Aotearas

Naw, that's just how gambling with RNG works. Some people get lucky, most don't.

I'm not about to watch someone open 240 Santa Crates or go investigative on what ships he had prior to opening, or if he had owned but sold them sometime prior to the opening marathon. Only thing I can say is that WG had a re-roll system in place that should work unless you game yourself and literally purchase hundreds of crates and that my experience with christmas crates I've never gotten a duplicate ship when buying crates incrementally. What I can say is the system appears to prioritize lower tier ships over dropping higher tier ones (or especially rare ones like Imperator, Gremy, etc.) so it most certainly fits the symptom of someone buying a metric ton of crates in one go and then RNG drops multiple low-tier ships duplicates. Either way, unless something changed radically with this year's crates (can't tell, haven't bought any) I'd have no reason to go full tinfoil hat considering my own experience is matching what WG said the crates work like.

Did he buy/receive all those containers at the same time? That's important because container contents are decided when you recieve them. That means the algorithm only checks what ships you own at that single moment, thus you can still get duplicates of the same ship because at the time you didn't have it yet and more than one container rolled for the same ship. That's why you should never buy those crates in bulk, but instead in smaller increments. That patterns has been found out by the community ever since the first time christmas crates became a thing in WoWs and people shared drop results.

Raising the Conqueror citadel has little to do with its HE shells and everything to do with people being allowed to derp around full broadside and barely getting punished for it until the moment the Conquek pops its heal and prints a brandnew ship. It's also totally not like you can simply angle and completely ignore any effects of said raised citadel against all but two ships in the game. If this is your typical kneejerk reaction I can only hope no doctor is ever going to test your reflexes, those fine folks are kinda hard to replace.

Guys, I just checked what I got and ... One Santa Crate, presumably small (and I hit meme jackpot!), two are collection crates (Dunkirk and Viva-La-France, normal crates, not premium) and one space crate. Codes appear to have had a limited activation contingent.

Meh. CVs would be a nice thing, but with how the rework is going I just can't find it in myself to be interested. As for RU BBs, we knew it was coming because of course it would and WG would never let something as trivial as not having much of a historic battleship fleet for the russians stand in the way of glorious comrade Stalin's Red Banner fleet. How many of those ships aren't paper? I see one ship that actually existed and Sovietsky Soyuz was at the very least laid down even though she was far from finished when she got scrapped again. Don't know if the other ones ever went further than blueprints. Considering we could have a line of french DDs and basically the entire italian navy without coming even close to having to resort to paper designs like that I can't say I'm particularily impressed. And since we're talking BBs, I can't even get myself hyped for a new shipline, game has plenty enough BBs around and if the meta needs anything the least right now it's more BBs to get the BB meta back into full swing once more. tl;dr: Meh.

Type it out manually. Said invalid code for the copy&pasta, but simply typing it in manually accepted it for me. Also, cheers for the codes, I presume all four are small Santa Crates? Will later see if I got something juicy

Ah, that's what you meant. I thought there was an additional, hidden clan ranking of sorts. In that case it's only semantically different from league MM. Tweaking progression to get more clans into higher leagues would still provide a better MM saturation and for run-away successes in Hurricane WG could always remove the rating MM for every clan in that league (it's the best of the best, so any clan making it into Hurricae should also get matched against anyone else in Hurricane regardless of how many points they have accumulated, with the obvious points won/lost proportional to the rating difference). If that still doesn't work and even with an improved progression rate not enough clans make it into Hurricane to provide a stable MM, then WG could look at expanding the MM to include Typhoon group I if waiting times exceed a set amount. Overall I still think making the progression easier (i.e.: less artificially deflated) can only improve things across all leagues (as said, even in Typhoon group II we had typical 1:39-2:00 minutes waiting time and there were far more clans around than what you'd see in Hurricane). Other tweaks can be added if still necessary.

Collaborations and both instances of anime characters where from naval themed series (Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Haifuri and Azur Lane (mobile game) respectively). Intended to draw in a couple fans and/or sell content to those who already play WoWs but are also fans of those. Luckily though you can use ingame filters to block the visual content (they show up as normal ships then) if you don't like the aesthetics like me (even though I generally am a big fan of anime, just not those series). As for the Asashio, yes, she's very much a one-trick pony and like you noted, as soon as there's no BBs or CVs left, your damage potential drops like an anchor.

That ... that seems to be unnecessarily contrived. So yeah, I don't doubt WG did it. Do we know how the rating works? If it's at least tied to the amount of points you get when winning/losing it could still be something that would work by tweaking that progression. If not, well ... guess another selfmade problem for WG to solve all by their lonesome, or more likely ignore.

"Allied" torps.

An easier progression would foremost lead to more clans making it to Typhoon, which is the league you need to fill MM for the highest ranked clans. Whether more make it into Hurricane or not is largely irrelevant since Hurricane itself is mostly just bragging rights anyway as the juicy CB rewards peak at Typhoon league anyway and I wouldn't imagine that much more clans would make it into Hurricane as soon as they start getting constantly matched against toptier clans like yours, OMNI, TTT, RAIN, etc. pp.. Reaching Hurricane league would still be a significant achievement. And ultimately: more clans, lower waiting times. Whether you get that by extending the MM bracket or by clans reaching the non-extended MM bracket by themselves makes little difference, except that one should be more sustainable because in the end a more steady progression isn't as frustrating as more than a win's worth of points on each loss. Even if those clans meet the same skill wall a bit later, it still means they spend at least some more time that other, better clans could piggyback along in the MM bracket which in turn would fill the one for the higher ups. I can say from my experience that winning against Typhoon clan (whilst being in Typhoon league ourselves) gets around 15-18 points. Losing against a Typhoon clan results in losing 20-23 points. To reiterate, those are same league scenarios, not clubbing a Storm clan and getting little rewards or derping against one and losing lots of points because we're higher ranked. Conway's statement certainly fits that experience. What other criteria go into the MM I don't know and at this point won't bother to speculate, but a lacklustre MM saturation and slow progressions are matching symptons and the most straightforward solution would be to improve progression so that clans can move up and fill the MM. To which degree that is necessary is open to debate, but it seems obvious that the current rate is causing issues. I do not believe we have.

The problem is that you always lose more points on a loss than you gain on a victory, as noted in MrConway's answer earlier. Increasing the MM range means that fighting higher ranked clans (and presumably losing on average) means they not only lose one game, but take longer to recuperate the points from the loss, hence slowing down progression. Compared to simply making progression a bit easier for clans to naturally progress into the normal MM range AND stay in the MM range due to not losing as many points means better MM population throughout all leagues. It would. More clans progressing on average means better MM population, period. Even when the better clans progress at a faster rate, others would eventually catch up and keep MM filled. Right now with a negative points economy, you effectively create a hard barrier that some clans will simply not be able to pass because they aren't successful enough to recuperate the points loss. There's a difference between less-skilled clans dropping out of higher leagues and never making it to them in the first place ... and that difference goes largely to the deficit of MM. Even if they drop out after a handful games, that's still a handful games they've gotten seeded into the MM and thus games people didn't have to wait several minutes because no one else was around. The highest leagues will still be populated by skilled clans because obviously they'll keep beating the lesser skilled ones. You won't be fighting (and I exaggerate to illustrate here) "I play for fun" casuals in Hurricane league just because it's going to be easier to progress. They'll still hit their skill wall eventually when they start regularily fighting clans above their skill level and losing. If anything it would reflect a clan's skill ranking better if points gain and loss wasn't artificially tampered into a negative sum game. Ultimately in order to keep queue times low you simply need more clans to fill MM slots, no other way around it.

That would be a bit too punishing on lower ranked clans though. Not only would they fight higher ranked (and thus presumably more skilled) teams than now, they'd still lose a disproprotionate amount of points for it on top if they lose (which is honestly to be expected in such a scenario). The only way to make such a change not inherently frustrating would be to make sure they don't lose as many points when fighting a higher ranked clan, but at this point you could just ease up on the progression entirely and achieve the same thing with a less frustrating experience for the lower end.

I can well believe that. Yesterday we had average waiting times of approaching two minutes in queue and we're in Typhoon group II. Easing up on the progression rate would mean more clans advancing up, filling the MM and thus reducing the queue wait.

Pretty sure german DD AP has the same 0.01 shell fuze as other DDs. You're still going to overpen most slim build DDs, but once they angle a bit (but not enough to bounce, obviously) or against the bigger DDs (like Gearing) the AP can deal some serious hurt. The AP is also really nasty against any other broadside. Cruiser or battleship giving you a side to farm? 3-4k per volley no problem, even more on the tier VI and VIII with their 150mm guns (though obviously at a slower rate of fire, but the tier VI in particular is fun to citadel cruisers with).

Honestly, not many of those unique upgrades are particularily worth it as they generally appear to be sidegrades rather than straight upgrades. Some are better than others but it's mostly dependent on whether they take the 5th or the 6th upgrade slot, because everyone should know how important concealment is in this game and thus how reluctant people are to give that up.

Considering that there's bound to be an influx of more Balansgrads as people get steel through snowflakes and the other campaigns, combined with the happenstance that WG is obviously reluctant to apply direct nerfs to premium ships and sprinkle a wee bit "yeah, that Blansgrad appears to be a slight bit too much vodka comrade" on top I'd personally recommend getting the Balansgrad first because you never know if WG is simply going to pull her from general availability once average joe gets access to her and the previous "but her stats are only so good because exclusively unicum players have her" won't fly anymore. Then again, the same could be said to some extent for all other steel ships, though for obvious *cough*CB*cough* reasons I'd guess most people are going to jump at the Balansgrad first and foremost.

Well, that's basically how progression botting works Just play a sh*tton of games and even miniscule rewards are steadily accumulating. You could do the math with average rewards at typical stages of a match. diminishing returns and offset that with time investment, but I'm not sure we'd want people to do that

Erm, correct me if I'm wrong since it's been a while since I last had to sit in a math lecture, but I'm pretty sure that in order to accumulate points you need more wins than losses even if points distribution on wins and losses are perfectly equal. At the current ratio (in Typhoon), three wins seem to roughly equalize two losses. So you intend clans to uphold a 66%+ winrate to keep a positive points gain (I'm sure WG has an internal numbers target, would be interesting if you could share)? That's a pretty lofty requirement considering the competitive environment on the EU server here. Last time I checked there's already clans that made it into Hurricane on other servers, whereas on EU, even toptier clans (and I mean the absolute top, previous clan season winners!) are still trading points on Typhoon league. I do think that's an indicator that the set points economy is a bit harsh. Iirc, one of the most widespread point of criticism of the last couple CB seasons has been the progression system/rate and WG had said they adressed this, but quite frankly at this stage I don't see how it changed for the better if it did. And though one might say it's perhaps a bit early to draw conclusions at this moment, we are rapidly approaching christmas and new year's time and there's inevitably going to be a lull in CB participation (and no, three more days compared to season 3 isn't a reasonable time compensation, especially since season 1 and 2 were roughly two weeks longer than season 3 and 4) across the board, so I'd go out on a limb and say that whatever ranking a clan reaches up just before christmas is likely going to reflect the eventual ranking for the season on average.

Enough people gave that sentiment and Conway said he's forwarded that and see if they would change that. If they changed that though, I wouldn't expect it in time for this season, let alone for the Dreadnought chain.

Gotta ask @MrConway, @Tuccy and other WG folks, did you really adjust the amount of points you win and lose? Because right now we're sitting on Typhoon and the typical points gain on a victory is ~17 points against same league clans, but on a loss it's well into 20 points or more that you lose, even against a clan in literally the same group.

Only difference to bad players in any other class is that CVs with their lower presence in matches make it more easily noticable. You don't want to know how many DDs, CA/CLs and BBs I've seen gleefully suiciding the last couple days.

Funny though how they couldn't arbitrarily set a lower damage output from the get go and then incrimentally work themselves up when needed, rather than default to a state that's literally no different from the stated problem. You'd think simply for putting up a show they'd at least try to make it look like they're getting rid of the "CV's nuking everything effortlessly" image. You're going to excuse me if I remain sceptical about WG's "balans" when they didn't even try touching CVs with a five-foot pole for years prior.

Literally the first ship that dropped on limited construction: Also had her drop after a couple more tries: I'm happy.