devtrackers.gg
Dear players,
We would like to comment on the recently announced feature, which you undoubtedly know about - Naval Training Center (NTC).
First of all, we hear you and appreciate your feedback. Thank you for letting us know about your concerns, expectations and thank you for caring for the game.
While the Center is still under development, we're already working on a couple of changes based on your discussions across different platforms:
The combat buffs will become incremental and significantly smaller than announced originally. Instead of having big leap in ship stats, we will concentrate on smaller improvements which will still be nice to have on your favorite ship. But they will not feel mandatory to be competitive.
We will do our best to make it diverse and incorporate other types of rewards for using NTC in further Seasons. As many of you suggested, we will consider such things as rare resources and cosmetics to be in the reward pools. This will allow to keep the combat buffs under control and diversify the rewards instead of concentrating on ship upgrade.
We will tweak the economic settings of NTC to reduce the gap between the players. We will make sure that the entry level of NTC is lower, and that the overall system works more for width of the rewards instead of depth. For example, instead of resetting and revisiting the ship line to get 1 strong level 1 bonus for 1 ship (probably tier 10), players will get a few smaller bonuses they can distribute. Overall, we will remove the pressure to min-max one ship, shifting it to evenly upgrading your collection with incremental buffs that do not create imbalance compared to other elements of ship loadout.
We will be mindful of the influence this system can have on competitive play. As we already said before, some capping of NTC buffs is possible for competitive, but with the feedback you gave us, let's be even more clear: NTC buffs will be capped at level 1 for Clan Wars, Clan Brawls and Training room. With the changes to the buffs themselves and their cost of acquisition, it will remove any unnecessary gap and maintain fair play. Only if we're absolutely sure that the core audience is invested into the new system we will consider increasing the cap.
We will continue improving this feature and looking for ways to reinforce the good parts of the system, while mitigating the parts you don't like. Our current tentative plan is to release this feature withing update 0.8.7, but if any critical improvements are planned, we will take our time and work more on this.
That said, we also have several clarifications about the parts of NTC which probably were not explained well enough on our side:
Completely switching the system to cosmetics or resources is not going to work. We seriously considered this option, but from all our experience with various in-game activities and their rewards, we still need to keep some performance-based rewards to keep the progression meaningful. However, we really appreciate your ideas about having much less significant bonuses and adding other types of rewards to make the buffs even more scarce.
This system rewards long term engagement, but we will make sure that it is much more dynamic and that the rewards also feel achievable. However, each season will have limits for maximum number of line resets, and with the changes described above it will be about having small nice bonuses, not about the "stressful race to make your Yamato tier 11".
NTC buffs, especially with the substantial reduction, will be offset by free improved consumables. As we mentioned, even on battle tier 10, over 50% of games are played with free consumables. On lower tiers, the number is even higher. A lot of players are struggling to use these consumables because they're still grinding credits, or merely not experienced enough to appreciate their importance. An extra charge and much quicker cooldown time for Repair party or Heal makes huge difference in fact. Of course we do understand that for high-end players the usage of improved consumables was mandatory anyways, but that's why the buffs are being tweaked and will be limited in any competitive modes.
While the first proposed implementation of NTC obviously needs more work, we believe the whole idea is still relevant. On the recent CC Summit we discussed the need for high-end meaningful progression. It's still there. We do not plan to release fewer ship lines, stop working on new maps and game modes, or to stop introducing quality of life improvements, but the core playerbase still exceeds our expectations in terms of activity. This feature is just one of the ways we are planning to address this need in future updates.
We realize that this PSA did not cover all of your questions and concerns. In the near future we will release at least 2 more important articles: answers to your most popular questions and the second part of this announcement with more details on how we are tweaking the system according to your feedback.
Once again, thank you for your input, and stay tuned.