Verblonde

Probably, but it would be vaguely useful to know whether to take the OP even remotely seriously or not.

This is what I tend to do; I found one yesterday that I hadn't done from the last free respec - whenever that was; however many weeks/months ago. Suspect the anniversary snowflake thing might show up a few others...

I suspect the daft names for the various skills is going to cause quite a lot of confusion; presumably, WG think not giving the skills more descriptive (and consistent between classes) names isn't sufficiently 'cool'....

That would make a lot of sense. Nope. You may wish to re-read what I said, only carefully. Like any company, WG don't confine themselves to a single marketing strand; they have many. Lessor? You're a landlord/owner of other leased product? I don't see the relevance... Still, thank you for drawing a new word to my attention (that I probably should have known already).

I have to ask: are you drunk? Assuming not, there is no inconsistency in my positions: WG make a product; what they do with it is entirely up to them. If they wish to bribe people (via rewards, missions etc.) to do certain things that they perceive will help their product, then they can. Nothing says anyone *has* to play ball; it's an individual choice to participate or not. With these annual rewards (which are hardly a new thing, so anyone half awake shouldn't be surprised) they have chosen to reward those who grind ships to T10 i.e. those who have spent time (or money, or some combination of the two) on the game. Up to them, and knowing this, it's up to players to decide which ships they want to acquire (as others have said, it's not like you have to play your T10s once you have them, except to knock the 'snowflake' off). It is sensible to reward both paying and non paying customers alike in this particular instance as - all together now - no freeloaders, no server population. As to rewarding those who pay up, WG *do* - I've repeatedly got lots and lots of rewards, via various means, as a direct result of having spent money on premium ships; this particular occasion won't be one of them (unless you count a butt-load of dragon flags that the freeloaders won't get because most premium ships aren't available for free), and would you like to know how much this bothers me - not one iota, for the simple reasons that a) I'm not wildly self-centred and b) I'm pretty confident that I'll rake in the extra rewards over and over again in the future (Christmas, for a start). Not of these things is contradictory; they are merely different aspects of running a f2p game.

Unless I'm missing something, the vast majority of 'manly' skills belong to BBs only; essentially nada for the cruisers.

No freeloaders, no server population, and we whales lose people to play with. There are more ways to contribute to the game than merely throwing money at it...

Okay, WG go mad and decide that they don't want to encourage people to grind to T10 (and so kill a revenue stream, which is *really* sensible for a business) any more, and give people SCs in proportion to how many games they've played - you would still get a third the SCs that I would (erring on the side of generosity - the gap is actually a bit bigger). Nothing changes - the newbie still gets less than the old lag. There is absolutely nothing wrong with WG bribing people to play how they want them to play - it's their product; it's just a matter of the players deciding if they accept the bribe, or want to do something else instead.

Bugger - there goes my 'for laughs' Azuma secondary build...

Me! Quite a few of my favourite DDs ought to up-tier reasonably well; quite apart from that, blasting T8s in a T5 should net quite worthwhile rewards. Of course, that assumes the mode counts for missions etc.

Unhide your stats and people will know how much weight to give your view and/or offer advice...

I'm not sure they need to be chopped entirely; just apply the hardest of hard caps of one CV per game and damn the wait times for the CVs. That's effectively what you have in the T6 Ops already...

One thought that occurs: the whole 'BB skills' and 'cruiser skills' thing apropos the various supercruisers - perhaps this is a way of nerfing things like Alaska and Stalingrad without having to give people their money back (assuming it ends up that you'll now have to run pure cruiser captains in them)? It's a pity that Graf Spee will get rogered at the same time - I rather like playing a manly GS in Ops...

Not just any signals, of course - some of them are useful. If you listen carefully, you can hear the gentle sounds of the earliest stages of an avalanche of ramming flags...! On the bright side, T8-9 get dragon flags, and they're actually useful. Anyway, back to the argument about whether T10 ship owners are being unfairly rewarded for their efforts....

It is, but the whole how quickly I need to react, and in what ways is different and I struggle to not think like a DD, so need all the help I can get in a fatty. I should - at some point - take the time the learn to BB properly, but lack the motivation...

Oh come on auto-censor - this is hardly obscenity. Gordon Bennett!

<mockers gods [edited] up their ears>

I'm not sure about that: this new version is better for bimbos like me who never took the old because it didn't fire at anything that you didn't actively designate; plus, as someone on another thread pointed out, the 'Straight A' skill might be quite impudent: besides increasing the rof for the secondaries, it does it for the main guns as well - provided something is in range of the former. Besides which, at this point they aren't mentioning anything about tiers - if I remember correctly, the current Man Secs is pretty hopeless for lower tier ships, so this new one might make for some lower tier hilarity. Might make PEF more fun, for a start?

This looks like it might be fun for brawling BBs:

It looks like it drops quite dramatically:

My 'body memory' and reactions are all tuned for DDs; I don't play BBs enough to get sharp enough situational awareness. As I think I said earlier, my semi-manly builds are mainly designed for fun in Coop; they are merely 'not entirely disastrous' for PvP, and if I ever needed to take the latter extremely seriously, I'd take a tank captain. Of course; why would I build a captain for anyone else's enjoyment? Quite. This'll all become entirely moot soon though....

I'm mostly looking at DDs at the moment, but: 1 Point 'AA Gunner' is worthless: +1 to flak clouds. Nothing for 2 points. 3 point 'Main battery and AA specialist' does the same as BFT (+10% continuous AA damage); less of a slam dunk than BFT as the boost to surface dakka is halved by comparison. 3 point (now) 'Adrenaline Rush': Reload time of all armaments per 1% HP lost -0.2% and AA continuous damage per 1% HP lost +0.2%. 4 point 'Main battery and AA Expert' is probably worthless for AA as it boosts shell explosion damage by 15%. I'm assuming that - as now - flak boosting is largely worthless. BTW I just got a message that the spreadsheet has been moved to the owner's trash, so I'm guessing a new one may be on the way.

I suspect the class division may be WG realising that the rather splendid feature (compared to WOT) of being able to use captains in any ship type was losing them revenue. On the other hand, I'm not sure how to read this: It could possibly be interpreted as meaning that, say, a ten point commander could assign ten points to each of the main classes' sections independently of each other; if that's the case, you essentially have four captains in one. I'm not sure why WG would be this generous though, unless they believe they are losing premium ship sales because of a lack of captain availability? This is one of those occasions where it would be really helpful if WG's writers of English copy were a bit better at it! Oh well, no doubt things will change a lot over the next few months, so it's probably too early to get too over-excited...

This is interesting (for DDs): If I read it right, the - kind of - new BFT works on all DD main guns, rather than just the small ones (some KM DDs punch the air); however, the effect on smaller guns, compared to BFT is halved (everything else sulks).