Verblonde

Thank you!

I finally got onto the final part of the penultimate set of missions last night, so just some xp grinding to do, and then break out Gallant and British cruisers, to try and get the torp hits... I have to say, I'm not exactly shivering in antici.......pation at this point in proceedings.

Why should playing for fun, and playing to win, be mutually exclusive? If this game wasn't fun, I wouldn't play it; equally, I'm damned if I'm not going to try to win (even if, at my level of competence, that can present a challenge)!

This sort of thing is exactly what I'd like to see more of... (I'm out of plus ones for the day, alas)

Many thanks - I'd been cheerfully shooting DDs in my BBs; I was concerned I was doing it wrong...

I was wondering about DDs; would I guess correctly that the reason they weren't mentioned before is that they're simply harder to hit, or is there more to it than that?

I know - I'm clearly delusional (and, indeed, fairly new here)! I play WOT a lot, so should know better... FWIW the games where I tend to suck least are almost always the ones where someone indicates clearly what they want from their team-mates, and what they intend doing, from the off. It does get harder once battle is joined to stay coordinated though... Please do keep trying: those efforts are very much appreciated by at least some elements of the potato community!

Hey, I'm (occasionally) an optimist...!

Perhaps some of us will; enough to make a positive difference...?

But there are in randoms, which is the alternative to ranked; the relevance of the remark being (presumably) that there are several good reasons why potatoes play ranked, rather than random.

Idiot reporting for duty! I've been driving a Tirpitz quite a bit, ten point captain only (actually, 11 now, I think), whole lot set up mainly for a mixture of survivability and secondaries. Personally, I'm trying to balance the need to get reasonably close to the foe, to make use of those secondaries (and torps if the opposition does something silly), with the need to not be first thing the enemy sees and so die horribly in the first minute. The key difficulty is that I don't have the experience yet to be able to do this reliably; it would be a lot easier if people communicated what they were up to in chat more often and more effectively - for example, if most of one's team intend to hide and snipe (which is fine), one has to play very differently to when they will let you be the point of the spear and provide support while you get close, hopefully tanking some damage in the process. I'd suggest talking to your idiots, tell them clearly what you're up to (when possible - don't get sunk because you're too busy typing), and provide polite suggestions as to what they should be doing - personally, I'll listen when people are polite, and do whatever the hell I want when people aren't. We idiots are a fact of life in Ranked; use us to your advantage - tell us what you would like us to be doing ("head for x, hide behind island y until z happens and then...etc"); don't stay silent until we've already done something stupid and *then* waste time telling us what idiots we are. I suspect most of us are fully aware we're tubers; everyone starts off that way, after all. If you're a good player, no false modesty - tell us what you want.

Thank you both! :)

Question for the better players: if one is actually trying to kill turrets, what's the approved methodology? My normal approach when shooting at BBs is (if possible) to aim at their citadel with AP; for turrets, do I stick with AP, or go with HE instead (in general). I got my first ever Dreadnought this weekend (in a DD, of all things), but have been struggling mightily with the 'blow up three turrets' thing...

This is now a key reason I play Ranked - it's a quicker (=shorter queues at the moment) way to get a T8 game at the times I can play; it's also arguably a better mode than regular randoms for those of us who are new to T8, for the simple reason it's much easier to keep track of 14-odd ships than 30. Having hit Rank 15, I would probably have dropped out of Ranked almost entirely if there were 7v7 randoms available...

Like that wouldn't be roundly and royally abused... I do feel, especially after this weekend, that something needs to be adjusted in Ranked, to make it less frustrating - especially for the good players. Perhaps something in the way of awarding stars for any player on either side that plays well; perhaps this could be judged in terms of getting x% of your team's total damage/spotting damage. Maybe, on the winning side, you should have to get above a fairly low floor to get your star; for the losing side, you have a higher floor that also gets you a star, and still lose stars on a loss, if you get below that floor? The key problem, as I see it, is that people like me (i.e. potatoes) can easily bugger up a game for a good player; why should that good player suffer because they got the bad luck to get me on their side? Banning people like me from Ranked altogether would shrink the player pool too much (plus would pi$$ too many people off), but there should be some sort of mechanic to at least mitigate the harm we can do to better players' progression.

So, these 'interesting' camos can actually alter the fabric of the ship (at least to look at)? Not keen on that idea...

I've been mostly playing Tirpitz in Ranked, as it seems to be the ship I have where I can be least useless to my team (at the very least, I can be a bit of a damage sponge). I'm tooled up for secondaries mainly, I think, but what seems to get me killed most commonly is getting focused down when my team decides the sensible plan is to snipe from range, and I don't notice in time (entirely my fault - not a rant at others!) - it's not usually CVs. Maybe I'm not being exposed to too many Big Es (Biggies?) as I'm still only Rank 15 or so, and they get more prevalent higher up?

That was partly what prompted my question: *if* newbies are having a depressing effect on the stats of premiums, imagine what Alabama might be doing without us (well, not me, in this case - I've only ventured out once in mine so far)?!

My point about the tier thing was that newbies are more likely to have a fully researched/equipped ship at the lower tiers; that goes double if they haven't bought any premiums yet. In my own case, the highest tier silver ship I have is T7 (Fiji); okay, I'm not rushing up the tiers, but that sort of thing can't be that uncommon (especially amongst the recent influx of Steam players). I doubt that different tiers for different ranks would eliminate the problem, but I do think it might reduce it a bit (bear in mind that last ranked season, the game was newer, so perhaps more people with a lack of appropriate fully tooled-up ships?); at the very least, it might give people a chance to realise what they were doing wrong and remedy it. Incidentally, the suggested 'minimum requirements' list is pretty much what I've been using as my "don't even think about it" benchmark in all respects in terms of which ships I would personally use for ranked...

What one earth is that enormous cylinder meant to be? It doesn't appear in the images at the start of this thread...? Am I being thick?

I'd be interested to hear suggestions too; presumably, they'll be relevant to countering GZ too?

(Emphasis added) - Ranked is something new and interesting, so it's bound to attract people, including the less competent. - Ranked is arguably a less hostile environment for such people than regular randoms - fewer ships to keep track of, and no higher tiers than you. - I, at least, have found it easier to get some of the recent missions done in ranked than in randoms (although that may be partly due to the times of day I can play). As I've said before, I favour having different tiers of ranked; a lower (T6?) tier would be a good place for we less capable players to start; by the time we got to T8, one might hope a lot of the worst cluelessness would have been weeded out, one way or another. Someone made a good suggestion earlier: have lower ranks played at T6, middle ranks at T8, and the highest at T10 - that would be a good compromise, and might also reduce the number of ill-equipped ships encountered (I'm assuming that most under-equipped/stock ships are owned by people who only just got them, and don't have anything fully tooled up yet to enter ranked with)...?

Many thanks - this sort of thing is very useful in my ongoing quest to suck marginally less.

Have your Mouse-Clicking Butler attend to the matter - most effective way to avoid RSI, I find...

Probably a dumb question: how do you know that those two types are doing those particular types of damage? Is it simply inferred because the former has a much lower WR than the latter, or is it something inherent to the two ships that I don't know about, because I'm a newbie?