FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

RL is a lot better balanced than radar. You need to acquire knowledge to use it, and practice. You need to keep using your brain even after acquiring the knowledge. It will give skilled players information, but not too much. It will even give skilled opponents information, even when they themselves don't have the capability. You can't just click a dumb button and get it all served on a platter. You can still get fooled by it (and by your opponents) even when you think you know how to use it. Like radar, it goes through mountains but that is actually historically accurate. What's not to like?

Maybe the point could be to get more players skilled enough that they even start to notice how broken CVs are. Knowledge is power.

Duplicating my General Feedback post from the Current Update forum, for reasons. Exeter's Last Stand: Once again, disappointment prevails, by and large. And I'm not even talking about the frustration to find out that the "Knights of Devon" thingy has already expired by the time you have ground the ship. For one thing, once again, the individual missions of the chain did nothing - nothing! to promote good gameplay. Whenever WG puts up an incentive like a free premium ship, but then poses dull challenges like "get 750,000 damage", they waste great opportunities to increase the overall skill of the player base. And for what? Farming and grinding is not fun, not rewarding and it doesn't even increase WG's profit. All it does is kerep the server slightly more populated - in this case, mostly in the Co-Op matches, otherwise known as the "side tables" normally used to punish undesirable elements such as team killers. Incentives are too valuable for that. They should ideally be used to reward didacticized challenges that stimulate casual players to learn new skills and acquire crucial knowledge that will hopefully help make them better players. This could even be associated with solving more complex strings of tasks that build on one another... gathering clues, solving riddles... how cool would it be if future events like this were in the format of something like a scavenger hunt? Just spitballing here, but an event where you're rolled into a small team of people that stays together for several layered tasks, forcing them to work together to accomplish the challenge?

Exeter's Last Stand: Once again, disappointment prevails, by and large. And I'm not even talking about the frustration to find out that the "Knights of Devon" thingy has already expired by the time you have ground the ship. For one thing, once again, the individual missions of the chain did nothing - nothing! to promote good gameplay. Whenever WG puts up an incentive like a free premium ship, but then poses dull challenges like "get 750,000 damage", they waste great opportunities to increase the overall skill of the player base. And for what? Farming and grinding is not fun, not rewarding and it doesn't even increase WG's profit. All it does is keep the server slightly more populated - in this case, mostly in the Co-Op matches, otherwise known as the "side tables" normally used to punish undesirable elements such as team killers. Incentives are too valuable for that. They should ideally be used to reward didacticized challenges that stimulate casual players to learn new skills and acquire crucial knowledge that will hopefully help make them better players. This could even be associated with solving more complex strings of tasks that build on one another... gathering clues, solving riddles... how cool would it be if future events like this were in the format of something like a scavenger hunt? Just spitballing here, but an event where you're rolled into a small team of people that stays together for several layered tasks, forcing them to work together to accomplish the challenge?

Quite right, but it's just a minor one of so many oddities, like for example the terrible dispersion on the BBs when in fact they were historically among the most accurate rifles ever. I frankly don't see a way around that without disrupting game balance.

Well, for Mikasa, WG chose to solve the issue by treating all the smaller guns as secondaries, with much shorter range. Conceivably, it would be also possible to treat them as main guns with different ballistic characteristics. That would be confusing and difficult, you would basically keep being switched automatically from the 12-inch turret to a St. Louis strapped to the side... however, the balancing would then at least be based on some kind of skill.

Where do you get the 15? It says "Earn 7 Battle Achievements"

Well, for the first part of the fourth and last stage that starts tomorrow, you will have to do them in Random because it calls for seven "battle" achievements, of which I don't think there are any awarded in Co-Op currently, and Wargaming's careless boilerplate phrasing notwithstanding, there are no Ranked battles on for the duration. So Random it is.

I'm sure they'll put in a whole online shopping platform, right after they get around to adding that pesky Demount-all-signals button...

Hm well, I have always thought the view through the rangefinder ("binoculars") shouldn't be so stationary, as if there were not the slightest swell at all... From this thread I get the impression WG has already implemented the effects of waves and ship motion but they just didn't get around to adding the visuals yet ^^

The link from the two in-game news bulletins (this one and the short "In a nutshell") to the web page ("Full details here") does not work.

Not really. New players get Signals at Account level 10 and camos at level 11. That's nothing. All that requires is to gain a sum total of 22,000 and 37,000 total XP, respectively. That is easily done without any boosters in one afternoon. Noobs might need two, maybe three if their skill is really low. Especially since you're already out of protected matchmaking at level 10 if you spend all of that time unlocking a single Tier V ship (grinding Minekaze for example requires 22,720 XP total down the line.)

Sometimes the shells are falling short in this patch. It has happened to me several times. Mostly in BBs I think. I did not pursue the issue any deeper though and don't have any replays to back it up, mainly because at the time I thought it was my noob aiming error. Or I was going crazy. But I just saw it happen to Flamu live on the stream! Clearly no aiming error. He was in Nelson or Lenin and aiming at a stationary target, across an island, both factors that often seem to disrupt the targeting. But the target was not closely behind the island, it was in fairly open water! At least one of mine was an easy shot, completely in the open, it was one of the initial Ishizuchis in Operation Aegis, I was probably in Arizona at the time.

This made me lol very hard. 3D chess? Sorry, but they have a hard time tieing their own shoe laces at times, as it were, regarding so many issues, from the most basic GUI improvements requested frequently over years, to crass marketing mistakes. Sorry, but they are all over the place. No offense, but really. They can't even (or don't want to?) get decent editors and translators. Re action and fast-paced gameplay, this is inherently the wrong game for that. People who want that should and will always look elsewhere. The whole point of this game is that it is more thoughtful and deliberate, that it allows for carefully considered tactics to be successful. If that condemns it to a niche of the market forever, SO BE IT.

Deeply into the sunk cost fallacy at this point.

I don't think aircraft carriers in this game can both have meaningful gameplay and be balanced at the same time. Some people may wistfully recall the olden days of the RTS style carriers. But the only times when they were not (overly) disruptive was when the meta was such that they were mostly out of the game for some reason, be it the skill gap or the phase in anticipation of the CV rework when very few people played carriers any more. Generally, by and large, they make the game less fun to play whenever they crop up. That is what most people think, by a large margin, and most players are not very interested in playing them in the first place. That is certainly sad for the minority that do enjoy them, and especially so for the even smaller minority that did enjoy the RTS gameplay. But it is what my little poll showed the other day and that is what I am very confidently expecting any future polls to keep showing. Forever. The concept is fundamentally not fixable. And it is very especially and definitely not fixable with the Kamikaze approach WG is currently taking. Think about it: unlimited planes means the whole premise of the current carrier meta is discarding planes and pilots with merry, cynical abandon, expendable like so much tissue paper. Even historically, all tactical efforts and technical developments notwithstanding, in the end, the only really effective counter to the Kamikaze, in the Pacific war, was on the strategic level - destroying the enemy's ability to make and operate planes any more. Destroyers, on the other hand, are vastly more important for the gaming enjoyment of the majority of players. They are a truly indispensable ship class for the continued commercial success of this game, yet Wargaming keeps piling more pressure on them with this half-baked carrier lark. One can only hope they come to their senses soon.

I get that on my low bandwidth connection whenever either the bandwidth drops even lower (less than 2 Kbit) or something else is running that uses up bandwidth, like a download.

Generally, what I maybe wouldn't consider is ships from nations for which you can't readily get at least a regular 10-point commander, at least as long as you don't have a few maxed-out commanders that allow you to grind Elite commander XP, which lets you "blow up" a regular 3-pt recruited commander in a relatively short time. So, besides US and Germany, that would be UK and France. No Perth, Duca etc. (although they are great). However during the next patch, there will be space battles, where you get access to a whole bunch of maxed-out commanders for a whole month. If you enjoy these and play them a lot, you could gain hundreds of thousand of elite Commander XP during that time fairly easily. Also there will be Space Captains on sale from the Arsenal which don't come with special skills and look funny but do have ten skill points, so a chance to gain a viable Japanese commander. In your price range, Scharnhorst and Atlanta are definitely among the most unique and interesting choices. Neither are easy, but both can be fun and rewarding when you manage to pull off a good play. Don't let it stop you that you didn't grind anything German so far, just get one of the Jutland captains from the Arsenal (or a space captain, next month) and you can have a basic, viable 10-point build right away. There are other very good premiums on VI and VII though. Before the carrier rework, T-61 might have been the single most OP ship in the game that is currently on sale, and yet she's not so OP that it gets embarrassing. I've also been having a lot of fun with Monaghan, which I'd never bought outright but got "forced upon me" by a Santa Lootbox. Has defensive AA and it is the most capable DD of its tier in the current, carrier-heavy meta. Part of this is because it does not have to give up engine boost to gain Defensive AA. Part of it is because I don't think she is as notorious as a troll ship among CV players (yet) as Sims, Kidd or even the silver US DDs that can have defensive AA. Part of it admittedly is because I am of course running her with 19-pt Captain Alexander Ovechkin, whose special skill makes her extra resilient, with 3,000 more hit points than a regular Farragut. Molotov is also a very good ship, it's a slightly tankier Kirov with Dmitri Donskoi guns from Tier IX. I've been having difficulty in Budyonny and Kirov but Molotov came a lot easier. Russian 10-pt captain Znamensky is also available from the Arsenal. Ships I would definitely not recommend in the foreseeable future (exaggerated): Arizona, West Virginia - too slow and the AA is too bad, so you're just carrier fodder. Which is a shame, especially regarding WV, because I like big guns. PEF - too clumsy, too long, too squishy, too unfun. Huang He - undergunned Aigle, Ashitaka - just crap Nueve - fun but useless due to lack of silver ship line; get Boise instead and get a lot more use out of her and your top light cruiser captain Blyska - similar predicament Or you could just spend even less money and do something really crazy and get Okhotnik the Absurd. Just saying.

On the other hand, players are not forced to do a great many other things, some of which are a lot more unpleasant, and still do them gladly, if you think about it. Like grinding ships. WG could incentivise gaining basic knowledge in the same way they incentivise any other kind of desired behaviour. They fail to do that either. And that's very hard to rationalize.

Well, there are radar ships on Tier VII, so you start running into them at Tier 5. Not playing DDs - ok. Not owning a radar cruiser yourself - ok. Making a conscious effort not to pay attention to the chat at all times - ok. Chat gets ever more toxic, and cluttered with automatic messages. Distracting. But playing cruisers, and never contesting a cap, and never wondering why all of a sudden you can see a smoked-up destroyer before the smoke fades - that takes a special skill. It would be possible and in fact fairly easy to at least make the players acknowledge certain facts and basics or else block further progress in the game. "Spoon-feed them the skills." Same as in school. Didacticize - teach - make them take exams (which would of course not be called "exams" but something gaming-related). "Congratulations! You have correctly identified all three Tier VII radar ships completed Combat Mission X-Ray! You have now unlocked access to Tier V ships!" But something tells me they wouldn't want to do that for some reason.

I'ma repeat this poll a few days after the next patch hits. Just to keep track of how much more fun and engaging this game keeps getting.

Fairly self-explanatory. Feel free to add further comments.

Low tier game play can be insane fun. Or rather, it used to be, until they destroyed the meta with the carrier "rework". These days, when any noob can keep you spotted and keep harrassing you, you can't just get drunk and go sealclubbing, you need to put some thought into having fun.

More to the point, you of course want both of them so you can have a cruiser build and a BB build.

I'm using the minimap screenshot here because on that, you can just makew out the position of the single surviving enemy Fuso licking the souther map border. Campers FTW, the enemy was by and large the more active team (which sadly got them in a lot of trouble.)