tocqueville8

So did I and yet here they are: 9/12 players were humans...of sorts. And relax, I only used an 18-pointer

You're in protected MM as long as you play Tier 4, tops. If you venture to Tier 5+, even under 200 games, you'll be paired with everyone else, as there would be even fewer players with fewer than 200 games up there. I suppose they could scale up the system, as in "you're still in protected MM at Tier 6, but the experience threshold is now 450 games", but they never have.

For once, I got to use Bazan's funny button with AP loaded ...and not a single kill for the Roma ...but Venezia always delivers

It's a nice QOL improvement for when you're in the mood for a specific ship but have a bad game/team the first time. Serial yoloers could do their thing already anyway: they just had to have 2-3 ships geared for battle to alternate, and click a couple more times. I doubt that was ever a deterrent.

After three unsuccessful attempts (hard throw by the first team; second and third down to 4 ships within minutes ), my Roma gets some satisfaction

A couple of nice wins in the I-56, trying to channel my Paolo Emilio instincts. I believe I used my puny deck gun more than homing torps, so hopefully I wasn't too aggravating pinging people I'll be honest: most of the other games were completely embarassing: zero damage and first to die, usually to some noob I'd just out-noobed

And 7 more bags in the daily containers

Exactly. Take the show Friends: Ross and Rachel are a couple between season 2 and season 3, then "take a break", leading to trouble Then they get back together at the end of season 3, and break up again. Then they get drunk and marry each other in Vegas at the end of season 5, and divorce. Then they have a one-night stand in late season 7, and she gets pregnant. They finally get back together at the end of season 10. By the same logic of that graph, after the show ended one would look back and say "they basically were together the whole time since season 2"

I don't know. Maybe because they're sloppy. Even if their graphs were fake, how long would it take to put some fake numbers on the Y-axis? The 3rd party information is widely inaccurate, or rather it is a completely flawed presentation of data (player registration date and date of last battle played) that might be accurate, but tells us very little: if someone left the game in 2019 because of the CV rework, or in 2020 because they got another job and moved, or whatever, it wouldn't show in the graph as long as they played a single battle later on, maybe years later. There is no "if": the author of that graph plainly admitted to using this methodology, which is nuts. There would be nothing surprising about an often bungling, incompetent company doing "half assed damage control" in response to claims made from half-assed data. It wouldn't prove anything. Half-assed debunking doesn't make half-assed allegations true: it just makes a whole a**.

Imho garbage data is garbage data, and I won't consider it regardless of the source and whether or not it confirms by beliefs. WG issues a "correction" with graphs that don't have a Y-axis label (very sloppy)...but might be true if we assume it to mean what's reasonable...but one might not believe them anyway "because WG lied in the past" (bad faith), etc. There's no rigor to any of this. It's garbage. On the other hand, whoever thought it reasonable to say "this account was registered in 2016, last battle was played in 2020, so I'll assume it was active in 2017-2019"? Assumption is the mother of all f%$*-ups, said that guy in Under Siege 2. Again, it's garbage. The posters (the one who made the original graph and the one who added the events/reworks trying to establish a "correlation" with player decline) should add a much bigger disclaimer that what they're presenting to the community (who lapped it up, judging by the posts and the upvotes) has a colossal methodological flaw. I'll believe player numbers are dwindling based on my personal observation and reasoning (whose limitations I'm aware of), or I'll know it based on high-quality data, rigorously presented to me. What's going on on reddit, on the other hand, is a food fight. And it's disheartening seeing @Sunleader being called a "shill" for making perfectly sensible arguments and counterexamples.

"Peak players" were 5-25k most months, but 350k in February 2021? WTF is going on?

No, he's not. If anyone left for good because subs were introduced, that shows up in the graph as it should, while past inactivity is "redeemed" by even a single game years later, and won't show up. That "flat line" is spurious: if people were playing in 2019, they would've had to be registered, so they would show up in the graph if they weren't playing, one game years later would've been enough to make them show up anyway: 2019 players are being overcounted, while 2023 players are not, as they haven't had 2024, 2025 and so on to play and be counted as active for 2023. Confirmation bias.

This I don't get though: the author (in a different reddit post: the lines with events/reworks were added by someone else) says this is the EU server population, and surely it should've increased with the transfer of accounts from the RU server, right?

I mean...the JB shot at me several times. I took 2M potential overall, which is very respectable for the Austin. Halland also came very close to torping me, twice. But yes, it was probably on him to try to gunboat me when I was on 11k, which might've saved you and the game. Cheers

One of my toughest win ever, despite the not-so-impressive xp. I had the almost undivided attention of @KillStealBoss's Chkalov, especially after I realized he was 15 km away and I had no choice but to push into him, while being targeted by a GK, then a Sevastopol, then a JB...while a Halland was torping me from the flank. It took my Austin all 5 heals, all 5 Def AAs, the Def AA coal module, the flags, the AA module in slot #6, both captain skills...but my Austin made it A nice Amagi game the other day, to finish the regrind ...and a good showing in Ranked in the Ohio (tank build), where I sort of out-traded a Louisiana 10:1

I'd like to say I knew where it was going when you Dev Stuck that DD in B...but let's be honest, I knew where it was going as soon as you said hello in chat

I don't know about "much higher", but yes, that's a pretty clear flaw in the methodology. If I understand the author correctly, the graph is basically waiting for people who "left the game" (for whatever reason) to come back for a few battles over the next months/years, and count them as having been active in between. For instance, the year 2019 already "had the chance" to get this spurious bump from players coming back (even for a single battle) in 2020, 2021, 2022 and early 2023, while early 2023 had...no such chance yet. Frankly, I think it invalidates the data in question as an objective measure of anything. Not to mention the old "correlation vs causation" issue: maybe subs drove players away (net players, as they certainly brought some new players in), but maybe player numbers were already declining and that's why WG addes subs, more premiums and more lines to try to keep players engaged. Honestly, my best guess as to why players would be declining is a sort of Copernican principle: subs and superships have made me more annoyed at the game (subs have earned me a couple of legitimate chat bans...), and the same is probably true of other people, because I'm not exactly special.

Honestly, they could've buffed the Hayate with the Pan Asian treatment, giving her TRB in a separate slot with 2 charges, and a lot more people would've gotten her.

One of my few CV games recently, my Saipan sank a sub that no one even spotted, based on the pings alone, I imagine. Meanwhile, I still miss when trying to use airstrikes, even if they're spotted

I've tried dropping Seattles with my Aquila in a training room, and the best I could do was 15k a pop

Our lovely Shima, in chat My Ohio, unfazed

I hate Cossacks in Ranked: so annoying to have to deal with Have my +1 for giving one a hard time

Indeed. For 100k FXP I would've expected a 5-10% chance of getting a Tier 8 premium, not 1.5%...

Double post

Spam HE in a low/mid-tier BB or cruiser: people are less likely to have Fire Prevention, flags or Basics of Survivability (and Tier 5 BBs can't mount DmgCon mod 2) more likely to mismanage their DCP more likely to stay detected (smaller maps, no CE on their captain) less likely to use island cover (centerline turrets encourage staying in the open and wiggling).