WoWS: Wargaming EU Rant - The Armored Patrol

By MrFingersEU

So, we’re in December now, and there have been some changes happening on the EU-side of this game. Back in October I made a pretty harsh but still polite post about the EU-staff going belly-up and doing strange things, which got responded to by fellow redditors in a confirmatory fashion and reaped some acclaim. I was reassured by Sub_Octavian that it was heard by the right people… Turns out that it might have been heard, and then got ignored, like so much gets ignored.

RIP Bootcamp Missions, Welcome Weekly Missions

In December we saw the demise of the weekly Bootcamp missions (better known as the same c**p reheated over and over and over and over again), which were replaced with great fanfare by the new Weekly Missions. The Bootcamp missions didn’t catch on (anymore) due to the very repetitive kind of them (there were only a few missions, and every 2 weeks they got recycled without a single adjustment), plus they had pretty steep requirements, especially in correspondence to the meagre rewards you’d get from them, which made them not really worth it to invest time into them. So they got binned, and replaced by new weekly missions, tied (loosely) around historical happenings, which upped the rewards you’d get from them… So far so good, that sounds like a pretty decent improvement… But the requirements got upped as well, and while they were pretty steep on the Bootcamp-missions, they are now absolutely ludicrous for the Weekly Missions. So ridiculous that the Bootcamp missions looked very fair. Is that the way you want to entice players to play the game? To give them a set of missions that require you to have a substantial port AND unicum-stats in order to get a chance to fulfil them, AND a need to have the RNG in your favour. How do you think that is being received by Joe Average? Meanwhile on the other side of the pond there are easy missions with decent-but-not-stellar rewards. Not grindy, nor unicum, just a nice little extra. Casual & laid-back.

ARP Catchup, only for the hardcore grinder

2016 will also see the end of the ARP-WG collaboration, in which ARP content was there for players to unlock. A year worth of missions left, right & center to earn flashy ships and fancy commanders. Did you miss out on a ship because you weren’t yet playing WoWS, or could not play during a certain timeframe, FEAR NOT, you’ll be able to earn those ships in the final months of 2016. So far so good: play the game, jump through a hoop and get rewards. For that catch-up, every other server [RU], [NA] & [ASIA] has reasonable requirements to earn the ships you’ve missed, mostly to do with “just play the game in any game-mode with a T6+ ship and earn base XP”. Meanwhile the EU got totally overboard with ridiculous missions of their own: “kill X ships of X nation”, “score Y secondary hits”,… with weird Tier-restrictions as well (quite often the ship to do the mission needed to be of a higher tier than the ship you will get as a reward). Oh, and only in PvE mode, not grindable in PvP. So, what’s the reasoning behind that? Don’t want too many EU players to enjoy the ARP-collaboration? I though this was a collaboration, for mutual promotion. Do you live by the adagio of “negative attention is still attention”? How do you think the ARP-era will be remembered by the community? As a joyful period of earning the ships from your favourite series, or the grim period of excessive missions and missing the reward by a country mile because you didn’t have a Top-Tier ship at your disposal?

Flag Bundles, not for you nor the Asian guy, my friend

The EU Premium shop does not stock flag bundles. That’s not true, they do. On the EU there are 3 bundles, each with mixed flags. Meanwhile the NA and RU do have 10+ bundles of sorted flags (each bundle contains one type of flag) for a few coins. The EU players are long demanding the same bundles to appear in their shop. This still hasn’t happened. Not too much of a biggie, but still an annoyance. However: The USS Missouri has appeared, a Tier 9 money-printing behemoth that can be yours for just 750k Free XP. Don’t have the free XP laying around? You can always convert ship-XP to free XP with doubloons… Or you can grind with Papa-Papa flags (which grant +300% free XP), and harvest free XP faster than you can process it. As someone has calculated it, it would take roughly 120€ to convert the XP to free XP using doubloons, or it would take 20€ (and some time) to grind 750K free XP with Papa-Papa flags. That’s a difference of 100€ that one group of servers gets just for having the right stuff in their shop, which another group of servers can’t enjoy. Hey, that’s good for your reputation, isn’t it [EU] & [ASIA]?

Hey, kill it off with the “kill X” missions

A long standing ache is the “Kill X ships of Y nation/class”. A type of mission that leads to MAJOR annoyance since it throws team-gameplay out of the window in order to fulfil a personal goal. Said missions are WELL-KNOWN to be very ill-received by the players. Yet you keep adding them without any adjustment. Why? Don’t you care how they are received? Don’t you care about the mood of your customers?

Is it all pain and misery then?

No, it isn’t… The replacing of the Daily Missions with Containers was a nice thing (albeit that was globally, I can’t credit you for that), and the Black-Friday-sale-that-wasn’t-a-Black-Friday-Sale-because-the-EU-doesn’t-do-Black-Friday-so-you-got-a-placeholder was quite nice as well, with smaller offers, individual discounts,… than the actual BF-discounts on the other servers.

Still,

WE DEMAND: