RamirezKurita

You can't simply pick and choose circumstances and claim that some premiums are balanced because of niche situations. You need to look at how often said circumstances occur and how the ship performs in them, this gives you how well a ship performs on average. Obviously, certain ships will overperform in some situations and some will underperform, but it's the average performance across a wide range of situations that is important. For example, the USS Texas has incredible AA and slightly better firing arcs at the cost of half a knot of speed. Now, the half a knot of speed is quite often relevant, ships do spend a fair amount of time steaming ahead at full power, but half a knot on a 21 knot ship is very minor and generally won't decide games. Likewise, the firing arcs might sometimes give a split second initiative in gunnery duels when maneuvering and will usually help with armour angling, but it is a pretty small advantage overall. However, the USS Texas's AA is incredibly powerful and can decide games pretty much by itself, plus in lower tiers carriers are actually quite common, making this a fairly consistent yet incredibly strong advantage. Putting these two aspects together, we have a ship that pays a very small, if consistent, price of half a knot of speed for some slight advantages in angling and a massive boost in AA power, advantages that generally will outweigh the disadvantage. Sure, games without carriers might leave it somewhat lacking(I say lacking, but even without the AA it's a close call between the USS Texas and the New York class!), but that's a highly specific situation - we need to look at the general performance of the ship across a variety of situations. Also, I noticed you dodged my remark about the difference in strictly better and generally better by hiding behind the matchmaker.

I agree that it is a problem of ship types being too well defined. I'd love it if things like spotting aircraft were to be more relevant to the game as more than just a self buff, in general bringing in seaplanes as a more fundamental mechanic (which would be very characteristic to the IJN, as they continued developing seaplanes throughout WWII as well as having far more seaplane tenders and their famous aviation cruisers that were hybrid seaplane tenders and cruisers) would both bring the air aspect into the game more as well as reducing the reliance on the true carriers for scouting, air defence and harassment. Unfortunately, as far as I can see a major seaplane rework isn't even on the books, considering how they have shelved the Tone (IJN aviation cruiser) due to it not having the necessary mechanics without any kind of ETA.

Tell me, if they released the Musashi as a T8 premium (in all of it's late WWII glory), would you say that it would be P2W? It isn't objectively better than the Amagi due to losing a few knots and losing a gun barrel, it has advantages and disadvantages compared to the Amagi. But most people would still say it would be better, despite not being strictly better.

What if we flip it around a bit, we are dealing with an archetype and not just a ship here - what if in a game with a smattering of DDs, CAs and CLs on each team, but only a single BB on each team. Now, if that sole BB, your entire team's supply of BBs, was AFK, would you have a similar problem? The answer is likely yes, as going from 0 to 1 of a ship type is a massive change in how things operate. Going from 1 up to 2 is a notable shift, but much smaller than 0 to 1. Once you get a few of a particular ship, anything more is just adding redundancy rather than actually broadening the team's capabilities. The issue of the AFK CV is because your team has lost an entire ship type, not because it was a CV that went AFK.

To also add onto my post regarding gimmicks and their overuse in the game, I do believe gimmicks have a place in the game. However, this is due to historically there being plenty of gimmicky ships made, designed or proposed that could be used to introduce gimmicks. If they want to have gimmicky ships in the game, then just choose to implement gimmicky ships in their full glory in the first place! Making otherwise ordinary ships into gimmicky messes is just ridiculous as well as completely unsustainable in the long run from a design perspective as they will eventually run out of gimmicks to use, rather than the much more sustainable method of deriving a ships properties and role from it's design.

The difference with flags and premium consumables is that they can be acquired in-game. Sure, you can buy them with real money, but that's simply "pay to not grind" rather than "pay to win" as you can just spend another evening or two to get the flags and credits for the consumables yourself. P2W could be something major, or it could be something as minor as a single extra AA gun on your ship. That one in a thousand games where that single AA gun makes the difference isn't your victory - your wallet won for you as without it you would have lost. As you said, some ships are quite hard to identify whether they are overpowered or not, such as the Alabama. Hopefully, we can wait until the class appears as a regular option in the game - people have been speaking about a 2nd USN battleship line that would feature the SoDak class since before even the German cruisers were announced, upon which we can immediately figure out whether the premium is overpowered compared to it's parent class. Otherwise, we need to go into core stats, for example looking at the stats of individual players between the ship and it's closest tech tree counterparts rather than comparing the classes in general. Obviously, the more unique premiums are even harder to balance, but generally speaking if they begin to appear in the competitive game types such as ranked or team battle in the hands of all but the most die-hard fans then we have an issue.

I disagree on more defined rock-paper-scissors. Such a simplistic design model doesn't really allow for any variety or any edge case scenarios as ships become defined by their archetype rather than the archetype being defined by the ships. That being said, I don't want certain ships becoming the "jack of all trades, master of all" as that becomes a balance nightmare (which certain capital ships are veering dangerously towards). There's a balance to be struck where each ship still has strengths and weaknesses, some of which might be out of line with their archetype - it shouldn't be X>Y>Z>X, there should be more variables regarding specifics, customisation and situation. It's fine for a capital ship to borrow some of the strengths of other archetypes, as long as it pays the price (either by diminishing it's own strengths, or by taking on additional weaknesses). High tier map design does seem oddly spaced out, a few more islands here and there would bring the action closer in and give more flexibility. Long range shooting should rely on kill zones and good placement rather than simply being the default. Gameplay bias seems to exist for both capital ships and destroyers, pretty much every single captain skill is practically made for one or the other (or carriers, which might as well have their own entire skill set). Captain skills do need to have their numbers tweaked to benefit a broader range of ships rather than having the word "Battleship", "Destroyer" or "Carrier" practically stapled across them. A lot of this is simply borked values chosen rather than fundamental problems with the skills though, simply a heavy balance pass on the skills would fix a good chunk of these issues (there would still be issues regarding carriers and their skills though, unless they figure out how to merge some of them into the regular ones appropriately).

Sure you can, there's a huge number of F2P games that make money via some kind of premium time to reduce grind or by selling only cosmetic content. You just have to look at the vast revenue of games like League of Legends to see that you don't need to make a game P2W to get players to spend, you simply have to create a good game that players want to spend money on and you will have players throwing money at you for cosmetic things. Likewise, more recently there is the runaway financial success of OverWatch which only offers cosmetic content for real money while everything else remains free.

I think you misunderstood my point. It would indeed be very simple to nerf all the non-premium RN BBs. However, this would not fix the issue of the HMS Nelson, which WG will not directly nerf due to it's premium status. Therefore, they need to figure out how to rebalance all of the fire and HE mechanics around HMS Nelson to indirectly hit it with the nerf bat to bring it in line, as otherwise we end up with a balanced regular line but an incredibly OP P2W premium.

Unfortunately, due to the early release of HMS Nelson before any real balance work could be done on HE centric battleships, nerfing fire in general is the only possible solution as WG don't nerf premiums. If they nerf the normal RN battleships then we are still left with overpowered premiums that they won't touch, so the balance problem isn't fixed.

In my eyes, P2W isn't about magically guaranteeing victory by spending money, it's about getting an advantage - P2W and P4Advantage are one and the same. If a ship is 1% better performing than tech tree equivalents then it is P2W and therefore unhealthy for the game, particularly for ranked and team battle play which are far more competitive game modes where every single tiny advantage matters. The way I see it, players should get premiums for historical context and to help ease the grind, not to improve their in-game performance. If WG were to hold a massive worldwide Esports event featuring all the top players from around the world, I would consider the balance teams to have failed at their jobs if a single non-cosmetic premium appears in the rosters as it would clearly show that some team considers using a premium to give them an advantage over a regular ship. Now, comparing raw win rates and other stats can be a bit tricky due to the effect of who is likely to pick up said premiums, however some premiums are clearly P2W cash grabs as they are pretty much almost strictly better than their tech tree equivalents (such as Atago vs the Mogamis, Kutuzhov vs Chapayevs, Texas vs New Yorks).

I also remember them saying that, plus the rumour is that is why we have that WG created abomination at T10 rather than a late war Lion design from 1944 onwards (the 60,000+ ton displacement designs). It might also explain why we ended up with the weird hybrid between KGV and the 15C design - without access to full blueprints for the 15C they just used a modified KGV to fill the gap. It also does beg the question of how much they even try to find out the values and layout for things. For example, I'm pretty sure the Yamato historically did not have 32mm plating anywhere, it seems an oddly Imperial thickness while it is far more likely they would use 30 or 35mm plates. I suspect any values they can't immediately find by glancing at archives they just copy+paste values from similar ships to fill the gap, which is why we end up with certain values repeating over and over despite all historical precedence (which then causes further issues between tiers due to all values being identical).

The PoW never made it to 1945 though, as sunk she was basically stock. It's more likely she will stay at T7. Literally all 4 of the other KGVs would make for better T8 material, although I'm still holding out for the eventual split in the RN BBs which would see the KGVs and the Monarchs both at T8 while the PoW could be given the Mutsu treatment and basically be a stock ship at a tier lower (and while they are at it, I want them to actually make the Monarch into 15C rather than the fantasy creation that it currently is).

You just need to adjust your play style accordingly, when you are lowest tier you need to realise that head-to-head you can't really beat your opponents and so you will need to adopt a more supporting role for your team. When facing higher tier carriers, remember the golden rule of overlapping AA bubbles. It's not just your own AA that matters, but also you add the AA of anyone you sail with. Doesn't matter how bad your own AA is if you follow Baltimores and Neptunes around.

WG doesn't always use a class's final or greatest configurations, it's the same story as the Kongos which use a mid 1942 outfitting in-game despite the late war AA loadouts being significantly more powerful. It's ostensibly a balancing decision, as some 1944-1945 refits of old battleships would otherwise be a little too strong, although as WG proved with the USS Texas they aren't afraid to use the late war setups as P2W cash grabs. In the KGV's case, it's not just the low calibre AA that's missing, they also forgot the postwar refitting of the secondary battery to bring them up to the RP10 standard (the same as HMS Vanguard).

You say "without being deleted", but you have much higher rates of survival in the KGVs than the QEs. This might mean that it might be related to capping, scouting and killing off DDs if you are playing too cautiously. A dead BB that deals significant damage to the vulnerable members of the enemy team is more likely to be a winning BB.

Without looking at videos or seeing more in depth stats, I can't say for sure, but damage generally is a measure of how much time you spend wailing on battleships due to their large health pools (plus repair party, particularly when firing HE). If someone has a good win rate and average damage, it could be any combination of them scouting, destroying DDs, sweeping the skies and capping points.

What you are talking about there is not complexity, but depth. Complexity is about having to process more information and execute more actions, while depth is all about meaningful choices and decisions. Generally, complexity is what dictates how difficult something is to learn, while depth dictates how difficult it is to master. In overall game design, depth is the goal while complexity is the price that is paid to achieve said goal - poorly designed mechanics add a vast amounts of complexity for no real depth while well designed mechanics add a tiny drop of complexity for a Mariana Trench of depth. Sadly, many games developers equate complexity for depth, which is why we end up with games that are a shallow APM nightmare, scripters begin to filter into the game and the actual decision making begins to take a back seat in favour of players frantically clicking (or using scripts to automate the clicking). Games with significant depth are very difficult to automate as it is very difficult for a machine to make difficult decisions based on limited information, while complex games with no real depth are easy to automate as they are all about collating information into making a very clear and well defined optimum path (which is why RTS/TBS bots can be extremely difficult to automate as players are very good at using intuition and leaps of the imagination, while a basic FPS could easily create godmode bots that are completely unbeatable due to reactions and precision playing to a machine's strengths). Extra credits did quite an informative video on game design with regards to depth vs complexity, which I strongly recommend players offering suggestions on how to "fix" carriers watch: Speaking of command ships, it would be cool to see some of the dedicated command ships being added into the game as a small mini-branch in the USN, although they would be difficult to balance as they would pretty much entirely be about buffing nearby allies. That being said, considering how difficult it is to integrate 4 rough categories of ships into the game in a harmonious fashion, adding a 5th shouldn't even be on the drawing board.

For fire prevention, it works multiplicatively with everything else. In practice, this means the fire chance reduction is pretty negligible particularly when combined with Demolitions Expert, the whole skill is about the limiting of the superstructure fire slots.

And here we have yet another stupid gimmick that exists only to make the game more complicated, adding more to the learning curve without actually adding any real substance. What we need are actual choices and depth, not more one trick ponys. They could easily achieve pretty much the same effect of making torps better against capital ships without making them deadly to smaller ships by adding in a captain skill or upgrade that allows torpedoes to reduce the effectiveness of torpedo protection systems.

So in all probablility, CV stems from "Carrier Volplané" A relic from the the end of WWI which was lost in translation, differences in nomenclature from country to country, and changes in nomenclature over time. Only the very first carrier started out as an auxiliary vessel in the USN, the USS Langley. CV-2 and CV-3 started out as battlecruisers (the Lexingtons) and after that they begun their purpose built carriers. The C is due to their originally envisaged role of being largely independent fleet scouts, which was one of the main roles of cruisers at the time, and nothing to do with the actual hulls themselves. The USN hull codes were all about a systematic way of naming things, they don't reuse the same code for different things (although they do sometimes switch codes around, but each code remains unique and systematic), if they were to class them as something else they would have simply chosen a different letter rather than double up and throw the system out the window to confuse everyone. It's entirely possible that the V is related to a French word relating to flying, I've also seen sources that refer to it as meaning "Voler" or it's derivatives in addition to sources that state it as meaning aViation, but as bolded in your post they are all just general hearsay and rumours without significant evidence behind them. It's quite possible that whether it was Voler, a derivative of Voler or aViation is something that has been lost to history.

As Namolis pointed out above, waaay back when they were introduced they were considered to be a type of cruiser due to their early nature as relatively independent skirmishers and scouts. The first letter, C, denotes the overall type of ship - cruiser in this case. The second letter gives the subtype of the ship. For cruisers in ascending order of size, the subtypes are CL (Light Cruiser), CA (Armoured Cruiser, this was reused for heavy cruisers in the interwar period though), CB (Large Cruiser, historically only the Alaskas bore this designation) and finally the biggest and meanest of the bunch - the CCs (Capital Cruiser, or a battlecruiser in common parlance, historically only the Lexingtons bore this designation before they were scrapped and two of them converted into carriers). CVs are Cruiser - aViation (or an aircraft carrier, as we know them as), which then followed through with their own entire set of sub-sub-classes during the period: CVE (Escort CV), CVL (Light CV) and CVB (Large CV). There were a couple of other cruiser subtypes that appeared in USN blueprints as well, such as CF (Flight Deck Cruiser, a cruiser/carrier hybrid) and CLD (Not entirely sure, possibly relating to destroyers as they were part of the design lineage of the Atlantas which were initially envisaged as destroyer leaders).

Even better - go for USS Guam. Pretty much exactly the same, neither of them have any particular historical significance, but using Guam as the premium doesn't make things awkward if/when the Alaska class appears in a regular line.

In general, no matter what game it is, there's always a subset of the players that hate any tiny notion of strategy. This goes not only for gameplay aspects that require strategy to use, but in particular for gameplay aspects that require strategy to counter. These players want everything to be reduced to twitch reflexes and heat of the moment decisions, and can't understand that they have to deal with the mid and long term consequences of their decisions. They will then complain that "there's nothing I could do", completely ignoring the long string of decisions they made that got them into the situation in the first place.

However, against a competent AA formation a skilled CV player has only two options. Firstly, he could instead go hunt down some YOLOing potatoes, padding his stats a bit in the process. Alternatively, if he is against an entirely competent team, then he basically gets locked out of the game and doesn't achieve a great deal. Something the stats don't show is the denial of options to the enemy. A strong AA ship doesn't need to destroy plane after plane to do their job, simply deterring planes from going near them is equally important.