real_icebeast

Why do you think this doesn't apply to Kutuzov or Belfast? It literally says right here why you won't get special treatment for ships when global mechanics are changed.

I think you completely forgot about Nagato which was also present at this battle.

Deleting the application and doing a clean install on a 2015 Mac Pro running El Capitan did fix the problem.

Best advice I can give, look at your minimap. Look at it more often. Look at it always. However long you're currently looking at it, it's probably not enough. The minimap provides so much information it cannot be understated. Turn on your different circles and, especially, last known position of enemy ships. This can let you anticipate ambushes, estimate distances to last known positions, see the ships that might be trying to flank you. Also, you can use it to remind yourself about potential useful places to put your ship. Again, I cannot understate how useful the minimap is.

Conqueror has access to 457s and no one is really expousing her overmatch power. I do realize that conqueror's 457s have many issues which this ship will magically overcome.

What a hilariously garbage use of statistics. Besides the fact that you're only using one game, the average win rate is poorly calculated as it's heavily skewed by players who haven't played many games (since it simply averages each players win rate, which I confirmed by checking the source on github). If you weight the overall winrate by battles played, you find that the disparity is only 48.8 vs 54.43. Really, you should be looking at a players overall winrate to get a better understanding of their general skill if you want to do this comparison, a suggestion I gave to the developers of MM monitor but they have not implemented (not blaming them, they do this in their own free time).

In general they're purchased and they have decent odds of dropping ships (you could earn a few on occasion). Here is last year's post. https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/deals/we-are-many/

You may be right but we'll see about the crates themselves. In the past, the crates dropped the Wednesday prior to Xmas (12/20/2017 and 12/21/2016). They could drop the patch early and release the crates delayed.

This^. They dropped on the 20th with the release of patch 0.6.15. I'd guess that they'll drop this year with patch 0.7.12, probably on the wednesday before Xmas which would be the 19th (entirely my speculation here based on past evidence).

It's hard to know exactly what you're experiencing. The castle will spawn on the surface once detected regardless of if Rasputin is alive or dead. As of Sunday, you still couldn't detect it unless you were underwater (again, I've never tested at periscope depth) at somewhere around 4k. It's possible someone else spotted the castle and caused it to spawn. It's possible you bobbed underwater briefly at the correct distance and caused it to spawn.

The castle can be spotted in 2 ways. Killing Rasputin causes the castle to automatically spawn on the surface. The other way is to get within ~4km and spot it underwater. It cannot be spotted on the surface prior to Rasputin's death. I'm not sure if periscope depth is sufficient but I always do a full dive around 5km to minimize any incoming damage.

The PTS hard mode had a reduced timer on discovering the black fortress (or castle or whatever it's called) and more towers in awkward positions to find. I think Rasputin also had more health and healed faster. As long as someone was quick on getting fortress/castle, it didn't seem too bad.

Let me see if I can help clarify this for you. Your confusion is that fusing is based on effective armor, not listed armor. That is, a 20mm plate is only 20mm thick when entered head on (at 90 degrees). When entered at an angle, it has greater thickness as more armor has to be passed through. At very oblique angles, even the thinnest armor has large effective armor. This is why overmatch exists, otherwise all ships could sit bow on and tank anything. You can look at wowsft or tanks.gg to see examples of effective armor vs listed armor.

Which DD is immune to radar? Just because Khab fights at 15k and doesn't conceal doesn't make it immune to radar. Plenty of times I've radared a Khab that went stealth to heal. All dds are affected by radar. Many BBs are not affected by this change. The goal, as stated by WG, is to get rid of 0 damage pens. Just because you've assigned a separate goal doesn't make that the goal. If this is the goal, its a dumb way to implement it. The only way this make sense is if you believe that Colorados are outperforming Scharnhorsts. If the goal is to reduce BB survivability, there are about a dozen more intuitive, effective ways to do it. This is why this clearly cannot be the goal. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against reducing BB survivability, I'm arguing that this is a dumb change because its counter-intuitive and only affects a subset of ships that an average user wont understand while not actually achieving the desired effect.

This change is actually very different than radar. Radar is a mechanism that globally effects DDs in an effort to balance them. We can debate if its useful or not, but that is how it works. This change only effects a subset of BBs and some cruisers. If this was like radar, it would effect all BBs. The goal here is clearly to reduce a counter-intuitive event (0 damage pens) but has introduced another counter-intuitive mechanic, pens to ships that have torpedo bulges. The only way this makes sense from a balancing perspective is if all the ships with exposed torpedo bulges are over-performing. Is Alabama really that much better than Tirpitz? Are Nagato's crushing KGVs? Are French cruisers good?