asalonen

Yep, there have been many good discussions on this forums that I'm pretty sure would've never been had on a different platform. Definitely not in Discord, which I also like but the more you scale it up the more strictly real-time it comes. Maybe in Reddit but even there it would be lost a lot quicker. I sort of wonder if it would make sense to have a community-run forum as a replacement. I've never administered a web forum, so I have no clue who easy they are to setup and operate these days. Ideally, the login would be with your Warships player name, which would require some effort. Since it wouldn't be official, I suspect a lot of trash aimed specifically at WG wouldn't be posted there.

My heart bleeds out for them! I know several of them, and to me they always seemed like the kind of people who really needed this.

The game has a few different scaling factors: Ships, planes and torpedoes are scaled up by factor of 2.0. Everything you see is twice as big as in real life. This makes everything a bigger target and easier to hit, since shell dispersion remains realistic. Ships are also sped up by a factor of exactly 2.61. Wargaming confirmed this value in a Reddit Q&A. And because the ships are also scaled up, they appear to be sped up by a factor of 2.0 x 2.61 = 5.22. This makes the battles play out a lot quicker than in real life. Finally, shells are sped up by a factor of exactly 2.75 – This has been confirmed by data mining. For gameplay this means that you don't need to take massive leads. Even at very long ranges you can manage with a lead of 20 seconds, while in real life it would've been almost a minute. The speed factors 2.61 and 2.75 seem to be the two "magic" values of the game experience. Why are they not the same? Likely they were fine-tuned in the very early days of the game's development, and this is where they ended up.

There is an alternative, and WG already did this once: Improve the economy for subs, meaning higher XP and credits for doing the same stuff. Many players don't really care too much if they are the ones carrying the battles. However, few players want to consistently finish low on the scoreboard since it is demoralizing. This is why subs now get a LOT more XP for spotting, compared to other classes. So the sub player gets to feel good about his effort -- even when it was less than he's lead to believe. Compared to other classes, subs have the worst damage output. They get VERY few kills since they are both slow and can't deal good long-range damage. They are fine spotters, but no better than DD's and a lot worse than CV's. All this means that they cannot win games very efficiently. Or lose for that matter, since they are just inconsequential. However, as inconsequential as the subs might be, WG cannot buff them because they are already considered supremely annoying. Buffing them would only make matters worse. So likely if their popularity suffers, they'll just be better compensated for their low effort.

It does not make sense to me, since Yamato's main strength is the main battery that is very accurate to long ranges. So generally speaking longer the engagement range the more it benefits you -- within reason of course. Your main battery traverse rate is also VERY slow, so if you push close you'll find it difficult to utilize the main battery. However, as a Japanese tier 10 brawler Shikishima clearly does make some sense. Compared to Yamato, its secondaries have longer range, about 20 % more DPM, and even better penetration since it has the more modern 120 mm's from Akizuki. Even the firing angles on the secondary battery are a bit better.

I explained in my post why I specifically chose to compare Q4 2019 and Q4 2022. Either you didn't read or you just didn't understand, so let's try again: Covid lockdowns in Asia started in Q1 2020 and especially in Asia caused a massive jump in the player numbers. The lockdowns in Asia also continued much longer than in Europe or Americas, mostly coming to an end in the latter half of 2022. Your first number (May 2020 to May 2021) is the absolute peak of Covid lockdowns. Everybody turned to their computer games because there was literally nothing else they could do. The numbers are massively inflated over what's been "normal" on the Asia server. And once life returned to normal the numbers likewise came down. Is it interesting? Is it surprising? Does it tell you a reliable story of the game's popularity in Asia? For me, the answer to all of these questions is a clear "no".

The high of 2020 was due to the worldwide Covid lockdowns. Sure you can compare to it if you wish, but is it interesting? What do you learn from it? For a 3-year trend, I'd much rather compare for example Q4 2019 to Q4 2022. Then you rule out Covid (because it falls in between) and also seasonal variation because you look at the same months. From https://stats.wotapi.ru/stats/wows/eu/total you get these average daily player counts: Region Q4 2019 Q4 2022 Change EU 13307 12911 -3 % NA 8333 7130 -14 % Asia 7016 7805 +11 % Total 28656 27846 -3 % Asia is clearly doing well, while NA is suffering a little bit. EU gained some players from CIS due to the account transfers around October 2022, but I don't think their number was very significant. But overall it really looks quite stable, and I think these numbers are valid.

The graph by Wargaming does line-up quite nicely with these 3rd party numbers: https://stats.wotapi.ru/stats/wows/eu/total. On that site, you can choose same 5-year period that is shown by the WG graph. EU, NA and Asia have all had pretty stable populations over the past 5 years. I also checked the past 3 months and compared to the same period in 2022, so that any recent decline would be shown but the seasonal variation is cancelled out. It looks like EU is about 10 % up from last year, NA is about the same, and Asia is about 15 % down. I think Asia is down mostly because their harsh Covid lockdowns ended quite recently.

Thanks for the heads up! This should now be fixed.

During the first few patches of this year, there's been several improvements in the tool. For 0.12.0, submarines and airstrikes were added for all ships, as they are evidently a permanent feature of the game. Also their mechanics are unlikely to receive any further major changes. For the latest patch 0.12.2, the gun diagrams received a major rework. The colors were changed for the dark mode, and you can now enlarge the diagrams and hover them for additional information. If you hover on an individual gun, you can see its firing sector and traverse range, like in the screenshot below that is for the Kaiser secondary battery. In the DPM diagram, by hovering you can check the exact DPM to any angle. Elsewhere in the app, the matchmaking monitor now has a more adjustable layout. You can now manually set its font-size, and also hide the ship parameters if you want it to be less wide. In its default settings the monitor resizes its font so that it fits a 16:9 aspect ratio with 12 players in each team. Personally, I find this convenient since I keep it full-screen on a 16:9 secondary display. However, if you need to run it in a different aspect ratio, these new settings should be very helpful. The tooltips have also been improved in the matchmaking monitor. These should be helpful, since it's difficult to add any more information into the already tight layout. For most ship parameters, you need to pop open the ship by clicking on the player's ship name. The next major update will likely come in June, for the game version 0.12.5. And as always, feedback is most welcome!

Tirpitz hard push makes you feel alive:

I think early in the battle you have to play very conservative, since you don't have any of what makes a good cap contester. I try to stay a little bit in front of my friendly cruisers and battleships. Since you won't be in smoke, your spotting will be valuable. I build this line 100 % for torps (except for the tier 8), and just try to be constantly aware of my position and detection radius. The main reason why I like to regrind this line is that once you get a hang of it, it's very SIMPLE to play. You don't have any bells and whistles, so the decision-making is straight-forward: Watch distance, poop torps, maybe pull back. It's extremely basic in a good, relaxing way. The heal makes it a little bit forgiving too.

I've reset the European line numerous times for the Research Points. I think Visby is just fine, and it plays very similar to Västerås and Skåne that follow it. So I would stick with it, since everything you learn you'll be needing later. Some points: 1. The torps don't hit hard, but they have a really narrow spread, high speed and fast reload. Aim carefully and you should be landing a lot of hits compared to other DD's. This is the key to success with this line. 2. Despite not having smoke, try to stay as close to the edge of your detection as you dare. You'll hit more torps if you launch them from 6 km instead of 8 km. You can afford to take some damage because you have heal. Just disengage quickly when necessary -- you're fast for a tier 5. 3. The guns are fine for a tier 5. Out of the tier 5 silver DD's, only Podvoisky has flatter arcs. You can hit well with them. The turret traverse is a pain, especially in tier 5 since you don't yet have rudder mod in slot 4 to negate it.

I don't know this as a fact, but I THINK only in the sense that storms increase your dispersion.

As the author of shiptool.st, a word on this. The Japanese battleships are the one line in the game that have hugely different ballistics for AP and HE. My users have reported this as a bug to me a few times... The ballistic model used by the game is really quite accurate, accounting for all the primary forces that are in play. The shells have a muzzle velocity, weight, diameter and a drag coefficient. The game even accounts for the atmosphere getting thinner and colder as the shells climb higher -- Musashi HE shells climb to almost 10 km when fired to max range. This could well be the highest trajectory in the game. The only part of the ballistic model that is unrealistic is the flight time, as the shells are sped up by a constant factor of 2.75. When you combine this with the fact that the ships are scaled up, we can actually get some hits with a reasonable lead... For many shells, like I believe the AP shells on the Japanese battleships, the shell parameters in the game are realistic. Musashi can theoretically lob an AP shell to beyond 40 km, like it could in real life. However, in the game the shooting range is limited by targeting parameters (artillery max range + fire control system and its modification + spotter plane). This is the case for the vast majority of ships and shells in the game. But Musashi HE shells have a seriously gimped drag coefficient of 0.543, as opposed to 0.292 for the AP shells. I don't know if this is in any way realistic, or if this is just something done in the early days of the game to differentiate Japanese battleships from the Americans. But in any case, Musashi's HE shells just cannot fly any further than 32.5 km. Maximum firing range is achieved with a gun elevation of about 45 degrees, and once you're all the way there that's all you're going to get. Edit: As a fun little thing, you can try targeting at 30 kilometers with Yamato or Musashi, and then switch the shell type. When you switch to HE, you can see and hear the guns being elevated about 10 degrees higher. And vice versa.