[2021] Naval Battles

I have already brought this up in our global QnA to see if we can come to a solution as quickly as possible.

Nothing happens overnight, so I’m going to have to ask for your patience on this. :)

I don’t have an answer as to why Naval Battles seem to have been more often BXP rather than ribbons or damage. In my experience it has always been skewed that way.

I am of the understanding, though have not had it confirmed, that BXP is the standard and variety was introduced to spice it up a bit and make it different. That difference was sometimes ribbons and sometimes damage, but BXP is the standard.

Base XP is a great indicator of a player’s involvement in a match and is harder to “game” than the other two. For example:

If Naval Battles are damage: people can bring flame-throwers and farm fires.

If the Naval battles are ribbons, people can spam secondary ships or Dakka Dakka’s like the Smolensk. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.

Base XP is much more standardized - unless you’re a CV and then you’re at a disadvantage.

I really don’t think I am…

Look, maybe I should put it this way:

NB’s for ribbons or damage heavily favor certain styles of ship, while BXP does not. It could legitimately alter the Randoms meta more than is acceptable if BXP is not the most common variant. A Shimakaze who x3 solo caps and lands 5 torpedoes for 2 kills has zero chance of earning a NB threshold based on ribbons, but arguably did FAR more for his team than a Harugumo who accrued x500 ribbons by spamming HE at a Krem he mostly can’t pen and doing 140k damage overall. BXP is a more consistent indicator of how effective you were than an arbitrary number like ribbons or even damage.

That being said, it is a perfectly fine point to bring up that Coop-focused clans will struggle to achieve the required base xp levels to compete properly in Randoms.

My personal answer on that point is that Naval Battles are clan-to-clan somewhat-passive competition. As Randoms are the primary game mode - Randoms will be the primary balancing factor.

And that’s just the thing, isn’t it?

Coop and Randoms currently share Naval Battles but do not have the same formats. It’s apples and oranges. I’m fully aware that this will cause discrepancies in Naval Battle competitions, but I have to fall back on the reality that Randoms is the primary game mode.

I understand that there are lots of PvE clans out there and I’m spending more time in the PvE parts fo the forums to hear our grievances that sound like they may have fallen by the wayside. I honestly love to problem-solve so I’ve started inquiries on behalf of some of those issues. In regards to Naval Battles, I suspect the reality will be that BXP remains the most common metric.