AnotherDuck

If you make the rewards less based on team effort and more on individual performance, the game will become less fun for bad players, and more fun for good players. That either drives players to become better, or it drives them away from the game. If it's supposed to be a game that's fun for all players, that's a bad idea. If you want a game geared towards the best players, it's a good idea. Playing for the team, according to all metrics used to calculate experience and gold gain, is not beneficial enough. It's more beneficial to play for yourself as it is. We don't need more encouragement to play for yourself. There are many things you can do that can't be measured in anything other than actually winning. Sometimes just holding a position gives a huge advantage. Spotting is not nearly profitable enough, but it's essential to win the matches. Some methods of harassing and holding areas, especially with torpedoes, can make it very hard to actually get much to show for it, but if it halts the enemy, it's a great help to the team. Taking damage for the team or sacrificing yourself to break a lock are other things that aren't rewarded much, if at all. Winning should matter. Rewards for being on the winning team is the best encouragement to play for the team.

Of course it is like that. "Learn to adapt" is for other people. As long as they get their lolbuttons so they don't need to adapt to others, other people should adapt to them. And then you have those, "im so kewl i dont need radar," who don't add anything other than, if you actually believe them, saying radar is superfluous. Which is another argument for removing them.

It's very rare that I pop radar and one enemy ship doesn't have a very bad day. It's just so easy that no matter how crap your ship is and no matter how crap you're playing, if you have that button, you can make the game sour for at least one other player. A lot of the time, you don't even have to do anything else, since your teammates will do it for you, as long as you press that magic button. That's also one of those ships with the broken combination of a radar with longer range than the ship's detectability, so you can be absolutely certain you find a DD if you're spotted. And since the guns on the ship are relatively good, you'll be able to dish out quite a bit of damage, even without the accuracy upgrade. Whether enemies camp more when I'm in a Chappy or not I can't really tell, since there's usually one or two other radar ships in the match. I can tell that since radar was introduced, I've noticed a far campier meta. It's been there the whole time, but it only really became extremely obvious even if you don't pay much attention when T7 Ranked happened a while ago, with P2W Belfast. Then everyone started smoke camping as well, which is far safer with radar than without. "Using your brain" is a non-argument, since you can apply that to anything. You could put a T10 BB in a T5 game, and since you can use the argument "use your brain" to counter that, it's perfectly balanced, according to the argument.

For captains, if you plan to advance to T10 (or some other specific ship), spec the captain for that ship. On nearly all lines that works out well enough (SN DD line is one exception, where you need at least two very different builds). It might not be optimal for every single ship in the line, and there might be a switch somewhere in the middle (most cruiser lines switch from CL to CA at some point) which may be enough to switch or respec the captain at some point. If you happen to find a ship you want to keep, just get a new captain for that ship (keeping the old one advancing in the line), and spec accordingly. For upgrades, what people said holds true. Focusing on the main guns is never really a bad idea. If you plan to shoot a lot of destroyers you want all the accuracy you can get. On the other hand, speccing for AA also works in quite a few cruisers, even those that are permanent no-fly zones (Like Cleveland and Des Moines). You're essentially going to go up one or two tiers in what CVs you can handle.

Okinawa works somewhat as a map. Players can't work Okinawa. Tears of the Desert in Domination works well enough. In Epicentre I get the impression that the southern team has a slight advantage. It's not nearly as bad as Mountain Range. That map just plain sucks. Two corridors of open water with random islands at the edges. North is also the most boring map to play, as it's campy as hell. At least Northern Lights is actually pretty, if you can manage to play it during night and the northern lights are actually visible. Ocean is fine. It's realistic. It's fair. It's unique. It requires a different way of thinking. Sadly I've not seen Ocean in half a year.

Actually happens rarely to me nowdays, but I've mostly been trying to advance my T7-T8 cruisers or other high tier ships. It's not that common on those tiers. When I play my Shinononome or Kamikaze for some bonus captain experience at mid tiers, then it happens on occasion. Normally, just shrug and get on with it. It's not a big deal. If someone actually raises a stink about it, and they're the one who fired the torpedoes, then they can has all of my reports. Which is really all you can do.

I don't have much of a "problem" with radar when I play DDs. I know how to play around it. However, radar has reduced the fun I have playing, both with DDs and with anti-DD ships. Shooting fish in a barrel might be acceptable levels of gameplay to you, but for me it just plain sucks for everyone involed. And that's besides the point that it still encourages camping.

Doubt all you want, but I know how useful it is. However, unlike radar, it requires skill to use, since aiming at an invisible ship in smoke isn't all that easy, especially if it moves. You also don't have the aim assist, so the dispersion is worse than if you aim at a visible ship. It's not just an almost automatic 50% damage or more if you know how to point and click. CV planes can be dealt with. They have counters that aren't just "kemp moar". You can smoke, get help from allied AA ships or planes, and in some DDs, like the USN high tiers, deal with it yourself without problems.

Spotter planes don't really make the game a whole lot campier, so that comparison fails. CV planes are weapons, so the comparison to them would be something like removing battleship guns. Not really. I'm talking about game mechanics that encourages certain behaviours. Separating it to only game mechanics and only players is missing the point that game mechanics can affect player behaviour.

Oh, sure, the game is totally less campy since radar was introduced. You're increasing the skill floor of ships that are already heavily punished from any mistakes. You're encouraging them to play safer. Safer gameplay from destroyers means other ships will be less likely to push, which leads to a campier gameplay. So yes, radar absolutely promotes camping, and the meta shows that.

What I wonder is why WG keeps crap employers who're under their paycheck but keeps [edited]up the game, but will happily kick CCs who promote their game for free.

Radar detects DDs who can launch torpedoes. Is that so hard to understand? That leads to DDs avoiding radar ships and playing it much more safe, which leads to less opportunities to torp into smoke screens (which goes especially against P2W Belfast), and ultimately, a more campy game. That's what radar does. Since radar was introduced, the game has only become campier. Yeah, why think ahead when you can just pop a radar for some free DD damage?

Radar is actually a very powerful counter against a counter to smoke: torpedoes. So it doesn't really help on the whole. It just adds to the smoke camping meta. So by that logic, torpedoes should do 50%-100% damage. I mean, it's a war game. People should die. You're just defending an extremely easy way to kill someone. But it's fine, since DDs shouldn't be too overconfident.

Radar should be removed from the game. It's only made the game worse, in particular it's increased the camping. Ships that were buffed with radar should get real buffs instead of a stupid button that does more harm than good. It's easy to take off 50%-100% of a DDs life in radar. That's not "mostly fine". It's a crutch mechanism that should get removed in favour of actual balancing, but we all know WG is completely incapable of creating new content or solving problems without gimmicks.

Well, if I'm in a DD and capping, and planes come towards me, I abandon the cap if there's no air support. Sometimes that's not a big problem, but you're going to be one DD short for a while, and probably one that's taken a fair bit of unnecessary damage. That's up to the friendly CV. Last time a T6 CV tried that to me in Chappy was absolutely hilarious. Thanks for those plane kills, and not a single one managed to drop. Equal tier CVs can do a little more, but still should probably choose better targets. If there are higher tier CVs, I don't do that kind of flanking in that otherwise motly crap ship that happens to have OP radar.

I only complain about CVs when they do obviously stupid things, like parking their fighters above the camping BBs instead of trying to help their capping DDs, or think they're playing an immobile airfield.

If you play aggressively, the difference between USN and SN lies in the cruiser-type destroyers, ending with Kebab. That play is being visible at almost all times, guns only stopping to reload, and never keeping the rudder still. The USN style, which some SN DDs can use, is more about bullying other DDs in caps, stealth firing through smoke or over islands, and getting close before either torping larger ships or gunning down smaller ships.

I think having the turrets all turn forward would help a lot. Although personally I've not used the ship a lot, just bought it today and played a full three games in it, so I can't say I'm an expert on it. The only thing I really can say is that the guns are very reliable. They hit on target and lose their damage one way or another. More so than other ships, I've found that I use the two forward facing guns for targets forward, and the third turret for some flanking ship, because it's often just not worth it to try to get the third to aim properly. In this case, more just means more than usual, which is almost never, so it's still not that prevalent. Having all turrets turn the same direction wouldn't lock you to one direction like most battleships do (unless you want to turn and lose a few salvos).

I'm going to put a vote against Concealment Expert on Fuso. Normally, you can see Fuso from the moon. With Concealment Expert, you reduce that so you're only spottable from orbit. In other words, it doesn't really make any significant difference, so the points are better spent elsewhere.

Detonations in DDs is far more common than in BBs, but it does happen. Usually from a torpedo. Detonations are particularly annoying if two ships in your team in a ranked battle detonate. Totally doesn't completely throw the game around, just by pure chance.

I think that if they are the only two (or three) DDs on the team, they should spawn separately, or at least centrally. If there are more DDs, they should spawn like usual. That's really the only problem. Anything else is up to player skill.

The worst thing about P2W Belfast is that WG won't fess up and admit their mistake, and then outright remove the ship from play. Radar is stupid to begin with, radar with concealment is ridiculously stupid, and radar with smoke is just plain go back to kindergarten and learn at least basic thinking skills.

Sometimes you have that one or a couple of ships that simply performs far below your average. It doesn't necessarily mean the ship is bad, but one way or another, you just don't gel with the ship. For me, that used to be Nagato, with a below-50% win rate. For the record, my total win rate is 56%, and in the last half year or so is about 60%, so I think I'm at least a decent player. However, now I have Chapayev. I have a lousy 40% win rate in that ship. I just can't get decent matches in that ship. Pretty much always get half my health deleted in one salvo no matter how much I kemp island or snipe. Sure, my individual stats, win rate aside, aren't that bad, but I just seem to lose all the time in that ship, and most of the time it doesn't feel as if I can affect the games at all. When I can, it's all about the radar, which to me just shows how crap radar is for the game. It's an overly powerful gimmick that creates far more problems than it solves. You end up with a crappy ship with a DD kill button to have some semblance of "balance". As a side note, my standard Myoko does rather poorly as well, despite that I do well (and more importantly, have fun) with the ARP variants. No idea why there either, even if the standard should be better, as she can use camo. Does anyone else have those outlying ships that don't fit your usual performance?

So, in another thread I mentioned that the Amagi is my best performing ship as far as winrate is concerned. Naturally, today it took me six matches to get just one win, and all but one of the losses I was first in experience, usually significantly ahead.

Step one to improving WoWs: Fire all BBabies from WG's staff.