Junpei_MT

Hope for change, lack of alternate options, sunk cost, routine and familiarity, obligation to a clan/team/friends, obligation to a paycheck/program, naiive hope that the next shiny new thing will be entertaining. Additionally, fun doesn't exist as a black/white dichotomy. You expect to have some days that have exclusively fun/great games, some days with only terrible games, and many many more in between. The best WoWs has to offer is incredible, and people will stay invested/online despite a torrent of endless bad days/weeks/months for a chance at an excellent game experience. If they can't recapture that incredible experience just by continuing to play, then they're gonna try other things. Taking extended breaks, playing the game in a different way, or trying to find why the game isn't producing a fun experience anymore and talking about those things online all come to mind. Eventually, playtime and investment will decrease to a minimum and at some point, they'll play their last game. It's a bit foolish to stick around and hope for the experience to improve. WoWs has had the same developmental philosophy in practice for many years now, and if you don't like it now you aren't going to get something different in the future. However, it takes time to move on from something you used to love, especially when you're witnessing that thing move further and further from how you remember it. People calling for boycotting this or removing that are just trying to recapture an experience they loved, and if that bothers you then you just have to wait for a while and they'll be gone for good. This isn't an easy or fun thing to grapple with for people mad at or disillusioned with the game, and it's very hard to express an appropriate response in the context of a forum thread. Even what I've written here is just a cursory glance at the phenomenon. So, while it's easy to say "Just stop complaining and move on if you're not having fun", understand that the answer is probably more complicated than most people care to get into, and you're probably not suggesting anything they haven't already considered.

I enjoy using the Ragnar for PD missions. Using range/no conceal build and pissing off BBs usually nets 120k+ damage and ~2m potential on average. Kleber and Marceau work well too, as does a kiting Nevsky/Moskva/stalin or well-played BB in a long game. Anything that can stay alive for a long time while forcing the enemy to actively pay attention to you will rack up huge PD averages.

Here's a generalist DM build that I've found works very well for randoms: You can swap in/out RPF, SE, DE, PT, IFA, and GtG to fit your preference. Numbered skills should be the first 10 points taken. John Doe/Halsey are preferable captains. If you don't have the UU, the Slot 6 reload module works fine. Same with the Radar module in slot 2, if you don't have it take the DCS mod 1 instead. For Cleve, there are more options. Here are 2: one with IFHE and one without. Either GtG, Expert Loader, or IFA are OK 1-point skills, then DE/CE as your first 2-pointer. AR and CE round out a 10-point captain. With no heals, Superintendent is only useful if you find yourself going deep into games and using all charges of radar/hydro. Additionally, no heals means the health from SE is very useful on Cleve to help turn the tide of close games. Top-Grade Gunner is less useful thanks to Cleveland's good stealth, but every bit of DPM helps. IFHE pushes Cleve from 30 mm pen to 37 mm pen. If you find you need/want to be able to penetrate the very common 32mm threshold, it's nice to have. If not, then take DE and pump out fires instead.

Opinions on design choices and balancing decisions often stem from how a player enjoys the game. If you like sailing around shooting ships the most, then the more content the better. If you like trying for big numbers, then you'll like ships with big damage/kill potential. If you like playing with friends then you'll judge ships by their division potential. Some people only play PVE, some people only play CBs, some people sample everything. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play the game, you just play the game in the way that you find most fun/rewarding. Having said that, Wargaming has designed the game around the 12v12 Random Battles hyper-casual environment. Design choices that make sense for a 12v12 random environment are often very broken when a dedicated player decides to min-max performance. As an example, look at the TX Napoli. She is balanced in Randoms by trading main gun range/accuracy/damage for extremely high survivability. When you bring that survivability into 7v7 or 9v9, or use a division to emphasize it in Randoms, her performance ends up being far more impactful/unbalanced, allowing her to survive alone on a flank against 2-3 ships for an entire match. This can be frustrating for people who enjoy 1) playing games to win, 2) improving at the game, and 3) organized competitive, which is further exacerbated by WG allowing for global performance statistics to be tracked and made available to players. In the end, WG develops the game as a playground for players to sail their ships around with an emphasis on replayability and content variety over and fairness and mechanical depth/complexity. When players who enjoy having a great deal of agency and control over their performance run into a mechanic that takes that control away, it frustrates them and worsens the experience.

Austin is a ton of fun. Fairly unique, lots of potential for fun and interesting gameplay. Very difficult to use. Not competitive/strong, but the meme potential more than makes up for that imo.

That was a good listen through. Appreciated the insights into a good variety of topics.

UUs generally present a playstyle change or a specialization. Here are a few I find good and use often. - Yamato: The dispersion bonus turns Yamato into a pinpoint accurate ship. You miss out on some Slot 6 DPM with no reload mod, but I find the tradeoff very much worth it. - Des Moines: Although nerfed from previous iterations, I like running the Des Moines UU. It makes her very maneuverable, which is helpful for dodging shells at range and compliments her island-hugging playstyle. You again miss out on the Slot 6 reload mod, but DM has a fast enough reload that the handling is worth it. - Shimakaze: The Shima is all about torpedo DPM. Because her UU replaces the Slot 6 torpedo reload mod (-15% torpedo reload, +50% module incapacitation chance), you end up trading torpedo traverse speed for an extra 10% off your reload. As long as you aren't knife fighting with your torps and manage your torp launchers proactively (similar to how you manage slow-moving BB turrets), it's a very nice DPM buff. - Khabarovsk: the Khaba trades Slot 5 rudder shift mod for 10% range, 6% reload, and a 20% consumable time penalty. If you're captaining a Khaba in the open, you're already used to her horrendous handling and will gladly trade for more range and reload. This UU buffs the best Khaba playstyle, so it's a pretty good pickup. - Moskva: The Moskva is a long-range sniping cruiser. Buffing her accuracy with the UU allows you to hit specific parts of the ship with HE to maximize fire starting and practically guarentee citadels at medium/long range with AP. The UU takes what Moskva does best and buffs it, making it a good choice to pick up. There are others that make playstyle tradeoffs that you have to choose for yourself if you want to utilize them. These include ships like Gearing ( -DPM, +Concealment), Venezia ( -Stealth/Rudder, +Smoke utility), Grozovoi ( -Torp DPM, + Gun DPM), and YY ( -Conceal, + radar utility and DPM). Hope this helps!

Are you complaining that you get sunk when you don't pay attention? If you're generally watching the enemy team, you can spot shells heading towards your ship very reliably. It's a pretty basic learned skill, and it usually only takes getting dev struck once or twice when you thought you were safe to learn how important paying attention to your surroundings is. Because you have ample tools, strategies, and time to mitigate long range BB AP, the interaction feels fair. When you lose to a fair mechanic, frustration is accompanied by the notion that you were bested through skill and not bad luck, and allows you to use the experience to learn, grow, and become a better player. It's like complaining about eating torpedoes while you sail in a straight line for 2-3 minutes despite knowing there are DDs about. You have no one to blame but your own inexperience and folly, so you take your lumps and learn how to avoid making the same mistake. I don't think you understood my post, but I also could have highlighted my point better. The difference is in the distribution of player agency, and the subsequent player response to the interaction. In a BB/CA interaction, both players have a great deal of agency over how the interaction plays out. The BB can hold his shot for a predictable movement pattern, predict the maneuver the CA will take and shoot accordingly, choose to fire a full broadside at one spot or spread his shots around an area, etc. The Cruiser can turn, speed juke, angle, disengage with smoke or islands, etc. >~75% of the interaction is directly decided by the choices made by both the BB and the CA, split about evenly. If you mess up, generally you get punished. If you outplay your opponent, generally you get rewarded. The other 25% of the time, shell RNG or other unpredictable factors have a meaningful impact on the outcome. In a CV/CA interaction, the CV has vastly more agency than the CA. The CV decides when to strike, with what ordinance, the exact angle of attack, how much damage they eat from flak, how much time they will spend in AA, how many times they will strike, etc. The CA gets to priority sector and Defensive Fire then decide if it's worth it to attempt to mitigate CV damage by maneuvering. Compared to the 37-37-25 split between the BB, CA, and RNG, there is about a 70-10-20 split between the CV, CA, and RNG. This disparity in player agency is what makes CV/CA interactions so much more frustrating: Even while performing at maximum potential, the CA player is completely dominated by the CV player in the interaction. If you get chunked by a BB, you can usually take steps to not make that mistake in the future. If you get chunked by a CV, there is a distinct probability that there wasn't more you could have done outside of completely changing your playstyle and moving to J1. If you completely dodge a BB salvo, you can feel proud of using your skills to throw off their aim or thankful that the BB can't aim. If you dodge a CV attack, it is usually because they screwed up or RNG stepped in, not because of any outstanding play on your part. It matters how the interaction plays out, and that things feel fair on both sides. Otherwise you're just playing a multiplayer slot machine. I wanted to reply to this specific part of your post because it was the most interesting part to me, and one I took issue with how it was presented. I don't have a stance on CC negativity and the community environment it perpetuates beyond what people have already brought up, at least not one I care to share in a well thought out and meaningfully written way. Making movement and shooting mechanics in video games feel fair and rewarding is something I've thought a lot about over many different games, so I chimed into the part of your post that touched on that subject.

Getting chunked by a 20km+ BB salvo teaches the player to scan the horizon for incoming shots, to be aware of enemy BB positions, and to assume that when you're getting shot at whenever you're spotted. You can learn from this engagement and prevent it from happening in the future with good positioning and awareness. It's not a fun experience, but it's a stepping stone on the journey to mastering the game. Despite the massive damage taken, this isn't frustrating to a learning player because the interaction is generally fair (or at least feels fair). If a BB predicted where you were going to be in 13-15 seconds while you act like a sitting duck, he deserves to hit his shot and punish you for not paying attention. You have plenty of opportunity in a cruiser to dictate the terms of the engagement thanks to your generally better maneuverability and stealth, and plenty of time to maneuver and avoid incoming BB salvos. Sometimes you mistime or misjudge your dodge and eat massive damage. Sometimes a BB will just get lucky. Sometimes a stray shell will end up citadeling you. This level of RNG and imbalanced interaction creates complexity and intrigue, complementing the otherwise heavy focus on skillful player input. Contrast this with a CA being dropped by a CV. That interaction feels unfair because the CA has a single button input attempt to mitigate or negate the incoming damage outside of hyper-defensive positioning. The vast majority of player agency is left in the hands of the CV, which becomes frustrating instead of enlightening. The only learning done from eating a 10k chunk from CV planes is to attempt to avoid the interaction entirely by playing passively and making yourself a less favorable target than your teammates.

The energy and excitement a good caster can inject into a complex game is tremendously valuable. Having someone point out the nuances of an intricate position, or point out and hype up a smart/important play does wonders for getting people invested. I got into casting and writing a newsletter for a different competitive game a few years ago, and was inspired to do so by watching the casters put on an entertaining show. It's incredibly important work.

Stalin's guns are really fun, but if you have Moksva it can feel like more of the same. Austin is incredibly unique and powerful, but very difficult to play well. I love both, but enjoy the Austin more for randoms.

Do you remember the T6 CB season with CVs, where we all sat around in crawling and Pan-Asian smokescreens staring at each other without vision for 12 minutes at a time? That's the exciting alternative you're proposing. Not to mention that you'd be attempting to push that into 12km radar, T10 torps, and coordinated crossfires using incredibly squishy ships, the effectiveness of which can be countered by a Gearing + Nevsky combo plus some BB/Moskva crossfire. You might be able to theory craft something like that, but actually executing it in a win or go home scenario against quite literally the best players in the game is something else entirely. Wows is a very, very slow game. When teams with competent players are trying their hardest against each other, it comes down to everything from the little micro-positioning choices a cruiser might make taking an island position to the timing of rotating or pushing ships to whether your DD survives on 500 hp or 3k hp after a radar. This does not translate into a thrilling viewing experience for most. The beauty and entertainment lies in watching the grand strategies unfold, how different teams approach attacking different maps, how well someone can execute a push, and how teams try to make desperate plays to save the game and completely flip the script. I don't think there is a way to make KOTS more exciting to the average player because the spectator barrier for entry is just so high. It's like watching a professional Go tournament; unless you're already interested in the extreme nuance and dedicated to understanding the tedious and strategic aspects of the game, you're just going to fall asleep. People either have to have a clan team to root for or be very invested in using KOTS as a learning experience. However, this does not mean that the tournament itself is at fault. KOTS was a player-led initiative to have fun pushing the competitive limits of the game. WoWs is not an e-sport designed for tournament play, but its depth makes a competitive scene both fun and worthwhile to be a part of.

The "Advanced Strategy" that comes out of adding CVs is long range kiting with the same 3-4 cruisers or smoked up Nevskies staring at each other from 18-20km while their Gearings try to hit torps at max range. At the highest levels, the CV amplifies how hard you can punish someone who is even the tiniest bit exposed by orders of magnitude, so the game turns into even more of a stale, boring, tedious camp-fest than ever before. It sucks to play. It sucks to play against. It's frustrating, boring gameplay that often comes down to praying for fire RNG instead of promoting any kind of complex thought. The gameplay is antithetical to a competitive environment and is despised by the vast majority of competitive-minded players I've heard from. Additionally, you seem to be under the impression that "Top Teams" don't like to play this crummy version of the game because they simply aren't skilled enough to hang with Randoms players. However, if you look at the CB seasons that had CVs, you'll find all the same clans still sitting at the top of the heap. If you look at Random Battles stats, you'll see all the players from the top teams sitting among and above the top Randoms performers. The teams at the top are at the top because they've put in the time and effort to understand the game better than everyone else. Adding in CVs doesn't change who's at the top, it just makes it a more painful experience getting there.

Nice work! Looks like a very well-played game :)