FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

I would pick the Kusnetzov captain over both those ships any day of the week. In fact the only reason I'm not buying that guy right now on my NA account is I'm still holding out for WG to maybe introduce commander coupons. But of these two ships, I like the Salem playstyle better. Its most serious drawback is that unlike DM, it can't take both hydro and radar at the same time.

So their premium shop disclaimer is just smoke and mirrors then.

As I was saying...

Full with players' money. Which reminds me: I actually do still want a Makarov. Off to buy some crates after all. Knowing my luck, I'll probably be the only one to not get it.

If by "all this" you are referring to the Satan crate thing - that does not bother me in the least. For one, because I don't buy any WG products any more. And for another, because I fail to see any meaningful difference to what they have been doing with the Xmas lootboxes every year. To the contrary! As I and others have laid out elsewhere, by and large, the containers actually seem to offer better value for money than in the previous years. https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/144358-official-statment/?do=findComment&comment=3721319 https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/144315-here-is-why-wg-wont-do-anything-about-the-santa-crates-scam/?tab=comments#comment-3719431 The only thing that substantially changed is that the most popular streamers used the scam to turn the tables on WG in an underhanded power play that even gave WG a run for they money in deviousness. Good for them! https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/144296-hypothesis-about-the-makarov-satan-crates-shitstorm/?page=2 h

This sentiment, albeit perfectly understandable, does feed the other pillar of their business model though, which is exactly as vital to their business model as selling products for money: players' time spent on WG's servers.

The only conceivable way for change to be achieved is through player organisation and thus, effective organised player protest. I don't know how big of a player organisation it would take to get some Hong Kong style revolution going, but it is a finite number and there are ways. And it would involve nothing more than all of these organised players playing the game as intended. A sizable number of players would need to be only playing CVs, which are specifically designed for griefing and sucking the fun out of the game for most players in the other ships. Getting CVs, preferably double CVs, into as many games as possible. As outlined in my "Month of the CV" idea last year and brought up again the other day here on the forum.

All they'd need to do was bring in iEarlGrey again for "one last job"... All kidding aside, they do seem to be, if you look at the drop rate thread. Drop rates for Premium ships are higher than in previous years across the board, for the small containers it is more than three times higher. Drop rates for Premium time are also higher across the board. If the price for that is that you need to buy loads of containers to fill your port with mid tier garbage before anything interesting drops, that's exactly as it was in the past. Not to defend WG, just to sprinkle a little heresy across this thread <g> However, that could be caused by "people like me" not buying any containers this year. I remember @black_falcon120 telling me in private at some point last year that my (lack of) drops had significantly shifted his statistical results, to the point where I had single-handedly depressed the value of the crate size I had bought by so much that a different box size suddenly became the most efficient buy... I felt like I was turning into Marvin the Robot from the Hitch Hiker series. That is a very complicated way to spell "derailing".

Even their Bingo cards are rigged. Notice how there are at least two words on there that will NEVER come up in the draw?

Also no ASW specific skills, are there?

I've got some 300 ships in port, every tech tree ship of them with some captain or other, at least above Tier V, for regular snowflaking. 36 commanders are maxed-out as of now. These days, I hardly ever use any of the ships at all any more because of the CV plague. Currently, the regular ones are just Benham, Friesland, Halland and Smaland. For a long time I have mostly been playing DDs although I am a bit better at BBs, stats-wise, but I just can't cope with all the garbage team mates, emotionally and tactically, especially the atrocious current crop of DDs. So, DD "main" out of pure self defense. Any other ships besides the four DDs mentioned above are only ever used when events, missions etc call for them and I can be bothered, but mostly just for the navel battles, depending on what is called for on any given weekend. So I figure, my first priority needs to be to max out the commanders of my main ships as quickly as possible, so they can start earning ECXP again. Then maybe look at the next Ranked and Clan battle season, and also max out the unique commanders after that. I will not be requiring the services of most of the 201 other commanders any longer after the Captain skill rework, one way or the other. Even if I should stick with the game, there is no need to retain them for snowflaking purposes since you can just Co-Op with no captain at all. (I'm picturing a sort of anarchical pirate commune running any uncaptained ship, in a sort of grassroots democratic fashion.) We will be able to fire captains and convert a quarter of the XP that went into their training into ECXP - for credits. That will take a lot of credits. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IucYwAmu1-6s7qU2P0jMlYmT3dHOybmgttW1Kanlmkg/edit#gid=2125998039 Getting rid of all my Captains with 10 or fewer skill points would yield around 3 million ECXP and cost 30 million credits. It would let me max out four of my 19-pointers. Maxing out all my 19-pointers this way would mean firing all captains of 15 skill points or less, and cost around 270 million credits - the equivalent of almost 12 fully upgraded Tier X tech tree ships. Combined with whatever ECXP I can grind until the rework hits, I'm probably looking at half a dozen or so maxed-out new captains. But what you actually want by the time the rework hits is as many maxed out captains as possible, right away, in order to be able to experiment like crazy during the period of free captain skill redistribution. So the main thing I need to grind until then is - credits. So I can fire more low-skill riff-raff and use the proceeds obtained by destroying their lives and careers, shattering their virtual hopes and pixel aspirations, to promote a tiny elite force. Just as in real capitalist life. That's as far as I've gotten.

Close range only comes into play when they're directly on top of you. You know what Tier VI DD actually has the highest continuous dps? Fubuki. 161. Sadly all of it close-range, and thus, just as useless as Yubari AA. Sometimes I think there's a real sadistic degenerate sociopath among these devs who thinks of himself as having a great sense of humor.

Bwahahaha. 61 continuous dps. My full AA built Dunkirk-Orion has 89 and doesn't do squat against their planes.

And what surface ship would you try to use for sealclubbing these days against carriers?

Sooo... the chances of getting a premium ship are much better this year, also the chances of getting premium days are much better. Making these crates a much better overall purchase than ever. Bang-for-the-buck-wise. Were it not for...

Yes but wouldn't that require some actual competence and thus cost more money? Also the more competent people required to code this, would require still more money to keep their mouths shut about it.

Didn't they outsource that? To that Lesta studio?

That did not bother me before the CV rework.

If the team compositions were mandated, it would actually be a completely level playing field - a serious competition and actual test of the players' skills. IOW, it would

Why? Has there been any kind of downward trend in the server population? Afaik that is the only valid metric we have on the state of WoWs financial viability, which in turn is the only factor deciding whether it lives or dies. In the end. Sentiment on the forum does not come into it, nor any kind of real or fake outrage on the social media.

The name iEarlGrey ring a bell? Seriously when have WG ever done anything but stonewall? Their PR flacks are almost as bad as the interns doing the development, the balancing and the audio reworks. Sometimes I think the only qualified ones among their 4,000 employees are those that shuffle the money in their Scrooge McDuck style Money Bin.

So bad that they voluntarily repeated the exact same thing with Tallinn, which never even existed in reality.

What about owning Fujin, spending more money on the lottery to get Belfast but getting Kamikaze and Nikolai instead?

I have all but Gremy and Belfast. I used to want them, or at least some of them, very badly for a long time and literally bought several hundred Satan crates to get them. Then WG turned them into fertilizer with the CV rework. What can I say? Look at muh signature. Do it every day. Do not give WG any money. They'll just blow it on more scams.

Oh Flamu straight up chat-banned me once, for a day, for giving him money, and twice sicked his followers on me, for reasons I still do not fully understand. He had forgotten to turn off that Streamlabs applet that he used to use on "Tonedeaf Tuesdays." It allowed donors to play songs from youtube in the background of his stream, and must have made him tons over tons of cash. God knows I myself donated a small mountain of money that way, playing whole symphonies, after deciding it was better spent there than buying any Wargaming products. But for some reason, he got super extremely triggered whenever you did the exact same thing - donate a few Euros while selecting a youtube song - on any other day of the week, when he had just left that thing on by accident, instead of telling him in chat about it so he could turn it off. Give somebody power, even just a little bit, and they will invariably show you the despot lurking within.