[2022] Submarine Guide

Read on to learn all the details about submarines in Early Access, as well as how to both helm and counter the new ship type! Read it on the portal

By definition the Silent Majority is silent. Most people play a game or partake in a service without taking the extra step to move toward providing feedback. While I worked in Hospitality, we were told that 1-in-10 will speak up if they had a positive experience while 3-in-10 will speak up if they had a negative experience. Using this metric with a stable product experience would result in roughly 3 times the criticism-to-positivity ratio as a normal situation.

To put this in perspective, how many times how you stopped what you were doing and went to someone at a store or restaurant to tell them how amazing your experience has been? Compare this to the number of times you have sought out an employee to inform them of a problem you are having with a service or a bad situation you experienced.

-

The narrative that we would need to lie about something holds little weight. We are a business that exists to sell a product which is an entire gaming experience moreso than a single form of premium ship or subscription. Our product is World of Warships, which is now a 5 Ship Type experience (SS, DD, CA, BB, CV). Research from our end is required before we make moves or implement changes because the existance of the product is tantamount to our survival as a business. As such, the idea that we are making decisions based on whim or make-believe does not reflect reality. We have a 7 year old, world-wide success story of a game... this is not done with random actions.

-

We don't need to rent-a-crowd. The game speaks for itself in that we continue to have thousands of people which log in and enjoy our game every day. People enjoying our product is a consistent and understandable metric which doesn't need to be bolstered by a false face in order to win a public relations fight over whether new content is valuable or not. New content is valued and change is required in Free-to-Play gaming.

This forum is larger than single threads. The common terminology here regarding Submarines tends to be "Pro-Sub" and "Anti-Sub" of which both camps have their respective members. Some days the Pro-Sub comments outnumber the Anti-Sub comments, though when news articles or larger-reach updates occur that tends to draw more short-term crowd posting.

This forum is representative of leaving a comment about a business on "Yelp" or "Google". This isn't a direct translation, but most players just play the game without ever visiting a form of social sites like our Forums or Discord. For the higher-engaged players, they will seek out places to have more engagement with the game and community, so we tend to have more passionate representative here. Passions do cut both ways and studies show 3-to-1 in terms of willingness to speak up, which is by nature of "going the extra mile" made up of passionate players. This is why Community Managers consistently engage with Forums to read thoughts, comments, and concerns from the players that visit and post. It's a directly followed and tracked form of engagement.

Players that discontinue using a Free-to-Play Gaming service are referenced in the industry as "Churn". Every game has a shelf-life and most players will leave to try other games. If you ever see a game with a stable or growing playerbase, it's because it has new players coming in every day, because other players leave everyday as a matter of nature. I once heard a stat from LWM that F2P games rotate out about 80% of their playerbase every 18 months. I haven't seen that elsewhere, but she has a lot of knowledge and I trust her sourcing on such a statement. The amount of people which do not comment on the forums is rather remarkable as we have millions, yes millions, of forum accounts on this forum alone.

I've seen this narrative repeatedly. Population in our game has gone up and down a few thousand players, but the core game is still very stable. Numbers fluctuate as interest and changes happen, but the overview is remarkably consistent.

This is a public site which tracks player-data: https://stats.wotapi.ru/stats/wows/na/total

Carriers did not stop WoWs from reaching it's Final Form nor stop it from having over 9000 players per day. They have existed in their current state for over three and a half years, which is more then enough time for the impact of your concern to be felt and pan out. Submarines have been in testing for quite some time and our game has continued to be quite playable and enjoyable. We have a great product. Our game is a quite good.

I am more of a game player than a historian. To me, my head thinks more in terms of Character Classes which I find synonymous to our options of ships. We have Tanky ships, Damage-y ships, Cooldown-oriented ships, Assassin-type ships, and more... we have a wonderfully complex, multi-classed team game where players combine their strengths and overcome their weaknesses through use of teammates.

This remains in the eye of the beholder. The game remains strong and fun to play. I personally joined the game post-CV Rework and have enjoyed the game in Randoms, Ranked, Co-Op, Scenario, Events, Brawls, and Clan Battle formats. I've played the gamut of the game with and without Subs and CVs and still find it engaging and valuable. While it could be argued that I'm a CM and should say things like this... the entire reason I am a CM for WoWs is because the product is fantastic. If it wasn't something I had devout belief in, I wouldn't be tiredly typing out all of this at 1:19am instead of sleeping.

Just because the silent group of players isn't talking doesn't mean that they aren't profoundly invested in our game. They come back again and again to partake in a game that genuinely hold their interest, which means they enjoy what we're offering and continue to want more. As for the "silent" aspect, that is partially penetrated by use of in-game surveys and data analysis on what people actually do when confronted with change and in-game events. We are a data-focused company so we invest a lot of time and effort into learning what does and does not work.

In a game that has hundreds of thousands of players frequenting the game on a very routine basis, there is little chance of finding "perfection". There are too many different views for any choice to not have detractors. In the end, we do the best we can to stay aligned with both our vision for a great game and the actionable data that keeps us grounded in a successful product.

Tier 10 Subs do have a fair amount of speed, but the lower tier ones in the Early Access are not very zippy.

Subs can experience issues in Co-Op with trying to get damage into targets, sure. It's not that they can't, but shells are able to reach out and touch targets at a speed and consistency that torpedoes do not. Further, faster DDs that yolo-torp has a strong advantage in a Co-Op arena.

Fortunately, this update has Operation Wolfpack which gives a rather extended experience for landing pings, landing torps, and trying to remain safe while doing so. It's an experience I can recommend.