Aotearas

Terms like that exist for a reason. They're a categorical description, like BBabies stands for clueless players who just play battleships because they like huge ships, big guns and think because they are the biggest boat in the game though should stomp all over the smaller, ships. Or how noob (n00b) stands for bad players that simply refuse to improve because they are convinced they're good players and everyone else is making mistakes. Or how newbies are simply fresh players that don't play that well because they don't have much experience yet (and many people make the mistake to think that noobs and newbies are the same, which is plain wrong). It's easier to refer to a particular subset of players exhibiting those characteristics with a simple term rather than have to list them every single time. It also helps differentiate players who play battleships but actually understand the game, the classes and how to play them as opposed to the often maxrange spotter airplane sniping borderhuggers. When someone analyzes a list of gameplay changes and concludes they mostly benefit learning resistant battleship-only players with a propensity to play in specific, suboptimal ways, just writing "BBabies" is considerably shorter whilst covering the same set of player characteristics you're talking about. Other terms like "sky cancer" however aren't descriptive of someone else, but rather of one's own judgement ("I hate CVs, blah blah"). Those terms serve little purpose, I agree.

Not going to happen. The Imperator Nikolai I. (also known as the Imp or the Impregnator) was already considered too overpowered to sell again even when it could see tier VI matchmaking. After it can now only see tier V matchmaking maximum due to the new protected tier IV bracket, that thing only got an indirect buff on top of its performance. On the bright side however, with the recent RU DD HE buff and the upcoming stealthfire removel, it's not entirely unlikely that the Gremyashchy might actually return to the store (since the Gremyashchy's defining strengths were the untouched HE which gave it superiour HE alpha and the untouched detectability debuff when firing, which gave it a ludicrous stealthfire window).

So if 30% are automatic wins, another 30% are automatic losses, the remaining 40% are player dependent, then does that mean 70% winrate (30% + 40%) is 100% skill efficiency?

Da geht's nicht anders: Upotte!! Dump Denkt euch bei Upotte!! ist wie Kantai Collection. Nur sans die Mädels halt keine Boote, sondern Knarren.

And the rampant crashing continues.

Maybe the reason why fewer people completed the Sirte stage IV and V missions wasn't because they aren't skillfull enough or put too little effort in it, but rather because they simply didn't have the luck to run into many RN ships on the opposing teams that were happy feeding themselves to them? I completed that mission line but if that one Neptune hand't decided it would be a great idea to turn broadside to my Yamato, the final stage might've well eluded me and it wasn't me being particularily skillfull as much as it was simply the enemy having a brainfart ... by the way, that was the ONLY RN ship on the enemy team in that match. And on average I saw one RN ship on the enemy team (sometimes two, sometimes none so it roughly evens out). Considering there's eleven other players potentionally looking to get that frag, ... Kill missions are terrible design and a bad example to try and draw conclusions from.

Assuming you continually improve your gameplay and knowledge about game mechanics and ships, there's nothing wrong with playing higher tier ships the moment you unlock them as you play naturally. Just keep angled towards threats, put yourself where you can help your team most, pick your targets so you reduce the numbers of enemy ships as fast as possible and either push or delay the enemy as the situation demands. What I do recommend everyone to do however would be to play at least the mainstream classes up to at least tier V or VI to get an understand how they play. That means cruisers (any cruiser line works, though the IJN arguably offers better opportunity as their line includes heavy cruisers from tier V onwards which is a good learning opportunity if you don't intend to start grinding cruisers in earnest yet) and DDs (IJN and US DDs up to tier V at least, both will give you a good idea how a torpedo- and gunboat play respectively). And I'm assuming from your comment you#re already playing BBs. The most important part of me recommending that is not only getting experience how to play those ship classes, but understanding how you play them. That directly translates into knowing how you can defend yourself against them. Having played a torpedoboat DD like the IJN ones will tell you how aggravating it is if enemy ships are frequently changing their course, making the torpedoes miss (commonly referred to as WASD hax). Knowing how easy it is to delete a straightlining BB and how frustrating it is trying to hit one that doesn't will really drive the difference home and is an invaluable experience for any cruiser and battleship player. Likewise, knowing how a gunboat DD plays, how and where it likes to ambush other ships will teach you how to avoid those traps and how to deal with a DD zipping around and just pouring low caliber HE shells into you all the time (also makes for good aiming practice). Playing cruisers will teach you positioning, paying close attention to your surroundings and evasive manouvres when shot at. A straightlining cruiser giving you broadside takes just one good salvo and it's gone. A cruiser dodging and weaving is MUCH harder to aim for. It will also teach you to keep an eye out where the enemy ships are pointing their guns at and pulling a hard turn when you see them firing at you is a very (!!!) effective method of evading shots. Knowing how to do that can also teach you to anticipate that manouvre and adjust your aim accordingly. As for CVs, the experience is neat to have, but ultimately nothing that will change or improve your gameplay much. If you know how to minimize airstrike damage (turn into torpedo bombers before they drop to make the attack harder and poor drops easy to evade, turn your broadside towards divebombers (minimizing your target profile as divebombers always want to drop lengthwise due to their bomb spread) and trying to stick to ships with good AA whenever possible will serve you just as well as playing and learing the CVs gameplay yourself. And if you're looking for more tips, try to division up with experienced players that can give you advice during a game. Positioning skills for example are extremely situational, so getting (hopefully good) advice from players specific to the current situation is an excellent shortcut for that particular learning curve. You can find players to division up and help you ingame in the "Forumites" chat channel. Search for the "Forumites" (with capital "F") chat channel made by Sturmtiger_304 (many unpopulated duplicates). The password for the channel is "play4fun" and there's loads of experienced players hanging around you can team up with. If you have a microphone and TeamSpeak installed you can also hang around on the official WG TS server: 92.223.3.90:9989

What the others said. You don't turn pink just because you teamkilled someone. Any form of teamdamage can get you pink if you dealt enough of it to an ally. Actually sinking an ally is just one of the instant-pink conditions. Be mindful of your surroundings, zoom out of the aiming view in between shots and hold your fire if you have allied ships in the firing line and you won't have problems.

Or perhaps its because balancing low tier CVs works even without axing the single most important game feature a CV player has to learn in order to play competitively. Just reduce the damage from airdropped torpedoes so they don't nuke everything in one pass. Problem. F***ing. Solved!

Quite possibly because the devs have made it clear they don't care about the negative feedback and will just go along as they seem fit, without adressing arguments from the community other than "we have data, it says everything is fine, move along, nothing to see here". Also, I do have a couple peeps that stopped playing in no small part due to WG pushing RL and seemingly ignoring player feedback, so there's that. If you want to we can open that can of worms again and rant about RL all day long. I'd rather spent my energy on something productive though and even if that's only to give my feedback about upcoming changes in the vain hope that WG might actually reconsider some stuff this time ...

Really? REALLY??? There's a lot of things aren't hard to learn, like say not showing ones bloody broadside to the whole enemy fleet, but alas ...

Just throw a pawn in front of the bishop. He'll have to wait until it passes or be prosecuted for manslaughter. At this point, who cares anymore if the bishop arrives late anyway, it's not like they're known for punctuality or something.

So after you accidentionally shot an allied after you missed him getting into your firing line (can happen, no big deal), you just didn't care and continued firing until you got pink? First one was an accident, second and third one are square on you if you just continue firing into your ally. I really wished WG would introduce the same system as in WoT. Pinkies who deal enough damage turn blue and a free game for everyone, including their own team. Should also give the corresponding XP and credit rewards for damaging/sinking them. That or just permaban the account, maybe donate premium time, doubloons and premium ships into a monthly lottery draft for lucky players to win. Have those pinkies give something back to the people whose games' they messed up. Eh, I had more engaging conversations with A.L.I.C.E. ...

Firstly, CV alt-attack changes are stupid: Rather than remove manual attacks because people can't handle them reduce the damage potential for torpedo bombers. A single solid torpedo drop can sink full health cruisers and DDs and deal crippling damage to battleships and other CVs. Adjust CV strike aircraft (torpedo bombers specifically) damage potential to scale with their tier's average HP level of ships would be a more meaningful balance tweak than just axing a gameplay feature! And if the skillgap between people who use alt attacks effectively and those who don't is an issue, don't punish competence by removing manual attacks, but rather force players to git gud by removing autodrops instead. Secondly, regarding the open seas stealthfire removal: Will all ships retain the 20 seconds detectability debuff, or will that figure see a change to accomodate the change on how detectability works? Maybe scale the debuff duration to gun caliber so lower calibers like found on DDs will have a much shorter debuff duration, say 5-7 seconds, larger calibers like say the ~150mm found on light cruisers will get a higher duration, say ~10 seconds, heavy cruiser 203+mm armament say 15 seconds and battleship calibers get the longest debuff duration of 20+ seconds. WG could also add gun number to that equation, so that a ship with less guns will have a slightly shorter detectability debuff duration than a ship using the same caliber armament but has more guns (say 9 mainguns vs 12, so it gets 25% reduced debuff duration). Another detectability debuff mechanic WG might explore would be a continually shrinking detectability bloom. When a ship fires, its detectability gets debuffed to match it's current maximum firing range, but rather than stay at that same range until it suddenly reverts back to the original detection ranges, the bloom gradually decreases as time goes by until it either reverted back to the ship's original detectability or blooms again if the ship fired before the debuff duration expired. And last but not least, the gun range buffs: Some ships needed those (Marblehead), others I can understand but don't feel strongly about it, but for the BBs getting buffs I can just shake my head in confusion and minor disbelief (Ishizuchi being the only exception, that ship needed a buff, but giving it more range isn't going to help much when the shell performance with the AP in particularily is the biggest problem this ship has, detectability buff is useful though). 4km range buff for South Carolina? 2.3km buff for Wyoming? 3.6km buff for Arkansas Beta? 2.3km buff for New York? 0.9km buff for Texas? 1.1km buff for New Mexico? 2km buff for Colorado? Aside from the South Carolina whose average stats were a bit lacklustre I don't see why any of those ships needed a buff, let alone some that were as substantial as that. Also the last statleak I saw had the Nagato range nerfed. Was that change dropped? BEcause that was another change that I couldn't understand at all. All in all, I'd have to say this looks like on of the worse patches to come out in a while. More indirect BB buffs (no more stealthfiring), more direct BB buffs ... didn't WG say they were aware of the BB overpopulation and were considering steps to remedy that problem? Then why on earth do you guys keep buffing them? At this point this smells more like you're just lying through your teeth to placate worried players whilst happily buffing BBs to continue pleasing n00bs playing their precious battleships. And if that isn't the case, you really have to explain to us how those changes are supposed to reduce the numbers of BBs back to a more balanced level. Because I ain't seeing it and if you're not either lying or plain incompetent, you certainly give off that impression and that couldn't be in your best interest!

Precisely. Then again, not everyone feels like banging theirs heads against a skillwall until they smash through it to beat that one bonus boss or whatnot. I don't expect that from people. I don't do that myself most of the time, but I at least put the effort into learning how the game works so if XCom is telling me my sharpshooter has 10% chance to hit that Viper, I don't take the shot and then complain about "OMG I never hit anything, this game is too hard". I will however savescum the hell out of the game whenever I get a stupid 95% hitchance that RNG decides to turn into a miss and a dead soldier next turn. Screw you XCom!

Guess where the magazines are located? I'll give you a tip: it starts with "C" and ends with "itadel".

*Sigh* ... if you know that detonations are a thing, why on earth would you even toy with the thought of it being a cheat!? ANY form of damage that hits gun/magazine modules will trigger an RNG call for detonations. Just splash damage is enough if the dice rools that way. I've sunk ships with a detonation despite never actually having hit it (detailed report sayd zero hits for blahblah damage, meaning the splash damage from the HE shell still hit the ship and caused a detonation). Do torpedoes deal damage? If the answer to that is yes, OF BLOODY COURSE they can cause a detonations.

This thread is like the 214% thread's smart little brother. Yay math and statistics!

Okay, I just had a brainfart that may actually quite interesting: That 90 aircraft capacity? What if the Kaga would get Kamikaze squadrons!? Say half the ships aircraft allotment is in single use Kamikaze squadrons, the other half is regular tier VII aircraft to strike with as usual. Would give the Kaga a tremendous damage potential at the start of a match, but below average efficacy in the late game due to a lower reserve of regular aircraft after the Kamikaze were all spent.

HNNNNNGGGGGG!!! Am a bit wary of the reserve numbers though. So many spare aircraft at tier VII would be extremely unusual unless WG deliberately made the planes squishy (tier VI aircraft or lower) at which point it might just be less effective (more reserves mean nothing if most of your strikes never reach the target because they get shot down by AA). It would also make the CV suffer from horrible tier scaling if it gets into uptiered matches. Think tier VI aircraft against tier IX AA ... they'd probably never reach the drop range. On the other hand, if it gets so many reserves and the airplanes are just as durable for their tier, it might turn plenty overpowered. Saipan got hightier (very durable, very fast) aircraft but fewer individual aircraft per squadron (which also means faster servicing times!) except for the DB squadron. Maybe Kaga will go for lower tier aircraft but larger squadrons, though I somehow don't think that would be very effective (as I said, more aircraft doesn't matter much if they just get shot down, and larger squadron sizes would also means increased servicing times, which combined with above average aircraft losses would make for a very long time in between strikes, giving cruisers plenty time to recharge their defensive AA ...). Also, that ship looks huge. Will probably make US CVs look like ninja's in comparision. Also means this ship will get blown to smithereens rather fast, being easy to hit (though depending on armour it might prove surprisingly resilient to typical DD caliber guns at least and maybe even ~150mm calibers). Anyhow, am looking forward to how this ship will turn out, even though I'm not a consummate CV player.

I blame two things: #1 - The videogame industry having done away with manuals (presumably to save money on printing and paper). Back in the days I used to put the disk into my PC, start the installation process (which could last for an hour depending on game size) and then read the manual. Pretty sure I still have the old Civilization 4 manual lying around somewhere. That thing was just as large and thick as the game's box itself. By the time the isntallation would be done, I'd have read up all about basic controls, game mechanics and what tips, tricks and ingame component documentation the devs had deigned to put in writing. #2 - Mobile gaming. Also commonly refered to as casual gaming. To be precise, the kind of games you load up on your phone when you're on the bus, play for ten minutes and then quit as soon as you arrived at your stop. The kind of games that are never supposed to hold your attention for longer than a couple minutes. The kind of superficial, shallow game design that actively contradicts concepts like high skill ceilings and difficult challenges that may drive a player to improve. Gamers by far and large are no longer expected to seek and overcome a challenge. They are being showered with instant gratification and easy success. Actually difficult games like Dark Souls, XCOM, etc. where getting your arse handed to you with little mercy and the game outright challenging you to git gud are few in between and this environment simply breeds low attention span attitudes in players. Now, I don't need every game to be like Battletoads, nor do I expect every gamer to be as invested into the game as South Korean progamers with Starcraft. But I miss the basic attitude of players getting challenged rather than handing out freebies just so that everyone has their little share of success. When I was a child I used to get Lego Technic sets for birthdays and christmas. Those come with instructions but being a child ... well, you make mistakes and stick stuff to the wrong ends and sulk when it doesn't look like on the picture. But my father would just dismantle everything, reshuffle all parts for good measure and have me start anew. When I'd finally complete the set I'd get an affectionate hair ruffling, a pat on the back and a promise of an even bigger set next time. ... damnit I feel old now. I'm not THAT old ffs ...

Austria, isn't that were everything is out to kill you?

They can't have much of an understanding of gamer mentality then. Every possible advantage will get exploited to the maximum. If WG didn't foresee stealthfiring being abused wherever possible, frankly they ought to play a couple competitive multiplayers for some time so they can actually grasp the gaming mentality and the gameplay meta that derives from it.

Someone done floundered rudely, eh? Eh? Mkay, I'll see myself out.