World of Warships Dev Tracker

Hi, here is the link.

Dear players,

Following your feedback and test results, we decided to stop live testing of Giulio Cesare at tier VI and abandon the initiative to individually re-balance premium ships, which were purchased in or directly marketed through our Premium store. Here is the reasoning:

While many of you did support the idea of promoting more balance and fair play, most of you were not willing to support this if it means making changes to purchased premium ships.


Many of you let us know that the perfect balance in each ship group is not as critical for you as we assumed; however, the confidence that the stats of purchased premium ships are not to be nerfed is much more important. It was not the only opinion voiced, but it was the most frequent in all discussions on all platforms.


According to the majority of your opinions, having several over performing premium ships in the game is not an issue for you, given the fa...

The total damage output of Graf Zeppelin is still very high. To keep the special features of GZ's attack planes and dive bombers and balance the total amount of damage this CV can inflict, the damage of torpedoes is lowered from 5500 to 4533. This change will be live at 14:00 UTC on 13.03.19

It's not planned to make further changes to the parameters of Graf Zeppelin, Saipan, Kaga and Enterprise. We consider their balancing finished. We also would like to remind you that you can exchange your CVs in the Inventory section before the time to do this expires with 0.8.2.

Accuracy settings are changed for Lenin and all researchable tier III - X soviet battleships;


Damage Control Party duration is lowered to 10 seconds for for Lenin and all researchable soviet battleships.

The accuracy settings for the Soviet battleships were very "unnatural" and the change of the spread at long range increases sharply. Also such setting...

Eh, no? The test start was announced when it was approved. And we're not "going to nerf them". We're going to test various changes to GC, while analyzing the stats and community sentiments, to see if we need to do anything and how. I mean, you can paint us evil geniuses sitting in the basement and plotting how to sell stuff and then nerf it (for lulz, obviously), but that's not how it works.

So? The game was perfectly fine before boxes, and if they are banned in the industry, the game will be perfectly fine without them. Fortunately neither WoWS economy, nor WoWS progression system are built around loot boxes mechanics. It's a component, which will be dropped, if needed, and replaced with one of the alternative solutions, if needed. Both as a dev and a player, I think this issue is blown out of proportion, thanks to several games that centered everything in their game design around this mechanics, pushing it to absurd levels. Thanks, dear industry colleague...

Well you are reading something else then.
I did not blame players. As I said, we're responsible for any changes to the game.

But if you think constant "oh my god, they nerfed it, now my wallet is closed" pressure during live testing any premium ship makes it easier to balance, you're wrong. That is not the most important point, but it's a point - a lot of players actively push for OP premium ships even when they don't participate in live testing, and a lot of players perceive OP ships as "comfortable" forgetting that their comfort sometimes means casually slapping all other ships in a group with less effort. That's just a fact, and no one it to blame here.

I am sorry, but I don't see anything I should apologize for. First of all, no action has been taken, and no decision has been made.

Second, distribution method does not matter. Some people purchased the ship originally, some got it for free, some got it from 1 crate, and some from dozens of crates. I don't consider rare ships in the crates "unethical", and don't understand why I should, tbh. That's the way to allow collectors to get them without overflowing the game with them. Some players want to have full set of ships, and of course, for crates, any ship like this is a unique item, so it's a win-win. Not even mentioning all other contents. The timing does not look good, I agree (recent sales + CV rework), but then you should also understand that we announced testing start - it can take months to make any conclusions, and there will be no perfect time to test it; there always be an excuse to postpone this question.

With all due respect, you should invest some time in CV before talking about unlimited planes, because, as I play literally the same game you do, my planes don't feel unlimited, and my pilots never enjoy flying over cruisers like Seattle. And if it's AA-specced or in a group with other ships, my pilots usually don't live to tell the story...

If you follow my activity you probably know I'm all for admitting the screw-ups and working on resolving their consequences.

But apologies for 4-5 premiums turning out to be OP from literally dozens and dozens of well balanced-ships? My apologies, but I don't know any PvP live game where the unit balance is perfect at any period of time. I also don't know any game design case in the industry of MMO where you don't have to make adjustments from time to time. Finally, it's very hard to feel sorry for...testing.
I think it's super important to admit your mistakes, but I also believe automatically admitting anything not popular or controversial a mistake and apologizing for it is...a mistake, and will only devalue any kind of open community interactions.

Sorry, but I don't understand all this semi-threatening "I will put my $100 elsewhere"? I fully realize that paying players like you pay the bills. I value that, and thankful for that. Why is this an argument for game health discussion though? Why do you think it contributes to the weight of your statements? Should I, according to this logic, disregard the opinions of non-paying users? Or pay the attention depending on the check size? Sorry, I don't think it's fair.
As for your points:

As I said, any alternative ways after the general sales are gone are not really changing anything. The majority of ship sales are generated in the beginning, not 2 years later, and there is no point in hoping "we don't sell it anymore, it's fine". No, it's not fine. It's either accepting the fact there will noticeable % of OP prems in queue (a viable option, by the way) or not accepting it;


EULA already allows the changes to the game. As I said before, I'm ...

Huh?
WG doesn't want to hurt their sales, and I'm not "playing dumb" about it. Also, a wonderful revelation for you: no company wants to hurt their sales.