[2022] Not sure what the british battlecruisers are supposed to do?

Hi!
The mid-tier ships have to make use of their high speed and good concealment to choose when and how they engage.

Their ideal function is to engage and destroy cruisers. While nearly all battleships want to do this, the speed and stealth allow them to have more options in this effort.

The armor on the BC's is not ideal for fighting other BB's, but is only truly weaker at the bow and the stern, so you can still count on deflecting some shells if you can bait the opponent into hitting your belt while angled. If you have to engage a BB, you would want it to be as isolated as possible to let you charge them and get torpedoes off.

You are a Cruiser-killer!
At high tiers, you will do best staying back and using excellent DPM to shell large cruisers and BB's at range, but you reaaaaally don't want to have stand-up fights with other BB's.

Ships and their roles have always been somewhat blurred. This is not a new thing.

I don't know what you mean by "the matching system just doesn't work anymore". It does work. The biggest criticism that I hear is disparity in the skill-level of teams, but this has nothing to do with ships or their roles.

Some DD's are more like light cruisers with no citadel.

Some Cruisers are more like light battleships.

Some BB's are more like Large cruisers.

Some cruisers are more like giant destroyers.

Again - I don't know what you mean by "the matchmaker doesn't work".

It clearly works, because matches are made thousands of times a day.

You'll have to be more specific if you feel there is a problem with the match-maker.

Ok, fair enough - you take issue with feeling that too many games are lopsided in terms of player skill.

This has been a thing for quite a while, but the data that we have about average battle length shows that this really isn't the case.

We're not quite sure why people feel like games are more lopsided these days, but this is not shown when we zoom out and look at thousands of games played over time.

Hey guys,
I don't want to completely derail the OP's topic about how to play RN Battlecruisers, but I will try and explain a bit here.

I hear you on this - but please don't think I don't have a player's perspective just because I work for WG. I have 15k battles ranging from Coop to King of the Sea Round of 16 and many seasons of Hurricane level Clan Battles. I still play about 100 games every 21 days, so I am not removed from the player experience

There are actually a variety of methods we can use to investigate whether or not games are, on average, more lopsided than before.
We can look at average XP per battle, per tier; average number of ships destroyed per game on each side; average XP per game on the losing side vs winning; average length of battles.... we can even look at all of them together.

It's an excellent place to start. The most common criticism of the MM that I hear is "our team gets steamrolled and the game is over too quickly". That's a simple check. If the average battle lasts 13 minutes, let's say, and now it's 10... that's a pretty swift indicator that something is wrong. If it stays 13, then it doesn't mean everything is perfect, but at least starts to draw a picture.
If the average XP of the losing team has dipped significantly, then yes, that is an indicator that something has happened.
If none of the above things I listed suggest an imbalance, then the odds are that people are, for some reason, highly reactive to the times when there is a steamroll - which is something that will always happen to some degree no matter what we do.