mrk421

(1) I'm quite sure you too would have a beef with that proposal if it wasn't you who made it . Just to name an obvious flaw, BBs firing at max range are generally not an asset for their team and they don't seem to care about that. Your proposal assumes, that they'd suddenly start to care if they were made even more useless - which I don't think would be the case. Additionally, such a mechanic would more than likely even further discourage those BBs from getting close to the enemy, because then they'd run the risk of actually getting hit... Now consider instead, if your proposal was reversed 180 degrees - accuracy would increase the further from target you are. That would introduce 2 thing: a) BBs camping at range would no longer be safe, and b) cruisers would feel more safe escorting their DDs to caps, because even if there was a BB nearby, they'd have a hard time hitting them. Now there's a thought. (2) 9v9 is far too low. Plus how would it avoid queue issues if there aren't enough DDs and CCs in the queue??? (3) That one I agree with wholeheartedly!!! I don't know exactly what sort of features maps would need to have to provide this effect, but that would be an effective solution for sure. (4) For sure games would play out a lot differently if there were only experienced players who cared about the game. Unfortunately those times are never coming back and there's no use crying over that fact (figuratively speaking - not calling you a cry-baby in case you're easily offended). I seem to have struck a nerve there... If so, it wasn't intentional and I'm sorry. (1) You didn't state that specifically. I figured it was implied, especially considering that any other solutions like nerfing BBs in any way would violate the same point. (2) In my book any comment along the lines of "dude, go away and come back after you've learnt to play better" (again, not your words exactly) is inherently elitist. And I'm not even saying YOU are necessarily elitist, but in my book such comments generally associate with elitism. But let's look at this "getting better" part more closely for a moment, shall we? I don't know if you agree, but I'd say that the differences in player skill levels have grown wider over time rather than closed up. I would also claim that people learn the most through playing, would you agree? People don't learn much sitting in the queue nor when they get sent back to port after 5 minutes, because they're a noob - instead they're likely to get frustrated and resentful. That I think is a big part of the reason many players are finding it hard to improve - they just don't get enough gameplay time because they're deleted early by the elite players. Divisioning up with good players is probably the most reliable way to develop in skill these days and I take my hat off for those who do that. Finally, @MacFergus I agree with you that the game got drastically more difficult for DDs and CCs due to the removal of Stealth Firing. However, I don't think the actual losing the ability to SF had much to do with it. Rather, it was the brute force solution WG came up with to get rid of the mechanic. Before the change, you could be well within your gun bloom range of your target yet shoot them without being detected if there was something like an island or smoke blocking the line of sight. That's because due to the smaller bloom, it was likely that there were no other enemies in LoS who would be within your bloom range. When they made the bloom expand to your maximum firing range, that is very rarely the case - now there's almost always some enemy within LoS who can detect you for the whole enemy team. That's what made the difficulty spike.

That's quite a tight list you made there. In fact, I think that list excludes ANY potential solution, as they'd contradict with at least with one of those points. You could probably even drop one or two of those points and the situation would be the same. Hence -> Status quo BTW, capping BB numbers per team goes against your point #3... Edit: point #4 (l2p) is pure elitism, which is far too rampant on the forums IMO. And I find it quite sickening tbh.

Do not take this as me agreeing to the return of stealth fire. Now that that's out of the way... ... do you have any suggestions you'd like to put forward? I get the impression a lot of players are unhappy with the current meta and state of the game. Yet whenever someone comes forth with their suggestion of how it could be changed, they get shot down immediately with no mercy. Looks as if people have actually accepted the status quo, or even that the situation is going to get worse over time, and they only keep voicing their concern because they want to be part of the crowd.

Another two things that might be worth considering (one obvious, other maybe slightly less obvious): 1) If you're tempted about these containers, you should buy the ship ASAP, to get the maximum possible benefit 2) If you like the idea of attaching a mission to a freshly released ship with possibility to earn extra loot, you should buy the ship ASAP. I think it's quite likely, that if WG sees that such an approach is successful (= they sell a lot of ships), they can use a similar approach for future releases of premium ships. We already saw something somewhat similar with the Hood and "Hunt for Bismarck" campaign...

I do love my AA monsters. That's basically the same build I'm going for, except since I'm using Stevie, on second row I have EM instead of AR (to take advantage of Stevies inherent bonus)...

like @Xevious_Red said it's very unlikely they're equally weighted. I would expect FreeXP to be the most common. So if you bought it today, I would guess more along the lines of 70-80k FreeXP, 3-5 days of Premium, 500-1000 doubloons. Still not bad bang for the buck...

Manual AA for 2 reasons: a) doubling the DPM of the longest range AA guns more than compensates for the slightly lower AA range (assuming you at least went for the AA range module); b) perhaps more importantly: the dual purpose guns (which the manual AA skill affects) are more likely to survive until the end of the battle, so the advantage at the later stages of the battle will be especially noticeable.

So your counter-proposal is to buff good players instead of bad players. How very capitalistic of you Except, a good capitalist will do very well in any environment without needing any buffs! @Exohoritis Btw, saying: and then in the same sentence: which to me implies that they do care if their team wins (they just refuse to accept that they're to blame). Which one is it? Cause those two claims seem to be contradictory...

"The proposal is too complicated" - I'm sorry, what? If that's referring to the example I gave (in the spoilers), that would probably literally just take changing a few lines in a couple of .xml-tables, real complicated stuff. As for the proposal itself, I think it was fairly straightforward: instead of buffing/nerfing certain ships or ship classes, consider making some allowances for the worse players so that they would have a slightly easier time. BTW, I specifically mentioned, that core game mechanics should remain exactly the same for all players. Frankly I have a hard time understanding the hate towards bad players. Comments like, "bad players should stick to coop" and the like - which, btw, I think (I don't really play coop, so, you know...) coop teaches some really bad habits which will probably make you a worse player for PvP. I seriously doubt any unicum player would have a problem with giving some advantages to worse players. Ultimately skill is still the king and regardless of any advantages they'd still mop the floor with bad players. And if they had a problem with that, then it's they who have a problem... Finally, I agree with the need for tutorials, but unfortunately, TUTORIALS ARE NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE REAL THING.

There would be lots of possibilities for sightseeing on those maps to make it worth their while. Like many lively villages and towns on islands, lots of dolphins and Whales swimming around and maybe even spots where you could do some fishing. I think it's brilliant!

I resent being called a CAby! Despite finding it frustrating at times and having a lot of room for improvement, I'm doing A-ok in my cruisers I wasn't suggesting cruisers needed a buff for my own benefit, but because it seemed to me like the more mediocre players would need extra encouragement to play their cruisers more. But in the end, I think you're probably right, so I concede and you win I'm sure many people who play cruisers a lot, myself included, would welcome the easy-mode such a shift would bring In fact, I think it entirely possible, that if BBs were capped to 3 per side, they could tank quite heavily damage output wise making cruisers look comparatively OP - just for the reason that people who play cruisers a lot (~>30 % of games) have been forced to get so good with the current meta of the past 1 year plus.

You did read that part of my post where I specifically mentioned that it more than likely would take changing more parameters than just one to get the balance correct. I.e. if we for example made cruisers less prone to being oneshot we'd probably have to buff accuracy to compensate, which would mean 1v1 a cruiser would still get deleted by a BB 8-9/10 times (just not in one salvo -> they'd have the option to disengage and retreat and reevaluate their play style). As an added bonus, I think that would help people learn to play the game better. Edit: BTW I think it's important to note, that when I'm talking about the CC-BB imbalance I'm mostly referring to higher tiers, i.e. T7/8 and up. At lower tiers, the balance situation is completely different.

Pays to read the fine print

I started playing only shortly before the German BB line was released and was still playing relatively low tiers at that time, but I also got the impression, that along with that release was when the major shift happened - and let's just say that since then the situation has not been improving. @mtm78 I appreciate your thorough reply. I only asked to see if we're more-less on the same page and I dare say we at least share some common ground You seem to agree that their high survivability is a big part of the appeal of BBs. I completely understand your argument for a limit on maximum number of BBs. And for the short term, that could well be the only viable solution. But I don't think it would be viable in the long term, because: a) it probably wouldn't people to play cruisers more, more likely it would discourage many people from playing instead; and, on a related note b) it wouldn't solve the underlying issue, which is ship class balance - which is, ironically, probably why it would be a good short-term solution, cause we wouldn't want to accidentally screw up the balance more than it is already. I do recognise, that making any changes to game balance is a delicate business, because everything is very much interconnected and changing one thing has an effect on many different aspects. So It's rarely so simple as to tweaking just one thing - one needs to consider the bigger picture. A very good example of this IMO is what happened recently to the Giulio Cesare. WG experimented recently what sort of effects improved dispersion on BBs would have on the game. The results should hardly have been a surprise to anyone: GC was deleting cruisers left and right like there was no tomorrow. And the result of this experiment: they went back to a typical BB dispersion. IF this increased accuracy were combined with a reduction to citadel damage for example, the results could be quite different. Who knows such a change could even encourage a more dynamic and interesting meta... Ultimately, I believe, balance changes are unavoidable, if the game is to flourish in the long term. In my opinion, the suggestion made in the first post is addressing what I also have identified as a key issue. If it were me, I would approach it slightly differently: by expanding the concept of damage saturation also to citadel damage, which would be in effect on all ship classes. Now it's quite clear that a simple change like that would probably make cruisers OP in the hands of good players. Which is why it could go hand-in-hand with an overall buff to accuracy, for example. Now wouldn't it be much more constructive, when a suggestion like this pops up, instead of looking at it in an isolated context and saying it wouldn't work people would say: "hrrm, that's an interesting idea. But it would probably cause such-and-such problems. So for it to work, you'd also have to change such-and-such." Wouldn't that be nice...

@mtm78 do you mind giving a statement as to what is in your opinion the root cause of the popularity/overpopulation of BBs in the game? I mean sure, right now a big part of it is that they're so popular which is creating a positive feedback loop, but they weren't always so... So what initiated it? And do you think there might be any balance issues at all (in a ship vs ship comparison)?

Well, if I understand Exocet6951's theory correctly, the people dragging down the Hood's performance are the ones who are buying it right now, not those who bought any of the original packages. Probably not so many new people buy the Warspite now, because Hood's available and "It's T7 so it must be better". Most people who own the Warspite know how to use her (same goes for most who bought the Hood when it became available)

I'm sure your interpretation is correct - at least it makes sense. What I find a bit confusing tho, is that those people you're talking about, the ones who don't know about radars or where to find the fire chance and max damage of a shell - how do they somehow "know" that "it's a British BB, you're supposed to shoot HE"

That's OK, no need to pick a side :) As far as I understand, the RNG element is in the game in big part as a means to level the playing field between good and not so good players. So it's not going anywhere... BTW, am I the only one who has gotten the impression, that on average, a typical DD or CC player is more knowledgeable about this game and overall better at it than a typical BB captain?

I don't find your arguments convincing. Mostly because you're selectively picking, which points to comment on, in an attempt to further your agenda, without addressing the bigger picture. But I see you're a stubborn one so I won't continue this discussion with you, but will leave you with this final thought: you need to face the reality that the game has changed since the "old days" - it's not a small club of enthusiasts anymore and never will be; a lot of casuals have joined (myself maybe among them) and they're here to stay and any changes to the game need to take that fact into account.

Currently BBs are the only class where potatoes/tomatoes/noobs are allowed: yes or no? ...because they'll just fail miserably at all other classes - and slightly less miserably at BBs. No-one, except you, has said anything about removing BB citadel damage on CAs. The proposal was to reduce the damage CAs take from BB citadels. Maybe to a level where a salvo that would have killed you previously, would take you down to ~30% health instead. Still pretty crippling, if you ask me, and a bigger punishment by far than what a BB would suffer from screwing up. Such a change would make the class a bit more appealing to a wider player base, which should be a welcome change to anyone. Yes, actually. This is also what WG claims. Obviously not to some extreme level to make it foolproof, but bad players are a reality and they're not going away. Therefore it makes sense to distribute them more evenly among the ship classes instead of restricting them to BBs alone. I understand this could interfere with your sealclubbing, but boo-hoo

..... piece of advice, take it or leave it: if you care about your credibility, then you really shouldn't go around making claims based on rumors and assumptions.

Instead of addressing all your comments one-by-one I thought I'd attempt to clarify the point I'm trying to get across. Hopefully I can state my case clearly enough to not leave room for misinterpretation TL;DR: Ultimately, we want more players to choose to play DDs and CCs. For that to happen, those classes need to be a bit more forgiving of mistakes. If you find any flaws in my arguments or assumptions, please, do point them out for me (I've coloured some of the key assumptions that I make in the text in green or used boldface, to make them more easily distinguishable) It is widely agreed upon, that in the current meta, BBs are too widespread while CCs (and to a lesser extent perhaps also DDs) are not played enough. Ideally BBs should occupy 3 slots in a team's composition, whereas CCs should occupy perhaps 5-6 - in reality those numbers tend to be reversed. There are probably many reasons for this: - many people are naturally drawn to BBs because they were the 'capital ships' and prides of their respective nations' fleets - who wouldn't want to sail one of those instead of some run of the mill cruiser or DD - DDs and CCs offer a more active and risk-prone game play, which does not appeal to everyone those come down to human nature and there's nothing that can be done to affect that. There are however other factors that contribute (IMO significantly) to the popularity of BBs over the other classes. Chief of those (again, IMO) is the fact that BBs are the most forgiving class to play, chiefly because their survivability is so ridiculously much better than any other class. Obviously, they need to be the tankiest class - by some margin - after all, that's what they were designed for. I have no problem whatsoever with that! However, as it is right now, this advantage in survivability is so big and so obvious, that it is attracting players to play BBs in lieu of CCs or DDs - which in turn adds to the challenge of playing cruisers creating a positive feedback loop. So just how much better survivability do BBs have compared to CCs for example? I would estimate >10 times the survivability. What would be a healthy ratio? My guess: around 5 times the survivability. (more detailed discussion in spoiler): Obviously there are plenty of players who choose CCs and DDs precisely for the reason that they welcome the added challenge and derive great satisfaction from overcoming it. And I too share that mindset. Thing is: there are not enough of those people, which leads to very BB-heavy teams. People have proposed a number of ways to tackle this issue, for example: - setting a hard limit on the number of BBs per team (to 3): this would definitely solve the problem of too many BBs per team, however it would not directly affect the number of BBs in the que - changing the economy to reward DDs/CCs more and BBs less: the effectiveness of this debatable, but it could be effective - nerfing BBs - either their offensive power (a la dispersion) or survivability or both: this too, could work, however - none of those three options would influence a player's confidence to play DDs or CCs. Therefore I fear that while all of them would potentially reduce the number of BBs, instead of encouraging those players to try the other classes, they would instead discourage them from playing altogether -> leading to an overall drop in player numbers. That is also why I suspect WG are reluctant to try any of those options... - improving the survivability of DDs and, especially, CCs: the OP's suggestion falls into this category. This is my preferred approach, because it would lower the risk factor associated with playing those two classes and might therefore encourage players who would otherwise not feel comfortable enough to try them out, to take on the challenge. I'm pretty sure a lot of players who main in BBs would actually love the change of pace the other classes offer, but many of them probably have had bad experiences and don't feel confident enough in their abilities to play them well enough to enjoy the process. Finally: would "option #4" - increasing survivability of CCs not make them too strong? In a way, probably. ...in the hands of good players and especially against mediocre BB players, yes. However (!), in a recent Reddit interview Sub_Octavian himself said, that you can't balance the game around the best players. In the hands of the mediocre player they (CCs, DDs) would still be far from being too strong and those players would help curb the average performance of these classes. Edit: PS. I'm sorry. This is as short as I could make the wall of text to still hopefully make my point clear.

Do I understand correctly that you agree in principle that BBs as a whole tend to have too many strengths and not that many weaknesses with respect to the other classes? (not that they're invulnerable, I know very well they aren't) As far as I can tell, the suggestion by the OP was meant to help balance this out a little bit by reducing one weakness of cruisers instead of nerfing BBs. While I don't think the proposed solution to be the best possible one (I might comment on it in more detail a bit later) IMO it at least addresses the correct issue. It's true, that the sheer amount of BBs in game exaggerates their op'ness I think there's more to it than just that... I don't understand what exactly you are trying to say. Are you attempting to put words in my mouth as if I wanted BBs nerfed to the ground and all other classes buffed so that they would be invulnerable? Because that's not at all what I'm advocating here or in any other thread where I've spoken.

@Strappster, @lameoll and others claiming that it's OK if you get citadelled to oblivion by BBs in a cruiser, because it means you screwed up and you should be punished for screwing up. Let's say I agree with that statement, at least to an extent. Don't you think that should apply universally - to ALL ship classes? Because right now, if I'm in a cruiser or a destroyer, and make an error in judgement, I'm lucky to escape with less than half of my health pool, or get deleted outright, if luck is not on my side. Making a similar mistake in a battleship would scarcely cost me 25% of my health pool, if that. Of course, BBs should be the tankiest class, but they shouldn't outperform the others by this much! Which, I suspect, is what drove the OP to propose the suggestion he did... This is an online multiplayer game. For it to work, there needs to be a certain balance of powers between the different classes. At the moment, the balance isn't there, as one ship class (BBs, for those who haven't figured it out yet) is largely exempt from being punished for not thinking ahead and paying attention. Do you find that this is OK? Because it's not, and it is one of the big reasons for the current BB-heavy meta that is ruining the fun for a lot of players.

You bet they will!