Verblonde

Nope. I suspect what people are trying to get across will be something about data-sets; I may be spectacularly wrong, but much of what you've written is suggestive of a newer player. If that's the case, there is a limit to how big your data-set is, in terms of what you've personally experienced; this isn't to say that what you've personally seen is a figment of a deluded imagination, but rather that it doesn't encompass the full extent of what happens with CVs in game in their current form over a larger number of battles. Bear in mind that we can only guess at how experienced you are though, in which ships, and in which modes, as - at time of writing - you have hidden stats. I read what he wrote, and there was nothing there that isn't pretty standard usage; I would mention though that WOWS tends to attract a somewhat older and (perhaps) more cerebral type of player a lot of the time - this can mean that you'll encounter people who do use language that is a bit beyond what you'll often see in mainstream use (I once worked with a former magazine editor; I think I recall him saying that most mainstream publications pitch at something like an 8th Grade, in US money, reading level); they aren't generally trying to make anyone feel foolish - it's just how they write. Conversely, we also have quite a few poly-linguists on here too, so one sometimes has to deal with language construction that looks a little odd (and can appear somewhat abrupt) to a native speaker; this is the different between 'give me a glass of water', and 'may I have a glass of water, please?'.

Smaland is a bit of a monster, given the right circumstances, and especially against players who don't take the time to learn about the ships they may be facing; perhaps WG are trying to make life easier for relative newcomers?

Dev Blog (various ships being removed): https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/95

He wasn't belittling you, but rather telling it like it is; you'd do better listening to what the CV experts on here say - it'll help you playing both with and against CVs - and @El2aZeR is one of the very best. Yes it works. If your aim is to lose the battle - clumping your ships tightly together results in giving up map control which is almost always unwise, although I'd be very happy if you do it when you're on the opposing side to me - besides not doing anything against a competent CV, blobs are marvelous targets for my torpedoes. BTW that Shima you mentioned earlier that remains unspotted the entire battle: unless his opponents have an IQ that would make a concussed whelk blush, he's probably doing it wrong - standing off in something like that and just spamming torps from range is another behaviour that loses games.

I suspect that it doesn't really matter much for at least half of the 'wrongly illustrated' CVs, specifically those where the planes aren't what you might refer to as iconic; where the planes are of particular interest (Stukas spring to mind; I suspect quite a few premium CVs were sold on the basis of having Stukas, rather than because of whether they were any good or not), I think WG are on slightly dodgy ground. If I were in charge of this stuff, I would just plonk the WOWS equivalent of 'serving suggestion' on each graphic that shows incorrect aircraft (assuming there isn't budget to get the graphics changed) i.e. a more 'marketing' way of saying "You basically aren't going to get these planes, so tough Paridae!". It's a fairly easy fix, and would reduce the number of annoyed punters who don't visit the forum and so know about it in advance...

So, you advocate 'blobbing', which - amongst other things, spectacularly dumbs down the game (no more clever manouevring) and makes the bulk of DDs worthless (a DD hiding under their allies' AA umbrella is nothing more than a cr4p cruiser)? You appear not to have understood much of why CVs are so problematic: it isn't usually about their striking power (although that doesn't help, most of them aren't OP as such), but rather that their mechanics have the capability to fundamentally break significant aspects of the game, especially on smaller maps. With a CV in the game, there is almost no mystery as to where the bulk of both sides are, which - obviously - reduces scope for skillful play.

Firstly, you aren't penalised if someone reports you for playing poorly as (as several people have pointed out) karma means nothing, and only the misbehaviour in chat option does anything tangible. However, quite a few experienced players might make the case that people who fall into the trap of advancing up the tiers too fast (especially if they've bought a high tier premium too soon) deserve to be reported; in a team game (PvP modes, anyway), it isn't unreasonable to expect your team-mates to take the thing seriously i.e. make the effort to acquire at least the basic skills needed to avoid being a liability to their team. Being able to report such muppets provides a safety valve that may prevent at least some irritated folk from becoming actually toxic.

For no particularly sensible reason beyond time-zones, I've recently started to use my NA account (set up years ago for WOT), so I've been getting a sort-of glimpse of the new player experience. It hasn't actually been as bad as one might expect, as - with a low battle count - Randoms are mostly bots, at least up to and including T4. I'm guessing that WG are hoping that new players get sufficiently hooked before they escape from the protective MM to not run screaming for the horizon when they finally encounter the T4 CV plague.

They have done - I refer you to the appalling reaction to the PR business last winter, although I can't remember who it was that made the ill-judged remarks that cause such uproar. I wasn't commenting on that; personally, I only get irritated with incompetent CVs (same as any other class, but it's more noticeable when a CV is a blithering idiot). Not really, at least on here anyway - for the average forumite, the new BBs are very dull; most people have made observations to that effect (plus the few who like them have commented as such) and that's it. Based on what I've seen on the forum, a commercial entity such as WG would need to have ludicrously thin skin to have a sulk over the reception the new BBs have received.

The problem WG have, IMO, is that they (apparently) tend to ignore any feedback that isn't full-on torches and pitchforks, and the community has worked that out. When people believe that polite feedback is worthless, it's understandable that they would jump straight to whatever has worked in the past. Besides which, the players (=customers) don't need to hold themselves to the same standards that a professional seller of stuff (WG in this case) has to; it sucks, but that's the way the world works presently - WG simply can't afford to react in anything other than a measured professional manner, and - no matter how human the staff are - mustn't 'bite' even when provoked.

As others have mentioned, you need to understand how visibility in the game works; along with situational awareness, this is arguably the most important thing to get to grips with if you want to do well. Besides the video that @ThePurpleSmurf posted, the wiki has a useful page on the subject: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Detection If you want to watch how things work in practice, keep an eye on your mini-map (having made sure that it's as large as possible, and displaying as many range circles as you can deal with) and look at what happens as enemies cross your surface detection distance (the 'detected' icon comes on, meaning they can see you; if the icon comes on but you don't see an enemy inside your surface detection circle, then you're spotted by someone you can't see yet, which means something sneakier than you are). Smoke screens behave a bit like islands (that you can shoot through) as far as spotting is concerned; when you dump a screen between you and the enemy, you vanish; when the smoke is no longer between you and the enemy, you become visible again. Make sure you understand how the smoke firing penalty works (short version: the bigger your guns, the further away from the smoke cloud you can be seen if you fire). All this sort of stuff that's happening to you is happening in the same way to/for the enemy. When trying to hit things in smoke, besides following the excellent advice already given, bear in mind that the less hopeless of your targets know this stuff too; for example, I mostly play DDs and keep my attention glued to the detected icon - the moment I go dark (whether through smoke, firing penalty ending, or simply getting behind hard cover), I usually change course and sometimes speed, to throw off anyone who fancies taking a pot-shot at where I would have been if I hadn't changed course. Even a competent smoke-spammer will move around within their smoke, to throw off the aim of people taking speculative shots at them (or use crawling smoke, where applicable).

I'd love to see more of the older warships in game; the key problem - in terms of the likelihood of that happening - is that I imagine it takes about the same amount of effort to produce a T4 ship as a T8 one, and the latter can be sold for a lot more money, plus there are very few missions for the former (reducing its desirability to the non-collectors)...

Ah! I forgot about that one - I filed it as 'useless' from the off and it's slipped my mind since.

+1 - well done, WOWS!

How do you lose 5% concealment? What did I miss? CE stays at a 10% reduction of surface detection distance...

Slightly off-topic, but I wouldn't let the lack of the captain be the deciding factor with regard to whether or not to play the Ikeas - he makes rather less difference than a lot of the other magic captains. Boosted AA is nice, but if you've knocked down 20+ planes already you're probably facing a lower tier CV anyway, making the boost merely 'nice to have'; the torps reload boost generally only kicks in quite late in the battle, so - again - the impact is commonly marginal. The boosted AR is slightly worthwhile (assuming there are no changes in the rework), but even that is a marginal gain, especially on a line of healing DDs. Basically, if you have him - yay - but it's not a killer if you don't.

Use the code that I assume @domen3 sent over; you'll get some freebies right away, but you need to play at least one battle in a T6 ship before you get Warspite. If you keep playing, your recruiter also gets points, which can be converted into rewards for either him, or both of you (containers); bear in mind that if someone recruits lots of people, it may not be hugely apparent who has contributed what to the pot, so I would suggest viewing the latter as a bonus, rather than a certainty.

Ooo, I wonder if there is any scope for trying to persuade as many CV players to do this as possible? It would make life as a DD a lot nicer... Assuming that when a fighter with this 'skill' (for 4 pts?!) is deployed, the patrol circle marker will be noticeably larger, that'll make quite a helpful 'useless CV' marker for intelligence gathering purposes...?

9/16 collected so far, plus 5 duplicates. With four more mission clumps (or whatever WG are calling them this week) still to do, I assume there's a good chance I'll complete it. I imagine I'll only play the ship for snowflakes etc. but it does have one key sterling quality: having it will prevent the damn thing falling out of an Xmas crate; wouldn't want to put off getting Cheshire any longer than necessary....!

Excellent work, OP - thanks! I'm mostly interested in the DD part of proceedings; an initial glance suggests that - for DDs at least - the number of viable builds may well increase slightly, although I think Propulsive (LS) will still be essential for 2 pts, and similarly Enduring (SE) for 3 pts. There are several skills that - I think - can probably be disregarded from the off, such as AA Gunner, and Cautious. Threshing (IFHE) is probably still not worth taking for the vast majority of captains, even thought it's a point cheaper than it was (although the IJN dakka line will be happy to gain a spare captain point). As an enthusiastic Smaland/Orkan driver, the 2 pt Consumables Expert might be worth a look...

I recall a discussion a while ago (of the order of a couple of years ago now) on one of the WOT fora, apropos arty; amongst the usual pro-con fracas someone made the point that arty was the only class that a subset of the player base could actually play, due to factors such as medical conditions (arthritis, missing extremities etc.) and so on. The point made was that 'faster' classes (in WOT that meant everything else) require two fully functioning hands to play effectively, which either made them very hard or ruled them out entirely for some people, with such conditions. If this is indeed the case, and such folk are a large enough part of the customer base, could it be that ships such as the new US BBs have been designed with them in mind? I can't see myself playing the new US BBs (or anything else which does everything so slowly) through choice, but it's possible I'm simply not anywhere near the target audience...

@Curesto - Some suggestions for 'what next?': Join a clan, preferably one that includes people happy to coach you (this will speed up your learning); ideally, you want to be using voice comms for faster feedback (most clans seem to use TS or Discord, but in-game voice comms can be okay). Look for a clan where people use whatever your first language is, and do so fluently, again for reasons of maximising communication efficiency. Play all the classes (BBs, cruisers, DDs and CVs) to at least T4; besides making the game more varied - always a good thing - it will give you a far better handle on what each class can/can't do, and what they're trying to do. It's a reasonable bet, for example, that the bulk of the BBs that you see straightlining in the game have never played any kind of torp boat; as a DD driver, you'll be able to better evade planes if you've previously played them yourself, and so on. Don't confine yourself to Coop only; play some randoms (in a division if you want some moral support), but be mindful that low tier randoms are a very different thing to higher tiers - they're generally more chaotic, more tending towards brawling, and an even higher proportion of players won't have the first idea what they're doing. Randoms generate much higher rewards, in general, but can be harder to do well with (although a lot of BBs can be more effective in randoms as those games often last longer, giving more opportunities to do damage). Focus on getting some good captains for your favourite ships; short to medium term, you need at least 10 points (assuming a sensible build) for anything in the +2 MM bracket and more points are better the higher you go. Your longer term aim - which will take some time - is to get your first 19 pointer; 19 point captains are valuable as they generate elite xp, which can be used to boost any captain, provided you have enough of it. Regarding captains, the previous point relates to how things are now; there is a rework of captain skills in the pipeline. So far, it's still WiP, but it's likely that similar general principles will apply; however, many of the skills are changing/moving/becoming unavailable for certain classes. Also, a 'top' captain looks like being 21 points, rather than 19. Keep an eye out for the free respec that will accompany the launch of the new captain system - that may well be very useful to fix any mistakes you make now vis-a-vis captain builds. Work on understanding how captain builds work, and what your current captains should look like, and be developing towards; there is rarely one 'right' answer, but variations in opinion - you'll need to decide on what works for you, but do expect changes when the rework goes live. Returning to ships, don't rush up the tiers if you're playing against real people; stay at a given tier until you're comfortable with the ship in question, and aren't losing too frequently. The point of the game isn't to get to T10 as fast as possible, but to progress up the tiers at a rate that is complimentary to your rate of learning/skill acquisition/captain development. Read up on how everything works in the wiki: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Warships Regarding the wiki, there is a huge amount of information in there; I suggest focusing on what you need to know e.g. who cares about radar until you hit T5, as that's the lowest tier that will encounter it (and T7 is the lowest tier that gets to use it). Keep asking questions on here - there are plenty of people happy to help newcomers. Be mindful of whose advice you follow, and how closely e.g. my experience is heavily biased towards DDs (against real people); I'm not that good (48% WR overall), but have played a very wide range of ships, just many of them not very often; so, my advice on 'how to be a unicum' is going to be completely useless (which is why I won't offer it), but I'm probably not a bad source on more general pointers. Apply similar logic to everyone else (and be suspicious of anyone with hidden stats in the first instance - some are worth listening to, but some are rather less so).

For money? Probably not, but the same is true of most of the T5 BBs, at least from a pure performance point of view: you are going to be uptiered regularly (because of the protective MM up to T4), making it harder to get consistently good results. Something similar is also true of the T6 premiums too, but at least they can be used in Ops. On the other hand, Okt Rev (as @PeteEarthling points out) is one of very few actually historical BBs that Russia had, so she's worthwhile for the history enthusiasts (that's why I have her, essentially). Since you can get her for coal, I'd suggest using that when you have a suitable amount spare and aren't saving for something better... BTW if you want a T5 premium BB, I would suggest getting the freebie at the end of the current mission chain...

Play the game in whichever way works for you (provided it isn't harming anyone else); just be mindful that there are downsides to being exclusively PvE - it's up to you whether the upsides for you outweigh those downsides. Incidentally, have you unlocked all the game's features yet? The reason I ask is that Randoms in the early stages of one's playing career are heavily populated by bots (I have a recent NA account and it's not uncommon for there to be only one or two real people per side in Randoms) - it's worth taking advantage of that for as long as possible, as you're (I think) getting PvP rewards in an almost PvE environment.

(Excess punctuation removed to give greater impression of sanity) It's three ships (Kami, Kami R, and Fujin). Why? Very, very easy to answer: and both cost money... For example, putting Fujin in last year's Xmas crates encouraged me to spend more money than I might have otherwise...