NCC81701

I think @Edgecase is 100% on point and I think implementing some form of player control AA would go along way towards addressing all 3 concerns Major issue #1: Punishing isolation = Punishing positioning Right now being isolated puts you at the complete mercy of the carrier players; how good the enemy CV is at striking you and keeping you lit and how good your friendly CV is at recognizing that you need an assist at an isolated position and send in fighters to cover you. The surface ship simply doesn't have an active means to fight back and your only hope is to weave and dodge while you simply hope your AA shoot enough of his planes down so it's not worth it for him to come back at you again. This is an incredibly frustrating way to play against the CV and you can't solve this problem as long as AA mechanics are only passive. If you buff AA to the point where isolated ships have enough AA to reasonably defend themselves then it would make it impossible for the CV player to get any strikes in when more than 1 ship is grouped up. If you nerf single ship AA so that a CV have a reasonable chance at attacking a group of ship then an isolated ship is more or less defenseless. With Automatic AA you are in an impossible balancing situation because you need to balance for every situation using static AA mechanics and static AA values. If you give players the means to manually or actively control their AA, then a player can make the AA vs CV fight more dynamic because how isolated you can be is dependent on a combination of player skill and how well equip the AA on the surface ship is, not just the static AA values on your ship. Major issue #2: AI-controlled AA is not counterplay No currently AA reinforcement sector is not counter play. In fact it is so passive and brain dead that I honestly rather have Ctrl+click to focus fire on a selected plane from pre-CV rework back. I weird but that is actually some how more interactive and engaging than the current AA reinforcement sector system. Biggest problem is that at the end of the day you are completely reliant on RNG. Ships like Mino and wooster simply give you better RNG. Right now it gives me no advantage against a CV player even if I can accurately predict the path and direction of an attack run, at most all I can do is mitigate some damage while I pray that the AA shoot some of his planes down. In order to have counter play you need to let players to manually control their AA. Major issue #3: Flak bursts are a basic skillcheck with no further purpose This really ties in with #2. Right now AI controlled AA is completely predictable. If you know the timing and pattern you can dodge the flak burst with near impunity. If you give an option to manually alter the AA aim point then the unpredictability of a human player would make the engagement much less predicable for the CV player and much more fun and engaging experience for both CV and surface ship player. How well a CV player can dodge a manually controlled AA flak burst now comes down to the counter play between the CV player and the surface ship player. If the CV player is better, he's able to dodge the flak burst and land some hits. If the surface ship player is better, then he has an opportunity to shoot down most if not all of the CV's plane before their ordinance is drop; the essence of play and counter play. Thus in my opinion all 3 root problems of the AA mechanics is solvable by implementing some form of manual control AA. I written up a concept of how to implement some human controlled element into the current AA system before and I'll copy-paste with some selectively edits of what I posted prior below in response to @Ducky_shot 's post about CV balance, maybe this time we can get the attention of someone like @Sub_Octavian : Manually Controlled AA Flak burst Surface ship to CV interaction is still problematic and the reason is, it’s because AA is still passive. You can reinforce one side or another, but at the end of the day you have no control where your AA gunners are aiming their flak bubbles. You are at the complete mercy of RNG of where the flak bubble appears and how good the CV player is at dodging AI controlled flak burst that operate on very specific rules of targeting where the planes will be if they flew straight and level. Having AA be only passive will always be a problem because then the AA will have very predictable behavior and predictable behavior means good CV players can anticipate and mitigate their effects. For the surface ship, it will always be frustrating because it does not give you any opportunity to outplay the CV player even if you can accurately predict what the CV player is going to do. The solution then, is to make AA an active interaction for the surface ship player. Fortunately the mechanics of the solution is already in the game. If you read how post 0.8.0 AA flak bubbles works, the AI aim the burst based on the calculated path of the aircraft squadrons and they burst in the pattern below; aim point is Zone A and to prevent saturation and to cover some of the maneuvering of the aircraft, flak burst greater than some cap value is spilled over to zones B. These zones also varies based on aircraft current speed (X1), the slower they go the narrower (X2) they get. The problem with passively controlling AA is illustrated below. The aim point of Zone A is automatic, and because it is automatic it will always lag behind the movement of the plane. A good CV player can time the flak burst so that they will always miss. This is currently mitigated somewhat by having flak burst overflow into zone B after 6 burst (or 20% of total flak bursts). For a fix number of flak burst, the problem is that if you increase the number of burst in zone A too much, you’ll never do any damage to a good player and your average player that doesn't dodge flaks might lose all of their planes after 1 burst. If you don’t put enough burst into zone A, then the CV player can fly straight and not get punished and the AA for the surface ship player feels like AA is useless. If you increase the total number of flak burst, then you just get an impenetrable wall of flak and we are back to the trivial surface ship vs CV interaction of Pre-0.8.0. CV player takes a hit from flak burst at T=0 and begins to evade the flak burst successfully by using a predictable but well timed S-turn Observe however, for a scenario where a player is allow to only move the aim point of Zone A laterally. In the example below, the surface ship observed/predict that the plane is making S turn in a predictable pattern after 2 flak burst (T=1 to 2). The surface ship player starts adjusting the AA lead for the 3rd burst and manages to get some of the flak bubbles on where the plane is. The CV player continues to make a predictable S-turn evasion maneuver, and by the 4th burst the planes are in dead center of zone A (punished for being predictable). Same as previous scenario by the surface ship player predicts the S-turn successfully after 3 flak burst and manages to correctly lead and hit the plane using manually AA aiming that only allows for traverse adjustment to a locked on squadron. The neat thing is, all of the mechanisms for this system exist in game at this moment. If you lock on to the plane like you would with a ship using the X key and you do not engage manual AA. You have the auto aim pattern of the first figure. By simply engaging manual AA (say by hitting the “4” key), you can now dictate how far laterally from the automatic aim point you want the burst to hit by aiming to the left or the right of the aircraft. To deal with the fact that the CV player can speed up/slow down or use islands to move the planes up and down then you can use move the mouse forwards/backwards to squeeze the flak zones horizontally or vertically as in the figure below. So now if a player recognizes that a CV player's tendency is to dodge flak bubbles by going left-right, you can widen your flak zones by stretching them out horizontally, if the CV player's tendency is to play with the throttle to dodge the flak bubbles then you can stretch out your flak zones vertically as in the image below. How moving the mouse forwards and backwards can change the shape of the flak zones If you were observant, we’ve just adapted the FCS aiming system that we are currently using in ship vs ship combat, but we have now applied it to planes. What’s more, every element of this manual AA system uses existing elements within the game; even the aiming motion against planes are somewhat analogous to how you’d aim against ships. In this concept you can balance AA to close the skill gaps between good and bad the same way we are already doing it with ship vs ship combat, which is playing around with dispersion values. In the case of the manual AA system you can play with the flak zones and the distribution the flak burst to balance the game between ships and across skill levels. In ship vs ship, even with perfect aim, some of your shells will miss because of dispersion. If you have mediocre aim, sometimes dispersion favors you and still put a few rounds on target. This dispersion mechanism narrows the skill gap between players with excellent aim and players with average aim. In our AA example then, we can do the same thing and play around with the accuracy and precision of the flak burst to find something that is comfortable for your average joe player that can aim against a ship, but for skill players you can always land Zone A on where the planes will be and maximize the odds of landing more flak bursts near the planes. But ultimately because both CV planes and AA are manual, the optimal aim point is never a guarantee the optimal place to land your shots because humans are unpredictable and they might go where you didn't expect. That's what makes the mechanics fun and engaging. More fun things that we can do with AA in this model is, we can play around with flak burst patterns and density, AA turret traverse speeds, burst sizes, burst delays, based on things like, ship class and nationalities. You might give DDs short burst delays, or more burst frequencies so it’s easier for DDs to aim and hit planes, but because they have less flak burst they do relatively less damage to a squadron; so it takes a longer time for a DD to shoot down an entire squadron. For a BB, you have longer delays or less burst frequencies so that it’s harder to aim, but if you aim anywhere close to where the planes ends up then you can do a lot of damage to a squadron because you have so many more AA guns and turrets on your ship. With this concept we still keep the auto-AA for new players or players who are not so good at controlling AA so that they have some AA protection capabilities, but if a player is good or wants to explore how to improve their AA via skill, they can simply hit that "4" key and see if they can do better than the AI Auto aim.

I haven't met any Indians that wanted to be associated with the British Empire.

The same way how gun mechanics in this game flattens the skill curve via dispersion. Let’s backtrack a bit to elaborate what I mean. I concur that the rework and the subsequent hot-fix patches up to 0.8.0.3 have address 2 out of the 3 core objectives of the CV rework.The issue of surface ship to CV interaction still needs work but I’d argue that we are at a better place than where we were pre 0.8.0. Let’s not forget that surface ship to CV interaction pre 0.8.0 is so bad that your only solution is to either pray that MM puts you on the side with the better CV player to keep attack planes away from you, or you spec so heavily into AA that your ship is a virtual no-fly zone; both of which resolves the ship to CV interaction with the trivial solution of essentially not have it happen. Post 0.8.0, at minimum there is some interaction to make it difficult for the CV to drop on you by maneuvering that you didn’t have pre-rework because multi-squadron cross dropping isn’t a thing from a single CV anymore. With that said, surface ship to CV interaction is still problematic and the reason is, it’s because AA is still passive. You can reinforce one side or another, but at the end of the day you have no control where your AA gunners are aiming their flak bubbles. You are at the complete mercy of RNG of where the flak bubble appears and how good the CV player is at dodging AI controlled flak burst that operate on very specific rules of targeting where the planes will be if they flew straight and level. Having AA be passive will always be a problem because then the AA will have very predictable behavior and predictable behavior means good CV players can anticipate and mitigate their effects. For the surface ship, it will always be frustrating because it does not give you any opportunity to outplay the CV player even if you can accurately predict what the CV player is going to do. The solution then is to make AA an active interaction for the surface ship player. Fortunately the mechanics of the solution is already in the game. If you read how post 0.8.0 AA flak bubbles works, the AI aim the burst based on the calculated path of the aircraft squadrons and they burst in the pattern below; aim point is Zone A and to prevent saturation and to cover some of the maneuvering of the aircraft, flak burst greater than some cap value is spilled over to zones B. These zones also varies based on aircraft current speed, the slower they go, the narrower (X2) they get. The problem with passively controlling AA is illustrated below. The aim point of Zone A is automatic, and because it is automatic it will always lag behind the movement of the plane. A good CV player can time the flak burst so that they will always miss. This is currently mitigated somewhat by having flak burst overflow into zone B after 6 burst (or 20% of total flak bursts). For a fix number of flak burst, the problem is that if you increase the number of burst in zone A too much, you’ll never do any damage to a good player and your average player that doesn't dodge flaks might lose all of their planes after 1 burst. If you don’t put enough burst into zone A, then the CV player can fly straight and not get punished and the AA for the surface ship player feels like AA is useless. If you increase the total number of flak burst, then you just get an impenetrable wall of flak and we are back to the trivial surface ship vs CV interaction of Pre-0.8.0. CV player takes a hit from flak burst at T=0 and begins to evade the flak burst successfully by using a predictable but well timed S-turn Observe however, for a scenario where a player is allow to only move the aim point of Zone A laterally. In the example below, the surface ship observed/predict that the plane is making S turn in a predictable pattern after 2 flak burst (T=1 to 2). The surface ship player starts adjusting the AA lead for the 3rd burst and manages to get some of the flak bubbles on where the plane is. The CV player continues to make a predictable S-turn evasion maneuver, and by the 4th burst the planes are in dead center of zone A. Same as previous scenario by the surface ship player predicts the S-turn successfully after 3 flak burst and manages to correctly lead and hit the plane using manually AA aiming that only allows for traverse adjustment to a locked on squadron. The neat thing is, all of the mechanisms for this system exist in game at this moment. If you lock on to the plane like you would with a ship using the X key and you do not engage manual AA. You have the auto aim pattern of the first figure. By simply engaging manual AA (say by hitting the “4” key), you can now dictate how far laterally from the automatic aim point you want the burst to hit by aiming to the left or the right of the aircraft. To deal with the fact that the CV player can speed up/slow down or use islands to move the planes up and down then you can use move the mouse forwards/backwards to squeeze the flak zones horizontally or vertically as in the figure below. How moving the mouse forwards and backwards can change the shape of the flak zones If you were observant, we’ve just replicated the FCS aiming system that we are currently using in ship vs ship combat, but we have now applied it to planes. What’s more, every element of this manual AA system uses existing elements within the game; even the aiming motion against planes are analogous to how you’d aim against ships. With this in mind, now we can address your question of how you can make CV accessible but at the same time make it comfortable for ships to play against. The solution is the exact same as ship vs ship combat which is playing around with dispersion values; in the case of AA how you shape the flak zones and distribute the flak burst. In ship vs ship, even with perfect aim, some of your shells will miss because of dispersion. If you have mediocre aim, sometimes dispersion favors you and still put a few rounds on target. This dispersion mechanism narrows the skill gap between players with excellent aim and players with average aim. In our AA example then, we can do the same thing and play around with the accuracy and precision of the flak burst to find something that is comfortable for your average joe player that can aim against a ship, but for skill players you can always land Zone A on where the planes will be and maximize the odds of landing more flak bursts near the planes. More fun things that we can do with AA now is, we can play around with flak burst patterns and density, AA turret traverse speeds, burst sizes, burst delays, based on things like, ship class and nationalities. You might give DDs short burst delays, or more burst frequencies so it’s easier for DDs to aim and hit planes, but because they have less flak burst they do relatively less damage to a squadron. For a BB, you have longer delays or less burst frequencies so that it’s harder to aim, but if you aim anywhere close to where the planes ends up then you can do a lot of damage to a squadron because you have so many more guns for so many more AA turrets on your ship. It follows then, If you accept that the current ship vs ship gun aiming system can be balance so that you can find a happy center of your triangle for ship vs ship combat and that the current ship vs ship combat is fun; then you must accept that a happy center can be found in plane vs ship combat and that if balance it is just as fun as ship vs ship combat if we are essentially using the same mechanics; mechanics that i’ll remind you once more that uses only existing elements of the game. I think we both agree that CVs are now more accessible and judging by the number of CV in gamesnow it is much more popular than RTS CVs even with all of its flaws. Even if you could have balanced RTS CVs, there’s no guarantee that a healthy number of players will play it (the pre 0.8.0 CV population was not healthy).Speaking for myself, balance was not the only reason why I didn’t play CVs. The RTS CV mechanics was simply too hectic with too many elements, and I felt extremely removed from the battle compared to any other ship. I felt extremely exhausted after playing a game of CV for every game I played regardless of how well I did. In comparison, I'm having a lot of fun with the current CV mechanics while playing a CV. I can certainly sympathize with the plight of the surface ship players as I've been focused by CVs in a surface ship before and it's not fun. But as a CV, the game is unquestionably more fun post 0.8.0 than pre 0.8.0 for me and I look forward to the UK CV line coming out soon. The general drawback I’ve found with the current CV is the lack of alpha damage and inability to attack the center of grouped up targets. This have some interesting implications once the meta settles down and players starts to learn to group up. It’s actually risky and difficult to kill secure a target in the middle of a group, where as for a surface ship, no consideration of how many ship is near the low health ship needs to be made. I’ve found that after the rework, a CV really have to bite at the edges of a group of ships and its strength grows as the game progress as the number of ships (and the number of AA decreases). You’d always have unicum players exploiting broken things about the CV rework; but i’m not as worried since for every fatal problem there seems to be possible balancing solution that we are just waiting for WG to implement. We can argue and wonder whether WG will ever be able to balance CVs, but I have issues with the idea that CVs is impossible to balance within WoWS. I find that argument to lack imagination and intellectually lazy; it’s simply throwing up your hands and giving up. The only thing that is impossible are things that are mathematically impossible. There are plenty of engineering problem that seems insurmountable as a whole (Landing on the moon, extracting oil from shale deposits ) but if you break the problem down into its constituent parts and resolve the problems one by one, then eventually we have a solution to a problem that only once seems insurmountable. Heck, before WoWS was launched, I wondered how they were going to balance a game where you have a BB battle it out against a DD. You have BB that basically have multiple DD amount of guns strapped to it sides on top of the big guns that completely out ranges anything smaller than another BB. If you have never played WoWS and someone asked you how do you balance that; would you know how? Yet here we are. We see the current BB,CA/CL,DD balance as natural, even obvious, but this is only true because WG have already solve this balance problem before you've ever hit that battle button for the first time. So what are these constituent problems that together makes CVs seemingly unbalance-able and are there some possible solutions for them? Frustration of surface - CV interaction | Manual AA as addressed here, tweak number of planes in an attack run/ number of ordnance drop per run Overwhelming ability to spot/scout | aerial detection nerf in 0.8.0.3, and subsequent adjustments for individual ships, different rendering rules for ships spotted by planes Excessive DOT damage | Flooding re-work, maybe tweaking flood chance CV vs DD interaction | rocket aiming nerf in 0.8.0.3; subsequent tweaks to say dispersion, distribution, and the number of rockets per attack, DD aerial spotting range I have seen reasonable and potentially implementable solutions to every problem that seems fatal to the CV rework. The rework have come pretty far even since 0.8.0.0 dropped and we still have 4 more full patches and who knows how many more hotfix patches before the official CV rework period is over. Even then WoWS is a game that is continuously undergoing rebalancing and tweaks. The assessment that the WoWS in general and CV rework in particular is dead is extremely premature.

I think the drop with WR corresponding with an increase in damage in experience is pretty much due to the fact that you are starting to play more high tier games and you lack the sufficient skills you need to perform at the same level at high tiers as you do at low tiers. At high tiers, mistakes are more punishing, there are more mechanics in play (i.e. radar), there are more experienced and veteran players so naturally it's much more difficult to do well. At high tiers, gimmicky plays that might work well at low tiers doesn't work as well since there are more good players and good players knows how to play around gimmicky plays. I present to you, your WR vs Tiers. As you can see your WR drops at you go up the tiers. You are clearly skill enough to carry your team at low tiers but you are more or less a burden on your team at tier 8-10.

RDF is way less useful than it sounds. There are a few instances where it would have been extremely useful, but it’s not worth 4 PTS in most cases.

The skill was never required but it remains a very viable tier 4 skill for BB captains

Sectors are Port/starboard only and you count as being in the sector where the majority of the planes are if you are on the border

Then these players are putting their own personal benefits ahead of every one else. Regardless of how may GC are in an average game they are clearly OP relative to other ship in the same tier and class by a wide margin. From a health game design perspective it should be nerf. We can argue over whether players who bought it receive just compensation for it, but it’s the right call to do something about the GC. Even if you disagree, the level of vitriol thrown at WG staff is not justified.

I think WG made a mistake of establishing an unofficial rule that premiums can’t be nerfed. I rather have the ships be balanced and sold rather than being locked away forever because the ship isn’t tuned correctly on first release. This creates several bad side effects: 1) creates artificial scarcity of a certain ship and people make all kinds of wrong assumptions about it because they dont see it often and make all kinds of assumptions about them (I.e. myth of Kutazkhov radar) 2) creates a feeling of unfairness when the opponent have a “better” ship by neglecting the build up of the rest of the team; then proceeds to blame the ship or MM for their otherwise what would have been brilliant victories. 3) creates a sense of entitlement if anything negative ever happens to these ship even if the change is negligible or is applied across the entire tier/class/game 4) meta changes, what was once OP may not be again due to new mechanics or general power creep (I.e. gremy) WG should just get rid of the rule of not nerfing prem. ships so they can actually balance them and make them available again. Give compensation when it’s warranted but they should be allowed to balance them. Thanks for the compilation @Ducky_shot

We are all dumber fromreading the First post in this thread.

O7 @Sub_Octavian . I appreciate all of your work both seen and unseen. I was a pleasure meeting you at Anaheim even though I didn’t get the answer I wanted about clan battle time extension. I am sorry that the appreciative majority is often silent. It is unfortunate for the community that you need to step away from us and we will all be less because of your absence. I hope you can find the strength to return to community again some day but I don’t blame you if you never come back. I wish you the best, calm seas and happy sailing!

1.) higher tiers drop more torps per run 2.) rockets to go after DD and scout cuz they are faster 3.) flak hits you if you fly straight without changing speeds

It's not hard to drop so that it arms right before impact.

Yeah why don’t we add the need to refuel resupply while we are at it as well.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have some manual component to AA or else surface ship to airplane interaction will always be a source of frustration at best and completely exploitable by good players at worst. +1 for @Edgecase for offering solutions and not just post nothing but doom and gloom like the rest of the forum.