This is what MM looks like lately

[gurudennis]

 

Look at the line-up closely. Do you see it? Tons of HE, smoke and walls of skill. Camping and sniping. All that goodness.

 

As a squishy cruiser with no real purpose and a vulnerability to being detected and to torpedoes sent into smoke, there's hardly anything to be done there at all. It's just not enjoyable and hardly any possibility exists to contribute meaningfully. Fight for scraps of damage and for your life, sure. It's NO fun knowing before you even load in that your role for the next 20 minutes of your life is smiply food.

 

Off topic #1. We ended up winning. I had something like 35k damage and lived. Landed in the bottom half of the scoreboard. My most significant contribution despite staying on the frontlines as much as the situation would allow was smoking a friendly Yamato some 15 seconds before a massive torpedo spread claimed what was left of her HP. This is irrelevant to the point of the post, but since people are going to ask anyway I figured I'd answer in advance.

 

Why does this seem to happen so often lately? I see two major reasons:

 

1. Premium T10 camo and economy changes. Playing T10 continuously is entirely economically viable even for a below average player, so many people do just that. Too many, in fact. I was warning about this loud and clear when the news first floated on the forum, and people disagreed. I hate to be right sometimes.

 

2. T5-6 MM being toxic as we all know it is. Normally you'd have to grind at T5-6-7 to recoup the losses at T10 or simply earn more credits to advance in the tech tree. Now that there are so many ways around this problem, hardly anyone in their right mind would play mid tiers. Hence a much lower population at T6 that would otherwise create an opportunity for T8 to be top tier.

 

Off topic #2. Add to this the new DD line and its walls of "skill". Before you start arguing on this, I'm not saying they are OP or anything, just that their effect on the overall meta is significant. Nothing really changed at T9-10, but the overall abundance of destroyers in the MM has become much worse this past week, so the sniping meta is back in full swing at most mid and high tiers. If that wasn't enough, oversaturation of DDs also means that everyone (including destroyers) has fewer visible things to shoot and lower enemy health pools to tap for damage, which directly impacts how games play out and how enjoyable they are.

 

I'm not looking forward to KM DDs because the problem of destroyer overpopulation will reach new and never before seen heights. You just don't release two DD lines in quick succession, WG. Just don't. I want to play them as much as the next guy, maybe even more, but not at this cost.

 

Some ship types suffer less from this, some suffer more. I've been trying to grind my Edinburgh and now I've had enough zero-win days and terrible outcomes to see the futility of it. She doesn't work in T10 games and in same-tier sniping engagements, and those are the two most common types of matches you tend to get lately. @!#$ this %$@# I'm out. For now anyway. Back to T7, the only playable tier (sub 10) that remains.

[anonym_LreZfNvihoej]

Are you kidding me? Edinburgh in this setup often brings home 80-120k damage and first place in team. Fiji and up are amazing pocket knives - just today I've made 8 kills in Neptune and it was similar mm (yea, T9 RN CL is amazing, but). This thing just cut through superstructures and shred dd's like lawnmower

 

Division up with me - I think I can help with Edin (we worked divisioning tactics with this razor)

[SubTender_Taigei]

Matchmaking has always been like that. There are those that are top tier, and those that are bottom tier, with a middle tier once you get to tier V-X unless there are enough players for a 2 tier spread. You seriously can't expect to be top-tier in every single match.

[TheKrimzonDemon]

MM is murdering me too. Today especially. I've had zero hope since my first 2 battles. My third, I loaded in as the ONLY T8, and I was a DD that was outclassed by the other DD's at T10. Smoking was pointless, all it did was keep me alive longer, I never got in any gun range at all, nor torpedo range. Breasts on a boar would be far more useful than I have been today. Sadly. My other battles after the first two were nothing but kids on my team, against actual TEAMS. So, that didn't go well, at all. The first lasted a total of 4 minutes, and I don't even know wthwas going on in the second, I honestly think the other team realized they could take a dinner break and still win, my team was so bad. My rating got hammered today, and there's absolutely nothing I could do about it. That, right there, is what stings. MM is horridly NOT making matches, and your rating suffers horribly, and it's not your fault.

[godzilla5549]

This rise in DD population is due to the fact that battleships are still the most played class by far.

 

We have a BB population problem (and have had it for a looooong time). What do you do when you have too many BBs? You play DDs. And people are playing the right ships to hunt BBs: Fletcher and Gearing.

[TheKrimzonDemon]

This rise in DD population is due to the fact that battleships are still the most played class by far.

 

We have a BB population problem (and have had it for a looooong time). What do you do when you have too many BBs? You play DDs. And people are playing the right ships to hunt BBs: Fletcher and Gearing.

 

I hate BB's. I rarely play them, hence why I'm stuck at T6, compared to T7 and T8 everywhere else. I hatehatehatehatehate them. Couple of the premiums are fun, but beyond that, just no. There's too many fast and fast firing cruisers and destroyers in the game to run around in a slow torp magnet.

[Goliath654]

BRING BACK THE OLD MM!!!!! I wanna see tier II's against X's lol

 

[Rouxi]

 

Look at the line-up closely. Do you see it? Tons of HE, smoke and walls of skill. Camping and sniping. All that goodness.

 

As a squishy cruiser with no real purpose and a vulnerability to being detected and to torpedoes sent into smoke, there's hardly anything to be done there at all. It's just not enjoyable and hardly any possibility exists to contribute meaningfully. Fight for scraps of damage and for your life, sure. It's NO fun knowing before you even load in that your role for the next 20 minutes of your life is smiply food.

 

It's not the HE, smoke and walls of skill that are making it so hard and causing the camping. It's the big guns on the big ships, in other words the BB. When getting spotted means within 15s you'll have several dozen 16" shells headed your way from every direction imaginable you become very risk adverse and start wanting to stay as far back as possible. This is compounded by WG's weird obsession with making high tier maps wide open allowing people to snipe from across the map making it impossible to angle since fire is coming in from every direction. What we need are more maps with large dividing islands that break line of sight which minimize the number of threats you have to account for at once.

[Brohk]

This rise in DD population is due to the fact that battleships are still the most played class by far.

 

We have a BB population problem (and have had it for a looooong time). What do you do when you have too many BBs? You play DDs. And people are playing the right ships to hunt BBs: Fletcher and Gearing.

 

Hit the nail on the head, just look at the picture in the OP. Eight destroyers and ten battleships, and matches like this are commonplace. 

[MrDeaf]

I think it is because T8/9/10 cruisers still have issues countering equal tier DDs.

[Rouxi]

I think it is because T8/9/10 cruisers still have issues countering equal tier DDs.

 

The only issue they have is the fear of being deleted at any moment by a BB.

[TheKrimzonDemon]

 

The only issue they have is the fear of being deleted at any moment by a BB.

 

This. This my chief fear. It's why I avoid playing my Lo Yang, Hipper, Prinz Eugen, and Tirpitz. I ALWAYS end up in a battle full of T10 DD's and BB's, and run for my life and that's it, until said deletion occurs.

[TheKrimzonDemon]

 

It's not the HE, smoke and walls of skill that are making it so hard and causing the camping. It's the big guns on the big ships, in other words the BB. When getting spotted means within 15s you'll have several dozen 16" shells headed your way from every direction imaginable you become very risk adverse and start wanting to stay as far back as possible. This is compounded by WG's weird obsession with making high tier maps wide open allowing people to snipe from across the map making it impossible to angle since fire is coming in from every direction. What we need are more maps with large dividing islands that break line of sight which minimize the number of threats you have to account for at once.

 

I have to agree. I saw the empty ocean map for the first time today, which got me called a noob, though I'm not. Rather than get to enjoy the difference, I was blasted as soon as the match started, by 16 and 18 inch shells. I mean, seriously? In a DD, shot at and hit before I could even get really moving. Htfh is that remotely fair? How was I even SEEN in a DD that fast?

[legoboy0401]

I have to agree. I've played in(and this is only today) battle tiers ranging from Tier III-IV to Tier VI-VIII.

 

I've run into SO MANY FREAKING EXPERT DDs today that it hasn't been much fun.

 

Although, that said, I have seen more than my usual fair share of idiotic Cruiser players, lots of them stop dead in the water or reverse for no reason, and my BBs feast. Even when they don't do that, they usually are fairly predictable in their course. nom nom nom.

 

Add to that a couple of dumb and bad DD players trying to cash in on the unicum DDs successes, and you get my latest Wyoming battle(the Cruisers) and my latest Texas battle.

 

An enemy Derzki was coming round an island two or three km from me, and me in my Texas with only AP loaded was ready. When he came out from behind the island, expecting to torp me, I thought(I had my guns pre-aimed at where he would be) to myself "All hands, open fire with all you've got!" and fired. ALL(EVERY SINGLE ONE) 10 shells hit, and utterly obliterated the tiny DD. It happened so fast for him that he didn't even get his torps launched... ...and that is how I got a devastating strike against a DD in a BB, with nothing but AP-loaded guns and no detonations.

[Kconvey_1]

 

The only issue they have is the fear of being deleted at any moment by a BB.

 

Cruisers are crud in the current game, its destroyers and battleships only. 

[Mahrs]

Tier X is frustrating in Hipper...my only Tier VIII (well, Takao...but, I don't count her).  Perhaps once I get my 15th skill point and CE it will get a bit better?  Hipper can sling some HE to a respectable range...but, it's not BB range...not even close...especially not Tier X BB.  

 

The challenge: sailing essentially a close-mid range boat in a match where there is, literally, no path to get within 14-15km of the reds unseen.  This affects all cruisers, really.  Even those with longer range do their best work in the close-mid envelope.  

 

The USN relies on the closer range due to shell arcs (and sometimes hard limits on max range), the KM because their AP penetration falls off so quickly.  The VMF handle the long range, "sling HE at everything" sniper fests because their damage output works within that style already.  IJN are gifted with generally very good HE, though without the delicious gun handling of the VMF.  The RN is the X-factor - chain saw style guns that put out consistent damage on anything in range, but obviously no HE.  Their generally good MBH %(which doesn't suffer until Minotaur...which, not coincidentally, lags the IJN and VMF ships at Tier X in dam output), combined with their volume of fire leads to good damage numbers...and, if anything, drives home the point that close-mid range is where cruisers do their best work.

 

Anyhow, hang in there...best of luck!  I think I only saw Tier IX in the games I played today.  Hilariously, I sunk a Missouri in my Myoko who steadfastly refused to pay attention to me.  His Iowa buddy picked me up though.  I was capping B on Shards, tanking for my team...because the BBs we had weren't up to it.  Unsurprisingly, we didn't win that match. ;-)

[Soylent_Red_Is_Tomato]

This rise in DD population is due to the fact that battleships are still the most played class by far.

We have a BB population problem (and have had it for a looooong time). What do you do when you have too many BBs? You play DDs. And people are playing the right ships to hunt BBs: Fletcher and Gearing.

Hit the nail on the head, just look at the picture in the OP. Eight destroyers and ten battleships, and matches like this are commonplace. 

Definitely.

 

Queue for a PvP battle, and get 5/6 BBs a side almost guaranteed out of (12) ships per team.

Queue for a PvE battle, and get 5/6 BBs a side quite often out of just (8) ships per team... only more of those ships will be ending a match with nothing at all ($$$ & XP) to show for it.

 

Enter a PvP battle as a cruiser and you may not get much anything, if at all, to show for it with so many BBs, DDs, and the occasional CV thrown into a team unless you yolo something.

Enter a PvE battle as a cruiser and you probably won't get much anything, if at all, to show for it with so many BBs, DDs, and the occasional CV thrown into a team unless you yolo something.

 

Having to (try to) yolo simply to not lose credits, let alone advance to the next ship or etc etc, should never be the more viable choice in a game where team-oriented play is how matches are won.

[Rouxi]

 

Cruisers are crud in the current game, its destroyers and battleships only. 

 

High tier cruisers are incredibly effective at killing DD, but in order to do that they have to push up and the moment they do every BB on the map aims their way. When I play high tier DD I'm not afraid of CA at all, not because they aren't scary but because I know the big ships behind me are even scarier. As long as I don't get too far ahead of my BB I know I'll never have to fear any CA because they all run as soon as the BB are spotted.

[Brohk]

As if to illustrate, this was my last match in my Hipper:

 

Twice as many battleships as there are destroyers. 

[GhostSwordsman]

Oddly enough, this is worse on the weekends. I play often in the mid/late afternoon on weekdays and I do find a fair amount of matches that only comprise of 6 or less capital ships total. With the rest either being cruisers or destroyers. Plus, during the weekdays, the number of cruisers in queue generally outnumbers the battleships in the tiers I play in (T6/7/8, so MM range of T5-T9/10), yet strangely, I still find games like the above images(all of them) very common. More common than I'd like

 

Those matches are honestly the best of the bunch. It's easy to check fire from two or three enemy BBs in a cruiser, and keep track of them, but once the number of BBs equals or exceeds the number of cruisers, they have to start hiding like a DD, because it's guaranteed that one BB won't be shooting at something, and they're all too eager to shoot at a cruiser(cit-hungry BBs).

[Reymu]

Simply means you have to check your aggressive side more often if there's a lot of BBs. Not hard to do as a cruiser, and it gets more feast or famine when that happens.

 

It happens. I just do what I can.

[Aardvar]

MM should limit each match to 4 capital ships per side with not more than 1 being a CV; so 1 CV and 3 BBs or 4 BBs.  Also limit DDs to 3 per side.  The remaining 5 ships must be cruisers.

[Brohk]

Simply means you have to check your aggressive side more often if there's a lot of BBs. Not hard to do as a cruiser, and it gets more feast or famine when that happens.

 

It happens. I just do what I can.

 

Oh absolutely, and I had a pretty damn good game in my Hipper (win, first in XP earned with 2025 base). The problem is how this affects the average player and how they respond to matches like this occurring frequently. Is it frustrating? Does it drive them away from playing cruisers? Does it drive them towards playing battleships and destroyers (can't beat 'em, join 'em!)? 

 

Just playing in a game where certain death awaits the slightest mistake or momentary lapse of awareness can be frustrating. Doing well in that same environment can feel impossible. 

[IronWolfV]

 

Look at the line-up closely. Do you see it? Tons of HE, smoke and walls of skill. Camping and sniping. All that goodness.

 

As a squishy cruiser with no real purpose and a vulnerability to being detected and to torpedoes sent into smoke, there's hardly anything to be done there at all. It's just not enjoyable and hardly any possibility exists to contribute meaningfully. Fight for scraps of damage and for your life, sure. It's NO fun knowing before you even load in that your role for the next 20 minutes of your life is smiply food.

 

Off topic #1. We ended up winning. I had something like 35k damage and lived. Landed in the bottom half of the scoreboard. My most significant contribution despite staying on the frontlines as much as the situation would allow was smoking a friendly Yamato some 15 seconds before a massive torpedo spread claimed what was left of her HP. This is irrelevant to the point of the post, but since people are going to ask anyway I figured I'd answer in advance.

 

Why does this seem to happen so often lately? I see two major reasons:

 

1. Premium T10 camo and economy changes. Playing T10 continuously is entirely economically viable even for a below average player, so many people do just that. Too many, in fact. I was warning about this loud and clear when the news first floated on the forum, and people disagreed. I hate to be right sometimes.

 

2. T5-6 MM being toxic as we all know it is. Normally you'd have to grind at T5-6-7 to recoup the losses at T10 or simply earn more credits to advance in the tech tree. Now that there are so many ways around this problem, hardly anyone in their right mind would play mid tiers. Hence a much lower population at T6 that would otherwise create an opportunity for T8 to be top tier.

 

Off topic #2. Add to this the new DD line and its walls of "skill". Before you start arguing on this, I'm not saying they are OP or anything, just that their effect on the overall meta is significant. Nothing really changed at T9-10, but the overall abundance of destroyers in the MM has become much worse this past week, so the sniping meta is back in full swing at most mid and high tiers. If that wasn't enough, oversaturation of DDs also means that everyone (including destroyers) has fewer visible things to shoot and lower enemy health pools to tap for damage, which directly impacts how games play out and how enjoyable they are.

 

I'm not looking forward to KM DDs because the problem of destroyer overpopulation will reach new and never before seen heights. You just don't release two DD lines in quick succession, WG. Just don't. I want to play them as much as the next guy, maybe even more, but not at this cost.

 

Some ship types suffer less from this, some suffer more. I've been trying to grind my Edinburgh and now I've had enough zero-win days and terrible outcomes to see the futility of it. She doesn't work in T10 games and in same-tier sniping engagements, and those are the two most common types of matches you tend to get lately. @!#$ this %$@# I'm out. For now anyway. Back to T7, the only playable tier (sub 10) that remains.

 

The hell you whining about? Least you have smoke and can play "NINJA VANISH" where as my poor Atago is being crushed like a tin can do to the constant up tier. I may have to just stop running her for now as I am just getting crushed at ranges I simply cannot reply to.

[SgtSpud]

 

It's not the HE, smoke and walls of skill that are making it so hard and causing the camping. It's the big guns on the big ships, in other words the BB. When getting spotted means within 15s you'll have several dozen 16" shells headed your way from every direction imaginable you become very risk adverse and start wanting to stay as far back as possible. This is compounded by WG's weird obsession with making high tier maps wide open allowing people to snipe from across the map making it impossible to angle since fire is coming in from every direction. What we need are more maps with large dividing islands that break line of sight which minimize the number of threats you have to account for at once.

 

I think I like this idea, if the goal is to stop sniping from orbit this might be a step in the right direction.