Ramblings of an Alpha Tester

[Macabe]

***Not using "Alpha Tester" as a my opinion matters more, just illustrating how long i've been here***

 

The game has come a long way from my perspective in good ways and bad so i'm going to briefly go through them.

 

Good Stuffs:

• Fairly Frequent updates. Who doesn't like getting frequent updates?
• Playerbase has grown in a mostly good way. I'm not a people person but i like seeing a group of helpful people
• Wide variety of maps. I like the different maps, there's even a few maps that were removed in alpha and put back in.
• Some Semblance of balance. OP ships have gotten nerfed: Mogami, Cleveland, you know what they are.
• Armor Detailing. This has been needed for a long time. USN BBs really needed it.
• Implementation of some of the more well known mods. Damage counter, minimap circles. 

 

Bad Stuffs: 

• Removal of Spalling Damage. 
  • No Bueno
  • Spalling was a big deal in reality, i understand this is an arcade game but if you hit something with a big enough shell:
    • this happens when things hit armor: <-This is bad. The armor splinters. This kills people. Please reimplement to make AP more useful. 
  • Over-simplification of mechanics. 
    • Different Secondaries used to have different ranges based on their calibers and what-not. For the most part, all ships have their secondaries tuned to 1 range before they open fire. Not really a big issue but something i did like.
    • Removal of spalling damage because apparently AP shouldn't have almost guaranteed damage like HE. I'm not looking for huge amounts of damage but i liked this mechanic. It provided very minimal benefits but it was still a thing. Iirc it was only like 100 damage per shell that was able to do spalling.
    • Fire-spam. The fire-spam meta is bad. Became hugely apparent during the ammunition rebalance in beta. I don't like it. Makes cruisers too powerful imo. A BB who gets screwed by RNG for multiple salvoes is going to take heavy damage from fire and HE when going up against a same tier cruiser. I wouldn't have an issue with this and many would say, just turn around and leave but you can't do that most of the time. Generally that opens you up to to getting your broadside shot by other enemy players or takes you out of the fight. Imo this shouldn't happen given the supposed rock-paper-scissors dynamic the game was supposed to launch with. I'm perfectly fine getting murdered by a destroyer that spent 2-3 minutes planning his attack, HE spam is just annoying and has a lack of skill imo. Not sure how to fix it but maybe accuracy modifiers based on what you are firing at? ie: If you are the counter of a ship and you shoot at that ship you are the direct counter to, you have a slight accuracy buff? Maybe like an additional .1 or .2 of sigma??? Don't take this suggestion seriously. Just rambling.
• Invisifiring. I don't particularly have a huge problem with this as i'd take advantage of it too if i still had ships that could do it but i don't see how this benefits high-tier gameplay because it encourages passive play. Ships that can do this are able to sit at range and invisifire, this allows them to farm damage with impunity with no risk involved. Basically if you really wanted to you could just say [edited] the team, farm damage, finish with large amount of xp regardless of win or loss. At least CVs eventually lose all of their planes.
• No clan stuffs..... Pretty self explanatory
• Teamkill mechanics are great and all. But overly sensitive. I have yet to turn pink but secondaries shouldn't trigger team damage. I can understand main battery and torpedoes but not something you have no control over. Hitting P works but that is decreasing your dps just because an ally decided to go in front of you.
• CVs are still an unbalanced mess. I don't even know where to start with them. They shouldn't be capable of dealing high amounts of damage. They are the middle ground for effectiveness against all ships. They should be dealing a moderate amount of damage but not more than main damage dealers(Battleships and Cruisers). They should have more of a support and harassment role. Good CV players already do this for the most part. ie: Keeping destroyers lit, scouting ahead for the team, launching torps at ships to force them to broadside to your allies or get hit by torps. CVs just need a full rework. They are either really bad or really good. It is entirely dependant on the player that is using them. They have a very high skill ceiling which isn't a bad thing. I don't know where one would begin to rework them. For those who say i can't complain because i don't play them: I do play them, just not on the live server as i don't enjoy playing them anymore. I liked them in Alpha/BW but idk what changed but they're just meh to me now.

 

 

 

/mini-rant? Rambling? idk just OP end.

 

Edit: My bullet points apparently broke when i hit post for a couple things causing them to indent. Can't seem to get them to move back over.

[Herr_Reitz]

Invisifire to my way of thinking, is an irritant, especially to campers. There's nothing I like more than sneaking in with a solid DD and pounding the daylights out of a camper. You can almost hear the rage coming down the lines. It took me a good while to grind to that point of having ships capable of it after having had to suffer through it to get a ship that could do it. Make sense? So I see it as payback in a way too. 

 

Carriers are a mess... it seems to me they will have to do a complete realignment of everything in the game in order for carriers to fit without being OP/UP. I don't envy them. 

[Lert]

What I miss: separate buoyancy and hitpoint bars.

[Macabe]

What I miss: separate buoyancy and hitpoint bars.

 

Yeah but it was really buggy. I didn't list it because idk how they could properly implement it at this stage of the game.

[mr3awsome]

What I miss: Historical ranges. 

 

Say what you will, shooting at a Colorado at 40km in Amagi was fun, and getting that detonation is still the best thing I've experienced in the game. 

[Czevak]

Yeah, the new 'TK' system is waaay too sensitive. The implementation of WoWs clans (like WoT) would be very much appreciated

 

[Dapider]

"not a people person" Looks at the "Coordinator" part of tags.

/jk

 

Yeah, I just got the Mogami and I don't really know yet if the ship has been nerfed to hard or I'm just getting super poopy teams all the sudden. Last time I looked I had like a 22% w/l with it, though I had a little above server average damage in it. 155's are good, but stock range ( even upgraded looks bad) is just downright awful at that tier. As anything that can kill you, will kill you at that range.

[Lert]

 I didn't list it because idk how they could properly implement it at this stage of the game.

 

Torpeedus and flooding remove buoyancy. Shell hits and fires remove hitpoints. If a ship loses buoyancy it sinks. If a ship loses all hitpoints but retains buoyancy it becomes an non-functional, burning, floating 'wreck' that can be pushed out of the way, but will still functionally be 'alive' for red team ramming purposes. IE, enemies can suicide upon it, but friendlies won't do / take teamdamage nudging it.

 

Just a thought~

[VTAdmiral]

• CVs are still an unbalanced mess. I don't even know where to start with them. They shouldn't be capable of dealing high amounts of damage. They are the middle ground for effectiveness against all ships. They should be dealing a moderate amount of damage but not more than main damage dealers(Battleships and Cruisers). They should have more of a support and harassment role. Good CV players already do this for the most part. ie: Keeping destroyers lit, scouting ahead for the team, launching torps at ships to force them to broadside to your allies or get hit by torps. CVs just need a full rework. They are either really bad or really good. It is entirely dependant on the player that is using them. They have a very high skill ceiling which isn't a bad thing. I don't know where one would begin to rework them. For those who say i can't complain because i don't play them: I do play them, just not on the live server as i don't enjoy playing them anymore. I liked them in Alpha/BW but idk what changed but they're just meh to me now.

 

Have you seen my thread about carriers?

[DarthDon49]

I feel this game is trying too hard to be a "Social" site. If I wanted to buddy up to be competitive, I would be playing Guild Wars.

[QJW]

Yea when it comes down to it, one of the things I feel really need to return would be the separation of HP. Buoyancy was pretty neat and would like to see it return, even if it would take a while for it to come back. AP also still acts like crap and needs a rework as you mentioned. I would also like to see the repair system be more dynamic and interesting, even if it only reached the levels of the Battlestations game, it still would be more interesting. 

[BrushWolf]

Good stuff Mac. My thoughts on the CV's is the changes in alpha and closed beta to them that made auto-drop torpedoes, which were over powered then, completely useless against all but AFK targets and even then they are still mostly useless. This pushed the skill bar much too high making the really good CV players that much better in comparison which directly leads to all the nerf TB threads. The current auto-drop distance is so long that most ships are able to dodge the spread even when they wait until the torps are visible. Auto-drop torpedoes need to be buffed enough that targets that are paying attention will negate them but those that are not will get hammered but not so much that they compete with the better CV players doing manual drop. Before someone comes in and says that manual drop is easy and it just takes practice, it isn't easy or we would see a lot more decent/average CV players which we do not.

[BrushWolf]

What I miss: Historical ranges. 

 

Say what you will, shooting at a Colorado at 40km in Amagi was fun, and getting that detonation is still the best thing I've experienced in the game. 

 

While an Amagi and many other ships would probably have been able to hit a shore target from 40Km for ship to ship fire the maximum range is pretty much limited to the horizon so about 20Km, the gunnery officer needs to be able to directly react to the fall of shot to hit a moving ship. So that isn't historical.

[NargilFenris]

I miss when we had 3 depths of water, really made for great DD play as there were areas only they could use.

[The_GoDDfather]

 Invisifiring. I don't particularly have a huge problem with this as i'd take advantage of it too if i still had ships that could do it but i don't see how this benefits high-tier gameplay because it encourages passive play. Ships that can do this are able to sit at range and invisifire, this allows them to farm damage with impunity with no risk involved. Basically if you really wanted to you could just say [edited] the team, farm damage, finish with large amount of xp regardless of win or loss. At least CVs eventually lose all of their planes.

 

While this does create passive play, some ships don't have a choice. Any closer than invisi-firing range in most USN DDs means you're easy, easy picking for a cruiser. A 9km shot isn't the hardest thing in the world. I do it all the time; just wait for them to turn out, or put the reticle 7 seconds above the indicated flight time.

    Although, this isn't my beef with this mechanic, nor do I have a problem with this being used against me. (In most cases.) However, as I say this is a necessity on USN DDs, there are multiple ships around that shouldn't have the ability to stealth fire, Zao for example. Yet I wouldn't say German cruisers are in the wrong just because they can invisi-fire, since I know that's coming next. The Hindenburg requires range mod 3 with full concealment build to stealth fire at 18.7km, which isn't the easiest of shots. (Roon at about 18km) Not to mention the risk of an opposing ship (and there are no ships with higher detection than 18km iirc) being inside the invisi-firing bubble. You say invisi-firing like it's the easiest thing in the world., just sit outside of detection after firing your weapons. It's not, the high arcs on USN DDs and mediocre KMS CA arc at Hail Mary ranges make invisi-firing easy to dodge at the respective ranges.

    However, there are some of the VMF DDs, and a couple of IJN cruisers capable of invisi-firing at ranges where arc isn't much of an issue, along with their high as hell fire chance. The combination of arc and fire chance is what truly ruins this mechanic for the rest of us that prefer not to get nuked the moment you see us. (KMS CA and USN DD.) No VMF DD or IJN cruiser should be able to invisi-fire except maybe the Mogami (due to nerfs).

    /mini-rant

[Francois424]

I remember the uproar against HE Fires in BETA... And I also remember WG getting fed-up with the entire forum complaining and basically said to play another class of ships if you did not like it as it was there to stay (it unfortunately has).  I don't start topics complaining about fires, but I still hate the mechanics.  What would cruisers say if we gave them a BB Heal ability with same delay/charges as BBs, but each AP shell overpen had a chance to create up to 4 flood holes, you can only put it out with your repairs, and it's "Light Damage" so can be repaired with your heal...  The forum would burst out in flames and never stop... with good reasons.

 

Fires are especially bad because the Rock-Paper-Scissors is kinda broken with CR-vs-BB relation.  Except in higher tier when you can insta delete, and even then, if you miss your shot or cruiser keeps angled, a BB is skrewed.

I hope it'll get fixed when the CL lines are fleshed out.  CL have torps that can hunt BB's, and BB shell will overpen them more, enhancing their survavibility in that role, and CR could hunt CL instead of BB's

 

Fully agree with OP on everything.

We also need more CVs to counter the DD's, but careful not to make them borderline OP again.   Still I'll take my chances with more CVs.

[stickdeath1980]

You get Clan's in and it'll be more of a player base

[MaliceA4Thought]

Shallows and the boyancy and damage double hit bars are the bits I miss most.   The different depths of ocean which made strategic play much greater, and the delineation of hit damage also made things more "immersive"  pun intended.

 

I also miss the spalling and the overeffectiveness of HE wqhich ultimately resulted in the heal potions for BB's.

 

M

[HMCS_Devilfish]

***Not using "Alpha Tester" as a my opinion matters more, just illustrating how long i've been here***

 

The game has come a long way from my perspective in good ways and bad  so i'm going to briefly go through them.

 

Good Stuffs:

• Fairly Frequent updates. Who doesn't like getting frequent updates?
• Playerbase has grown in a mostly good way. I'm not a people person but i like seeing a group of helpful people
• Wide variety of maps. I like the different maps, there's even a few maps that were removed in alpha and put back in.
• Some Semblance of balance. OP ships have gotten nerfed: Mogami, Cleveland, you know what they are.
• Armor Detailing. This has been needed for a long time. USN BBs really needed it.
• Implementation of some of the more well known mods. Damage counter, minimap circles. 

 

Bad Stuffs: 

• Removal of Spalling Damage. 
  • No Bueno
  • Spalling was a big deal in reality, i understand this is an arcade game but if you hit something with a big enough shell:
    • this happens when things hit armor: <-This is bad. The armor splinters. This kills people. Please reimplement to make AP more useful. 
  • Over-simplification of mechanics. 
    • Different Secondaries used to have different ranges based on their calibers and what-not. For the most part, all ships have their secondaries tuned to 1 range before they open fire. Not really a big issue but something i did like.
    • Removal of spalling damage because apparently AP shouldn't have almost guaranteed damage like HE. I'm not looking for huge amounts of damage but i liked this mechanic. It provided very minimal benefits but it was still a thing. Iirc it was only like 100 damage per shell that was able to do spalling.
    • Fire-spam. The fire-spam meta is bad. Became hugely apparent during the ammunition rebalance in beta. I don't like it. Makes cruisers too powerful imo. A BB who gets screwed by RNG for multiple salvoes is going to take heavy damage from fire and HE when going up against a same tier cruiser. I wouldn't have an issue with this and many would say, just turn around and leave but you can't do that most of the time. Generally that opens you up to to getting your broadside shot by other enemy players or takes you out of the fight. Imo this shouldn't happen given the supposed rock-paper-scissors dynamic the game was supposed to launch with. I'm perfectly fine getting murdered by a destroyer that spent 2-3 minutes planning his attack, HE spam is just annoying and has a lack of skill imo. Not sure how to fix it but maybe accuracy modifiers based on what you are firing at? ie: If you are the counter of a ship and you shoot at that ship you are the direct counter to, you have a slight accuracy buff? Maybe like an additional .1 or .2 of sigma??? Don't take this suggestion seriously. Just rambling.
• Invisifiring. I don't particularly have a huge problem with this as i'd take advantage of it too if i still had ships that could do it but i don't see how this benefits high-tier gameplay because it encourages passive play. Ships that can do this are able to sit at range and invisifire, this allows them to farm damage with impunity with no risk involved. Basically if you really wanted to you could just say [edited] the team, farm damage, finish with large amount of xp regardless of win or loss. At least CVs eventually lose all of their planes.
• No clan stuffs..... Pretty self explanatory
• Teamkill mechanics are great and all. But overly sensitive. I have yet to turn pink but secondaries shouldn't trigger team damage. I can understand main battery and torpedoes but not something you have no control over. Hitting P works but that is decreasing your dps just because an ally decided to go in front of you.
• CVs are still an unbalanced mess. I don't even know where to start with them. They shouldn't be capable of dealing high amounts of damage. They are the middle ground for effectiveness against all ships. They should be dealing a moderate amount of damage but not more than main damage dealers(Battleships and Cruisers). They should have more of a support and harassment role. Good CV players already do this for the most part. ie: Keeping destroyers lit, scouting ahead for the team, launching torps at ships to force them to broadside to your allies or get hit by torps. CVs just need a full rework. They are either really bad or really good. It is entirely dependant on the player that is using them. They have a very high skill ceiling which isn't a bad thing. I don't know where one would begin to rework them. For those who say i can't complain because i don't play them: I do play them, just not on the live server as i don't enjoy playing them anymore. I liked them in Alpha/BW but idk what changed but they're just meh to me now.

 

 

 

/mini-rant? Rambling? idk just OP end.

 

Edit: My bullet points apparently broke when i hit post for a couple things causing them to indent. Can't seem to get them to move back over.

It hasnt gone unnoticed by me in a CA that got nerfed that pretty much always the ones still floating at end of the game  are BBs  before the nerf and certinly afterward also at times now there are just as many  BBs as CAs in game thanks to MM  , setting a BB on fire is the best  way to inflict good damage in a CA  , if he can take 3/4s of my health with 1big  shell ... Well fair is fair .. Deal with it... Just rambling on to

 

[AVR_Project]

 

Torpeedus and flooding remove buoyancy. Shell hits and fires remove hitpoints. If a ship loses buoyancy it sinks. If a ship loses all hitpoints but retains buoyancy it becomes an non-functional, burning, floating 'wreck' that can be pushed out of the way, but will still functionally be 'alive' for red team ramming purposes. IE, enemies can suicide upon it, but friendlies won't do / take teamdamage nudging it.

 

Just a thought~

 

Many shell hits are below the waterline.

Ironbottom sound is full of sunken wrecks caused by nothing but gunfire.

This is from the Wiki...  Battleship Prince of Wales:

"Prince of Wales struck her target first. She would ultimately hit Bismarck three times. One shell struck the commander's boat and put the seaplane catapult amidships out of action (the latter damage not being discovered until much later, during an attempt to fly off the ship's War Diary on the eve of her final battle). The second shell passed through the bow from one side to the other without exploding. The third struck the hull underwater and burst inside the ship, flooding a generator room and damaging the bulkhead to an adjoining boiler room, partially flooding it. These last two hits caused damage to Bismarck's machinery and medium flooding.^[14] More importantly, the damage to the bow cut access to 1,000 long tons (1,000 t) of fuel oil in the forward fuel tanks. It also caused Bismarck to leave a visible oil slick and reduced her speed by 2 kn (2.3 mph; 3.7 km/h). Bismarck was soon listing 9° to port and lost 2 m (6.6 ft) of freeboard at her bow.^["

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Denmark_Strait

[BrushWolf]

I remember the uproar against HE Fires in BETA... And I also remember WG getting fed-up with the entire forum complaining and basically said to play another class of ships if you did not like it as it was there to stay (it unfortunately has).  I don't start topics complaining about fires, but I still hate the mechanics.  What would cruisers say if we gave them a BB Heal ability with same delay/charges as BBs, but each AP shell overpen had a chance to create up to 4 flood holes, you can only put it out with your repairs, and it's "Light Damage" so can be repaired with your heal...  The forum would burst out in flames and never stop... with good reasons.

 

 

Fires are especially bad because the Rock-Paper-Scissors is kinda broken with CR-vs-BB relation.  Except in higher tier when you can insta delete, and even then, if you miss your shot or cruiser keeps angled, a BB is skrewed.

I hope it'll get fixed when the CL lines are fleshed out.  CL have torps that can hunt BB's, and BB shell will overpen them more, enhancing their survavibility in that role, and CR could hunt CL instead of BB's

 

 

Fully agree with OP on everything.

We also need more CVs to counter the DD's, but careful not to make them borderline OP again.   Still I'll take my chances with more CVs.

 

The problem with fires is the feeling of helplessness when your damage control party is on cool down. I would remove the timed damage of fire/flooding/weapon incapacitate and  instead of a consumable give each ship a number of damage control parties, 1 for DD, 2 for CL/CA, and 3 or 4 for BB/CV that can be assigned to a problem that have an increasing percentage chance to stop the fire/flooding with each tic of damage and a chance every few seconds to repair disabled guns. You can only assign one DCP to one problem with each fire/flooding/incaped gun being one problem. While more simulation like this would allow the player to feel that they have some control over these events.

[Covalence]

 

The problem with fires is the feeling of helplessness when your damage control party is on cool down. I would remove the timed damage of fire/flooding/weapon incapacitate and  instead of a consumable give each ship a number of damage control parties, 1 for DD, 2 for CL/CA, and 3 or 4 for BB/CV that can be assigned to a problem that have an increasing percentage chance to stop the fire/flooding with each tic of damage and a chance every few seconds to repair disabled guns. You can only assign one DCP to one problem with each fire/flooding/incaped gun being one problem. While more simulation like this would allow the player to feel that they have some control over these events.

 

This, the problem is not fires themselves, but the damage "scaling" of them. A single fire on a DD hardly affects HP, whereas one on a BB can take a good chunk of health off (albeit easily replenished with RP). That is before getting into multiple fires.

 

Another idea too is to reduce the chance of fire in a specific location after one has been set. Say a cruiser a 13% of setting a fire with a shell. If the cruiser sets one at the front of a BB, that chance drops to, say, 10% for any following shells hitting that specific location (don't get hung up on the value, it's for visualization). This reduction would affect all other ships shooting that location, with the reduction being the same across the board (so a 9% chance from a DD becomes 6%). Any further fires would add a further reduction value (say 10% to 7% for the second and 7% to 4% for the third, again for visualization). This way fires are kept the same as is while providing BBs a better chance of survival as a game wears on.

[Lert]

Many shell hits are below the waterline.

Ironbottom sound is full of sunken wrecks caused by nothing but gunfire.

 

Yes, but we're trying to keep the game streamlined and intuitive here. Gameplay mechanics and damage modeling should provide an immersive, simplified and intuitive model rather than a hardcore sim-esque one.

[mr3awsome]

While an Amagi and many other ships would probably have been able to hit a shore target from 40Km for ship to ship fire the maximum range is pretty much limited to the horizon so about 20Km, the gunnery officer needs to be able to directly react to the fall of shot to hit a moving ship. So that isn't historical.

Neither are hit rates above about 5% or the ranges that ships have been allocated, for example Warspite's ~16km when in that same form in real life she managed the joint further hit on record for a battleship at ~24km. 

[BrushWolf]

Neither are hit rates above about 5% or the ranges that ships have been allocated, for example Warspite's ~16km when in that same form in real life she managed the joint further hit on record for a battleship at ~24km. 

 

Real life range was based on the elevation of the guns and shell speed where here it is based on the height of the main mast which impacts each ship differently.