LittleWhiteMouse

Message boards always house a small (tiny) percentage of the total population.

It's the nature of chat rooms, especially Discord where posts can be quickly altered and deleted. People with less than wholesome intentions can ping someone with a rules-breaking message, ensure that it's seen. Scroll makes it hard to find for others and it's easily edited / deleted. It's also painfully easy to fabricate Discord messages too, so it's not like screenshots are reliable proof of transgressions either. In short, it's a challenge to moderate. That's one of the nicer things about message boards, even when you edit or delete stuff, the board keeps a record of it, so bad actors have less wiggle room. Best thing to do if you're the target of less-than-desirable posts is to keep all notifications off on group Discords, use it to broadcast messages but avoid general interactions because of that inevitable minefield. That runs contrary to how I like to interact with the community. I like answering questions. I like talking with people that enjoy the things I enjoy. The forums lets me do that. Discord doesn't. Not in a group setting. It puts too much power in the hands of bad actors.

I have Discord (AprilWhiteMouse is my handle), but I will not be on THE World of Warships Discord. It's not safe.

Creepy guys see someone on the internet of the opposite sex . . .

I gave the World of Warships Discord two tries. Both times were creepy and uncomfortable.

Thank you, @Pontifex_Americana_Regin. I'm looking into it. It might be just what I need.

I'm exploring other options than just Reddit. 'm not a fan of Reddit, but it's better than Discord for sharing info for the time being YouTube is less than ideal. It (greatly) increases the time needed to produce articles and comes with additional challenges for me.

This will probably be the last topic I start, so I figured I go out doing what I love: Sharing information about the game. Here's two things I learned today: Thing the First: I am blind. Not legally mind you, but my eyes do bother me, but that doesn't excuse the fact that today I learned there was a lead-time indicator for torpedoes. Yeah, it's apparently been in the game forever. Just like with shell flight estimation times, torpedoes will tell you how long it takes for the fish to reach X range. Neat. It would be fun to include for reviews of ships with painfully slow sea mines like Sims and Black or for hail-mary yeeting fish off ships like Asashio or Iwami. It's easy to see yourself. Thing the Second: The 75% health protection against detonations is more effective than we were originally told. Back in 2017 (and reconfirmed time and again while I was a CC), we were told that detonations can only occur once a ship has been reduced beneath 75% of its starting health. This could include the attack that dropped you below that threshold, meaning that it was theoretically possible to be one-shot via detonation from full health if you were unfortunate enough to be smacked a single, high-damage attack (a high tier IJN torpedo versus a bottom tier battleship, a Royal Navy HE shell versus a destroyer, etc). This apparently isn't the case and has been further clarified that you have to START with health below 75% before any attacks are greenlit to be able to set off a detonation. So let's use an example to make this clear. You're at full health. You're going to be hit with three attacks that each hit your magazines (you unlucky bum). The attacks will each take 20% of your health off per hit. THE OLD EXPLANATION: The first hit reduces you from 100% to 80% health. You're still over 75% so no detonation check is made. The second hit reduces you from 80% to 60% health. You're now below 75% so a detonation check is made. The third hit reduces you from 60% health to 40% health. You're still below 75%, so a second detonation check is made. So under this explanation, you would expect to take two detonation rolls. WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS: The first hit reduces you from 100% to 80% health. You're still over 75% so no detonation check is made. The second hit reduces you from 80% to 60% health. You were over 75% health when the attack came in, so no detonation check is made. The third hit reduces you from 60% health to 40% health. You started below 75% health when the attack came in, so a detonation check is made. So instead of two rolls, you're only taking one. What this means is that there should be no full-health detonations observed in game. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon double checking this, huckin' Minotaur torpedoes into South Carolina bots. I performed this test... lemme check ... 132 times, which isn't conclusive by any means; we're talking about a 1% to 2% chance per torpedo hit to cause a detonation. At 132 times, I could still see RNGeebus saying "haha, no", so don't count it as definitive proof that this new explanation is correct. If anyone has any anecdotes and/or replays demonstrating detonations from singular attacks when they were over 75% health, I'd love to see them. But still, if this explanation is the accurate one then yeah, rest easy. There's no chance of being detonated from over 75% health. It's not like this is a new change, supposedly -- it's been in the game since the 75% thing was implemented and that goes back, what? Six years? It's just better sharing of information. Now if only we could get the actual math formula for how critical hits were rolled. Then we could put the whole Juliet Charlie phantom detonation rumour to rest. Love you all. Good luck in everything that you do. Mouse signing out.

I dunno yet. The next review will be on the World of Warships Reddit. We'll see where it goes from there.

Yup, a lot of people don't appreciate the number of stacked skills and experiences they use to navigate through newer applications. They also don't understand how years of experience with previous software / skills can create traps in thought pathways and problem solving which can further complicate things. To say nothing of just having your body actively sabotage your attempts to learn something new, like GOING BLIND or having your brain just say "haha, no". I can make Discord work, but Discord communities that size are not a comfy place for me and I've been burned twice in the past trying to join it. You can't moderate a Discord as easily as a forum and it's easier to creeps to do their damage.

. . . I just choked on my tea. WE ALL KNEW IT WAS COMING.

I'm actually surprised they're giving us 72 hours. I would have shut it down in 24 hours. Less time for drama. It's like they ALMOST get that the forums have value but they can't quite grasp it...

It's like they've forgotten who their target audience is... Late millenials Gen Xers Boomers You know, the people who are stupidly comfortable with message boards... I guess they want them all on Meta or to get hip with their fellow kids.

The shut down doesn't make any kind of sense to me beyond someone higher up not wanting a message board for aesthetic reasons. It's not a "look" Wargaming wants for World of Warships anymore. And the more I look into the reasoning and replacements being suggested by their representatives, the more ignorant they sound. It's not about cost. Boards are cheap to maintain and easy to staff with unpaid volunteers. That's your biggest overhead. It's not about bandwidth. Message boards are not prohibitively expensive to run, being designed for the era of dial-up. Though the software has changed over the years, expensive features can be disabled easily. It's not about user numbers. World of Warplanes, another property, still has an active message board with a fraction of the population here, to say nothing of the regular eyes pulling at threads. If Wargaming was concerned with user numbers, there are other, more constructive ways to put eyes onto these pages ... population here directly ties to the population in game, for example. It appears Wargaming simply doesn't want there to be an official World of Warships forum. Discord doesn't replace the message boards. You don't burn down a library because people can read a book on their phone.

The next few reviews (I have ... oh god, six in progress, how did that happen?) will end up on the World of Warships Reddit, so keep your eyes peeled there. After I've done those, we'll see how comfy I feel there or if the game is still going or not.