just_dont

The most productive way of retorting (both for you and the game) would be not to play. It's not very impactful, but the rest... is even less effective than this. Naturally, one would think that actually telling the situation to WG would be a way, but WG does not operate by the way of listening to individual feedback (no matter how constructive or correct it is). It's their choice, and nothing you can do can affect that.

CV concept can be reinvented as many times as WG wants, it's not really a problem. It won't be realistic, but WoWS is completely unrealistic anyway beside ship models. And so far they managed to reach the all-time lowest possible entry bar on CVs - the only skill that you must have nowadays is some very minimal map awareness to avoid dying early. The rest doesn't matter. Auto-dropping RTS CVs required potato opponents to produce any results (and then base XP multiplier would throw these results to crap pile anyway), current CVs will produce reasonable results as long as you possess the basic skill of putting crosshair over a target and pressing LMB. 2 out of 3 weapons doesn't really even require you to lead.

The problem of this particular issue is that it's inherently difficult to balance due to usefulness vs omnipresence clash: put hard limits on CV strikes and you might create a situation where only high-skilled players will be able to achieve anything notable as a CV (and then nearly nobody would play CVs). And vice versa, implement low skill entry and you might end up in a situation where high-skilled players pretty much do whatever they want with no limits. The situation was always near the latter, and rework pushed it this way even more. And I'd say that it doesn't matter if CVs are RTS or not - this issue can be balanced from a purely technical standpoint (e.g. undo unorthodox means to save your planes via predropping, undo gamey bullsh** based on "invincibility frames" like slingshot drops, increase plane respawn delays to punish lost planes even further, and so on) - you definitely can tweak the game to limit CV omnipresence very harshly, the problem is - won't CV class nearly go extinct again because most of your typical 45% WR players won't be able to produce any impact as a CV at all? That's to say - I'm not against trying to go this way; problem being - for some reason WG thinks that all ship classes must be easily accessible for absolutely potato players, and they won't even try to raise the entry bar.

I'd rather say that CVs are fundamentally broken at all times, starting at WoWS alpha. In this regard nothing has changed much with the rework. There were always fundamentally fixable issues (AA vs planes, etc) and fundamentally unfixable (scouting or striking anywhere with no limits, only at certain cost). Rework didn't change anything at all regarding unfixable CV issues.

It's an issue created by WG in the first place. Earlier editions of CVs didn't do much burst damage save for only T10 or clean torp runs with no dodging at all (but which were very much dodgeable). Then, over time, WG attempts at balancing resulted in more and more burst damage potential. And then WG had an amazing idea to add AP bombs. Also every time I'm seeing Haku removing 1/4th of a DM hp in a strike (and repeating that in about 30 seconds) I fail to see how the issue of burst damage was addressed. Yes it is. A single good strike is fire(s), flood(s) vs a BB, or up to several citadel hits. In what world that's "not an issue"? And we'll see about speed nerf. From the dev notes it reads like a pretty minor nerf. You can't "de-plane" a good CV player because he'll be pre-dropping and slingshotting and you will barely even have a chance to employ your AA at all. And even if you do, you'll be killing only 1 strike worth of planes. In fact, the only kind of ships that can employ AA in a really impactful way nowadays are AA DDs - mostly because they are the only ships that can surprise attack planes. Players move together because blobbing still provides certain degree of protection against strikes (if only by having CV dropping a player next to you and not you). This doesn't necessarily mean any kind of pushing. Certainly not if they're under pressure. The only kind of pushing I'm seeing in general - is a push that "naturally" happens due to lack of opposition, when the other side runs away too much and/or there's no CV pressure right now. And because people tend to blob, they push as a blob as well.

Ah yes, the mighty stats™. I'm not privy to that, but subjectively and from my very small assortment of battles since the rework - I'm seeing a lot more CVs taking top scores in leaderboards, no matter if it's win or lose. In fact, as long as 1) CV isn't bottom-tiered and isn't T4; 2) CV didn't die early - there are very good chances that CV will be in top 3 in your team. Before the rework (but after the CV economy patch ofc) it was a pretty rare sight for a CV to score high, and usually indicated a really good CV player with a pretty poor teammates.

I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed by WG's ability to stall. It's four months since CV rework, and I came back to the game thinking that at least most glaring balance problems would be fixed by now. Instead, I'm finding out that nearly nothing important had happened since the rework patch and even their proposed future plans carefully tiptoe around the issue that needs a bulldozer at least (hopefully not a nuke, yet). 1) There's still an extremely major power level gap between T4 CVs and the rest, where T4 CVs are spectacularly ineffective even against ships of its own tier, have no fighters, and can do nearly nothing to higher tiers; whereas the rest of CVs are quite powerful against ships of its own tier and can counterplay each other. 2) Only a single CV balance problem was addressed with the rework - the extremely overpowered ability to scout everywhere with the planes. And even that problem was addressed extremely poorly (because now we have the issue of CV scouting the entire fleet even before engagement happens). The rest - CVs being overpowered against other ship classes due to one-sided play, relative CV player skill being way too important for winning or losing for the entire team; etc - nothing of this was addressed at all. And it doesn't even look like it's going to be addressed in future. 3) CVs still have entirely one-sided play against other classes. They can and will spot and hit you, no matter what, while you can at best delay their attacks on you a bit. You have to play against a ship which can strike anywhere; and apart from finding and killing that ship all you can do is to increase the delay between its strikes. And even that requires you to go out of the way to specialize your ship into AA, and helps only against a CV player that's not good enough. 4) You have no means of preventing a strike against your ship by a good enough CV player with CV of the same or higher tier (except T4). I reiterate, you have no means to do so. Blobbing will not prevent strikes. AA spec will not prevent strikes. Hiding will (obviously) not prevent strikes. Dodging will not prevent strikes from hitting at least sometimes. Old CVs could be countered by massing AA power (even though most of the time the game was balanced around the idea that a single ship will not have enough AA to deal with CV strikes of the same tier, even if it's DM or something). New CVs can still do one drop per sortie most of the time, and no amount of AA will prevent that. Not with fairly [edited] techniques like slingshotting. 5) Plane speeds and landing & takeoff delays are so terribly balanced that pre-dropping bombs/torps is strictly beneficial to the CV player in all cases where there's enough AA to do plane damage. WG managed to invent game mechanic where dropping your torps/bombs in water is actually a good and helpful thing that allows you to strike even more often (because there will be much less downtime waiting for new planes to appear). I'm assuming they were basing this balancing around the concept of average player becoming bored and leaving the game forever if he can't be striking enemy every 20 to 30 seconds. I guess they forgot that average players are quite fond of BBs with their ~30s reload speed, and so they felt the need to make CVs with even less average downtime than BBs. 6) CVs make battles way more passive and less engaging (because you can't push against a CV flank and your risky moves anywhere on the map might be quickly punished by CV if he's good enough to pay attention). After the rework, we have much more CV games. As a consequence, battles in general became much more passive. 7) The problem of relative skill gap between your CV and enemy CV is only worse after the rework. Old CVs could be countered by other ships to a degree and could be drained of planes, at least some of them. New CVs pretty much ignore most of what other ships can do, AA-wise. Meaning, a good CV player will continue to wreck your team for the whole battle, while a bad CV player will fail to produce a good impact on the enemy team (or might even die early due to bad position). And to answer all of this WG plans to implement things like initial takeoff delays? It took them 4 months to realize that it's bad when a CV scouts 100% of your fleet before teams can even fire at each other? Really?