FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

Actually makes perfect sense. Just one commander will fit both ships perfectly, you can alternate bnetween them and grind a tonne of elite commander XP while the Premium makes up for the credits lost by the silver version. Also, if anything, Salem is more comfortable to play with that monster heal, same as Boise vs Helena.

They don't have bot plane squads ready yet, so all those CV ops were kicked out.

Yeah that's why I called it "probably a surge". And I don't care why it happens. The important thing is it does happen. Same as with Trump, in the end it doesn't matter why he's acting like a traitor, mob boss and Russian asset.

I don't mean to be annoyingly obsessive but - credit where it's due - one of the sensible improvements WG have implemented these past few months is to delete the comment section below their News bulletins, replacing it instead with a "Discuss on the Forum" button which takes readers right to the relevant thread in the correct subforum, thus leading to a single, unified thread there. That subforum is called "News & Announcements". So I don't know if it is helpful to undermine their efforts by spawning more threads about the same issue elsewhere. However, for one, they undermine themselves by never sending news bulletin readers to the "Current Update" subforum, thus creating duplicate threads of their own. Also I'm fairly certain more people read the Gameplay section of this forum than the above mentioned "News & Announcements", or "Current Update". So whatever, let me just copy this from there: "It's nice that WG is trying to unclutter the port GUI a bit. How ever, that seems far lower on the list of players' priorities than a lot of other GUI improvements that disappointingly, once again, have been ignored. Even though the player base has been suggesting many of them countless times, over and over, sometimes for years, and some should be really really easy to implement and would enhance the gaming experience so much more. Once again, no signal flag management, not even a basic „Demount All Signal Flags“ button which players have been asking for since the earlier stages of development. Let alone fullly configurable ship profiles for the different battle types. No "Hoist flag X on all ships" button. No hotkeys for switching the AA sector. No deselected auto-resupply by default for all items that cost gold doubloons. No configurable limits for automatic in-game currency expenditures. No consistent hot key bindings for consumables And the Port is as suggish as ever, with the usual mysterious power consumption spikes still giving rise to absurd conspiracy theories about WG secretly abusing players' systems for bitcoin mining etc. Also it would have been very nice if you had included a few mods from the sanctioned Aslain Mod Pack into the game proper. Specifically "Return commander to his ship", “Score Timer” and “Extended Tech Tree” should included into the regular game client." And regarding the naming change from "Arsenal" to "Armory": "The name change to Armory is pointless, counterproductive and needlessly confusing. Any "added" functionality is marginal. So you can buy a few more ships. <slow clap> If anything, that is an "extended product range". The functionality itself is completely unchanged, as far as I am concerned. Or rather, the dysfunctionality. What WG should have done, very very urgently, is implement the most basic "shopping cart" function. I am not even talking about the full online shopping experience here. Just let players enter the number of items they want to exchange at once, to get multiple instances of the same item. Like 5 packs of Zulu signals at the same time. For example. It may not seem like much of an improvement but I can only reiterate how much of a pain it was to click 240 times or so just to convert all the crowns from the FSW event into Florins, and click several dozen more times to eventually convert those Florins into signals. All of it in this annoyingly sluggish port interface."

The problem is there are too many CVs in the game. I've been jotting down the numbers yesterday and while that is a small sample size (yet), in 27 Random battles, I had carriers in 63% of them, and 11.1% were double carrier games. This is all mid and high tiers, mostly Tier VIII and X, some Tier VI and XI IX. I suspect the number is higher in the low tiers. Contrast that with CV approval numbers like 13% in the Flamu strawpoll or 16.6% in mine (albeit two nerfs ago) And since WG is incentivising carriers and pushing them via promo and other marketing initiatives, things are going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Granted, it's a surge right now but I expect even the lulls to be close to a third of all games, with an average in the forties. If the average percentage was below 20%, like their approval among the player base, I wouldn't say anything but this is out of proportion and it is annoying as heck. Especially since WG can't get the balancing right, and they are hurting a ship class which is much more fundamentally important for the game as such and has a much higher approval rating among players. And I still maintain balancing CVs is fundamentally impossible if at the same time they are supposed to have meaningful gameplay that is at least somewhat "realistic". I mean come on. It's already fairly ridiculous, what with the concealment of ships being better from the air than from the surface when actually, everybody knows you can see real ships from greater distances if you're up in a plane.

The name change to Armory is pointless, counterproductive and needlessly confusing. Any "added" functionality is marginal. So you can buy a few more ships. <slow clap> If anything, that is an "extended product range". The functionality is completely unchanged as far as I am concerned. Or rather, the dysfunctionality. What WG should have done, very very urgently, is implement the most basic "shopping cart" function. I am not even talking about the full online shopping experience here. Just let players enter the number of items they want to exchange at once, to get multiple instances of the same item. Like 5 packs of Zulu signals at the same time. For example. It may not seem like much of an improvement but I can only reiterate how much of a pain it was to click 240 times or so, just to convert all the crowns from the FSW event into Florins, and click several dozen more times to eventually convert those Florins into signals. All of it in this annoyingly sluggish port interface.

It's nice that WG is trying to unclutter the port GUI a bit. However, that seems far lower on the list of players' priorities than a lot of other GUI improvements that disappointingly, once again, have been ignored. Even though the player base has been suggesting many of them countless times, over and over, sometimes for years, and some should be really really easy to implement and would enhance the gaming experience so much more. Once again, no signal flag management, not even a basic „Demount All Signal Flags“ button which players have been asking for since the earlier stages of development. Let alone fullly configurable ship profiles for the different battle types. No "Hoist flag X on all ships" button. No hotkeys for switching the AA sector. No deselected auto-resupply by default for all items that cost gold doubloons. No configurable limits for automatic in-game currency expenditures. No consistent hot key bindings for consumables And the Port is as suggish as ever, with the usual mysterious power consumption spikes still giving rise to absurd conspiracy theories about WG secretly abusing players' systems for bitcoin mining etc. Also it would have been very nice if you had included a few mods from the sanctioned Aslain Mod Pack into the game proper. Specifically "Return commander to his ship", “Score Timer” and “Extended Tech Tree” should included into the regular game client.

The title "Norma Quest" makes no sense. Unlike "Alldestroyer Quest", which unlocks Alldestroyer, and "Flyfire Quest", which unlocks Flyfire, Norma Quest does not unlock Norma but Century Hawk. The only thing it has to do with Norma is you need to do it in Norma - or Zaya. Edit: Or Galaxy. I now understand what has happened. There are two different Norma quests, and one of them actually does unlock Norma. The other one was actually supposed to be titled "Century Hawk Quest", and they created it by copy&pasting the Norma Quest, and failed to change the title, and failed to proofread the copy.

Yes well but if that were Tier X Randoms, I could'vew only damaged same or lower tier ships. Shouldn't that be worth even less?

Minor nitpick/question, I get the impression there is distinctly less base XP to be earned than in Randoms? 62K damage, two kills, one cap assist - barely breaking 1K base XP. Is that normal? Is that because of all these ships being on the same tier? Granted, it was not a really stand-out result, but 15 K was from one DD kill alone. I frankly was expecting a bit more for my trouble.

I appreciate that players now can buy legendary modules for the space-battles currency ironium in the "Armory". Especially since there are no carriers in space battles. So you can do carrier free space battles instead of slogging through carrier-contaminated Random Battles. That is very good news indeed. However. I haven't done the full math yet but it seems we are yet again looking at another very looong haaaard grind. 25 Ironium per mission, 600 for one Legendary module, that would come to 24 missions for one module. Are there even enough missions? And looking at the missions, some seem really hard. I had an incredibly hard time getting wins on the test server sometimes. Sometimes the right battle mode would simply not come up, something that is completely out of the individual players' control. And also it's either grind in Random or grind in Space Battles. That seems a bit greedy, Wargaming. It seems to say "Those servers ain't populating themselves, you plebs!" How about this for an idea: award a few Ironium for the Random Legendary grinds as well. Even to players who are already in mid grind. Or lower the price by a few bars for completing stages of the Random grind. Or let players buy individual stages of Random grinds. Or something. First edit: Despite my PTS feedback, WG did not add a "Battle on" button to the Space Battles results screen. I still fail to see a good reason for a mandated break in Port after each battle.

Tier 6 and above, actually. However, if you focus your efforts (and your best power camos and signals) on just one or two ships, the grind is fairly quick, even as F2P player. Just read up on the OPs, coordinate you grinds amongst each other so you don't end up with six DDs but with a good, synergetic mix of ships, and you're set in no time. It might mean that each of you only has one and the same ship to play in OPs for a while, but that way, at least you get very used to its strengths and weaknesses. It also puts all of you on a 20 min Operations break after each run, as long as you don't have a second ship on the go, so better have enough beer at the ready. Also, there are ways to get individual days of "free" premium account time more or less selectively. For example: Buy days in the Arsenal Armory for Florins from the Fly-Strike-Win event. Especially if you don't have any interest in owning aircraft carriers. Or play a lot of space battles (which is advisable anyway since you get maxed-out captains, which let you experiment a little with different commander skill builds) and buy premium days in the Armory for the Ironium currency. And you can buy "Battle of the North Cape" containers from the Armory for coal. Each time you finish one subcollection, it's one day of premium time, increasing your credit and XP earnings. Usually you get a lot of duplicates, and you can buy missing items for several of those. So that lets you mostly save those days for whenever you have a free day to do a lot of grinding, possibly together with some other guys. Also, even though it might a bit much for you guys at this stage, but nevertheless I'd like to point out that you could also look at Clan Battles. http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Clans#Starting_a_Clan You need Tier X ships and need to have a clan, either found a clan yourselves or join an existing clan that lets you guys play CBs. There are solo player clans out there that might value your oil contribution. I was in such a clan myself and it was a pain to get a few players together even for a single CB but for a group of friends, that would be no problem, and it doesn't hurt anybody else in the clan. Now Tier X is definitely a long grind away. Even though it can go much faster today than a year ago, let alone two or three years ago. On the other hand, you only need to lay your hands on a single Tier VIII ship and play one battle to gain rental Tier X ships you could use. Even though they have slightly worse concealment than the regular version as they cannot carry camouflage. Still, even Tier VIII is a fairly long grind (if you decide against simply buying a Tier VIII premium ship) (and there are many good reasons not to do that). And also beginners will get clobbered fairly brutally a lot of the times in Clan Battles, even though you do come across some astonishingly weak teams every once in a while. But I still thought I'd mention it because it is the most fun and the coolest group experience I've had in this game. And there are no carriers.

Thats's as may be but the fact remains they still keep cropping up in more and more games. I will try and keep my own statistics from now on. Today so far it has been 2:1 carrier vs no carrier games, and half of those with carriers were in fact double CV games. And neither are fun and nearly everybody hates them. And it will stay that way.

I agree. Low tiers could be so much fun, even (especially!) if it were only clubbers and no seals. (And no carriers of course.) My suspicion is they don't want experienced players to farm the incentives for such challenges, which would increase the seal clubbing even further. So what they'd need to do would be some sort of skill-/experience-related matchmaking, which is a yuge can of worms, as evidenced by lots of previous threads.

And I of course stand by it. Ever since last Friday, whatever your stats may say, there has been a surge. Most games were carrier games, even in the high tiers. Many of them were double carrier games. WG has shown no sign of letting up. To the contrary, they are releasing more carriers, more incentives, they are stepping up the promotion and the marketing. There may be the occasional lull ahead but by and large, carriers will remain in a much too large fraction of the games, despite polls over polls showing that most players hate this. Until WG shows serious signs of stepping up to the problem, correcting the meta to one that the vast majority of players enjoys most of the time, WG needs to feel more pressure. Dunning-Kruger, sunk cost fallacy and all that.

Look at the title of this thread and read carefully.

You definitely need to master the art of not being seen in that ship. And unlike Neptune, which is very similar in that respect, you don't have smoke. More things you don't have is a lot of horsepower for quick acceleration, nor high shell arcs for shooting across islands. So you very much need to stay hidden, but any cover islands can't be too high or you need to stay too far away from them. You need to find really good spots, typically angling away from the enemy at the end of islands where they are sort of tapering out. Luckily, you have so many guns, and they fire HE. So you don't really need to bring the full broadside to bear to have an impact. You can sometimes even let the rear stick out a bit, which at the same time lets you torp around the island. Often, you get into a good gunfire position just by pulling off the turn in such a way as to have the launchers pointed into the cap. Smoke is often the better concealment if you have DD players on your team who understand your needs and are willing to put their faith in you. It rarely happens, but on the other hand, these days they tend to be more sympathetic because they appreciate some cruiser AA near the cap. It may not be a whole lot of AA but it is for sure a lot more than most DDs have themselves. However, there will then of course be torpedoes incoming, and you need to anticipate their direction, and postion accordingly. Even with hydro, the acceleration is too slow to evade them if you are not sufficiently angled already. And your evasion maneouvre should ideally also not expose you to heavy gunfire. So once again, even with smoke, the typical Mogami position is angled away from the cap, with the nose already behind an island. Build-wise, it could even be worth speccing Vigilance for extra torp warning, especially if you regularly division with a DD player. But then you can never have [the basic 10pt HE light cruiser build plus] SI. That could be a problem in the carrier meta, you'd only have 3x fighter and no def AA. I'm only just testing it, as well as Propulsion Mod 2 instead of Steering gears. It makes you rather sluggish when kiting. Which is a problem because if you are not too far ahead while kiting, you have a chance to get in the occasional torps in the endgame. On the other hand, it makes your ship not outturn the guns, especially if you don't specc EM, which you don't wand because then you could not have AR. Oh well.

Currently, no premium at all is "worth it". The carrier rework has already destroyed about half of the game, with no turnaround in sight, and WG is busy undermining the other half. And low-to-mid tier premiums without meaningful AA like Dreadnought, Arizona, West Virginia etc etc, are doubly not worth it. Not worth money, and not worth the free time of F2P players. You'll just be fodder in most games, which is very few people's idea of a fun gaming experience.

I'm doing this probably more often than the average player with my kind of middling experience because, as almost every form of behaviour in the game, it can be a tool. If you want to make the HE-spammer in question really tunnel-vision hard on you, to the extent he possibly overlooks more pressing concerns, single-fire DCP is a prime way to achieve that. If he likes to communicate, you can get a whole flank full of people to overextend that way. There is a right time and place for everything.

Even though I'm about to generalize a whole lot, for #reasons, there is no general answer to that. However, what frequently happens is that whole teams get too cocky after initial successes, try to win "even harder." Players see enemies die, caps being captured by their own team, and think they'll be left out of the XP and credit feast if they don't hurry and get their own licks in. Then they overextend, get isolated and killed off by the remaining enemies (which tend to be the more skilled ones) and what seemed to be a steamroll turns into a defeat. You see it every day. There is a thin time line for a well-timed push. In Clan Battles, this is hyper pronounced. Even just a few seconds too late or too soon can make all the difference.

In my experience, there is on average a lot more communication going on than in WoT, simply because the game is slower paced and more deliberate, so you have actually got time to type things in chat. That, and you don't get blowed up as quickly by people you have not even a theoretical chance of even seeing, let alone hurting.

Have any of you had shells falling short of your aim point this patch? Shells have been falling short for me maybe two, three times. Mostly in BBs I think. I did not pursue the issue any deeper and don't have any replays to back it up, mainly because at the time, I was startled but, as you do, quickly convinced myself it must have been yet another aiming error, and moved on. But yesterday, I just saw it happen to Flamu live on the stream. Very clearly no aiming error. He was in Nelson or Lenin and, granted, aiming at a stationary target across an island, both factors that often seem to disrupt the targeting. But the target was not closely behind that island, it was in fairly open water. And at least one of mine was a very easy shot, completely in the open, it was one of those Ishizuchis in the first wave of enemy ships in Operation Aegis, I was probably in Arizona at the time.

Just look at the after-action report, last page, XP and credits. It says right there what you gained and what you expended for that. http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Economy Higher tier ships have more expensive post-battle service, so it makes sense to reserve the respective flags and camos that reduce those costs only for the highest-tier ships. At the same time, you often make fewer credits in those ships in the first place. You meet more highly skilled opponents in battle (by and large) so your performance may be worse. Your damage figures get higher than in the lower tiers because the hitpoint pool is higher because high tier ships have more health. But the XP and credits are based on percentage of damage and not those concrete numbers as such. So you get fewer credits for the same amount of damage if it reflects a lower percentage of the damged ships' total health. Smaller ships are harder to hit but it is worthwhile to try, for this very reason. Do 10K damage to a DD and you get a lot more credits than for 10K BB damage. Also you get less money for damage done to lower tier ships, especially if they are lower than your own tier, and vice versa. Also many high tier ships are increasingly gimmicky which means the premium consumables start to add up.

Aaaaaand the old favourite is back, Port swicthing automatically to the Twitch port for no reason.

Just don't do boring things. Just don't do things you hate doing. Seek challenges that you find interesting. What about Clan Battles? OR you can also try becoming an a-hole sealclubber if you're a bit sadistically inclined. My latest fad is Asashio, that thing feels like sealclubbing on the high tiers, it's so hilarious. Will make a noob feel like a hero, with its Tier V concealment but Tier X guns and Tier XII stealth torps. Granted, the seals do club back occasionally but it is usually worth it. Edit: the above advice is of course purely hedonistic. Always indulging yourself will only get you more boredom over the medium-to-long term. So another approach would be to make yourself do the things you hate because you are a responsible player and they just need to be done for the greater good (like grinding Legendaries for Clan Battles), and only indulging yourself with a spot of Asashio every once in a while. As a treat, like.