Summary of North Cape

[Brainzzzzz]

So. Finally. Finally we are done with the Battle of North Cape. And maybe I am done with WoWs.

 

First, let me give you a summary on how I feel about this mission, afterwards I would really like to read your opinions, comments and so on in the thread below. Thanks in advance!

 

Now, I play this game as a premium user since the roll-out to live servers. Invested some money into ships etc. Why? Because I love this game. I love the setting, the design, the ships, the overall feel to it. Yes, there are some flaws and faults, but hey, the overall appearance and gameplay is ok. Some hickups in between (ships like Belfast, Nikolai, Conqueror; maps like Tears of the cruisers Epicenter; ....), well, you name it. Still, it was fun to play. And, sometimes not fun, it was at least ok.

 

If some of you have been around for some while, you will have also encountered some of the more severe hick-ups in the game. The "Kill x amount of y ship" missions. These missions always produced the same predictable results: the to-be-focussed-class of ships were avoiding queuing in, and killsteals were common. Who doesn't remember the fun mission: "Kill a CV with a Destroyer". Oh boy, did we laugh at the rushing DDs, ignoring the caps to hunt down the Carrier on the map border. Oh those beautiful memories. Or, do you remember the great "Kill 20 soviet cruisers" mission... Jesus, did no one dare to play soviet ships for a while! Anyway - a big community outcry later, the missions changed to more playable variants, where your team doesn't start acting like starving hyenas.

Having lived through all those missions, I was pretty satisfied having achieved all ARP-ships, Kamikaze R, all the new "Collections" etc.; sometimes the grind was borderline gruesome, but it was ok so to speak.

 

But not this one. No. No no no, not at all. See, first of all, it seems you didn't get any Collection items anymore from shortly after New Years Eve. Second, the mission parameters in North Cape 5 were so stupid, that you could not achieve them in a regular amount of time. Three times 75k XP? 90k dmg in torps in a single battle? 11 torp hits with british ships? You could tell what mission your teammates or enemies had chosen by watching them: charging down the enemy lines with a Minotaur and launching torps and guns silent.

 

Wargaming, I understand that it is hard to make the game fun and engaging. And I am really not all to mad at you for throwing the occasional screwball for reminding us how grateful we should be if you do things right. But this time, this special time, you went wrong on so many levels, that I can not sit by and let it happen. Don't get me wrong, I literally would sell the Duke of York if I would have gotten her, I didn't NEED her. But what you did was that you ruined the gameplay for the last 2-3 weeks. This, I can not take lightly. Not with spending my money on your game for premium time, premium ships and all the other things. Not with your blatant ignorance on what the community wants and the game needs.

If you don't need the money any more, just tell me, and I will move on. For now, I have reinstalled another online game and spent the money dedicated for the Roma on some ingame credits.

 

It hurts that much, because I really love this game. Question is: will it be a lovestory with a happy end, or will it end in a drama.

 

Until then...

[bushwacker001]

In other news, my grass grew about 1mm while I read this pathetic whine...........some people take online games too seriously. 

[DFens_666]

Yep pretty much the same feeling i have/had... I even managed to get DoY and make it to Icy Scharnhorst Camo (even tho i dont own her xD).

But back to the missions:

Yes, horrible. There is nothing else to say. Why not promote teamplay/role of the class u choose? Instead make totaly stupid missions which makes u play to the worst of what your class should do.

F.e. the deal 150k damage to BBs/DDs. WHY would u need to do them in the SAME class?

Deal 90k torp damage: Clearly promoting DDs to play for the objectives - NOT. Border hugging, Yoloing, Selfish play.

 

I can understand that WG doesnt want to make it too easy to achieve Premium ships / certain rewards in general, but there are better options.

Tanking for BBs - receive x Potential damage (this could even scale by tier probably!)

Or receive a certain amount of Fire damage as a BB.

Arguably they do exist in form of "Receive one Fireproof / Dreadnought" achievement, but imo the other way is still better.

 

For DDs obviously is getting caps - but then again, when u are unlucky and get dragged into Standard battle all the time this is BS. I thought about rewarding a standard battle base cap higher (f.e. 3 times) than a domination cap, but then we get the same problem about stupid DDs, going to the border sneaking behind the lines trying to cap the base - stupid.

 

I think a nice mission for Cruiser might also be: Deal x damage with AP Shells (can this be introduced maybe?) Why must it always be: Deal x Fire damage playing Cruiser...

 

There are many way to get better missions than those, and not even hard to think of it.

[Captain_Singleton]

eh? i found it easy, finished it way before xmas, but what do you expect, it's for a T7 BB, they aren't going to just give it away...

[NoirLotus]

The problem was not the difficulty of the tasks, the problem is the combinaison of difficult tasks and time limited event, which means people all rush to make them, even if it means throwing the game away or breaking the MM. Tasks for Yamamoto are not much difficult but they don't pose problems as players know they have all the time they want to complete them.

 

Personnaly, I got fed up after getting DoY and did only half of the new year campaign. The broken MM, the terribad teams and the need to grind in festivities time were too much for me.

 

 

[ColonelPete]

Some missions were indeed bad for teamplay, but overall it was a good campaign.

Not too hard, but not too easy either.

The two extra days were a nice gift for people playing rarely.

[Tekacko]

Could also be done in COOP, btw

[DasTongle]

The Mission where a little set to high for the Casual and Normal Players also tey delivered little to no value to any game mode as they went against the grain of most targeted classes. Wich is rather bad from a design viewpoint. But we allready seen that this doesn't stop People from designing it like this anyway. :) And no Tekacko the last most redicilous task wasn't availible for coop ;)

[Wobly_1]

1 hour ago, Brainzzzzz said:

Three times 75k

it was two actually,because you need 4 points to unlock final task and it takes time

i did it without Premium in 3 ships plus sum arp ships in 2 days,time was ca.6 hours per day

most rediculous was 150000 damage to DDs

[DFens_666]

1 hour ago, Salentine said:

eh? i found it easy, finished it way before xmas, but what do you expect, it's for a T7 BB, they are going to just give it away...

 

Gimme those haxx, since Battle of the North cape could only be finished after the 8th of January, because the stages were unlocked one at a time...

53 minutes ago, The_Reichtangle said:

And no Tekacko the last most redicilous task wasn't availible for coop ;)

 

Nope, u needed 6 points for the finale stage. But in general 2x75k XP should have been enough, killing 2x10 BBs in that time should have been possible aswell, thats how i did it. Both missions 2 times = 6 Stars.

4 minutes ago, Wobly_1 said:

it was two actually,because you need 4 points to unlock final task and it takes time

 

Maybe he confused it with New Years Raid campaign, which was possible to complete entirely in Coop. Still questionable farming XP/Commander XP/Credits in Coop, since the rewards are so little. Killing a certain ship and winning however was rather easy in coop. Alltho the Coop players did they utmost to prevent u from doing it.

[MK1D]

I haven't finished the north cape campaign, as the last stage was a a damn choreand the reward itself was not worth it.

[iJoby]

1 hour ago, Brainzzzzz said:

Until then...

Bro, why didn't you just part with the pathetic £30+ and buy the DoY, instead of putting yourself thru hours of misery?

[BrusilovX]

 

Personally, I gave up on the missions.    I was even struggling to destroy a cruiser and win a battle until I finally did that yesterday!

 

Some of the missions left a lot to be desired, and as other have posted, do not contribute to players using the types of ships then bet way.

 

One thing to point out with DD capping is that not all DDs are good for that with enemy DDs around - the detection difference between IJN DDs and Soviet DDs is a bit one sided and if the DD does not have support then it's even worse.

 

21 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

 

Gimme those haxx, since Battle of the North cape could only be finished after the 8th of January, because the stages were unlocked one at a time...

 

 

I wonder if they did that on purpose (saying they completed prior to Xmas when that was impossible) or as a mistake?

[Brainzzzzz]

1 hour ago, bushwacker001 said:

In other news, my grass grew about 1mm while I read this pathetic whine...........some people take online games too seriously. 

As I invest money and time into this game I rather bloody well take it seriously if a gamebreaker of that magnitude appears. If you can’t understand this it is your problem. 

2 minutes ago, iJoby said:

Bro, why didn't you just part with the pathetic £30+ and buy the DoY, instead of putting yourself thru hours of misery?

As stated I didn’t want to have the DoY as it didn’t appeal to me. The camos of the accompanying tasks would have been my goal together with the full collection. And to judge in hindsight is easy. Should have could have and so on. 

[MrFingers]

It could be worse, WAAAAAAAAAAAAY worse... The missions themselves weren't so bad (despite a bit grindy), but it was the combination they came it. If Stage 4 & 5 swapped some missions, it would have been more enjoyable, and with less impact on the matchmaker. I've completed North Cape after 2 days (it required 31 matches on Tuesday to get my 6 stars), so I'm now a bit ground-out of WoWS. Am making the best of my few days of premium I have left (Science of Victory + supercontainer), to powergrind the Monarch and Nelson (20k away), after which I will take a break. Maybe I'll get a Cesare out of it as well!

 

Still, it could be: "sink 20 Russian ships, T8-10".

[RUSSIANBlAS]

It was a meh campaign. Nothing too offensive.

 

Only killing 3 turrets and 90k torp damage missions were really a problem.

 

Maybe it messed up the MM but that's opportunity to farm the stupid.

 

Besides no one's saying you had to finish both campaigns unless you've got OCD. The rewards were forgettable for anyone with some experience. 

 

Personally I didn't like the Scharn camo and I'll likely never play DoY again as she'll so uninspiring. 

[wilkatis_LV]

"Yes, they were ok" is not included in "Yes they are better than previous missions". If you include extra explanations for the answer, include the neutral positive (just yes) and neutral negative (just no)

 

The only mission I had a problem with was "destroy 3 turrets in one battle", and you still could just ignore and skip it.

[B010011A]

2 hours ago, Wobly_1 said:

it was two actually,because you need 4 points to unlock final task and it takes time

i did it without Premium in 3 ships plus sum arp ships in 2 days,time was ca.6 hours per day

most rediculous was 150000 damage to DDs

150K damage to dds? That is wrong. I did it in no time, one was 150K damage with fire and the other 150K damage to BBs, wasnt it? Or something like that.

 

Btw, i have chosen the "meh" option cause the grind was real in the last stage cause i thought it was 5 stars then the end mission but surprised me with a sixth star, so i rushed really hard on repeating the 90K raw torp damage (which i was soo damn close to repeat it but wasnt possible {i had a game with yugumo dealing a total of 150K damage to BBs only with torps and the raw damage was only 87K, imagine my dissapointment}). At the end i hated playing dds cause of stress so ended up doing the "kill 10BBs" mission twice.

Overall i got the ship, which is fun to play and its AP rocks, so im happy.

[DFens_666]

2 minutes ago, B010011A said:

150K damage to dds? That is wrong. I did it in no time, one was 150K damage with fire and the other 150K damage to BBs, wasnt it? Or something like that.

 

http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:New_Year's_Raid

Did exist in the New Years Raid Campaign - the restrictions are wrong on the wiki tho, u were supposed to do it in DDs

[B010011A]

6 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

 

http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:New_Year's_Raid

Did exist in the New Years Raid Campaign - the restrictions are wrong on the wiki tho, u were supposed to do it in DDs

Oh, on that one i only got to Galisoniere sadly, then stopped at Gaede missions. So im the wrong one here ( i was talking mostly about the DoY missions).

[robihr]

most of the missions werent too bad, but some were.

 

i find missions that force specific class of specific nation to be played generally very bad design. you have so many nations/classes and not everyone has grinded them up to be useful in specific missions. 

then i find some mission very bad cause they promote bad gameplay... like get 11 torp hits in british cl/dd t5+, spot german bb in uk cl. torp hits would be ok if there was uk dd line, but only t5+ dd is gallant so this mission is hidden behind paywall if you dont want to ruin others peoples game in yoloing with minotaur (sadly i was one of those ). also spot a bb with cl? this is not a cl job.

also i find mission that depend on rng to be generally bad. like destroy 3 turrets in one battle... i would have easier time to get 5 citadels with bb than destroy 3 turrets.

[Deckeru_Maiku]

As someone above said: the missions themselves weren't that bad, but putting them into the order that WG had done was utterly stupid and makes me wonder, if the guy(s) responsible for it really spent more than 5 seconds thinking about what this arrangement would result in.

[Bortasqu]

ARP Atago ones where way easier than the Puke of Yorck.

 

The destroy 3 turrets, the 11 BRITTISH torpedo hits, and the 90k damage all got one thing in common. And the 75k xp was a deuchebag move at the end for those who don't play DD's and Brittish cruisers at all.

And to the certain someone in WG thought it was a good idea to overlap the DoY and the New Year's raid together. Please don't design missions again. It was horrible to play the DoY to get all of the containers. Since everyone and their mom was out to get the "kill 10 BB's", my survival ratio in BBs plummeted though the floor.

Which meant that all of the DoY mission tasks was so hard to complete I gave up 1/4 of them.

[Capra76]

Too much grind, too little reward, about the only thing worthwhile was being able to skip the dog of a ship that is Jianwei.

[ppraet]

The amount of effort required to win DoY was fine, although I admit I had a bit of an easier time running premium account. However, the tasks for the individual missions were NOT fine up to the point where it impacted overall gameplay and screwed up matchmaker.  Please WG, for future campaigns - balance out the tasks so that there is no one favored ship class per mission (like BBs for mission 4 and DDs for mission 5).

 

Instead, mix the tasks so that at least two classes of the rock/paper/scissors concept are covered at the same time. For example, make a task for BBs AND a task for DDs available for the same mission. Ideally, for every mission of a campaign there should be one task for every ship class plus one grind task that can be done with any ship (like XP, credits or total damage).

The individual tasks should then promote the intended gameplay for each class, i.e. for DDs this could mean capping objectives or accumulating spotting damage. Cruisers should get rewarded for supportive play (i.e. fires, shooting down aircraft, sinking destroyers, resetting caps) while BBs get tanking or damage missions where they have to accumulate potential damage, collect Dreadnought achievements and so on.