In a previous post, we shared our decision to introduce a ship limitation system for Season 14 of Clan Battles and talked about how it impacted gameplay. Now, we want to go into detail about how and why we decide to limit certain ships.

Why implement ship limitations?

The ship limitation system was first introduced in Update 0.10.1. with the purpose of being able to shake up the established “meta” during a Season and introduce more variety to team compositions.

An established “meta” during a Clan Battles season often translates into teams almost exclusively gravitating towards a select few ships and strategies that have most often proven to secure wins. This phenomenon causes most battles to play out very similarly to each other throughout the season. It can sometimes happen, however, that a go-to meta is not firmly established from the very start of a season, and two or more different ship + strategy combinations can be spotted on the battlefield before the final verdict on the “ultimate” option is settled upon by players. This initial uncertainty helps to keep Clan Battles interesting, so in an effort to promote it, we introduced a ship limiting system to allow us to make live adjustments to what ships can and can’t be used as the meta evolves, thereby forcing Clans to adapt on the fly with new, creative approaches.

How we use the ship limiting system

How do we keep track of the Clan Battles meta and how do we draw conclusions from it?

We’d like to share a status report on our work to fix some pre-existing bugs in the game, as well as highlight some technical issues that you might encounter in the latest Update.

Bug fixes

Long client loading times

After one of our more recent Updates, the time it takes for the game to fully boot up has increased noticeably. During Update 0.11.1, we released a hotfix that solved the issue for most players. As of now, we’ve observed a noteworthy increase in performance across the board. Regardless, we will continue working on improving this aspect going forward.

• During the last month, the average startup loading time has decreased from 42.8 to 21 seconds.

Blue indicates the average time in seconds it takes for players to load into their port.

• On the Public Test of Update 0.11.2, the average load-in time for 90% of players was brought down to 25 seconds from the 83 seconds experienced during the 0.11.1 Public Test.