Commanders!

Today we have some interesting news for you and this series of posts will be very different from most of the news that we usually publish on this page. In the coming posts, we'll tell you about the new aircraft carriers, which you will see the in version 0.8.0. You will be able to read more details in a special series of articles on the official portal.

First of all, thanks to all the players that took part in the testing process of aircraft carriers. Your feedback, opinions and bug reports have allowed us to find and fix a lot of bugs and improve some mechanics.

New CV will be unbalanced.

The problem when you test something in a closed and separate environment, is that you cannot make a large amount of players truly emulate their production server behavior. While beta test is a great place to generate a major improvements list, adjust the priorities and see how the concept works in general, we cannot adjust all aspects: cool-downs, timers and DPS etc for each ship, especially when we talk about fine tuning individual ships versus each other. We will have to spend some time, we estimate approximately 1-2 months, after CV rework release. It's inevitable, but necessary. We're eager to have your feedback and impressions when 0.8.0 is released. We'd like to apologose in advance for any inconvenience that you may experience during this period.

We've met a popular request to directly control a CV despite autopilot improvements. There are different opinions on that, ranging from "it's crucial for gameplay" to "the lack of it is just dumb". Let's try to break it down:

First of all, as players rightfully noticed, the role of CVs in battle is much smaller. The main "unit" under player control is a squadron. This is exactly what we wanted to achieve, as concentrating on the squadron allows us to create more action-packed and more visually epic experience. CV direct control is not needed for the majority of the battle - autopilot can take care of CV positioning. Most typical tasks, from plotting a course to the farthest corner of a map to parking a CV behind an island, can be done via tactical map, and done faster than with direct controls. Most players do exactly this with the current CV on live server, and there is really only one case left uncovered - precise dodging of torpedoes. And that leads us to...

A DD that manages to get to the enemy CV should be rewarded - if a DD player succeeds in pulling this off, he either dedicated a lot of effort to it or a CV was positioned exceptionally poorly. The CV does have a choice to aggressively defend with its squadrons or to abandon plane control and directly control a CV for evasion. We strongly believe that adding opportunities for a CV to maneuver in CQC and still control the planes (and thus, making it harder to destroy in such an engagement) is not good for balance. Just imagine the case - a cruiser caught broadside will most likely be punished by a battleship. A careless battleship could be punished by an ambushing destroyer in the same manner. And a destroyer will surely have a hard time surviving a cruiser encounter at close range. The bottom line is: if a CV is engaged at close range, and without support, there should be a tough choice of either WASD-ing the ship or attacking the attacker.

We do understand that the ability to directly control the CV is immersive and helps the player to feel more like a CV commander, as opposed to the squadron commander. The rework is indeed about commanding a squadron. Concentrating on it allows us to make the gameplay more dynamic, more entertaining, and more balanced. With that and what was said above in mind, adding this control just 'for the feels' is not justifiable. We also will be looking into more ways to customize the squadrons both visually and gameplay-wise, so that the reduced focus on the ship is compensated.

Of course we don't think players are incapable of managing more than two things at one time. Our game is far from easy and that's one of its key aspects. There is a lot of multitasking and awareness involved when we're talking about good players on any class. And we do want CVs to have the same depth, but to have it centred mostly in the squadron - in the place which is the core of the new CV gameplay experience. What we really question here is the value from simultaneous direct control of two separated entities - a CV ship and a squadron - both in terms of game design and attention focus.

Nothing is set in stone, and the possibility exists. We are not going to close this question now and forever. The point is that the top priority in the CV rework is focussing and improving on something that players will spend most of their time doing - controlling the squadrons and engaging in combat with them. We need to allow some time for tweaking the balance after the rework goes live and for players to familiarize themselves and get stuck into the new gameplay tactics of carriers.

Automated consumables concept. As recently announced, we're going to implement automatic activation of DCP and Fighter squadron on CV ships. We're well aware that some of you find it controversial at best. There are several reasons that has led us to this decision:

We observed that players understandably tend to concentrate on their squadrons, and despite all interface prompts and indicators (icons, timer, sound) for, say, fire alarm, many found it very difficult to notice and act upon. Again, it's not like we want to cater to everybody and avoid any punishment for mistakes or lack of awareness. But, please remember that the scope of rework is a shift from RTS to action, and all other classes manage the situation around one unit - the ship.

А player in a BB, DD or a cruiser manages the consumables directly and it totally makes sense, because there are meaningful choices, and the ship is the only unit under control. While playing reworked CVs, it's pretty simple - it makes no sense to wait for a second fire, it makes no sense not to deploy a Fighter squadron when in danger, and what's more, the overwhelming majority of gameplay is managing squadrons. BB can use damage control between its salvos, DDs - smoke, cruisers - their support tools, but from CV point of view, we believe, there is almost zero difference between "X happens, I push a button and then don't care" and "X happens, the button is pushed automatically, I don't care".

With the right balance settings for fire, flooding and fighter squadron the focus will be fully on the player's controlled planes (and the Squadrons consumables, which are managed manually of course).

To sum up, while these mechanics sound unusual, we believe it can help us to shift the attention of a player on this reworked class to the place where the real gameplay is - and this leads us to a very fundamental concern we will address in our next post.

To start the discussion on that, we would like you to think: how many battles do you need to play in the BB class to understand shooting mechanics, angling and tanking, damage control, shell choice, torpedo evasion and overall planning? A new BB player will probably start from almost mechanical skill of target prediction. Only after that he will go to deep strategy and understanding of meta. First 10-20 battles on a class is just the beginning. Such concept should work with new carriers, too. We wanted to make CV more accessible in some aspects, but by no means "simple" or "elementary". We have several features of the CV rework that should, by initial design, be discovered and mastered by those who are motivated and want to play them well. The CV rework is massive, and we cannot be 100% sure that every feature will be used as we predicted. Of course when the rework is released, players will find some ways to play the game that we never thought about. And we will have to address that and adjust our design concept. But for now, here's the preliminary list of things that should keep players engaged, while keeping the skill important:

So to sum up, We want gameplay to be more accessible and more action packed compared to the current CVs, we indeed took away some RTS-level depth, but we tried to add a lot of places for tactical depth, skill development and smart play in the design. We fully realize that not all of them may work, and some new layers may be discovered, but we really ask you - the players - to consider trying it out and discovering some tricks that you might have missed on Beta.

Lack of player feedback influence. We're very well aware that some of you feel that we're pushing the rework despite the concerns, issues and reservations from the playerbase, and that your feedback is widely disregarded.This is definitely not the case, so please allow us to explain;

We know that we will need to work more on CVs, to tune their balance and to see what issues are a priority, but we firmly believe that the beta period did it's job, and CV path should continue on to the live server, so the whole playerbase experience, passion, skill and feedback contribute to it.

Console influence.

We also noticed some talks about CV rework being a result of WoWS Legends development and overall "dumbing down the game for the consoles". Please let's be very clear. World of Warships PC is a successful and accomplished game, and this game, along with the players, is the most precious and valuable thing for many of us personally as well as for Wargaming Saint-Petersburg. CV rework gameplay could very well fit in to WoWS Legends, and if it works well, we will be happy to share it with our console colleagues for them to assess it's suitability in what is a separate title and project. But there is zero chance we are risking our main game, our years of work and our loyal audience because of a new title that is being developed. It just does not make sense, CV are not a hard requirement to launch in Legends, and they have their own development timeline.

We implement the CV rework to fix the balance, to make the class more popular in the game, and because you told us it was needed. We will do our best to deliver fresh, enjoyable, engaging gameplay, but we understand that the work is not over with the first release. It will be quite a journey for us along with you. At this moment beta test did its job and to move forward we need to see how you guys play it on live server. We will listen, adjust the priorities for further development, and while it's a challenge, we think its worth it, because ultimately we're responsible for keeping the game fresh and interesting for as many of you as we can. Thank you for your time, attention, feedback, patience and assistance. Good luck and fair seas!