Dear Devs, thanks for putting effort into improving the game.
I believe your intentions are to make the game's sound both more informative and immersive, which I like.
TL,DR:
You're doing way better than most commentators give you credit for, but please, please, please implement at least some weakened fashion of speed of sound in your game. It will improve the sound experience soooo much.
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When we talk about sound quality, we have to take a few things into account:
Technical sound quality doesn't offer much improvement opportunities any more. Sampling technology is advanced enough these days and the samples you use are generally well chosen. Maybe the new deflection sounds remind me a little too much of a spaghetti western. But I can't honestly give any advice for improvement, because I have never heard a 16" shell bounce off half meter of steel ship armor. I really like the vast majority of gun sounds, but a little more variance between individual shots would be really cool.
Far more important though, is the management of player expectations.
WoWS is obviously an arcade game, not a simulation, I totally get that. It basically means, that players expect a movie type of experience. An example of this would be that explosions and gun sounds should transport the impression of power and might.
We are talking about psychoacoustics here.
The impression of size (that is what "mighty" mostly comes down to) is typically achieved by reverb. Reverb in turn is generated by a sound event being reflected on surfaces.
If there are no surfaces, there is no reverb. At sea, there is only one surface, the water. So in a simulation there would be almost no reverb I would imagine (I haven't actually witnessed explosions at sea, and it's difficult to find a video example).
An explosion without reverb is not much more than a very loud but very short "POP". It's very difficult to derive any kind of sense of magnitude from that. So apart from the actual loudness, (which can't be transported because pc speakers can't produce the sound energy and nobody even wants that in their living room) a ship explosion sounds the same as a tiny firecracker. That's very unattractive for the players and thus I'm glad you use reverb despite of that being unrealistic.
Scale:
Coming to my point now. :)
This psychoacoustic principle also applies to distance and speed of sound. If you want to give the impression of size, you have to implement speed of sound to match the scale of your game.
Right now, from an audio point of view, the game feels somehow like playing with toy ships in a bath tub.
Let me explain: If I see a ship explode that's supposed to be 10 km away, and I hear the sound 0.1 second later, my brain tries to make sense of it.
And it can:
The brain's primary method of grasping distance involving the ears is correlating a visual cue with an audible one.
A visual cue 10km away arrives at my eyes after 0.00003 seconds. Let's call it instantly.
An audible cue at the same distance arrives after 30 seconds.
Brain: OMG this is a very big distance!
Turn this around please:
If an audible cue arrives 3 seconds after the visual one, my brain knows from experience that the event must have occurred about 1000m away. (Remember counting seconds after a lightning strike?)
Brain: OK I roughly know the shot distance, now I'll apply this knowledge to everything I can see. (Because what I see could also be a small scale model from just looking at it, right?)
We don't actually calculate this, but our brain works it out instinctively, trust me.
So back to our 10km and 0.1 second example.
0.1s is around 33 meters of distance at the speed of sound. So my brain scales down your ships by a factor of 10 000 / 33 = 300. And just like this, the mighty Große Kurfürst is a pitiful 1m of length in my mind.
Conclusion:
I talked about management of player expectation earlier, so I absolutely understand that a 1:1 implementation of speed of sound wouldn't benefit the game. Hearing 10 km sounds 30s later would be utterly confusing. But you already have a scaling system in place, why not integrate speed of sound into that. Just try and play around with it and you will see how much the game will grow.
Additional notes:
You already have speed of sound in the game: when you zoom in or out while changing speeds, the "speed bell sound" changes in pitch. So the camera is the listeners ear and moving away at speed lowers the perceived frequency. It's a general decision you will have to make: "Is my listening point the player's ship or the camera?"
The very same size distorting effect like in sound is present in the animations of water spray when a ship is moving. The spray moves way too fast in comparison to the ship. Just slow down the animation, it will definitely be a much more aggreable scenery. Imagine the size it would convey! I bet there is lots of further examples ...
generally your scaling model is very inconsistent. This is very detrimental to a well balanced game perception, because our brain knows that certain conditions don't fit together. Examples:
Iowa's shells are supposed to be 762m/s fast. Yet they cross 23 km in 14.7 seconds, which amounts to a speed of over 1500m/s. -> Scaling factor of 2
Iowa does about 33 knots but makes one ship length (270m) in 5 seconds. At real 33 knots she would need roughly 18 seconds for that distance. -> Scaling factor of 3.6
Again I know much of that is due to playability and fun experience. But I am convinced that a better balance could be found. Especially with the mentioned points like sound and animations, which don't have an actual impact on the game mechanics.
