So WG, let's discuss the changes in the game and your plan.

[C4PT41N_0BV10US]

Hello,

Some of you might have noticed, that recently we had a nice topic to discuss the new changes WG are testing. Namely changes in smoke mechanic, HEAP changes and radar consumable changes. However, I have a strong opinion, that those changes, albeit might be interesting, are much less important then the real changes that aren't even tested. 

So, I just wanted to ask few things and, hopefully, get some answers. So, @Tuccy @MrConway @Ph3lan and @Kandly it would be nice to get your attention to this topic and get your feedback.

Almost year ago we had Sub_Octavian saying on reddit, that he is aware that battleships do too much, survive too much, have too much of an influence on the battle, and that there are too much of them in general. He said you're testing ways and solutions to that problem, but mostly, we named the problem at all. Am I to believe, that it is no longer considered a problem? I don't remember exactly if what he said was before or after the GE BB release (I think it was short before they were introduced, numbers of BB players were oscillating around 31% back then), however situation only grew worse from that point. You removed "stealth firing" mechanic from the game, but didn't compensate ships that relied on it in any way. Therefore, ships like Zao, which was constantly nerfed long time ago, mainly because of this mechanic, now ended overnerfed. And although I said many times that "stealth firing" isn't a good thing to have in game, I expected that small buffs to compensate for lack of it would be introduced. I was wrong. Instead we had constant buffs for BBs with nerfs to other classes. Iowa speed buff, Iowa and Montana armour buff, GE BB secondary buff, AA buffs. Not to mention, that captain skills are being a massive buffs to BB's too, while not really changing anything for most of the cruisers. Fire Prevention skill made BB's even more durable, which is exactly opposite of what we should try to achieve? Advanced Firing Training, is not only buffing the range on AA guns, but also on secondaries, making the synergy effect even stronger on BB's. However, I wasn't complaining that much, since HEAP skills was also a considerable buff for light cruisers, making some of them less painfull to play. Schors, Cleveland, Mogami with 155mm guns, Donskoi - they all profited from the change, and went from very bad cruisers to a nice ships, even fun to play. But now you're testing the change that more or less just make the skill irrelevant and is a big hit to CL damage potential. To give credit, when credit is due tho, you managed to buff high tier US cruisers, after a 1.5 year of being the worst line in WoWs, you managed to make them playable. Reduced the fantasy spotting range of Pensacola, and gave Baltimore some hitting power (although in exchange of it's range, making it more risky to engage targets). So, for cruisers, you often go for "trait" changes. Cruisers often lose something to gain something. This is not the case for battleships. Why? 

You also recently wrote, that you fixed most of the UI problems of CV's, and therefore you can add more of them into the game. This is not true. Many, many, many bugs are still there, a lot of them very old and frustrating, some of them new and no less frustrating. When moving your CV while using waypoints on minimap, game sometime treat your order as you clicked it "through" minimap, therefore your ship is ordered to move to a place where your cursor is currently hovering above. It can be in the middle of the enemy team. And this is a common "bug", the "transparent minimap" bug. Fighters while being ordered to make a strafe from a bit longer distance, often doesn't strafe at all, just fly to the place you placed the strafe marker, and then hover above as inactive. Torpedo and bomber drop circle is very inaccurate, often making planes do another approach although they clearly should drop their payload. When dropping in zoom, if you will hover your cursor over chat bracket, the drop order will not be acknowledged by the game. If you click a lot (and any RTS fan will know how many clicks you do while playing), if you move your cursor it will often treat your action as trying to select multiple groups of planes and the infamous "green frame" will appear. It's super annoying and distracting. It looks like there is a "lag" between clicks, both in using the minimap and on the tactical map. When changing the drop marker planes sometimes will do strange manouvers and drop their payload in unexpected location, like in mid move. All this, coupled with long downtime between strikes, make CV's unfun, boring and entirely dicourageing class to play.

 

Introduction of GE BB's with their superior armour, as well as popularity of the class and this particular line, made a lot of cruisers struggle. Playing IJN cruisers is now really unfun, with even perfectly placed salvo just crushing 90% of it's shells without doing any damage to it's target. Do you plan to rebalance the IJN shells, which were long considered as their strong point? Cause right now, Zao, Ibuki, Mogami with 203 mm guns and Atago struggle a lot. Will they get the treatment you did with GE cruisers? 

 

But, the most important thing is - do you plan to do anything with battleship dominance at all in World of Warships? Cause instead of curbing the numbers. both in game efficiency and in sheer numbers of BB's played, you managed to do exact opposite during the last few months. You consider changes to smoke, radar and HEAP mechanics, but you don't consider changing fire damage type to not be light damage, fully repairable by battleship. You consider nerfing mechanics that don't need nerfs, and are only abused (if they are abused at all), cause the battleship class dominates everything else? And the only way to reliably defeat BB is by other BB or by staying in smoke. Why are you buffing armour on US BB's when you should do exact opposite? Why you buff GE BB secondaries when you should be doing exactly the opposite. So now you will change the Repair party on IJN BB to have 45s activation time to prevent fires? Why are you increasing the radar range against cruisers, effectively mitigating any teamplay and forcing cruisers to more passive gameplay, when you should be doing exactly opposite. What is the flaw of BB's? Cruisers get citadelled, destroyers are very fragile, CV's are 100% dependant on the team they are facing. What is the flaw of a BB? 

 

So. How about we discuss this, cause RN BB's are very close, and despite super cruiser missions in Yamamoto campaign, we're still looking at 39% for tier VIII, 37% for tier IX and 39% for tier X BB population, while being the least numerous class in the game apart from CV's. 

 

[Kruzenstern]

The sad but simple answer is because there are many more stupid people than smart people, and many stupid people pay WGs bills better than few smart ones do. And BBs are the tool of choice for stupid people, and for them to work in the hands of imbeciles they have to be overbuffed. And apparently people become not smarter but more stupid with the passage of time, so every now and then BBs need a new buff...

[RUSSIANBlAS]

WG consistently play to the lowest common denominator.

 

Instead of trying to educate and create something where all classes are as viable as each other.

 

It's why I find attempts to make a professional scene laughable when you have things like the Black & Flint as a Ranked prize, the Yamamoto Captain, the CV's utterly unbalanced addition to the game, BBs being able to be successful via casual play when other classes need far more attention, a lot of Prem ships being clearly better than tech tree ones, the IFHE and smoke proposals, etc...

 

Still, I'm guilty as I enjoy the Lion on PT so I'll be lapping up RN BB for awhile atleast. 

[zappori]

22 minutes ago, Kruzenstern said:

The sad but simple answer is because there are many more stupid people than smart people, and many stupid people pay WGs bills better than few smart ones do. And BBs are the tool of choice for stupid people, and for them to work in the hands of imbeciles they have to be overbuffed. And apparently people become not smarter but more stupid with the passage of time, so every now and then BBs need a new buff...

This.

[C4PT41N_0BV10US]

Quote

WG consistently play to the lowest common denominator.

 

Instead of trying to educate and create something where all classes are as viable as each other.

 

It's why I find attempts to make a professional scene laughable when you have things like the Black & Flint as a Ranked prize, the Yamamoto Captain, the CV's utterly unbalanced addition to the game, BBs being able to be successful via casual play when other classes need far more attention, a lot of Prem ships being clearly better than tech tree ones, the IFHE and smoke proposals, etc...

 

Still, I'm guilty as I enjoy the Lion on PT so I'll be lapping up RN BB for awhile atleast. 

I just refuse to believe in this. I refuse to believe, that WG will say one thing, and then just outright do complete opposite. And, tbh, I don't really expect much of an answer, since what WG can say? I don't think anyone from WG dev team will appear here and say that they misjudged stuff, or that the changes they envisaged worked the other way. I just want to know if BB dominance is still a problem, or is it accepted by WG as a way to get paid.

From what we know, the "Clan Wars" system or activities for WoWs will basically be: "play randoms as you were, but now you will get some clan supplies by doing it". So, no real "end game" for experienced players. I just want to know if I can expect WoWs to get better at all, or will it just slowly devolve and I can move to other titles. I play Cold Waters more then WoWs recently, and streams with subs are pretty fun. So when I saw they were testing some stuff, I just wanted to know if they understand what is the root of a problem they try to solve with wrong changes. 

So I will just await response from WG staff. And in the meantime, what a nice summarise to my post - WG servers are down. 

[zappori]

1 minute ago, landryn_k said:

I just refuse to believe in this. I refuse to believe, that WG will say one thing, and then just outright do complete opposite.

Welcome to capitalism and marketing. WG is not your daddy.

[Hesp]

I remember when the BB HE was the only effective option against DDs.

I wonder when the game lost its sanity...

 

 

[Kruzenstern]

5 minutes ago, landryn_k said:

I just refuse to believe in this. I refuse to believe, that WG will say one thing, and then just outright do complete opposite.

 

Then you are indeed very very naive. Expecially in the case of the BB problem in WoWS they have been doing just that for like a year now...

[cro_pwr]

I'm not sure if they really don't know what to do with this game, or they just don't care about overall quality, and tbh at this point I'm too scared to ask.
But, the fact is, this game is going down, and its going down rapidly (in quality of gameplay). If something in their approach doesn't change really fast, there will be no reason to play for anyone except random scrubs (And I didn't mean the clan :P ) that just wants to shoot (and probably miss) every 30 sec without even turning on hes brain.

[Aragathor]

5 minutes ago, cro_pwr said:

I'm not sure if they really don't know what to do with this game, or they just don't care about overall quality, and tbh at this point I'm too scared to ask.
But, the fact is, this game is going down, and its going down rapidly (in quality of gameplay). If something in their approach doesn't change really fast, there will be no reason to play for anyone except random scrubs (And I didn't mean the clan :P ) that just wants to shoot (and probably miss) every 30 sec without even turning on hes brain.

 

It looks to me that they want to milk the game for every last penny and then drop it to concentrate on WoT.

New premiums, slipshod patches, pissing of their customers.

i can't think of any other reason for what they are doing.

 

PS: The game got so bad for me that I switched to coop. I'd rather play with aggressive bots than island camping humans.

[cro_pwr]

Just now, Aragathor said:

 

It looks to me that they want to milk the game for every last penny and then drop it to concentrate on WoT.

New premiums, slipshod patches, pissing of their customers.

i can't think of any other reason for what they are doing.

Thats why I asked whats happening few months ago allready, cause they started to print out new premiums like crazy (implementing 3 premiums at once, and announcing 3 more at the same time and things like that). All of them ofc being either OP, or borderline OP with new "flavours" etc. while at the same time ruining basic concepts of the game.

[Takru]

24 minutes ago, landryn_k said:

And, tbh, I don't really expect much of an answer, since what WG can say? I don't think anyone from WG dev team will appear here and say that they misjudged stuff,[...]
 

 

That thing did happen once already, though. Remember the discussion about battleship AP doing excessive damage to destroyers? The discussion (loosely) went from "We don't see an issue here." over "We checked the numbers and don't see a problem, but will continue to investigate since the community things this is a problem." to "Shyte's broken, yo". So, there is still hope I'd say.

[C4PT41N_0BV10US]

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Welcome to capitalism and marketing. WG is not your daddy.

Care to elaborate? WoWs are slowly loosing the playerbase mostly because there is no alternative to decent naval wargaming. I'm all for capitalism and marketing (actually, I kinda work in marketing), but I also know, that long term deals, even less profitable, are better then 1 - 2 years of intensive cash grabbing. WG has a terrible PR and slowly killing second of their titles will not get this situation better. 

Quote

Then you are indeed very very naive. Expecially in the case of the BB problem in WoWS they have been doing just that for like a year now...

I'm not. Some of the changes are in a right direction, for example, the AP bombs. US CV's with those setups would be really nice BB counter, if the UI problems and overall bad design were to be changed. Same with Kaga - step in the right direction. And Chinese, oops, PanAsia DD's torpedoes also confirm they "try" some mechanics. So no, I'm not naive, and I don't believe this game is a cash grab. They put a lot of money and effort into this game and in some terms it is getting better. But in the same time, the gameplay, which is the core of the game, is getting worse. And this is the problem. Coop missions are a cool (although rewards are way too high, moving players from PvP to PvE), campaigns are cool. Those are good and nice additions to the game. If you try to be objective not biased, you'll see there is a lot of positive stuff happening at wows, but not in the right departament. It's a bit in line with what Negativv wrote - they make stuff for casuals - campaigns, coop missions more interesting. But the core of the game is flawed, which leaves a lot of "influencers" and experienced players dissapointed. Yuro (dude known for "torpedobeats") recently saying that he will not make vids from WoWs cause it's boring and nothing interesting happens. RN BB's effectively becoming super hybrid of a BB and CA making CA's obsolete completely. 

Quote

It looks to me that they want to milk the game for every last penny and then drop it to concentrate on WoT.

New premiums, slipshod patches, pissing of their customers.

i can't think of any other reason for what they are doing.

For me it doesn't look like that. WoT is a dead end, and it has competition in War Thunder and Armoured Warfare, as bad as they might be. WoWs is currently without any competiton at all (unless you call Steel Ocean a competition). So wows has it's perspectives. There is no clan activities, there is a lot of to be added and to be improved. I think they will invest in the game even more they do now, but the problem is do they have a clue what are the problems that drags this title down. And if they do know, when or if they will act to remove those problems. 

[lup3s]

19 minutes ago, cro_pwr said:

except random scrubs (And I didn't mean the clan :P )

 

too late

 

[Bersigil]

1 hour ago, Aragathor said:

 

It looks to me that they want to milk the game for every last penny and then drop it to concentrate on WoT.

New premiums, slipshod patches, pissing of their customers.

i can't think of any other reason for what they are doing.

 

PS: The game got so bad for me that I switched to coop. I'd rather play with aggressive bots than island camping humans.

 

I sincerly doubt that they would make a graphics update (or consider changes to physics that take months to implement) if they considered dropping the game.

I do however fear that they will maneuver themselves into a corner, that will make the game drop: once BB-players got so used to being overpowered (and consider this status "normal", not realising that they do as well as other classes with half the effort and skill) those players are forced to play the easy class.

The reason for this of course being: they would do horrible in every other class - and then WG cant buff the other classes to objectively balanced status anymore, because those players that kept playing those other classes would rip every (former)BB-player or new player to shreds.

 

We already see the problem with CVs: WG nerved CVs into the ground (not at least by buffing BBs AA and rudder) and hardly anyone plays them because they are so hard to do well now. But if one player kept playing them, an inexperienced CV on the other side is pretty much an automatic loss for their team.

So... they either nerf BBs hard and soon - or I don't see any way out of their self-created mess anymore. Even if I do believe they want the best for the game.

[Onsterfelijke]

I just posted this suggestion:

 

Which should influence the BB the most as they have to close in.

[Aragathor]

7 minutes ago, Bersigil said:

 

I sincerly doubt that they would make a graphics update (or consider changes to physics that take months to implement) if they considered dropping the game.

I do however fear that they will maneuver themselves into a corner, that will make the game drop: once BB-players got so used to being overpowered (and consider this status "normal", not realising that they do as well as other classes with half the effort and skill) those players are forced to play the easy class.

The reason for this of course being: they would do horrible in every other class - and then WG cant buff the other classes to objectively balanced status anymore, because those players that kept playing those other classes would rip every (former)BB-player or new player to shreds.

 

We already see the problem with CVs: WG nerved CVs into the ground (not at least by buffing BBs AA and rudder) and hardly anyone plays them because they are so hard to do well now. But if one player kept playing them, an inexperienced CV on the other side is pretty much an automatic loss for their team.

So... they either nerf BBs hard and soon - or I don't see any way out of their self-created mess anymore. Even if I do believe they want the best for the game.

 

The graphics update might have been planned early last year, we don't know what long term plans WG has. This is a big problem with them, as they aren't communicating with their customers. At least not in a meaningful way.

 

As to whether they are maneuvering themselves towards oblivion, yes they are. They are making right now one mistake after another (no real CV balancing, RN BBs being openly OP) and it doesn't look like they are following a coherent plan.

 

Their only lifesaver is the fact that they have no competition in this segment as WoWs is the only game of its type.

 

[Prospect_b]

3 hours ago, landryn_k said:

and radar consumable changes.

I didn't hear about that one. What is going to change?

[Aragathor]

1 minute ago, PzychoPanzer said:

I didn't hear about that one. What is going to change?

 

Radar on US and RN ships gets different spotting ranges for different classes. Russian radar spots everyone at max range because balans.

This is another dumbo design choice. Full info under the link.

 

 

[C4PT41N_0BV10US]

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I didn't hear about that one. What is going to change?

Basically, cruisers and battleships will be spotted from further away. And as we all know, BB's care a lot about the range they are spotted from, while cruisers doesn't rely on camo at all. Here you have some info:

[LastButterfly]

2 hours ago, landryn_k said:

I just refuse to believe in this. I refuse to believe, that WG will say one thing, and then just outright do complete opposite.

 

Maybe not that harshly but I do have proof they they dowright lie to their playerbase. And when I brought up my reasonning and evidences in the middle of a discussion with a certain WG representative, he conviniently never answered me.

[Aragathor]

3 minutes ago, LastButterfly said:

 

Maybe not that harshly but I do have proof they they dowright lie to their playerbase. And when I brought up my reasonning and evidences in the middle of a discussion with a certain WG representative, he conviniently never answered me.

 

It's like they don't need paying customers. WG is very unprofessional in their communication with their player base.

[Prospect_b]

8 minutes ago, landryn_k said:

Basically, cruisers and battleships will be spotted from further away. And as we all know, BB's care a lot about the range they are spotted from, while cruisers doesn't rely on camo at all. Here you have some info:

Thx for explaining. I do not see the point of this at all tbh.

[LastButterfly]

Just now, PzychoPanzer said:

Thx for explaining. I do not see the point of this at all tbh.

People complain carriers are too sneaky so now you may spot them at 15km or even 18km.

Because obviously Midway had too much concealment.

[C4PT41N_0BV10US]

Remember most of it is still testing, so we don't know if it will be implemented in the game or not. But, why don't we see changes to BB's being tested? Why don't they tweak fire damage, flooding damage, HE damage, why don't they tweak AA values, why don't they tweak planes, spotting mechanics, cruiser armour and citadels. Why we only see stuff that is a direct and hard nerf to each class that isn't a BB?