World of Warships – 19/09/2017 Q&A Digest
8 min readPh3lan and Ev1n talked on Tuesday about the new update and other topics during a live Q&A on Facebook and Twitch. Vectoranalysis was kind enough to do a digest for those who couldn’t watch the Q&A.
Source: World of Warships Reddit
Upcoming Patch 0.6.11
- Clan/Naval base –> expanding the functionality if players use the base/like it enough (e.g. a commanders barracks that houses all your commanders – so more an optical thing and less in-game bonus thing), economics 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 gameplay ‘best of the best’, currently high tier gameplay 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)
- The 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 smoke meta, guaranteed detection in smoke is in the devs eyes the best option they had, game needs to evolve away from the smoke meta, 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)
- The game will not develop in a direction where being member of a clan is necessary to play the (basic) game
Maps
- Epicentre is currently thought about to change (esp. for “Tears of the cruisers”)
New Weapons
- IJN Beehive: Not planned atm, esp since the game engine 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 team battles), 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 instantly 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,
Tier X 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 dependent but players don’t make the effort to switch ammo, HE currently works too good in all situations and that needs to be addressed
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,
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 was tested, super fun to play but it doesn’t fit the game, that’d be “World of Warships: Modern Warfare”
Sounds
More individual sounds for different AA and main guns were asked, but no answer possible due to no contact with 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 is not decided, Swedish could/should receive their own destroyer line (=stand as a separate 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 eventually, but not anytime soon, in the foreseeable future an IJN high tier premium DD is coming.
Pan Asian DDs
Powerful is relative, 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 seal clubbers around, especially during T4 specials (thus specials maybe moved up to T5), more tutorials, but in general not a big problem with seal clubbing.
Reports
Working on the next iteration of ‘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 Tokio Game Show”
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Still nothing on Oktyabrskaya’s release… 🙁