NobleRipper

You do! But they come in the form of tokens that you can put towards random bundles that, if you purchase enough of them (likely requiring extra tokens that you have to pay for separately), will eventually drop the thing you wanted in the first place

Actually, I've calculated that if/when I earn about another 200k credits I'll have completed all the necessary objectives to get another ship for Ops (albeit of possibly dubious value) and some miscellaneous T5 trash ship, at which point I can dispense with any further engagement in the current event at long last ;)

You call those deck guns?!? Ahem. Props on bringing up Surcouf! Just waiting for X1 and the various different permutations of the M-class, personally ;)

I know, right? Kinda strange for a military-themed forum not to have something for 'Don't ask, don't tell'... There's always the ol' Peeping Tom (oh the things he's seen!):

Is Madame Olga's closed for fumigation again?

I just want to address WG's point that a lot of people have mentioned, regarding Ops not bringing in much/enough money: it seems to me to be of exactly as much (or rather, little) weight as the one about not much/enough players. For one thing, again we have no figures to back it up (my thanks to @Admiral_H_Nelson for reminding us of Hitchens' Razor!); for another, if WG wanted to make more money on Ops they could do so with some effort put in (have a specific weekly 'Operations Bundle' in the Armoury with some signals, camo and a bit of premium time; have a 'Grand Operations Bundle' with more of the above and a different premium ship each week; that sort of thing), and we're just not seeing it, which seems to suggest that they don't really take the financial aspect of Ops seriously enough to put any effort behind it. What a couple of other people have pointed out, however, is that Ops requires more resource investment by WG to create new content/maintain, and I'd also suggest that the skills required to do so are rather different to their usual (ship modelling/artwork, occasional mapmaking, balans-by-spreadshiet) which could mean they just don't have people with those skills available and getting some in would be an extra investment. Which is all to say, I think that again the idea of 'a small amount' of income from Ops is not the same as 'not enough' income from Ops as far as WG are concerned; they seem to want to stick with their cheap, minimum-necessary-effort PvP modes where the players are bringing the content themselves rather than try the more challenging task of making PvE more economically viable.

Agreed on most of those, but as Jingles pointed out, Raptor Rescue has working red carriers in it again (so presumably there's nothing particularly to stop them going into other Ops too). I wonder if WG is still using that line in their official denial package, though?

On the subject of mods, someone might have done one for what you want; just install it, then make sure to disable/uninstall for if/when you play again. Alternately, pick a port with lots of background objects, pick one or more of them for reference, then do what the ol' AvP xenomorph multiplayers used to do and put a small piece of tape or something on that exact point on your screen so that it covers the reference point precisely when you orient back on it again in future. The other thing I can think of, and it might not do exactly what you want anyway because it's only for fixed angles and also varies which ones for different ships, is go into the different port screens (the ones that still actually let you see the port), especially the Exterior screen, and click through the tabs to go through the different default ship views. Then just get rid of the UI elements and Robert's your mother's brother ;)

Except in Co-op now that they're scared of going too fast near the sticky islands Does the predictability of their entry points and paths not help with the aiming, then?

This is really what I'm worried about; it's easy enough to make anything work in Co-op (albeit only just in some cases) but it's Ops that I have my eye on mostly when considering a new T6, and Ops needs high DPM. Ironically I'd say the lack of torpedoes is less of a handicap in that environment, but if they're balanced around the silly new gimmick airstrike and that doesn't do the job, the ship isn't likely to cut the mustard. Maybe I can amuse myself by using the planes for shore bombing in Killer Whale sometime...

It's illuminating that when WG does something scummy, there are numerous people on here who seek to blame the person they did it to...

Very much agreed on points 1, 2 and 3; the short matches issue is one that's been around forever though (it's the way of co-op for the destroyers and fast cruisers to get in close and torpedo everything on the red team before the slower battleships can make much impression, which is why New Yorks et al. have to work ridiculously hard to even break 200 base XP most of the time). Believe it or not, the current state is an improvement on how it used to be because both teams now start with 400 points rather than 300 (in Domination matches at least): before the change it was entirely possible to kill enough red ships quickly enough to end the match in three minutes while three or so of them were still untouched at the back. Now the matches tend to reliably last 4-5 minutes instead. To echo my previous post: Progress...? Yeah, it's not as though they're even really trying to pretend otherwise at this point, even in a lot of their official comms. What kind of game developer goes out of their way to deliberately sabotage large portions of their own game?

I don't think I'm in a position to make any particularly objective evaluation of the game, but from my personal point of view I would rate it as increasingly uninteresting. The same trend has been going on for a while, and although it seems like there's still space to go downward it certainly doesn't look like things will be improving anytime soon. I think I'm reaching the end of what WoWs has to offer for me personally.

Not spending anything on a Dockyard event, the last one didn't even load properly. Hopefully there's a midpoint freebie ship, otherwise the 'lesser' rewards are likely going to be of no interest either (unless there's a decent amount of coal maybe)...

They implemented the island-avoidance change, and it seemed to work out alright. Then they changed the underwater topography for the benefit of the submarines that we won't see in-game for ages if at all which had the effect of making islands extra-sticky, so the bots started getting stuck again. Progress...?

We need an in-gamee visual indicator for when a skill reeeeeework is coming, would likely come up more often than half the current conditional bonuses...

I was really hoping to have enough tokens to just buy the T6 and skip the Celebritease, as she seems for practical purposes to just be a slower De Ruyter except without the benefit of having been real. Alas, seems like I'll get them both at once (assuming I go ahead and complete the relevant directives, which... Maybe), so will likely just do the same as @Verblonde

They raised some destroyers to start with, essentially by hand-cranking...

We laugh now, but those were tough times for itinerant Scots waterfolk... Ahem. The reality is actually almost as good: it's a temporary crew hut that was put on there for the caretakers who took the ship down from Scapa to Rosyth (under tow); they did the same thing with the various other ships that Ernest Cox's company salvaged. The journey was supposed to take about three days (of bobbing about in the North Sea atop an upside-down ship that had been underwater for 10+ years), but apparently with one of them there was a big storm and it took twice as long... Hope they had good lavatory accommodations for that one! Those funnel-looking things sticking up from the hull at a bunch of angles, by the way? They're the airlocks they used to climb down into the ship while she was still submerged in order to pump out and seal each compartment manually. Homemade airlocks at that... Kaiserin was in deeper water:

Presumably, if WG had done nothing at all to the camos they would still be in the game; so does that mean one of the devs accidentally hit the delete key over the wrong files, or is there some other way that a whole bunch of permaflages could go missing between updates?

Nor did the French apparently! Definitely good to see VdT being included though, as you say; she was the first of the High Seas Fleet battlecruisers that I ever read about, as well as the first 'proper' battlecruiser that Germany had and one of the last to be scrapped if memory serves:

It's good to see a proper battlecruiser line at last, honestly it's kinda shameful that it's taken this long. Interestingly I notice there's a T3 again, even though we were told the Italians didn't get one because that tier wasn't popular enough; I wonder if the real reason was just that WG couldn't find enough ships/napkins with designs on...?

Wait, that's historical and WW1-based, so off-message for WoWs... You rock on OP, sounds like you're having a great time ;) Although I'm not sure I'd call Trafalgar a 'sneaky battle'...

Legit thought this was a new crossover, judging by the thread title...