[2021] Important message for the community

Dear players,

Lately a lot of you have been upset with various incidents, our decisions, as well as a general state of things in the game and community. Before we continue, we want to apologize to all of you, players, content creators, moderators, testers, and other volunteers, to those who support us and those disappointed with us. Everything that happens within the game and the community is our responsibility, and we are sorry that we let the situation come to its current state.

We want to take this opportunity to be more transparent about how we will take actions to improve our internal processes and our relationship with you. It will be a long read, you will see items of different scales and with different times required to see results. No doubt more news and announcements will follow, so please don't treat this as a final plan and the ultimate solution to everything. Instead, please treat it as a list of things we're currently working on and a way to show our intentions to make the game and community a better place. Also, please note that it is not comprehensive, as many other measures are revolving around internal processes.

Monetization

World of Warships is a free-to-play title following the game-as-a-service concept with substantial monthly updates and a constant evolutionary cycle. To support this model we rely on a multitude of monetization tactics considered to be standard practice in the industry. While we believe it's unreasonable to expect to discuss our monetization strategies in all but the most general terms - this is business-critical information - we do understand that there are specific details that are a cause of concern for some of you. We will address them as best we can below.

Random mechanics. As a business, we always follow laws and comply with new regulations as they appear. Therefore, our position on containers and random bundles is always consistent with governments' decisions on this matter and will keep being so. In some cases, we will even try to work ahead of industry practices. We are aware that there are slowly progressing trends to regulate the digital space more and more, to catch up with technical solutions and business models built on them. With that in mind, we appreciate your feedback and commit to the following: from now on for all new ships, if they are distributed via Containers or Random Bundles, there will be an alternative way to obtain them. Methods may vary and may include timegating (i.e. early access or time delayed offers), direct purchases, completing in-game activities, etc.


Drop rates. We plan to publish all drop rates for all Containers and Random Bundles, and are already working on it. It will take some time, but our hard commitment is that it will happen over the course of next year.


Return of Missouri. The initial concept of the event was perceived negatively, and we should have known better. The case was a learned lesson for us and we added an alternative way to purchase the ship. We're also addressing the situation with the ship's earnings to make sure that those who owned Missouri before 0.10.7 will on average receive not less credits than before the changes to the ship's economics. We're grateful for the battles you played, these helped us to collect sufficient data. This amount of data allows us to add a +10% bonus to the special Missouri combat mission (from 20% to 30%). Additionally, we will issue appropriate amount of credits to all the affected players as a sign of appreciation; details will be published in Devblog separately.


Summer Sale. Unfortunately, we made a translation mistake in a sensitive description. We fixed it ASAP and to protect you from such mistakes in the future, we will add additional checks and approvals to our internal processes. If anything like that happens again, we will offer refunds to all of the affected players. We did it before and we will do it again to make sure that you are compensated. We will also pay more attention to the positioning of such events: for example, many of you stated the term "Sale" suggests direct discounts on in-game items.


Age ratings. We've already added disclaimers about in-game purchases with random items to our PEGI ratings. We're also in touch with other rating organizations to adjust our ratings everywhere in a consistent way. While our game was never popular among minors and we adhere to legislation in all countries where we publish World of Warships, we plan to go beyond what is required of us by laws and we are working on our own in-game measures to additionally protect children who interact with our game. We will share more details on this point once we're ready to announce them.

Feedback

One of the main topics we want to address is how your feedback influences the game. Regrettably, it was not always clear how we use certain types of feedback and where it fits into our decision-making process. We've always taken it into account, but looking back, we see that in some cases it was not balanced well enough against other equally important sources of information: large volumes of data and the team's creative vision of the game. We want to change this situation and make sure we pay more direct attention to your suggestions and opinions while also giving you more insight into how the decisions are made. Things we are considering and evaluating right now:

More reaction to feedback on ships balance. We know there are several ships you want to be addressed, and we'd like to confirm: balance changes are planned for Zao, Petropavlovsk, and FDR in 0.10.10. Moving forward we will try to increase the promptness of addressing released ships in a similar way and when it is not possible (for example, changing a ship will move it out of the interval of normal performance), we will put more effort into giving you insights and explaining our reasoning.


Aircraft Carriers. Despite many other things happening in the game, we haven't forgotten that there are still questions to be answered regarding CVs. We've implemented a lot of changes to this class since the rework, but we acknowledge more changes may be needed. CV spotting is a good example - we conducted several tests before and did not find a good, adequate way to address it. That does not mean we will not continue to improve it. It's not something that can be done quickly, please keep that in mind. Another common question is regarding odd-tier carriers, which were previously mentioned as "support CVs". Right now they are in an early prototyping stage (developing document concepts), and we want to honestly tell you that they are not to be expected in 2022.


New gameplay experiences. We will keep evolving the game by introducing new game modes and mechanics, both fiction- and history-based. For example, in 0.10.8 we will have a new mode - Convoys - inspired by historical events. We will keep exploring new game modes in the future, - it's one of our priorities. Expanding permanent types of battles (primarily Random battles) with new modes is also one of the long-term goals to keep the game fresh and entertaining. However creating a mode suitable not just for a short gaming period, but for a permanent presence with high replayability is a much bigger challenge, so it takes many more tries and effort.


Maps. We've slowed down with adding new maps to the game recently because the team focused more on the game's visuals in general (updated visual effects, new water, and other improvements) as well as introducing a whole new level of underwater world. That said, in 2022 at least one new map will be released, and another one has some chances to make it in time. Spoiler: we're also going to try a new mechanic with the first of these new maps not previously used in the game.


Operations. CV rework rendered a lot of AI-related internal tools obsolete and made working with AI-aircraft-related stuff very difficult or impossible. Right now we're in the process of removing this obstacle. It's being worked on for many reasons, not just for the sake of Operations, but one of the benefits we will have when this project is done is that we will be able to return some of the old Operations in 2022.


Other. There are plenty of other things we know you're interested in, and quite a lot of them are being worked on in different stages of development. We haven't forgotten about things such as secondary builds for cruisers, the update of some old ship models, Tier IV CV tuning, Huron (coming 2022), West Virginia'44 (coming 2023), addressing the chat system, improvements for Ranked Battles, and many other small and not so small changes to the game that will make your experience with it better.

Communications

We are a large, distributed team of over 500 people working across more than 4 countries. Coming from all walks of life, culturally varied and hindered severely by the pandemic from travelling to see each other in person to be able to align on certain matters, we are bound to have organizational challenges in the realm of communication. However, these internal challenges should not be visible, much less influence the player experience. Improving communications is a never-ending process which needs to be evolutionary and not revolutionary, so you will see those improvements incrementally over time in many areas, rather than as a one-time institutional overnight change. But we want to address a few specific points you pointed out in this area.

Community Contributor Program. When we created our CCTP, our goal was to help talented folks interested in our game create content and grow their channels. Right now it's clear that a lot of things in the Program do not work as they should, which leads to frustration and failed expectations even though some other parts are running well. We will update the Program, both in terms of rules and the way we work with it internally. We expect to have some sort of internal plan and first action points ready in the second half of September, and then proceed with the changes during this Autumn.


Future of the game. We'd like to offer you a deeper look into the future of the game. Right now we have Devblogs (where we basically announce everything that comes to Supertest) and the Waterline series (quarterly updates). To complement these and expand the horizon of events, we want to share a general roadmap with you, of what you can expect to see in World of Warships in the far future. It will give you an idea of what we want to focus on - but please keep in mind that things can and will change. At the same time, we want to show the progress World of Warships achieves. The game evolves a lot each year and it will make it easier for you to follow what we are doing.


Communications quality. There have been a lot of communication mistakes and incidents on our side recently. While mistakes always happen and we're all human, we acknowledge that we need to improve in this area. We've already launched a full internal review of all related processes. We want fewer mistakes and translation errors, more answers, and productive conversations. We want to improve the way you interact with us in any place, be it Forums, Customer support, Discord servers or official streams.


General transparency. We need to work hard on it: on the one hand, we need to pay more attention to the community sentiment, on the other hand, we have to be more transparent and explain our positions. We will create a series of publications to make our development process more transparent and to show the logic behind what we do. For example, players did not understand why the latest torpedo bug took 2 updates to fix, while a CV bug (plane losses in 0.9.9) was fixed almost instantly. They are in fact very different: the CV bug was fixed by quickly adjusting some parameters, while the torpedo bug involved game logic, and even though it was technically fixed within a week, it had to go through all regular quality assurance processes. Deploying such change through a hotfix is extremely risky for the game. This should have been communicated transparently and we will do our best to do so in the future.


In-depth communications and insights. When it's necessary we will use more specifics and will provide deeper explanations of our decisions. For example, we implemented the system for CvC ship bans, which helps us to keep the meta fresh, and we want to tell you more about how and why we use it, as it's something that our hardcore players are interested in.

All of it is just our current, first plan. We will keep looking for other points of interest and challenges. We want to show you our responsibility, care and desire for the game by the way we communicate and through our actions - to make the game better for everyone.

A final word on passion and communication. While we are working hard to improve the way we communicate and interact with you, we want to take a moment to address your passion and the way that we communicate with each other. We know that you care about the game a great deal and ask you to remember that there are people - community managers, support staff, developers and volunteers - that read your communications and posts, wherever they may be made. While we as a company certainly need to work on the way we communicate with you, we ask that you treat the people you interact with fairly and with respect. Your voice will carry as much – or more – weight with them if you present your feedback and opinions in a reasoned and constructive way.

Yours sincerely,

Victor Bardovsky, Publishing Director

Andrey Lisak, Development Director

World of Warships Team

Thank you!

Well, we committed to what we can right now and we will start turning our rudder to steer the course. Unfortunately, we are a battleship and organizational change takes time.

We do make balance changes to ships even when people do not riot. Sometimes we also do not make balance changes, when people riot for no reason.

As I've said in another thread last night, we need to contrast feelings with data, to get an accurate picture of what should be changed.

I apologize, but there is a commitment: over the course of next year. So, not later than 2022.

We of course know the drop rates. However, World of Warships operates in all regions of the world, including China. As you may know, in terms of video games and random monetization mechanics, China is especially regulated region. We want to disclose drop rates for Containers and Random bundles in a consistent way in all regions, so we have to do a fair amount of legal and technical work to make it happen and to make sure we are compliant everywhere. We commit to do it no later than 2022, and will do due diligence to do it as soon as we can.

We will disclose drop rates. However, this is not a technical choice or problem (of flipping a switch or writing code) - it's a legal and logistical one. We need to make sure that a change like that is consistent across all the jurisdictions we publish the game in - which includes China, a region regulated very strictly. We also need to be sure that we understand the implications of this change on all of those regions and the business model we are operating in them. It's not a simple matter.

We will do our best to make our balancing process more visible, so that when feedback is given it's clearer on how we look at it. However, we will not abandon the core principle of balancing - we still need to confirm with data whether something needs a buff or nerf.

Yes, of course there are QA processes relevant to every step of the development and publishing pipeline. Some of those will be updated or revamped. It's obviously not the same team working on each part of the pipeline.

We understand, and we will do our best to show you evolutionary changes on a smaller scale with a shorter horizon.

With all respect to the stellar analyses LWM has always done, she only sees the final bit of the pipeline for certain content releases. The development and publishing process are much bigger than that and require more QA steps where the community cannot be involved.

As a general statement this is unfair - whatever issues we have had with the game, or made players unhappy, let's not forget that overall we have an overall good game and a healthy community. If we mistreated them on a general level, the servers would be empty, so please don't make sweeping generalizations like that.

Look, you can read into linguistic nuance all you want, but we are trying to give you guys information and commitments. Other than that we do expect you to hold us accountable, within those commitments.

Console platform operators require us to disclose drop rates.

Which is why i commented with that stronger wording. We have to plan all of this stuff to make it happen - nothing fishy.

Its not about size or speed - quite the opposite, those are mostly influenced by the fact that there is a huge audience which consists of multiple player groups. Each of those has different priorities and engages with different parts of the game more or less.

Case in point - for you it's all too much, while for others it's not enough.

As we have said in a previous thread, we will reach out to LWM to try to reestablish a dialogue and mend the relationship.

I appreciate your point of view on this and respect the level tone. I do agree that we need to be held accountable for promises broken. However, we also need to draw a line between that and changing development plans and evolving the game. This is one communications challenge that we are addressing with this.

I absolutely see that in your replies and the replies of others. If players were not passionate about the game, we would not all be here. However, as I've said in other threads in the past few days, not all qualitative feedback always makes sense. This is absolutely normal, especially in the context of how the SM landscape changed in the last few years, but this type of feedback is also included in the communication stream. This is why we always say that the more factual and detailed feedback is, the bigger the chance that we will know what to do with it.

I am always happy to have a reasonable discussion.

We previously thought, based on our conversations, that we were on the same page about what was being asked, or we would not have announced Huron publicly. Now it seems we did not understand the main points after all, so we will reach out and try again.

Developers do play the game, some religiously - the vast majority on the RU server. As for the other point, we will do our best so that this doesn't happen systematically, though please remember that it might happen at times. Sometimes the ticket queue is empty and sometimes its full, while staffing is planned for the average.

We will update our moderation policies on NA, to make sure its clear what is appropriate and so that moderation is clearer and more effective. In terms of locking threads - if you see someone derailing your discussion, please report them and the mods will mod as soon as they can.

We absolutely understand this sentiment, but all that we can do is plan changes, tell you about them, start the changes, implement the changes over time. You will see them over time - some sooner, some later.

That's a reasonable concept, but some of the suggestions are based on your opinion and your perceived value of certain things. We are committed to the concept, but still need to balance the game around the meta and need to disconnect performance from value.

We will try.

We do not delete any posts that are not inflammatory or otherwise breaking the rules. This thread is an example of that i believe, while i can't say that all the comments are favorable towards us.

Yesterday's locked thread was a counter-example, where we did not moderate enough.

Once we deliver on this commitment, please feel free to collate community data, just like you are doing now. The research will have the same limitations, but may help to catch any issues.

I appreciate the level of introspective you have. It's difficult to not use a spreadsheet in IT though - I guess we will rephrase this to "the data". I do agree that we should give proactive updates on some of these changes - the idea of a community-facing roadmap will hopefully contribute to that, with updates probably every few months. Other than that you will see smaller changes reflected in dev blogs and patch notes, since those are released much more frequently, to follow our current 4-week development cycle.

While I appreciate the reasonable analysis, we generally separate the concept of apology from commitments to change. From that perspective we need to be on the same page that we just have different points of view on what is good for the game, because we have technical context of how it works (UX design, the software and the business model) and most players don't.

Otherwise i do tend to agree with the communications aspect - its something we are trying hard to address.

The World of Warships pillar in WG is 500+ staff. The mothership is much bigger.

This is a mischaracterization. I was responding to a comment that said we should leave QA to the community based on the example of a CC. This is not possible, because this is not how gamedev works in general.

We have no contempt for the community nor any specific player groups. Otherwise i would not be here replying to you and trying to separate opinions from business practice from our commitments for changes.

Our loot boxes are not pay 2 win. Well, we seem to disagree on a simple point here: you are saying that all players understand everything about the game and the business, because its all common sense. I allege that this is not the case and so we try to address that.

And I did not mean that as a demeaning or diminishing comment - just to make it clear that the QA process is more complicated than that. Just don't see the joke there, especially that the topics being addressed are supposed to be serious.

I don't currently have an answer for the first question. Regarding loot boxes the answer is, because they are not illegal, its not true that all (or even the majority) players hate them despite what it may look like from this discussion or that they actively hurt financially. There are different points of view on this and i understand that we may not agree on it, but the bottom line is that we are addressing some of the specific items related to loot boxes.

We don't push biased soviet ship lines. Soviet ships are generally balanced just like all other nations, while we strike a balance between how many ships and lines of each major nation we release.

We do not ninja-nerf ships - all changes to ship characteristics are announced. If they are not that is a bug and not intended.

We do not *continue* to treat our Community Contributors poorly, or they would not be in the program. We have made mistakes, this much is clear, and we will address the program in general.

Please do hold us to our commitments above.

This is interesting and i appreciate the effort. However, we can't discuss the business at this level of detail without you having an NDA. It's just good practice. :)

I do, of course, but that does not remove the point. Many of our oldest CCs left, but the majority remain, because not all issues quoted are systemic. It's just easy to extrapolate and think that all we do is treat everyone poorly.

We've been working on the AI for scenarios in the background for a while, but it's not been a priority for the team due to the fact that they are not very popular overall (i.e. not many players play them).

The main point here is that if CCs are still supposed to be the ambassadors for the community, as most participants in these discussions seem to want, then it stands to reason that we would use the CC program to communicate with them, because its the best channel to do so and has always been. We will improve this channel and fix all those complaints and issues that we conceivably can (that are not based on an immovable difference of opinion) and continue using it, because while it may be a part of the problem, it is also a part of the solution.

I know and i appreciate the kind words.

I'm fine with criticism, but the challenge is explaining the background of some decisions without going into also explaining all the connected systems and dependencies. I will do my best though.

I'm sorry but I can't read Portuguese and don't want to misinform you based on a web translator. We'll do our best to come back to this.

I will do my best.

Just please don't freak out if tomorrow I'm not on the forums full-time. Today this is the most important item on the agenda, but i also have to get back to my regular job of keeping NA running. We will schedule some more specific weekly or bi-weekly time frames when i'll make myself available to talk to you guys. We will figure out how to make this work sustainably to fulfill the commitment.

I'm not the right person to address these specific concerns, but as always - if they underperform, we will tweak them again. However, we will tweak them based on broad performance data.

Guys, I can't really answer those questions at this time, because recently we were focusing on making decisions and plans on the big items. Yes, we will look at these kinds of small wishlist items like buffing California in the near future, but we will still look closely at the data to validate whether/what needs adjusting. As for adding any specific new ships - i can't promise that, for sure not in the short term. This depends on our production pipeline and multiple other factors like whether we have the necessary references. Some specific ship classes are also pre-assigned to be part of future tech tree branches or to be premiums accompanying those branches and we believe that's the best fit for them.

I can't commit to this right now, and it would not be actionable "today", or even next week most likely. Overall it might be possible for us to release this ship, but would that really change the opinion of most players?

Lol. I appreciate that one. :)

Fair Assessment. Nothing unexpected in Flamuu trashing us.

As I've replied to some of those comments here today - we will back them up, but it will take time, please do hold us accountable.

We are not reluctant to buff such ships. The problem is with the assessment of "clearly underperforming". In terms of win rate, the ship is at 49.95%, it has the second highest plane kills in tier, it is absolutely average in kills and KvD (better than Colorado and Nagato though). It is currently a bit below average in DPM though, but above average in survivability and lifetime. I understand that for players gunplay is often the most important factor, so we will look at the possibility of buffing that slightly, so that she is closer to the average.

We will take that into consideration and see if we can make that happen within the agreement between us and the partner, but I can't make any commitments on this at present.

That counter tells you how many bundles you've obtained. Random bundles always show you what's next. Since you haven't purchased any bundles (unless you have and I'm wrong) this is correct. You have not obtained any of the bundles.

She looks average in the stats. 53% avg WR, average DPM, average survivability, average damage per battle. What was painful about her?

Thank you, I will tell the mods to not moderate without stating the reason. I'm sorry they did that.

Generally, we want to make sure that we keep an open forum for discussing the message in question, not Flamu's content. People are absolutely free to go view it on his channels though.

As for responding to it - I am happy to respond to normal discussion points, but its hard for me to find those there. There is his opinion based on his personal understanding - which is wrong in the case of his evaluation of our legal practice or refund policies. I find it interesting though that he flaunts the in-game kickbacks he receives in-game from his audience and then proceeds to discuss what's wrong with the monetization of the game.

Thank you. Now i can reply to this since now i can read it. As stated in the OP we are going to address the main listed concerns you have with the use of random mechanics, but overall we do not believe these mechanics need to be fully removed from the game.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand the question you're posing here. Can you maybe rephrase that?

To be perfectly honest I don't remember all the details of this right now, while the question you are asking is a legal one. I will come back to you on this and why it was done one way and not the other.

I'm sorry but its not possible for us to "just stop" or immediately slow down what we are doing, at least not without significant danger to the game. As we have said, we are committed to addressing those concerns, but the change must be evolutionary.

I get that, but there will always be those ships that have weaker and stronger guns - otherwise everything will just feel the same. That's why some ships have strongpoints in other areas, even though we know that those are not valued the same as guns.

As we've said before, it's not a simple matter of "just do it". Sure, coding the drop rates themselves and the front-end UI may not take that long, but changing the business model to fit the new mechanics and behavioral trends is something that needs to be done carefully. We'll try to do it as fast as we can, but the commitment horizon we give is the next year.

I can't answer this directly right now - we're planning different ways to address that lack of clarity on the balance process, but those items tied to new mechanics will come closer to the date when the mechanics are in final stages. I just currently don't know exactly what the ETA is on those mechanics. I will come back to you on that.

I can make a polite suggestion, but ultimately it will be up to their game teams to choose the tools they feel they need. We do not have company-wide guidelines for that specifically, because different regions and games require different approaches.

Yes. We will do this. We'll just try to see if we can automate it at least a bit, to try to avoid a situation when on NA it will be outdated because we're in a different time zone than the dev team.

1. As above - we will revamp that, but we'll.

2. We will make that happen - most likely through our streams.

3. Yes. Either him or when he can't you're stuck with me.

The name was mentioned because a comment was made referring to the person. Just for the record, Flamu did not leave the program in the current situation.

I absolutely value Flamu for his gameplay analyses - he is extremely good at that and that content is simply very good. However, that does not mean that his opinion on other topics is objective or true. He is a content creator and will cater to his audience. It's not personal, just an evaluation of the modern media environment.

We used to do that on stream and the forums very early on and when we asked people "what would you like to see?" we basically got a list of all the ships that ever existed - one from each player. This is why we usually would reply to questions like "Is THIS ship coming?" by saying that we want to introduce all the ships eventually. The other problem is that the NA part of that would likely be focused heavily on US Navy ships, while we need to make sure we cater relatively equally to our global community.

This is not to say we can't or won't do that, but we just need to organize it in some meaningful way.

We will do our best to achieve that.

That is the point - we need to find a middle ground where we address your concerns and give you the experiences you individually desire and meeting our goals. As I've posted above, we will give you an updates (the scoop) on those commitments.

This is not me at my most sociable. When we finally get through the pandemic and are able to resume offline events, then you will see my most sociable. I do look forward to meeting players at some of those events. :)

Nobody likes to pay - that's absolutely understandable. However, there are absolutely players who like to grind and there are players for who long-term goals are important. We do understand that we need to balance the amount of both in the dockyard system though. PR taught us that.

We're unfortunately a bit understaffed, but you will see more of us in the future, once we get more crew on board.

I'm a criminologist and a grumpy cat, so I know i come off like that.

This is an interesting take on the effect of Operations. Thank you for sharing it.

Yes, quite literally (except for the bias comment). As I've said in other threads we need to contrast players feelings about things with the way that they behave in the game and interact with its systems. Sometimes the data shakes or topples the feeling, sometimes it confirms it. The more players are vocal about a specific topic, the more reason for us to look into it and start cross-referencing data, but it doesn't automatically mean we need to buff or nerf any specific thing without doing that analysis (which, ultimately, takes time).

We are in compliance with all current laws in all jurisdictions so the parallel doesn't really apply this way. For us it's a matter of making a big change to a business and operational model that needs to be well prepared. However, I do take your point about perception of end-of-year activities - it will be discussed with our monetization team to see whether we can meet our objectives without causing upset.

That is not the case. We understand that this is concerning for some of our players, but it is not a matter of legality. As stated earlier we are committed to finding a middle ground where we address those concerns and are able to meet our own business goals. The ship simply doesn't turn on a dime.

We are compliant with the current systems in the game. We will also have to check whether we will be compliant with any changes that we make and whether they meet certain criteria - for example whether the UI elements that facilitate the disclosure are good enough and many other factors.

No, we did not nor do I believe that would help in this case. In any case, we will give updates on the commitments posted today.

This thread is not the right backdrop for that. As Sub-Octavian had mentioned, we will use the same channel which was used previously.

And we always will. :)

Ladies and gents,

It's been a long day, so I will turn into port for the night.

I know that tensions are high, but I appreciate that we managed to keep this thread civil, with only few moderations needed. I will leave this thread open and come back tomorrow to see if there are any more new points that I could address.

I do ask that we keep it constructive and refrain from poking, trolling or worse. If this turns into another pillow fight we will lock it.

Thank you for your patience and your attention today.

Fair winds and good night.

Best,