FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

No idea, the search function of this forum sucks too hard. Don't care though.

Flag profiles even. Conceivably. Different ones defineable for the different ship classes. (c) @flamu It would be a genuine challenge to implement several or all of the excellent signal flag ideas that have come up while at the same time keeping it simple and userfriendly. But a "Demount all" button would really be the barest minimum. When they could even get marketing mileage out of it... for what appears to be next to zero effort. What were those like, how were they better? More ideas from the Flamuu stream today: - Make Friends list sortable by online status - Battle GUI: show all the different detection icons at the same time

My German ones are headed for the Kurfürst and Hindenburg. Using one of them maxed out on Roon currently and it is ok. Regarding Hindenburg, the ship has a great deal of flexibility anyway and it is easy to envision a play style where both the enhanced skills increase the ship's utility for the team even further. I am mostly considering Clan Battles, of course - Tier X Randoms don't interest me very much. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UDqctb8pVpiyYBZZdgE7LzkwphdJ6hjUQpgRA_9CZpk/edit#gid=1700316440 The latest Flamu Kurfürst build (12 Dec 2018) suggests EM or JOAT as the final skill to grab. Again, not using the ship regularly in Random but only sporadically in Clan Battles. Didn't have Herr Jütland on that ship last season, only a 12-point regular guy, and in the few battles I had, I did mostly OK to great without EM. The shortened consumable cooldown will be welcome, helping with the tankiness for brawling - more hydro uptime and quicker heals and damage cons. Second-but-last skill of that suggestion was BS and it is easy to envision having V instead. It stacks with hydro and is afaik the only way to get more than 3km torpedo spotting range. The only problem would be that the build would not be completely ideal to use on the German premium BBs. Not very interested in PEF here but König Albert is (even more) agonizing without EM, and Scharnhorst doesn't need V imho. If that were your only 19-point commander, that could be a small luxury problem. However, I can see that build working all the better on Graf Spee instead.

Once again, the bulletin appears to be not very well written or translated. I find it a bit confusing, especially because it's not really clear what is supposed to happen in the "Engagement" stage. In any event, it was very exciting to read the phrase "‘Clan Battles’ format". As in, a small series of mini clan battles over the weekend. You know? With teams of seven duking it out like in clan battles. Exciting group experience with me mates instead of slogging through casual weekend players and reworked carriers. But after wrestling with this bulletin here, it seems all this is going to be is a sort of chain of personal missions which, it turns out, you do have to do a) on your own and b) indeed amidst all the weekend warriors, in Random, Co-op, and Ranked Battles. The whole group activity shall consist of discussing who attempts to do what. Which they will then proceed to do each on their own. The clan will only meet in discord (if that) but not in battle. I hope I got it all wrong, because if not, then it appears all that WG were thinking about was how to drive up the server population. Which would be disappointing.

@MrConway So when will there be the next free Commander retraining phase?

(Return commander to his ship ) Well maybe it's one of these issues again which is caused by using a non-Administrator (Windows user account) when playing. That's what used to cause some other mods suddenly to stop working on my system a few versions ago (like the badobest side panels) and those have been fixed since.

Return commander to his ship There is this fairly new mod called "Return commander to his ship". It lets you set a captain as primary crew for a ship, helping you to more easily return him. Which is of course really great, especially if you have a lot of premium ships. I really like it a lot but its value is strongly diminished by the fact you have to keep resetting all the captains whenever the mod pack is updated. I would greatly appreciate if it were possible to store that information somewhere and automatically retrieve it when a newer mod pack version is installed.

Keep it for sealclubbing, come back to it once you have your first 14-pt US cruiser captain <g> (I hope you're aware that you can swap commanders into premiums any time and back with no retraining required.) That is also why, the more premiums you have, the more fun you potentially get out of free captn skill point redistribution week.

They SAID it worked like that in the rules they published. Edit: It didn't increase the rate of ship drops per se. But whenever you did get a ship drop, and you already had the ship that's dropped, in port, the box was converted into a supercontainer with a ship you definitely did not have in port. So that mechanism slightly increased the likelihood to get "something good" if you had more premiums in port in the first place. If you had every ship in port except the Belfast, then the next drop would automatically have been converted into a Belfast. (Which is why I blew some of the gold from the crates on a Molotov just to push my luck even further.) Of course your sheer number of premiums did not increase the likelihood of getting a ship drop in the first place, or so the official version went.

Too long, didn't read. Did anybody bring up the idea yet that this might be the trial balloon for a more predatory business model than ever? Launch OP prem - pull it after a short while - milk players via loot boxes - nerf OP premium. Rinse and repeat in ever quicker succession.

You couldn't play the Black in Space Battles. Why didn't you raise a fuss then?

You can see the team line-ups by holding the <TAB> key. Regarding the third question, it depends. Basically, you are shown the name and emblem of the player that killed you, as long as you are not using the "dogtag remover" mod from the Aslain Modpack. The ship that killed you is also shown above the minimap for a few seconds and there should even be a chat message. You can only see that player if one of your team mates is spotting him though. Press Shift to go into free camera mode, then you can move around with the WASD keys and your mouse.

Shorter answer: Watch the two iChase vids on citadels and overpens (see below), skip over the boring parts where he just moves his jaws without advancing the topic (cuts down the time in half). Then go to a training room in a Kurfürst and try to citadel a stationary Roon and/or Hindenburg from under 7 km and be amazed. (I don't even remember the actual minimum distance, it might well have been approaching 10 km.)

Sort of true but that should be evened out statistically by stretching it over a whole tournament with lots of matches. At least a bit.

Or remember Space Battles. Without the fancy skins, it was essentially a small selection of Tier X rental ships where you couldn't install upgrades, couldn't use camos (and not even signals iirc) and everybody even got the same number of commander skill points. It all depends on what you want. If you want it to be about playing skills, this is the kind of format you need. I'm not even sure what the current Ranked format is supposed to be about. (Which doesn't mean I can't be grateful there are no carriers there.)

Thank you for illustrating my point. Also note if you couldn't play it in ranked, that obviously - your own words - wouldn't seem to bother you. So I don't see what the fuss is about.

I'm not even talking about CVs. And why would I? They are a whole different mess to fix and frankly, I refuse to even spend a single thought on those any more, certainly not before WG at least tries to do their most basic homework. What I mean by that is perfectly illustrated by that company needing some freelance streamer dude to explain to them in three easy-to-understand sentences how and why you don't, ever, introduce OP new ship classes and things. Into any kind of MMO. I would like them to replace the Juliet Yankee Bissotwo signal flag with one that actually does something useful. Other than that, flooding works fine as intended. If the newly introduced carriers make that a problem, then it's a problem of these carriers and obviously it's them that need to be "fixed". Also I think it is time that WG finally strike the obsolete Team Battle statistics from the players' profile pages and replace them with Clan Battles and Ranked Sprint statistics instead. Oh and could you fix the bug this time, please, where the port changes back to the Twitch port every time you restart the game?

To be honest, I have much less of a problem with that AND with the Arms race mode than with all of this taking place on Tier IX, specifically because of existence of Black and Kitakaze. If you really want a Ranked competition where it's absolutely, definitely, 100% the rider and not the ride, you must exclude severely OP ships from participation, especially ones that not anybody can simply go and acquire themselves. Otherwise it will always remain a farce. The closest recent approximation of that was Ranked Sprint on Tier VI, even though they allowed carriers.

OR you could just change your Nick to "Parks" instead.

Hall of Fame I wish there was a way to disable the extra screen with the Hall of Fame points shown after a battle that you need to click away to get to the post-battle stats. I have no interest in the HoF "competition" and it just gets needlessly annoying. People have been pointing this out since the Eagles vs Sharks thingy.

Well there are several issues here, and the key to all of them is ultimately to improve your understanding of the mechanics that are involved. Your aim will only improve through training, which means playing a lot and reflecting on the fall of shot whenever possible. However. That said, German BBs like Gneisenau and Bismarck are maybe not the best ships for learning how to aim better. They have a rather wide dispersion (meaning, simplified, that their shells scatter over a wider area). My experience seems to tell me that really hitting where you were aiming does wonders for your aim in general. Combine that with their low number of guns, compared to other BBs, and it is not really surprising you don't hit much stuff. And regarding the citadels, first look at the gun caliber. The German BBs, not only on Tier VIII, often have the smallest guns of their Tier. The Japanese Tier VIII ships have 410mm, compared to 380mm on Bismarck. The Americans have 406mm. While the smaller German shells are capable of penetrating the citadels of most or all ships you might encounter, they have a harder time doing so. The thicker the enemy armour, the closer you need to be and the flatter the broadside the enemy needs to give you. Which means your positioning needs to be all the better for it, and you need to outplay the enemies to get them into a worse position. Which is hard. You need to use your speed for that, but in contrast to Gneisenau, Bismarck is not that much faster than most other Tier VIII BBs and slower than some, like the French ones with the engine boost. This goes for the BBs. The cruisers' armour on the other hand is more easily overmatched, but from up close, you often tend to get regular pens or overpenetrations, rather than citadels. For a better chance to reach many ships' citadels, you rather want to hit their weak deck armour from above, with plunging fire. For that, you need a greater distance, but thanks to the small number of guns and large dispersion of Bismarck, you have a harder time hitting them from a larger distance. It would be a good idea to try a different line because going back to basics after reading up a bit on the mechanics and watching the odd youtube video would probably help your aim as well as your tactics. The other thing you can do is try to play the Bismarck more to its strengths, rather than suffering from her weaknesses. She is very tanky and hard to citadel herself due to the turtleback armour. Granted, she is a lot more vulnerable to the increasing number of overpowered HE spammers these days, but she is nowhere near in as bad a place as Friedrich der Große. Specc into secondaries and tankiness, pay attention to the matchmaking and try to find the ideal moment for a hard, fast push. Avoid sniping from the rear, but also avoid locking yourself into situations where you just get burned down by some Cleveland or Akizuki or Kitakaze or whatever, often without even seeing your opponent. It is a thin line these days. I very much think it is more difficult than other nations' BB play and you could make it easier on yourself by just trying the Japanese line, and come back to Bismarck in the summer. The key to good cruiser play in Random battles is usually to play it a bit cagey at the start to avoid squandering your health because you just can't tank a lot of damage. There are more ways to achieve this than hiding behind rocks. There is also kiting, where you try to capitalize on being harder to hit while sailing away from your target while the target is easier for you to hit when it is chasing you. Different ships are differently suited to that. And then there is the crossfire, where you need to be in a position at right angles to the line between your target and its target. That way, ideally the target can't be bothered to change target to you, so even though you are in plain sight, you are - ideally - not shot at and can farm the target. Once again, this requires a bit of planning ahead, anticipating enemy moves and careful positioning, and all of this can be hard. But it is definitely easier once you only just realize what kind of situation you should be looking to create.

Also. should they ever again sell loot boxes, like they did several times before, and if they keep using similar mechanic again - the more premiums you have in port, the better your chance to get one you don't already have from a loot box, or possibly even get one that you really really want.

I'd like to mention I appreciate the little change in the Arms Race mode where the "buffs" are now supply drops parachuted in via transport aircraft. This is a nice touch that adds to the realism and takes down the "arcadyness" of the Arms Race mode a notch. It may be just a small thing but ultimately, I believe this kind of detail tickles the kind of people that are into this game. I don't care who came up with it, a player or somebody at WG - both would be a good sign, either of the goal orientation of the WG people or of WG listening to player input.

Sending the automatic chat message "I am using surveillance radar" is a bit more questionable than the hydro message. On most ships, the radar duration is too short for this to be beneficial. Also radar does not give off torpedo warning. A major benefit of knowing that a nearby team mate has his hydro running is the knowledge that you will get advance warning of torpedoes from that direction. Granted, the radar notice does make more sense than I first thought it did, because of the simultaneous change of the radar mechanics where team mates only see the radared targets after a few seconds of delay. This way, they get at least a little advance notice that a target might pop up in a few seconds. However, for radar use to be the most effective, it usually takes some positioning on the part of the team mates, which takes more time than six seconds, so players ideally should still communicate in advance. In any event, the messages are too wordy for my taste, which clutters up the chat and detracts from the realism. This kind of thing should be phrased tersely. "Hydro is on" is what I usually type in chat, and "Hydro is out" which is almost more important because team mates need to be aware there will be no more advance torp warning from me! For the radar, just drop the word "surveillance", it is much too big a word anyway. English speakers are too lazy for big words, by and large. "Radar is on" is enough. What SHOULD be included though is the ship name because otherwise, players will often have to go through the team line-up to find out what ship the radaring player is in anyway, and if the message even is relevant to them in their current position. And in the continued absence of proper reference materials, which should be a higher priority than many many changes implemented in this update, believe it or not but many players don't even know about the miracle of holding the tab key. Edit: another thing I'd appreciate is if you made a greater variety of camouflages available to players on the PTS. And preferably those should be the more attractive camos. Currently, everybody is sailing around in the Union Jack. Granted, it is one of the prettier ones but variety is the spice of life, and of course you could even get some marketing mileage out of it, showcasing what is currently on sale in the camo department.

I disapprove of the changes of the Shards map even after only a limited number of games. The changes of the islands around the flank seem to follow the general trend of dumbing down the game, which I think is wrong and dangerous. This simply is not a game for dumb people. It will be ultimately impossible to make it appealing to dumb people. It is definitely possible to scare away the current core clientele in the process though. And the extra islands in B give even more cover to HE spammers, and those are overpowered in the current meta anyway. I see no upside The port improvements work. While the port is not yet as responsive as I think it ought to be, it is a lot less laggy even on my system, which is fairly up-to-date but on the low end of the spectrum. This is great. Keep it up. I do think it should remain possible for players to completely switch off the music in settings though, not just turn down the volume to zero. Correct me if I'm wrong but if the music is still playing, albeit at zero volume, it is still using up computing resources and it is thus still impairing the performance, however small the actual performance loss may be. This just bugs me, I guess it triggers my OCD whenever I think about it. Not sure about the interface changes, specifically regarding the automatic signalling of consumable use to team mates. Granted, sending the message that hydro is on does make life easier for those who try to be good team players and communicate these things in chat. Also, players able and willing to pay attention, will suffer less from team mates too lazy to communicate. However, the lazy guys now have even less incentive to even try to get into the habit of communicating. Or to make the effort to acquire the necessary basic English skills, for that matter. What the game needs is the opposite - stronger encouragement of communication. There is no way to predict how it will work out but there is a chance this might turn out counterproductive. Also while there are exceptions, I find automation is often detrimental to the gaming experience, lessening the player's engagement. The pinnacle of that trend is of course the automated consumable use on the new CVs. The changes to the flooding mechanics also appear questionable. Misplays should be punished. These changes appear to be another effort to further dumb down the game by minimizing such punishment, strangely while at the same time making the actual mechanics more difficult to understand. Also I don't get the rationale by which torp hits to the bow no longer automatically mean flooding. Changes in interface sound effects are OK for me; while mostly not strictly necessary and not an eye opener as such, I do seem to notice they aim at generally being a bit softer and avoid grating sounds, banging and general harshness. This is a good thing in a game where a lot of explosions and gunfire occur anyway, which can cause ear fatigue in extended sessions. So it's a good thing for the "interface sounds" not adding more unnecessary stress. What has not been changed though are some grating and harsh sound effects that I'd absolutely wish had been changed, as I suggested earlier in the Suggestions thread: The "ripping velcro" sound of new collection items being revealed. The strange "spring being tensioned" sound at the end of the main gun loading cycle in some smaller-gunned ships like Friant seems to have been attenuated but is not completely gone. However, if you stay in binocular mode, it now has a super strange delay effect on it, making it sound as if it came from some bathroom far away in the bowels of the ship. And all in all, the mix is unbalanced, with explosions of my own shells on targets (several km away) sometimes louder than my own gunfire etc. Maybe I screwed the mix up in my attempt to balance it myself - I didnt notice much untoward before when playing Baltimore and Monarch. Also maybe it's just me but I have a strangely hard time getting a well balanced sound volume mix in the Audio settings because it is unclear which sounds are "SFX", which ones are "Interface" and which ones are "Ambience". Some examples would be good maybe. Or a test sample being played when you mess around with the sliders. What slider do I need to turn down to lower the volume of that 'womp' orchestral hit when joining / leaving the battle queue? No matter what I do, this one effect seems to remain a lot louder than any other sound in the game, which is distracting, especially when using headphones. Don't have this problem with the regular game client. The modified visual effect when the ship is destroyed - the drama queen zoom-out really gets on my grille after like the third or fourth time and I really hate that the image gets black-and-white. Many CCs probably do, too, I don't think it makes for great streaming video. However, the changes once again fail to address the one thing I thought should be changed about the destruction sequences, and which I also suggested earlier: the destroyed ship still immediately stops in its tracks as though it hit a reef. This looks very unnatural. If the destroyed ship instead kept gliding on for a while, bleeding off the remaining speed more slowly and gradually, that would add a lot more to the realism. Also it said in the developer bulletin "It’s now possible to exchange credits for combat signal bundles in the Arsenal." Of course I expected to see that in the PTS Arsenal as well but either I'm too blind to find them or they aren't there. Also there is no way to spend the new yet-another-in-game-currency Florins, which seems strange. Also, if you are testing directives of the Fly-Strike-Win Event with missions that can only be completed in certain premium ships, like the British premium BBs needed for the "Fundamental Knowledge" mission, then there should be a way to acquire these ships on the PTS, or else they should be in the test port from the outset. So much for now. Seeing as though apparently sound effects have been changed across the board, it would be a good idea to reduce the XP required to unlock lower tier ships as well, so players can more easily check if they like the changes to some old favourites. For example, I always loved the strange and unique sound of the Nürnberg guns, but to get that ship, I would need to grind out some 20,000 XP, and from the looks of it, mostly in Co-op battles since there are no other players for lower tier random battles around.