FlakKnight

Smart man doesn't realize not all states even have sales tax.

Yes but because it wasn't allowed previously, most state tax codes don't do that.

Yes, but not all of them yet have similar e-commerce tax legislation (yet), though. I already get charged sales tax for WG purchases.

So I don't play this game a ton, but it's been improved over time and I feel it's in a much better place today. In keeping with that theme, I admit that I rarely keep up with the weekly news here, but I do come back every six months or so to see what's going on and read all the big email announcements. It looks like there's been drama lately involving radar from the Russian DD change to the cruiser line causing radar spam. It seems to me that radar is basically proliferated enough now where it's starting to look like it's in the same degenerate place where stealth firing and smoke were not too long ago. That is, it's a binary "F U". If you get hit with it, you usually just get burned down and there's little to respond with. You are playing CDs rather than the ships, so many combats seem to come down to the supremacy of binary vision cooldowns. If you pop it and the enemy gets lit, +1. If not -1. So the question I have is why are all these components so binary? They're generally short ranged, death trap cooldowns that all of a sudden win or fail spectacularly. Radar varies in accuracy and purpose, but in the real world it never let's you visually "see" the target, just identify it is there. As an aside, smoke can obscure a ship, sure, but where's the inconsistency, the wind, the fact that you're being spotted by multiple ships or the black smoke from a stack trailing out? The WoT binary render vision engine just does not serve a game of this scale well. So why doesn't radar just do what it, you know, actually does? For instance, have ships with radar have a reasonably long scan range, say at high tiers you "see" a BB at 20km out. Obviously, radar is still affected by LoS to a degree, but when a ship of particular cross section hits its max "radar detection range" it gets picked up. Maybe once every 10 seconds your sweep pings an overly large and ungainly broad enemy-colored blob on the screen indicating a contact with no further information. As you get closer within range, the blob tightens to the actual silhouette of a ship, to the point that you can identify type. Eventually you'll get a tight enough blob to ID the class of the ship and its rough orientation until it's spotted visually and it renders completely. Then you can have the consumable just increase range, scan resolution or sweep time, etc. You could give all the ships that had it radar which facilitates strategic visibility and then the special ships really focused cooldowns. Maybe some DDs would have extra long range to scan for rough positional info on enemy CVs not behind an island. Some CA/CL might have DD killing high speed scan CDs that let them hunt them down by constant position updates. Missouri probably would have a high resolution CD allowing better out of visual fire against enemy BBs, albeit likely not enough at extreme ranges to reliably hit, mostly just harass or finish off. Despite that, the even playing field with general radar would allow people to respond to attackers with CD advantage, only at a disadvantage instead of not at all. It also opens up strategic opportunities like driving multiple CLs together tightly in clumps to show up as multiple BB sized blobs, causing the enemy to risk deploying improperly if they don't take care to ensure ID. Anyway just a rambling idea at this point. The pop-in, pop-out vision is just so jarring.

Also, they should just add submarines as the natural counter to CVs.

As someone who largely stops playing every time I try because of things like CV instagibs and permaspotting, CVs are in really poor state overall. Match to match, they can go from worthless waste of a hull to game winner. MM doesn't pair AA with CVs. I think as a general framework, I would want to see spotting range restricted to aircraft, that is, not shared with ships (except for spotters). I would also like AA to be effective defence against attacks, without overly penalizing CV players, and more reliability from planes and AA. That is to say that a huge AA armed/specced cruiser would very predictably turn a 6 torp drop into a 1 torp drop every time, whereas a terrible AA BB might have to always avoid a 5 or 6 pack of torps without escorts. Same with bombs. Point being, large enough flotilla with good AA should be nearly immune to CV, while a lone ship without proper AA support should be reliably harried until sunk by a CV player without crazy RNG on drops or aircraft or AA. The CV player should gain reliability on aircraft performance and enough aircraft supply regen to keep going the entire battle even if mistakes get made. CVs should have to commit dedicated spotting planes to scout for the team that will be priority targets, and shouldn't be permanently lighting the enemy team with fighters.