Capra76

But then on the other side you have to ask if an extra 3 knots speed makes up for the slight detection and damage nerf, I would say on the whole it's marginal but probably a slight buff unless the Vigilance skill becomes more popular as well, either way it's a massive relative buff compared to all other DD. This is what WG have been doing for the last 3 years, they wanted to control high tier DD numbers and IJN/Shima in particular, but every change and new mechanic they introduce hits every other line far harder than the line they actually want to target.

100m is marginal and compensated for by extra 3 knots speed, damage depends upon torp not detection range so is mostly irrelevant here. If vigilance + new module becomes popular and now every torpedo is spotted at min 2.25km then maybe 20km becomes viable with its 2.5km range (maybe the target is AFK), or perhaps more accurately pretty much every other torpedo in the game ceases to be viable except as YOLO weapons.

Even with the RN zombie heal that extra 10% is only about 3,000 HP, so maybe 1,000 for a regular ship, I'm not convinced. I'm not so sure, I guess that good players will likely still use concealment or possibly the enhanced repair but they don't tend to get hit by torpedoes anyway, the bad players (the core diet of torpedo DD) however may well be attracted to the upgrade so even if only 25% of the players take the upgrade, it's the 25% who are most likely to be running into torpedoes and thus a much bigger nerf than the popularity might suggest. Hooray! 2 worthless modules for the price of one.

50% of the DD games at T10 are Shimakaze, and you come up with a change that doesn't affect them but nerfs every other torpedo DD in the game, what is the thinking behind that?

Link to the development blog post: https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/129646-st-upgrades-changes/ A couple of points to note: there's a new module that gives +5% torpedo speed (3 knots?) as well, slot 3 so no strong competition for it: the 1.8 km is in slot 5, so T8+ and competes with the concealment system mod. So there are potentially winners and losers: IJN might get a small buff out of this especially the 12 km type 93s; anything with slow but stealthy torpedoes is badly screwed, USN mk15 55 kn speed going from 1.1km to 1.8km, good luck hitting anything with that, USN mk 16, was 1.4 so big nerf for them too; RN, RU ships in a similar position; what about the PA deep water torpedoes? Are they just going to become a pure downside for the line? What about Asashio too, are the players who've spent real money on this going to be happy with the change? What about the Italians? 51 knots spotted at 1.8 km? Are WG going to introduce an It DD line? Sounds like on the whole a buff for bad BB players who can't use concealment properly anyway so benefit from enhanced torpedo avoidance, presumably vigilance now becomes a much more desirable captain skill for them too. Finally, Shimakaze is still 50% of the DD games played at T10, what on earth are WG thinking about introducing a change that buffs that line and nerfs pretty much everything else.

Maple Syrup says in the 2 months to 11 January there were the following number of unique players per server: EU - 132; NA - 189; RU - 67; Asia - 481 (!); EU will probably rise a bit as the event is completed, NA server was more willing to spend $$ to get the ship, RU seems to have had more players willing to grind it out and the Asia number I find hard to believe since the smallest number completed the event but there are alegedly more of the ships on that server than the other 3 combined.

Detonation?

Looking at his profile, plus the 180 claimed hours, not far off 30 random battle games a day, every day, for the last month.

P robably the strongest DD tier in the game, no CV to reduce its share and it makes it all the way up to 22%, oh and remember that the total population for T9 is the smallest of any of the higher tiers. Well you're the one who mentioned T6 as some kind of evidence that everything was fine, so I'm happy to agree that it is indeed nonsense. It's hardly a sign of health is it? When other classes are 2 or 3 times more popular, oh and at T7 and T10 CA outnumber BB so it's hardly BB only being the problem. Again it's a sign of (poor) health, if the population is being kept barely afloat by one line out of 9 it's worrying, and the fact that one line has been in the game since day one is a further sign that things are not well.

I'm struggling to follow your logic here, you seem to be saying that because players aren't playing DD at T6 then everything at higher tiers is fine, even though even fewer players are at T7/8. What the T6 numbers tells me is that players don't want to play higher tier DD, so they don't bother grinding the lower tiers either. In any case are you really saying that a population down at 18% or lower is healthy, I mean down at T8 you're talking about 3 x the number of BB relative to DD, how can you possibly think that's fine? Finally, just to hammer the point home, if you take the Shimakaze line out of the equation you're down towards towards single figures population for the other 61/2 lines combined, surely you can't think that's healthy.

17.67% against 18.31%, what's that got to do with anything?

Really? 15% at T7, where there are only 3 classes to start with; 16% at T8 18% at T10, and half of all of those games are in Shima. It seems to me that the players don't agree with you.

Which is why the reeeeeeework is fundamentally broken, if CV in general were "balanced" more like the RN ones then no-one would play them, WG only manages to make the class somewhat playable by giving them influence and potential far in excess of anything else in the game.

Not really, the CV and sealclubbers are on both teams so the OP needs to compare himself to other new players in the game, he should be looking to be much closer to 50%. My suggestion, pick a cruiser line (I'd go IJN or maybe USN) and play 25 games in each ship before getting the next ship until he gets to T4, once he's played 25 games there pick a DD line (USN would be my choice) and do the same thing and then do it again with a BB line before (optionally) playing Hosho for 25 games as well. Also, make a point of finding out how ship captains work and don't make the mistake of throwing them away once you've finished the grind in one ship.

V-25 says hi.

Not quite, Fubuki stock torpedoes are 6 km range but faster than the 10 km upgraded ones, Shin gets the stock torpedoes with an extra 2 km range (8 km, i.e. the difference between being able to stealth-torp or not). So essentially a boat with enough gun power to take on anything else at the tier (MN excepted), useable fast and hard hitting torps or a one trick pony torpedo boat with an extra 2 km torpedo range.

IMO, generally speaking, more HP is usually a sign of a terrible ship, it means that the developers know that the ship sucks but they can't fix it without abandonning some fundamental concept so they simply bump up the HP pool to compensate.

I wonder if some of the CC's should take some of the blame for this mess. I tried it out on the PT server as well, it was fairly obvious that the numbers were placeholders and the CC's should've realised this as well and warned about it, that said I don't think anyone could reasonably have expected the level of grind that WG served up in the end.

Wow, look at how quickly the WR% is tanking, 59.16% -> 57.66% -> 55.94%.

Explain that again to me using small words, that was far too complicated.

Jingles did a video on the Star Wars BF 2 controversy a couple of years ago:

Maple Syrup, copy + paste into Excel.

Thought I'd share a couple of charts with you: A ship that's good against maybe 20% of the game's population, not so good.

We can probably make an educated guess at how much WG made from it. Maple Syrup says 105 unique players for w/e 21/12 and 28/12 so that's the minimum number of them on EU server. WoWs-numbers says approximately 12,000 battles in total for the ship, of which only 10 players have more than the 80 required to get onto the leaderboard, strip them out and you have roughly 11,000 battles spread across maybe 200 - 500 players depending upon how many battles you guess that they play on average. Lets assume 500 unique players and that on average they paid for the 3 x boosters so €80 each, that would give you perhaps €40,000 revenue for the EU server as a whole. NA server seems to be at similar population levels, lets give WG another €40,000 for that. Asia is a bit lower and Russia is tiny, I'm not sure what the prices are like on those servers but lets be generous and combine them and give another €120,000. So combined across the 4 servers, maybe €120,000 as an upper limit of what they might've made from it. What it has cost them is harder to guess, if anyone has an idea how much it costs to model an in-game vehicle I'd be interested to know, the shipyard animations won't have been cheap either (but are potentially re-useable) but in any event the real cost to WG is reputational and is measured from lost premium accounts and other in game transactions.

Depends what you mean by free, if you mean "premium account plus a mountain of special signals and cammos" then maybe.