Battleship Plague 1 - the Inevitability

[dasCKD]

After abusing my new uberlikes to further my anti-battleship agenda and finally digging myself out of my self-perpetuated cycle of procrastination, I'm baaaack~
Before we go on into this article, I would like to extend my public and formal apology to @El2aZeR for something else. He has helped me greatly in creating an article meant to instruct newer carrier players on the art of carriers. That has been indefinitely postponed.

The Universal Class
The term "universal class" can mean different things. It could mean a generalist class that could do just about anything, it could mean the most average class with the most balanced abilities across the stat sheets, or it could mean the class that is meant to take up the largest numbers of spots in a team. In a game where a single player manages many units, this is fundamentally different from a game where the matchmaker has a first come first serve policy. A game where the class that is meant to occupy the largest number of spots in a team but doesn't is an imbalanced game. The battleship numbers at the medium to high tiers in particular is passed imbalanced. The scale has tipped off balanced, tumbled off the table, and rolled itself into the Marinara trenched. A panda's diet is more balanced than the game right now, and the nerfs to the battleship class and buffs to the cruiser class has done little to address the problems with the game. This article isn't about what to nerf on battleships but to talk about why I think that the battleship plague was as inevitable as the heat death or any conversation about religion, politics, or waifus destroying friendships.

The problem ultimately is relatively simple: cruisers fail as a universal class. People may think of this as an oversimplification, so to refute this I would like to cite the third law of thermodynamics: "das is always right". Whilst many war games would start newer players off with a smaller unit and let them work their way up to heavier armed units, WoWS starts you off with a cruiser. Cruisers, as opposed to destroyers, are also the most numerous class in the game in terms of variety with them contributing far more silver ships than any other class. This is all the more worrying in the context of the game where cruiser numbers quite commonly can go as low as 1 per team where it's an anomaly for battleship numbers to dip below 3 and numbers from 4-6 are far from rare. There are many who argue against the battleship plague even being a thing, but the numbers speak far louder than any flimsy ad hoc justification and arguments from personal incredulity possibly could. It is a fact that some of the worst players in the game find battleships rewarding and that battleships are far more common than just about any other class at the higher tiers in particular. I am of the belief that players will eventually gravitate towards the state of maximum reward for minimum effort  which is where I believe the problem comes in. The problem isn't that battleships overperform or that they have too much armor or even that they could do too much damage. Being the class that does the most damage or has the most armor isn't fundamentally a problem, it's the way that the problems compound that causes the problem. The underlying issue is that battleships are simply performs the role of a better universal ship class than cruisers and the issue lies with the game mechanics themselves and will not be fixed by twiddling with the class performance.

Spoiler

Cruisers

• Have moderately fast firing guns effective at long ranges
• Have some of the best self-defense consumables
• Have some of the best DPM

Which is fine, as they are meant to be the universal class. The problem is of course that they fail to function as the universal class for a reason that they just don't appeal to the lowest common denominator the same way that battleships do. They also present the largest variety of ships in the game. Cruisers are also the most diverse types of ships, performing so differently that they are close to being different classes which should in theory appeal to a far larger number of players. All of this of course makes it almost incomprehensible that cruisers aren't simply just not the most presented class of ships in the game but also some of the most underrepresented ships in the current game meta. It wasn't always like this of course, there was a time where cruisers were more popular than a chocolate flavored diabetes cure. Those days a long gone however and whilst cruisers aren't as rare as they were in the days of the German battleship rush, they are still a minority.
Destroyers

• Have the fastest firing guns
• Are the best concealed
• Can attack enemies from perfect stealth without alerting them (sans the Russians obviously)
• Are the fastest ships

This means that other ships can't catch them, and that a poorer player with worse aim will have more occasions to attempt to correct their aim. They can theoretically perform well without anyone ever knowing that they're there and they can outspot just about everything not in their own class. Their faster firing guns don't have shells that behave as well as the cruiser's obviously, but it would make just as much sense that destroyers would become the universal class. Destroyers are fragile, but border skating second line torpedo skippers are also far from common. Destroyers have also gotten far more common following the battleship plague, but games can also start with only one or two destroyers. The destroyer plague, if a thing, has not reached anywhere close to the magnitude that the battleship plague has.
Carriers

• Have no range limit
• Have attack vectors that can be corrected up until the last moment
• Can attack enemies from perfect stealth without enemies being able to directly retaliate

I bring this up because despite the fact that battleships have the highest penetration,  best armor, and largest health pools, they still do not have the monopoly of beneficial traits. As stupidly powerful as the concealment of the newer battleships are, they still can't hope to hold a candle to destroyers. As fast as battleships are at the higher tiers, their fastest members are still considered decidedly average in cruisers and utterly awful in destroyers. They may have the longest range of any surface ship, but carriers don't even have a limit on their operational range and can be used, in technical terms, without the user even having to learn to aim. The problem isn't that they have beneficial traits or the traits they have are better than any other classes necessarily, but that the traits that the do have simply makes them a better universal class than anything else does. The carrier class in particular makes an interesting case study when talking about the battleship plague. 
Battleships

• Have the longest range
• Are all basically the same
• Have the biggest guns
• Have the best armor
• They have the most inaccurate guns
• Have the largest health pools and are abundant in large numbers
•  Have the lowest skill ceiling

All of which are the primary causes for the battleship plague. These issues, in one way or another, feeds the psychology of the lowest common denominator, prevents the natural control of population through die-offs by in-class diminishing returns, and self-perpetuates the problem through the effects that the plague has on all of the other classes. Now some of you might find it odd that things like 'lowest skill ceiling' would contribute to why battleships are so overly represented. I mentioned the beneficial traits of the other classes but I did not mention all of the beneficial traits of the battleship class because not everything that battleships do better than other classes contribute to the battleship plague and blanketly (a real word now, I said so) nerfing battleships will not fix the problem.

The Battleship Problem
Much has been made of the battleship plague. The nigh-extinction of cruisers and carriers at the medium to higher tiers, the resurgence in torpedo boat destroyers, and the dominance of the Midway on damage charts are all symptoms of the larger battleship problem. The battleship problem is far reaching due to the fact that the game is built around them not being the universal class. The ability for battleships to kill other ship classes in a single salvo whilst persistently resisting incoming damage would be fine if they were a slightly rarer and more difficult to master class from a gameplay perspective. The problem, however, is that everything in the battleship class from the way that overmatching functions to the ease on transitioning between nations is characteristic of a universal and not a specialist class.
Bang Bang Goes the Sniper

Spoiler

The battleship sniper is a meme by this point. It may therefore seem odd that I single out the fact that battleships have the longest range as a gigantic reason why they're so over represented. This trait of battleships contributes to the psychological side of World of Warships, the appeal to the lowest common denominator, the refusal for the dregs of the players to learn to manage and mitigate damage beyond cowering where the enemy can't do damage to them, and their guns can reach the enemy. It won’t do much, but the occasional lucky shot will always get through.

There is a certain road that all players walk from complete incompetence to mastery of a game system. During this time in Warships, these players are thrown in with the sharks with thousands of games in their favourite ships. The new players will of course get constantly stomped and will always try to stay as far away as they could from the source of their grief. This will naturally drive them towards the ships with the longest range in order to keep ‘being important’ whilst ‘staying safe’.
Long range allows bad players who know nothing about positioning to get to take shots more often. A ship with a shorter range needs the minimum amount of map knowledge to know where the enemy is likely to be so they can go meet them, but the range that some battleships boast can allow players to simply sit at the back of the map and shoot shells until they land a lucky shot. In a ship with low range that depends on their guns for damage, the player needs to be able to predict the actions of their enemies to a certain extent in order to be where the enemy wants to me to meet them and shoot them down before they cause any trouble. The common theme that runs through all of this is the matter of effort and reward. Ships with long ranges that could deal the gratifying massive damage hits simply feed the ego and drive players than ships that feels like punching bags to most players.

Attack of the Clones

Spoiler

To keep players as main players of a class, the class needs to appeal to the player by giving them something different whilst not being so much of a departure that it turns them off. Spore is a game about evolving a species from the monocellular state to a space faring empire and is one of the biggest disappointments in videogame history thanks to how convoluted the entire game was in practically jumping game genres with every evolutionary tier. Whilst this would be something of an obvious jab at the French, Russian, and especially the German cruiser lines, there is a larger point here. Battleships are almost universally immune to citadel hits from cruisers baring exceptional circumstances and are resistant to citadel hits from other battleships as they have the health to resist the damage better than any other class thanks to their large health pools. They all have powerful and slow firing guns that are liable to straddle broadside battleships and cruisers whilst landing three full penetrations on destroyers in a single salvo. The skills learned from a Fuso are applicable to the New Mexico and vise versa.

Battleships are different enough to feel different whilst allowing novice and relatively unskilled players to use them without having to relearn any of their skills. Battleships have nuances obviously, but apart from the British battleships it takes an experienced players to use those nuances in any meaningful way. There is an incorrect belief that I once held and Wargaming probably still holds that a more diverse class would mean that it would appeal to more types of players and therefore fill the class with more players. Whilst this may be true in other study cases, the retained player intake rate of a multiplayer game of World of Warships appears to be quite low barring exceptions such as right after Gamescom or with Steam releases. Whilst newer players may first pick up and maybe enjoy a cruiser line, they still will have to move on to another line eventually when they reach the end of the line or, more likely, hit a credit sustainability wall and transition over to a new line. If the player, for example, transitioned from a high explosive and mobility dependent line like the Soviet cruisers onto positioning and high explosive free line like the British cruisers the change can often jaring especially if the player is not yet skilled enough to diagnose a ship line’s speciality and necessary playstyle the line if not the game may well lose that player.

Compensation Much?

Spoiler

There was once, in the golden age of cruisers, a legendary ship. A ship so powerful that she could have picked on a battleship double her tier and won just about any fight. So powerful that she could shred several lesser cruisers and return just about everything to the primordial depths from which all life spawns. That ship was the St. Louis, the American tier 3 cruiser.

In the current state of the game, a high explosive shell has a penetration that is tied to the shell. If it hits a plate of armor with lower armor than the penetration, then the damage is transferred. If not, 
The simple fact is that if a cruiser wants to deal damage to battleships, they will need to shoot the correct type of ammunition and hit the correct place. Against British battleships, most cruiser HE applied to just about any region will deal damage. Against a German cruiser, only the bow, stern, and superstructure is commonly vulnerable to a similar tier cruiser. In a battleship however, as long as you hit an enemy cruiser you can expect to deal damage. Even against battleships, simply hitting the enemy battleship will tend to deal damage. The fact that battleship shells also deals more damage makes the experience more psychologically appealing to many players even if the final damage would have been higher with a suite of smaller and faster firing guns. The overmatching mechanic is largely the driving force behind this issue. To maximize the damage in a ship with smaller caliber guns, a player needs to be able to at least hit the superstructure consistently for damage. A bigger guns with better penetration has a lower skill floor to do damage than smaller guns even with better DPM.

More Unnecessary Armor

Spoiler

The largest issue with the battleship class and the reason why they are, in fact, so poor at self-balancing is their armor. At this current stage, the only tier X battleship that would reliably take citadel damage from a broadside is the Yamato. The rest of the tier Xs as well as a plethora of other battleships are nearly impervious to taking citadel hits from close ranges thanks to turtleback armor or citadels lower than my opinion of Wargaming’s balancing team. At longer ranges, they would be theoretically able to take more damage from plunging fire. This, however, is often stopped by the fact that battleships also have strong armor everywhere that is more likely to shatter or bounce shells at long ranges. Mid ranged engagement also suffers from this issue where even the most rudimentary efforts at angling will minimize incoming damage from armor piercing to effectively null.

In game terms, battleships will feel much less punishing than any other class as they are far less likely to take all the damage at once. Losing about half your health pool instantly is extremely demoralizing for players and newer players are unlikely to take it well. As this happens far less to battleships as the most lethal carriers are up at the very highest tiers and torpedo boats, at least until the Pan-Asian line, have been defanged to the point where they are rarely if ever a threat to battleships. Cruisers and destroyers on the other hand are far from strangers to having half their health bar being taken away or clipping a torpedo or two and being irreparably damaged for the rest of the game. Battleships are the toughest ships in the game. The fact that battleships have the largest health pools and thickest armor also means that they are far less likely to take the grating sound of ringing whenever the game decides that you have taken too much damage. Not only are players punished mechanically, but they are also punished psychologically. The impetus behind this may be to force players away from decisions that makes them take catastrophic damage, but the simple fact is that most players don’t have the skills to diagnose the mistakes leading up to the point where they took that damage. Instead, many players appears to have decided to take the option of playing the class that doesn’t appear to be punished like the others are.

Battleships, Shore to Salty Shore

Spoiler

The large numbers of battleships are a self-perpetuating problem. There is an element of psychological gratification that comes from scoring incredibly high damage numbers. The more battleships they are, the more large healthpool targets there will be for other battleships to hit. Whilst this means little in terms of gameplay, the fact that battleships are so common makes it so that players will gravitate towards units that can best access the health pools. Destroyers have been defanged and cruisers, with few exceptions, requires significant amounts of mechanical skill and knowledge in order to deal consistent damage against a heavily armored target. In larger numbers, cruisers suffers from skill differences far more than battleships do. This makes it so that, assuming equal player skills across the two classes, most players will gravitate towards battleships over other classes. It allows mediocre players to stay alive for longer and deal mostly inconsequential damage against the enemy.

Playing the Numbers

Spoiler

It may be odd to see me mention the inaccuracy of battleships as a reason why battleships are so popular. After all, accuracy is almost universally regarded as a good thing. This, I can explain by talking about something that is obvious but that most people do not necessarily consider. The progression of a player through World of Warships.

As discussed above, battleships feel much less punishing than cruisers and destroyers and their hits feel more substantial, even when they aren’t. This means that lower skilled players don’t feel as if they are being punished and feel like they’re contributing, even if they’re a Bismark pushing into a pair of Hindenburgs. Their lower accuracy acts in a similar way. Most battleships with a few exceptions are quite inaccurate. No matter how good a battleship player is, they are fundamentally limited by how much power they can wield and how much they can exploit the mistake of a weaker player. A bad battleship player could give a good battleship player a full broadside at 14 km but, if the good player is unlucky, they might do nothing but two or three standard penetrations with maybe two utterly inconsequential superstructure over-penetrations. On the other extreme, a good carrier player can wipe out the entire air power of an incompetent carrier player with one hand whilst mauling their team with the other. Cruisers and destroyers lie somewhere in between. Destroyer players who sail in straight lines are liable to take torpedoes they can’t recover from and cruiser players are liable to get shot after shot into their citadels until they are nothing but a reef under construction. The inaccuracy of the battleships however makes it so that there is a fundamental limit on how good a battleship captain can be. This limit will be lower than that of a cruiser, destroyer, and carrier. This, combined with the other advantages that the battleship class tends to have, makes it so that battleships simply attract more newer initiates to the class. For a class population to build, complete novices will need to be able to get into a class. Even if their aim would miss the broadside of the Kurfurst from inside of her bilge and they show more flat than the Great Wall of China, battleship players will still have some success as their armor and health pool keeps them alive long enough for their inaccuracy for the RNG to reward them with a lucky hit that takes away half of the enemy’s health pool. Battleships have crutches that cruisers simply don’t have and this just leads to new players preferring battleships over cruisers.

Power of the Heart

Spoiler

What is true does not matter. Wargaming can comb through all of the statistics they want but they will not find a solution to their problem there. The simple fact is that a large minority of any game's player base are flat out bad at the game. They barely know what they're doing and do the things that give them the dopamine rush whilst avoiding anything that results in them having an unpleasant experience with no regard to the game or their practical performance like a badly written reflex agent instead of a thinking human being. The problem isn't that they're easy but that they're easier for bad players. This may seem like splitting ends, but the difference is important.
In many games where multiple classes are present and that requires player cooperation like most MMORPG games, the matchmaker often has class quotas that makes certain roles like tanking, DPM, and support are all filled. For the most part, World of Warships depends on the metagame to keep the match balanced. The game requires much more careful planning than a game where strict matchmaker rules are enforced. Each available unit needs to be created in such a way that enough players would pick the units in more or less the ratio that is envisioned by Wargaming. This, more than just about any aspect of the game, illustrates the failure of War Gaming to balance the ship classes. In an RPG game, players can gravitate towards the more ‘selfish’ classes like DPS over healers because the matchmaker makes sure to keep the party balance in check. There could be 200 DPS mages and fighters queuing and maybe 20 clerics, but the matchmaker makes sure that each instance has more or less the character distribution that the developers prefer. Not so for warships.

In WoWs, players are given an option of 4 ship lines. If they want to get anywhere with these lines however, they will either have to invest far more money than newer players can be expected to spend or they have to start grinding. I made a big thing about battleships feeling heftier than their contemporaries but we must remember that the variable that motivates most players isn’t mechanical perfection or optimized win rate farming divisions as much as they are there for personal gratification. Battleships are far less immediately punishing and can be made to perform by players with far lower skills. Players who average 20k in tier X battleships would likely also be the kind of players who would die before dealing a single point of damage outside of secondary hits in a cruiser.

It’s not battleships are easier per se. It’s that battleships don’t feel as punishing to new players. A battleship wandering to the edge of the map on Okinawa and firing their guns twice before being one shotted by a Midway is, effectively, about as useful as a destroyer who sailed in a straight line and then died to focus fire 2 minutes in. Less, in fact, because that dead destroyer would at least spot a portion of the targets. To wield the influence of a even mediocre destroyer player, a battleship player has to be extremely competent and work far harder to swing matches. The problem is that the dregs that makes up the majority of the player base don’t feel gratified by spotting for the team or raining down ineffective shells hoping for a fire nearly as much as they feel seeing 10k damage pop up on their screen despite hitting a battleship with 100k health.

Cruisers and the Specialist Class
Before I make this point, I would like to you a little more about myself. I am terrible with destroyers. Destroyers, basically being small ships, are a bit like children and I react to children like most people react to parasitic worms. That is what children are anyways with their tiny malformed bodies and-

The point behind this is that despite being a poor destroyer captain, I chose the American destroyers as one of my first destroyer lines. With the Farragut, I would be able to average 40k damage against enemy ships by sitting in a smoke screen and raining fire on enemy battleships. For reference, this meant that my first tier 6 destroyer averaged better damage than my first tier 8 cruiser. I was able to do this because back then, high explosive caliber basically didn’t matter. As long as you could get shells down range and hit the target, you would deal hideous amounts of damage against whatever you are shooting at. It was the age where the St. Louis, Cleveland, and Mogami were the most powerful ships in the seas.

Spoiler

Back in those days, DPM ruled everything and cruisers did their role as the universal class. Battleships basically needed to kill cruisers from the first or second salvo or get shelled into oblivion as they attempted to maneuver out of the constant steam. This made the skill threshold for cruisers far lower. As long as you can get shells to land on the enemy ship on a module that had its health tied to the ship’s health, a cruiser can walk away with massive amounts of damage. AP was rarely even used at this stage considering how effective long ranged HE spam was. This was also in conjunction with the fact that cruisers had serviceable shell flight time and decent reloads that made them utter monsters. At this stage, battleships required far more skill to play than cruisers. Considering their size, the maneuvers they made had to be far more extreme. All of this made it so that battleships are far more difficult ships to play than cruisers. This made cruisers the noob friendly class that the general players who want to go pew pew and see their damage numbers crawl up could play without having to know much about them.

The HE mechanics was doomed to change eventually. The dominance of lower caliber and higher DPM ships would limit the functional ship designs that could exist in the game. The end result of this however was that battleships ended up dominating. It may sound obvious, but the shells that could be landed on a ship don’t matter nearly as much as shells that actually do something. Almost every single landed shot was an effective shot from a cruiser in those days and cruisers had more chances to correct their aim. This made it so that cruisers were by far the easiest class to play with the lower skill floor than any other class save for arguably the American destroyers. When the changes to high explosives were made, the ability to indiscriminately use one shell type to deal damage to a target whilst ignoring even the angle of the shell was largely gone from the cruisers and destroyers but persisted on the battleships. This transferred the ease and the lower knowledge required to make a ship perform from battleships to cruisers. Even back in the golden age of cruisers, they had weaknesses. Their smaller health pool and easy to reach citadels combined with mediocre maneuverability made it so that even in the days where many cruisers are grievously overpowered on the strength of their guns alone they still had a higher skill floor than battleships do in the current meta.

The diversity of the cruisers also largely became its own enemy. This point was made above, but I feel the need to expand in order to emphasize the importance of this point. At the lower tiers, all ships are basically identical. When the ship lines begin to gain individuality and the line begins to diverge, the game starts to get difficult for newer players. Battleships don’t really have this wall, their health, armor, and gun caliber and performance has a mostly linear growth. With cruisers however, the jump from Kolberg to Konigsberg to York to Hipper is far more than what a newer player could potentially deal with. Problems like this also persist in other ship lines. The Pensacola works best as a cruiser hunter that plays against Yorks and Myokos whereas a New Orleans would be ripped to pieces if she tried to pull that against ships like the Mogami or Hipper. Similar rules applies to ships like the Fiji’s transition to the Edinburg. The rules of cruisers often entirely changes, completely changing how they perform. Battleships have one jump from tier 7 to tier 8, they are otherwise nearly homogeneous in terms of ship growth. Better variants of lower tiered ships that have to deal with the same problems and are generally safe from the same things. The way that the Fiji changes from a tier 7 cruiser that could brawl other cruisers to an Edinburg tier 8 cruiser that needs to cower least she gets shredded by tier X ships is seen all across the cruiser lines. Destroyers and battleships are both better in this regard. With very few exceptions, players can expect that a lower tiered ship they like will transition into a bigger high tiered ship of similar performance. No such guarantee can be seen in the cruiser class. The fact that a newer player is placed in an entirely unfamiliar ship with a playstyle they can’t adapt too will continue to result in fewer and fewer new cruiser players in relation to new players to every other class. This is compounded with the fact that certain players have a nationalistic preference. If the cruiser of their favourite nation doesn’t have the playstyle or armament that is easy to use then they may very well abandon the line. Battleships on the other hand can be expected to work like battleships no matter what the line.

With every change, cruisers have changed for the worse from a universal class’s perspective. They may have grown in strength, but their maneuverability only means so much when it takes a few lucky shots and then some to put them down permanently. Their guns requires far more game knowledge to perform correctly and their unexceptional speed combined with unexceptional range means that they require far more from their players to get them into the correct position to even be moderately effective. The changes to the cruisers mainly benefitted the better players with the knowledge to properly command and utilize their ship potential. Battleships, with their far lower skill floor and skill ceiling and moderately consistent damage dealing ability even for poor players, simply fits the niche of the generalist class far better than cruisers do in the current state of the game.

I would talk about some solutions, but I quite frankly think that this article has gone on for quite long enough even by my standards. If this feels like an abrupt end, that’s because it really was. You may consider this to be an artifact of me going rusty after not having done an article for so long but you’d be wrong. There are things that Wargaming could do from tooling battleship into something more or a generalist class than it is now to changes to the cruiser class to make them the easier class for newer players. That will have to wait until later. It’s a bit like a DLC to milk even more attention.So you see, I’m not incompetent. I’m just evil. All the best.

[triumphgt6]

Nicely written and thought provoking. Also agree with most of it. I play almost exclusively cruisers and have settled at Tier 7 for exactly the reasons you state. My favoured ship is the Fiji, which is simply fun to play. The Edinburgh, despite the better heal, seems slower, and far more vulnerable. And hence less fun - so I don't play it. Neptune was wrecked with the smoke changes and the citadel and I am not good enough to play the Minotaur, even though it is quite amusing!

[Gnirf]

At higher tiers the only thing that seems to combine well is some cruisers, at low and mid tier I enjoy everything (not CVs)up to c:a T7-8 ships

[dCK_Ad_Hominem]

Nice effort, but you tend to some oversimplifications here. A bb won't always damage an enemy with a hit, angling is a thing. In opposite to that have fun angling against zao HE. Had several 9k salvos, plus fires and what not. 

 

I think we need raised citadels so bbs can feed on themselves better, better ijn torp concealment and some more love for carriers and things would be fine. 

 

Would be interesting to test cruisers and bbs, commanded by equal skill level players against another 1v1. I'm quite certain it would be a coin toss at most tiers. 

[RUSSIANBlAS]

Great analysis but i think it boils down to the uninitiated seeing historical BB snipe at long range for hours. They then think this applies to the game...

 

In their little minds, the odd glancing hit or very rare 1 shot is good. 

[Azalgor]

58 minutes ago, dCK_Ad_Hominem said:

I think we need raised citadels so bbs can feed on themselves better, better ijn torp concealment and some more love for carriers and things would be fine. 

 Yes, this in the long shot was the turning point, started at the reliece of KM BB, that had a well protected citadel at certain ranges, then they lowered US BB citadel, and i think they never gave RN BB any at all.

IJN were left behind on this, and at most part they stay the heck away the most because they have the citadel in plain view. No idea whats gonna happen to French ones, but the tier 5 has a citadel that can be shot at from any angles by same tier BB, the dispersion doesnt alow any camping, so will be interesting to see where it will lead to.

[RUSSIANBlAS]

5 minutes ago, Azalgor said:

 Yes, this in the long shot was the turning point, started at the reliece of KM BB, that had a well protected citadel at certain ranges, then they lowered US BB citadel, and i think they never gave RN BB any at all.

IJN were left behind on this, and at most part they stay the heck away the most because they have the citadel in plain view. No idea whats gonna happen to French ones, but the tier 5 has a citadel that can be shot at from any angles by same tier BB, the dispersion doesnt alow any camping, so will be interesting to see where it will lead to.

I got a citadel vs a Gnesi in the T5 FR BB although the potato was broadside and firing HE at me... So probably doesn't prove much!!

 

I feel bad for the IJN. Poor Kongo has been well and truly power creeped out by GC. Nagato is meh vs the new breed of BB, only Amagi stays relevant. Yam is OK I guess but Conq does a similar job without needing to be able to aim.

 

Every BB should have raised citadels otherwise what's the point? As no one is really punished for broadside brain dead sailing. If you're caught broadside you deserve to get one shotted, you're less likely to repeat that mistake than if you only take 10k superstructure damage.

[Azalgor]

59 minutes ago, Negativvv said:

Every BB should have raised citadels otherwise what's the point?

 Im sure you know about it, but still, a WG made up term  ''gimik'' (or how its spelled), WG made few of them and now, since they ran out of ideas they just shuffle them up and add as gimik to a new nation, RN got the most of it, and as far as the community goes, they expect the next line to be better, does the speed boost make up for it as such? Doubt it, so im guessing that the historical trait of having quad turrets doesnt count as well. Sounds stupid, but thats how it goes.

 And you are right, and as i also mentioned, the oldest nation in the game, the IJN, were left out and are in need of some buffs, and raising the citadel on other BB would be a good start, turret traverce speed would be welcome for cruisers.

[SovietFury43]

WOW! Willy Wanka, the official knight-defender of Battleships and the current meta will burn your house to the ground and eat your kittens when he sees this.

 

Any way, this has been apparent even a year ago and WG did nothing, they are still not doing anything. Sure, they may make a comment here and there about the oversaturation of BBs, but meanwhile they continue to nerf everything else and indirectly buff BBs.  

 

I believe this problem could be very easily at least partially fixed by giving all high tier Cruisers repairs. I took a double citadel from an NC yesterday in my Atago right at the start of the match. Retreated, repaired, came back, burned the NC to the ground, did 130k damage, survived until the end of the match and ended up 1st on the score board. If that happened in the Mogami (for example), those two early citadel hits would have effectively ended the match for me right there. 

 

But WG have already made it clear that they do not intend to give all Cruisers repairs. In turth WG probably likes it this way, by having a single dominant ship class that is forgiving to play, they attract and retain more of the mediocre/bad players who still pay. And also keep all the whales concentrated on one ship class. Then they can simply make a few copy-paste ships (Misery, Mushashi), give them radar or otherwise make them stupidly OP and watch the cash pile up. 

 

Unfortunately, it seems the BB meta is here to stay.

[dasCKD]

4 minutes ago, SovietFury43 said:

WOW! Willy Wanka, the official knight-defender of Battleships and the current meta will burn your house to the ground and eat your kittens when he sees this.

Let 'em come. I defended carriers, I could deal with a few gits as they vomit the same arguments they always do.

[SovietFury43]

4 minutes ago, dasCKD said:

Let 'em come. I defended carriers, I could deal with a few gits as they vomit the same arguments they always do.

 

Trust me, Willy is quite special. He actually argues that the IJN DD torpedo nerfs were actually buffs to IJN DDs because it makes torpedoes easier to dodge for IJN DDs on the enemy team and as such should not be considered indirect buffs to BBs.

[cuddlesRO]

TLDR

[loppantorkel]

Sooooo much text. The point narrowed down is that you want cruisers to be the main/universal class and bbs less common?

[piritskenyer]

Excellent writeup mate! 

 

One thing I would say, though is that imo it's the skill floor that is way lower than a BB, rather than the skill ceiling. Not that skill ceiling is *that* high, but a good BB player can do much more in terms of match influence than a bad one, while even an average player can rack up tons of damage. 

 

Most cruisers and DD's have much higher skill floors and much bigger variety (as you stated), and in my opinion, that is what makes people go for BB's. 

 

In short, I agree. 

 

PS: I'll stilk take my cruisers over my BB's, because I'm weird like that. 

[dasCKD]

5 minutes ago, loppantorkel said:

Sooooo much text.

You clicked on something posted by me and expected something else?

5 minutes ago, loppantorkel said:

The point narrowed down is that you want cruisers to be the main/universal class and bbs less common?

No. The point is that despite WG creating the game with the intention of making cruisers the universal class, battleships act far more like a universal class than cruisers do. The article might be motivated by me wanting to see more cruisers in the matches, but that isn't the point of the article.

4 minutes ago, piritskenyer said:

One thing I would say, though is that imo it's the skill floor that is way lower than a BB, rather than the skill ceiling. Not that skill ceiling is *that* high, but a good BB player can do much more in terms of match influence than a bad one, while even an average player can rack up tons of damage. 

I still consider the relatively lower skill ceiling to be a problem for the battleship class as a whole. No matter how good a battleship player is and how awful their enemy is, there is a sharp limit on how much power a skilled player can wield in a battleship against other battleships which gives poor battleship players an easier time than poor cruiser or destroyer players.

[piritskenyer]

On 2/10/2018 at 2:02 PM, loppantorkel said:

Sooooo much text. The point narrowed down is that you want cruisers to be the main/universal class and bbs less common?

 

No, it's more like a situation summary of the reasons why the situation is what it is. 

 

On 2/10/2018 at 2:01 PM, clocky said:

TLDR

 

Why even comment then? 

 

On 2/10/2018 at 2:13 PM, dasCKD said:

[...] 

I still consider the relatively lower skill ceiling to be a problem for the battleship class as a whole. No matter how good a battleship player is and how awful their enemy is, there is a sharp limit on how much power a skilled player can wield in a battleship against other battleships which gives poor battleship players an easier time than poor cruiser or destroyer players.

 

That is very true. I didn't consider that. 

 

PS: after reading your article I feel a bit guilty for proposing HMS Vanguard. 

[dasCKD]

3 hours ago, dCK_Ad_Hominem said:

Nice effort, but you tend to some oversimplifications here. A bb won't always damage an enemy with a hit, angling is a thing. In opposite to that have fun angling against zao HE. Had several 9k salvos, plus fires and what not. 

A battleship salvo still has the highest amount of effecting change compared to most ships. A Zao firing at a Kurfurst or Montana for example might hit the midplate, gun turrets, or belt and do close to no damage whilst a battleship also has the option to switch to high explosives. This is even encouraged with ships like the Conqueror with poor AP penetration but broken HE. It's also a matter of the learning curve. Even tier X cruisers need to know how to exploit their armor whilst all a battleship player has to do is point their bow at the enemy and effectively negate most AP damage.

[SovietFury43]

Sometimes it seems as if WG just doesn't put any thought into game balance when designing new ships at all.

 

When they decided to give the German BBs hydro and great secondary's, it seemed like they want to encourage BBs to play more aggressively. And then they add the RN BBs and give them unprecedented HE spam capabilities, better concealment then Cruisers and submerged citadels. Basically everything a cowardly map edge sniper ever dreamed of.

[justadude0815]

Nice post. Finally someone who makes an effort to look at the problem, instead of aggressively complaining about it.

 

I am not sure you are clear on the definition of universal. It means applicable to all, but you repeatedly build your argument around the premise that players either new or lacking skill are drawn to BBs. You make this argument by correctly pointing out the psychology of long range, big hits, tough armor and large hitpoints as the driving force behind this. You go on to point out the BBs playstyles are largely universal and transcend the nuances of the class allowing unskilled and new players better access, unlike other classes. The conclusion you draw is that these attributes are the reason that a certain subset of players favor BBs. That makes BBs are not a "universal", but, in fact, a specialist class.

 

You bias shines through glaringly at times. So much so that even when the evidence you present does not even support the point you are arguing you seem undeterred. Also you refer to unskilled and new players in derogatory terms. You go through great effort to present your arguments as analytical and thought through, but this complete undermines that.

 

I do think your analyses of the psychological factors behind the allure of BBs for a specific portion of the playerbase is spot on. The iconic nature, security and power coupled with the relatively simple and easily transferable skill set make BBs very appealing to new and unskilled players. The question then becomes: how can skilled and veteran players help this subset to explore more of the game in order to at least learn the nuances of BB play and hopefully learn how to carve out a nich for themselves with other classes.

[G01ngToxicCommand0]

50 minutes ago, SovietFury43 said:

WOW! Willy Wanka, the official knight-defender of Battleships and the current meta will burn your house to the ground and eat your kittens when he sees this.

 

Any way, this has been apparent even a year ago and WG did nothing, they are still not doing anything. Sure, they may make a comment here and there about the oversaturation of BBs, but meanwhile they continue to nerf everything else and indirectly buff BBs.  

 

I believe this problem could be very easily at least partially fixed by giving all high tier Cruisers repairs. I took a double citadel from an NC yesterday in my Atago right at the start of the match. Retreated, repaired, came back, burned the NC to the ground, did 130k damage, survived until the end of the match and ended up 1st on the score board. If that happened in the Mogami (for example), those two early citadel hits would have effectively ended the match for me right there. 

 

But WG have already made it clear that they do not intend to give all Cruisers repairs. In turth WG probably likes it this way, by having a single dominant ship class that is forgiving to play, they attract and retain more of the mediocre/bad players who still pay. And also keep all the whales concentrated on one ship class. Then they can simply make a few copy-paste ships (Misery, Mushashi), give them radar or otherwise make them stupidly OP and watch the cash pile up. 

 

Unfortunately, it seems the BB meta is here to stay.

^^That is the gospel truth and there is plenty of evidence that that is exactly how Wargaming is dealing with this issue and that they have zero intention or incentive to do change the status quo. Wargaming simply makes more money by keeping the BB meta strong and profit is king. If WoT is used as a measure of Wargaming's business model it is that powercreep is used as a tool to make the players spend money on gold/dubloons in order to convert free xp so they can advance through to tier 10 without having to grind their way through the new line and this is exactly what Wargaming is doing in WoWS as well. The game has only one purpose which is to grind to tier 10, all other things such as CB, ranked etc. etc. are only there to keep competetively minded players in the game as the game in itself really has nothing to offer game experience wise other than repetitive gameplay and frustration over a bad meta and bad players.

 

The only way to get a different, and better, game experience is to play a better multiplayer naval warfare game which, alas, do not exist at this moment.

[PapVogele]

Great article, your analysis of why BBs are so numerous are interesting and in some cases new.

 

I also love how you don’t propose buffs or nerfs as such, but invite to a debate.

 

That said, I’m not sure WG is going to do anything about it as metas change, maybe the upcomming carrier changes that we know nothing about is going to do something to the meta, who knows. I only wish they’d reduce the manouverability of BBs again... some BBs turn faster than most cruisers and even some of the longer destroyers...

[HystericalAccuracy]

3 hours ago, dCK_Ad_Hominem said:

I think we need raised citadels so bbs can feed on themselves better

Amen. (means: so shall it be)

 

 

I would accept getting the citadel of my Missouri raised to the level where it was on the Iowa before being lowered.

 

 

I remeber my last Iowa-match back then very well: i supported the DD at B, saw an enemy BB at A (90 degrees off my starboard) and knew: that guy will stretch my anoos. And that´s what happened. 50k gone in one salvo. I got punished for having bad positioning. I learned from it.

 

Today i see BBs standing/sailing broadside-on like potatoes and they get away with it.

[Wildf1re]

Well written and I basically agrgee with all you have written. Interestingly enough I have myself gravitated towards BB play for grinding missions and and playing ranked, despite the fact that I actually prefer DDs and cruisers - and started with playing them. I am by no means a gamer that generally avoids challanges, however, at some point the sheer amount of BBs in each and every game feeds frustration when you are in one of only a few squshi cruisers - and so, it just sometimes feels easier to play BBs.

I do think it is a shame how things have developed. I have two tX DDs but have stalled on the Neptune because I simply ran out of steam playing cruisers - even though I actually like the challange of UK cruisers.

 

I can't help but wonder if range in itself would be a source for solving a lot of the problems with BB overpopulation, snipe and hide mentality etc. While same range for all would make WOWs a totally different and even more arcade like game, I would like to see much shorter ranges for BBs, forcing them in play to have a chance of downing anything. I think that alone would give much more dynamics to a battle and would require that you actually play somewhat intelligently to survive in your BB. And with this I am not genaralilsing BB players, I have been up against enough really skilled BB players to knowthey exist and can do a whole lot of difference in a game, as it is now however it is a you say just too easy to e.g. stay in the back and stille feel you contribute even though from a team perspective you actually do not really do anything of significance...

[loppantorkel]

23 minutes ago, justadude0815 said:

I do think your analyses of the psychological factors behind the allure of BBs for a specific portion of the playerbase is spot on. The iconic nature, security and power coupled with the relatively simple and easily transferable skill set make BBs very appealing to new and unskilled players. The question then becomes: how can skilled and veteran players help this subset to explore more of the game in order to at least learn the nuances of BB play and hopefully learn how to carve out a nich for themselves with other classes.

New and bad players will always exist and best case scenario in a battle is that they are playing bbs. If they wanted to learn and get better and if they have the capability, they would improve. Some improve, some won't. BB/cruiser/dd gameplay is in a pretty good spot at the moment. WG are introducing minor new mechanics, like changing smoke, deepwater torps, that have improved the game. I don't see any good reason to try make new/bad players move to cruisers instead. Forum would be flooded by complaints, cruisers would underperform, they'd probably buff cruisers or nerf bbs and cruisers would be even more powerful than before.

 

Would be interesting to hear what WG thinks of interclass balance and how they balance the classes between themselves.

[_VAMPA_]

@dasCKD "... they are nothing but a reef under construction." I steal that directly to my clipboard xD

+1 for the effort, and for that, that the text is in spoilers so u not get hit by wallOfText