First EU WoWS Q&A, translated by Ph3lan (WG staff) from French a few days ago. Excuse the poor formatting.
- Is there any progress at work on clans? When can we expect them and are they still coming? We understand that CWs are still faraway future (unfortunately) but we would appreciate at least clan tags, so players could start to gather together.We are still working on Clans and they should be arriving this year – we are aware of their importance for our audience and for any sort of team-based gameplay. But we can already tell you that the WoWs clans will be separate from the WoT ones.
- Are you planning any kind of official league / nice big tournament before the clans will be launched?So far we have only been organizing big, server wide event like the Grand Naval Battles, Project R, etc. Organizing a tournament would require using the training room and this is a feature of the game which we are still not ready to incorporate into the game.
- When are you going to finally unify gold from WoT/WoWp with doubloons in WoWs as you promised at the beginning of the game? it shouldn’t be a problem as doubloons have the same value as gold. There are players who bought big packages of gold in WoT/WoWp because they’ve been told the economy is going to be unified and they feel like they’ve been cheated.
When the free XPs are going to be unified, as it was promised?
Are gold and doubloons going to be unified? Currently is not possible to change your name with doubloons, but only with gold for example.Consolidation of the accounts is a staged process. So far, the announcement from September 2015 still stands: Currently Premium Time is unified for the whole World of trilogy, as are logins, passwords, account names. Information about any further unification will come with a separate announcement. - Is it possible to ask players in-game about what do they think about MM before the battle and not after it? Players are most of the time emotional after the battle and they tend to say MM was bad just because they lost (which is not necessarily MM’s doing) or the other way around, just because they want to be fast done with it. Sometimes players would like to check the table and check it before responding, but they can’t see it until they click their answer there.The same argument can be turned around: Before battle players may have some preconceived notion that is then disproved by actual battle result (such as winning against the odds) – we prefer to ask when the battle is ended as that way players see if it worked out or not.
- Any plans for fixing the UI bug where clicking on certain places on the screen de-selects your squadron (space over the ship icon on the left side, clicking on the minimap area,etc..)?We are gradually hunting down bugs, so in time this one should also be exterminated. Sometimes it may take some time to catch the more elusive ones though.
- Any plans for fixing the ability of attacking border huggers with your TB’s effectively? The border now doesn’t allow to angle the attack effectively?TBD
- Are there any plans of introducing daily login rewards similar to AW?We tend to try to encourage players to play daily instead – you have chance to finish daily missions, more or less permanent Boot Camp missions and you may also try to hunt achievements and Signal flags.
- When can we expect to have the chat box fixed in game?As above.
- Is there a MM rule (similar to the one in WoT) where you cannot be the bottom tier more than 3 times in a row?Currently we do not have this rule, on average players are spread evenly thorugh all possible setups – though it may obviously happen that if you are in a wrong place at a wrong time, you get a short end of the stick.
- When are we going to fix the in-game research options (for example: other players, etc.)Not sure what is meant here.
- What are the current plans for changes to carriers in the game, to no longer be big game-changers, but still fun to play?
Are we going to nerf the CVs this year again?
Are we going to implement changes in the carriers’ mechanism?We are currently not too happy with how carriers play out – we are planning to rework them and hopefully make them more fun for all players involved. Stay tuned! - Are we going to improve the fire mechanism?Damage mechanisms (including fire) are constantly worked upon, though currently we focus on making armor model as accurate as possible – see the changes in last few updates.
- Are we going to implement more commander skills?Possibly – while our latest update moved one of the most used ones to default skill, the captain skill tree will change and will see more updates in the future.
- Why does the marketing team repeatedly split the community between recievers of (multiple) gifts and those who get nothing, without a single explaination? We would even accept it if it was a lottery draw, but considering what has been posted before there are specific rules behind those giveaways. What does a player have to do to get selected at least once? Why do others get picked at every possible opportunity?The special offers etc. usually are based on a large matrix of selection criteria – we do not plan to publish them. If you did not get anything yet – do not despair, you just might not be target group for the current campaigns, but you can easily get lucky in the future.
- Why does Wargaming EU believe it is a good idea to antagonize supporting players by refusing to compensate them properly? A mission to earn a day or two of premium time wouldn’t be hard to do. There was one before the last attempt as well. Filtering the database for premium time purchases for the time frame couldn’t be that hard either (if it is a properly set up database).Not sure what the occasion referred here is, we do compensate Premium users routinely for longer server maintenance or for patch days.
- What are the plans regarding replays?Currently we are working on improving the system to the state where we will be satisfied with it – then we’ll be ready to unleash it en masse. For now, if you feel you need replays, you can find a guide on how to turn them on on the forum. Accidentally – the same goes for training rooms.
- Ranked has now been proven to be flawed, too much of a lottery. Getting to Rank 1 means little due to the total reliance on getting into a coordinated team more often than others. Can we not see a points system rewarding effort (spotting, capping damage etc) no matter what team? (Obviously a winning team would get a winners bonus).
Bottom line – Will Ranked get reworked to make it less like a lottery? Ranked definitely shows strong correlation between personal skill (and note that that may not necessarily mean highest XP – there is a ton of support activities that can decide a battle with little going in for personal reward) and getting to Rank 1 / speed thereof. However we are constantly working on improving the system and reward individual performance more. Stay tuned! - Early this year you made a video about what you planned for 2016. Could you make similar videos somewhat regularly? Like, as example, every six months with the first part of the video about what you did in the previous period(like a small recap, nothing too detailed or fancy) and the second part about the plans for the next one. That could be interesting and, potentially, useful(since you could gather impressions from the players)We try to give out information in advance, however that works only for the really big things – and even then we often have to shift the exact timeline.
- Will we have night battles with specific mechanisms (launch flares instead of planes, used lights, diminuation of view range…) in a special mode ?Right now we are working with the Cyclone and weather effects and checking their influence on gameplay. Night battles would bring a whole new host of technical challenges – so they are not in short time plans.
- Are we going to be able to test premium ships before buying them (like on a map against bot or allow us to test all the ships that we can unblock) ?We are thinking about how to provide better outlook on ships – regular or Premium. Currently we are working on providing timely basic gameplay tips and videos – and on running previews through our contributors.
- Can you tell us the history behind the partnership between Arpeggio and WoWS ? TBD
- When are we going to have permanent camo for T10 ships ?We are introducing new permanent camouflages gradually – bear in mind that it is quite a task, as ships are very complex things that need a lot of textures etc.
We started with the most used ships and gradually are filling in more and more permanent camos – so tier X will for sure find their place as well.
- Are you planning on reworking the reward system giving out credits & Exp so team play mechanism get better rewarded ? The idea is to encourage players to be team players by given them an incentive & better rewards at the end of the battle.Yes, we are looking more into rewards for team play and assistance etc. The trick is, obviously, to come up with solutions that would work, but cannot be abused.
- Is it going to be possible in the future to mount multiple flags on a single ship, for example from the different seasons?We are thinking about it, as it is a pity to be able to mount only one of the many flags – we will let you know when it’s closer.
- From time to time you see penetrations (indicated by the new ribbons) with 0 damage no effect. What is the cause/reason for this and is it a bug or intended?In most cases this would be intended – the most usual case is some module fully eating the damage, so that the ship’s hitpoints do not get affected (destroyed gun turrets, for example). Do not forget that even if some part of ship is knocked out, it usually means a huge piece of metal still in its place.
- When is the armor viewer going to be released? As with all such questions, the only valid answer is “When it’s ready” – but definitely not for gamescom.
- AA’s are able to shoot behind the mountains but it shouldn’t be like that. Are you going to fix that? This is not currently a priority – while it might be weird at moments, changing this would require quite some efforts – not only
- Are you planning to introduce a system to damage the ships crashing into landscape? Not for now – getting stuck under fire seems to be punishment good enough for careless sailing.
- Why do I have to reset all the captain skills when I want to change some captain skills? that’s just the way the system works – we are not planning to change this for now.
