FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

"Why can't you just tell me where the key is?!" But while we're on the topic - is it normal that the guns of that first ship you get for the event, do not make any sound when they fire?

Not currently, since the campaign was time limited and ran out. Chances are he will end up in the Armory in a few months or so. Buying WG products is worth it if you love their way to develop the game and want to show your deep appreciation for accomplishments like the CV rework and things. Otherwise, do not buy any WG products until they fix the CVs.

Not quite. What they actually knew was that the crap storm would soon blow over, but while it lasted, it would allow users to vent their outrage and burn it out ineffectively. It wouldn't even impact Satan Crate Christmas sales to a noticeable degree, let alone WG profits overall, or the other pillar of their business model, the server population. Chances were, it would all be forgotten by February. And so it came to pass. They could also be certain the community would not be organising in protest to take any kind of action that could actually be effective, like a wide-spread boycott, because their social media and PR droids handled it in their staged conflict. All those streamers are de facto WG employees without the benefits and without an actual salary. Ever notice how, despite all the venting and bitching about WG, they never ever do anything effective, like advocating to not buy WG products? Can you imagine the hurt that a dude like Flamu could put on their bottom line if he actually used the hold he has over his minions for that purpose? It's a sick mix of Controlled opposition, shills and naive stooges. And that is exactly how it played out. Still bringing up PR is like some crazy old coot telling war stories in this day and age. Same with the Research Bureau. Pseudo crap storm - staged conflict - community feels represented by streamers without actually being represented - nominal changes to the concept create the appearance of progress - launch it anyway. Everybody happy. Same with the Clan Battle boycott. The very rules of their Discord, that the "Clan organisation" makes you read first thing, already take every form of protest that would actually be effective right off the table, since an actual WG course change on the CV rework "is not happening anway".

Reinstall the latest NA client and it will work on both servers.

They're all just CV fodder. Paying 30% less for being griefed is still paying for being griefed. Do not give WG any money until they fix the CV rework.

*EDIT*

Capping has become a lot less important for me as well when playing DDs, chiefly because teamplay is not rewarded highly enough and damage is rewarded much better. When early caps are won, that's the first step to one of two very frequent scenarios: Quick steamroll win with less time for me to do more damage, or "Green Alert" (=all caps in our posession), followed by an outbreak of Win Harder Syndrome on my team, which in turn is usually followed by a loss. Or the other thing that happens is I contest the cap too tenaciously and die early like a muppet, not the least because the DDs I like best are not the best cap contesters. I have not kept detailed statistics of course but it feels like these happen a lot more often to me than running out of time and losing because of too little cap posession. After an early cap, more often than not, I find myself wishing we could give back a cap at some point, just so I have more time to blap the campers, especially if they are CVs. (It goes without saying but I'll say it anyway, entering a cap before the positions of the radars are known is a very high risk and more often than not, a needless one that should be avoided.)

The reload is not the only factor for your purpose by a very long shot. Not even the range matters as much as one might think On the EU server, where I have a lot more ships, I usually use Tirpitz because $reasons. Sometimes, PEF. But on the NA server, back when I didn't even have a Georgia, I used to use Pyotr Velikiy because it had the longest secondary range, combined with a good number of secondary guns, and broke 300 secondary hits with that one on more than one occasion. The only difference is it was less reliable and took some more doing and everything had to come together really perfectly for that kind of result, so averaging across x number of battles, the ships with the longer range and the better armor do better in the long run. (That said, good luck trying to find a ship with better frontal armor than Pyotr.) The chief concern though is out of your control anyway, which is the skill of your human opponents (even though all of them are on your own team in Co-Op). Because what mostly happens is that some torpedo ship or other blasts ahead much faster than you, somehow manages to survive past the DD bots (or kills them) and just polishes off the BBs with their torps. For hundreds of secondary hits, you need to find yourself one or even several enemy BBs, get your own BB into secondary range, and then all of yous need to keep circling each other and just survive for as long as possible. So what you chiefly need to do is not support any other people on your team. Especially all the torp ships that are faster than you should ideally die as soon as possible. You can accelerate that a little without teamkilling, for example just by indicating with your movements and positioning ('body language') that you're backing them up, but then just don't shoot and watch them get melted by the bots. Or push them out of their smoke even, ideally in a way so you're still hidden, though that would really be an artful piece of treachery. Also it probably goes without saying but I'll say it anyway, don't do any other kind of damage to those ships you chose as targets for your secondaries. On the other hand, you will probably not be able to avoid using your main guns and/or torps completely since you need to survive getting into range and then survive staying there. So the real knack is to decide which other ships to attack with the main armaments, and when, and of course the positioning. (Edit: There's of course another option - use the autopilot to set a course and let the ship sail on its own while doing something else.)

As if we weren't reminded of the pandemic enough already.

Well you see, much like "I don't have time for that", it would in fact be an admission that something else is more important to them. Which, you know, people wouldn't like. Especially the kind of nasty people, in the presidential parlance of our times, who somehow get their hands on a guesstimate of how many Satan Crates they sold in all these years and what kind of exorbitant profits that means, especially since hardly any of it is bound to end up in the pockets of those few of the 4,000 strong staff that do the actual work.

The minimap is broken. All the ship symbols always point North. . Looks like it was a mod, installing the latest mod pack version seems to have fixed it.

Also trying to change the port crashed muh client. (The first time around. Second attempt after restart was successful. For now. Let's see if it retains the change until the next restart.)

Firstly, just in case you're not aware, let me point out that the amount of Free XP gained in a battle is based on the total amount of ship XP earned, which is to say it is calculated after all the modifiers are applied to the base XP. As such, the extra modifiers Papa Papa Signal and Ouroboros Special Signal stack with the ship XP modifiers. So for maximum Free XP gain, you should reserve the use of these signals for ships where you are using other ship XP modifiers too, viz., camo with XP boost or permanent camo and other signals. As a F2P player, you are probably reserving these ship XP boosters for lines of tech tree ships you are currently grinding. So whenever you're going back to a silver tech tree ship which already has elite status, just for kicks, and only using, say, one of the "Lidl" camos (Type 1, 2 and 5), or no camo at all, you should definitely not be using the Free XP booster signals but saving them. Personally, on my F2P account on the NA server, I'm reserving any and all signals and XP boosters for exclusive use on Premium days only, and I get only the premium days earned by playing the game itself since I'm boycotting commercial WG products because of the CV rework. With respect to your original question, what Flamu usually answers whenever the question comes up in his chat on Twitch is that whatever the outlay, it is worth it if you actually go on to play the ship a lot. That is a useful baseline. From your stats, it definitely sems you might enjoy the Alaska experience. It is actually fairly different from the American heavy cruiser experience since the ship is so hard to citadel. Getting caught in the open is not the automatic death sentence that it is in a Des Moines, for example. It is also objectively the best Free XP special/premium ship. although I think Ägir is very close. In contrast, as was pointed out to me when I was at your stage, using Free XP to skip tech tree ships means paying WG for not having to play their content. F2P or no, your playing time spent on their servers is the other pillar of their business model and they cannot exist without it, same as without people buying their stuff. That said though, while the sentiment still holds true, the content you're paying them to not play is mostly garbage these days because of the CV rework. Upshot for me is you can do it but if you decide to skip a Tier IX ship, you should have a very good reason (like maybe needing the follow-up Tier X immediately, for competitive play.) Otherwise, Tier IX is currently the sweet spot cause there are the fewest CV battles and many ships on that tier are very enjoyable, and more than just a few are held by some players to be objectively better than the follow-ups. That is also why you definitely want to finish the Five Epochs campaign asap, seeing as it drops two Tier IX perma camos. Also once you're at Tier X, there are very few reasons to keep playing these ships, at least in Randoms. The Legendary upgrades are mostly garbage with two or three exceptions. The grind just stops without a follow-up ship. Grinding commander XP and Free XP and credits could be done but you can't farm any higher tier ships any more and any boosters feel wasted since you don't need the Ship XP for anything any more while you could use them for grinds. All that is left is training for competitive modes; events and campaign missions if there are any; and pure gaming enjoyment. And because of the CV rework, the only Tier X ships I find truly enjoyable most of the time these days are Halland and Smaland.

Yeah so I'm mainly writing this because writing is my main coping mechanism for when playing no longer works. So if you're not into reading, best just disregard. I started out on the EU server (of course), but then, on a whim, created an NA server account about a year ago. Back then I used the same game instance and a tool called WoWs Realms, from the Aslain mod pack. I did not use the Wargaming Center (WGC) back then because it was not mandatory and from all accounts, it was a crappy piece of dysfunctional Wargaming software that caused a lot of trouble in return for nothing. The only drawback was I couldn't play on the NA server on Patch Day because the new patches are rolled out a day early on the NA server and I found no way to update my client here in Europe on that American Patch Day already. I could live with that. Had I found a way to update early, I wouldn't have been able to access my Euro account on the American Patch Day. Fact of life. Then at some point, WG said using the WGC was now mandatory as a launcher, although for a long time after the announcement, in actual fact it was still not required, I still could launch the client by just executing its .exe file. Still, I kept running into some trouble or other, as WoWs players do. And Player Support kept telling me the proper way to do it was to install a second instance of the client, specifically and only for the NA server. So one day I caved, not the least because my ISP finally, graciously gave me the bandwidth upgrade they had been fervently denying was even physically possible in my neck of the woods for the past 20 years. So the download only took an hour or so and not three days as before. However, all was not well. The clients somehow failed to save my login data. It took me a while to figure out that in order to avoid any trouble, I had to not only manually switch accounts in the WGC, but also manually switch client instances. Every time when starting the game. Annoyingly unprofessional software design but in the greater scheme of things, only a minor inconvenience. Another annoying but minor inconvencience was of course the fact that from then on, I had to install the Aslain Mod Pack twice every patch instead of once like before (which was already annoying.) Somebody really needs to tell Wargaming that one of the main purposes of computers is supposed to be removing dull, repetetive, easily automated tasks from human existence. By doing them for us. Not to add more of them. But the next thing that happened was, at some fairly recent point in time, WG announced that players could now go back to using just a single client instance to play on all the different servers. After mulling this over for a few weeks, I decided to do that. For $reasons, the drive of my gaming PC had become a bit cramped for storage. The EU instance had become very long in the tooth over the years and patch after patch being added to it, and it seemed a good opportunity to get rid of it in favour of the relatively fresh NA instance. Only one Aslain installation per month any more and no more manual instance changes in the WGC. Over the growing pile of minor annoyances, I had completely forgotten to consider the different patch days thing. So today, it is patch day on the NA server. As you can see in the screenshots, the WGC tells me I'm running the latest game version, 0.9.10.number_salad. Despite that proud announcement, it is not possible to log on to my NA server account, so I'm losing one of the precious premium days won in the Five Epochs event. It is possible to access the EU account though. And once the client is launched, it tells me that it is still 0.9.9.1. I hate these people so, so much.

Ehm but I do have the NA client?! Although I did install it a few patches ago, so it originated as 0.9.06 maybe. In any event, the client download is now over 30 GB, as opposed to th 16 GB it used to be when I first installed it. Part of that seems to be because there are actually two client versions hidden inside all that mess of data.

Well, I got all other tech tree Tier Xs beside the carriers, and the next snowflaking event is coming up. Getting only carrier battles in muh Benham these days. Got nothing else to blow the special signals and camos from the Anniversary snowflaking on. Supercontainers, although nerfed into the ground, are still addictive. Kansas has temporary special ship status, letting me use the maxed-out Halsey captain and grind Elite Commander XP at the same time. And as the OP outlined, it is actually not that bad. I went through the FDG grind when both that thing and my half-understanding of game mechanics were at their worst. The Kansas experience is actually better than that, from what I remember. There is no need to push into secondary range, no need to get the timing of that push just right. You just sort of waddle along, you win some, you lose some. I've only had six Randoms so far, so the numbers don't say much, but the 80% WR is currently almost twice that I have in Smaland. In carrier battles, you actually do farm a fair bit of planes and they usually leave me alone after the first attempt, despite the username that usually tends to provoke them into trying to grief me extra hard. I've only been getting 50% carrier battles so far which is 17% below my Tier VIII average. And when you're top tier against, say, a German noob DD fail division, it can actually be fun. I got 4K doubloons from the 5th Anniversary snowflaking. Should I get as much again, that would basically be a free Mainz, with Halland AA at Tier VIII.

I seem to remember being told by a fellow forum user that the early American patch day was a way to suss out any remaining bugs a bit earlier and maybe have a chance of fixing them before, or soon after, the patch hits the larger, more important EU server. So they're basically our crumple zone. Much in the way my former brass band regarded the fifes and drums marching ahead of us in parades as our crumple zone, actually.

Did they maybe secretly patch the dispersion? Cause I do keep getting hits across the map now.

Just switch to aircraft carriers.

That only applies for short-cutting through the reset, which of course would defeat the purpose of gaining more Free XP. It may be legitimate to equate the tokens with that amount of Ship XP but they are by no means automatically worth the same in Free XP since that is so much harder to come by. The value of a currency is not determined by the value of the goods you can acquire for a given amount of it because the pricing of those goods is fairly arbitrary. Sellers always take as much as they can get. Pointing to things like product quality or manufacturing cost is just a smoke bomb to obscure that fact. Rather, the value is determined by the lengths the buyer has to go to in order to acquire the currency. That is why a Euro/Pound/Dollar is a lot more valuable to a lowly hairdresser than a millionaire, and why it is so grossly unfair to do things like putting a cap on healthcare premiums or financing the state mainly through the VAT charged from from low and medium income earners. But I digress. anyway, in order to try and "normalize" the currencies one would probably have to convert them all into grinding time and try to standardize that somehow.

Sure it is. The main use of the hydro is to be able to maneouvre aggressively without fear of torps. Also you spot torps for team mates behind you, hopefully keeping your support plebs alive longer. And of course you can use RN smokes offensively, same as any others. You just can't sit around in it for as long. But even that is a good thing since it keeps you on your toes while not giving the enemy a lot of time to sneak up on you. And you usually start at least a couple of fires even so.

Where do you get that ridiculous number? To answer your question, I reset the two American cruiser lines and actually ground through them again, only using free XP to unlock the upgrades, in order to unlock Smaland as quickly as possible. It cost me a ton of camos and flags but I did come out far ahead. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_vz205JSLNoV2FARefsDt6bNNpUZcih8HItQLZJT5j4/edit#gid=1451788746 And it was definitely worth it because I have no interest in any of the ships available for research tokens. They're all just CV fodder anyway, and in the rare games without CVs, you can be sure to have some low-skilled DDs on your team that die instantly or just refuse to do their job. Either that or no DDs at all. For which I also blame the CV rework. In any event, BB and cruiser gameplay also sucks. Which basically leaves me with Halland, Smaland, Friesland and the odd attempt at other Tier IX DDs, in the hopes of favourable matchmaking. But as of the last two patches, my Benham seems cursed once again in that it attracts a lot more CVs than muh Friesland strangely, and the Yugumo can be sure to end up in a carrier battle as soon as I even think about swapping the smoke for the TRB. So, bollocks.

Well, I'm sure a lot of potato moves have been pulled by me in the past, so many in fact that I don't remember any one of them specifically. But let's just go with the general paradigms: Going for that close-up shoving-all-the-torps-down-the-guy's-neck but missing most or all of them at extremely close range and getting blapped; especially in a stealthy DD when all that was required really was to gain just a little more distance and the guy would have never seen it coming; another variation: sneaking up from behind to an opponent camping alongside an island, often a front-gun only BB, and just have the guy sail away, dodge my attack and blap me; fourth variation on this theme: in the bad old days when the Target Acquisition System Modification was still available, trying to sneak up on an opponent camping alongside an island, usually a Jean Bart, only to be detected at 3 km out already instead of just 2 km, and miss the attack and get blapped; although this could also easily get very embarrassing for the other guy, like if he had snuck up so close to some rocks in front of him, for torpedo protection from that direction, that he now was unable to sail away and had to take the full, er butt-load of torps while unable to blapp me; Trying to pull off a ram and then either being dodged, or missing closely, or changing my mind about dying in mid-attempt, and either way ending up fully broadside at extremely close range in time for the other guy to calmly obliterate my citadel with multiple shells; The old getting-too-close-in-muh-smoked-up-Ship-while-trying-to-catch-noob-DDs-with-hydro (Friesland smoke fire penalty is 3 km, Neptune: 6.6km); Variation of that theme: Getting annihilated in Lo Yang by The God Of Blind-Firing Into Smoke in a high dpm DD or cruiser; Smoking up in muh Smolensk, getting blapped, remembering they put the smoke on the hydro button in that ship. I'm sure I'll remember a few others in a minute or so.

That does not make any difference.

(Seriously though: search for a Little White Mouse tutorial named something like "So you want to improve your win rate" and do everything she says, which is to generally stop doing stupid sh|t and needless high risk plays even though they seem to be so much fun, and that should do you for now. As map knowledge increses, you can then over time work on your positioning.)