WoWS: Planned Updates

An overview of what has been done and what is planned to be done.

Captains!

It has been two months since we published an important message for the community, which you can find here. Today, it’s time to share our progress on our commitments and the plans for the foreseeable future.

Monetization

• An important change has been the disclosure of drop rates for items: from November 2021, all new containers and random bundles that go on sale will also be provided with the complete drop rates. Initially, we promised a much less precise deadline (basically somewhere in 2022). There were a lot of open questions and we were not certain that we will manage to get all the details and descriptions clear in time. The upcoming Black Friday and New Year monetization activities will also be affected by this change as well as all new activities involving containers from now on. You can read more about this change here and here.
• Subsequently, after these publications, there was another frequent question: how will New Year containers work? They will work in a similar way to our current WH40k containers, with different categories of drops and all content within a category having the same chances.
• On top of this, we also have two more initiatives that we also promised to implement—warning about the nature of randomness and additional protection for children. This year, for all containers and random bundles sold for real money or Doubloons:
  • We will add a warning about the nature of randomness and the need to approach the purchase reasonably.
  • We will add the requirement for a user to confirm the age of 18+ to make such a purchase.

• We continue to search for alternative monetization mechanics. For example, in Update 0.10.9, we used the auction mechanics to sell Early Access to new German Tier X battleship Schlieffen instead of random bundles or containers.
• Update 0.10.10 kicks off Black Friday. We have carefully considered your feedback from the previous Black Friday regarding missions that return some Doubloons or resources when obtaining a Black ship, if you already have the original version. This mission was added from our side to reward our loyal customers who already purchased the standard version of the ship and provide them with an opportunity to earn extra Doubloons or other resources. In order not to confuse players, on the upcoming Black Friday we will not position this mission as part of the bundles that can be sold, especially when the original ship is no longer available for purchase. The mission will be credited only if you have both ships on your account—the original ship and the black version. You’ll be able to complete the mission playing both variants.
• The New Year celebrations in Update 0.10.11 will feature not only the disclosed drop rates for items from containers, but also reworked victory bonuses. You will be able to play Tier X ships to earn New Year Certificates—a special temporary resource that can be exchanged in Update 0.10.11 for Santa’s Gift containers, as well as Santa’s Big Gift and Santa’s Mega Gift containers, which include more rewards and have higher chances of dropping a Premium ship. The bottom line is that now you have a choice of different types of containers and all the information you need to make a decision. More details are available here.
• An important change in the coming year will be the replacement of Khabarovsk and Grosser Kurfürst by Delny and Preussen in the Tech Tree. More details are available here and here. The replacement is similar to the one that was made for Moskva and Alexander Nevsky. But last time, players who had a permanent camouflage for Moskva didn’t receive a similar camouflage for Alexander Nevsky, and we decided to change our approach. Now all players who own any permanent camouflage for Khabarovsk or Grosser Kurfürst at the time when the ships are removed from the Tech Tree will receive the Type 20 permanent camouflage for Delny or Preussen, respectively. All players who had any permanent camouflage for Moskva on their accounts at the time when Update 0.9.5 was released received the Type 20 permanent camouflage for Alexander Nevsky within a week of Update 0.10.9 being released. Those who already have the Type 20 permanent camouflage received 5,000 Doubloons as compensation.

Feedback and Communication

We have done our best to significantly improve our communication lately and will continue to work in this direction.

• We have recently shared our planned balance changes for Update 0.10.10. In the future, we will continue to gradually adjust the parameters of ships if needed. Since last year, we have been using this approach to balance the ships that have already been released.
  • These changes are part of our approach to balancing. We would like to incrementally influence the balance in the game, instead of a few huge changes to the released ships as possible. Thus the ship may be changed several updates in a row, but by a little margin.
• In the first half of November, we will publish a special video, which will tell you more about how we are working on the balance of ships in our game. We will continue to release videos on issues of concern to you on a regular basis.
• We have noticed your positive reaction to the voting on the choice of appearance for the future map. Thanks to all voters. We will keep holding similar activities in the future.
• The Update 0.10.8 release became a serious challenge for us. The final build contained several bugs that had a negative impact on the festive update. We explained in detail why these errors occurred and how we planned to fix them. We will do our best to avoid making errors like this, but should this happen again, we will inform you in detail about the cause, expected time of fix, progress update. Read more in this post.
• Also, this month we released a Clan Season review where we gave a detailed breakdown of the reasons for format selection and changes that we had implemented during the season. We are planning to tell you about the entire restriction system in Clan Battles and inform you more thoroughly about the decisions we make.

Submarines

• After the test of submarines in Ranked Battles, we made some major changes, many of them based on your feedback—the biggest one was the addition of anti-submarine weaponry to almost all ships in the game. As our next step, we added submarines as rentals to Random Battles to be able to assess which additional changes we have to make in the future. In our announcement we tried to tell you as thoroughly and as openly as possible about the changes and the reasons behind them. After publishing that message, we decided to prepare another post with additional statistics to answer your frequently asked questions.
• While we continue testing submarines in Random Battles, we do our best to respond to your feedback as quickly as possible. We would like to thank everyone who leaves their feedback. Based on your feedback we‘ve been working on changes for the next update. Many of you highlighted that the Sonar Ping mechanic provides too many advantages, so we decided to divide the benefits into two types of torpedoes. Players will have to choose in the future between homing torpedoes or unguided torpedoes with higher damage output. We also doubled the distance at which the guidance for homing torpedoes is disabled for both cruisers and destroyers.

To implement this plan and continue moving towards better transparency and communication, we also made many changes to our internal processes. We strive not only to answer your pressing questions and concerns, but also to become a better team that creates a better game for you. Over the past months, we have made a leap together with you, and to turn it into sustainable and long-term growth, we may need new people with fresh ideas who love video games. If you are interested in working at Wargaming, check out our vacancies page.

We are currently looking for the following positions at our office in Prague. If you think you would fit and want to give it a try, feel free to apply and learn more at the following links:

• DE Community Manager.
• Community Engagement Manager.
• Operations Coordinator.

We also still have open positions in our publishing team in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, at this time we can only consider candidates who are currently authorized to be employed in the United States of America. If that applies to you, feel free to check out this page.

In conclusion, we would like to thank you for both your constructive criticism and your support. Criticism allows us to identify our shortcomings, and your kind words help us understand when we are on the right course.

We will continue to keep you informed about our plans and important updates. See you soon!

Source: WoWS Devblog