Dear readers,
first and foremost, I’d like to state that everything contained in this post is my personal opinion, as I do not want to draw Seb into this if he doesn’t want to – thus, any criticism should be directed at me.
Now, what I want to bring to your attention and seek your support in is the state of WG EU’s relation to the playerbase, which some of you might have heard of. This post is catalysed by the very recent Christmas campaign fiasco, which I will describe in more detail in a moment for those who didn’t follow the news in that detail.
I will base this post mainly on two reddit posts made by MrFingersEU – his first rant from over two months ago, and his second rant some two weeks ago. Boiling down his posts, the first one criticizes:
– Posting information in a timely fashion: this concerns mainly the Event Calendar post at the beginning of each month, which came very late in October together with an announcement that the calendar will be dropped whatsoever in the future due to allegedly “low number of page views” – however, the NA office doesn’t miss to post their calendar even though the most recent December Event Calendar has had ~42k views, compared to, for example, the Wallpaper for December post on EU, having ~46k views – although only containing a bloody wallpaper!
– We can’t celebrate each and every single holiday: NA seems to get something for every little holiday in the Americas – an X2-event for the “national children’s day of Brazil”, for example. This brings us to this year’s Black Friday fiasco. One can argue that Black Friday is quite an American thing, with Thanksgiving being celebrated in the USA, but nowhere on the European continent. However, I’d think that if my mailbox is being bombarded by retailers screaming about their 20%, 30%, 50% discounts on anything and everything, a quick glance on the NA offering a whopping -52% on premium, a look at the RU portal having tonnes of discounts on ships, slots, premium time even though Thanksgiving and Black Friday being one of the least Russian things. Then WG EU says “we gotta throw a special together, I guess” – 30% on tier 6-7 premiums and a measly 15% on premium is what you get.
– General negligence of the EU-community by Wargaming: Proper interaction of staff and community is yet to be seen on the EU side of things, compared to NA and RU – the Q&A’s on these other servers, even being shared on the official portal, are nowhere to be seen on EU.
This was only a selection of the points in the post. Now, moving on to the second one from two weeks ago:
– Flag Bundles, not for you nor the Asian guy, my friend: While a small point and one where donating money to WG is involved, it is again the difference in treatment of the various servers, with NA and RU having the possibility of these bundles, EU and ASIA being left out again.
– ARP Catchup, only for the hardcore grinder: This point deals with the ridiculous restrictions regarding the mission conditions of the ARP missions, which were only present on the EU server. ASIA had some easy-going “earn base-XP” missions for this, as well as NA. EU, however… “kill X ships of X nation”, “score X secondary / torpedo hits” – need I say more?
Now, for me, the very recent Christmas Campaign fiasco is what makes this series unbearable. WG EU standardized the mission requirements of the Graf Spee campaign, thus all servers having the same requirement of grinding XP – for the “very low price” of actively cutting content compared to other servers. The EU server will not get the “Santa’s Convoy” campaign, which all of the 3 other servers will get. The reasoning for this, as stated in a forum post by Tuccy today, is that there would be “little time” for the convoy missions after getting the Graf Spee on the 9th of January, that they made the premium camos obtainable through the convoy campaign purchasable in the client “so more players can get them”, and that they will be launching all Spee bundles at the same time, in contrast to other servers unlocking a cheaper bundle each week.
What?!
Firstly, the “little time” which would be there is still better than the no time at all we’re getting now compared to all other servers. The campaigns were clearly aimed at very dedicated players – does WG EU believe there are none on their server?
Secondly, the assumption that more people will get the camouflages if they’re sold directly is clearly false – if one can grind their way to obtain it for free, you’d think he would very likely try to do so.
Thirdly, the “kindness” of launching all bundles at the same time is, again, bullshit. The other servers clearly aim to push sales of these bundles, because access to the convoy campaign is restricted to Spee owners only. This creates an incentive to buy the Spee and start grinding the campaign for the not-so dedicated players who don’t want to push their luck and grind both campaigns, while still leaving the possibility to do so for the hardcore ones. But the way EU handles things, there is actually no point at all in unlocking the bundles, since every f***ing player can get the Spee anyway, for free.
This concludes my post, or rather rant, if you will, and if you took the time and patience to get here, I want to thank you for that, and ask of you, if possible, to support the cause. Make yourself vocal on the forums, stop buying things through the WoWS EU shop, or even transfer the account to another server, if that isn’t too inconvenient in regards of progress.
