eliastion

Oh, you remind me of a match I had on PTS. I know it was a PTS, but bear with me. I've seen two Moskvas. One (enemy) was on ~2k hp after meeting with me (I died) plus some healing, the other (ours) was basically full hp and running away from kiting the other at a distance of maybe 10km? The enemy Moskva was just sailing bow towards ours. And not even shooting at that one - she was shooting our other ships. Why, you ask? Well, for starters, it's easier to damage or even kill ships engaged in other fights than a full HP moskva that has her stern pointed towards you. The other reason: our Moskva was shooting AP. Only AP. At the hull of a very low hp enemy Moskva completely bow-on. This went on for like 3-4 minutes at least. Finally the enemy Moskva ran out of other targets, started shooting at the AP hero. AP hero felt pressured and the need to finish off the enemy quickly occurred to him (in the meantime some, I assume, stray overpens to the superstructure got the enemy back below 2k hp). And what you do when you need to quickly kill the enemy? Well, you turn to get your front guns in on the action, of course. Then the enemy Moskva loaded AP aaand you know the rest. This spectacle made me realize that all these complete potatoes I usually rage about, about bad ammo choices, target selection, positioning? Most of them are actually pretty decent players if you compare them to the REAL bottom of the barrel

From what I've seen watching a lot of CV players pre-rework, that's a pretty well deserved insult, though No, seriously, you'd be surprised how many CVs did an airport impersonation, only ever moving when shot at, if even that. Right now they actually seem more mobile - perhaps periodically seeing the hull reminds them that it exists? And more seriously, what they are telling him is a bit different. It's "you will have too big of an advantage over people too stupid to control both ship and planes and manage your optimal consumable use". To put it simply, the automated consumables are used by a dumb AI but they are insanely overpowered otherwise. These grant you the level of resistance to DoT that would be far from trivial to achieve through manual management of the normal ones (as in: manually activated but with normal cooldowns and action times). This is a crutch for players that would struggle to control their planes and manage the hull at the same time - they are given an automatic system that's so effective that, frankly, even if I could switch freely between the planes and the hull AND then received the option to pick in Port "OP auto consumables or normal ones with manual control", I would have to consider the choice carefully. They are so overpowered that they make up for how dumb the AI is in using them. And you don't need to do anything for them to save your stern from these fires and floodings and whatnot. To put it simply: the automatic consumables might be irritating for skilled players who wouldn't have a problem with taking good care of both their planes and their hull but with their insane characteristics they don't really put you at some big disadvantage compared to the normal ones. And because they work like this for everyone, with no player input, they are a big equalizer, since the worse CV players won't get the chance to die stupidly due to follow-up DoT after a mismanaged fire from the first rocket plane strike. It isn't the most elegant solution but it DOES shrink the skill back a bit. Rather than tying one hand behind your back in this context, I'd compare this to putting floaties on all the participants in a swimming competition. It does actually hinder the ability of good swimmers but it makes sure that those that can't swim will be able to somehow kinda make it to the other side. They still won't be a match to those that can swim - but they will be a little less helpless. I don't necessarily appreciate the tone of the response shown in this video AND I absolutely hate the current CV controls as getting to where I would want, assessing how secure a position is and even making sure that the hull does what I ordered (and actually sails backwards when that was my intention for the damned autopilot) are a problem. But the arguments in favor of automating a couple less essential things as means to slightly lessen the advantage of the more skilled player (one more capable of being "in two places at once") when one of the big problems of CV balancing is that a skilled player outperforms the bad ones more than in other classes? These arguments hold much more water than Fara is willing to give them credit for. The more control you give to a player, the bigger the gap between the good and the bad will become - this is common sense, because the skilled will have more options to apply their skill and the unskilled: more occasions to make mistakes. And, obviously, the reverse is true too: the less control, the less the skill "speaks". So taking away player's direct control over CV hull consumables (not the most integral part of core CV gameplay, these things) and automating them is a valid - if a bit desperate - way to deal with the skill gap being excessive.

We're still facing a high tide of CV popularity (not as bad as first week but everybody and their dog is checking out the new class). This will likely persist for a bit due to the partial RN CV release next big patch and complete release the next after that, but a hype like this always dies down and even if WG don't introduce 1 CV/team rule, the numbers of double CV matches are already falling considerably and the matches without CVs aren't a big rarity anymore as well (talking about high tiers here). In 1 CV match you're likely to be spotted less than in old CV matches (more so if you're not the only DD - but, again, multiple DDs are a rule rather than exception now as well) and when there are no CVs, you might find the meta even now surprisingly friendly since people build AA rather than Anti-DD and Anti-torpedo. That being said, as mentioned, there is a lot of CVs around and that's certainly not a friendly environment for most DDs and there are no definite promises about helping DDs made so far, just the general "our ideal is 1CV per team per match" and "we're monitoring the situation". If you're unsure about the direction of the game, you can always wait with your spending until things settle down a bit? I mean, even if you are spending a lot on this game, I don't think there's anything at the present moment that cries "here, you NEED to buy me RIGHT NOW" unless you are a compulsory shopper?

Whether that's a problem depends on what you do with your CV, though. I often find myself glued to the biggest, baddest island I can find before me, so that nobody can shoot at me from the front and my planes don't have far to fly. Sometimes I find myself closer to the front than MOST BBs, since getting closer to the front than me would mean "pushing hard" ...although my island-loving tendencies have their problems. In my last match I was on Two Brothers, the team split to the sides and not long after through the channel came a DM+DM+Minotaur trio. I spent most of the match (and most of my planes) frantically trying to support a friendly DM that cane to try and stop them from getting through. Against two DMs and a Minotaur. Bad news: planes don't tend to live long when up against this line-up. Good news: it was hilarious at one point where they all (or two of them? I'm not sure if one DM wasn't already dead at that point) hid in Mino's smoke, friendly DM fired Radar, enemy DM fired Radar so felt like they knew what was going on around them but there was nothing to spot my planes for them... Ah. Being able to fly over and attack with impunity a closely clustered Minotaur and 1-2 DMs, all that close enough that my hull was within their long-range AA aura already... well, talk about a cathartic experience for a traumatized CV player

I could understand this approach as "that's how it should work" in one - and only one - situation: if they actually planned to introduce CV hybrids and perhaps even make the normal CVs more "hybrid-y". As in: introduce CVs that have some actual main armaments and for the existing ones give the player direct control over the (biggest) secondaries, though probably not with very good stats... But the hybrids are so far a big "maybe" and I'm almost 100% sure we won't see the normal CVs with main batteries, no matter how gimped. Unfortunately, WG side has been pretty vehement about not allowing direct control of CV. To the point where forget steering - you sometimes don't even know if your genius autopilot decided to reverse or go forward and turn. I'm sure there's some method to that but for me it sometimes seems random. And at least once I died because I was sure I'd go reverse... and, well, I didn't, my CV gleefully sailed forwards to meet the coming enemy fleet

Well, if you managed to get spotted by returning planes then you probably played some other game than WoWs... Returning planes are - invisible on the minimap for enemies (probably allies too, they wanted to do that but I'm not sure if they already did) - invulnerable to AA - incapable of spotting Once they reach the return altitude, they effectively disappear from the game and only reappear for a brief moment while landing. Now, I wonder about validity of your other, more vague and harder to verify observations...

I don't want to be rude, but if Z-52 kills 62 planes, that's a huge L2P issue on the part of the CV. Z-52 is a DD that enjoys a big FLAK barrage. That's a huge advantage in terms of AA... but other than that, her base DPS, while great for a DD, isn't all that outlandish since she just has no defensive AA to boost it. There are easier targets but if you lose a lot of planes to her (and in an equal tier CV at that), it simply means that you're flying into her Flak bursts. A lot. This is something you need to fix if you want to have any success with the new CVs - Flak murders planes, even if it's spawned from puny DDs.

Bad players are bad. But you're also wrong about the buffs. Buffs are crucial. If you just play the "more usual sensible play" and ignore the buffs that don't spawn on you, you're going to lose. That being said, trading a ship for a buff is a stupid thing to do, obviously. It's hard to give a reliable formula but you'd normally expect DDs to try and collect the buffs closer to the middle, cruisers (depending on what cruisers exactly) might want to go for the ones in the back. A lot depends on the kind of the buff too. The consumable buffs are of little value, rudder buffs aren't worth taking risks. HP regen buffs can be very important - DDs usually don't have heals but they do trade hp. Slowly regaining health can mean that a DD badly damaged in the opening stages of the game might regain a lot of value near the end. Concealment is crucial especially in matches with lower saturation and better reload is always a nice thing to have. Long story short: buffs are a precious resource that helps you win the match. All that said, your goal is winning the match in the end, so you need to dynamically assess the risks or - in case of buffs that spawn far away - how much use your team has of you elsewhere. There are matches where some faraway buffs (even good ones) remain untouched for most of the match because nobody can afford to go and collect them - the situation is just too hot elsewhere and every barrel counts. The type you win with? No, but more seriously: DDs (especially those with some knifefighting potential like Kitakaze, Jutland, Black, perhaps Fletcher) are good for getting and protecting buffs. Radar cruisers are good because they make a huge difference in DD fitghts, as long as not all your DDs are muppets, you can have a lot of impact. BBs deter cruisers and look scary, they are a powerful presence in the fight but I'm not convinced about their ability to really carry in this mode. I've seen them deciding battles but that was usually more due to some important cruiser making mistakes that got them blapped. The only "ship type" I would strongly advise against is non-Radar cruisers. They can have an impact and you might feel like you're contributing, but when you're taking a cruiser with no Radar to the field, chances are that you "bring" an opponent that has the consumable in question, making the life of your DDs harder. Even when you get a good score and the match is lost due to friendly DDs failing miserably - that might well be the result of the Radar imbalance you contributed to through your ship choice. Oh, and CVs. I don't recommend CVs, not very useful this season. There are literally no viable CV choices for Ranked Season 11

You do realize that +50% ship XP implies +50% freeXP (since freeXP is calculated based on the XP with all bonuses included). And if you also fly, say, Papa Papa then a +50% XP results in much more free XP than if there was a +50% (or even +100%) free XP first win effect. AND the +50% XP increases the captain XP as well (all +XP effects are also included as captain XP bonuses as well)... And as for credits - most of the older players are drowning in them as well. Long story short: why are you asking WG to nerf first victory rewards?

Well, to be fair - do you know what the 0. in 0.8 means? In the typical convention of numbering software versions, the first "finished" version bears the number 1.0 Open Beta lasts forever

The entire balance of the rework revolves around small strike detachments. Unless striking a REALLY strong AA target, your first attack is basically guaranteed to succeed, what limits you is the number of successive strikes you can realistically perform. Giving, say, Hakuryu an ability to drop 12 torps (from the 2-torps-per-strike configuration) would let her obliterate basically any ship (including those she probably shouldn't even be trying to attack) and bad accuracy wouldn't really change much - in fact it would make the humongous swarm of torps into a shotgun-like weapon that requires less aiming and can't really be avoided. And, on top of that, it would be safer to use since big squadrons are more resistant to AA and dropping everything in a single run means that they all bail out at the same time and with more hp left. What you're asking is basically akin to "I'd like to be able to condense three minutes of firepower from my BB and fire six-salvoes worth of shells at once, at the cost of worse dispersion and longer reload". Of course it's more realistic for planes to drop everything in one run (that, in fact, is what they would normally do in real life) than for guns to fire six full-sized shells at once from one barrel, but from the point of view of balance, your idea makes about as much sense. Small strike detachment size is the main limiting factor for CVs. More so for certain loadouts (IJN TBs being the prime example). You can't just take away that limiting factor just because it, well, limits you when playing these ships.

The only relevant bit of RNG would be "what planes out of the squadron get affected by aura DPS". If you lower the speed of planes and the damage from DPS, what you get is damage more spread out, meaning that the planes survive longer before any are shot down and then they start dropping from the sky all at once. The speed of the former can be balanced if too long without touching the speed of planes. The latter is literally pressing one button - if someone struggles with pressing it in time then he probably deserves to suffer much more damage from an airstrike than he does with current "death of a thousand cuts" CVs... No, seriously, how would it help in balancing to give players more time for pressing one button? At this point you might just set it on "auto" like CV consumables because if they struggle to use it now, I doubt they would manage much better with some more time. Well, this doesn't really change much no matter what you do. Speed helps - but it's just one of the balancing factors. Making planes slower wouldn't make balancing easier - it is just something that can be done if they are too strong to make the weaker. One of the knobs you can turn in balancing - lowering it wouldn't suddenly make the other knobs work better. Also, as a balancing factor (compared to lowering their hp, for example) speed has a significant problem of making CVs more tedious to play as you lower it (low tier planes are painfully slow - and the only reason it sort of works is because the maps are relatively small).

"Helping against the opponent CV bombs and torps" is part of that. The point is - when there is significant gap in skill between RTS-style CV captains (a bad players vs an average one, an average vs a good one, a good vs a unicum) the better one can almost completely prevent the opponent from spotting and delivering strikes while retaining the freedom to significantly contribute to their own team at the same time, effectively creating the situation where the gap between contribution is even bigger than the gap between their skill levels - making it much harder for the team on worse CV side to win (even if they are better than the better CV's side team). And most CV players actually seemed to acknowledge the problem. Oh, so you not only wanted to split the CV queue - you wanted to split the entire WoWs into two different games, basically And no, the idea of "using the same settings" wouldn't fly at all. I'll just give you examples - RN CVs are created for the new CV rules, there's no "RTS mode" for them at all - the Radar and flooding changes affect CVs and the class most vulnerable to them (DDs) a lot. They are likely to call for balancing - and you need to balance two different games for your concept - a lot of people (especially in DDs) would be picking based on the general perception of where meeting CVs is less likely. Because it's just easier to play a DD in the game where CVs hardly appear as opposed to one where everyone and their mother is checking out the new CVs. - the entire captain skill tree AND the CV and AA modules changed in 8.0 tremendously so, again, you'd need to create two separate captain builds for each captain OR you'd need to balance the new skill tree with RTS in mind (or RTS with the new tree in mind) despite the fact that a lot of the new skills don't even make sense for the RTS. Same with AA modules - the new ones aren't compatible with (and definitely not balanced for) the old system Putting this all together, the only way to really implement your idea would be to just completely split the game and have two game clients: RTS CV client+servers and FP CV client+servers, with the former either being a "legacy" version of the game that receives no updates OR having a different development team in charge of keeping it updated and balanced with new stuff. And no matter which option - it wouldn't be healthy for the game, nor would it even give you the data you want - because people's reasons for picking one or the other could be very varied, with "these CVs are barely playable so nobody plays them, especially now that a lot of people went to check out CVs on the new servers" being actually a solid argument in favor of the old system for some people. In the end, WG wouldn't really get reliable information about which CV system could make them more money. In the meantime they would be losing money on keeping both games running and dealing with the problem of split playerbase and even more unbalanced queues. Yes, they are. Not without complaining even more than usual, of course And as for the second question from that poll, you're missing an important aspect: how many people, do you think, considered the old CVs balanced? Do you think the answer to "Can WG ever balance the RTS CVs" would be that much better? The reality we observed was that people didn't like playing the old CVs and didn't like playing AGAINST the old CVs either. And while we can't really discard the possibility that the new ones will become just as unpopular, one thing can be said with quite a bit of confidence: it won't be much worse. Not because I have that much confidence in WG and the new system, but because there's just so little space for "worse" in the situation of the old CVs.

How would taking away air supremacy skill solve anything? I was talking about player skill, NOT the skillpoints of a captain. Good CV players would be raping the weaker ones with smaller fighter squadrons just as hard as with bigger ones. Well, that required a combination of t10 CV, 4 AM and bad luck on top of that. Well, it is regrettable but, unfortunately, the "nope, (almost) no direct confrontation in the air" is superior to both the point-and-click (this was SO BORING) and strafing (much more interesting but extremely punishing for the less adept player) versions from the old RTS CVs. And, let's face it, the current approach to CVs doesn't really support air-to-air battles too well anyway, as you'd basically need to take off with your fighters rather than something more useful. So you'd need the fighters to actually be able to shut down the enemy CV (since you're playing them instead of using strike planes in the meantime). And then you're basically playing only to kill the fun for the one specific player on the enemy team... not the ideal situation. And then there's the "how do you even implement it" and before you know it, you're playing some ugly stepchild of WoWp This is the worst idea you could've came up with, though. 1. You'd need two CV queues (you're splitting the queue for the least played class!) since it's impossible to balance them against each other. 2. You'd need to balance AA twice, so that it somehow works equally well against both CV modes. 3. Players would have to deal with two kinds of CVs that wouldn't have the same mechanics at all, meaning that counterplay will also be different... Basically, you're doubling (at least) the work of developers, ensuring humongous queues for players and making life even more annoying for the surface ships. This just wouldn't fly (pun intended). The results of this poll are also worthless, though. We're in a high tide of CVs and people confuse the effect of new CVs with the effect of having two of them per match; things are in the early stages of balancing; most RTS fanatics haven't even really learned how the new class plays... basically, it's a mess. To put it simply, it's much too early for this poll to really show anything worth more than a brief sentiment swings... Oh, and on top of that you've put it in (unless mods moved it while cleaning HEAPS of CV-related topics) the section of the forum that most players don't even visit unless they have complaints. And if you don't believe me that results of polls like this aren't reliable... take a look at that one: https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/112841-rts-cvs-do-you-miss-us-now/ What would you rather: RTS CVs came back (39.58%) Rework as is (7.81%) Rework with changes (52.6%) Giving us, overall, over 60% people against getting RTS CVs back. At the same time, if we were to believe your poll - 64% people prefer the RTS CVs while the rest is further split between "reworkers" and a minority of undecided... Have fun drawing sensible conclusions from all that. As for me, my conclusion would just be that we really shouldn't be taking the results of any of these polls at face value right now. And whether the post-rework CVs are more enjoyable to play - that actually might prove to be one of the easier questions to answer, given time. Wait a year (or half a year at the very least) and check the CV population compared to how the RTS was. This would give us some actual stats, with people "voting" by actually clicking "Battle" with CVs or not.

Why exactly, though? The RTS CVs (other than requiring a completely different set of skills) had a very high skill floor, very high skill ceiling and were pretty damn merciless when two players of differing skills were meeting. It's one thing to have it like this in a 1v1 game - but WoWs is not a 1v1 game. And a class like RTS CVs, other than attracting very few player in the first place (in no small part due to being visually unappealing) created serious issues when it came to interaction with other players: - high skill floor meant that there was a portion of CV players that were useless at the best of times. This normally wouldn't be much of a problem (there are bad players in every class) but - high skill ceiling meant that a good CV player had a very disproportional impact on the match. CVs rewarded the skill of the CV player a lot and were extremely hard to stop without a friendly CV of similar skill level; and the "similar skill level" was very important because - the CV vs CV match-up was prone to yielding extreme results - the better CV player was capable of shutting the opponent down completely... and here we're back to the previous points where one CV exercises the disproportional power of the class and the opposing side has little ability to resist "Dumbifying" the CV gameplay - lowering both the skill floor (so that bad players are less useless) and skill ceiling (so that good players are less monstrous) combined with toning down of the CV vs CV factor (so that having a better CV doesn't mean that the enemy team effectively might have none) was precisely what was needed. Now, whether the result was achieved is a different thing. I personally think that situation vastly improved on all three fronts but there are people claiming that CVs are still too hard and/or that in good hands they still hold just as much if not more power. I guess the stats will show once the situation stabilizes a bit and the initial balancing is more or less complete. One thing we can agree on is that direct CV vs CV confrontation has been toned down hard... or more like "mostly removed". Perhaps they overdid this part a bit. But this part too seems better than what we had, frankly. It was just too one-sided with the strafes and a case of absurdly boring point-and-click pre-strafes (or on lower tiers after manual attacks were removed from them).

Ah, I forgot that we have a "special" premium like Kaga Even then, that's not even close to 170 in 13 minutes - the fighter consumable doesn't really count too, so we're having 102 "real" planes lost, on a very small map (you fight the moment you take off, basically), and he was struggling - launching, say, 3 TBs? And not because any are "stuck" on their way home? The reason it didn't feel really empty was because it basically ended then and there and the map was very small with him sitting in the middle, almost. Even he was hurting for lack of planes at that point and that's THE "we've got reserves" carrier of the game - by no means something to be taken as "typical CV experience"

Oh yes, losing planes most definitely is an issue. And I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that video. The theoretical maximum number of planes of specific type can be easily calculated for every CV based on their initial number + the number they can regenerate in 20 minutes (notice how to regenerate place you need to have space on your deck, so you need to rotate the planes you use - and lose some of them). Obviously, the last planes from that maximum will be almost useless (you don't have much use for a plane you can receive 10 seconds before the timer runs out at the soonest). Now, my Hakuryu (with my current build) has: 14 RP (78 second restoration) 18 TB (74 second restoration) 18 DB (72 second restoration) I don't run the full resupply speed build and neither do I use the mod that would give me +2 planes on deck, so you can get slightly better values. Still, this is a fully equipped Haku with 19 point captain. Now, my theoretical maximums would be 14 + 15 = 29 RP 18 + 16 = 34 TB 18 + 16 = 34 DB This means that 1. Even if my initial planes all took off simultaneously (not possible) and exploded on takeoff, I'd still never be able to launch more than 97 planes over the entire 20 minute long match. I could get +2 starting planes (per type, I presume) plus a bit faster resupply (one 5% buff that I don't have equipped), that would buff my numbers to 103 + perhaps a couple extra planes would be generated. Probably (I don't feel like calculating) you'd end up with something like 106 planes maximum... so let's take a round 110 as our benchmark, for convenience. So, let's say that, theoretically, Haku could perhaps approach close to 110 launched planes. This is pretty damn far away from the 170 you mentioned. Frankly, I sincerely doubt the existence of a CV capable of launching 50% more planes in 13 minutes than Haku possibly could over 20. 2. These numbers being theoretical maximums means that I'll never actually get close to that. For starters, at the beginning I hardly use DBs (they have some use late game, in the early stage they're just pretty fireworks if you try to attack with them). 3. Rocket planes are the only ones I can restore more than I get at the start. This is not because they regenerate fast, but because I get so few of them as the initial complement. 4. If I lose two full squadrons (each 12 planes) of any bomber type, I'll NEVER be able to send a full squadron again for the rest of the match, even in theory. For RPs I can scramble, in theory, three full squadrons - that's because after the nerf a full squadron only has 9 planes, so if RPs are regenerating for me form second 0 of the match, I can lose two squadrons (18 planes together) and have a full squadron ready with slightly over 3 minutes left on the match clock. Believe me. Losing planes hurts. If you manage to shoot down a lot of them, the CV will notice the loss, I guarantee.

Would it, though?

I must say I'm enjoying the Ranked season so far (then again, I reached R5 in 21 battles losing only 2 of them and as confident in my Kita skills as I might be, that was clearly better than I deserved ). But as for meta... I have a distinct feeling that people have no idea what they should be doing. In "normal" Ranked there is just a handful of maps and each one has about 2 viable strategies and that's it. Arms Race is very different because the buffs are spawned randomly, so the match is never the same and while the base rules for "things you shall (not) do" remain the same, the actual strategy needs to be dynamically adjusted based on things other than just the initial ship line-up. Even at the start of the battle, the initial "middle cap" can be extremely important (oh, the bloodbaths of DDs fighting each other over the only initial concealment or reload ) or... well, let's say that some buffs are more equal than others Anyway, this makes this Ranked more fun than usual, so I'll count this season as a pretty good one. But it most definitely doesn't help any stable meta to emerge. Everybody is just doing what feels right at the moment rather than following any established tactics. This might change if we have more seasons like this one, but for now there's quite a lot of glorious chaos PS: This might not be about meta, but damn, it's so glorious to be farming Dreadnought after Dreadnought on a DD without heal.

The idea of rating MIGHT work for Ranked where you have small teams (so your contribution has more impact) and people explicitly play chasing the rating - picking whatever ships they are most comfortable with/have best commanders on/consider best suited for the meta. It would be disastrous for Randoms where people grind new lines, play ships they don't know well, train new captains. For Ranked it doesn't matter what ships someone is better at and what he's worse with: the idea is that he is incentivized to pick his best options. The same won't be true for Randoms - you don't want people only playing their best ships and WG has all the reasons to avoid this even for the very pragmatic reasons of making money: people grinding new lines use up resources and are in need premium time etc. They are also finding new ships they like and might want to buy a perma camo for, or they want to experiment with new premiums... People who prefer to stick with the ships they're best with don't make WG that much money. What it all means is that you would need a separate ranking for each class. Most likely - for each line or even a ship - but the more detailed you get, the less information you're going to have. And we're talking a 12-player mode. You can win (or lose) ten matches in a row by sheer dumb luck while being a perfectly average player, so it takes many matches before you can have a rating of any value for the player-ship configuration in question... And finally, the last problem. "there won't be any stompruns" you say - and you're completely wrong. You see, WoWs is a game that has a lot of snowballing. When two equally good teams meet in a football (soccer if we have any Americans here ) match, it's relatively rare to see the encounter become completely one-sided. The reason for that is because football isn't a snowballing game. When you lose the first goal, the disadvantage you are in is merely of tactical nature - the enemy just needs to defend the score to win, you don't become less powerful. And yet, even in high-level professional football we have the disposition of the day, a bit of luck and the like and end up with pretty high results. To the point where two teams can meet two times within weeks from one match to another and the matches can end up in high victories for one and then the other. Even in that kind of game, between teams on pretty similar level, we occasionally see "stompruns". But WoWs is different. To keep our football analogy - imagine if every time a team loses a goal, the coach has to take one player off the field. You lose one goal? You play 10 against 11. You happen to lose two goals in a row? Good luck recovering from that while also being two players short! I mean, sure, in WoWs the surviving ships also suffer damage, but there's usually a big difference between sinking a ship and ALMOST sinking a ship. When there is a 4 vs 4 flank and one side loses a ship, holding that flank becomes really problematic. Losing two with no kills means usually that the flank crumbles - the enemy can push and set themselves in a position allowing them to get the falling team's middle into crossfire, nullifying their angling and quickly inflicting significant damage. The whole formation is likely to crumble quickly and decisively - all because two ships died too fast on one flank. Stompruns are a natural, unavoidable occurrence, you're going to see plenty of them no matter what. Even if you managed to clone a team, give each a mirrored ship lineup and pitch the exact same players against themselves - there will still be matches ending in "stompruns" and they wouldn't be very rare. I mean, sure, having the level of players be closer to each other (and closer between the teams) would make "stompruns" rarer. But not by nearly as much as you seem to believe. And, what's worse, there's a price for that to pay that you didn't think about, that price being: reversals. In WoWs it's very hard to achieve a reversal, when it does happen, it's often caused by the fact that the losing team has more of their good players surviving while the good ones on the other side met with misfortune. This means that even when you're losing, there's still hope. If enemy team has worse remaining players in somewhat battered ships - you can still hope that maybe you can turn things around. Admittedly, on the winning team this translates to "these muppets can still throw the game", but the point is: it's more worth it to play until the end. If everyone was of similar skill level, however, you're less likely to be able to do something. They aren't that much worse than you to make the mistakes that would let you turn tables on them (unless you're all really bad and it's mostly about luck). And games with the result clear by the mid-time aren't very exciting. So, you're getting less "stompruns"... but in turn you also have less battles that seem to be going badly but then turn out well. And frankly, these matches are the most satisfying ones. What does it really matter if you avoid a stomprun if instead you get a dragged-out match where one team is clearly winning but the whole thing drags out for the entire 20 minutes or close to that? No stomprun as the losers are putting up resistance. Yet no excitement because it doesn't seem like there's going to be a reversal at any point. Just a long process of making the victory (and defeat) official and farming damage in the process. Frankly, these matches don't really seem that much better than "stompruns" to me...

How can you not appreciate the glorious bath battles!

From all we've seen, Audacious lives up to her name like no other ship in the game. There are ships dubbed with nick-names, Impregnator coming to mind as the prime example, but the sheer audacity of releasing Audacious in anything resembling her current state is going to make it hard to come up with a better name

Obvious? We're talking WG here. HAve you heard the tragedy of Hakuryu the Broken? It's not a story WG testers will tell you ...although I admit that we did dodge the bullet with Błyskawica, for example. Remember how she was when released, before all the power creep and stealth fire removal? It seems that she was initially planned for tier 6. Then, with the same stats that were datamined for her t6 version, she was put on t7 and proceeded to be borderline overpowered there for quite some time. So... I guess even WG indeed has moments of "wait, it's clear that this thing will be broken if we release it like this"

You're mental if you think nerfing the ship in opening weeks would cause LESS outrage. People would be going out of their minds over "bait & switch scam" if that happened, claiming that WG purposefully released a blatantly OP ship to get high sales fast and then nerfed the thing people already paid for to the ground. And, in fact, I bet you'd be one of the super-outraged as well, seeing your general attitude towards WG polices in general and the considered balancing of GC in particular And, in fact, I might've even actually joined you in that outrage had that been the case. Had WG actually decided to nerf GC within the first weeks after the release, THEN the demand for cash refunds would be actually very, VERY strongly justified. Because getting people to spend money on something and then promptly altering its qualities in a way that make it less desirable WOULD actually feel like tricking people into parting with their money without giving them what they were led to believe they were getting.

Frankly? A lot of people. The reason for the outrage is that for too long have WG pursued the (unwritten) rule that premiums are not subject to direct balancing down. Changing that rule now might therefore anger some people, but there really is no objective reason for that to be targeted by consumer protection agencies or even seen as a problem by the community - other, that is, than them not doing it before. There are a couple rules they should keep, of course - selling a ship and then immediately nerfing her would be a good reason for people to get quite angry, but as long as we're talking ships that are - not sold for considerable time already (say, 6 months as the bare minimum, better 12) - clearly OP (therefore hurting the game by their presence) - give you the option to get a doublon refund and/or a chance to swap for another similar value premium ship from the shop (and it seems like they do have plans like these) then it's a perfectly reasonable business practice. The only problem being that people didn't expect that, too confident in their belief that no matter how OP something is, if it's a premium, then it can only be buffed or powercreeped but never directly nerfed.