Some Thoughts on This PTS

[AJTP89]

So, generally the PTS is everyone runs up to T10 and half of each team derps up, and the team with the least amount of morons wins. The rewards tend determine the primary ships.This one is a little different.

 

What's being tested: Shorter duration CL, CA, and DD fires and longer RN smoke. The missions. Do 15K fire damage to cruisers and DDs. OK, fair enough. Win two battles in Minotaur. Simple enough (heh heh). Clearly you're supposed to work your way up the RN tech tree to the Minotaur, testing the new smoke, and being the victims of the RN BBs who are doing the fire missions. To facilitate this, we get not the usual T8 ships, nor even T6 ships, but T3 ships. And this is a problem.

 

T3 and 4 are OK, pretty easy to find a battle. T5 is a little longer, but I managed to get a full battle. T6-8, forget it. I was playing the RU cruisers for the fire mission, and to get the XP for the Minotaur. Every Budyonny game was 4 v 4. Yeah, that was interesting. There were people who were at the beginning tiers, and the people at T10, but in between was nothing. Maybe that should have been thought through a bit more. Especially if you want to run up a line. You have to play something to get the XP for high tier ships, but it's a little tricky when there's only 7 people in your range.

 

Other thing. The minotaur mission and the fire mission are mutually exclusive, because, you know, the RN hasn't discovered HE. I thought about going full secondaries, but nah. I know this is more what happened to be testing, but maybe just make it win in any two RN CLs? That way you don't force everyone to T10, mostly through a line that doesn't complete the other mission.

 

Finally, can we please stop testing the minotaur this is the second time it's been 5 or 6 minotaurs on each team. It's really impossible to test anything like that. And if there is ever a ship that is not forgiving, this is it. I'm used to the terrible standard of play, but this time WG seems to have added to the usual chaos with the missions and ship choice.

 

Spoiler

I know PTS players are terrible, but I'm still amazed. This last battle, enemy Mino yolos me and another mino and a Baltimore, forgetting he has torps or smoke. Just as I think we may have less idiots, the other mino starts shooting at half the enemy team in B, while driving along in a straight line, also forgetting he has smoke and if he stops shooting he can vanish. After he goes down, the Baltimore decides to avenge him by yoloing the massive group at B. Needless to say, that game we lost (in fact, I think I had our only two kills)