Aotearas

We shall usurp you in due time, Overlord.

*cough*

Oopsie ...

No u.

1. That's how stealth works. Pay more attention to your minimap, enable last known positions and learn how to predict enemy intentions. 2. WG quality programming is stronk. 3. That's not how it works, you deal damage, you get XP and credits. 4. BS! There's multiple times to conclude a battle. Sink all enemy ships, have the enemy team's points drop below 0, capture the enemy base in Standard Mode, have your own team reach 1000 points in Domination/Epicenter mode or have the match clock (20 minutes) run out and the team with the most points gets declared winner. A fleeting glance over your profile tells me you're still new to this game. I suggest taking off the tinfoil hat and instead read through the newcomers subsection on the forum, perhaps watch a few Youtube guides/commentaries (iChase has pretty decent tutorials on basic gameplay facets of the game). Learn, adapt and improve.

In that case, have fun and keep shooting AP at cruisers. You'll get citadels at ranges and angles you wouldn't believe possible. And if you ever see a nice flat side of a BB ... om nom nom!

Imho aside from paying a teamdamage fee, offenders should be penalized with negative XP they have to grind back. Say 1:1 conversion rate of teamdamage to XP, then with a modifier that increases with each tier (i.e.: if you cause serious teamdamage in the hightiers, it's going to take a good chunk of games to get rid of that penalty). Like with captain retraining and captain XP, the player will not earn any XP towards the ship until the penalty has been cleared. Torp from second line in your precious tier IX DD and land 40k damage on a friendly? Have fun with your additional 60k XP you have to get rid of before resuming your ship grind!

What you're talking about is the skill ceiling (i.e.: how much good skill increases the performance), whereas skill floor is the opposite (i.e.: how much your performances suffers if you play bad). Skill ceiling is acceptable (though it could be raised by reducing the gunnery RNG a bit and making BBs more vulnerable if they don't angle properly), but the skill floor needs to be lowered. All this stuff with super-low citadels is teaching bad habits. If a BB shows broadside, it should get nuked like any other ship that catches a handful citadels, not get away with just a couple normal penetrations (still hurts a lot, but it's not an instant devastating strike) because the citadel is so low that it's virtually unreachable.

Stock Baltimore is worse than the upgraded New Orleans. But don't be disheartened, the upgraded hull already gives you nice AA (more than the New Orleans and finally you peak out at AA again after the Cleveland!) and once you get your hands on the gun upgrade ... citadels, citadels everywhere! Obviously, you not being a scrub kinda gave it away ... duh. Bet you someone still managed to undercut you in the scoreboard! As for my own day, went rather well. Nothing particularily spectacular, but considering it's sunday, my session was remarkably bereft of facepalms (sure, there were some questionable decisions from randoms, but hey, par for the course and NOTHING like the usual weekend madness). Finished the grind through the Algerie (which was rather enjoyable, a nice solid if otherwise unremarkable ship) ... well okay I cheated a little and spent 1794 free XP because I wanted to exploit the discount on buying and outfitting the Charles Martel. Also had this clinch of a game: Was a pretty intense affair. B quickly turning out to be untenable for me in between all the aircraft buzzing around and the loads of ships that would be able to fire at me when I get spotted (and they always fire at me, I can spot and call targets on exposed ships and my team will typically do anything but fire at them, but when I get spotted, the enemy team drops everything they've been doing and focus on me ... bastards!) so I had to bail and help at C instead, smoked up the Missouri that was busy getting a bloody nose, though unfortunately I caught a torpedo meant for Ole Miss' in the process which chunked me for 10k (I got lucky for once, usually I get dunked for full torpedo damage and an Atago torp can do a lot more than 10k ...). Helped cap C, then turned back to B after our CV (big shout-out to @Shizzlesticksz who did a splendid job in his Taihou), though it was looking quite bad around that point, we were down two caps vs one, had less ships and almost 300 points behind the red team for the longest time until our team managed to claw ourselves back into the fight. Managed to finish off their last DD, then stalked the cap until our CV got rid of the Fiji whose presence forced me out of the cap, though I got a good torpedo spread into the enemy North Carolina. After capturing B, we had essentially swing the game around, we now had rough parity in ships, but ours had more HP and especially the enemy BBs were low on health so we could finish them off rather swiftly. Meanwhile I capped A and as a final boon, I got to munch on the Essex which nearly doubled my damage total.

The skill floor is a lot higher for BBs than for DDs. Even a bad BB can still do plenty damage and gets kills and feel rewarded ("look mummy, I made cruiser go boom"). Playing bad in a DD typically just gets you killed with little to show as a reward. Same in cruisers, you just die. Same in CVs, you just get deplaned and end up looking at the screen for another 15 minutes (assuming they don't simply ragequit). BBs need to be less lenient for bad play. Lower the skill floor. The skill ceiling is relatively well balanced (apart from CVs, but that part of the game is a jumbled mess anyway) but any idiot can play BBs and see pretty big numbers.

I like to believe I have common sense but alas it ain't very common at all, so I suppose psychic is the next best thing indeed.

Imho, what WG should do at this point is: Suspend the sales of the ship entirely until AFTER a satisfying balance has been achieved after readjusting the ship's gameplay. Issue a public apology about releasing the ship in a state that was unrepresentative to prior CC impressions and appears to be underperforming. Offer no questions asked refund for anyone who doesn't want to keep the ship. Offer incentives for people to keep and keep playing the GZ as WG adjusts it (more data means faster cycling through changes, thus achieving a satisfying finalized state ASAP at which point sales can resume). #0 and #4 to infinity on that list should be: Never ever pull that kind of stunt again!

I'm afraid at this point that'd be akin to trying to quench a boilover with water. They can try and quite frankly WG has no alternative other than try something (well, technically they could try to simply ignore the fiasco as if it never happened, but I'm sure we all know how that would turn out), but WG has no option left to appease the most. They can only opt to displease the least. Coming around to buffing the ship as if it were just underperforming (with the AP bombs being so unreliable they might aswell be nonfunctional against anything that moves) after having released her in the current state is going to rile people up that think (with good reason) it should've never been released in this state in the first place. And after the whole "just testing" radar and DFAA for RN BBs that already have the vocal community in uproar, actually releasing a ship (a premium ship they're asking ~50 bucks for, just to emphasize) in such a poor state might aswell cripple whatever good will/trust many of the forumites might've had left for the developers/balancing team. Not wanting to sound like a doomsayer, but WG can't really afford to lose their community's faith in their ability to provide balanced gameplay (and yes, I'm aware the forum community is but a droplet in the ocean of total players, but the vocal community is probably also the one with the most investments into the game in form of premium ships, etc., a.k.a. the whales for WG's business model). I.e.: a bad choice from a business perspective as you risk losing returning customers. Again, I'm not saying WG has no options or there's no right way to try and adress this issue. But WG simply doesn't have any good choices, no matter what they do, it's going to hurt. Which is why I completely understand their silence (as much as removing people from the CC program may count as silence ...). They probably have their marketing department crunch the numbers and try to come up with a course of action that projects the least amount of loss (short and longterm) and will then simply do what the numbers say is the least worse outcome for them. Or they can do something even more stupid than I give them credit for (WG sure seems to be trying), at this point I'm actually more inclined to the latter.

That is the right decision. But at this point, WG is losing either way. Because if they admit the product isn't finalized, then de facto it's faulty and they MUST accept refunds if anyone asks for it. And that is about nuclear as it gets in terms of bad choices for a company selling goods. I'm not saying there are no solutions for WG. I'm just saying that no matter what they do, they're screwed ... they literally have no good options left from their perspective.

There is no easy solution here for WG. IF the release of the ship was unintentional, oh boy did someone FUBARBUNDY'ed at his job. I mean they released the ship on the first (public) day of Gamescom, they were advertising it on Gamescom (with evidently prepared presentations), they had a news article about it. This wasn't a case of someone accidentally pressing a button. The release was prepared. That's not just messing up, that's graduating the University of Mess-Up-City with honours, acquiring a doctorate in advanced f*ck-ups, then dedicating five years of research into how to screw up the most effective way and what we have here is the result of a triple-checked 1000 page research paper. And if the release of the ship was intentional, then someone clearly thought that the ship in its current state is worth ~50 bucks standalone AND that people would want to buy it (I am presuming based on the current state of the ship, not the earlier iterations that hyped it up with its ludicrous 3x5 TB strike package, because the obvious alternative would be extremely underhanded hype abuse). I'd question anyone's state-of-mind who'd genuinely think people would be happy with this ship as it stands right now. This ship simply should've never been realeased in its current state. The moment it got live on the premium shop is the point of no return for WG, they dun fooked up so magnificiently they simply don't have a good path to choose, only paths that are slightly less worse than the others.

Pretty sure the only angle WG can work this is with his suggestions of people getting fired. Recommending people to go through the proper channels and ask for a refund is entirely within the customers rights and as such can't be held against iChase if he tells people to make use of their rights. The only foot WG is standing on here is iChase's comments about firing employees. But as we're seeing a lot lately, WG seems to have developed a liking to shooting their own feet, so let's see how they're going to stand through this one.

I want pictures of Sabaton being drunk and naked!

Clemson gun upgrade gives a measly+1 to its artillery rating. But it doubles the actual gun count as it turns the four single mounts into four double mounts. Don't trust the simplified stats. Click on them and check out the real hard numbers and the picture is going to be much clearer and in many cases no longer outright misleading.

Welp, never was much of a fan of iChase (though his beginners guides and the Know-Your-Ship series he had are nice!). He had a penchant for calling out other people's mistakes, only to do them or similar mistakes himself and patting himself on his back for it. And most assuredly, even though many, many, MANY people are of a similar mindset about what iChase said about the ship and its more than questionable implementation/release ... he went overboard with it and as someone who is affiliated with WG via the CC program, he kind off has to watch his tongue and WG is completely within their rights to exclude him for that. That however still doesn't change the fact that WG's decision is stupid AF and just another link in the chain of boneheadedly stupid decisions that culminated in this PR mess that is ENTIRELY of WG's own making. They're not just shooting themselves in the foot, they're taking breaks reloading their gun so they can keep shooting themselves. Clearly someone or multiple people up in the WG management and marketing departments are off the hooks and instead of dialing back and start damage control, they're going full retard. At this point WG might aswell just terminate the entire CC program. First the Foch debacle that cost them a couple prominent CCs like Jingles, now iChase (which I believe was one of the biggest NA CCs they had for WoWs) ... evidently they haven't learned. In fact they seem to have actively unlearned some stuff, even Foch was issued a warning to take back his statement, not simply outright thrown off. If anything, this isn't policing foul language, this is more akin making an example of iChase to cow other CCs since apparently no one can expect second chances anymore.

I would assume it's Razer's proprietary software that might cause a hiccup. I presume you are running that software in the background, yes? Try disabling it and see if it changes something.

Wut? I mean ... wut!?!?! I understand that some Des Moines players actually chose to use HAS instead of DFAA because hardly any CV even dares to come close to a Des Moines (though me and a couple division mates had a good laugh when our Essex was forced by circumstances to attempt to drop on a Des Moines to help win the game, only to find out he didn't in fact have DFAA, then got wrecked unceremoniously). But even without DFAA a Des Moines has nasty enough AA that it will shoot down plenty aircraft ... Though I would never use anything but DFAA ... but I'm a bit of a vindictive jerk and pray for CVs in my Des Moines games, just so I can gleefully murder all their little pretties with muh magic button. And yeah, everyone thinks it's the CV's duty to provide them with 24/7 fighterscreen and spotting, oblivious to the fact there's another 10 people who think the same way. Hell, even I fall for that bias every now and then when I see myself getting focused by the CV though I typically don't overextend, they focus me because they want/need me dead ... so it's a bit frustrating because as the player getting the business end of that attention, it looks entirely predictable and it's too easy to forget how taxing the multitasking of several squadrons at once is, so in the heat of the moment it just feels like you're being left abandoned. Part of why I made it personal policy to compliment every CV (including enemy CVs) when I see them having performed well in the game, regardless of how pissed I might've been during the game. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

Nackert natürlich. Und bring Bier, jede Menge Bier, damit Sabaton auch nackert wird!

Buy more doubloons. Buy more premium time. Buy more premium ships. Buy Yamato campaign containers. Buy, buy, BUY!!!

Having recently unlocked the Des Moines: she's totally worth it. An absolute blast to play! I also found the Baltimore grind to be rather pleasurable (after unlocking the main battery upgrade, stock Baltimore is baaaad) and the superheavy AP you get with the upgrade is no joke. You citadel ships at ranges and angles you wouldn't dare hope for in any other ship, it's just beautiful. And the Des Moines is just a Baltimore on crack! Almost double the rate of fire, better radar and with AA that makes you wish for a CV to be in the match. Now, onto my stuff: teams today were HORRIBLE. So bad in fact the odd couple Gamescom accounts I saw today played better than the vast majority of random allies I had today. Like trying to press a quadratic block through a triangle hole, complete with infantile whining when *surprise* it didn't work! Thankfully we could salvage some games with our division as a counterweight: You know the game is going bad when you have to use AP ammunition in your Ishizuchi. And I don't mean want to use because you see a juicy broadside (even though I still rather prefer HE because the AP is just that unreliable on the Ishizuchi). I mean have to use in order to maximize your damage potential in a desperate attempt to cling to the mere chance of victory by outkilling the match timer. We had already lost @MortenTardo who in a case of freakishly bad luck got hit by utterly random torps (like seriously, there was literally zero sense to those torps, nowhere near Morten's last know position, he wasn't spotted and they couldn't have been area denial torps because they would hit the island not 5km away, just randomly pressed on buttons and as chance would have it Morten's Clemson was in their path, wtf!?). Down 2 vs 5 ships at the end (and one of those two ships was lameoll with barely over 1k HP left on his Kuma) and severely down on points. The only chance at victory we had was literally kill all remaining enemy ships before we either die trying to, or the time runs out and they win on points. At that point @lameoll was already busy reducing the enemy barrels (had a Kraken by the time we were down that much, me still no frags to my name), but so low on HP he had to play it passive. Which means me in my Ishizuchi had to balls-out charge the enemy and attempt to wreck them singlehandedly. It worked. Sunk the Kuma that was just about to start kiting me, turned about towards the B cap as they were capping, nuked the Kolberg there (didn't prevent the cap though), then had to turn out to angle against the full HP Kawachi and kill the rushing Duguay instead (stronk torpedobeating/-baiting), THEN have a turning war with the Kawachi (bouncy, bounce babay) ... at this stage I had no choice but ignore the Wyoming that was in B until I killed the Kawachi (he had my broadside once, but he was firing HE ... guess his team must've facepalmed as hard as I had earlier at my team's performance). My AP ballet with the Kawachi at least ensured I kept the Wyoming spotted so lameoll could pour HE into him unspotted from over islands and set him on fire multiple times, so after I finally sunk the Kawachi (was so close I couldn't even aim properly in gunnery camera, had to use external view) and got my fourth kill, I had HE ready to put a permanent fire or two in the Wyoming (cuz that's what an Ishizuchi HE broadside does), but as it turns out, lameoll already hat two fires burning. My HE salvo sadly wasn't enough to kill him, so lameoll's fire did the last tick of damage, otherwise we would've had two Kraken between us. That would've been a splendid ending to that hard carry ... As usual, didn't even get a compliment for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. But with those teams, I'm not sure they would recognize good performance if it jumped into their faces arsefirst!

Naw, I'm fairly certain there's no actual addiction in play here. I just tend to stick to one game over playing lots of games simultanously and right now don't have many other games to play that interest me (though that will probably change once the XCom 2 expansion comes out and I got the word from trusted people if its worth the 40€ or if I should wait for a slight discount). That has the added benefit of me actually delving deep into the game and its mechanics instead of being a broadside straightlining nubcake that just wants to make big guns go boom a couple times per day.