World Of Warships

[DB]

Those three were rewards for completing the "Ships and Tea" events. Sadly, I only got one of them due to not playing the game until my eyes bled.

 

Anyway, Bellerophon suits me as a low-tier sealclubber at the moment. I've got her set up with Jack Dunkirk and feel really guilty(*) about smashing low tier cruisers that normally just burn low tier BBs to death. Still not sure about whether I should just use HE or mix it up. So far I'm going with first salvo as AP because I can pick the moment (stealth is good compared to gun range) then pretty much switching to HE. Of course, as most of hte other big iron in play at the moment is other UK BBs, it's difficult to tell how well she compares with a more normal mix, but I suspect that she's better than my previous Tier 3 club - the Nassau, even though she's not as nimble (ha!).

 

 

(*) I may be lying about that bit.

[Allan W]

Isn't it a little concerning that cruisers may have issues with the higher tier RN BBs? Last time I played, when German BBs were still fairly new, there wasn't any reason to play low-mid tier cruisers. From what I gathered that may not have been the same for high tier cruisers but the WoWs community is so small I was skeptical of what others were claiming.

 

Have there been major balance reworks in the months since I last played? What role do mid tier cruisers fill if there are still no CVs in the queue?

 

My experience is that every ship has a role. Battleships kill cruisers, cruisers kill destroyers, destroyers kill battleships.

[Harold Jones]

In general yes, but remember cruisers, especially US boats were supposed to focus on AA to counter carrier strikes. These days there isn't much work for that line.

[Colin]

The V150 is my seal clubber, the Nassu is a wee bit better than the belle for taking out DD as the UK guns are slower. The King Albert is almost useless against DD as her guns are wildly inaccurate.

[Skywalkre]

Downloaded it again(I think this is the 5th time) to try things out. As always instead of new content it's the players that are the story. Mouthbreathers on your team effectively giving the match over to the other side early on but given how slow the game plays you still have to waste another 15m for the loss to happen. I really wish there was some way they could implement the adaptive game mode that WoT tried out last year. Have the match set for 5-8m at the start and it's only extended if certain criteria is met. This way blowouts and campfests are over quickly and good games have enough time to finish.

 

On a different note I was perusing the WoWs subreddit and the latest trend seems to be everyone shooting HE, even BBs. Did they revise HE mechanics in my recent absence? At launch BBs firing HE was usually a surefire way to help your team lose.

[Allan W]

Downloaded it again(I think this is the 5th time) to try things out. As always instead of new content it's the players that are the story. Mouthbreathers on your team effectively giving the match over to the other side early on but given how slow the game plays you still have to waste another 15m for the loss to happen. I really wish there was some way they could implement the adaptive game mode that WoT tried out last year. Have the match set for 5-8m at the start and it's only extended if certain criteria is met. This way blowouts and campfests are over quickly and good games have enough time to finish.

 

On a different note I was perusing the WoWs subreddit and the latest trend seems to be everyone shooting HE, even BBs. Did they revise HE mechanics in my recent absence? At launch BBs firing HE was usually a surefire way to help your team lose.

British BB HE has a 48% fire chance, so I suspect that is the cause of the excessive HE use right now.

[DB]

The RN bb line may also be more vulnerable to HE, so its effectiveness msy be overstated due to everyone and his dog levelling them right now.

[Marek Tucan]

They tend to have big superstructures, so vulnerable for "overpenetration" damage (and easy target for HE). On the uother hand unless it is a British BB, if a BB is firing HE at me I am happy to meet not the sharpest knife in the drawer

[Harold Jones]

Some kind of carrier centric event this weekend on NA so playing my tier 4 uk bb is somewhat less than fun.

[Skywalkre]

On the bright side at least there will be a purpose to take out mid-high tier USN CAs and BBs.

[Harold Jones]

I should look at mine. I'm not even sure if I bothered to AA spec the captains. Usually carriers are so rare it's not worth it.

[Skywalkre]

Meh, I took the Cleveland out for a few games after swapping to the AA consumable and even with all the CVs in the games I wish I had stuck with the acoustic one instead.

[Skywalkre]

I really want to like this game but all the issues just rear their ugly head every time I reinstall.

• The playerbase is special ed level of intelligent (and still no effort to seperate the mouthbreathers from folks actually trying).
• CV play is beyond awful going on two years since release.
• Games take too long and there's really no reason for it. There's so much dead time in game... why?
• The P2W aspects of the game, especially after seeing how competitors don't need it, are frustrating.

I just don't care enough about seeing WW2 era ships on my screen to put up with all this. It's a shame because it feels like a great game is there to be had if only some changes were made.

[Mk 1]

The playerbase is special ed level of intelligent (and still no effort to seperate the mouthbreathers from folks actually trying).

I'm not sure I get this. If the playerbase is all dumbies, that makes it easy to stand out as a consistent over-performer, right?

 

Perhaps I'm one of the "mouthbreathers". But I find that I win some, and I lose some. Win more than I lose, but still ...

 

My observation is that the playerbase is not uniformly anything. It's a mixed bag. And the "special ed" players come in many shapes and sizes.

 

- Some players simply don't know how to cooperate on a team. Or maybe they just don't want to. The team will discuss and settle on a plan, and 2 or 3 will wander off to do random things.

 

- Some players seem almost unaware they even HAVE team mates. I've had team mates fire torps at the enemy THROUGH my smoke screen -- my smokescreen full of ME. Sometimes it can be dismissed as tunnel vision. Haven't we all had a teammate who collides with us, and continues blasting away at the enemy without wondering why he is getting that "DO NOT FIRE AT YOUR ALLIES" message on every salvo.

 

- Some players ignore planning communications, yet expect coordinated play. I have messaged that I will go deep down the edge of the map with my DD, and then, 8 minutes later when I am closing on a CV, I am strongly criticized for not scouting behind an island on the opposite side of the map. No one bothered to suggest my deep penetration was not a good idea, or that the rest of the team needed me to do something else, but now I'm clearly the idiot for being out of place when they want me to do something they did not suggest they needed done.

 

- Some players just don't seem to be able to understand a plan, no matter how clearly it is communicated. Several on the team suggest and endorse a focus on A. I announce that I agree with the focus, that I suggest every else go to A, but as a lower-tier (lower-value) fast DD with good concealment on the opposite side of the map, I will rush C, start capping to see if I can draw some of the enemy team away, but that I will not stand and fight. I go, I start capping, 3 enemy cruisers and a BB show up, I scamper away, and 2 team mates drive their cruisers right into the face of the enemy and get shot to pieces. Now because my plan worked, we're down 2.

 

- Some players believe there is only one way to play. Maybe one way to play a class of ships, or one way a team should play on a class of map. Anyone who even suggests, much less demonstrates, another approach is immediately ignored, lambasted, or worse yet fired upon. Yes, I've had team mates launch torps at my NoCar for holding back from a cap to provide fire support without exposing my flanks, or shoot at my Mahan for not marching boldly into open ocean to spot targets for them.

 

To say they are all "special ed" though would be wrong. It ignores the obvious differences between players. Part of the game ... part of ANY game that puts you on randomly assembled teams, is learning how to succeed in leading or following teams of widely varying player skills and capabilities.

 

There are structures to separate the mouthbreathers from those who are really trying, though.

 

First is divisions. You think you are better than the rank and file? You are dismayed at the quality of your teammates? Find some players who play well (with your style of play), and go into games together as a Division. Even a 2 ship division, if they play as a coordinated team, can change the character of a game. Play as a DD, and smoke your division mate's BB. Watch him score and score again. Take a Cleveland or an Atlanta into battle with your CV. Suddenly you are immune to enemy air counter-strikes and DD sneak-attacks. Two DDs working together can completely dominate half of a map, between drawing focus one way as the other gets within torp range, or smoking and re-smoking the same strip of sea.

 

Second is ranked battles. The only way to advance in rank is to win games. You improve your ranking with each win. You lose rank with each loss. Individual scores, kills, damage, etc. are meaningless to the ranking process. You need wins, which means you need your team. Once you get past about level 10, the games change. You get a lot more consistent teamwork. You get a lot more consistent proficiency. You still get variety -- variety of playing styles, variety of communication styles. You'll get some players pushing for very conservative plans, others that want to drive hard and fast. You still get some cowboys, but not too many. You still get those with very rigid tactical notions, but not too many.

 

 

CV play is beyond awful going on two years since release.

I've read that so many times. I have a lot of fun playing CVs. It's not easy to do well, and my performance can vary widely depending on how my team and the other team plays. But that's what the game SHOULD be doing, isn't it?

 

I will admit that there are some problems. Higher tier, I'd say there are just too many ships with overwhelming AA capability. Fly towards them and all your planes are swatted out of the sky, period. Nothing you can do as a CV driver except avoid those ships. And sometimes the tactical situation does not allow that. And the USN CV airgroup options make no sense at all. You have to cripple your airgroup size to get both fighters and torpedo bombers on the same ship -- why??? The idea of an airgroup with no fighters just seems so random.

 

And then there is that bloody Saipan. It just seems so WAY OP vs. other USN CVs. A competent (not even a star) Saipan driver seems to have a magic wand in A2A combat with the break-off-and-strafe capability combined with more, smaller fighter groups.

But overall, I find CV combat up to about tier 7 to be interesting and challenging.

 

 

Games take too long and there's really no reason for it. There's so much dead time in game... why?

 

OMG. I must just be a dinosaur. Has the world really gotten to the point where real adults can't stand 12 to 15 minute activities, even for the sake of amusement? Does the whole world really need to devolve into 2 minute speed dating?

 

Does your total lack of attention span allow you to cook anything more than eggs? Must be difficult when you don't have the patience to actually go to a store to buy groceries. Even ordering a pizza is out of reach for you, huh? Best stay away from banks or post offices. But at least your bathroom won't be cluttered up with magazines ...

 

-Mark

[FlyingCanOpener]

Eh, Skywalkre was a pretty high level player in World of Tanks, so he's pretty used to terribad players ruining his gaming experience despite having platoonmates to stack the deck in his favour. Having played Warships extensively in the Beta, it sounds like a lot of the core gameplay mechanics haven't changed much. Carrier gameplay is still wonky because Wargaming can't make airgroups useful, AAA is too OP against planes at higher tiers, and a bad CV player hurts a team probably more than a good CV player helps his due to the lack of a ship on the gunline providing damage.

 

Then there's the final comment about game time. You do have a point, but when I was playing, games would drag out for a good 20 minutes after the game was decided and we all have to sit around waiting for the last 2 stragglers to die so we can get our ships back. World of Tanks is immensely popular in Russia because they aim for a 5 minute average game experience with the game clock set to 15 minutes. That's enough of a rush to get you through a game and onto another tank in time for your favourite tank to be back in the garage, or 15 minutes is a good enough time sink to get a decent game played. Warships is slower paced, but there's no mercy rule that can end unnecessarily long games that happened in my experience more times than not--especially when the surviving ship was a useless CV hiding in a far corner of a map that was going to die as soon as it was spotted, but we all have to sit there and wait for the inevitable to happen... eventually.

[Skywalkre]

Then there's the final comment about game time. You do have a point, but when I was playing, games would drag out for a good 20 minutes after the game was decided and we all have to sit around waiting for the last 2 stragglers to die so we can get our ships back. World of Tanks is immensely popular in Russia because they aim for a 5 minute average game experience with the game clock set to 15 minutes. That's enough of a rush to get you through a game and onto another tank in time for your favourite tank to be back in the garage, or 15 minutes is a good enough time sink to get a decent game played. Warships is slower paced, but there's no mercy rule that can end unnecessarily long games that happened in my experience more times than not--especially when the surviving ship was a useless CV hiding in a far corner of a map that was going to die as soon as it was spotted, but we all have to sit there and wait for the inevitable to happen... eventually.

He didn't have any points with that textual diarrhea that ended his post. The cheap and horribly ill-informed bit about attention span was way off the mark (I guess I could counter with "Grandpa Mark will have to tell us what it was like to climb uphill both ways in the snow, barefoot, to school back in the day" but that doesn't help further a meaningful discussion like his last bit failed to do). The bit about wasted time was just that - WoWs wastes the player's time on a level I can't recall seeing in any other game I've played in years.

 

As a comparison the gaming I've been engaging in the most recently has been raiding in WoW. When clearing a raid that's on farm status we're looking at about 1.5-2h of straight gameplay for the level of the guild I'm in. Individual boss fights in that clear can last upwards of 15m (so a good WoWs game if you're lucky) but most are closer to 5-7m (WoT timeframe). The huge difference between those boss fights and WoWs is that I'm actually engaged the entire time I'm fighting. There's no several minutes of nothing going on or dilly-dallying for minutes at the end waiting for the fight to end. From first pull to boss death I'm basically doing something every 1.25s or so (basically as fast as I can do something which is based on the stats of your character). It's also not mindless activity (if you're good and depending on what role you play).

 

The point, which I'm hoping is crystal clear at this point, is that when playing a game I actually want to fucking play the game. All the sailing you do at the start and end of a match in WoWs is pretty much the definition of boring in my book. It's not serving any useful purpose ('terrain' doesn't play anywhere near the role it does in WoT maps and at least in WoT maps you're engaged almost immediately depending on what class you take) other than wasting the player's time. That bugs me and I uninstalled because every game at the end just felt like time I could better spend doing something else.

 

 

Eh, Skywalkre was a pretty high level player in World of Tanks, so he's pretty used to terribad players ruining his gaming experience despite having platoonmates to stack the deck in his favour. Having played Warships extensively in the Beta, it sounds like a lot of the core gameplay mechanics haven't changed much. Carrier gameplay is still wonky because Wargaming can't make airgroups useful, AAA is too OP against planes at higher tiers, and a bad CV player hurts a team probably more than a good CV player helps his due to the lack of a ship on the gunline providing damage.

To address the bolded bit - they haven't. CV play is a mess still with the possibility of variables lining up in a way to make you largely irrelevant (and per the bit above you now have to spend 15-20m to get on to the next game). There's a reason CVs have apparently mostly vanished on NA for the last few weeks/months (last time I played I basically never saw them and only saw them this last time because of an event going on catered to them).

 

The rest of the game just feels like it's on the cusp of being something fun to play but doesn't quite reach it. Someone on here described Skyrim as a game that was an inch deep and a mile wide. WoWs right now is a game that's an inch deep and a foot wide.

[Harold Jones]

Your description of raiding makes me shudder, but it also sounds a lot like operations in WoWs. Both have the same problem for me, I don't want to do just one thing for an hour and a half, especially when that one thing involves repeating stuff over and over again because somebody in the group hasn't got that drop they need. I am the poster boy for short attention span, and these days it's even shorter. If I can manage to devote an hour straight to a game it's an epic play session. That said I don't mind the length or pace of WoWS random matches, probably because I've never worried much about efficiency or the optimum path (probably also why I've avoided raids like the plague since EQ) My primary problem with WoWs is that they insist on trying to fix carriers. That someone might like to play them is one thing, but they seem to have made playing them and/or sinking them a requirement to complete various events and campaigns which just ensures that I won't even bother.

[Marek Tucan]

Eh, Skywalkre was a pretty high level player in World of Tanks, so he's pretty used to terribad players ruining his gaming experience despite having platoonmates to stack the deck in his favour. Having played Warships extensively in the Beta, it sounds like a lot of the core gameplay mechanics haven't changed much. Carrier gameplay is still wonky because Wargaming can't make airgroups useful, AAA is too OP against planes at higher tiers, and a bad CV player hurts a team probably more than a good CV player helps his due to the lack of a ship on the gunline providing damage.

 

Then there's the final comment about game time. You do have a point, but when I was playing, games would drag out for a good 20 minutes after the game was decided and we all have to sit around waiting for the last 2 stragglers to die so we can get our ships back. World of Tanks is immensely popular in Russia because they aim for a 5 minute average game experience with the game clock set to 15 minutes. That's enough of a rush to get you through a game and onto another tank in time for your favourite tank to be back in the garage, or 15 minutes is a good enough time sink to get a decent game played. Warships is slower paced, but there's no mercy rule that can end unnecessarily long games that happened in my experience more times than not--especially when the surviving ship was a useless CV hiding in a far corner of a map that was going to die as soon as it was spotted, but we all have to sit there and wait for the inevitable to happen... eventually.

Average game time is far less... Not 5 minutes, but not 15 minutes either. Though in WoT BNA server was kinda known as the more campy one so maybe that applies to WoWs as well. Still...You can take another ship out in the meantime. Same way in WoT you have plenty of times where last survivors just camp. Then again you can also get a 20 minute battle full of action.

 

@Skywalkre Re. terrain, I disagree, it plays a lot of role, esp. for more squishy ships (regardless of class). Maybe it is sometimes worth not to start shooting the moment you see a red guy and instead get to the islands that allow you to work around the flank of battleships (which have a natural aversion to them), plus hard cover is always useful (even for a BB - the other flank of enemy team not being able to hit you is pretty big thing).

 

@Harold In campaigns there is always a way how to do it without them (you do not havbe to have all tasks to progress), in missions that usually applies to weeklies or so and then... Well, you can just live without one set (or do part of the chain) - at least on EU that works, do not keep that close eye on the NA missions TBH

Edited September 23, 2017 by Marek Tucan

[Harold Jones]

I don't have a problem skipping or not completing weekly missions since I only play an hour or two a week these days. What does bug me is that I have to leave boxes unchecked in a campaign because I don't play carriers. I know I still get the rewards but that little ocd part of my brain still finds it nothersome.

[DB]

One may be familiar with Flamu, a Finnish contributor and very good player.

 

His language is... entertaining but not for loudspeaker use.

 

I give you the Conqueror

[TonyE]

Itali!

[Marek Tucan]

Mamma mia pasta esplosiva!

 

Giulio is fun fast battleship, though pretty squishy.

[TonyE]

It is a lucky ship! Have played 8 battles in mine yesterday with 7 victories in a row and one very minor loss. Despite multiple one-on-one engagments i have not been sunk even once! It even got hit by two dud torpedoes, perhaps that irish green flag provided the luck in that one.

[Colin]

I find the WOWS players older and better mannered, it's a different style to the more intense gameplay of WOT. So I play both depending on mood and energy. I have SB Pro, wonderful game, which i currently don't have the time or brain cells free to play. 1.5hrs gaming without interruption, I recall such things from my youth.......

Edited October 22, 2017 by Colin

[DB]

Flamu polarises opinion, I suspect because he fails to sugar coat criticisms of team members who don'#t bother to play the actual game.

 

Personally, I think that this is one of his best game commentaries.