Crysantos

That's not true though - even at rank 7 you get to fight a lot of rank 11 people, too. Just fyi.

I think that's the problem and the message that a "good" rank conveys. Right now having a high rank doesn't really tell you much about a player's skill, more about his persistence and endurance. Nothing's wrong with being stuck on a higher rank if you don't have the time or can't compete with the veterans of this game, but right now it's a lot about RNG and MM, making it really hard to make a statement about a player's class. Irrevocable ranks are just a bad way to help players grinding up, you should be able to grind up easily because you're good, not because you got lucky to have a safety net on your bad day.

I think that everyone playing ranked can relate to that feeling. I usually switch the class if I have the feeling I can't really pull my weight in the battles or sometimes I just swap over to randoms if I can feel the mode dragging down my mood. Currently I'm doing one rank per day if possible - I always found it most efficient to agree on a plan within a team and stick with it - even if it might not be the best plan in your opinion. I believe in you

Correct. This is hardly comparable to this challenge. All I'm asking for is taking a ship that has a very bad reputation and to show whether it's possible to make it to rank 1 with it or not. Nobody's forced to take it and with the current DD heavy meta the Atlanta is actually a good ship on most maps except for ocean. Nobody forces you to play it, nobody asks for stupid maneuvers in it - and it's still a way better choice than some other ships I've seen the past days ;)

I've met quite some forumites during my ranked battles session - papedipupi, ghost_swe, limonchiki, Teob_VG and many more. It's fun to see so many familiar faces around, although I'd always love to see you on my side, would make the grind a bit more enjoyable

The problem isn't the mode itself but the players playing it. Considering that you need the team to act as one to win the battle and that's the only way to gain stars... that's your source of frustration. Why play it? The rewards are pretty neat, you can improve your gameplay quite a lot because you encounter way more 1 on 1 fights, your own performance weighs more than in random battles, but so does the performance of your teammates. My 2 cents on that.

You're entitled to have your own opinion - but I'll have to disagree. I'm always a fan of the more aggressive approach, especially because it's usually harder to pull off - to take one battle (KK's second battle) and say that all these TX battles were like that is wrong though. And it got punished severely. I can understand that people want to see fast paced action, but these teams play for the win and these tactical approaches develop during a lot of battles because they work, not due to their fun factor or beauty. As I've said - there's always room for improvement and these games show that some things should probably get tweaked to give us a better experience, like a lower smoking time on USN DDs, etc. @Z_OnkelE: That was my bad, I could've turned that on but I simply forgot to enable it. I'll make sure to keep an eye on that next time - if we get to do that on the EU server it should be an easier task to keep track of the actual game and capture it on screen, with the player names displayed correctly and hopefully a simpler way to get into spectator mode. But I'm happy that you guys still enjoyed it despite our limitations. Yeah that's what I thought, this map would've taken me by surprise, too - as you could probably make out judging by Bloodlegend's and my own reaction at the beginning of the battle. You did well and it was fun to see how your team reacted - especially if you enjoy playing these battles yourself and know the feeling. @Dawn: Yes, we were in "favour" of the EU team - I know you guys and we were covering the EU side of things. If this would've been the major stream covering this then I would've focused on being a bit more neutral, although I always made sure to state my high opinion of these Asian / Chinese teams, they played very well!

KKtm played very defensively - but once more, this is what many decent teams do on Tier VIII, too. The main reason for this is that pushing is just so much riskier compared to holding your position and waiting for the enemy to commit - being able to punish them in a spot where you want them to be. This is about strategy (map control best control) and it's very different from map to map. It's not really the issue we see on TX in general - there's usually the fear of committing to a fight than actual reasonable moves like smoking in a fleet and using this to your advantage - on TX randoms you just see BBs and CAs fighting on max range because ohmygod I could take some damage. This is also represented in the meta we can see in these games - EU's favourite CA Zao got absolutely rekt in these TBs, Khabas are pretty much useless because they can't fulfill a role that no other ship can do or how Shimas are only needed for one aspect - torpedos for a smoked fleet. In contrast to randoms, where these ships are so popular and effective due to the way people tend to play. North is probably the worst map for these battles due to the layout with the huge island in the middle. It's usually a race for the cap, once you've established that it's very hard to be aggressive without getting absolutely rekt due to the map layout. The different approaches to North from KKtm and TTT are interesting and especially TTT did a very good job on North - until that Moskva on the 4 line happened. I think it was the right decision to dispatch the 2x Yamatos to deal with it, even that the CV tried to help with its planes - but the lack of eyes on B and the Gearing / DM slow disengagement at B shows you how quickly things can go south. All of that was done with high precision and decent teamwork, you can see them work as a team and commit to a strategy like this. It might look campy, but it actually wasn't that campy - KKtm on North or Land of Ice, yep that was camping. But the TTT vs. F3 matches were usually pretty dynamic, just check out the match on Trap for example - Trap is a map that our EU teams are not used to, it's not in the TB map rotation - we only encounter it in random mode. So TTT had limited experience with that, chose a defensive approach but then committed to that push. F3 made a mistake to panic when clumped up like that - falling apart completely when TTT did an amazing job with their push - the positioning of that push was also crucial - Lachanar in his DM near the island to show less profile and stay alive as long as possible with radar on, spotting the smoke. The Hindenburg in front to push with torps - just to break the enemy's formation and the two Yamatos behind that punishing each move. For me that was amazing to watch, it had action, decent strategies behind it plus each and every single mistake got punished. I love it - it was tense and interesting to watch. In general each maps needs a different approach to it and smoke has been and will always be an useful tool to hide your fleet or a single ship to make it survive. It might seem boring but it's in most cases just the right choice. Hiding the whole fleet in there is of course risky and as you were able to see, usually punished. I think events like these also show the strengths and weaknesses of certain ships in a very highlighted way - and maybe things to tweak and balance. Like the Gearing's smoke compared to its SN / IJN counterparts or the range of certain ships, inferior loadouts like Midway vs. Hakuryu.

...delete pls, doublepost

Awesome battles, tense and enjoyable - hope we can do this in the future again. I'll upload today's battles later on to YT ;) Well played by both parties, great comeback from TTT after the first 2 unfortunate battles.

Both are considered to be bad - so I wanted to see if anybody would be willing to accept the challenge and work his / her way up to the top with the allegedly weaker ships. It's a challenge

Ums kurz und knapp zu machen - sehe ich völlig anders und bin dagegen.

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I always blame Jungo...

Not on stream though, we'll just use this as test session - at least that's what I know and planning to do ;)

We tried to push as a team, but my cruisers got scared and my fellow Amagi was hiding behind me - still full HP when I went down. Always living the push, most of the days it does pay off, sometimes you just die in vain though

No, it's just my opinion. I never said I'm happy that it happened this way, but I also do understand that crap can happen and as long as the developers are upfront about it I can live with that. That has nothing to do with not opposing, probably just a different approach to "go ham on the forums each time something doesn't work".

craphappens - it wasn't on purpose and if they can't fix it in a proper way right away then what do you expect them to do? At least they are upfront about it and inform you, trying to come up with a possible solution and postponing the event itself. I would've loved to grind this weekend, too - instead of one of the next weekends. But such is life, isn't it? ;)

Thanks for the quick info!

That is pointless with the OP though, he's a troll.

I think that would be... Ectar

For this they get my absolution - but only for this

I'm not sure when it comes to CVs, I always regarded the Hiryu as one of the stronger CVs but I lack the knowledge and experience in CVs to make an educated statement about its chance against a Saipan with a decent loadout. When it comes to DDs I do prefer the Blyska due to the better shell arc but I don't think that the Mahan is so far off. It mostly depends on the situation where you get to fight each other, both have a comparable concealment issue and the Mahan should have the better DPM when it comes to a knife fight. Besides that the Blyska is better at fighting on range and faster, the Mahan has the better stealth torp ability which might come in handy when you're in a 1 vs. 1 situation with a BB with no means of spotting by friends, so no smoke advantage. Kiev lacks the HP and concealment to be a decent pick for ranked atm, it just excels at different things than contesting cap zones - and contesting / holding cap zones is one of the main features of ranked mode. When it comes to CAs I still think the Myoko is the best pick. It's sturdy, it can deal with a lot of different classes and the lack of range compared to other Tier VIIs isn't that much of an issue due to the cap focus of ranked. The Indianapolis is a good ship but fragile - its Radar advantage is very limited with a 25s window of 8.5km vision. It might make the difference when you need to push a cap zone and it has a decent agility / shell arc / range, but it can't really fight multiple targets like the Myoko can. Bow on it's strong, it's also strong against isolated targets and on range vs. BBs. The Shchors could be the 155m Mogami of the old seasons but its major issue is agility. It turns like a Yamato which is an absolute no go in this mode - you need either agility or some kind of armor to be able to withstand some enemy fire. It's better suited as random battle ship where it excels as support ship, performing best when friendly ships tank for you while you add in your fires and brawl isolated targets. The Pepsicola is a no go, just like the Yorck (for me at least). BBs are more difficult to make a real choice... The Nagato would be my pick because of its speed, which you need if you have to do the capping or you need to chase a limping CA. The Colorado is the better brawler and has better AA but if you need to chase or get to a certain spot on the map, you're at a big disadvantage. There's also one BB that most people seem to forget about - the Fuso. It would be a strong pick for the known reasons - volume of shells, lack of superstructure and it's fast with decent range. In general I'd always recommend playing the ship you feel most comfortable in. Don't snipe, don't yolo. Find a decent balance between those two, communicate and focus fire. Always make sure you have at least one cap zone - if you get the cap advantage the enemy has to react - and once he has to move out of his comfortzone he'll do mistakes that you can punish.

I've seen Karma_Happy_Dad today - twice actually. It was nice playing with him, in the second battle he got a bit unfortunate with his team despite their DD advantage suiciding into us one after another. Good games though! Also ran into C4rm4 the other day and Teob_VG with his triple Gearing division - making my team's life pretty harsh but we managed to overcome them as a team.

I really enjoyed the event - it's the kind of content we're all looking forward to. Besides the derpy ending of the event and the underwhelming "secret" I think this has been quite an amazing event. You were able to pick your own rewards, get multiple premium fun ships, dubloons, flags or whatever floats your boat. Our community contributor team did its best to help creating interesting additional contest and I hope we'll get to see more events like these in the future. Tweak the few negative things and then future events should be fun for all of us!