Verblonde

So, a made-up ship, and undoubtedly coming with the 'liable to nerfs' thing? Looks like I can ignore for the moment, and add it to the 'Satan Box' list

In theory it is: https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/130 Of course, and as always, we don't know for certain until the patch notes are released...

I assume you've bought it back since?

I suspect an eventual sequence might be: Realise that prices at Madam Olga's have gone up *again*. Remove the 155 mm option from Mogami, to make the line 'easier for players to understand, honest'. Bring back the 155 mm option as a premium (available in bundles too, naturally). Profit. WG have pulled this sort of stunt a few times over in WOT (the premium ISU-152 for example)...

Just because a BB is paranoid doesn't mean there *isn't* a DD out to get it...

Speaking mainly as a target for these things, I'd say it's Chapy, and fairly comfortably too: the combination of 12 km (stealth) radar and those ballistics is pretty fearsome. Plus, the sheer area of the map that a Chapy can cover reduces your freedom of action more than 10 km radars do more so than one might think (Chapy covers up to 452 km2, compared to 314 km2 for a 10 km radar; the latter is only 69% of the former - assuming my maths is right; Pi * r2).

Worked for me too (NA and EU) - much appreciated!

Absolutely not; several of my favourite ships in the game are premiums, and even the less interesting/fun ones stop me getting them again from crates etc.

I'm not sure I don't disagree with some hard limits, assuming you want the mode to be approximately competitive; if I go into battle with - say - a Yugumo, with neither cammo, modules, nor a ten point captain, then my surface detection is 7.02 km (according to the wiki), versus 5.5 km (if memory serves; I'm playing Tanks at this afternoon, so can't check) - given how important DDs are to the team, I've gimped my team badly from the off and made the results of that battle deeply suspect from a competitive standpoint. I would suggest that the purpose of hard limits would be to even the playing field as much as possible; given this you have a choice: *no* cammo, equipment, or captains, or all of them. The latter seems the way to go, as many ships have more than one viable build; everything stripped bare would be less interesting. As such, the limits I would insist on would be: Proper cammo (both bonuses); it really isn't hard to get a tolerable stock, even for f2p (you could even give everyone a dump of 20 basic ones each season without knackering the economy). Full modules set (perhaps even a fully upgraded ship too, although that one's arguable e.g. AA hulls, versus regular). 10 point captain minimum; not 15, as 10 is where you can just nab one from the Armory [sic]. This assumes that 'you' want Ranked to be vaguely competitive. Equally - for Bronze anyway - I do also think it's a good learning mode for higher tier play, for the basic reasons that there are far fewer ships to keep track of than in Randoms.

Mummy, I don't understand...?

This may be true, but the latter is a *lot* more likely to win you games. This is an illustration of what I (and others) mean about the sort of damage; I mainly play DDs, and I rejoice if the enemy is focusing on my side's BBs, as it means a couple of things - firstly, they don't know about target priorities, and secondly they're shooting at the ships on my team whose primary job is to tank i.e. the ships that are built to be pounded, not the targets that actually matter. If you want to win, concern yourself less with pure damage, and much more with doing the right damage: the side that sinks the opposing DDs and radar ships (i.e. the really influential targets) first, rather than only racking up big damage numbers, usually wins. Also, recall that although damage drives rewards, there is more than this to winning (which is why I hate having Deadeye BBs on my side, for example). Well, we all want lots of purple on our stats (which, alas, isn't going to happen for me until a little while after the heat death of the universe), but don't worry overly - just use your stats to benchmark how you're doing personally, and where you need to focus... (Stats can also allow you to weight someone's views and the experience/perspective behind them e.g. my views on BBs are very much not derived from playing them a lot against real people.)

Short answer: yes, over a large enough number of battles. The other stuff is useful information, but ultimately the crucial question is are you winning or not? For instance, doing tons of damage isn't helpful if it's the wrong sort of damage (healable fire damage on BBs is rarely much use, but blowing a DD out of the water - say - could be a lot more useful). More important: WR only matters in terms of what it can tell you about how you're doing personally; don't get too hung up over worrying about how it compares to everyone else...

Essential cultural reference:

Not really an achievement as such, but rather an interesting demonstration of how much silver you can bag with a fully flagged T9 premium (Neustrashimy in this case): This was a loss in Ranked with 4 kills and 174K damage (most of my team were wildly inept, giving me a bit of a free hand engaging the opposition) - two million and change silver!! Another thirty seconds on the clock and we would have won too...

This here is the crux of the matter: in theory, WG being able to properly balance premium ships *ought* to be a positive development; the trouble is that - in perhaps 90% of cases* - WG have tended to show that having the slightest trust in them to do the right thing is naive. As it is, WG have given us very little reason to think that 'nerfable' premiums will be anything other than a gateway to the OP-sell-nerf-new OP-sell-nerf-etc. cycle that we fear. If I had any meaningful trust in WG, I would applaud this development, but as things are, sticking 'may be nerfed' on stuff makes it a lot less attractive as a potential purchase (not a "hells, no", as I said elsewhere, but less attractive). *To be clear: this is a total guess.

Post script: I assume it's no accident that the first proper nerfable premium (the others have been silver ship clones) appears to be quite unremarkable: Such a ship is apparently not OP. It's unlikely that Flandre will need nerfs (unless her AA is actually effective, which might make the CV players burst into tears). Assuming that Flandre gets left alone, WG will be able to claim that we have nothing to worry about, so no need to object to doing this with subsequent releases. That lot then potentially lays the groundwork for starting the 'release OP ship then nerf it' cycle that many of us fear. Of course, it could just be that my tin foil hat is on too tightly, but if there is one thing that WG is spectacularly short of these days, I would suggest that it's trust...

My view is a slightly less extreme version of this: with the 'no nerfs' policy, I know that anything I buy will stay the same (apart from global changes) for the lifetime of the game, however long that turns out to be. This has a couple of consequences: If I buy something now, play it half a dozen times, and then get sidetracked by something else, I can return to it in six months' time (or whatever) and carry on where I left off. So, in terms of value for money, I have the lifetime of the game to get my money's worth out of a premium ship purchase. If we consider Flandre specifically, it shows as 36.02 UKP; this isn't cheap (especially for DLC, which is essentially what premium ships are), especially when I open Steam, say: (No idea if Evil Genius 2 is any good, but you take my point) With the 'no nerfs' policy, I would have as long as WOWS lasts to get that thirty-six quid's worth out of her; by plonking the 'right to nerf' on Flandre, I now have - potentially - as long as it takes WG to decide they need to change the ship to get value from the purchase (if those changes are dramatically for the worse). This doesn't necessarily make every such ship an automatic "hells, no!", but it does change the value calculation significantly and consequently increases the likelihood of my going "naaah!" to a shiny new ship (as in this case). Incidentally, I recall saying the same thing about T10 permaflage at the time of the Moskva business; as it turns out, I have been buying far fewer T10 permaflages since then as I now know I potentially have less time to get value from those purchases as well. I don't have a problem with 'nerfable' premiums in principle (provided WG don't get into the release OP premium, clean up, nerf OP premium, repeat cycle - and I *really* don't trust them not to), assuming they're clearly marked as such - at all times (no 'forgetting' about crucial details as per the 2020 Satan crates) - but I am certainly less likely to buy them at the current pricing.

So, in summary: a mediocre BB that could easily be made more mediocre: Yeah, I think that's a hard pass; it can be added to the 2021 Satan Box list...

Quite - we (premium folk) have to mingle with the peasantry. Ghastly state of affairs!

I don't believe it is an April fool, given the context of the full Dev Blog, *but* I bet the timing is deliberate, just in case the 'community' goes ape-poo - if the reaction were especially epic, WG could (whilst swearing under their breath) just say "April fool!" and not go ahead...

This here is - IMO - the crux of the matter. Special ships that you could only get from playing are a different beast, compared to things that you could pay actual money for, but the line is blurred (by WG's own doing) - for instance, there have been instances where money = more steel/coal, so some people's 'resource' ships could easily have been at least partly directly paid for with money. Of course, the counter argument that you can pay real money for silver (if you're sufficiently impatient/bad at the game), so silver things shouldn't be nerfed either rather makes a bit of a nonsense of that line of reasoning. Also, some 'money' ships are also available for resources... My personal view is that if a ship has been advertised as liable to nerfs (which the T10 'event' ships have been, if memory serves), then it's fair game; if you can/could buy it directly for money (so, actual $, or doubloons) then it shouldn't be, unless advertised specifically to the contrary at the time of initial sale (e.g. ARP Yamato). If I were WG, I would also make the distinction *crystal* clear - how many people will think words to the effect of "Thunderer got nerfed, ergo any premium I buy might be too...", and be less likely to spend money on 'proper' premiums? I can't imagine WG aren't aware of this danger though - premium ships are a ludicrous source of income (e.g. for the price of - roughly - a T6 premium, Valheim has already given me many days of entertainment, and it isn't even finished yet!), and it would be foolish for them to jeopardise that.

I suspect WG may deliberately be being cautious here: I hypothesise that this is more about testing the fact of a nerf to an event ship (which I don't believe they've done before), and to see a) if the reaction is as vehement as when they proposed nerfing/changing GC, and b) if people distinguish between event ships and 'proper' premiums in their reactions. So, I suggest that the nerfs haven't gone 'Full YY' as the mere fact of their existence is sufficient to trigger the data that WG are after...

Dev Blog (modest Thunderer/Stalingrad nerfs, plus other changes): https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/135 Dev Blog (Godzilla v Kong tie-in): https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/133 (No idea if any aspect of these is April Fools...)

We don't have precedent for whether the Dev Blog is used for wind-ups (it's still fairly new), but - to my eyes - the rest of the Dev Blog looks fairly normal: https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/135 (I'm not good at spotting things in stats though.)

Thems is good changes, as far as I can tell, even if they are quite modest. The only concern is that, if the level of objections isn't excessive, WG might take that to mean that they also have carte blanche to mess with for-money premiums; whilst some need it (we all know which ones), there is the question of whether we trust WG to avoid dropping into a lucrative cycle of releasing OP premiums to rake in the cash, followed by nerfing them, and then repeating the process...