To my surprise I was able to take care of Fleeing Victory #3 a couple of days ahead of time. That means I’ve got a free Sunday to devote to whatever (the map most likely). Feels good, man. Anyway, I decided to take a post to mention a few things, FV included.

I knew the draque units were going to show up relatively soon in Fleeing Victory, but until I started writing, I didn’t know just how soon. I figured by FV#6 they would have at least shown up onscreen, but I’ve gone ahead and debuted another of FV’s major characters. I think I’ll leave her name for FV#4 and not go into any more of that here. Suffice to say, you’ll be seeing a lot more of ‘Sra. Jinete’ in the future.

I had a little trouble figuring out where to end FV#3. There was an opening to end that last scene earlier for more tension, but I felt that it could also work if Ricard and the draque scout had some kind of exchange, some kind of nod to the situation they were both in. I went with the latter which also cemented the title for FV#3, ‘Orders.’ The original title I had is probably going to be pushed up to FV#4 or FV#5, depending on how the pacing goes.

So How’s Wargaming Doing?

In World of Warships news, I managed to get the new German Battleship Brandenburg in a special container yesterday. I took her out for a spin (which is all I had time for) and I like her. Wargaming did a lot of comparisons to Tirpitz in their overview video, but the community sees more similarities to Odin. I’m not sure which way I’m leaning yet (I never got to play Odin), but the ship is in an interesting place. It’s only really held back by the fact that Tier 8 players aren’t allowed to have fun when Tier 10s are around. I’m kind of hoping WG figures out this new ‘Tier 11’ situation quickly so that Tier 8 can finally have some relief from all of this nonsense. Tier 8 would be tied with tier 7 for this game’s best tier if not for the matchmaker in random battles.

Real talk. I’ve kind of fizzled out on the issue of Wargaming’s bad practices. WG clearly got the message and are making changes little by little. They even started posting those drop rates immediately rather than putting them off until 2022, something I mentioned looking bad for them. Something I was waiting on after of the good news was for WG to make some kind of visible effort to mend things with LittleWhiteMouse. I doubt that’s going to happen, and even if they did make some kind of effort, I think the time scales it would involve would make it meaningless to most. At this point I think that relationship is over and what’s done is done.

As for player feedback, this problem is a never ending cycle of bad timetables and bitterness. People can argue that adding submarines to the game or not nerfing the crap out of aircraft carriers across the board is a clear sign that they’re being completely ignored, but that’s disingenuous at best. It’s the bitterness talking. If WG took the routes some of the ‘mobs’ are suggesting, submarines would be cancelled leaving us with 4 ship types. Next, aircraft carriers would probably be removed outright since people would realize WG is willing to run with any demand with enough torches and pitchforks behind it, leaving us with 3 ship types. Finally, once the player base is whittled down to just the people who like or can tolerate endless, impunitive HE spam, WG will finally be free of distractions from some of the game’s biggest problems, the HE spam, the balancing of tiers, and the lack of interesting and diverse game modes. That’s a lot of destruction just to get through the bad suggestions to the good ones. I just think WG needs more leeway when it comes to player feedback and our expectations, especially considering this:

The player base can only rally around an idea.

Wargaming has to create an actual product.

That’s not to say that I think Wargaming has done a 180 and we should just assume everything is in the rearview mirror. Maybe a 90 degree turn. By all means hold WG to their promises. Companies will try to get away with whatever they can. It’s like clockwork. So you have to keep them honest however you can.

My reasons for going on a spending hiatus are close enough to addressed as they’re likely to get. I don’t begrudge WG for adding subs to the game, not even in the way they went about it. They were at least being careful this time. More over, as much as I would like additional permanent game modes and the cushion that would provide for all this random feature testing WG likes to do, it’s a moot point until the player base is big enough to warrant the existence of those extra modes. “If you build it, they will come,” while true, won’t convince anyone over at the budget department or whatever they have.

As for submarines, I think they’re boring, but I also find the game in general boring these days. It’s mostly just about sailing my favorite ships and trying to have great moments in them. I understand people’s frustration with the particulars. No one wants to spend a year straining their neck looking out for planes only to be double pinged and deleted by six torpedoes out of friggin’ nowhere. No one wants to be forced to sit at the back of the map or be burned down in 90 seconds by a moody, fire spitting cloud of smoke. The game is set up in such a way that ship vs ship dynamics have to be addressed in broad strokes, and sweeping changes have to be made all at once. The public test server is all we’ve got going for us as the player base and it’s just there to eat up a ton of hard drive space in exchange for more feedback time. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s not enough. The game needs more ‘game,’ not just more ships or cool mechanics.

For example, a lot of people thought subs would be a good fit for convoys mode for historical reasons, and I agree, but what if convoys was already a permanent game mode during sub development? What if subs were announced specifically for convoys mode and only convoys mode? You wouldn’t have gotten nearly as many upset randoms and ranked players if they knew that, at least for the moment, submarines wouldn’t be coming to their game modes and shaking things up. Submarines could have been fully released with no major backlash, carefully balanced as data piled up, and then after a year or two, Wargaming could have started floating the idea of adding them to randoms and ranked. There would be resistance just like there always is, but the discussion would be more productive, not just players getting angry at the inevitable introduction of submarines. More modes provides the infrastructure for steadier, less panic-inducing feature testing. That’s why I’ll always advocate for it, even if we’re not quite there in terms of player population yet …

… according to Wargaming.

So, am I back to spending stupid amounts of money on random warships in-game? Hah! No. I’m just hopping off the hiatus train as of this post. If I feel like premium time or doubloons are worth buying, I’ll buy them, and that also includes special events like Arpeggio. I’ve still got my budget to consider, though; I’m a photoshop user after all and Adobe isn’t cheap.