RamirezKurita

Objectively, WG has been saying for years that this is the time of the carriers - this is their moment to shine and to get the extra mechanics and buffs they need to be brought back into the game in a big way. Objectively, what WG has been doing is adding gimmicky premium carriers, buffing AA, making carrier MM worse and generally making carriers more fiddly to use. Now, do you think these two facts can be reconciled in any other way beyond WG lying, or at very least the PR teams having zero communication with the rest of the company?

The worst part about all the changes to make CVs difficult is that all they have done is to make CVs more difficult to learn, but no harder to master. They are still the antithesis of good design, still languishing in the "hard to learn, easy to master" style as they have just made them more fiddly and complex to use even at a basic level but they haven't got around to adding much actual strategy and thought to their use.

I think this issue is made worse by a couple of other issues in the game, namely the effectiveness of autobounce and the impossibility of long range fire. Autobouncing basically means that 3mm extra on the bow is more effective than 300mm on the belt, as nobody actually angles to increase effective armour thickness but instead angles to attempt to autobounce. It's the same problem players have with the KGV, a thick belt is completely pointless as everyone just goes for the autobounce off the bow. To be honest, I'd prefer it if they altered the overmatch mechanics so that no unarmoured sections on ships would ever be able to autobounce anything bigger than a destroyer AP shell, but keep the ability for the armoured belts to autobounce with sufficient angle. This would bring angling in line with WoT where it is there to increase effective armour thickness rather than to attempt to autobounce the shells. Secondly, the lack of long range fire means that plunging fire doesn't work against battleships. Even against battleships with weak deck armour, like the Kriegsmarine ones, it is still extremely difficult to land citadel penetrations even at maximum range. Obviously, simply increasing ranges in the game to allow for plunging fire wouldn't really help as it would just make the game even more of a campfest. I've suggested before that they should remap the ballistics so that shells have the arcs and penetration of 150% of their distance, so that a shell fired 10km would have the ballistics of one fired at 15km, while long-range plunging fire would be quite possible as a NC firing at it's maximum range of 23.3km would have the ballistics as if it were firing at 35km (complete with massive deck penetration). The trouble is that in-game long-range is basically mid-range historically, putting engagements between BBs straight into each other's immune zones unless they close the gap, meanwhile mid-range in game is basically knife-fighting range for a historical battleship where armour doesn't matter.

It doesn't necessarily mean they are getting fixed slower, but it also doesn't mean that they are even getting fixed in the first place. Quite simply, we don't know and the only piece of information we have to go on is that they are removing them from competitive play until further notice. Particularly as WG has shown time and time again that they don't care about carriers in the game at all, almost every single change in the game has resulted in them getting more fiddly and unforgiving. Even the new lines being added show a similar story, as we are still at 2 carrier lines while BBs are sailing along with 4 and cruisers have a massive 6 lines - this all points to carriers being all but abandoned. Banning carriers from competitive play is sending a very strong signal that they place clan wars, a single game type, above carrier gameplay. If they truly cared about the quality, they would delay CW until carriers were fixed - but instead they are effectively stating that they do not care about carriers enough to even consider their nonexistence to be a problem. Think of it like having a swear jar, it's a way of self-regulating by putting a metaphorical gun to your own head, sometimes you need to threaten to hurt yourself to give yourself motivation to get something done that you don't want to do. You mention they are prototyping things, but have you seen any evidence of this? As far as we are aware, the giant carrier rework that they said was coming this year was just the alternative UI, we haven't even heard rumours about what/if they are planning for actual gameplay changes.

However, removing them from CWs isn't just an admission of defeat on CVs, it's also a removal of an important reason to get them fixed. As they aren't in clan wars then there's no reason for them to sort them out in a hurry, they can just delay the CV rework by another 5 years without them affecting CWs. Conversely, if they allowed CVs in CW then it would give WG the greatest possible motivation to get them sorted - every day they are available in their broken form they will be causing problems in clan wars and so every day closer to a fix is an improvement.

Unfortunately, cutting carriers from probably the most competitive gameplay mode limits the information for how to balance them as well as removes almost all motivation to balance them. By not letting them into competitive game modes, there's no longer any pressing need to fix them and so they can just be thrown onto the back burner indefinitely. If they were allowed in clan battles, then it would put WG on an urgent clock to get them sorted as the competitive scene would require them.

The way I see it is that the removal of carriers and the limiting of BBs to 1 per team is basically an admission of WG's refusal to even attempt to balance them. Rather than balancing them, they are metaphorically flipping the table over and attempting damage control to limit the problems they cause without actual solving the problems themselves.

Chasing the latest balancing failures isn't a metagame, it's effectively the official way to play the game (whether intentional on the Devs' part or not). The whole point of a metagame is that it involves the human side, literally the term means the "game about the game". It's often called "playing the players" as metagaming is about what players do beyond what the intrinsic rules of the game dictate. If a ship, class or line is overpowered, then intrinsically it is the way to play the game rather than just being a metagame, it's no different than saying we have a "captain skill point" meta that sees it's players use their captain skill points rather than sitting there with 19 skill points remaining - there's technically a choice there but the game's mechanics dictate that one is the best way to play. When it comes to identifying a metagame you have to look at what is popular then ask the question: "is this popular because it is overpowered, or is it popular for any other reason despite average power?". If the former, then it becomes the "right" way to play the game; if the latter, then we have an actual meta forming. New OP ship being released and everyone demolishing the competition with them is not a meta, it's a balance problem. Jingles and Flamu making a cool collaboration video that sees a featured ship spike in popularity despite it's mediocrity is indeed a meta, there's no in-game mechanical thing to say the ship should be used but it is. The other thing is that metas change even without direct balance intervention as players counter whatever is popular and develop new strategies. If a game stagnates into a particular playing style, then it's likely a symptom of an unbalanced game as the so-called "meta" was actually just imbalance that it's abusers like to claim was a metagame.

There's a difference between adjusting to new content and gameplay balance constantly shifting from one unbalance to another. One adds an extra puzzle piece for the players to work with, while the other one is just the devs clapping their hands and announcing the officially sanctioned "way to play" for the next few months.

So basically, because WG won't balance half the ship classes in the game, we have the ultimate competitive game mode lacking pretty much half the ships in the game? On top of being a kick in the face for every non-cruiser, non-DD player in the game, it's basically WG metaphorically flipping the table over and resigning from actually trying to balance the game. Restricting CVs to 2, or maybe even 1, I can understand to keep the game accessible for those with poorer internet connections, but removing them is a terrible idea as they are a fundamental part of balancing the game. Giving T10 teams access to CVs is basically giving everyone the main tool to gather balance information for the T10 mechanics as the conditions are much more controlled. Banning CVs basically prevents everyone from actually gathering the info we need to actually get to work to solve issues surrounding them. We can't figure out what needs to be done if we can't even play as them! Restricting BBs is likewise just trying to hide the actual problem rather than solving it. If BBs get nerfed and balanced into a workable state, then it wouldn't be a problem if a team went for 5+ BBs in a game as other team compositions would work. Treat the causes, not the symptoms. Again, this effectively relieves WG from the responsibility for ever actually having to try to balance the game. If team compositions are going to be so restricted, why not make clan battles only allow the T1 ships? It would give us similar variety as well as being much more accessible to newer players.

The issue with the N13 at T10 is that they wouldn't really ever stand a chance against the current crop of T10s, being 2/3rds the size and a 20-odd years older. If anything, the N13s fit better at T9, being comparable in scale to ships like the Iowa but coupled with the usual Japanese traits of oversized guns and high speeds but poor in other respects. I agree the Musashi shouldn't be another separate line though, if they desperately want to bring the 4x3 155mm layout into the game it would make much more sense as a Yamato class B hull. To be honest, there was enough variation between the final Yamato class design, the historical modifications, the updated designs used in the later ships in the class and the planned modernisations the IJN had for them for the Yamato class to have half a dozen different hulls.

The real issue the Atlanta faces isn't that it has any problems itself, it's that carriers are now so rare in the upper tiers. Obviously the AA specialised ship in the game will not perform properly without any aircraft to shoot down, it's an AA escort first and an anti-DD flamethrower second. If we could somehow filter the Atlantas's performance to include only games with carriers in them (or 2v2 carriers at T7), then I'm sure the stats will tell a different story.

All this fuss about the Musashi but I'd rather if they just implemented the Yamato class's original layout as a B hull for the Yamato. Sacrifice half of the 127mm guns for an extra 155mm triple a side, combined with bumping up the secondary battery range to 8+km base on a B hull. The two Yamatos didn't have enough variation between them to justify them as separate ships unless they are willing to basically make the second one an almost direct clone like Prinz Eugen or Missouri. Now, if they were to implement the Shinano in her as-planned battleship configuration then we would have an argument for a new premuim as she was planned to have the 100mm guns rather than 127mm, but again I'd rather see the Shinano configuration as an option for the Yamato class's considering that the modifications were still part of the class.

What they should have done, in my opinion, is to instead make it so that each team has to have a distribution of T8-T10 ships in each team. A team might have a budget of 65 tiers or so to spread across their 7 ships on the team, meaning that they will have to bring a few T9s and T8s to make up the numbers. This would make it far more accessible for clans as they don't need a full roster of T10s (they would only need a few T10s to form the core of a team), more players can join in and we would even see much more variety in the battles as there will be triple the number of potential ships to choose from. If the premiums in the other tiers cause problems, they could simply ban all non-silver ships from the mode.

It would be easy, but it would be a complete kick in the teeth for those that expect the Tone to be interesting, premiums generally should be interesting rather than just a regular but substandard cruiser and simply having both types of seaplanes at the same time does not make for an interesting cruiser. Not only that, but rushing out the Tone as a regular cruiser basically sends the signal that WG plan to completely abandon all development on seaplanes, which were a pretty major thing in WWI and the interwar period, particularly for the IJN. This basically cuts down the potential historical ships in the game by a dozen or so classes, even without going into the various conversions and proposals.

I'm with the crowd that says we don't need a dedicated hybrid view, leave the full RTS gameplay for the carriers. What is far more workable though is to have much better mechanics for seaplanes, including folding out better mechanics to existing seaplanes on regular ships. Simple things like seaplane bombers (most seaplanes could carry a small selection of bombs, particularly late-war IJN ones) that would function as a small DB squadron that flys towards the currently selected target and does an automatic drop before returning. Likewise, similar basic orders could be added for spotters and fighters by giving the ability to repress the ability while active. Changes to duration and CD would help too, as it makes no sense for a plane to be recovered to be just as bad as having one downed. I don't see why it couldn't be made like a regular carrier squadron where they have very short cooldowns and do not use charges if the plane returns, but the large CDs and loss of charges are reserved for lost planes. Combining these two implementations would give seaplanes a much bigger role in the game as well as making ships like the Tone-class, the CAV Mogamis, the Ise-class BBVs quite viable in the game. With sufficiently fleshed out mechanics, even without the top-down view, I could see actual seaplane tenders being a full thing, particularly for the IJN as they were the only nation to really focus on them in the interwar period (granted, the later tenders were basically cruisers with lots of seaplanes with their 3x2 140mm guns - they could even be used at lower tiers to lead into the CAVs in upper tiers). Sufficient influence from seaplanes on the game would also give AA more prominence even in carrierless games, as well as reduce the overall influence carriers have on the game as the skies wouldn't entirely belong to them.

It's basically because some players rage at the game as they fixate on a single variable - the calibre of the main battery. This vocal subset of players cry out at any unusual design that doesn't follow the typical progression and claim anything with a low calibre gun is useless, regardless of the overall ship's performance. To appease this vocal minority, WG had to instead opt for starting the Gneisenau with her planned 380mm upgrade and strip the 283mm guns from her. This does create the strange situation where the stock ship involves the class being named after the second ship, using the guns from a planned but never implemented refit combined with the engine from large cruiser design that was designed but never built. It's one of the most chimeric of all the current ship classes in the game

It's already pretty much the most difficult to get ship in the game, even if you are averaging +200% free XP every single game it still works out to effectively 3 million XP to unlock, which would let you unlock most of the stuff in the game.

The Kutuzov is practically a T9 ship in all but name anyway, being generally comparable to the Baltimore in both age and displacement and generally being better than the Chapayev in almost every respect.

It's not about being broadside in the Dunkerque, the secondaries actually want to fire aft rather than forwards. It's the same with all the all-forward designs (Dunkerque, Izumo and Nelson in game currently), they all have their secondaries in the back to cover the arcs that their main battery couldn't.

However, the fact that it doesn't happen on public yet is commonplace in ranked and TBs shows that it isn't the actual in-game mechanics that are at fault. It's a combination of L2P and the XP system rewarding selfish play rather than actual gameplay being the issue.

If they are so very, very powerful, how come in team battles they were basically relegated to overglorified spotters past the potato levels? I never got to the top ranks in TB, but I heard that some teams were even starting to go carrierless as it allowed them to bring another cruiser along for extra firepower as the carriers couldn't do anything except spot.

Most of those games you listed have functioning matchmakers that actually try to balance teams rather than just throwing players together at random. I'm sure that if you put a challenger ranked player in League of Legends into a games full of players of completely random skill you would see some truly staggering win rate - but you don't ever see those games because the game has a skill based matchmaker. In games with functioning matchmakers, high win rates are either a sign of the player still climbing to the position they are meant to be or a sign of a player that is so good that the matchmaker find opponents worthy of them.

There's a few obvious good reasons to have carriers in the game: Firstly, they make the game far more proactive as they punish campers and snipers. Carriers deal more damage in longer games, so they encourage players to push harder to limit the potential damage the carriers can do. This goes double for preventing people dropping anchor to snipe, as stationary ships are much easier for carriers to pick on compared to ships underway. Yes, a Midway might have enough planes to solo pretty much any ship in the game, but if it takes them 10 minutes to do so then you can basically knock the Midway out by simply ending the game in the first 10 minutes. Secondly, they provide additional map awareness, helping flush destroyers out of key points and keeping battleships permaspotted to prevent stealth builds overpowering all others. Stealth builds for DDs, CLs and CAs still remain useful though even against carriers, as they can get enough stealth to allow them to open fire on any aircraft that try to keep them spotted - BB stealth builds (the ones that people complain about most nowadays) don't normally have the concealment to get the first strike against fighters though. Thirdly, they strongly encourage ships to support each other, so that they can huddle up in preparation for incoming air strikes. They don't need to always sail in close formation as CV haters cry out, they just need to be near enough that they can move to support each other when aircraft appear on the horizon. Supporting allies should be encouraged, rather than trying to turn the entire game into a YOLOfest where everyone goes off to their favourite corner to die. There's already plenty of reasons to spread out across the map, the game needs more reasons to move in to support nearby allies to promote decision making skills. Fourthly, they are a major balancing factor for ships. So many ships are practically defined by their superior AA capabilities, particularly the cruisers and the majority of the USN ships, and without that AA they are basically just oversized hulks. The ships that people dislike playing as in the upper tiers? Cruisers and the USN battleships; ships that were basically balanced around matches where carriers are a serious force, matches where performing AA duty was a very important task for the good of the team rather than just being an incidental way to scavenge a bit more XP. Fifthly, CVs promote mid and long-term decision making rather than trying to simply react to immediate events. They reward planning, map awareness and being able to predict the flow of the game far better than any other class. While engaging a battleship you can usually pull something out on short notice, which basically only rewards reflexes and hand-eye coordination, dealing with an impending carrier strike instead relies on choices made minutes ago.

It is very much restricted to particular regions. Superstructure, bow, center and stern are the 4 sections that all ships have, and each section has 50-70% or so of the overall ships health (this adds up to much more than 100%, you don't need to deplete every single region to sink a ship). Historically, most ships had watertight bulkheads, so flooding would always be localised and wouldn't sink the entire ship. Some ships in WWII literally lost their entire bows and continued operating before eventually being repaired. Citadel penetrations, fires and flooding are also not affected by saturation, as their damage isn't applied to any particular location.