FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

I wonder where you got that statistic from. Otherwise known as "camping". Also, it means that not only are you dependant on having a decent CV player on your team but also on none of the other players near you screwing up the group positioning. Which is of course not something you can rely on, what with a high percentage of casual players with very limited skills in the game, which is one thing that is very definitely going to stay that way forever, no matter what WG ever does.

So to have a quick intermediate summary after a few initial days and 225 players participating, there seems to be some hope for the game yet. The good news is that less than five per cent of players say they will become CV mains in this new meta. I seem to remember it was around ten per cent before the rework but I may be very wrong about that. But it does sound as though you will run the risk of meeting a really good CV player even more rarely in future than before the rework. The bad news here is of course that it doesn't even have to be a very good CV player any more to utterly, utterly ruin your fun because the "carriers" have been dumbed down so much. So most of the not quite 25% of players who say they will play them regularly or even exclusively in future will accomplish that for you quite nicely, and whenever WG rolls out some kind of halfway decent incentive, things are bound to get as awful again as they have been these past few days after the roll-out. The single question that bugs me most these days is if we will get another unmolested Clan Battle season or if it's already a wrap on that, too. Because in that case, I'd probably drop the game entirely and get back to some faintly productive pastime, like woodworking. Be better healthwise, too.

It depends what you want to do with that ship, and on how good you are at it. Edit: Also I'll probably never Free-XP any ship ever again. There was a very good thread about that whole issue recently, I think in the newcomers' section. The only type of Tier X battles I've played a fair bit are lower league Clan Battles, but I did enjoy those a very great deal, and a lot more than Tier X random battles. So I'll write a few things about that from my noob perspective, and based on the assumption that the format will not change a whole lot by the time the next season rolls around. This is of course not a given and it could change very drastically if Wargaming, for example, decided on a whim to do the next CB season on a different Tier, or in the Arms Race mode, or to add aircraft carriers. But let's just hope for the best. In any event, it will be some sort of baseline. Clan Battles are fought by a team of seven, only one of which can be a battleship and none of which could be a carrier in the past. At the same time, for playing just a single battle in any ship of Tier VIII or higher after the start of the season, you get three CB rental ships, one BB, one cruiser and one DD, and those are treated as premium ships, so you can just swap in any of your captains with no retraining required. Also there is a week of free captain skill points redistribution at the start of the season, which you unlock by playing your first clan battle. The rental ships can't take any camouflage, and they are changed out two times at regular intervals during the season. So that means they have a slightly worse concealment than the tech tree versions. Also you might conceivably not have a great commander with a whole lot of skill points for every ship type from every nation that might be the next rental ship. So this means you're basically covered as far as BBs go because you can always hop into the rental, and they are basically all viable, even with maybe just a ten or twelve point commander, while the other classes, at least this past season, were more restrictive. However, since your team can only bring one BB, this is a coveted spot and other clan mates will want to have a go in the BB sometimes. The clan may really want you to play since they struggle to get enough bodies to fill the team, or fill the second team, but at the same time they might not want you to play the BB or the rental DD. So it would be good for you to also have a cruiser and DD of your own that you can make work, since these ship types are more tricky as rentals. By way of further illustration, the third rental cruiser of last season was the Moskva, which has a terrible concealment of at least 14.3 km if you can't mount a camo, which is even worse than a BB. I found that very frustrating. If your DDs don't smoke you up on the way in, you either get spotted way before you are in any kind of useful position (let alone in radar range, even though the radar range is so absurdly yuge) or you sail a more circuitous route and hide behind islands going in, and thus come into position late. If they do smoke you up, the enemy of course can see the smoke cloud and knows something is up. The Zao worked better for me, concealment basically doesn't matter for the kiting role and for the sniping from the second row. It does however matter for pounding onto hopefully unsuspecting DDs at close range. You only lose a few hundred meters of concealment over the normal tech tree version with a camo but these meters can be crucial. The most versatile and noob-friendly all-purpose cruiser proved to be the Hindenburg, which is why that one is my current priority to unlock for the next season. Second priority is the Des Moines, which is an absolute staple of CBs that you can expect on every team you come up against. Besides also being a versatile and well balanced package, all things considered, it is the best radar ship on Tier X. Longer duration than the Russians, longer range than Salem, and even though Worcester has this ultra-long radar duration upgrade, many players consider the ship itself just too squishy. Just as Minotaur, you can certainly make it work but you need to absolutely know what you are doing. Tied for the next priorities are the Zao and the Henri IV, which is a must-have counter to the Stalingrad. Serious teams usually field only one or at most two DDs and their role is very constrained due to a very radar-heavy meta. In contrast to Randoms, teams can get away with having poorer DD players that maybe are not always the top knife fighting experts etc. At least in the lower leagues. You do a bit of spotting and a bit of scouting and a bit of torping every now and then. You try to avoid being radared and you sneak into the odd cap, but only when the time is right. Since the teams are so small, it's not even a rare occurence for DDs to win their teams the victory just by staying alive and eventually sneaking into a far-side cap uncontested while everybody else is busy fighting on the other side of the map. For this kind of basic noob play, both the classic archetypes are ideal, you mostly see Gearing and Shimakaze. Daring is too slow and all the others also seem to have something wrong with them that either disqualifies them or you need really great skills to compensate for it. By and large.

My conjecture is that you will be hard pressed to find players who have more fun in battles where any one of the surface combattant types is entirely missing, especially if that means the type is also missing from their own teams. Battleship players may moan ever so loudly about DDs until they get into a battle where there are none. OTOH, few players would miss aircraft carriers, were they gone entirely, be it RTS or the new, "action packed" type.

This is not an argument that can be carried to the extreme of logic because that would mean players preferred there to ideally only be a single ship type in the game. Which is of course bollocks.

The only way a strike can work is if enough players stop playing. For months. Even (and especially) the F2P players. They are often painted as some sort of mooches but in fact they are a vital element of the MMO business model. Without a sufficiently high server population, there is no game and no business.

Dude, they just sold a bazillion Santa loot boxes thanks to their toxic marketing tactics ("Who knows, maybe there's a Belfast in there?") Those things cost them precisely nothing at all and sold like hot cakes. They're sitting on a sky high mountain of cash right now. Especially since they did the exact same thing with the Tanks, which game was already broken and still shows very few signs of decline.

I don't think so. As @El2aZeR pointed out, it is WG's stated goal to make CVs super popular, have them in almost every battle and eventually open up all battle types and competitions to them (i.e. Ranked and Clan battles). That means if people get bored, they will on the one hand make the CVs ever more OP and dumb down their game play ever further while on the other hand offering ever more enticing incentives to play them. Until their dream has come true. They be like "START! LIKING! OUR! CVs! ALREADY!"

Well, there may be a bigger element of chance than in the normal mode Ranked, but even there, you get thrown into random teams... You do have a point but I have to say, personally I don't mind dragging this Ranked season out for as long as possible. I have several Tier X ships to grind for the next CB season and wouldn't care at all about doing that in the carrier-infested Random battles as long as this rework mess hasn't been sorted. What we all need to focus on is keeping carriers out of clan battles indefinitely though.

Does it really make sense to award the Dreadnought achievement in Arms Race mode? I think not. What with the constant heal buffs. A clan mate of mine just got it in his Yugumo.

Apparently, the CV rework involves removing the AA Guns Modification 1 upgrade from slot 3 of all ships that had it mounted while issuing the corresponding number of the AA Guns Modification 2 upgrades to the players' inventories. Which upgrade goes into slot 6. This seems to make very little sense, at least in my case, where the vast majority of the ships that had Mod 1 mounted are Tier VIII and lower. These don't even have 6 slots and therefore can't mount the AA guns mod 2 upgrade. The net result is 1) Players need to re-fit all these Tier-VIII-and-lower ships with AA guns modification 1 and 2) Players that failed to notice the module is gone, which is without a doubt a great number, are going out without any Slot 3 module and have less effective AA and will be even more frustrated by the carrier rework. I fail to see any intended upside to the measure, only the side effect that players can sell some or all of the Mod 2 modules and cash in.

I suppose it's supposed to avoid encouraging even greater numbers of advanced players from sealclubbing in the low tiers. And it's not alway, only most of the times.

Reduce the HE penetration of Kitakaze, Harugumo and Akizuki guns to normal levels as per your own stated rules (1/6th of caliber). Also reduce the fire chance. These ships are OP and it is ridiculous that by some magic trick, they should be able to pen the same as other ship's 152mm guns but at thrice the rate of fire. If that means they can no longer do a lot of damage to BBs and many cruisers, then that's just the way it's gonna be. There are other ships whose weapons are no good against specific ship types as well, viz deep water torpedoes. That would be just their tough luck and they'd have to play around these weaknesses like almost everybody else. You can give them Defensive AA instead, which would not only be historically apt but also especially good in the current carrier mess. This game needs fewer fantasy rules, exceptions and magic. What it needs more of is consistency.

The Port still keeps resetting to the Twitch port after game client restart, no matter which port you selected before the last shutdown of the game client. I think this must have been the third or fourth time I alone bring this up, don't know about others. Port UI is laggier than ever, which is almost more annoying than the carrier plague. At least you can get around the carriers in Ranked... no getting around the Port screen. Oh and that Operations bug, where you can't call fire on the bot enemy ships and it always says "hit the onshore installation" instead on hitting F3, even when there is no onshore installation, and which I've been sporadically reporting a half dozen times - that has also not been fixed again.

I agree. However, what I meant to refer to was Wargaming's (more metaphorical) "addiction" to making craploads of money threough predatory marketing tactics ;-)

Here's the screenshot. Turns out it was actually added, just not mentioned in the box, and I relied on the box and only did the sum myself just now. I'm repeating myself here but WG has a talent for confusing people.

Hi, the requirement of the "One more step" challenge is "Play a battle" in a Russian ship Tier V or higher to get 100% Additional Free XP. However, no extra Free XP was added after my last Okhotnik game and also the "Rewards for Heroes" box in the port screen did not appear. Is that Free XP tallied up and added at the end of the day or something?

Well, it's tough getting off the train once you got addicted. QuickyBaby said they sold 5.5 million loot boxes in World of Tanks for Christmas. The WoWs Santa gift box sale was probably on the same order of magnitude.

I mainly used them to farm elite commander XP. Maxed out captain in premium DD, power camo and as many special signals as possible => minimum 30K commander XP per run, often over 50K. It also yielded a modicum of credits, about as many as a middling win in a Missouri in random battles. Although I have to say the other night, a clan mate of mine killed a ridiculous amount of them from his Sims... I think it was close to 20... WHILE also slaughtering 32 planes. I have no clue if that was a fluke but it is possible.

And the Russian ships are really great. I have an easier time hitting the MTBs from a Leningrad or Minsk than Coassck, even though the latter has three more guns.

Hi, is there a good source for largish pictures of the game maps? I've been using the usual image search engines with sketchy results. Or maybe is there even something like a tool to visualize map tactics, like say for different discord users? Are there commonly used names for geographical features other than basic descriptive ones like "the channel" on Two Brothels / Solomon Islands etc? And shouldn't we just start naming the islands?

Oh man that is SO great!

This would be what we Germans call "Jodeldiplom". following an immortal Loriot skit.

IDK if this is a new idea or not and I'm not gonna read this whole thread. But I've been thinking. Actual real world active sonar as well as radar can be detected at a greater range than the range at which they give the 'sender' any useful information because obviously the transmitters emit far more energy, and more directional, than is ever diffusely reflected back by the target. Which is why real world military assets are very careful about using these active systems. Their use is highly likely to give their own positions away to enemies, and at a greater distance than the distance at which they themselves will be able to gain useful information. If the game were to model that, it would turn these gimmicks into disadvantages for the sender in most situations where they currently can just mindlessly switch them on at no risk at all for themselves. Still, the move would probably not be very popular. At the same time, there should be some degree of risk involved with their use though. There shouldn't be a free lunch. It is the very definition of imbalance. So what if the targets didn't get a clear information about the sender's actual position (= have sender rendered / appear on the minimap) but they at least got a direction indicator like you get from the Radio Location commander skill? It could be the same sort of bow, just a slightly different radius and different colour. To reflect physical reality, this locator signal should be received at slightly greater ranges than the sender's radar range. It could even be combined with the RL skill so you only got it if your captain has that skill. Or if everybody got it without an extra captain skill, then it could lead to more players understanding RL and using it better.