Fluffy WoWS Q&A – 29th September 2016

Thanks to Takeda92 for taking the time to sort out the relevant answers.
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/comments/54vqoz/dev_qa_lets_do_it/
Answered by Sub_Octavian, the best WoWS dev.
Q; Might not be within your ability to answer but misght as well ask.
Any plans to reduce the amount of BBs in game and improve CA/CL to make them more desirable?
A: We would like to make cruisers more popular. This is why they get rudder mod.3 in 0.5.12. Other tweaks will be introduced later.
In our concept of ideal class distribution, BBs should have 25-30% of popularity. It works more or less, but on some realms/tiers they exceeded this limit.

We don’t want global nerfs and will try to avoid them at all costs – this is why we cancelled bow plating reduction. But some smaller, more precise actions will be taken.
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Q: I think the question that’s bugging most of us is what the hell is going on with the British Cruisers.
A: The initial concept implied too much “HE-smoke-spam-click-click” meta gameplay, which we really don’t want to support more. We want each line to offer some unique experience rather than being clone of previous lines.
We are testing a new concept, the 2-nd edition didn’t show good results on production test, then we improved it and will tests 3-rd edition. For now, it seems to be much closer to what we want. I am not sure the line will be ready by 0.5.13, though. We’ll see.
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Q: Quite a few players feel that T5 and T6 are being handicapped since they currently see +2/-1. Is there any potential insight you could provide? Are those tiers likely to see +2/-2 ever again?.
A: We do realize that after matchmaker tuning T3-4 and T7-8 got more fun and T5-6 got more difficult to play. It was preidctable, and this was our conscious decision. We’re conducting a dedicated research on that to see what action is needed (if any) to soften the effect.
Personal remark: one guy from my team has started a new account, so we play on low-mid tiers weekly to help him with advancing. I have to say, T5-6 are still fun (IMO).
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Q: In the CV command interface, you seem to select your ship (no.1 squadron) each time you issue a lot of commands to your planes in a short timeframe. This can be very troublesome, not only because you might lose vital time in commanding your planes, but also because it might put your ship in danger, without you realizing it.
This feature is very rage inducing. Are there any plans to change how this works?
A: There are plans to re-work the whole CV UI, as it actually causes more problems then just someone pushing the wrong button. CV UI is very complex, it does not contribute to learning curve in positive way. We want to change that. However, for the next upcoming updates all major plans are complete, so I can’t tell you when and how exactly this will happen..yet.
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Q: It seems like Commonwealth and British ships will be separated (Perth, etc.). What was the reasoning behind this? It seems to somewhat clash with historical reality of WW2.
Will we ever be able to dismiss ARP commanders (and/or recruit new ones)? They often were obtained multiple times while ships were not (I have 3 Hiei), meaning they are currently stuck in reserve for many people, taking up a slot.
Any chance of ARP ships to be able to benefit from camo bonuses?
With the upcoming Haifuri collaboration, will we still toggle anime content by using the Yokosuka port, or will it be done differently (i.e. in the menus?)
A: But there are too many ships in both “factions” that might be introduced to the game. They won’t fit into one screen:D
Uh, I think your best shot might be support ticket – maybe they will help you and remove unwanted commanders.
Small chance (or not in the nearest future) – we are thinking about special camos for these ships, but, for example, hight tier permanent camo are more important (and more demanded).
Don’t know about this event, but I’m pretty sure all “stylized” content should be toggled, and it’s logical to toggle anime with one port.
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Q: Do you plan to revisit the New Orleans T8 Cruiser armor model before Ranked Season 5 and restore it to its historical setup as pointed out in this thread by /u/drowned_man?
A: Part of it is planned to be fixed, and the rest will be checked ASAP. I guess the whole bunch of fixes is coming. However, it won’t go to 0.5.12 – only to 0.5.13 (hopefully not 0.5.14).
UPDATE: fix planned for 0.5.13.
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Q: Knowing you can’t do specifics and it’s not your department…
Anything ‘coming soon’ for co-op? I do notice you guys are constantly tweaking the AI nearly every major patch (it’s not documented but the behavior differences are noticeable over time).
A: Yep, at least one experimental thing is likely to pop up soon. Then…we will see. I can safely say this: we have a separate dev group that works primarily on PvE evolution concept. So we do want to improve PvE.
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Q: Compring Mogami and Myoko, the number 5 turret on Mogami doesn’t turn all the way to broadside on Mogami, while it does on Myoko (and on Atago and Ibuki as well). This means that Mogami has to show more broadside to fire her number 5 turret. I’ll post screenshots below. Is this intended or a bug? Are the turret angles changed for balance reasons (eg: nerfed for overperforming ships) or devs always try for the optimal angles for all ships?
Also, the same question for Tenryu’s number 2 gun. Compared to the other 3 guns, it can only turn slightly more than 180 degress.
A: Sooo..checked both cases with devs. You are right. This will be fixed in 0.5.13, thank you so much for yor help.
Turret angles are normally NOT used as up/nerf method, they are more about comfort and historical accuracy.
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Q: Here are few:
Training Room – why is this not a fully implemented game feature? Currently, everyone needs to install a mod to unlock the training room
Chat in port – chat history will seem to just “magically” disappear – yet this is not an issue in WoT. Why are there still problems with the chat history?
Is there an estimated timeline for Team Battles?
Will there be something similar to the WoT Strongholds implemented in Warships?
When will the Wargaming Clans be updated to include Warships (currently has WoT and Warplanes…)
And finally, we have a unified account only in regards to premium time. Why has Warships back-tracked on a previous promise to unify gold/doubloons across platforms?
A: Training room will be implemented later in production quality. Chat – it is automatically cleared sometimes, triggered by inactivity or conversely, by messages limit. Team battles – not yet. Strongholds – let’s say, managing something in port is being designed as a concept. Clans – no comment yet. Unified currency – not possible now due to several implementing reasons, but will hopefully be worked out in future
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Q: Given how you guys at WG have all of the data to look at when balancing, what stats do you tend to consider the most? Is it win-rate? Average Damage? Another category?
Often we as the players just pull up the stats on warships.today, but that is neither the complete picture nor tell us what stats you consider when balancing.
A: There are tons of data to consider. Win rate and avg. damage are important, but there also so-called “hand dependance” – the comparison between ship effeciency and player effeciency, and other particular values like lifetime, range, done/received damage structure, and so on.
And all of that cannot be used without exploring the ships ourselves and/or with help of ST and community feedbacks to get the impressions, the feeling of the ship.
There are some ships that are fine but are not comfortable for most players and vice versa. So “human factor” is always taken into account to some extent.
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Q:
Are there ideas about restricting a maximum number of DD and BB for each side? There is already a system in place preventing to have more than 2 CV on each side. For example not having more than 3-4 DD and 4 BB in one match on each side? Too often I see 5 DD and 5 BB on each side, making Cruisers and CV rare and the gameplay results in sniping campfests.
Is Wargaming happy with the manual abilities of CV? Right now I am more or less forced to manually drop my torps in the face of enemy ships, making it either impossible to dodge them or letting me miss entirely because I dropped to close or at wrong angles.
Do you guys think Air-Air battles need to be improved (too much rng and US fighters are vastly superior to IJN fighters?)
A: CV are too unique. Doing this limitations for other classes is not desirable and will surely mess up matchmaking.
We are not quite happy with CV state and UI. Will work on it.
We think this class will eventually be re-worked in general, as I said a few times even in this thread.
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Q: Previously you have given some answers about what Krupp value is, it’s something about the “hardness” of the shell. For AP shells it is self explanatory: harder shells penetrate better. But what is the function for HE shells as they explode on contact?
Japanese HE shells have better Krupp in general than other nations and they seem to do more relative damage along with better module damage. While Yorck HE has the extremely low value of 1 for example.
A: Krupp value for HE shells is a redundant parameter. It is not used in game.
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Q: What is aircraft’s speed boost after dropping? And fire chance for each type of aerial bombs?
How many more premium ships can we expect to get from now till the end of the year (except Leningrad, Belfast and Perth)? I guess it is not possible to disclose the name, but how about the nation or class?
A:
That should be 25% boost. I will check it, just in case. Fire chance..it is HUGE. Just..HUGE.
Depends on bomb specs. This information is not in Port UI because it doesn’t matter when this chance is so high.
Uh-oh. Nope. They’re watching me!
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