Verblonde

Mine both mainly live in Coop, due to a distressing shortage of being DDs, apart from the recent 'Pommern' Ranked season, where GA was glorious. I personally would pick GA first: She's a bit more unusual, and fun, being a secondary-orientated BB (and the engine boost is glorious). She's the better earner. Thunderer is basically the same play-style (at least to a non-BB connoisseur) as several other things. From a practical perspective, the main thing Thunderer has going for her is that she's T10, and - as such - eligible for the bulk of competitive events. Whether or not that matters to you will depend on preference, and which other things you already have.

I picked Salem first, partly because she's cosplay Graf Spee, and partly because I was years away from getting Des Memes. I'm rubbish in both, but - playing mostly DDs - I have a lot more respect for Salem, mainly due to the radar and superior heal (the latter making it harder to kill off, to eliminate said radar). Salem also has the benefit of being real, if you care about such things.

I did wonder how long that might take...!

Because WOWS is fundamentally still a good game, at least IMO, and I enjoy playing. WG may be unprincipled Excessive Emulators of Onan, but their product is fun for me, and I have enough premium content now that I can pick and choose what - if anything - I want to buy into.

And this bottom DD player says she's worth it too!

In amongst all the Makarov-related brouhaha, we may have lost sight of the most important question that needs - nay, demands - to be asked. Whilst I agree that questions such as 'pitchforks or torches' are important, along with 'how does whoever came up with all this sleep at night/are they more or less worthy to live on the gods' clean earth than a liver fluke', I don't believe anyone has asked the crucial one yet. I, naturally, refer to 'Makarov: what colour should it be?'. I'm rather partial to the elegant simplicity of 'gimp black' myself, but I'm open to suggestions:

<nods sagely> Ah, I see you are a scholar in the physical sciences...? 🧐

You misunderstand me: this is no mistake. This marketing blurb is a cynical attempt to encourage people to believe that they will get something that they either won't or is breathtakingly unlikely. The blithering incompetency comes in with the implementation of this. If these copy-writers were any good, they would come up with text that induces a similar set of behaviours, but without triggering all this uproar/bad PR.

This. I've lost track now of how many times a perfectly serviceable promotional activity (which is what all this stuff basically is after all) has been turned into a PR disaster for WG by blithering incompetents writing the English language copy.

Whilst I strongly feel that the way WG presented the boxes, with regard to what you're likely to get from them, is an utter Richard move (entirely justifying the outrage that we're seeing), it's a little strong to say that only bad ships are on the shortlist. If you'll permit me to elaborate: According to the Reddit thread we've all seen, the shortlists are as follows. Gift Shortlist (WIP) Tier 6 British cruiser London Tier 6 French cruiser De Grasse (?) Tier 5 European battleship Viribus Unitis Big Gift Shortlist Tier 6 Soviet cruiser Makarov (common) Tier 7 US battleship California Tier 8 European destroyer Orkan Mega Shortlist Tier 6 Italian cruiser Duca D'aosta (common) Tier 7 Japanese destroyer Yuudachi (common) Tier 8 British battleship Vanguard Tier 8 Soviet cruiser Ochakov We'll all have our own opinions on these ships, based on personal experience and preferences (for example, the only Big Gift ship I view as dross is Cali), but I think a reasonable description of the bulk of ships on the short-lists is 'meh'. What I mean by that is, if one reads the entire long-list of ship possibilities from the boxes, there are quite a few (mostly T5) where the value proposition is noticeably worse than most of the short list ships (yeah, I know VU is in there, but apart from her). The short list approach makes it harder to get these 'lowest value' drops as well. Whilst I should emphasise that I'm not defending what WG have done with this year's boxes (especially the marketing), I can see why they've done what they've done - imagine the uproar if the initial box opening threads were full of people getting lots of T5 ships...

My spending habits will probably remain much as they were, *but* I'm one of the few for whom the Xmas crates work well, and my general spend overall is lower than it was anyway (I got about 2/3 the crates for money that I did last year). This crates business won't change how I play either, as it doesn't touch the gameplay (using the word generously at times, including my own!). Things like subs and the captain rework may or may not mess up my playing, but they aren't connected to the crates fiasco. What will change is the advice I give people, especially newcomers! Assuming WG continue to be Richards about this (apparently they'll be bugging the Devs on Monday), I will urge anyone who doesn't have a port like mine to avoid Xmas boxes like the plague (unless they actively want whatever is on the short list - to be fair, some of the options were quite good IMO)

I feel a bit sorry for the moderator on the stream; they've clearly been told to remove all references to Makarov, and appear to be well on the way to RSI... I normally don't bother much with Twitch, but the comments section on this one is pure gold (at least in the time it takes for the weary moderator to delete half the messages)! I do wonder what the Verizon people make of it though.

It's the weekend and the people with enough clout at WG to authorise the level of actions needed to actually fix all this are - presumably - knee-deep in a crate-funded bender of truly biblical proportions at Madam Olga's Esteemed House of Vodka and Negotiable Affection...?

I just dropped into Twitch for the potential rewards; the comments section is hilarious - I'd guess that 90% is a combination of Makarov/crates comments and moaning about the camera... It almost feels like a privilege to be able to witness this level of PR balls-up...

That provides quite a dramatic contrast between WG's current marketing copy, and what they used to do. I imagine they would have had very little trouble this year, if they'd done something similar to what they did back in 2017...

You can make the case that whales are more likely to be happy with their crate loot: if you had all the crappy options already, you were much more likely to get good stuff. One aspect of all this that makes me roll my eyes at WG (again) is that - if they were competent - they could have actually spun the short-lists as a good thing; when we read the general list of ships that can drop from crates we tend to focus on the interesting stuff (the T9s, and various rarities, especially), but we may forget the 'bottom' of the list: V Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya V Viribus Unitis V Genova V Texas V Kirov V Mikoyan V Exeter V Yahagi V Marblehead Lima V Marblehead V Murmansk V Krasny Krym V Hill V Siroco V Okhotnik If you hadn't been sacrificing enough virgins to the volcano gods, you could spend a lot on the bigger crates and still get only ships from this lot; the short-lists reduce (or even eliminate) that possibility; if WG had focused on that as well as being honest that - at the same time - your actual chance of getting the best things in the initial crates is (apparently) zero, they might have avoided much of this year's (apparently now traditional) PR chicken-up spectacular.

Over a large enough sample size, the drop rate for the middle-sized crates appears to be *roughly* one in ten for *a* ship. However, it is looking increasingly hard to argue against the idea that this year's crates are rigged: if you don't have them already, the first few ships will be from a very restricted list (see the thread that @rage1750 linked to above). If you happen to want the ships on this list, great, but otherwise the crates appear to be an unwise buy this year. The only exception is if - like me - you had all the dubious premiums already, so making it impossible for any ship that did drop to not be at least vaguely desirable

Whilst I'm not unhappy with what I got from the containers I bought personally (mainly because I had almost all the dross already), I find it curious that - as far as I can tell - there hasn't been a peep out of anyone at WG even trying to refute the 'short list' scandal (for want of a better word). At the moment, by their silence, WG appear to be confirming the supposition that initial ship drops actually had no (or almost no) chance of getting something that wasn't on the short list. Would someone from WG care to issue an official statement?

I ticked 'yes', but it would be more accurate to say 'maybe': I bought three batches of 20 crates; the first 40 were the medium ones, and the last 20 were the largest ones. I opened them individually in sequence (mainly so I could record the data for the survey elsewhere on the forum). The ships from the medium crates went in the order: Cali, Champers, Cheshire, Poltava, and Indomitable (so, Cali first, and I had all the other 'short list' ships already). From the large crates: Neustrashimy, Ochakov, and Agir (so, Ochakov not first, and I had all the other 'short list' ships already). These new ships meant I actually had every ship on the complete list (yeah, I know, I know...), so the number of possibilities for me is limited - contrary to something I implied on another thread (I thought there were still a couple of T7-8ish ships I was missing, but they obviously didn't make the list). So, whether I conform to the 'short list' theory depends on how containers are rolled when you buy multiples; the medium ones do conform (in as much as it's possible with limited possibilities); the large ones don't if the ships are rolled in sequence, but still might if they are all rolled in advance of opening the first one (when you buy multiples at once)... I don't believe my data disproves the theory, but it doesn't unequivocally support it either.

I always assumed that WG had different 'tiers' of ships, based on things like game tier, rare or not, and so on; I also assumed that there would be a set of ships that were a lot more likely to drop than the others (it's why I rarely passed up a low tier premium in the past). What I didn't think was that WG were sufficiently foolish to make the probabilities stupidly loaded in favour of the 'undesirables', to the degree that it becomes extremely obvious, in a 'PR disaster' sort of way. IMO what this means is that: Sales will drop a bit, but not a lot, this year (most people will buy before they hear of this issue). Next year, *all* the advice will include strong wording to be very aware of this issue; how much that impacts sales will depend on how many people visit the forum... An interesting question to me - as a recovering e-commerce retailer - is what do WG need to do to fix this issue (if they even care)? I can't think of much that would do the job without them having to be spectacularly generous (sufficient bribery usually does the job)...

If it helps people: This is the sequence in which I received ships from the medium crates: Cali, Champers, Cheshire (the horror!), Poltava, and Indomitable. I had both Makarov and Orkan already. For the Mega Whopper crates: Neustrashimy, Ochakov, and Agir. I had Duca, Yuudachi, and Vanguard already. I was pleasantly surprised that my drops didn't force me to go through all the lower tier options before getting the T9s; also, getting Neustrashimy first indicates that the short list isn't entirely unavoidable, but rather a 'loading' of probabilities. I should emphasise for anyone who hasn't read all my posts on the subject, that I have far too many premiums already, so my chances of getting good stuff from Xmas crates are much better than average...

That's interesting: might explain why I got California (which I didn't especially want), and Ochakov (which I did); I had the others already.

I'm sure it is simply the shared joy of another's good fortune...! I haven't actually tested Cheshire yet (I gave some of my other loot a run-out first); I have to do some work first, but I'm sure - like the finest wine - the experience will be all the better for the anticipation!

This illustrates the other thing to be aware of: your chances of getting a particular individual ship are vanishingly small, unless you have all (or almost all) of the alternatives already. In other words, the Xmas crates tend to be far better value - from a ships perspective - if you have lots of premium ships already (and, ideally, all the low tier ones).

The problem with the various gambling boxes is that you need to buy a relatively large quantity to avoid the vagaries of RNG; over many boxes, the drop rates appear to be about the same this year, given the limited data so far. That said, the general feeling is that the medium sized boxes are probably the best value (fwiw I got 5 ships out of 40 boxes this year, which is within spitting distance of the previously estimated 1-in-10 chance of a ship)... (Obviously, this assumes you don't disapprove of these boxes on principle, and you're interested in getting *a* ship, rather than a specific one.)