WoWS Info – 20th September 2017

Ph3lan: ‘My lovely assistant tuccy’

Talk about upcoming patch 0.6.11:

• clan/naval base –> expanding the fuctionality if players use the base/like it enough (e.g. a commanders baracks that houses all your commanders – so more an optical thing and less a ingame bonus thing), economoics is geared for long term gameplay, another discount for clan creation when clan bases get released (no number stated), oil progression is expected to be ok for a 50% full clan
• OIL: ways to get it: from daily containers (small value of 10 oil per player and container), missions (undisclosed), clan battles (undisclosed),
• clan battles in the very near future (0.6.12 or 0.6.13), 7v7 @ T10, is wanted to be high end game play ‘best of the best’, currently high tier game play is not in the state the devs want it to be, they want something more dynamic, players should see T10 as end game content, too much long range going on (unlike T6-T8), actually the same as team battles and thus will replace them completely (reimburses coming for players that spent something on teams)
• anniversary event is going to be extended until the 28th of september. Goes on to show what’s inside the anniversary containers (25 of a special camo, 100 regular signals, piece for the collection), devs wanted to make fun of themselves via the collectables and the achievements are mostly based on memes
• no smoke changes in 0.6.11, explanation on how it did work on the PTS, intention was to counter smoke sitting in competitive gameplay, ships and players have been relying quite heavily on smokemeta, guranteed detection in smoke is in the devs eyes the best option they had, game needs to evolve away from the smokemeta, certain classes having higher visibility from smoke is fine (esp. BBs were never intended to be doing that), devs don’t think it’ll change how people play (for the majority; high skill and competitive will change though), devs take their sweet time and take a close look at Belfast and MK (don’t nerf premium problematic surfaces again)
• game will not develop in a direction where being member of a clan is necessary to play the (basic) game

Maps: epicenter is currently thought about to change (esp. for “Tears of the cruisers”)

New Weapons: IJN Beehive: Not planned atm, esp since the game enginge doesn’t allow main guns to be used against planes

New Ships:

• Italian Techtree: Italian yes, complete techtree is difficult since they don’t know about Italian CVs, but the three ‘regulars’ will come, not anytime soon though
• general talk about implementation of new lines, e.g. research for KM BBs started in early 2015 and they’re still receiving blueprints from their historians, museums are rather protective about their stuff and want money, production stage takes a few 100 up to 1500 man hours per ship, sometimes a ship doesn’t fit and they’re looking for side projects (e.g. Monarch), long before alpha was set up devs went to the US and checked out all the museum ships
• general talk about big data, ship progression, differences between player experience vs. survey data vs. big backend data (e.g. players stopping a ship line at some point because they don’t like the ship and never come back to said line, mostly because for the players, this ship feels different I don’t want to play this anymore and then they forget this line)

Theorycrafting about ranked:

• if in the future everybody (or most players) moved to clan battles and nobody wants to play ranked anymore, they could imagine that ranked would work as a ‘mercenary’ game mode (just like back with teambattles), then you’d have a Clan ELO and a personal ELO rating, that way a clan with less than seven members could still join clan battles but with a few mercenaries, but only if ranked dies due to too few players

PvE / Operations

• cycling of missions, more or less completely new missions every three months (if they can make it), the more history is involved the longer the development time the less new operations per year, nothing is planed with regards to redoing existing missions to get more of the rewards (e.g a reset of the operation progress every three months)
• they are however working on the ‘hardcore mode’ (infinitely scale the difficulty like in diablo), maybe locked for clans, with each redoing of a hard operation it could increase the tier level of the enemies (imagine Operation Dynamo with infinite waves and a growing minefield), better rewards are on the table (plan for Q1 2018)

CVs

Ev1n: ‘Why are you showing the Graf Z. It’s a controversial topic right now” (laughs)

Ph3lan: “I think we can talk about her aswell”

Ev1n: “I don’t think we can avoid it…, this is a painfull topic for the development team”

• T8 CVs are currently in a rather tricky MM, some can’t drop T8s others (like the Graf Z.) can insta delete a T10 which is not intended (!), after the Graf Z. they’ll release NO MORE CVs until the complete overhaul of the CVs is done. Currently design of the new mechanics , this will affect: Commander Skills, AA as it currently works, modules, takes so long because they are really really careful about the changes they’re discussing/planning,

Ranked 8: not anytime soon (maybe, maybe around Christma), no info about Tier, depends how well clan battles go, if CB goes good planning for ranked starts, if CB goes bad ranked is postponed until competitive clans are satisfied, there is already a decision about what a 7 time ranked one winner will get (but Ev1n ‘forgot’ what it is)

German Port: might be Hamburg, but German port is coming

USN cruisers: if stats showed that a range increase for main guns is necessary they’d do it, some ships may require these buff, but currently they don’t want to touch USN cruisers because they’re working on the long awaited USN light cruiser line, if that’s ready USN cruiser might in general be looked at,

T10 Balance

• no range change planned, sniping BBs is not a problem of BBs having too much range but player behaviour, players afraid of taking damage and/or being (too heavily) punished for making mistakes, more choice is better thus they want to try other incentives to get player moving
• high tier RN BBs need some time of data gathering (two patches = 6 weeks) before they can decide if and what nerfs are necessary, Ev1n thinks Conqueror needs a nerf (maybe raised citadel), he’s not afraid that then (with a raised citadel) players will camp more, another thing would be to reduce the fire chance on the 419s to make the 459s more viable, HE is not that skill dependend but players don’t make the effort to switch ammo, HE currently works too good in all situations and that needs to be adressed

Balance: Powercreep: Yes, some. It’s not that bad but they’ll adress power crept ships if it becomes an issue, but also: Power Creep can be a form of confirmation bias (you like one ship with a certain range, a new ship with more range comes out, to you that’s power creep, when it actually doesn’t harm the balance that much),

Consumables: currently no need to buy consumables by the dozens that you can stock them up

Kitakami:

Ev1n laughs: “You know the answer by now…”

• Maybe PvE but in PvP it’s too scary, still!!!!! Maybe with deep water torpedos (either she becomes then viable or too bad and thus only interesting for collectors), other option would be to offer it to top of the class, pro DD players that it’d be the Type 59 of Warships,

Kidd: Was eventually planned for an event that got cancelled, currently she’s sitting in forever alone port. She’ll receive balancing in the future and then maybe received.

Premium ships on PTS? Difficult since players on PTS play differently than on the live server, also additional statistics are not that much worth, PTS is also rather late for the balancing process for premium ships,

More modern ships:

Ev1n: “Painfull questions…”

• Ship to Ship missiles were tested, super fun to play but it doesn’t fit to the game, that’d be “World of Warships: Modern Warfare”

Sounds: More individual sounds for differnt AA and main guns was asked, but no answer possible due to no contact to the sound team, there is however more sound development on general ongoing

Pan-European/Swedish/Dutch line: They’re currently debating which nations should remain independent and get their own lines and which should be summed up into one Pan European tree. Dutch are not decided, Swedish could/should recieve their own destroyerline (=stand as a seperate nation) but not anytime soon, this is an ongoing discussion,

Teamplay: More/better rewards for actual teamplay (smoking up teammates) is planned but requires them to development, currently they don’t know exactly how to reward it in terms of economy and compared to the actual grand target of the game damaging/defeating the enemy

Super Akizuki: Yes eventuall, but not any time soon, in the forseable future a IJN high tier premium DD is coming

Pan Asian DDs: Powerful is relativ, thus radar (if they get it in the end) is at least fine to be tested, maybe shorten the radar duration (5s), the idea behind PA DDs getting radar is to offset the fact that with deep water torps they can’t reliably damage DDs, but still WIP! Maybe PA DDs have to choose between radar and other consumables

Catering to new players: It can happen that there are sometimes more sealclubbers around, especially during T4 specials (thus specials maybe moved up to T5), more tutorials, but in general not a big problem with sealclubbing

Reports: Working on the next iteration on ‘anti-abuse system’ which includes reports and bans, and it’ll be released soon

Musashi:

Ev1n: “Maybe, probably, actually probably maybe, we’ll see. Keep an eye out to TGS”