Capra76

Presumably that's a single player, my comment applies in aggregate.

Usually that means it's the very best players who're using them, if they're struggling to be effective then something is very wrong.

IRL I doubt it mattered in the slightest, you're shooting at ships on open water that we're spotted perhpas 30 minutes or so previously, not suddenly switching between targest as they slip in and out of detection range. As an example: "Just before 03:00, Suffolk regained contact with Bismarck. Hood and Prince of Wales were 35 mi (30 nmi; 56 km) away.......................... At 05:35, lookouts on Prince of Wales spotted the German ships 17 mi (15 nmi; 27 km) away.................... Hood opened fire at 05:52 at a distance of approximately 26,500 yd"

Since there's often no misplay involved and thus no opportunity to correct your mistake does it matter if you die in one pass or four?

Two points: in surface v surface that usually requires a misplay such as straight-lining or showing broadside, CV doesn't require any of this; in surface v surface both classes are at risk of devstrike, CV is substantially immue to this risk.

All of which is irrelevant since if I wanted to be strictly correct I could have written "balancing a class that ignores all other balancing mechanics, and interacts with other classes in a fundamentally different way, in an overly simplistic and very slow shoot down HP bags game", but "planes in a ship v ship game" is much easier to read and conveys much the same meaning. And since you're now down to nitpicking at semantics can we conclude that you have no real response to the underlying point? And what WG have done is create a class that doesn't care about those abilities and just on every class regardless and that is less than normal business.

I'm sure RTS could've been improved but then the game would run into the same problem that the reeeeeeeeework has generated, if the class is easier to play and more accessable you get more of them in game and the inherent difficulties in balancing aircraft in a ship v ship game come to the fore.

As I've been accused of being a slavish follower of your opinions I should like to say that I think the fundamental problem is that CV as a class ignore so many of the in-game balancing factors that any inclusion of the class is unbalancable for that simple reason. Happy to be proved wrong, but RTS was just as broken, it's just we didn't care as much if it was only 1/10 games

What's the range of the ship's AA aura? Is it 30 - 40 Km? If not then CV can go elsewhere upon the map, do other things, wait for a better time etc AKA Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. BTW, this is exactly what DD players were told to do to counter CV, strange that this only applies one way in your mind.

If I were inclined towards headwear made out of tin foil I might suspect that my poll rattled someone at WG and this thread is an excuse to quietly kill that thread off; 85% of votes being in favour of major changes or total removal of the class not being the sort of thing they want to see on the forum.

A new CV poll, as impartial as I can make it, my thinking behind the questions is: question 1 is I believe the only realisitic choice (and then only just), RTS is not coming back and there isn't going to be a rework version 2, it's this CV or no CV; question 2 is every possible option I can consider, it is mostly unrealistic but hopefully posters can answer question 1 truthfully even if they don't really want either option if their preferred option is available in this question. If you have suggestions for improvements or would like other options added to question 2 I'll edit the poll and include them as best I can.

RTS CV was broken as well, it's just they were rare enough not to really matter.

Selling premium CV when the rework was still a WIP was certainly a questionable decision (like so many others). Maybe powercreep them out of existence? Just keep upping the amount of AA until even the best struggle to achieve anything, it'd be dirty and underhand but since when has that stopped WG?

As I said let's pretend. Maybe @El2aZeR is an AI created by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency to test the next generation of unmanned airiel vehicles, maybe it escapes and starts to self replicate, soon every CV player in the game is an El2aZeR and in an act of desparation WG does the unthinkable and, for once, listens to what the players say and acts on it. Or maybe, lets pretend something even more absurd, that anything that's posted on here matters in the slightest and just go with the poll to see what the consensus is.

Well, lets pretend then.

Probably, but on the off chance that WG ever did take their had out of the sand, or if it started to make financial sense to them, that is the only realistic option I can see.

Look at the survival rate, and remember that the majority of the ones that don't survive are potatoes at the end of an already lost game. Look at the spotting damage and think about how important that is in this game. That's two very important stats way out of line with everything else for starters.

Back with the insults I see. FTFY. CV of course in the hands of competent players are effectively immune to this risk, so being sunk by a surface ship is an acceptable cost of playing the game, but being sunk by one you can't attack back isn't. Erm, so what gameplay options do you think you have after your ship has been sunk. In fact your whining about shutdowns is completely back to front, if there are particular ships you can't attack then options still remain and you are not shutdown, if you no longer have a ship then that's it, game over, complete and irreversable shutdown.

If being sunk isn't a shutdown what is?

Balance has two sides, that's why it's called balance, for a class to be balanced the costs that it imposes on other classes should be roughly equal to the benefits it brings to the game. In this case the survival rate is a proxy for the benefits other players get from having a CV in their games and the fact that it is so high indicates that generally other players obtain little to no benefit from having them in the game and thus the costs the class imposes (in this case damage output) should be much lower than for other classes that bring far more to the game for other ships. None of which is relevant because the problem is not damage output or the rate at which it accrues, but instead as mentioned above, the problem is how little other ships benefit from the presence of CV in the game. No it isn't, this is a contradiction. A bit, I find them fairly easy to play, increadibly boring but at the same time the power and influence is obvious to even a relative novice in them. There are two main problem I have with them as a surface player: Restricted movement and gameplay options thanks to spotting and AA mechanics; CV remove close and exciting games

It isn't good for the game, it's just less bad that two.

Better to have 1/10 games ruined by CV than 9/10 games.

Do the insults come naturally or do you have to work at them? Anyway on with the show: The role of CV is purely damage farming however that fact tells us nothing about what the damage output should be, it's entirely consistent for it to be a damage farmer and just bad at it at the same time the only problem is that no-one would play the class. If I'm deciding what to parrot then logically, I'm not parroting. Taking you as an example, your CV survivial rate is about 80% whereas your BB survival rate is more like 30% and your DD rate more like 20%, so if you want to survive 3-4 times as many battles and offer 1/3 to 1/4 of the rewards to the enemy then you deserve the same proportion of rewards yourself. Incidentally, since you seem to want to tar me with being DD mafia (ShimaStasi surely), would you be interested to learn that the vast majority of my DD games were in 2015/16 and I've only really played the KM and PA lines since then? Jump to all the conclusions you like, but to the extent that I play at all I'm mostly a cruiser main these days.

And again the insults flow, I shall take comfort from the fact that it's the surest sign of a losing argument. Back on topic, @El2aZeR is correct that damage farming is the only role that CV have in the game but that does not mean that you can simply say that their output is in line with other ships therefore everything is fine, you have to look at what they offer back to the game in return for the damage they inflict and that is where the class falls down, because they offer so little back the damage they are entitled to is correspondingly small. What would a balanced CV look like? If they're going to survive 80% of games then maybe a kill every five games or so and maybe 20k average damage at higher tiers, but would anyone play that? Of course not. Nope. The problem isn't when the CV does its damage, it's that it doesn't offer anything back to the ships in return for that damage, either directly or indirectly, and thus CV are pure freeloading parasites on the game. Hence why they're widely disliked.

The surface ships still sit (somewhat) in the rock-paper-scissors circle of fun/misery. The BB AP is bad news for the cruiser but it's good news for the DD because it means that there are big fat slow stupid BB waiting to be torpedoed, and those torpedoes are bad news for the BB but good news for the cruisers because it means that there are fragile DD waiting to be spanked by the cruiser and thus all the surface ships are bad news for some and good news for others. CV on the other hand are bad news for cruisers, bad news for BB and bad news for DD and as far as I can tell good news for exactly no-one. That's the difference.