Verblonde

One aspect of Ranked (and Clans too, come to that), at least at the lower levels, is that - IMO - it can be easier than Randoms. I suspect there are a number of reasons, but the key one is that the smaller teams make it easier to keep track of what everyone is up to, so requiring less map awareness (which seems to be something that gives a lot of newer players trouble)...

I would disagree with this quite strongly: as I mentioned elsewhere I was in a game the other day where an Edinburgh (if memory serves) put in an excellent performance that was instrumental in our win, and he came last. As long as the game disproportionately rewards damage over everything else, anything that makes teamplay even less desirable is probably not a good idea. Sure, a few potatoes will get carried by the same mechanism (obviously, you can come last by being rubbish too!), but I can live with that. I don't think this would be wise either (although it would be if your Copper League was implemented): at the moment, I suspect the de facto function of Bronze is to give everyone something in the game to go at, which is fun and quite painless, and provides a sense of achievement at the end, plus a few nice rewards. The irreversible ranks are part of this, as their lack was what made the previous ranked so frustrating for weaker players after about R12-10. At the moment, a weak player can say "yay, I got to R1" and feel all warm and fuzzy; of course, this means the 'real' challenge for better players starts higher up. The qualification phases are the real filters: we've already seen the whinging about it being much harder to qualify out of Bronze (I vaguely recall some hapless soul even started two threads on the same subject!); the same basic thing happens after silver too, so - hopefully - ensuring you have to be a mind-meltingly persistent potato to get into Gold. With luck, the better players will have Gold to test themselves against worthy opposition whilst the rest of us can find our level in either Bronze or Silver. The only problem with this is that the rewards don't exactly encourage players to go above Silver, but that's a different conversation.

What, a bit like this: (Haida) (VU) (Blysk) (Smaland) If you haven't found it yet, the national flags can be mounted from the very bottom of the 'flags' tab in the 'exterior' screen...

Ah! It's a New Year miracle!

Escalate it; I have a vague memory of this problem arising before with Free XP ships (although it didn't happen to me and it was sufficiently long ago that I can't recall detail), and I think it was eventually fixed last time. Don't be over-hopeful though; WG do seem to be going out of their way to avoid good customer service recently...

This is true, but what I was obliquely referencing with the whole 'all in the same boat' thing i.e. we're all boned. Also, with this new normal, we are forced to choose between a number of viable skills i.e. there may well no longer be 'one' choice for any given ship (or at least some of them) - I suppose, if this is really the case, we should acknowledge that an alleged aim of the exercise has been achieved. Basically, we can't have everything we want, even with 21 points. I'm also assuming that most of the nerfs are designed to reduce the impact of a good captain; currently, well-chosen captain skills can have a significant impact, which makes life easier for older lags - if that impact is lessened, it makes an actively good captain less crucial for many players. Or at least that may be the idea; personally, I think they'll still matter, and it's now almost impossible for newcomers to catch us more experienced players, which risks turning said newcomers off the game.

I'm not certain yet that DDs are nerfed overall: For a start, everyone gets impacted, so it's not just us that lose captain effectiveness. The cruiser players are very upset, I gather, and they're our primary predators (in terms of actual damage). I gather that at least some of the CV boosts are about scragging fatties, so that *might* encourage at least some of the buggers to chase BBs more (which helps our DDs, if not their team). DDs get some potentially interesting skills that make us harder to hit some of the time, and some are flat-out boosts (for example TA no longer nerfs range, I think). So, everyone is in the same boat (as it were), and there may be scope to do some things in DDs that we can't do as well at the moment. We just have to see what the final skills end up looking like. As I mentioned earlier, I suspect a lot of the changes will end up being a bit swings/roundabouts; it just sucks to be a) a cruiser and especially b) a 'fatty' cruiser, even more especially with decent secondaries. The enormous - nay, humongous - metaphorical dump that WG have taken in the middle of our collective meringues is the ridiculous cost of it all. IMO, of course.

They absolutely aren't; it is this aspect that I personally am angry about. I don't really mind WG messing about with things - in general - at least, when there is a sensible reason; yeah, things will change, some ships will get better and others worse - swings and roundabouts and all that. But in this case, they could have rearranged things without the blatant cash-grab, and without shafting newer players (this extra 1.2 million xp thing almost doubles what it takes to get a full point captain - good luck with that, newbies). If WG were merely concerned with draining the captain xp economy, they could have simply provided people with a premium ship or magic captain that you could only buy with that resource, or maybe an interesting permaflage. WG get bonus 'pi$$ing off the paying customers' points for essentially trying to tell us that our new 21 point captains will be better (than our existing 19 pointers) when - for the princely sum of 1.2 million captain xp - you end up with a captain with the same skills, only nerfed, with a lot of common DD builds (any with both PT and AR - which both go up a point in cost, plus the nerfed BFT). Their actual words were that while we were grinding the extra two points, there would be no loss of efficiency (for strict accuracy).

I haven't been paying enough attention to comment on some of this stuff, but as a general approach, I'm thinking along the following lines at the moment: Don't do anything irreversible until we really know all the detail; there have been significant changes in the past where WG made a major Richard move in some way, and it wasn't apparent until the very last minute. The apparent cost of the 'extra' two points on captains is entirely unreasonable, and I don't believe WG should be rewarded for this greed, so a key aim for me is to try and avoid rewarding them in any way whatsoever (although I won't cut my nose off to spite my face). My aim is to get as many 21 pointers as practical, as quickly as possible; in the first instance, this will probably mean low single figures (1-3). Unless I've missed something, this is best served by holding onto my elite captain xp for the moment, so as to concentrate it in whichever existing 19 pointers I select. It'll take a while to work out which skills are really worthwhile, so the existing advice to zero all my captains, and then experiment with as few as is tolerable, still makes good sense. WG will ensure that something important changes after the free respec has ended, so 'encouraging' us to spend. I intend playing only a very few captains initially, and making as much use of my premium ships as possible; in theory, I should be able to experiment with all classes of ship with just one captain, if I pick the right nation (i.e. one with lots of premiums, ideally covering all classes). I'm thinking that for the duration of the free respec, I should mess around with a few different existing 19 pointers to concentrate captain xp where it'll be needed, and then zero them all at the end. After that, perhaps play just one non-special captain, to keep pushing towards 21 points, but avoiding expensive resets of other captains when WG drop their inevitable changes on us. I'm thinking avoiding the special captains initially (i.e. after the respec ends) as - depending on what WG do to them - there is a better chance of it being more important that they're set up 'right', so making me keener to rectify any mistakes by spending. I suspect the key advice will be to play/experiment as much as possible while respeccing is free, while focusing captain xp where you will need it most (so, don't spread it thinly), and after that exercise as much patience as possible - unless you want to take a break from the game while others work out the best approaches, the 'ideal' will be to play with just one captain, using him/her/it on multiple ships. BTW depending on what's in your port (and this will be of most use to whales), one of the HSF captains might be a good one to pick: they aren't 'specials' and they work on more ships than anyone else i.e. their own nation, plus any other HSF premiums you may have.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Happy New Year Everyone!

In case anyone has missed it, a year of premium time is available for half price in both the Armory [sic] and the premium shop (33.70 UKP in the latter). This, naturally, assumes that anyone has sufficient delusional optimism to think that the game will still be playable in twelve months' time (captain rework, submarines etc.), but anyway...

It wasn't entirely easy, but getting a butt-load of Free XP from some crates a while ago contributed...! (By 'run out' I mean got down to single figures millions).

The Free XP, coal, and doubloons that you occasionally get are quite worthwhile; even the less impressive cammo can be sold for silver (which helps if you recently blew all your silver reserves on high tier ships <looks sheepish>)...

Whilst CVs shouldn't be allowed anywhere near small map modes, I have noticed something a bit odd in the games I've played so far (small data set though): I've encountered a few CVs now that struggled to stay hidden - I even gunned down a Lexington (?) in my Cossack earlier today, without being horribly out of position. Is it possible that maps have been picked that are harder to hide CVs in, or did I just meet a couple of idiots people who are a bit more 'CVly challenged'? BTW this was in Bronze, so that might answer the question...

If you aren't particularly stoked for anything at the moment, there's no harm in saving it; besides seeing what damage the rework does, there will probably be one or two interesting new things along at some point (to replace the soon-to-be-removed ships). If it doesn't *have* to be a T10, Neustrashimy (on the basis of only a few games, admittedly) is pretty good, and - as a full premium - an excellent silver earner.

I think she's hilarious in Coop (and gloriously effective for missions in that mode), but my results in proper modes are more disastrous than a very disastrous thing. My suspicion is that she's quite worthwhile if you're good with the 'glue the fire button down' approach to DD play, but very hard to do well with otherwise.

This was my logic too, although it helped that I did actually want Strasbourg anyway (the usual toccata and fugue on the theme of "she's a real ship and everything", plus she'll be handy for Narai too). For me, I'm not sure I'll be able to play enough in the window between completing Strasbourg and the campaigns finishing to get the second one done, and this way I can potter through it at my leisure whilst giving Ranked a lash and/or snowflaking.

Alas, no. I did think about not bothering to remind people at all, but thought that there may still be a few souls about whose cynicism vis-a-vis WG has yet to reach my levels. These sorts of offers have tended to get pulled quite quickly in the past... If WG do want to pay me, they could most usefully do so for fixing their appalling marketing copy; I could produce English copy for things like BF crates and Satan boxes that reduced complaints by at least 75% in about five minutes. Without trying very hard. With a hangover of such epic proportions that it could be clearly observed from Pluto.

I took the view that "it's free silver - yay!", plus I like having T5 permaflage, as it saves wasting a decent consumable one when snowflaking or whatever. Some lucky souls may even get a ship from the Satan boxes you get too... A couple of my examples of the ships in question only had three pointers on (probably from re-buying them for previous snowflake events), so a few of the captains came in handy too, as long as my sanity can cope with the 'jolly' voiceover...! Mind you, the missions are pretty easy, so I wasn't expecting towering splendour, in terms of rewards.

It's not quite that bad: At time of writing, we have another 21 days until both campaigns vanish (although that could easily be 20 days, given how WG tend to count days).

I agree with you, but I've gone and done it anyway; I strongly suspect that this will be me covered until the end of my time playing the game though. I hope I'm wrong, but have a nasty feeling I'm not.

Best guess: it's the premium time offer; if you view that section, I imagine it'll go away.

No, but you do have to bag your free Strasbourg through the relevant campaign first; of course, each section of the Strasbourg campaign opens up over time (one per week; the second opened a day or two ago), so you won't have a huge amount of time to complete the Ships and Fates campaign. On the up-side, the latter is fairly easy, and - as @BMARC_ alludes to - you can repeat tasks to get enough stars (you pretty much have to, unless you have Hizen, and possibly even then - I don't recall).

Because the league was set up for an extended period of time, not just for right now. WG like to give us targets to grind (or spend money) for. Bwahahahahaha! I have one request: please be on the opposing team. There is no such thing; the T10 coal DDs are - at the moment - 'all' a bit weird and/or specialist. I keep hoping we'll get a mainstream T10 DD for coal, but no luck so far. If you actually want to compete in T10 Ranked (or Clans), you're far better off with something like Daring, assuming you played all the way up the tiers to get her (if you just buy your way, you'll get a kicking). At T10, that's Shima, with the 20 km torps; if you're going to run those, please see my request a few lines earlier. DDs with good cammo can be highly effective, but mainly because they allow you to get closer; if you want reliable hits with torps, long range spamming is not the way to go about it. The only people you'll generally hit at long range are straightlining idiots, who aren't usually much of a threat to your team anyway.