Ev1n, WG Staff:
…maybe they were afraid of having to much similar ships, so they opted for a prototype like you said?
A: You summoned me?
Shed some light on what? Why there’s a round bridge? That one I cannot answer off the top of my head – please put it in the Q&A thread and it might reach our engineering team that way. I’ll also try to remember that when i get face-time with them.
Generally though, the reasoning for why certain things might be different than in commonly available historical resources is the same as for German Battleships. There are bound to be some liberties taken with configurations to facilitate better gameplay or line progression, like predicted upgrades that would have conceivably happened (but didn’t, for example because Germany was losing the war 
), simply because purely historical configurations do not offer the necessary flexibility to fit into one line. We’ll shed some light on that closer to release.
Sub_Octavian:
Draken84
a couple of weeks back, you answered this question with the following
“The part you are talking about is included in the citadel because it was valuable initially (torpedo armament storage) and it is protected accordingly: 25 mm citadel deck you mentioned; 32 mm deck you cannot see in port viewer currently (it is bow internal deck); 152 mm belt (you can see a part of it behind anti-torpedo bulge; 102 mm transverse (in game 102 mm layer is a sum of several IRL bulkheads); It is located underwater and extremely hard to hit. Most part of damage to Warspite is bow/aft/casemate/superstructure, so this part does not play a vital role in ship in-game performance. On the other hand it is logical to be included in the citadel, remembering its initial function and armor (these are two main criteria).”
how is logical that a cold-storage compartment that contains nothing more threatening than what amounts to supplies for the galley is part of the citadel ? the magazines have a separate bulkhead of 150mm plate between it and the former torpedo magazines that these rooms are, it’s on the B9/11 one. i concur entirely that it used to be part of the citadel, but the ship we see in game several years past than the last refit of the Warspite that actually carried torpedoes.
It is logical because it corresponds to balancing and gameplay purposes. And it corresponds to our damage model design. After this prolonged discussion we researched Warspite performance more closely. There is no need to buff or change her, (while the change you are suggesting is a very small buff). Your request, unfortunately, cannot be fulfilled. Sorry.
bathoz
As other have said, thanks for these… onwards!
While I’m finding the Royal Navy cruisers very challenging, I have to say that so far it’s been an enjoyable one. That said, there’s a UI factor that I reckon would greatly improve my enjoyment, and I wondering if there would be any chance of it being implemented.
It’s a smoke timer. At the moment, I have to do quick head maths to work how long it is until I need to be hauling ass out of there. This is particularly important for the RN, as if you appear, stationary, you’re going to blow up more often than not. Granted, you wouldn’t want it to be something that everyone sees, but the ship that laid it down could do with some sort of countdown.
You are welcome. Yep, this is good suggestion. It has been approved and will most lkely be implemented. However, at this time I cannot name update number. “Somewhere in 2017” is the most accurate date.
HowDidYouDoThis
One question.
How do you view CV game credit earning ? I have yet to have a single game breaking 400K credit earning on my Taiho although I can break 600K on Des Moines every few games.
In net profit values CVs are currently on the same level as other classes, which is good. Before 0.5.12 they were a bit over-farming, which was bad: players should chose their classes based on personal preferences, not on economy.
Vectoranalysis
Thank you! Much much appreciated!
QUESTION: Will you add a marker in the Tech Tree (InGame and wiki) to distinguish ship lines that are more beginner friendly and lines that require more experience?
Background: With the British cruisers added to the game, we have now quite a selection of cruisers (five different lines). Each line has its gimmicks and difficulties one has to take into account while playing them. New players might run into unnecessary trouble if they go up a line and don’t have any success. A marker that some lines might be more challenging to players, whereas other lines might provide an easier entry.
Example: From the questions I see (here, forums and elsewhere) that the most recommended beginner cruiser lines are the IJN and USN (although only up to a certain tier). These two lines should get a marker “A” attached to them. KM and VMF are a bit more challenging due to squishiness or bad concealment or lowish HE DMG. Those two lines should get a marker “B”. And from what I saw from the RN cruisers, they require the player to work more and/or have more experience to get equal results as with other lines. This line should get a marker “C”. Of course there is lots of room to detail such markes and even sub divide them (e.g. USN CLs marker “A”, USN CAs marker “B”)
Always welcome! This is an interesting suggestion. Other possible option is using personal offers mechanics to show some line-specific tutorials. And there are other ideas floating around, too. We will consider yours. Thanks!
Speedkermie
Question: When the RN Battleship line eventually get done. Please can we not have any more of your experiments/gimmicks. Just solid ships like every other nation gets.
They are in production. I cannot reveal planned update number, sorry. But I can say for sure that nearest lines are NOT RN BB.
Crawdacious
When are you going to balance USN CVs against IJN CVs? USN basically has to pick 2/0/2, do no damage and barely counter IJN due to IJN massive amount of squads, or pick 0/1/3 and get destroyed by the 2/2/2 IJN squads. IJN has to make no sacrifice at all. Give USN 1 fighter squad in their 0/1/3 or take away IJN fighter strafe. Outnumbered and out-damaged by ability to cross-drop and more map presence from more squads. WG Pls.
There are currently no plans for such balance changes.
Racound
I’ll try again from last week 😉
Around a week ago there was a small analysis about matchmaking. It wasn’t really representativ but coincides with my own and other’s observations. It basically said that at T5-7 the player is in more than 50% of all matches uptiered. Around 40% of all matches are even 2 tiers higher than the player. Is this true? And is this intentional?
Today I had a T7 match with the exception being 3 ships on each team that were T5…
This is frustrating a lot of people and we would really like to see a change to this… maybe a global +1 or -1 Tier restriction?
The effect on T5-6 MM is not “intentional”, but rather “natural”. After the changes, T2-3 and T7-8 got more comfortable, and T5-6 got less comfortable. This coincided with upper tiers population growth. We realized it prior to the change and don’t view it as something that should be rapidly “fixed”.
Then this topic was raised, and we looked into it more, ready to change our mind. But we found no stong arguments for that.
Ksielvin
Since adding ship names to full map was mentioned, it occurs to me that I’ve long considered the big map (M key) to be in unusable state. This is because of the zooming transition animation. IMO it’s disruptive and creates a delay that is enough to cause cognitive dissonance in gameplay as well as making the map too slow/dangerous to access beyond the starting minutes of the game.
Also there’s a dumb little trick where people are spamming M key twice rapidly to use the transition animation to peek over islands. This lets us observe enemy ship’s movement more accurately than only minimap. In streams I see this used more than the actual map screen itself. Luckily the need for the trick comes up fairly uncommonly because repeating it makes me slightly nauseous. I don’t think designers intended for us to do this.
Could the transition animation be removed so I can go between normal 3d mode and the big map immediately, including flashing it to maintain situational awareness while fishing for specific information like MOBA players do with the score screen?
Well, I am certainly not UI design expert, but from my point of view you made some sense. I will send your suggestion to relevant team. Thank you!
ongty
My question: Are there any plans to revisit and relook at the torpedo armament of the IJN DD’s? Historically long lance torpedoes give off less emissions and should be harder to detect. I know they were nerfed to hell cos of “balance”, but this is too much IMO. Only an AFK person would be hit by them now. The long lance are the best torpedoes of the IJN and it’s almost criminal they are misrepresented so badly. I don’t feel it’s right to nerf them this badly. The US ships get much better torpedoes at high tiers (8-10) due to low detection range. The Gearing’s torpedoes are at 16.5km range and 66kn, 1.4km detection. Meanwhile the closest the Shimakaze gets is 12km range torps (4.5km shorter) at just 1kn faster than the Gearings, and +0.5km detection. It’s not even a contest. Look at the Kagero’s torpedoes for example. 2.5km detection on her longest ranged ones. It’s so bad any BB can turn and avoid in time, always. Let’s not even mention any other class which are even more easily able to dodge them. Personally I’m fine with the IJN DD’s being more specialized for torpedo attacks, they have been that way for awhile now, and the new split in the line will allow for more gun-focused DD’s. But right now, IJN DD’s are bad at everything. USN DD’s are better at torpedo attacks, and knife-fighting at caps, even have better smoke. There’s literally no reason to pick an IJN DD now. They are just outclassed. What are you all going to do about it? You all changed the torpedoes, added in new ones, and are now telling people not to use the old ones. I don’t think that’s fair.
No. We respectfully disagree and believe that IJN torpedos have adequate stats for current meta. Of course, “short” versions are superior. And this is good, because we don’t want to encourage “torpedo soup” when all you have to do is to spam torpedoes from huge ranges. By the way, high tier IJN avg. torp+flooding damage is 20-25% higher than USN.
HarunAA
Hi, thank you once again for continuing to do this Q & A. I know it takes effort and I appreciate you trying to answer some very hard questions all while trying not to break NDA. That said, I have some questions, all of which I believe are under the same topic.
Do you think BBs should receive a nerf soon? If I recall correctly the last time BB got nerfed was the maneuverability based on tonnage thing which was ages ago. After that is buffs. Armor reworked, USN main gun accuracy, AA guns improved. Buff to vigilance, intro to radar + lower radar cd makes BB’s life easier when facing DDs, while cruisers are still very easily destroyed even when angled, and meanwhile ijn DD torps get nerfed, CV gets nerfed from AA buffs and economy. Its only after much rants and discussions about how inviable high tier cruisers are then they get steering mod 3 and even then it replaces the concealment mod.
Even if a BB sail in a straight line, it is still much easier and faster for said BB to delete any cruiser than a DD to delete that same BB with torps. Your plan to not nerf AA in the near future given their state now means CV isnt very enjoyable and sometimes not even fun anymore as well, and lets not forget that air dropped torps have way lower chance to cause flooding. A plus for BBs but a nerf for CVs.
So do you think BBs are a tad strong? Do you think they should receive a nerf anytime soon? Right now I really think that the counters of BBs are weaker now and this lead to a quite a heavy bb meta if not an unhealthy one. I strongly believe this game is meant to be enjoyed by players who plays all types of ships and I still believe you and your company would make it so rather than to just “please” the “majority” which is the BB players at the expense of making other ship types unfun
Thank you once again
You are welcome. Any job takes effort, so this is fine:)
You have asked an interesting question. We do see some dangerous fluctuations in class balance, and currently are researching it in depth. That means conducting surveys, gathering data scopes and brainstorming. We want to establish several perfect battle compositions and then find a way to achieve them (to shift the meta if needed).
However, ideally we would like to do it smart way. Maybe some counter-buffs or even indirect tweaks. But nerfs are also possible. They are difficult to avoid when dealing with balance in MMO game, unfortunately.
I cannot go into detail, the research is not finished yet (but we plan to summarize what we have in several days and then go on with internal discussion).
What is important is that we are on this, and willing to act if needed. And yes – we believe all ship classes should have their happy player base. No one here wants World of BBs mono-class game.
Teahee_
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. With the introduction of the Commonwealth Navy as a separate line to the Royal Navy, will captains be transferable between them? Historically the Royal Navy was very closely connected to the navies of the commonwealth, so would a premium RN ship be able to host a Commonwealth Navy captain?
You are welcome! No, in terms of gameplay these will be two separate nations.
dreiak559
Hi, my question is this:
A lot of top tier players (especially in reference to playing ships like Baltimore, Des Moines, Atlanta, Montana, Mogami, Amagi ect) talk about power creep with the introduction of new lines. I am certainly not one to say that US cruisers are bad, because my experience has been quite the opposite, but I can say that in many instances I have to agree with the concept that a lot of times to make new lines or ships shiny and appealing they can often end up causing overlap and often out performance of previous ships that filled those roles. Is it likely that we will see changes to ships (like Atlanta in comparison to Flint / Belfast, which both basically seem to be outright better than Atlanta in nearly all scenarios) that have been somewhat left by the wayside in the wake of new ships, lines, features and premiums? Personally I was pretty peeved that the flint got a smokescreen and not Atlanta, considering the idea was to create a high skill ship, and I feel that smoke is a lot more user friendly than radar, especially given how the Atlanta guns are nuanced with very slow shell speeds. Baltimore also suffers from not having torpedoes, and having to rely on low DPM armament, and Mogami, for example is in sort of a weaker position than Atago / Mikhail Kutosov based on captains skill changes, and other game balancing considerations. Those are just a few examples, but I know many of the older ships have kind of fallen into a weird place due to coming out with increasingly nuanced ships and lines.
Being a military member, I am not one to complain about something and not offer my 2c for a solution, and honestly I think it should be with increasing customization options. I think that weak ships can become strong depending on consumables available to them for example. It would be nice to have some more consumable options, perhaps, to chose from, that would really allow skilled players to take advantage of ships that would otherwise struggle. I kind of like the idea of a consumable that dramatically increases main battery reloads for a limited period of time, for example, and think it might be cool on IJN DD’s and US heavy cruisers, or a consumable that reduces citadel damage while active [maybe called “brace for impact”] temporarily might be kind of cool and remove some of the RNG involved in playing some of the “high skill” ships (IE British CL / Atlanta).
Hello. Thank you for the ideas, they are interesting. We’d rather not let power creep, one of the reasons: because it is very bad for new players. However, we are not letting it now. We buff old ships if there are problems with them. Sometimes it takes research and much thought, sometimes we do it directly. But we would like to maintain all ships viable, this is good for players, and good for the game.
Exkuroi
Hi Sub, thanks for taking time off to answer the many questions posted since the start. I would like to ask what can be done for the Kagerou (or Yuugumo in the future) vs Fletcher matchup.
Takes out the torpedo table made by /u/iku_19
For this example, lets use the Type 93 mod.2 10km torpedo for Kagerou and the upgraded Mark 15 mod.1 10.5km ones for FLetcher. As it can be seen from the table, Kagerou’s torpedoes have a worse reaction time by ~1.5s compared (the number may not be exact but it is around there). This drawback can be partially accepted if Kagerou is able to output more torpedoes per salvo or reload faster (Screw reload booster, it is not worth giving up smoke). Kagerou is running the 2×4 set-up compared to Fletcher’s 2×5 setup which cannot be changed. However, why does Fletcher have a reload time of 106s for a quintuple mount while Kagerou reloads in 120s? Even the F3 torps reload at 104s, the fastest reloading torpedo on Kagerou and the most suicidal. It doesn’t make sense for a quintuple setup to reload faster than a quad setup. USN DDs are a more general purpose DDs, but at T9 they are a better torpedo boat than the IJN.
Hi. No problem, thanks for reading and asking.
There is a paradox: Fletcher is “better” at torpedoes while Kagero has significantly better torpedo damage according to server stats.
You are right about USN DDs being more general purpose. And Fletcher is a fine ship. But I cannot confirm that she has superior torpedoes. In theorycraft – maybe, but not “in real game”.
Jay_BA
Hi, Octavian and the WG team! My question is how do the team approach the learning curve for less experienced players (but not beginners) entering higher tier play? Going from tier IV to tier V is very punishing due to frequent up-tiering.
Hello! MM changes did not cause any significant influence on new players transition – this is data fact. However, you are absolutely right that for newcomers, there should be kind if additional guidance. And we already have quite an interesting solution that at least partially solves that problem. You will see it soon.
RandomBritishGuy
I appreciate that you want to stand by the RN cruisers, but you only have to look at the numbers being played to see that people aren’t happy with them. Other lines swamped match making for a while after release, now theyre barely more than average, despite how hyped people were for them. I often only see 1-2 RN ships per game, which is shockobgly low for such an anticipated line.
I want to stand by objective answers.
I look at the numbers quite often. Let’s see last 4 days worldwide, for example.
Most popular T2 cruiser: Weymouth (30,4% among 8 cruisers)
Most popular T3 cruiser: Caledon (32,9% among 6 cruisers)
Most popular T4 cruiser: Danae (39,7% among 7 cruisers)
Most popular T5 cruiser: Emerald (25,1% among 8 cruisers)
Most popular T6 cruiser: Cleveland (Leander has 14,5% share among 6 cruisers)
Most popular T7 cruiser: Myoko (Fiji has 7,9% share among 13 cruisers)
Most popular T8 cruiser: Mogami (Edinburgh has 7% share among 8 cruisers)
Most popular T9 cruiser: Ibuki (Neptune has 14,7% share among 5 cruisers)
Most popular T10 cruiser: Zao (Minotaur has 13,1% share among 5 cruisers)
By the way, RN cruiser have WR and avg damage from medium to the top places over all tiers currently.
So we see newcomers are dominating low tiers, look good on medium and high tiers (although, progress speed is not that high to evaluate high tiers properly).
If we look at the same period after 0.5.10 update (GER BB introduction), the picture is pretty much the same – new battleships were most popular on T3-6 and slowly securing their places at higher tiers.
There is no “shockobgly low” numbers. And if we notice that some ships are underpowered and need some love, we will buff them.
We did not work on this line to make it obsolete.
However, some ships will always be more popular than others. It is impossible to reach equal popularity among all ship groups.
Cheers!
