tocqueville8

I'm not sure what you're implying here: I NEVER complain about being bottom tier, not in the forums, not in the chat. Having said that, yes, as an individual player being bottom tier is an uphill battle, and being top tier is a downhill battle, on average. I'm not sure what's controversial about that... Sure, bottom tier and top tier games will also even out eventually, but the OP was lamenting a series of bottom-tier games, in which yes, he was fighting uphill as an individual.

Good for your T8 DD teammate. Your team is balanced with the enemy team, but you are not balanced with the DD on your flank.

I said on average the enemy DD is going to be higher tier than you. So yes, necessarily, on average.

Tell me: what color is the sky in your world?

Your team isn't playing uphill, but you are. If you're in a T6 DD and the enemy DDs are T6-8, on average, on your cap/flank, you're going to have to deal with a DD that's better than yours. Ceteris paribus, that's an uphill battle.

T7-8 cruisers generally don't have a heal, so they have to be much more careful than their T9 counterparts. And T6-7 BBs are overmatched all over the place by T8s, while T8-9s, provided they angle, only really suffer against HE monsters (Conqueror, Thunderer, Bourgogne) or Musashi-Yamato-Shikishima.

The benefit of having worse players (teams) to stomp at, and the penalty of having better players (teams) to be stomped by, over enough games. I don't believe a partially-balanced MM (say, the two teams can't differ by more than 4% avg. WR) would completely eliminate steamrolls, as some of them simply depend on luck and a snowballing effect, but it would likely make them rarer, and I'd take an entertaining loss over a boring steamroll, whichever team wins it, any day.

That's true, of course, but I'd much prefer some balanced games, meaning they're only decided in the last 5-10 minutes, over steamrolls that "equal out over 100 or more games"

Meh. If it were "random", divisions wouldn't be allowed. If it were "random", you wouldn't have (usually) the same number of ships of each class, from each tier, in both teams. Balancing the win-rates somewhat wouldn't go against the spirit of "randomness" any more than balancing ship classes and tiers already does.

True, but he's still kind of right, though: - the enemy team had 7 points higher avg. WR - 27% more avg. xp - 211% more avg. games played

Des Moines. USN heavy cruisers have better bow armor and a higher proportion of guns at the front (except at tier 6 and tier 9: Pensacola and Buffalo), so they can go nose-in, showing a smaller target, and still have a good damage output. The Baltimore can even (barely) stealth-radar, meaning if you build her for concealment she'll be stealthier than her radar range, so if you get outspotted it means a DD is within your radar range... The Worcester is a good ship, but considerably harder to play, in my opinion.

A memorable win in the Chung Mu despite intense the trolling coming from a speshul Jean Bart on my own team. Islands of Ice, North-East spawn, all-T9 match. 30 seconds in he's already complaining. Some sarcastic pinging: he's parked on C2 behind the iceberg, hogging it from the Seattle. His "left" is the East, hence the confusion. More sarcastic pinging, even though he's further back than most of the team. Notice that both enemy DDs are on my side, so he and the Musashi have no excuse not to open up and crossfire. Pointless insults... Sarcastic pinging again, asks the enemy team to sink me, I guess... We're losing by 4 ships, so I exploit a gap in their formation and slip through the middle to support our FdG. Will it work? I torp the defending Soyuz, while our troll goes down complaining... ...and attacking my honour! I launch speculative torps towards incoming cruisers from the North-East, and hit the Buffalo on the nose. The FdG supports me and quickly finishes her off, but our troll is having none of it... TA-DAAA!!!

"CaPtaiN rEWorK rUiNed CruIsErs!!!" "Come up with your hands in the air!" Seriously, it's like soldiers falling back until they're surrounded and can only surrender... I mean, this was a 10v9, not like they didn't have a chance... I ended up taking ZERO damage in this match...

To be fair, what the OP is saying (too many DDs!) just isn't on that table...

Duh. Credits-for-money are for whales who "grinded" a T10 ship using a bunch of special camos and signals (see Flambass' video, for instance), but lack the credits to actually buy the thing and equip her with modules.

It's gambling, but it's not like the boxes/crates because if I don't win the coal I don't have to pay anything. I'm curious to see what happens, but I don't have a problem with the concept: I can always grind more credits (the new achievement system is very stingy with Zulu Hotels, but for some reason I've got plenty of Wyvern signals...), but coal is limited.

Are there any "full premium" ships at T10, or are they all "special"? As far as I understand, "special" ships don't have the improved credit multiplier of premiums, so they need the T10 permacamo to generate good credits. Thing is, they come with that camo anyway: you just have to choose between good xp and good credits, or excellent xp with a different, one-use camo, but poor credits. I think the difference is that "special" ships aren't sold for real money, so WG is in a stronger legal position to nerf them. The same would be true of T9 premiums, let's say, if they were only for coal/free xp or whatever other free resource, but then they started selling them for doubloons...

It's still brawl, really: there appear to be no class restrictions, so it's 6-7 BBs per side. Most of them German. Maybe a Kaga can do well, also a smoke Edinburgh, a Baltimore and of course an Asashio.

IMHO the vertical dispersion should be small, so that you're fine if you angle nose-in but you'll take considerable damage when broadside, just like with German CVs. I was in the Marceau yesterday, and this poor Midway did the same 1-2k whether I angled like a good boy or I was broadside like I didn't care. That's just a crapshoot. Viceversa, I seem to attract a lot of German rockets when sailing the Saint-Louis, but if I'm paying attention I'll turn away for as long as needed, the CV will get frustrated, strike me for 1k and then leave alone, and I'll write "nope" in chat: IMHO that's the way it should be. So yes, I'd like rocket damage to require skill (to inflict and to avoid): make the ellipse tighter in one direction or the other, not necessarily smaller, so that "dodging" pays. Instead, it's basically a circle on British CVs...

I'm pretty sure comparing temporary restrictions imposed to protect public health during a pandemic with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany would've gotten public figures fired, or forced them to resign, in the 1960s, as well. SJWs might act as a mob to get people censored on social media, but people used to be censored all the time before social media as well, and I don't mean by the government, I mean journalists by newspaper editors, politicians by party committees and average people by peer pressure. There was less need to "cancel" people with fringe viewpoints because fringe viewpoints were often never given a platform to begin with. That's not to say society was conformist: here in Italy 25% to 33% of the country voted Communist, and there was nothing weird about it...

Fire HE and you can take 3/3 of a DD's health in a single volley

What @GarrusBrutus said, except I'm okay with CVs. I know the Petro is strong, but for some reason I don't hate her the way I did Smolensk and Thunderer. To me the most ridiculous ship in the game is still the Benham: that thing has T9 torps with T5 reload, and what's worse is I don't have one myself

New maps would be welcome, at all tiers. New game modes? Along with Randoms, Ranked, Operations, Co-op, Clan Battles, Clan Brawls and events like Key Battles (which I enjoyed)? There are plenty already. The only things I would do is to add more enemies in Co-op, as the games are so quick that if you sail BB your DDs will mop up all the enemies before you've had time to do anything. They could also add some operations for T8 and above: it would help players with little free xp to grind stock modules, at least. Frankly, I loathe the drive to produce new content, as it often gets mixed up with reworks of the game mechanics: IFHE rework, captain skill rework (same builds for twice the experience cost, basically), CV rework (from what I've heard), submarines eventually... There's an enormous variety of nations, classes and playstyles, builds, tech tree branches and premiums, in fact some lines have been quite uninspired imho (British CAs, Italian BBs come to mind) because there simply aren't enough gimmicks one can think of. Going from Kawachi to Yamato, from Sampson to Gearing and Chester to Worcester is already a fun adventure, I'm not sure what new content has to be added after hundreds of ships. Would chess be more popular if they added new pieces or changed the capture rules every few months, or if they added more game modes? I doubt it. The game is very diverse imho, what sometimes lacks is the reward you get from seeing your decisions have an impact over the outcome, as too many matches are just steamrolls one way or the other. A partially balanced matchmaker (say, the average winrate of the teams can't be more than 4% apart) would probably add more to my enjoyment than another game mode would.

I read it's because US wars are increasingly unsuccessful and later turn out to be unpopular, as it's just hard to see how the invasion of Iraq, let's say, could be said to have made the world a better place. So morale is low (there isn't a global struggle for freedom against Communism, either), and it needs to be propped up. At the same time, these wars are fought more and more (not exclusively, mind you) by professionals who joined out of lack of better opportunities, not people who volunteered at a time of crisis, as was the case after Pearl Harbor. That doesn't mean that US armed forces personnel aren't patriotic or are only doing their job for the money, far from it, but it means there's been a growing disconnect between the general US population and their armed forces, as a lower and lower percentage of people have served (there's a famous controversy about how few sons of members of Congress served in Iraq, regarding Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911"), having a veteran in your family, or just knowing one, is rarer and rarer, and so the decision to go to war is less "personal", it doesn't involve broader society as much. The rise of private military contractors, the massive technological edge of the US military and the use of drones has also lead the US public to think less about what going to war actually means, since their personal cost is likely going to be pretty low, in terms of loved-ones they might lose. To quote the essay https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/, which I've been paraphrasing here, "This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way." Sorry if I went on a tangent, but I remembered that article from 6 years ago, and maybe someone's going to find it interesting.

Good point. In addition, since Achievements no longer give signals, mitigating the problem with Dreadnought and Fireproof flags has become a lot more expensive.