Verblonde

This is pretty much my thought too, with the added observation that it's earlier in the year than usual for my first "great, something to inevitably get through before I get a drop I actually want next Xmas..." Perhaps this thing has some non-obvious merit that I'm unaware of?

If it follows the template set by the present BP, it'll be one of the new RN submarines. No money for WG from me, if that's the case...

Pretty high, I imagine. The acid test will be the one after: if enough people do as you hypothesise, and are disappointed, then - one might imagine - the income from the next iteration will drop. Mind you, if I guess the end reward of the next one right, I won't be touching it with a ten-foot barge-pole and that won't be down to disappointment this time around (the latest is poorer value than the previous ones, for me, but still useful enough. Just.)...

For me it is - kinda - as I dislike playing Colorado intensely (doubly so since Narai went T8, and I retreated from Randoms), doing the BP gets me the T8 hybrid thing without my having to use up free xp or - crucially - do anything as ghastly as play Colorado. For more sensible folk, it probably isn't.

So, the aim appears to be: hope that people got sufficiently 'trained' by the first couple of BPs to think that certain things are included, and then make it comparatively hard for them to realise when they're subsequently excluded, so getting more money for less in return? Personally, I don't really care about the free equipment dismount (it was merely a 'nice to have'), but this making people hunt for changes (generally for the worse) in different iterations of - ostensibly - the same thing is shady.

Not really the same thing, but WG did do this a while back (some incompetent Googling suggest that the name - in Gaelic - is for St. Patrick's day 2017):

Quick question for those who upgraded right at the end in previous months: if you buy whatever the very top level pass is called, you get a bonus on coal/steel/RP earnings from whatever source (5%) amongst other things; does that get applied retrospectively as well? For example, if I earn 100 steel this week, and then get the super-duper pass next week, will I get the extra 5 steel from this week's earnings as well? Incidentally, am I misremembering, or did previous iterations of the pass include free equipment dismount (or was I getting that for something else?)? The present one doesn't.

I'm taking part in this one, as I assume the T8 hybrid will branch off from Colorado, and I *really* don't want to ever play that hunk of junk more than I have to (for snowflakes etc.). Yeah I know - no moral fibre! Besides that, I can always use the steel, and coal (to a lesser extent). Presumably, this 'early access ship as the final reward' thing will continue, and - if memory serves - that means the next one will be British submarines, at which point my wallet slams resoundingly closed.

This. Smaland isn't really worth her original 2 million price tag (and she's probably OP in the right hands), making Hayate - the 'other' 2 million ship - *definitely* not worth it... I like Hayate (not that I play her against real people really - she needs to be sub-6km sneaky IMO to be worthwhile), but she's absolutely not worth her free xp price!

Whilst I agree with the 'play something else' sentiment (although my 'something else' does include submarine-free modes/Coop), thank you for posting - that'll be most useful information for those prepared to tolerate submarines.

That's basically my issue with Hayate too - she's not nearly sneaky enough for my tastes... Worthwhile/fun for Coop, but I'd almost always pick something else for Clans or Ranked.

She ought to be about the same as Marceau etc., surely? Mind you, of the two, Marceau is almost certainly better value for the coal (not that I can play her well)...

I still can't decide if Benham is OP or not (or if I'm just doing it wrong - good chance); detection distance is okay, torps are pretty monstrous, but I struggle to influence the game as much as I would in something that's a better DD hunter. It's probably just me being rubbish; far better players than me seem to be consistent that she's OP... At my (low) level of competence, killing DDs tends to win battles more than making fatties' lives miserable.

Probably just echoing others, but it looks an awful lot like the OP simply has a problem with ships that don't play in a similar way to the norm. Black - for example - has radar which can be quite nasty if the Black user knows how to make use of it, and the opposition doesn't know how to mitigate it, Tromp has her air-drop, Sherman her smoke/dakka (and lousy torps), and so on. This used to be (and still is against a typical 45% player) the thing with Lo Yang: the cruiser sonar, combined with smoke, and decent dakka is pretty fearsome, yet most experienced players know how to deal with it. So, the instinct the first time you meet a Lo Yang may be to scream 'waaaaah - OP!', but she really isn't once you take the time to work out how to deal with her. There really are very few OP premiums in the game (you can make a case for one or two discontinued ones, although mine may be broke - I have a higher WR in the relevant tech tree T5 than I do in Kami), but there are quite a few which may seem it if the opposition don't know how to deal with their particular foibles (in my experience, often things to do with vision control).

Ah! I hadn't noticed that distinction. Thanks for the correction!

I'm working, so can't double-check, but I think you can get at it via the captains log bit of the in-game drop-down from your account name (upper left of the port screen); I think there's a 'ships' sub-section and all the premiums and rare (and 'other') ships are in there...

Presumably, the issue is that - for a decent player in the right ship - that would mean a dramatic increase in potential rewards. WG have a major hard-on for Randoms, and they want to avoid any player exodus which might happen if the potential rewards for Coop increased...

True, but not for the better lately. For example. Endless new things are not an improvement if the quality of the game suffers; I have - I think - all of those new ships you list on my main account, yet the amount of time (and, more importantly to you, money) I'm spending in the game has cratered. The reason for this is simple: recent changes (of the submersible variety) have made Randoms drastically worse than they used to be, so I've stopped playing the main game mode. If recent additions had improved the game, the reverse would have been true.

I fear you may be being rather optimistic with this wish: this has been a complaint for pretty much the entire time I've been visiting the forum, and I'm not sure there is much will at WG to do anything about it. I'm not even certain there is much that *can* be done; as mentioned by others, the bulk of the player base are not playing the game with the same motivations as most of the hard-core forum folk. It's the perennial question of 'small game with skilled and dedicated player-base' or 'big and lucrative game with largely clueless player-base'; the latter results in far more trips to Madam Olga's, so no prizes for guessing which direction WG go in...

I'm another vote for Black, despite the whole 'T9 is now the red-headed step-child' thing; bonus points if you've unlocked the alternative paintjobs for the US DDs - the alt for Black doesn't have the 'shoot me here' markers for the fire locations...

Don't forget everyone's favourite and entirely non-controversial BB - Yukon...! (Had to look it up, and it turns out I forgot Mysore as well, not to mention a couple of upcoming new ones)

FWIW I collected the final non-Santa reward in a browser window (Firefox) this morning. At that point, I couldn't collect the final Santa captain reward. A quick page refresh, and *then* I could. Just in case this helps anyone.

Regardless of what *can* be done, I don't think much *will* be done: it's counter to WG's financial interests to try and improve the quality of the player base: I'm not good at the game; I was merely 'average' (and only barely) when I withdrew from Randoms, and it took - in gaming terms - a long time, and was (comparatively-speaking) a lot of work to get there. I could have probably made my life easier by not playing as wide a range of ships, but my low boredom threshold precluded that. If we take me - and my 'average' standard - as a lowish minimum aspiration for quality (I wasn't even winning half the time overall), and the time/effort it took me to get there as similarly average then we see why WG won't be keen to try and nudge people in a similar direction: it's too much work/time for most punters, and if they push the bulk of people too hard in that direction, the bulk will give up (and, crucially from WG's perspective, stop spending). Basically - IMO - WG had a choice: either a niche game with a small number of better dedicated players, or a much more popular game where the bulk of players suck (but which also generates a lot more money); I imagine we all see which one they chose.

If you haven't already, it's worth familiarising yourself with some of the details of how the game economy works, and what the key reward drivers are (if you find yourself short of silver in particular). The wiki is a good place to start: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Economy The key thing though, that may not be obvious, is that damage is the most important driver of rewards, and - more specifically - relative damage. What you're really after, if you want to maximise earnings, is not so much big damage numbers but high % damage numbers. What that means is, for instance, that doing 1,000 hp of damage to something small (like a DD) will be more rewarded than doing an identical amount of damage to something bigger (like a BB). Happily, this tends to coincide with the order in which you should be - all things being equal - blowing the enemy team up in. Other than that, as people have already mentioned, the game is designed to get economically harder as you go up the tiers; WG want you to spend money, and the economics of T8+ are designed to encourage it. If you do want to spend money on the game, the best place to start is premium time - that makes life a lot easier as it works on all battles played (whereas things like premium ships only work when you play those actual ships, obviously). Premium time is generally cheaper when bought in larger lumps, *but* bear in mind it runs down even when you aren't playing so it's a bad idea - say - to buy it just before you go on a couple of weeks of off-grid holiday...

Ah, there's nothing like a proportional and rational response after lunch...