Ranked Season 7: Back to 6?

[Jarkorsis 92]

 

4 hours ago, Hellvn said:

I've found since reaching rank 15 that the players are noticably better - you're seeing more bow tanking by BBs rather than broadsiding, and cruisers firing behind islands rather than exposing themselves. 

There's only been one game with a complete shitter who was a rank 15 (took 3 minutes to move, then went solo rather than with the team, sailed broadside etc.).

I'll probably run the Warspite rather than the Arizona from now on, as the ability to overmatch bow tanking BBs is probably more useful than the Arizona's range once the battles are joined, and the heals are way better on the Warspite.

 

On NA I have not found that to be the case. On the last game that got me to T14, we won 7-0 and it wasn't even that close. It is really random on NA.

[publord 20]

I'm really struggling to give a shit about ranked. Think I'll just take the extra signal flags as my reward and call it a day

[BiggieD61 364]

I normally play to rank 10 or 12 every season, then kind of stop since the plentiful rewards tail off quickly after that.  I feel like I want to go all the way to Rank 1 this season though.  Having it be tier 6 all the way through simplifies the strategies and ship to ship tactics that are available.  To me, this simplification means that I have a more even playing field against a lot of better players, who are better at leveraging more complex and high ceiling ships.  I want to hit Rank 1 at least one time in my career, and this seems like it might be my best chance.

[33nfidel 13]

Like Biggie' said... I just don't have the time this season though sadly, work is really getting in the way. I'm liking Fuso so far and don't have a 19 pointer for Warspite, but the CV pain is too prevalent and ranked means CV always have the XP to keep the star on the losing team... Shinonome has been a cheap option for a 19 pointer.

What are you thinking about the Mutsu, is it worth throwing a few bucks on?

 

[Birkovic 135]

5 hours ago, publord said:

I'm really struggling to give a shit about ranked. Think I'll just take the extra signal flags as my reward and call it a day

Ditto.

@33nfidel why not the Arizona? Being NA I would assume, that you love that boat ;-) It's a better ship (for ranked and pubs) then the Mutsu.

[cheereereerios 44]

In the 6-10 bracket, I'm just forcing myself to play DD at this point since there are so many absolute (friendly) shitters playing already into that bracket.

Mutsu doesn't have the insane accuracy of Nagato (or Warspite), she needs to push in a bit closer.

Maybe in the top bracket I'll be able to play Warspite again.

[map381 264]

Played in my Anshan today, 8 battles and got to 10 with 1 star.  All wins, 47k average.  It's not a bad little DD.  I honestly don't think I've played it before today.  6.3 conceal is workable, and a decent reload on the guns.  But they hit for shit.  And the torps are deceiving.  14400 supposed damage.  I hit a Cleveland with 2, did 10k total to him.....I've had a few other hits like that.  Hit a 10k Shira and didn't kill him.  3 hits on a point blank Fuso, 20k total.  

[Madner Kami 405]

Given damage-saturation, torpedo-bulges and torpedo-protection, stuff like that can happen.

[Rodrigopine 184]

43 minutes ago, Madner Kami said:

Given damage-saturation, torpedo-bulges and torpedo-protection, stuff like that can happen.

Plus damage saturation can have an impact too.

[ncc81701 152]

@BiggieD61 I would have thought the same but the skill level this season with T6 ship is just mind bogglingly bad. I'd like to hit R1 at some point too and this season I manage to start early enough that I think can make it. We'll, see but so far this is the most frustrating season I've played since I feel that T6 have so much less carrying potential. I missed my Belfast, Scharnhorst and Genisenau , I should have ranked out last season. 

7 hours ago, 33nfidel said:

What are you thinking about the Mutsu, is it worth throwing a few bucks on?

Warspite and Mutsu are my 2 primary ships this season. I think if you have a Warspite then you don't really need to bother with it. The thing that Mutsu have on the Warspite is speed which is handy in some situations but it's not like Warspite is slow either relative to USN Standard BB .  Between the 2 I think warspite is the better ship given its better heal and better concealment but I think both are good boats for rank. These ships are better than the non-prem counter parts but it's not broken op like belfast and was in the previous season.  

P.S. You can ignore the fact that Mutsu have torpedos... the arcs & range is such that you'll have to show broadsides <7km to use them. 

[Rodrigopine 184]

@ncc81701 it's too bad there aren't divisions for ranked because you in your BBs me in the Shinonome would be glorious!

[Madner Kami 405]

29 minutes ago, ncc81701 said:

@BiggieD61 I would have thought the same but the skill level this season with T6 ship is just mind bogglingly bad. I'd like to hit R1 at some point too and this season I manage to start early enough that I think can make it. We'll, see but so far this is the most frustrating season I've played since I feel that T6 have so much less carrying potential. I missed my Belfast, Scharnhorst and Genisenau , I should have ranked out last season. 

Warspite and Mutsu are my 2 primary ships this season. I think if you have a Warspite then you don't really need to bother with it. The thing that Mutsu have on the Warspite is speed which is handy in some situations but it's not like Warspite is slow either relative to USN Standard BB .  Between the 2 I think warspite is the better ship given its better heal and better concealment but I think both are good boats for rank. These ships are better than the non-prem counter parts but it's not broken op like belfast and was in the previous season.  

P.S. You can ignore the fact that Mutsu have torpedos... the arcs & range is such that you'll have to show broadsides <7km to use them. 

Really? Shame. Shame for mentioning that you need Belfast and Scharnhorst for a carry. People who need a Belfast or a Scharnhorst do not deserve to get to Rank 1. Shame on you, sir.

Neither Mutsu nor Warspite are "better" than their same-tier counterpart. Both just offer different gameplay to their counter-parts. Warspite offers gun-size, allowing for overmatches. Along with good armor, good secondaries and being maneuverable like a finger on a map, it makes for a very solid carry-ship. Mutsu offers speed, overmatch and trades quite a bit of armor for gaining speed. It`s secondaries are solid and, if I recall right, got better main battery reload speed than Warspite. Compared to their regular techtree coutnerparts, New Mexico (standing in for a Warspite counterpart) is even tankier, offers faster reload and more guns. Fuso is a living, breathing shotgun. It lacks accuracy or overmatch, but it sure as hell is a cruiser-oneshotting machine of doom, in the right hands. All of them are solid ships in their own right and none really fall out of line. Mutsu is probably even the weakest of the T6 BB, due to low amounts of armor.

[ncc81701 152]

@Rodrigopine I wish, I could really use some reliability good DDs on my team in ranked.

22 minutes ago, Madner Kami said:

Really? Shame. Shame for mentioning that you need Belfast and Scharnhorst for a carry. People who need a Belfast or a Scharnhorst do not deserve to get to Rank 1. Shame on you, sir.

You don't need a belfast or a scharnhorst for a carry, but they were much easier to play and carry given how OP they were. Plenty of people don't deserve to get to Rank 1 either if you look up ship comrade leaderboards so that point is mute. 

22 minutes ago, Madner Kami said:

Neither Mutsu nor Warspite are "better" than their same-tier counterpart. Both just offer different gameplay to their counter-parts. Warspite offers gun-size, allowing for overmatches. Along with good armor, good secondaries and being maneuverable like a finger on a map, it makes for a very solid carry-ship. Mutsu offers speed, overmatch and trades quite a bit of armor for gaining speed. It`s secondaries are solid and, if I recall right, got better main battery reload speed than Warspite. Compared to their regular techtree coutnerparts, New Mexico (standing in for a Warspite counterpart) is even tankier, offers faster reload and more guns. Fuso is a living, breathing shotgun. It lacks accuracy or overmatch, but it sure as hell is a cruiser-oneshotting machine of doom, in the right hands. All of them are solid ships in their own right and none really fall out of line. Mutsu is probably even the weakest of the T6 BB, due to low amounts of armor.

I never said nor implied that NM, AZ, Bayerns and Fusos are uncompetitive. I was replying to @33nfidel question on whether Mutsu is something that's worth spending money on for ranked and my reply was that if you have a Warspite, it fills nearly the exact same role and is unnecessary.

Judgement of what is "better"  have elements of subjectivity and I personally hold BB speed and maneuverability at a premium. The Warspite and Mutsu offer these things without sacrificing firepower and I value that. When it's a pure long range slugging match then all T6 BB except the Dunkerque are competitive relative to each other. But sometimes all you need is a few extra knot of speed to step on a cap and win on points or just a few second of faster rudder shift to dodge that 1 torpedo and that's what makes the Warspite/Mutsu better in my view. It performs about the same against other BBs in 95% of the games but it can do things other BBs can't do in 5% of the game and that's enough of a difference for me to run them as my main ships for ranked. 

[Mesrith 356]

19 hours ago, publord said:

I'm really struggling to give a shit about ranked. Think I'll just take the extra signal flags as my reward and call it a day

I've played three games this season.  It's just more of the same and I'm pretty done with it at this point.  It would be cool if they'd ever allow tier 9 or 10 to be worthwhile for anything more than randoms.

[Mnemon 38]

11 hours ago, ncc81701 said:

@BiggieD61 I would have thought the same but the skill level this season with T6 ship is just mind bogglingly bad. I'd like to hit R1 at some point too and this season I manage to start early enough that I think can make it. We'll, see but so far this is the most frustrating season I've played since I feel that T6 have so much less carrying potential. I missed my Belfast, Scharnhorst and Genisenau , I should have ranked out last season.

I feel that the playerbase has also degraded even further since the last season. I know after all the ARP events and the Convoy I felt pretty burnt out and played WoWS a lot less (so I barely bothered to play season 6 ranked much, even tho Scharn was EZ). And I notice a lot more people in the clan I'm in have disappeared as well. Other people I know who play say on average many of their friends have quit the game. So we're left with failgrinders who hit battle over and over without caring, new players who play in an increasingly shitty environment, and some rarefied good play. WoWS' playerbase has been hollowed out due to how stale the game is getting. T6 means you'll see more raw new players, but I doubt the jump to 7 would make much of a difference there.

[Madner Kami 405]

They are trying to get more non-random modes into the game to keep people motivated, though social player-to-player interaction is still woefully underdeveloped. The game needs more perpetually competative game-modes and reasons to get to T10.

[Rodrigopine 184]

I agree that the 'end game' content is pretty much non-existent. Which is a shame because there's definitely no shortage from the community on ideas, chief among them clan wars. In the interim you could re-activate team battles for tier 9-10, maybe some PVE scenarios for top tier as well? I suspect that the reason we haven't seen a lot of activity on this front is that wargaming's bread and butter comes from selling mid-tier premium ships and premium time.

[publord 20]

Some official league with worthwhile rewards would be a good start. There's nothing wrong with the 7v7 format, I just don't care about playing this "competitive" mode with complete strangers. 

Also WoT eventually figured out that the low tiers are a joke for competitive. Tier 6 has some very boring and lackluster ships. Even the solid performers are not very powerful or interesting to play

 

 

 

 

 

[Mesrith 356]

4 hours ago, Madner Kami said:

They are trying to get more non-random modes into the game to keep people motivated, though social player-to-player interaction is still woefully underdeveloped. The game needs more perpetually competative game-modes and reasons to get to T10.

On the NA server, when we ask about this, we get told "In due time".  Due time, of course, was at least a year ago.

The game has lost so many players that would have been interested in sticking around if there were an actual end-game.  At some point, WG decided that Ranked Battles was enough.  They keep murmuring about doing something for the competitive crowd, but I suspect it's going to be more tier 8 stuff, and probably too late to have a real impact on the game.

[Madner Kami 405]

Im guessing they thought it would take a lot longer to get many people to Tier 10, given the costs involved and I guess they got caught up way too much in the usual executive meddling with reseting priorities just once too often. That they promised a lot more than they are going to hold to is something that became apparent even before the big carrier rebalance year 2017, sadly. The current PvE modes should have been in the game last year, at latest.

You know, thinking back, we are in the 7th season of ranked already and the 1st season ended shortly before release. What have they actually done between release and today? Mostly released more lines of ship and premiums, it feels like. A lot of that time I had Tanks-CW take way too much of my attention, but you are perfectly right. For someone who mostly played Ships in that time, this must have been quite the draught, with all the obvious consequences.

[cheereereerios 44]

Maybe you could say sure, the end-game takes a bit more time to work out, but they haven't even expanded the clan size limits yet. I can only imagine how much fun that is to keep giving them doubloons to work around that. I wonder what the technical obstacle to that one is

I don't mind a lack of "clan" wars per se, since I'm not in one, but even the team battles (which clans would obviously rock out in) would be good. Make it a mini two week tourney style thing. Give out some reasonable rewards. Rotate through the upper tiers (8/9/10).

Re T6 BB's: Arizona is essentially an accurate New Mexico. Mutsu is a bit more accurate than Fuso, but I've noticed it isn't so much *more* accurate that it is much better at range - Fuso uses the shotgun method to compensate. It really shines within 12-14km, but then against most BB's do. Bayern is tankier than Warspite, but Warspite has better guns (to put it lightly). Then again I tried Bayern out yesterday in a random to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Somewhere north of 100k and a Kraken later, started thinking I've probably improved a bit. The French girl is fun, and can bounce 14" shells like the rest, but terribad concealment (14+ WITH CE), and the guns can be wonky, especially if out of practice. In practice I guess I would say the guns feel like the Scharn - fast, lower caliber, and my goodness the RNG rolls for dispersion are all over the place. (Devastating Strike to bracketing the broadside Myoko seems way too common).

I loathe inaccurate guns so in BB's I've pretty much settled on the Warspite for now.

23 hours ago, Rodrigopine said:

@ncc81701 it's too bad there aren't divisions for ranked because you in your BBs me in the Shinonome would be glorious!

Have already had too many matches where it was clear a whole clan was basically queuing up at once, having 4 of them on the red team (and you know they are probably all in voice chat together) is just shitty. Especially since WG hates making the labrats powering MM think any harder. If they could rig it so a max of one 2-player division per team, and each team would get a div, then maybe. Just maybe.

[Rodrigopine 184]

5 minutes ago, cheereereerios said:

 Have already had too many matches where it was clear a whole clan was basically queuing up at once, having 4 of them on the red team (and you know they are probably all in voice chat together) is just shitty. Especially since WG hates making the labrats powering MM think any harder. If they could rig it so a max of one 2-player division per team, and each team would get a div, then maybe. Just maybe.

That actually makes a good argument for allowing some kind of division play possible if people are already trying to rig the system and end up on the same team anyway. A single two player division per team is probably good from a balance perspective. I'm just not sure how robust WG's MM is to handle it.

[Mnemon 38]

1 hour ago, publord said:

Some official league with worthwhile rewards would be a good start. There's nothing wrong with the 7v7 format, I just don't care about playing this "competitive" mode with complete strangers. 

Also WoT eventually figured out that the low tiers are a joke for competitive. Tier 6 has some very boring and lackluster ships. Even the solid performers are not very powerful or interesting to play

Yeah, ranked has always been the tomato welfare mode. They queue up enough times, and better players will carry them to free stuff. Some of them have no shame at all and hit battle enough times to fail their way to exclusive ships.

I actually like how T6 ships are not amazing though. The higher tiers are often World of Gimmicks/Overtuned Ships, so when the ships are kinda capable but flawed the players have to work to get amazing results out of them. If WG wanted to do ranked with powerful ships I'd actually prefer 10 to 8 or whatever. At T10 you have no illusions about how monstrous almost every ship can be (and none of them are straight up for sale in the shop).

[map381 264]

Clan wars wouldn't be hard to do.  The entire mechanic is there with ranked and team battles.  Just make them 10v10.  Then you have a reason for people to grind and spend money to get to tier 10, and you'll make a good size portion of the playerbase happy

[Mesrith 356]

23 hours ago, Madner Kami said:

The current PvE modes should have been in the game last year, at latest.

The inclusion of this new PvE mode is part of what's triggered my latest rash of pessimism for this game's long-term outlook.

The game needs clan content and tournaments to keep PvPers interested.  Instead, what 2017 has brought us is a PvE mode that 97% of the server does once per week to get their easy 24 hour premium and 10-point commander.  But the twelve Co-Op-4-Lyfers on the forums are thrilled with it, so it's a success, right?  We also got two (soon three) new premium carriers and a few gimmicks instead of an actual carrier rework.

WoWS is lacking either a plan or the resources to execute that plan.  My gut says that a plan is there, but that Wargaming has gone full-throated Save Tanks mode, and Ships has just enough resources to keep the lights on and keep the population steady.  There certainly doesn't seem to be anything coming soon that would retain more players and grow the playerbase instead of merely replacing churn.