Aotearas

Just met @absolute_justice and friends. I was stuck playing punching bag for the team (nearly 2,5kk potential damage) in my DoY because most of the team's BBs were chickens or wasting their time killchasing a lone enemy DoY. Only did 15k damage (not missing a zero there), but apparently that was still better than half the team, which ought to tell you how much lifting justice and his division mates had to do to carry this team. Somehow ended up losing Karma on that game

I'm actually quite a fan of Koto music. I also like some folklore music, particularily old norse folk has quite the ring to it.

Interesting ... if the Damage Repair Party heal doesn't scale with Survivability Expert as I thought it should (since SE increases the maximum HP that the DRP supposedly heals percentage based, not by a set amount), then my dilemma about choosing between SE or AFT for my Kidd captain is resolved. Btw @Affeks, when opening a forum thread about what appears to be a game bug, it helps to tag WG staff like @Sub_Octavian, @MrConway, @Tuccy or @Kandly to ensure the people that matter take a look at it. Sending a PM also does the trick.

Possibly caused be the trapping of the radar, since having it encourages you to get closer to the action (in the attempt to get within range to use it), which in turns means you draw more attention and focus fire. Plus people who know about the Missouri radar are also more likely to focus it compared to an Iowa that doesn't have radar.

The thing is though that the two aren't entirely unrelated. Playing badly simply tends to cause other players to call you out for playing badly and particularily players with a short fuze or those who had a string of really bad games tend to lash out (been there, done that myself though I typically keep that in our clan TS). Sometimes (read: usually) that calling out comes with less than charming words (my rants in TS typically involve a lot of superlatives around the concept of stupidity). Not yoloing straight into the enemy guns and sinking without having done anything useful helps a great deal in not getting raged at. Of course there's people who're going to be douchecanoes no matter how well you do, but by simply not playing horribly you can reduce the amount of negative attention you're given substantially!

Except we now know that the mechanics behind spotting damage and its rewards have such miniscule payout that they're basically negligible. What the Missouri however is probably going to do that results in better overall XP and credit rewards is that her radar and the accurate guns mean you spend more time shooting at and damage destroyers and cruisers which simply pays better than focusing on lolpenning battleships which is essentially the only thing the Musashi will be good at compared to other battleships.

Except you can CLEARLY see his username in the link ...

Almost as classic as naming and shaming other people.

Missouri, Missouri and Missouri. A much, MUCH more versatile ship with its speed, stealth, AA protection and accuracy (particularily if you use the Plotting Room Mod.2 for -11% main battery dispersion). Also, the radar is invaluable in its utility. Musashi is slower, less stealthy, has barely any AA to speak of and the accuracy is meh. No radar on Musashi. The only point in favour for the Musashi is her 460mm guns allowing her to overmatch tier VIII+ BB hulls which the Missouri can't. That makes the Musashi the better ship to handle enemy battleships, but the Missouri is simply better at basically everything else. Missouri prints credits like mad and whilst it's not currently known if the Musashi will get the same ludicrous credit earn rate you get that credit printing machine guaranteed with the Missouri. Also, Missouri is about to get removed whereas you're going to have time to grind free XP anew if you really want the Musashi too.

Liked, then unliked so I could like it again!

I'm by no means an expert about Apple configurations, but a quick Google Search for MacBook Pro Retina tells me it's either using the Intel Iris Plus 640 or the slightly better 650 version. Those are integrated GPUs and essentla scrap by the bottom of the barrel in regards to gaming performance. And whilst WoWs isn't particularily demanding, trying to run this game on an iGPU at a resolution of 2560x1440 for the 13" laptop (2880x1800 for the 15") isn't going to work unless you deliberately lower the resolution. The reaons why I'm saying this is because I'm not quite sure you can really rule out a hardware problem, or at least not rule out a hardware problem might be escalating an existing software issue. Anyhow, you want to open a ticket at WG support here. You also want to supply a WGCheck report along with an as detailed recount of the issues you're having and how they occur. The WGCheck report file already includes system specs so they can check if your hardware is falling short (which I strongly suspect). From there on out WG support might help you sort out the issue.

System of a Down!

Just met @FireRM testing his Normandie. Match was largely uneventful if one were to discount half the team lemming to the map's potato cap and achieving little to nothing so the other (not braindead) half had to bail them out. And the amount of damage an IFHE Atlanta can do to a New Mexico is FILTHY!!!

For 203mm guns IFHE is generally not useful as your HE penetration won't beat any armour thresholds they can't pen already. Only ships in the french cruiser line who can make use of IFHE's HE pen bonus are the light cruisers (up to inculding tier VI) and the Henry IV.. The latter because her 240mm guns with IFHE can penetrate 50mm armour plating (can't penetrate without IFHE) which is found on some hightier BB hulls (plus Moskva's and Khabarovsk's 50mm troll hullplating). Essentially IFHE is wasted on the french tier VII-IX cruisers and of questionable value on the HIV (compared with other captain builds). Personally, I'm building my french cruiser captain for IFHE and intend to use it on the HIV (plus the premium De Grasse on which it definately is useful), but I wouldn't exactly recommend it (and I'm only really doing it for teh lulz anyway).

Just met @El2aZeR who was most definately totally not contributing to the BB overpopulation in any form, shape, fashion and speech. Left a compliment for him and two for the Kagerou who actually turned about when I told him I could support him if he goes for B (as he was initially going to try C). I think he also had a pretty neat game in his Kagerou coming fifth (iirc) on base XP in a tier X game so hopefully that's going to leave a positive impression about teamwork.

First thing, tutorials. A crapton of tutorials. This game needs to explain its game mechanics, not brush them under the rug like it does with so many game mechancsi (overmatch says hi): Tutorials explaining angling your armour to increase armour effectiveness, bounce angles, overmatching. How HE penetration works. The most common armour thresholds for overmatching and HE penetration cut-offs. Map tutorials that explain where you optimally want to be (near the bloody objectives, but apparently people need that spelled out for them!), how maps play different depending on which side you spawn. Positioning tutorials for each class. A tutorial explaining the stealth and spotting mechanics. A tutorial about captain skills and builds. A tutorial about fitting ships out with upgrades (and none of that Armada BS of putting the Target Acquisition mod on everything!). Secondly, limit the accessability of premium ships: There's literally no point in allowing players to buy premium ships of classes/tiers they have no idea how to play. Gate premium ships so that players have to gather some experience playing the same class of ships at the same tiers. NO ONE likes having a newbie in his torpedoing allies from second line or just rushing headlong into the enemy and getting instagibbed by the enemy team. WG can instead target newer players with premium time offers as an alternative marketing strategy until they reach the thresholds necessary to be eligible to purchase specific premium ships. I dare say most players probably also don't enjoy having bad games (which brings me to the next point). Thirdly, AUTOMATICALLY GIVE PLAYERS CONTEXT ON HOW THEY ARE DOING!!! Reflection is the single most important part of learning. I'd even say it's the starting point of the entire learning curve. However that isn't exactly a strong point for many players. However being ignorant doesn't mean they're willfully ignorant. Some people simply never bother to look at the teamscore and think their couple hundred XP is a good job (particularily since a couple hundred XP is what you get for a decent game in CoOp, more on that later!), without ever realizing they were the bottom of the team. I'd welcome a monthly (or perhaps even weekly for new players) status report with a simple breakdown of the players performance compared to the server averages and a prominent spot for showing the gameplay trend (is the player improving, stagnating or getting worse?). Bundle that with a couple cheap rewards (silver camouflages, some premium consumables, some signal flags, nothing spectacular but useful). Show people how they are doing where they can't miss it and give them some motivation to improve. Last but not least, improve CoOp: Operations are a great thing, far from the stale, normal CoOp matches. They bring flavour, even some narrative (something many people more into the history of naval warfare would quite probably greatly appreciate). More importantly though, they're actually rewarding. A good Operation game nets pretty equal rewards in XP and credits compared to a good random PvP game, unlike the normal CoOp games that reward players with peanuts and a precious looking 95%+ winrate against the bots. I actually grinded some ships in Operations (Galissionaire on Operation Aegis, one afternoon!) and that was certainly more fun to play that ending up bottom tier in Randoms all the time. Right now many players probably feel forced to play PvP to move up the lines because the CoOp rewards are so niggardly that getting to new ships playing CoOp takes months. Tweaking the economy might end up making CoOp much more attractive to players who're just looking for some casual shipping around without any performance pressure they might be feeling in PvP.

Is that a JoJo's reference? /meme If we're doing more vidyagaem music, I very much enjoy my XCOM:EW playthrough right now (about to blast EXALT to kingdom come): CivIII, the music to "just one more turn" to: Mandatory Command and Conquer:

I actually seriously contemplated simply not using my DCP and flooding out just so that ignoramus gets credited a full TK. But in the end I enjoy winning more than being vindictive so I pressed that R key and tried to make myself however useful I can be (considering I was a OSK to everything at that point). Did send that bloke a PM after the match telling him to do everyone a favour and just uninstall though.

Germans don't make "funny" decisions. They're decisions and there's nothing funny about it. If at all an adjective were necessary, it'd be "efficient".

First game this Ranked season, really only wanted to play a single game to get the rewards for the free ranks ... first thing the Atago on my team did was blanket torp MY smoke from second line. Of that match's eleven minutes I spent ten nursing my Lo Yang's remaining 81 HP. That's why I don't want to play Ranked anymore and why I believe there should be at least SOME discrimination as to who is actually allowed to play Ranked. This player has not a single regular techtree ship above tier V, bought himself a high-tier premium ship and ruins Ranked for other players.

He has a point though, one that has been raised a couple times already: MM should match radar ships. I've had domination games where one team had 5 radar ships and the other had zero (!!!). I don't think I have to go into further detail as to why that's bad MM.

If I had my way, then I'd change the overmatch mechanic so that any AP shell that overmatches a layer of armour will always be limited to normal penetration damage maximum (unless they hit the citadel hitbox and the armour they overmatched was the actual citadel armour). To offset the reduction of damage potential, BBs get an accuracy buff. So whilst there's no more lolovermatch citadels through the arse against cruisers for BBs to enjoy, having much better accuracy would allow BB players who know how to aim to land better hits more consistently (which also means they can punish broadsiding cruiser more reliably instead of watching their shells avoid a perfectly cooperative target) provided you can aim correctly (and compensate for evasive manouvres against cruiser players who don't straightline). It would conversely also allow cruiser captains to dodge shells more consistently if their ship is no longer intersecting with the original aiming point as less shells are flying wildly off target that just happen to find themselves hitting the cruiser, resulting in a more skill based interplay (rewards better dodging for cruisers, rewards better aim for BBs). Such an overmatch change would coincidentally also balance the Yamato's lolpen capacity against other BBs so ships like the Montana can get their old citadels back without getting citadeled by overmatching AP volleys through the bow from the Yamato and allow other players to punish BBs for showing their broadsides, i.e.: bring back that layer of positioning skill to seperate poor players from those you can effectively protect their broadsides. Imo a Win-Win change. Maybe I can finally get someone from WG to take a look at the proposal this time, what say you @Sub_Octavian, @MrConway, @Kandly, @Tuccy ?

Heh. For a bit context: the Deutsche Post had extra advertised that any package sent up to the 19th december will arrive in time for christmas, guaranteed. My mother had send our care package for her mother out on the 15th (well before the touted date). The package did not arrive in time for christmas. It did not arrive the following days. After checking back with DP, they allegedly had no idea where the package was which makes little sense, considering there's a package tracking number and the status read "moved into car for delivery". A day later, the tracking status updated to "in storage". We checked back again, asking why it was in storage. They couldn't (or wouldn't) tell ... naturally we demanded it be taken out of storage and be bloody delivered already as it was already approaching New Year, well past christmas (remember the advertisement). A day later the DP called back and told us the package was lost and that'd we'd have to request a formal investigation. We did, but all we heard back from them were the usual placations and no information why the package went from "moved to car for delivery" (where the tracking code was scanned, ergo the package must've still been there) to storage, or how it got lost subsequently. So on the 4th (january) we filed a demand that the DP refund us the value of the package content, all in all roughly 70€. Then on the 5th grandmother calls, the package arrived.

But that's two days old mince pie ... at the very best. Who knows how long that stuff was sitting on a shelf before getting bought. No, no, no.