MaliceA4Thought

You could always make up for the queue times by going back to the origional +/-3 tier for those choosing this mode to make the waits shorter? G

Only reason I have T10's and SS is for the Christmas and other events that get good freebies.. my normal play is T5 - 8 only. If WG recognised ships below T5 as actually existing for anything other than just being there, I would probably play T3 - 6 all the time as I prefer the ships from that period.

Not gonna argue with this SC :) Nice for a free daily. G

SO... I got a friend interested in the game a few months back... he kinda wanted to play but wasn't sure so he installed it and invited me round last night to help him get started and see where he had gotten to. He decided he wanted to look into destroyers, having started with BB's, probably german and asked me if I would show him how to play a DD (yeah asking me to play a DD is not always a good idea). He's currently over the 200 battles intro period so his Random games are normal and not protected so it was a full game of Humans surprisingly and full teams mostly T3 ships. He had the T2 German DD but was constantly dying quickly in game.. so I said.. yeah I would play a game for him on his account whilst he was watching and try to give him some advice. I can't div with him because he is on the EU server and I am on NA.. Now, I'm not a great DD player, and his account is totally free to play and he doesn't have any bonuses or anything on his ships as yet, so I wasn't expecting much, but now I have to apologise to the red team for being an absolute seal clubber. Just wish I could do this all the time on my account at tiers higher than 2 :) Frankly I don't normally do this amount of damage in my T8 DD's :( A very slightly embarressed me but hey.. it got me some beers :)

Me too.. there was another variation in Alpha as well I seem to remember that they tried.. when they were short of ships, but had more of one class than another, the MM would equate 2 DD's as 1 CA/CL and there was a similar one for BB's to CA/CL to DD so you could wind up with one team having 2BB,3CA and 3DD and the other having 2BB, 2CA and 5DD or similar.. there was no guarantee about same number of ships per team to keep queues as short as possible as there was no bot filling in general. This was also a lot of fun as it changed gameplay well... of course, that was also in the days when DD's had citadels and torp soup wasn't so much of a thing, and visibility rules were completely different :)

Ark Royal and Malta may want to disagree with you. :)

Remember this from the early days? This was the one produced in 2014 I think and was certainly still valid in 2015/16 :) I certainly remember being in T3 BB's in a T6 game :) You know it's early because there are CV's in every tier from T4 up and no matchmaking for the best ship they ever introduced.. the T2 BB Mikasa which is such a LOL ship and for me still gets played because it's just a laugh a minute :) . I know it finally changed to a generic +/-2 when the number of exceptions at the bottom grew rapidly. G

What issues do you think we face now from a +/-2. Personally, I don't see any issues that this causes, although you do have to play rather differently if you are bottom tier than top tier, but the lack of tier spread, to my mind, leads to games that are far more boring where people are scared to come out from behind islands etc.. all the stuff we see in T10/T11 battles. From my own point of view, all the really close matches and the most fun matches I have ever had in this game have been at lower levels, and often as Bottom Tier, and frankly the rush of getting into the top 3 or 5 of a Random match as bottom tier FAR outweighs just winning when top tier. I would love to know, though, what you see as the "lot of issues" we now face that would be solved by not having the +/-2.

Looks fine to me, everyone is top tier and lots of things to sink and make money and exp from.

Although, as you have noticed from the responses.. very little has changed on the Forums since Alpha... still plenty of people willing to complain about everything :) And we still have forum threads about the inbalance of MM, which as an Alpha, you too will laugh at :). Welcome back. G

Got one this week from the 5 years on Steam mission and I'm not on steam.

Bought a 10 pack and was really lucky... 3 ships... Napoli B, Jean Bart B and Saipan B. Cant decide whether to go buy a lottery ticket as well. :) G

OK some thoughts.... whilst nothing in this game is particularly historical, ie torpedo reloads, massive increase in main battery hits, shiops having radar or ASW that shouldn't submarine speeds etc etc, I think we need to look at what was used to determine the mechanic that could be used or introduced. 1) A homing torpedo latched onto the cavitation of the propellor.. what this means is that the homing torpedoes as they exist today shouldn't react to a PING, they should actually head towards the nearest enemy ship under power. Having said that, the PING is a mechanic that shows the position of the sub and allows the torps to be countered and the sub attacked. 2) People have suggested a Foxer.. these were towed arrays and as such the ship towing them should be limited to 15 knots max, otherwise you will loose the tow. In addition, they were not 100%, SOme acoustic torps still got through. In addition, an acoustic torpedo strike destroyed the Foxer. 3) DCP is a working mechanic that drops a PING, but it doesn't need to be used in the same way as a single fire needs no DCP (in General). So, what we are looking at, if we start translating the mechanics to WOWS.... 1) Loose the Ping from a sub and make the torpedoes just lock onto the nearest enemy ships propellors and loose the indicator of where a sub is for counter attack making subs a massive stealth weapon who can be undetectable. 2) Add a mechanism (foxer) to those ships that can carry them (only DD's) and restrict their speed when using them making them easier targets, and giving no direct ASW measure to a Cruiser or BB. 3) If a Foxer is smacked by a torpedo, it's gone. Now, if you bring those mechanics into game, even allowing for extra unrealism as per WOWS typicals.. all you do is make a sub even more dangerous to other ships, and probably way to powerful. What we have now would be seen as trivial by comparison. Personally, I think the current system of forcing the sub to advertise it's location and giving the target the opportunity to respond works very well.. My one suggestion as it stands, is that the ping lock should vanish as soon as the sub is killed... but I would imagine thats a pretty complex programming issue :)

There is some immunity which is why you get the cross marking a ship that the ping won't take on (yeah I think that cross should be removed).. it's not as long as the recharge from DCP but it does exist in the same way as if you kill a fire with DCP there is a short period of immunity to starting a new one on the same ship.

Well somewhere and somehow, these companies have to make money. You can't have a free online game that continues to be developed.. someone has to pay the bills. WOWS does at least allow for some people to play for free and download the game for free, but they have to balance that. Years back, in order to play an online game, there was a monthly subscription.. In 1999, a well known MMORPG had monthly subscriptions of upto £20 per month for ALL players whether you played one day or every day ( so around £35 - £40 per month in todays figures), and an additional £60 (I think it was) to buy the game and then an additional cost for each new release which was an annual release. Whilst I understand some of the angst at WG finding new ways to get people to pay... fundamentally, it's a game downloaded for free that costs you nothing per month to play (if you wish) therefore people can't expect to get all the rewards that those people get who do pay to keep the servers online and the development teams going. It's really six of one and half a dozen of another, but at the end of the day, people have to be realistic about what you can get for a large multiplayer game without paying anything for it :) Yes, it may tend to put some of the free players off, and it may reduce the number of players a little, but that game from 1999 is still going and still being played and by enough people to make it a fun experience for those that do play it. Sooner or later the free side may dissapear completely, but there is never a major issue with free player churn/loss (from the companies point of view).. the danger is churn or loss of paying players (and one player threatening to stop spending is completely irrelevant if 2 new players come on board who do spend under whatever the new system is :) ), however all these small changes may also well extend the life of the game for a lot longer and still allow people to play free if they wish, if enough people pay by microtransaction to make sufficient to keep it running even if the player base is a completely different set of players each year.... Ultimately, unless you see the accounts of the company for a specific game, you ill never have enough information to make an informed decision about whether a decision was, or was not, financially sound, all you can decide is if the game is still financially sound for you and if not.. move on.. For us it's just a game, we are not compelled to play it or pay for it.. it is just entertainment.. for the company it's a buisiness and every decision is critical to that continuing, and only they have the information that decides if those decisions were correct or not, and even to the point of whether that business should continue.