World of Warships: Wargaming bought the tournament King of the Sea
5 min readOn Friday evening, the result of a few weeks of negotiation between Wargaming and the Admins and owners of the King of the Sea tournament (Tobiassho, Ataww, Eclaire and Gitaristing) was made public. The tournament King of the Sea will now be owned and managed by WG instead of being simply sponsored by them.
Farewell to a devoted team of admins
After years of good and loyal service, the admin team retires from their heavy commitment and hand over the tournament’s keys. I myself took part in quite a few King of the Sea editions, may it be as a player or as an adjudicator and I can only thank them for all their hard work and devotion in managing such an amazing community-organized event.
In a last announcement on the King of the Sea Discord, Eclaire as well as MrConway (from Wargaming) addressed the members of the Discord to clarify the situation and to give some precisions on how things will evolve starting from now.
Been a while since we’ve made a serious announcement. This one counts: we’re selling out 
Which is to say that the EU orgs are moving on to other things, and we won’t be part of the tournament anymore. We’ve organized KotS in collaboration with WG to this point, they’ll be taking over from now on. The tournament will go on, just not with us running it.
What this means and what happens next
- Ataww, Gita, Tobi, and myself will not be part of KotS
- WG is taking over all aspects of EU KotS, including rules and gamedays
- This discord too
- Yes we sold it, no we can not tell you details
- Next week we will clean up the discord and hand over to WG
- The NA and SEA orgs will have follow-up announcements soon
We’ll add some personal admin messages later but for now standard thanks to all of you from all of us for giving us the chance to build something fun for a community. Most everyone came at it in the spirit of playing together, so thanks to the teams and the reps who put up with endless pings. We cannot say enough about the Adjudicators who made it possible in the first place to run something with 1500 participants more or less smoothly. Streamers who put it out there too, I hope you had fun and managed to grow your own projects along with KotS. And last but not least the WG community team. We may not have found the way to make it work together going forward but we do appreciate the enthusiasm and support you put into KotS and the server clashes from the beginning.
Hi everyone!
It would be a shame to pass up this opportunity to do a mass ping and I want to add my .02$ quickly.
First of all, I want to give a huge thank you to Eclaire, Tobiassho, Gitaristing and Ataww for building, growing and running KoTS for all of these years. I fondly remember the time when they made me go convince people in the company that WoWs competitive gaming was indeed a thing – it turned out they were right!
I also want to give a shout-out to the Adjudicators – that I hope will be staying with us going forward, so that you can continue to have the same amazing tournament experience in the future. All of this would not have been possible without their efforts and dedication. Please show them some love, they deserve it.
I’ll be back with some more detailed information on what will be changing next week when we transfer the server, but I can reassure you that KoTS isn’t going anywhere and will continue to be the go-to tournament for WoWs – and in the format that we have all grown to love!
I wish you all a fantastic weekend!
The future of the King of the Sea
Before anyone goes batshit crazy, screaming that Wargaming are doing this just to bring Carriers to the King of the Sea, you can put that pitchfork down.
They are not planning to add them in the foreseeable future, mostly due to the spotting issue. However, as you may know, there are still some internal testings being done to limit the spotting provided by carriers. If these end up being successful and reach live servers, then things might change for the King of the Sea as well.
Of course, even with that in mind, they aren’t going to shove CVs in if they see that the community is against it.
When it comes to why Wargaming decided to acquire the tournament, there are multiple reasons.
The first and most obvious one is that this way, they will have full control of the tournament. This will make it easier for them to organize things, may it be the sign-ups or choosing the most suited dates so that it doesn’t overlap with things like Clan Battles. It will also make it easier to manage the streaming coverage.
There is also a certain will to evolve the tournament and make it bigger in the future. As for what it exactly means, time will tell us. Hopefully, we will have some more improvements for the training’s room interface as such as seeing directly the layout of capture points when setting up things in the lobby.
Another reason for WG to acquire the King of the Sea is having legal management of the tournament. This would open up the possibility of future third-party sponsored editions, similar to the Verizon’s Warrior Championship that took place in December 2020.
In the end, we aren’t in an “It’s the end of the world scenario”. Wargaming aren’t acquiring the tournament to kill it, CVs will still be kept away (at least for now) and Gitaristing and co get their hands freed of a heavy burden which ends up being a good thing for the admin team, as the future KOTS XII would have been hard to handle due to their respective personal lives.
In any case, the most important for me is that I will keep my little news channel on the King of the Sea Discord! My precciiiiious channel!
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Have a good one and see you soon!
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‘Of course, even with that in mind, they aren’t going to shove CVs in if they see that the community is against it.’ -And what exactly should stop Wargaming from doing so? No selling of Tier 10 ships, no submarines, no guns >460mm… they went back on so many statements over the past few years no one is gonna believe them. They tested countless ways to limit the excessive spotting capabilities of carriers yet the issue is still not fixed and the carrier rework is over 2 years old. Everytime they tried to balance carriers the player numbers dropped to pre-rework levels because their basic gameplay is boring. Being overpowered is literally their selling point. Wargaming has no interest in fixing carriers or compe***ive play or they wouldn’t have forced them into Clan Battles back then and Clan Brawls now. When they think it’s about time that carriers come to Kings of the Sea our opinion will not count. Our opinion didn’t count when they reworked carriers, it didn’t count when they reworked anti-air, it didn’t count when they reworked the Inertia Fuse skill and armor plating thickness and it didn’t count when they reworked the commander skills less than a month ago. They don’t even listen to their testers and community contributors. All they care about is their short-term income.
@Stormhawk Why would WG ever listen to the unfiltered playerbase, testers or CCs if the majority of them isn’t good enough to properly identify balance and gameplay issues or suggest good solutions to them?
@Yurra Are you new to World of Warships? Because if you’re not you should know that Wargaming prefers the feedback of pepegas over the feedback of unicums but they ignore feedback that doesn’t fit their narrative no matter where it comes from.
I’m hardly new, look me up on wows-numbers if you want. I am very much aware of how WG treats feedback, they give as little value to pepega feedback (which they rightfully should), as they do to pro level feedback (which is a pretty huge issue).