RamirezKurita

Actually, carriers aren't limited in normal games because of how they affect the gameplay itself, they are limited because of net code and performance issues. They are limited to reduce the amount of stuff going on in the game so it doesn't overload players with their toasters trying to play the game on their 56k modem. Carriers only really had major issues with how they affected the game in the early history of the game before AA started to get majorly buffed. Nowadays, they are weak enough and have little enough impact that some of the top ranked teams in team battles stopped bothering to bring them along. Nearly all issues surrounding how much effect they have on the game stems from a lack of player knowledge on how to deal with them. The issue with BBs is that they were fairly balanced many moons ago, they had weaknesses and strengths and they tried to play to hide their weaknesses (staying back and sniping rather than risking torpedoes and exposing broadsides to enemy ships). Obviously, this "correct" way of playing was unfun and unhealthy for the game (particularly after they stopped carriers from dominating at the higher tiers - they were one of the core things keeping sniping battleships in line as solo battleships reversing away from their team made easy pickings), so something had to be done. Unfortunately, they did this by removing weaknesses rather than the balanced approach of swapping them out for different weaknesses. The successive buffing by the removal of weaknesses of battleships has basically removed any reason to play as any other type of ship; meanwhile other ships haven't received nearly the same amount of attention to allow them to tread onto the battleships' roles.

The options should be equal, but not the same. Balanced, but different. It's possible to balance power levels without simply making everything identical. Battleships can keep their survivability (although I'd argue the lack of plunging fire and the underwater citadels on most of them is making them a bit too survivable these days) and their alpha damage, but they need weaknesses to balance out their strengths. Weaknesses they don't really have, particularly in the upper tiers when they reach 28+knots as standard.

I never mentioned balance, the issue regarding Tone's seaplanes isn't anything to do with balance but entirely about design. Seaplanes haven't changed since early beta; they were designed as throwaway consumables rather than integral mechanics to certain ship types. Unfortunately, trying to design multiple entire categories of ship (aviation cruisers like the Tone being one of them) around a simple throwaway consumable doesn't work as it just creates a ship that's basically identical to a normal one and throws away all the potential for gameplay the classes offer. The Tone was actually among the least seaplane-centric of the aviation cruisers (often abbreviated at CAVs in a USN-like designation) by only carrying 6 seaplanes, the Mogamis after refitting carried 11 or so, the Ises after refitting carried 22 while the actual seaplane tenders in the IJN carried 20-25. If balance is an issue regarding seaplanes, then make all seaplanes behave in the same improved ways as whatever they use for the Tone. Just don't drag the tone down just because the current implementation of seaplanes is fine for the current crop of ships.

By limiting them they have not only shown how much of a balance problem they are, they have also implicitly admitted that they won't balance them.

This statement might be plausible if WG hadn't recently announced that they are limiting battleships to 1 per team in clan battles.

Because seaplanes aren't nearly developed enough to make ships that rely upon them like the Tone work. To throw out the Tone with just a few regular in-game seaplanes is to basically throw out all the potential for seaplane tenders, the Ise class and the aviation cruisers. For those ships, seaplanes aren't just a throwaway consumable, they are literally the defining feature of the ships.

Ahistorical features of guns? Literally the only things about the Conqueror that are actually historical are the guns (the 457mm guns were from the L, M and N class battleship designs while the 419mm guns were from one of the G3 proposals), literally everything else about the ship is pure fantasy - no ship of that bears any resemblance to the Conqueror has ever appeared in any design study or archive.

Introducing a hard cap on battleships hides the problem, but it doesn't actually solve anything. Deal with the actual balance and QoL of the ships in the game and the numbers of battleships will naturally fall as players will move to other classes.

Fictional carriers aren't in the game, even the most fictional carrier in the game is the Hakuryu which was a completed design coming from the latter part of WWII and no less fictional than the Montana. It may have never been built, but there are historical records of it. For worrying about fiction, I'm more concerned about fictional battleships. The German T10 is a fictional design by WG where they designed a hypothetical ship around a turret the Germans sold to the Soviets early in WWII, rather than using a historical design from WWII. Meanwhile, for the British battleships, we have ended up with the Monarch (a complete fantasy design that marries the KGV's hull, the turrets from the Nelsons and the guns from a KGV preliminary study) despite a comparable historical design already existing (the often mentioned 15C); then there's the Conqueror, a fictitious design that only has the guns from historical designs (admittedly, very old pre-treaty designs that shouldn't be competitive at T10) but everything else about the ship sprang from WG's imagination despite there being a perfectly suitable set of historical designs (the 1944+ Lion designs).

I don't think it's entirely CV related, I think part of it comes down to a relative (if not complete) lack of spotting damage rewards. Getting 150+K spotting damage in a carrier without any real financial incentive is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I don't really see why it can't use a WoT style system where rewards damage caused when a player can't personally see their target are partially distributed amongst the spotters.

Most MOBA games do have an economy, they usually do have some kind of in-game currency that you use to unlock new characters to play, however their economies do operate on a few different rules. First and foremost, their economies are pretty much entirely based around winning and losing. It's very difficult for a computer system to identify how much difference an individual player makes towards a team's performance, the only real metric to go by is based on whether the team loses or wins. This also have the extra bonus of encouraging players to play to win rather than prioritise their own benefit as the two become the same. If worrying about the maintenance costs by stripping players of the chance to go seal clubbing, WG could easily add in a multiplier of some kind based on the player MMR. Players with very high MMRs could enjoy increased income or significantly reduced maintenance costs while players with lower MMRs would find the economy punishingly against them. Alternatively, they could scale rewards based on who you are affecting, not just on what you are doing, so destroying a high ranked player would be worth more than destroying a standard potato-grade player (things like capping would take the average of the enemy team).

If skill based MM won't cut it and promotes an extremely unhealthy style of gameplay, then how come it seems to work fine for almost every single other competitive multiplayer game? I'm sure that games like OverWatch and League of Legends wouldn't be enjoying both their incredible popularity and their competitive scenes if skill based MM was fundamentally a bad idea.

My sarcasm detector is on high alert here, but 'd argue that we don't actually have a match maker. It doesn't even attempt to actually make matches, it just throws players together at random and hopes the teams are balanced. We have a maker, but matches it does not make.

Carriers should remain mobile, trying to stay as close to the mid lines as possible without exposing themselves to excessive risk. Obviously, the closer a carrier is to the action the faster they can launch successive waves as their aircraft don't have to travel as far, but being a bit closer also lets the carrier do the occasional bit of AA support themselves (particularly when they get the ability to panic enemy bombers at higher tiers, but don't confuse carrier AA defensive fire for the proper cruiser one) and cover their own backlines from airstrikes. A carrier that is underway is also harder to hit as they are already moving quickly so they can dodge, which helps prevent the enemy carrier or destroyers from picking them off. This is particularly relevant for IJN carriers in the mid-tiers, as they have slower but faster reloading aircraft (so a greater proportion of their time is spent traveling to and from their targets), as well as IJN carriers having pretty good concealment, reasonable armour (just don't expect to bounce BB shells) and long-range AA.

Stealth firing generally caused more problems than it solved after carriers started to die out. Without the team's primary spotters, we started to see entire teams focusing on stealth firing and the game just turned into a passive campfest as everyone danced around out of sight (which then arguably lead into half of the big problems the game is currently facing, particularly in upper tiers). Sort out carriers until we see 2 CVs per team on a regular basis, then we can talk about stealth firing. Until then, it has to remain in its grave. That being said, I could see something like a "flashless powder" consumable working that allows for a single salvo to be fired without causing the vision bloom. Stealth firing for a single salvo once every 3 minutes or so wouldn't be a problem, it's mostly when stealthy ships are able to pound on their enemies with impunity that it's a problem.

I could see something like this working by changing the tier matchmaking for players and appropriately altering credit and XP gain by allowing players to select a difficulty when entering the queue. For example, a player could choose to get a 50% XP and credit bonus in exchange for never being top tier as long as they continue to choose "hard mode". Similarly, a player could opt to sacrifice 50% XP and credits to ensure they are never being bottom tier by selecting "easy mode". Once the +2/-2 MM begins ad the mid-upper tiers, options for "very hard" and "very easy" could become available where a player could opt to always be bottom tier (+2/0 MM) but get double credit/XP gain by selecting "very hard" or to sacrifice 75% of credits and XP to ensure they always top tier (0/-2 MM) by selecting "very easy". It would shut up those who complain every time about the matchmaker putting them into games when they aren't top tier, while also giving those of us who don't mind being bottom tier the chance to progress faster at the cost of greater difficulty.

It wasn't just the British, the Germans used the term "Grossekruezer" to denote their battlecruisers in WWI (not to be confused with the literally translated "large cruiser" used to denote a ship type midway between a battlecruiser and a regular cruiser), the Americans were building their own battlecruisers in the interwar period while the IJN used the term "Junyousenkan" ("cruising battleship", or "cruiser-battleship") for their Kongou class. Until the mid 20s or so, everyone still had their eyes on battlecruisers and it was only post-treaty when engine technology had advanced enough such that the distinction between battlecruisers and fast battleships was moot.

Even the WWI German battlecruisers still had notably less armour than their battleship cousins, the Mackensen-class only had a 300mm belt compared to the Bayern-class's 350mm belt. In practice, they sacrificed a combination of armour and firepower to maintain their high speeds rather than just one or the other. The Scharnhorst class were only ever referred to as battlecruisers by the British (and the British referred to any capital ship over 24 knots or so as a battlecruiser at the time), the Germans only ever referred to them by either "Schlachtschiffe" or "Kleine Schlachtschiffe", meaning "battleship" and "small battleship" in English.

Simply having high damage doesn't mean they are overpowered, it's the win rates that matter. HE spam on battleships generally is a good way to pad the damage stats without actually being as useful as your damage indicates as fires can be healed back up easily. The worrying part of those numbers for me are that both of the top two ships are premiums, suggesting that T7 BBs are very much P2W. The Hood could possibly do with a buff, but not as much as the poor Colorado.

I think an increase in the rewards for spotting damage would be most applicable here. At the moment I don't even know if spotting damage actually gives experience to the spotter as I've had games with 150+k spotting damage and yet my rewards were pretty much in line with what I would have gotten based on my own direct damage. Simply split damage rewards in half, with half the reward going to the dealer and the other half being distributed equally amongst the spotters if the dealer can't see the target themselves. Obviously, if a ship spots the enemy directly, then they still get the full reward.

Unfortunately, those proportions won't change unless the balance behind them does. Players aren't going to willingly migrate away from the stronger ships to the weaker ones, there needs to be some balance work done to prevent one class from being dominant and then the appropriate proportions will naturally follow.

That's not fixing the problem, that's merely hiding it behind even more broken matchmaking. If they fixed the actual issues behind the large numbers of BBs then we wouldn't always see so many of them, and the times when we do see too many they wouldn't be a problem as a BB heavy team would have it's own set of weaknesses.

Not only have they simply removed CVs unfinished state as a consequence rather than fixing the problem, removing them as a consequence also effectively removes the pressing need to fix them as they won't be a problem in clan wars. It's effectively giving them Carte Blanche to ignore carriers for another 5 years, when what they need to be doing is to put a metaphorical gun to their own head to "encourage" themselves to fix them. Clan Wars was a perfect chance to create the development equivalent of a swear jar, but instead they choose to mitigate the final symptoms so the real problem is less visible.

I actually suggested that they could warp space and time compression by 50% for ballistics in-game, which would also make plunging fire more dangerous to battleships. Long range fire doesn't exist in the game and "long range" in-game is actually playing straight into most ship's immune zones. Another alternative that wouldn't give long-range fire the increased effectiveness it so dearly needs would be to instead add some kind of anti-normalisation effect to shells of a couple of degrees. Such an anti-normalisation value wouldn't affect perpendicular or near-perpendicular strikes to any appreciable degree, but would make a huge difference to glancing strikes because of how the sine function works.

Any angle that is enough to bounce any shell would also likely be an angle great enough such that the armour's effective thickness is enough to stop the shell anyway. Removal of autobounce would effectively change the "autobounce" angles to sub-5 degrees as they are the angles necessary to increase the thickness of unarmoured sections to prevent battleship shells penetrating.