xxNihilanxx

Using the Kamikaze as an example of a "broken OP premium ship" is not really a good argument, in my opinion. (I know what you are thinking but hear me out.) When they were released the Kamikaze, Kamikaze R and Fujin were essentially clones of the regular tech-tree Minekaze. Unfortunately WG, in their infinite wisdom, decided to nerf the tech-tree variant as low-tier BBs were complaining about being torped too often. Due to WG's reluctance to nerf paid-for ships this left the premiums stronger than their tech-tree counterpart. They were not created as OP ships, they just became stronger due to yet another of the myriad DD nerfs we have seen since the game began. In terms of "game design" the original Minekaze was a fantastic ship to have in the game. Why? Because it introduced to new battleship players the notion of how strong stealthy torpedo boats could be and thus afforded them the opportunity quite early on to learn how to deal with them. It was a perfect ship to teach BBs how to WASD and thus breaking bad habits (straightlining) very early on. Unwilling to adapt, however, they complained instead and the Minekaze got smacked with the nerf-bat. This left her premium counterparts much stronger as they retained the pre-nerf characteristics. In short, the premium Minekazes were not created as OP ships but rather new players' reluctance to learn made them (appear) so. As for the rest of your post, I am afraid it lacks any teeth whatsoever. Regardless of the competence of his mentor, no player with a tier 4 as his highest tech-tree ship is ever going to be ready for T8. I have ground to T8 in all the lines I play and it takes all my skill, awareness and split-second thinking to perform at that tier - you can't possibly do all that for yourself and him simultaneously.

Not a screen shot but it made me laugh. CV game and I am in my Minotaur. I follow our friendly YY toawrds the cap to try to dissuade the enemy CV from parking over the cap. Enemy CV sends his fighters over the cap and tags our CV's fighters 4km away from my Mino. Not understanding (I guess) why he lost the dogfight he instantly sends in two more squads of fighters to dogfight our CV 2v1. Enemy fighters lost - 15, friendly planes lost - 3.

Some people, myself included I am ashamed to say, could spend that on beer in a weekend with nothing to show for it other than a urinal full of pi$$ and a stinking hangover. How is it so bad that somebody spends the same amount to have a year of premium time to play the game they love, a free DD and at the same time help support the game and keep it running? Different strokes for different folks.

This is, by far, my most hated way to die in this game. WTF - what are those torps doing ther....BOOM! Hates it, we does, hates it.

Reading this I was genuinely gutted for you, OP. Somehow your completely "philosophical" attitude to the whole thing just serves to make me even sadder for you.

I have seen a few familiar faces over the last couple of nights. Had @DangerousDave2k on my team a couple of times, met @BeauNidl3 - who was kind enough to deliver the coup de grace on my very battered Chung Mu (he even apologised for doing so - what a gent) and saw @HMS_Kilinowski who very graciously destroyed an Akatsuki and an Indianapolis who were trying their very best to prevent me from capping in my Shiratsuyu. Good to see you all.

I still think that the solution is really simple. Just remove radar from the US CL line and do not introduce any additional radar ships into the game. EVER. This solves the over abundance of radar in-game and also stops the Worcester from being the overly-strong ship that it currently is.

And here we were thinking that you were testing it as a counter to island-camping Worcesters. The disappointment is real :(

When they do, which they undoubtedly will, is there any chance you could pay off my mortgage?

So how are people cheating? Describe for us the cheats you have seen.

As I said, don't take it as gospel as I could only presume it was the forumites that comped me - I could be totally mistaken.

Not sure this is true. I met a division that included two forumites the other day and, as we tend to, I comped them after the game. Got into port to find they had done the same as it told me I had been comped twice. I could be wrong but I assume it was those two who were responsible.

You seem fairly new, I suspect that you just have a fair bit to learn about the game yet. Please don't turn up to our lovely party and start behaving like an arse - there's really no need for it.

Doesn't sound so bad. Using your example alongside my survival rate we are talking about 10 - 30 minutes per ship.

Stickied threads are oftentimes the hardest to see as many people just instantly scroll past them to read the actual discussion threads. Exactly why mods will combine and sticky threads about a current, hot, contentious topic as they know it has a similar effect to sweeping it under the carpet.

Well I, for one, can definitely keep a secret. A classic example happened the other day when my clan leader, a certain cherry2blost, told me he was secretly a woman in disguise and to this day I have never told a soul.

As things stand at the moment damage rewards are calculated as a percentage of the HP of the ship you damage, making DDs a prime target as you can easily wipe off a good chunk of a DDs HP with a single salvo. However, it is still easy to rack-up a good XP score by chipping away at or, as per your example, long-range HE spam against a BB which will take huge percentages of the BBs HP over time. Hell, the BB heals mean you can fire-spam a BB over time and be rewarded for more than 100% of his HP. BBs that sit at the back can only really reliably hit other BBs at the ranges they need to fire from whilst sitting on the back line. If the reward for taking away a percentage of a BB's HP were far lower than the reward for hitting other ships maybe this would fix things somewhat. Make the rewards not only HP% based but also on a sliding scale dependent on the difficulty involved in hitting the the target ship. Currently taking 100% of a DD's HP will reward the same as taking 100% of a BB's HP but BBs are easy to hit at range. With my propsal taking 100% of a BB's HP would only reward, for example, half of what taking 100% of a DD's HP would give. To get better rewards you need to get close enough to reliably hit the more nimble ships - DDs and, to a lesser extent, CA/CLs. Does that make sense?

The bolded part is exactly why, after consideration, I stopped being overly in favour of "fixing" radar by making it LoS. As a person who plays DDs a lot I realised that it would reduce the information available to me and could potentially make things worse. As I am sure you know, decent DD players have to have a constant stream of deductive reasoning going on in their head in order to be successful so anything that reduces the amount of information available to me makes things less than ideal. Do not think that the anecdotes I have given above mean I am necessarily in favour of LoS radar, I only provided that as a refutation that non-LoS radar counters the tactic in the Flambass video because I know from experience that it didn't. I was never really overly troubled by radar (sure we all derp-out and get killed due to it from time to time but ship happens) but I do think that as it becomes increasingly prevalent it becomes a lot less enjoyable to deal with. Like I said earlier, it is exactly the same as BBs. The existence of BBs does not make it difficult to play cruisers but an over-abundance of BBs does cause problems for that class.

This is largely to do with the fact that the game rewards damage the most and so these players could survive longer, deal damage longer and end up high up the result screen on a losing battle. If the game rewarded objective-based gameplay more than it does dealing damage then the players would be "educated" towards a different approach. The way the game is set up it does teach bad habits.

The issue was that even if a radar ship sat behind an island and radared us the rest of the enemy had either died or moved so far from our doom cloud that hitting me was practically impossible. I had to be the primary target as without my eyes the doom cloud was blind and thus totally ineffective. With us locking down a huge area of the map with just 3 ships the rest of our team had greater influence on the areas of the map we couldn't cover at any one time. We would communicate our intention to our team at the start of the map and ask the other 9 ships to push a second cap. Once they saw what was happening they were usually more than happy to oblige. The enemy, however, had no idea what was about to happen so initially we had plenty of targets. It absolutely was a game-winning strategy far more often than not. As I stated, a CV spotting us before we could move into a viable position (ideally the centre of B) was our biggest obstacle to getting the whole thing rolling. Tactically if 3 ships can create a no-approach zone in the centre of the map it puts the enemy at a huge disadvantage. These were random teams we were facing with all the lack of coordination that that comes with. It would have taken a major coordinated effort to stop us and, well, as I said this was in randoms so you can imagine how likely that was. Trust me, all theory-crafting from those who weren't there aside, it was a crazy good tactic and we won far more than we didn't whilst using it. Enemy radar had zero impact at the time. Torp walls were the bigger threat, as I stated earlier, but that is as you would expect because the counter to this level of smoke-based teamplay is not radar but DD torps. Torps are and always have been the only counter to smoke that was ever needed. Decrease DD numbers and this tactic starts to increase in viability once more.

I don't think this is entirely true, mate. I have said countless times that radar isn't a problem but rather that an ever-increasing prevalence of radar is. It is exactly the same with BBs. Nobody (well nobody with half a brain) has ever said that BBs should be removed from the game, however, when teams regularly consist of 5 BBs a side then it does become problematic and people start to complain. This is exactly the same with radar-equipped ships.

Radar and hydro didn't prevent that tactic, they enabled it. As the Gearing in the equation I would spend the bulk of my time outside the smoke spotting enemy targets, screening for torps and searching for DDs but it was impossible to screen in a full 360 degree arc around the smoked-up cruisers. That's where their radar and hydro came in to make them impervious to DDs getting close enough to torp into the smoke with the hydro picking up the torps from those that could launch from outside of radar range. The only time we had any problems with this tactic was if a CV was in game because they could spot the cruisers before we could get into position to do our smoke screen of doom. Was it a disgusting tactic? Undoubtedly. So sue us for employing teamplay in a team-based game. Did radar affect it? Not in the slightest - the only radar that had the range to be a problem was the Russian radar and that was too short duration to make that much of a difference (largely because I was the target of focus once we were radared). The only thing that caused us any issues once the screen was set up, bearing in mind we would aim to do this right in the centre of the map, was multiple torp launches into the smoke from multiple angles creating walls of torps that were essentially undodgeable despite hydro. Think about that for a second. The ONLY realistic counter to that tactic was enemy DDs - exactly the ship-type that the increasing prevalence of radar discourages. Of course, with recent changes, the Zao could also add to the torp walls being sent against us but back then it was only really the T10 DDs (Gearing and Shima - this was pre-YueYang) that had the torp range to launch into that smoke. So yea, more radar encourages fewer DDs and with fewer DDs that tactic becomes a little more viable once again. LoS for radar has no bearing on the issue.

This example is pretty irrelevant in this context as there is nothing to stop the division from doing that now so is totally independent of radar having LoS. We did exactly that, in fact, in our clan at one time - Gearing, DM and Minotaur so the DM could use the Minotaur's smoke while the Gearing's was on CD. It wasn't radar that made that tactic less feasible it was the smoke firing nerf.

And it is still as wrong as ever. As to the topic at hand, radar is not OP it is just a little too prevalent at the moment. If WG had not given it to the US CL line things would be pretty much fine.

It was both the Atlanta and Cleveland that radared me. The Atlanta chased me down doing disgusting Atlanta things with those dirty Atlanta guns only to have a rogue Dallas steal the kill. And yes, I was pink, as I accidentally clipped a friendly Hood with a torp in the previous match though he was very understanding about it. Was good to see you, mate, I don't think I've seen you in game before. Tonight has been crazy with regard to seeing forumites, it felt like almost every other match had a familiar face on one team or another, the most recent being @Estaca_de_Bares in his Shimakaze who must have felt a little victimised as he had our 3-man division shooting at him every time he got spotted. Wasn't personal he was just the best target on each occasion. He did a great job of dodging and weaving and was proving quite difficult to kill until in the end he got caught out in his smoke by our Cleveland radar.