We need an agreed metric for OP/UP discussions.

[verkhne]

  After following some interesting discussions on these boards I have noticed a common stumbling block when trying to evaluate ships/lines. What statistical method has merit.

 

 Due to "hidden stat' server average numbers  may not be a valid overview of a ships performance (this is what I took from some of the discussions others are welcome

to clarify/correct my interpretation.)

 

  Would the ship statistics in the hands of its top 10% users be a fair  criteria? This group is not likely to be hiding it's stats. One could argue that top players have abandoned certain ships or lines (eg Atlanta or US cruisers) but even so that would be a telling piece of information.

 

  Any other methods? Perhaps evaluating top scores only of players with these ship types (again games played would have an effect)

 

 A standard baseline of ship effectiveness would allow more fruitful and less diverted discourse on these boards!

[aSlipperySausage]

Honestly I dont think one percentile will give enough information onto how a ship generally is. Some ships maybe but I do think because of skill cap/variance it would probably be good to look at 50% and the bottom as well. We would get an idea of how the ship performs with Unicums, on average and what the min scores are generally. Despite that stats can be hidden I don't think it's a large enough of the population to make a difference. It would also be interesting to compare across servers, differences in meta/preferred play style. 

 

The problem with some discussions though is that people don't always rely on logic/data but anecdotal experience. Also you get misunderstandings which can hinder efficient communication. We could be like the developers and say a ships worth in yubaris lol but we'd be guessing at that point.

[NargilFenris]

I would use server averages as a good metric. Maybe even look at a ships average across NA, EU, RU, and SEA servers.

[Submarine_Wahoo]

Hidden stat is an opt in function, unlike games like Armored Warfare where hidden is the default setting, so it's really only players who are conscious about their stats (regardless of their skill) are the ones that choose to activate hidden stats.

[SpeedingBus]

  After following some interesting discussions on these boards I have noticed a common stumbling block when trying to evaluate ships/lines. What statistical method has merit.

 

 Due to "hidden stat' server average numbers  may not be a valid overview of a ships performance (this is what I took from some of the discussions others are welcome

to clarify/correct my interpretation.)

 

  Would the ship statistics in the hands of its top 10% users be a fair  criteria? This group is not likely to be hiding it's stats. One could argue that top players have abandoned certain ships or lines (eg Atlanta or US cruisers) but even so that would be a telling piece of information.

 

  Any other methods? Perhaps evaluating top scores only of players with these ship types (again games played would have an effect)

 

 A standard baseline of ship effectiveness would allow more fruitful and less diverted discourse on these boards!

Don't listen to people claiming that there are hundreds of players that hide there stats. We don't even have that many active forum goers let alone most of us don't hide our stats in the first place. Also if your not an active forum poster you don't even know that you can hide your stats let alone would bother to.

[WanderingGhost]

They tried that top percentile thing when making the personal missions over on tanks and guess what, it failed hard. You can't balance a game around what the top players play as, you have to go by your average players because maybe the top players have some other trick they use.

 

Using top players, CV's would potentially be one of the most overpowered classes in the game because the top CV users abuse the ever living hell out of the broken manual drop mechanic. where as those who don't wish to abuse it deal less due to how some of the balance is. Then you have the average players who are keeping there squads grouped for attacks but getting slaughtered by top players using strafing. Part of why CV's are nearly non existent in matches because it has devolved into alt attack spam.

 

Cruisers would seem weak as BB's with skilled players just land citadel after citadel across the map. Yet against a DD, that same cruiser may seem like some doomsday ship.

 

You can't balance it around the top 10 or even 20% because the difference could literally be aim and mechanics knowledge. You can't balance off the bad players either, and by bad, I mean the complain's torps are OP because they sail straight all the time at the same speed. The base has to be off the average player who knows enough to play the game well, and understand the core of it, but not super elite that can hit a citadel at 21 km while blindfolded.

 

But then again comes all the things we players don't know in terms of mechanics and how WG wants a ship to sorta play. Carriers, with how poorly the two nations are balanced, are a great example of this. Namely fighters. At tier 4, IJN, on paper, has the superior fighter, yet in combat, even with some help from AA looses to a Langley's in a click fight, no strafing. And setting up to enhance fighters, means that they did the same or still had more power without that specialization. Which all my observations have lead to  it being a matter of the stats we see are per plane, not the group, giving USN a very clear edge, or accuracy, which assuming its a mechanic similar to DB's again gives USN the edge because in the same area, USN fills more of it. But this is pure speculation based on observation because WG hasn't released what the specifics are. But we can only guess they want IJN's thing to be attack and USN's defense, but as is has more or less made CV's unplayable for the majority of players.

 

End all be all, all methods are somewhat subjective to balance, a common one is winrate, but those numbers can easily be skewed by the ship simply being more popular but not being OP, or sample size, or by blind, silly do-da clueless luck.

[dahdah325]

Quite honestly, we as players never see the depth of information that WG has access to. The vast majority of arguments over OP/UP here on the forums are simply people expressing opinions, often times without fully understanding or being able to best utilize basic game mechanics. Trying to quantify OP/UP from a player's perspective is really not worth spending a lot of time on.