eliastion

Sorry, did you really believe there's some monitoring of the situation going on? Most likely there wasn't even any serious AFK problem - they just saw they're giving away more containers than they anticipated and decided to kill SL, the rest is just BS to make it less obvious. If they really wanted to fix the problem we'd see some min 2500 DMG or min 500 XP threshold. Or rewards restricted to winning team. None of the above happened - they just opted to restrict rewards to less than a third of original amount in a way that created as unfriendly meta as possible. Basically, the less SL going on, the happier WG is.

Well, I'm pretty sure the game would just make random 2 to be first 2 even if you pulled it off. Either way, "ramming only" matches would be pretty fun but there would always be that one random oblivious guy who couldn't help himself with the trigger. ...or that would jump in with a battleship just for the sake of trollishness if nothing else The "no smoke" rules seem to be more realistic

"Yay supercontainer" has become a "wow, PERHAPS you got a supercontainer, but likely just a cheap copy, open to find out". I completely stopped picking TYL...

Might be the only way to get some enjoyment out of this mutilated game mode. Perhaps I'll try showing up I mean, even if there were some matches going on, the meta enforced by "2 top XP from each team" where your actual enemy is the team... seen that once, not much incentive to try again...

You're just wrong. Only the X is in your range. The Y you see? Probably the number of all players in Ranked queue. Of course it's fluctuating as they get matches - Ranked (other than SL) is alive and well. But they're not queuing for the SL! Of course their presence won't make you get a SL match. There are just almost no SL players and hence - no SL matches happening. Over the last week the t5 ships that got more than 10 Ranked matches: Texas 10 ARP Hiei 11 Murmansk 18 Kamikaze R 32 Between the four: 71 ship-matches. About 5 complete matches total (in a week). Hard to guess how many instances of less popular ships happened but it's HIGHLY unlikely that there were more than 1-2 SL matches a day on average. Probably 0-1 matches on weekdays, maybe 2-3 on weekend? I've managed to get one match. WG's "fixes" created an absolutely horrendous meta where your actual opponents are the teammates - you need to have more XP than them, not to win the match. Add to that the nigh-insurmountable of even finding a match in the first place and I don't really feel the urge to even try and go through this again. There's no amount of AFKers that could've been as harmful to SL as what WG has done. PS: And on topic of MM screens with nice waiting times, that was from my first "primetime" after getting Rank 1. No, I did NOT get a match then, I only managed one on... was it weekend or Friday? Not sure. Either way, as I said in the original thread where I posted the screenshot below: SL is dead.

Hated Tashkent. Hate Udaloi. ...in for some more of both, apparently... And here I was even happy originally when I saw the original plans with t9 Kiev (hoping for some nice performance out of once-liked then a bit overnerfed fun ship that it was). Oh, well...

I'm stuck at Rank 1, no way to even find a match here

Ctrl+Shift+Esc -> processes -> kill process I'm not even joking. While I've yet to see it freezing, the closing of the client seems to take ages sometimes. A couple times, when in a hurry, I've actually used this method for closing it faster. If you experience system freezes, you might find killing the process a favorable alternative. Of course this doesn't fix the underlying problem, whatever it might be...

On the other hand, it would mean more trouble in actually dodging shotgun salvos from BBs and cruisers with many barrels.

Well, not really - it's the punch line of the bigger joke of WG deciding to prevent perceived exploitation of (badly designed) original mission. Well, they did prevent the exploitation, that much is true - along with any other SL activity.

RU DDs have extra caliber-independent penalty to their concealment after firing. They could just get similar penalty to their fade-out time after firing - so that's hardly a problem here. I wouldn't be so sure. It would make Priority Target a skill tax but other than that? Akizuki with her caliber would have ridiculously short fade-out time. The trick would be to stop firing when people start locking in on you and their guns turn in your direction... before they can really fire, you're gone. Basically, enemies would have the choice of pre-aiming guns in the direction where they expect you (and there's no guarantee that you're going to open fire, especially if you see their guns facing in your direction!) OR they will just ignore you until better targets are gone. What BB or cruiser will waste their potential firepower on looking scary into general (expected) direction of enemy DD to keep the latter from firing? There are ships that need shooting at around!

My new grind for t10: another Tashkent grind (oh, God, why) or a new Udaloi grind (I hate this DD so much, is it going to be changed along with its expediture to "stealthier" and more general-purpose branch)?

Yes, the mission is a joke but for a completely different reasons than what you think, OP. It's for people who reached Rank 1. When you're Rank 1, you get to play so called Super League with tier 5 ships. Or rather (here comes the joke part): you don't get to play it because there are no matches going since the only actual reward (containers) for 7v7 t5 (hint: the standard rewards in XP/credits are much below what you get if you just get your t5 ship to Randoms) given out got from 14/match to 4/match after a few days AND the rules for who gets these 4 have nothing to do with good gameplay incentives since it doesn't matter if you win or lose BUT it matters to score more XP than teammates, making anything vaguely resembling teamplay (that is, actions that let your teammates perform better) a shot in the foot since it's them you're playing against for this mission, not the enemy. So, you have a game mode where rewards are designed to reward selfish, toxic play AND are pretty underwhelming, so nobody plays it and that means ridiculous waiting times (or going the extra mile with out-of-MM coordination) to even get a match, so nobody plays it even more aaand... it's dead. In the last week (after reward nerf) 2 ships got taken more than 10 times into SL: one 14 and one 10 times, if I'm not mistaken. That's 24 ship-in-game instances, less than 2 7v7 matches. Of course, there are other ships but in the one match I got to participate in these two ships constituted more than half of all ships. Extrapolating I'd make an educated guess for the number of SuperLeague matches played in the whole last week (7 days) on EU server: 5. Five. In a week. Less than one match a day. So... yeah.

Atago (well, Takao) feels more nimble, actually, although that's mostly the perceived trait since Akizuki still should generally turn better (unless her stats lie).

No, they're not going to do any preliminary buffs, they said that much!On other unrelated news: a russian DDs have a HE damage buff coming for them. To, you know, keep them in balance with other DDs.

This, fortunately, also implies that they actually want to change game mechanics rather than just outright remove invisifire (which would be accomplished by mutilating concealment as it was done to german DDs pre-launch). If I had some trust in WGs ability to anticipate the results of mechanics they devise, their ability to discern where certain results come from OR in their devotion to game balance, I might be sleeping better. Problem is... well. They're the company that gave us IJN torpboat DD "rebalancing", intends to buff german DD HE damage, introduced new "upgrades", doesn't plan "any preliminary buffs" for ships most affected by stealth fire removal AND - perhaps above all else - failed to anticipate that concealment range smaller than gun range might lead to people shooting while undetected in the first place! I mean, the fact that they "didn't plan" for stealth firing that appeared "by accident" strongly suggests that they really aren't the guys that should be trusted with removing it... So, yeah. I don't hold my breath about their ability to remove stealth firing without breaking the ships that use it with any regularity - much less those that just outright rely on it (like Akizuki).

General Feedback on Ranked Season 6: - no rewards on Ranks 2-10 - the only incentive to climb to R1 in reasonable time: SuperLeague - got to R1 and behold: SuperLeague is dead because WG decided that they don't want to award containers after all. I don't know if there were AFKers - I didn't make it in time to see it with my own eyes although people who did tell me that WG is lying. What I do know is that the situation couldn't POSSIBLY have been worse than after this f*cked up nerf. I managed to get into exactly one match after two days of trying. It was awful. People just sailed around trying to score as much XP as possible. I came 3rd in team - meaning absolutely pitiful rewards after a throughly unsatisfying match I managed to get after two days. If WG really wanted people to play seriiously, they should've kept the number of containers awarded, giving 2 to each player of winning team (save AFKers) and 0 to losers. Instead they decided to award 4/match instead of 14/match AND made it so that you don't really play against the enemy - you play against your own teammates becase you don't care what happens in the match: you care about having more XP than your teammates. This is absolutely retarded "fix", even by WG standards. It's hard to believe anyone was really this incompetent - so the natural conclusion is that WG wanted to shut down SuperLeague (the only thing that seemed to be saving this season's reward system after substituting r10-r2 rewards with useless junk) by making it as unenjoyable and unrewarding as possible. Frankly, I feel cheated and lied to by WG since - regardless of actual reasoning behind the change in rules - the change itself is an obvious attempt at eliminating rewards from SL. They didn't make it so that bottom 2 players get unrewarded. They didn't make it so that only the winners get rewards. No. They just created a cut-throat teammate-vs-teammate environment with less than 30% of originally promised rewards given to people willing to play. Frankly, I'm not surprised nobody wants to play this sh*t anymore. Pity that I didn't get to reach R1 in time to play some SL while it was still alive, whether there were actual AFKers or not (could be that this is just another WG lie to make their no-rewards-for-you-suckers decision less repulsive for uninformed).

Matchamking in Super League: DOESN'T EXIST since WG decided to kill it.

DDs messing up drop spreads with DF is one thing. DDs killing planes without being spotted is another thing entirely. WG wants to remove stealth fire but stealth shooting down planes is apparently fair game since it doesn't hurt BBs.

Well, there are ways to try and remove invisifiring without [edited] the game over. If invisifiring ship was, say, rendered for the target (and ONLY for the target) it might be worth considering and (for most ships, Akizuki would still be [edited]) not game-breaking. But I have zero trust in WGs ability to handle this well. Especially with comments like "no preliminary buffs are planned" proving that they have no baility of foresight at all (well, the very existence of "unplanned" stealthfiring mechanic proves how good they are at predicting consequences of their design choices but that's another thing...).

If they said they are planning buffs to compensate, I'd have my doubt whether the buffs are going to be appropriate to the harm done. They mo nitoring the situation, however, is a pretty obvious PR talk for "we don't care and won't do sh*t" - after all, aren't they monitoring the population of BBs, state of CVs and performance of IJN DDs for a really long time now? They'll just break it and leave it be. As usual. Oh, but while there are no plans for buffs for ships that are going to suffer from stealthfire removal, there's a RU DD gun buff incoming. So it's not like they are not balancing anything. They want to bring RU DDs to better balance with other DDs!

The Q/A session this thread is based upon contains an information that NO BUFFS ARE PLANNED for ships suffering for stealth firing removal. They'll be looking at stats, you know. Because it's too hard to predict that, say, Akizuki will suffer a lot. Oh, but they mentioned Akizuki overperforming and I doubt they're capable of linking it to who really plays the ship that has a very peculiar playstyle and leads to no t9+ options in her tree..

Yes, it does matter. Because it's usually 10-11 km or even less, not 13 km. Błyskawica does rely on it quite a lot - her torps are simply not reliable enough and the edge of her stealth firing range is where she's still pretty easy to hit. The reality of Błyskawica gameplaye is pretty often an intense knife-fight phase followed by low-hp invisifire phase when getting spotted more or less equals getting killed. And then tere's the fact that getting spotted means a DD sneaking upon you - even if bigger ships magically stopped shooting at you whenever spotted, removal of stealth firing would mean less information for staying alive in that fragile state. Shiratsuyu is very fragile from the get go and suffers from pretty long torp cooldown. She isn't very fast either and - once again - an easy target on ranges where she can usually open fire to supplement her torps with some gunfire. Opening fire would change from calculated risk (some hits in exchange for risk of getting spotted) into suicidal move. Yugumo is squishy and her torp reload looong due to 2 launcher configuration. However, she is still a fun ship, nice to play enough that I have no drive to even buy Shira. Why, you ask? Well, that's because she has workable guns with decent invisifire potential, allowing her to score some damage on the side while waiting for torp reload! Yugumo is a good generalist, in fact I build her more for guns than torps - the latter are still very good but they happen once in a while. The former can surprise enemy gunboats but - above all - are a much more reliable source of damage, leaving me with something done even on these poor matches where everybody seems to remember they have a rudder and proper torp hits are a rarity. And then there's Akizuki. She can't dodge for sh*t. She can't run once spotted and chased down. Both her ability to survive and deal damage is closely tied to great invisifire range she has. Even in the knife-fighting phase she's extremely vulnerable to supporting fire of enemy fleet. She survives any longer than her prey in no small part because her prey is very often the only thing spotting her - so when the enemy dies (preferably) or breaks away and smokes up, Akizuki instantly vanishes and can get away with as much hp as she preserved. So yeah. Invisifire is important.

"Humanoid form" means just "not bear" since there are two distinct Kirishimas (the girl and the teddy bear). Both are still from anime, nothing to do with voice actress (apart from her voice, that is - all ARP captains have their voiceovers).

Better yet: never do something so retarded. Even now, with no such system, people periodically spawn tinfoil whines about getting burdened by bad players in attempt to keep their own well deserved winrate down. Imagine the frustration if MM really did just that, trying to keep everyone at 50% winrate by giving good players better opponents and worse teammates to create evenly matched (by skill) teams...