. So many an average casual player will never have. And never forget: this is EXACTLY why this game works: that there are people who pay. Because if everyone would just invest time, there won't be money to run the company and the dev team, right? Where WG goes off trail is that they do not respect the paying customers enough and they do too many things to deceive them and pull them into unnecessary spending. and it seems based on your comment that you do support this behavior of WG I really appreciate that you looked after my situation and made such a friendly comment. Thank You. It is always good to realize that others do listen and care. Especially from a hardcore player who is recruiter at a clan :) Honestly I never did skill reset from FreeXP, I usually pay for it with doublons. FreeXP is spent on accelerating tech tree development due to limited time to play. Well I'm a critical but paying customer... so far... Overall I still believe the CW feature could have been designed much much better had WG asked and listened to the community and its customers more openly.

I was hesitant very much after seeing iChase's video many days ago in which he was angry about the limit of Clan team size feature (30 with upgrades to 50) and was calling it a money grab. Reading through this thread it becomes more and more obvious that there are far more elements that got designed around the idea of money grab for WG in this CW function: the re-spec of ships / the rental TX and people FreeXP/ing to them once they tried them, limitation of BBs so many players will have to quickly develop new lines and captains, exclusion of CVs so CV players will have to look after other ship classes if they want to participate, Feels bad. And on top of this comes the inconsistent and arrogant WG communication to convince us that it is "our best interest" and they were making difficult and hard decisions... Of course... decisions were indeed hard: as how to develop a system that allows maximum money grab, but still playable somehow by the naive players.

Reading this made me realize how inconsistent WG is when it comes to argumentation. On one hand WG says that certain limitations had to be put in place to improve CW gameplay (exclude CV, limit BB) On the other hand they give out rental TX ships THAT CAN ONLY BE USED IN CW battles! - so imagine a player getting his/her hands on a TX ship (any!) without any experience using it, testing and and this player gets pushed into a competitive battle! How is that? ..and is this good for the meta? ...is it good for the teams? ... is it good for the situation? ILLUSTRATION: Formule-1 cars can only be test driven on an official RACE - no test period allowed? How would that be there?

Sorry guys for not being able to fully read through the topic, but I tried to cover most of it. My first thought was after reading the new article that the next s..tstorm is coming soon. WG made so many bad decisions in configuring Clan Wars that half way through the article I already was shaking my head. My vote goes on the side. that the decision of excluding CVs, manipulating the share of other classes (one BB limit) and especially the rental concept of TX ships is FULLY WRONG. PERIOD. The few important things I want to record in this thread related to the issue. 1. The fact that WG eliminated CVs and limited BBs in Clan Wars is the biggest confirmation for the community that WG KNOWS the ship meta in the game is wrong and unbalanced. However unlike in many other places in the world, here in WoWs WG limits the use of the broken meta for the MOST PROFESSIONAL PLAYER COMMUNITY PART: the organized battles, while it lets poison the gameplay in Random. Normally you should TRUST the best players and organized teams to make best use of the tools, not limit them. ILLUSTRATION: It is like the airline industry would say that new planes are to be flown by regular commercial airline pilots, but for professional TEST PILOTS it is dangerous so they are not allowed to try them! 2. WG is an Eastern Culture based company and they seem to believe in regulated situations instead of giving freedom for players. WG wants to tell us what is GOOD and what is not. While there are tournaments running successfully with WoWs without regulations and limitations, WG slaps their faces and creates artificial bad rules for "comfort" - nonsense. ILLUSTRATION: Communism was about regulating economy and people, Democracy was about freedom to act, succeed or fail. Care to guess which one develops better? 3. I'm equally angry about all the limitations and the rentail TX concept, but for this later my disappointment is huge (i.e. rental TX) WHY? Because WG provides evidence here that ships can be tested and the game is ready for it. HOWEVER ever since the existence of the game community asks for being able to TEST PREMIUM SHIPS before purchase - that was said not possible. And yet here with Clan Wars you can get TX ships, but not only that: you can keep the XP and Credits earned by them. So WG was lying about a feature. Overall: series of bad decisions and most insulting was McConway in this thread accusing the community of not knowing what they talk about. Outrageous. I'm sure many changes and apologies will come in a few days or weeks / but again WGs inability to correctly manage situations has been demonstrated again.

Well, yeah, WG can change plans but SubOctavian seems very reliable at least for me when it comes to taking positions on "do and don't". I put the reminder here as I noticed that the thread turned into the FreeXP speculation avenue and wanted to highlight a two weeks old official WG point on this. Personally for me Musashi is a "must have" ship and this is why I'm afraid of WG making it a special reward ship (i.e. Clan Wars) and thus closing off the general player population not interested (or not having time) for hardcore clan play from having the ship in any way. We shall see. Yamato being Tier X I believe (hope) Musashi won't get down-tierred. During the wait, if you haven't read, I recommend this book about the ship: Battleship Musashi

You guys did see SubOctavian's answer to this?

In the fashion of the initial post about the Birthday Event. It strikes me how the World and the actual reality and commercial practices are able to bend fundamental human values and celebration. Birthday for me is a very special event in which we congratulate someone for being able to be with us so far (since birth) and also kinda feel happy that we were part of his/her life. On some more material level the friends surprise the Celebrated with gifts, presents. Modern day commercial and marketing throws this concept away and in a strange upside situation the company celebrating its Birthday is supposed to give out freebies, discounts and other customer friendly things - with all efforts on getting extra profit and increasing consumption. What happened here in World of Warships is that beside the expected commercial behavior, unlike many other companies, WG did very nice things - threw a virtual party (video, mission events) and in return some of us - the ones who played this game in the past did not forget to say: Happy Birthday. The missions supposed to be in the freebie package that the Celebrated gives out in this World. In this sense they were sometimes fun, sometimes crazy, sometimes difficult, sometimes just beyond realistic sense. The good was that even if not all missions were doable the pin collection was easy to complete - and just BTW: how many of you read through the description of the pins? All 16? Spent a few second to admire the artwork and the fun it was put in? I could complain about WG, but will not do it here. Not the right place, not the right time. For this one time, I thank for the missions, I purchased a BDay 3x Container as my "gift" to WG - despite I did not really needed it. and that's it. I have waited for this game more than 4 years before it arrived. I'm glad it is 2yrs old and yet living :) Happy 2nd Birthday WoWs.

That's the good question. I spent a lot of time trying to find this information in the news, announcements or on-screen. No success so far. Rush finished the collection by duplicates yesterday as I feared that it might end the same day as the Anniversary event. (that was today 7am)

Not sure what you mean by that. In my understanding the "back seat sniping" for BBs especially at high tier originated from the game economy, namely that it was very expensive to lose a high tier BB, therefore players were more concerned for safety than playing as the situation required. WG tried to address that but yet the BB meta did not change too much. Then was the problem of BBs NOT angling properly can get citadeled easily therefore again players were choosing the bow-in strategy and back-seat-sniping. So WG introduced the German BBs with ability not the get citadeled, and yet players choose to take distance and safety. That is to me pure psychology and do not see why you say had the BBs play more aggressively it would be at the expense of something else... Can you elaborate please? I can easily agree with you that DEVs only have ways to INFLUENCE gameplay but it is the player who decides what is comfortable and what is not. Yes it seems WG lacks understanding as why some behavior that seems illogical still exists. But we are getting very far from the original discussion on which I made the comment - so I'm happy to continue this in another place I'm ready to make a bet on this. How about you? :)

I think I see your point in saying that it is easier to make an improper balancing, than to intentionally set up a marketing flame about an intentionally designed OP ship to boost sales? Well, I'm not as forgiving in assumptions regarding WG than you are. Simply because I do not only look at them [WG] as a player, but as a businessman. It is way too evident for me that profit and revenue is a strong driver for WG that in many cases overrides other factors even if short lived (i.e. GrafZ incident) After all this "free to play" game development concept very much works like a bicycle: while you pedal it goes, but when you stop you will eventually fall. So they need money to run the servers and develop the game, because if they don't they will loose player-base and consequently the game dies out. Therefore from business standpoint it is not wrong to make (appear) your new product very shiny at first, but later become mediocre. (as it will make you a lot of revenue quickly) It is all psychology and just look at the reactions here on the forum to see that people can be easily deceived. I for myself stand suspicions based on the past track record of WG. Some said earlier here that of course such behavior will make WG lose credibility and trust, but it is only true if many players do realize what is done to them. And to me the evidence is that except a few nobody reached this level of understanding --- so WG is safe continuing this practice.

Yeah, the Monday Flamu video is an eye opener in many terms. On the other hand the truth of the matter for me is that this is kind of a proof for WG as well that the ship is "working as intended". The devs said many times (including SubOctavian) that they want to encourage the players to take the BBs into the middle of the action and stop the general practice of staying back and sniping. The German BB line was their first trial, but the general playerbase still does not play tham as it was intended. With regards to the Brit BBs the advertisement from WG was that the high tiert RN BBs will be good for brawling and the superheal combined with the stealth capability will be the method to endure the fight by disengaging and healing up. Well it may be the case that WG made them too strong, but rest assured it will be adjusted (like Yamato lost its superheal). You need to think two ways about WG - one is the obvious for us that is the game balance and professionalism. The other is the money grab marketing approach. So as we all see the news is out that the new RN BB line is super strong and super OP. Therefore many players who has fat wallet will put money into the game, for example convert FreeXP to unlock the tech tree king the Conqueror that is like a 100EUR investment. And once the hype is over, the RN BBs will get nerfed but by that time many many EURs has been spent... Dirty trick indeed. But works...

Interesting question. I voted for the Russian tech lines. This is because my personal opinion is that WG is biased towards its home country / territory and the inclusion of the Russian ships into the game at the very early stage was nothing more than propaganda. No matter how good they are I'll ignore them completely until all historical navy nations get fully introduced.

I for myself created a very similar topic and seeking answer to this question since May this year. Neither in the old QA forum, nor here the point is not picked up by the WG staff. Despite a lot of promises earlier this year it seems that the point has fallen off (down) on the priority list. Yet I\m still a believer that a more popular carrier class (as intended by WG originally> 10% of playerbase) could solve many other problems in the game "ecosystem".

Hello, if possible please let me know if still recruiting. About me: A genuine and sincere interest in naval history; regardless of period. - WW2 Pacific Theater. From stories to facts (i.e. http://www.combinedfleet.com/). The motivation to join in with scenario battles on occasion. - very motivated, but looking for a team where I can do that. Would be nice to replay Battle of Leyte Gulf) A friendly, mature approach to both gaming and historical discussion. well, looking forward to it, crowd will judge if I can meet expectations A favourite era/period - mostly WW2, but as for Naval History I was reading a lot about the Nelson era as well... A favourite ship type/class/line - While absolute favorite ship is Yamato, my favorite class recently become the DDs. I would love to play more CV but in the current state of the game it is too painful. My best grind experience with a ship line was with British Cruisers so far. That was fun. Ability to speak and/or type English at any level*** - hmmmm. :) Voice chat is never mandatory in this clan, though you will need to join in on our Discord from time to time to be an active member.- not used Discrord up till now but there is always a first time looking forward to hear back from you.

I would like to get some more clarification on the "fixing the carrier class" issue. There has been several announcements from WG earlier this year that this is a major topic for 2017. However in the meantime despite some minor UI fixes nothing happened and got communicated. Furthermore there has been 3 Premium Carriers released (I do count Graf Z as one in addition to Kaga and Enterprise) Since WG was saying earlier that Premium CV releases are done only if the carrier class is healthy (“…we [WG] do not want to offer uncomfortable player experience...”) would that mean that the CV class fixes are done and nothing to expect? More specifically the class' behavior and play parameters has not been changed at all. (YET?) Despite hundreds of recommendations and ideas even on this very Forum regarding the future of the carrier class remained uncommented by WG staff. Question: Suspecting the WG DEVs are working with a so called "Agile" methodology, what I would like to know is if there are any major items in the Developer Backlog related to carriers and if so with what priority level? More specifically are there any ideas approved into the backlog to. A) Alter the currently very inflexible key carrier characteristic? (i.e. fixed flight deck versions, limited nation differentiation factor that is the number of planes in the squad and number of squads) B) Improve the attractiveness of the class to play? Make it either more epic (action oriented) or more strategic? (free up flexibility to make it really look like RTS) Game Balance Question:: does WG officially still believe that the "healthy" population of carrier players is around 10% as it was said from the get go? (that would statistically mean 1 carrier pair in each battle) Conceptual Question: Does WG agree with the following statement and if not why? In my opinion one major striking evidence of the deep problem of the carrier class is that carrier tiers cannot be mixed, like the other ship classes (i.e. matchmaking must ensure Tier equality for carriers). This is because the balance and power of the carriers is calculated in such way that one tier difference immediately causes so much advantage and disadvantage that is VERY DIFFICULT (if impossible) to counterbalance with player skill. I suggest this as a "TEST" criteria to determine if the carrier class is fixed or not. PS - these questions are not new. most of them are pending unanswered since 29th of May, 2017 in the original Q&A forum thread (that is closed by now)