CV Imbalance Is Not An Accident

hello hello everyone today i'm going to be talking about aircraft carriers and more importantly i'm going to be talking about the cv rework and the reasoning for why wargaming does the things that they do because if you ask them obviously you're never going to get a straight answer because uh there's basically a lot of confusion here why things have turned out the way they've done and also there seems to be this general idea that wargaming doesn't realize that the carriers are too strong or unfun and all of these other things and i can assure you that wargaming most certainly realize it's just that this is not a priority for the company and in order to understand this first we have to go back why has the cv rework failed well if you go back and look at their original goals with the cv rework you can see that there originally they stated that they wanted to reboot the whole class using an innovative concept which will consider all initial issues and challenges that's a and what they would like to achieve is adequate complexity curve of aircraft carriers which implies smooth skill growth this is something that we can maybe give to them in a sense that well they made the actual level of skill required to wield the carriers like they made the skill floor extremely low but there's certainly a big difference between really good cb players and average cb players so there is some smooth some skill growth allowed however enjoyable gameplay that will be attractive for most players and give more space for resourcefulness of aircraft carrier and its targets as well well that's certainly something they have failed in because there are plenty of players that heavily dislike them and this is something that had led to the future choices that they have made and also give more space for resourcefulness of its targets is certainly something that hasn't happened in fact that is a significant failure the following failure is of course create a balanced integrated class that will enrich the game without ruining it for others and i doubt there is anyone here that can with a straight face say that this hasn't been a catastrophic and total failure on this point there has never been as much see anti-cv vs cv defender like clashing in the game there has never been such a direct battle direct fight between people who play surface ships and people who play carriers and the animosity between the two groups has never been as high as it is now it is fundamentally the most hated class in the game and honestly we have these two sides that are just fundamentally fighting against her against each other and the idea of a balanced integrated class that will enrich the game that is a complete failure and i don't think there's anyone who can disagree with that there wouldn't be this much animosity in the community regarding this class if it wasn't for the fact that they just failed to make it part of the game and finally of course increase aircraft carriers popularity and enhance aaa defense ships well see that point there increase aircraft's carrier's popularity that's something i want you to focus on right now because that's actually very very important and basically of everything else that they said in this this fact sheet that is the most important part of it that is their key point enhance a.a defense ships well that is obviously a gigantic failure as well uh i doubt i have to point out ships like the atlanta or the des moines or even ships like montana that were originally added with the whole point of having strong aaa and of course they are very far from that these days and generally a in fact a cruisers tend to be just as juicy targets as any others however of course wargaming are adding a bunch of new ships which of course have better aaa than the old ships so that they can sell those new ships because the old aea ships can't defend themselves anymore this is why every new ship you see tends to have much much better aaa than the old ones it's a form of power creep and it's a form of selling selling a product they create the problem and then they sell you the solution but fundamentally i guess looking at this i doubt there's anyone who can with a straight face argue that this hasn't been a fairly fundamental failure and we need to look back a bit and we need to understand what was what is their actual goal because if this spreadsheet was their goal obviously they would be doing a whole lot more to fix the situation and let's not pretend like they didn't get plenty of feedback from all the cv mains all the experienced players but the thing is what we see on this spreadsheet isn't that actually wargaming's goal i'll show you where gaming's go before we move on though um i do have to address the elephant in the room there's often discussion about are cvs overpowered or not and this is not really a discussion that needs to be had if if you just refuse to believe but all the competitive teams and all the competitive players and basically all the super unicom players say you can just look at wargaming's own statistics in fact in 2018 they created a metric called battle influence which they use to track how certain classes perform and in that in that metric they basically track relative damage potential damage control points a.a spotting relative spotting damage they basically track all the things that affect winning a game basically how good is the class at winning matches and of course to no one's a great surprise carriers have been the absolute dominant class followed by the ideas once again not by anyone so not a surprise to anyone the major difference here is of course that dd's are extremely vulnerable while providing this in fact how often do we not start again with all the dds-9 whereas carriers have superior combat effectiveness from the total total safety of the backline of the map and do not and keep in mind of course that this is old data and that's not a good thing because since then we have had countless of aaa nerves we have had huge ones like the 500 000 module they're removing the flag from that one they completely sloped all the mid-range flag from every single ship in the game a lot if we could see the metal influence scale now it would no doubt be even higher that we're seeing right now so the whole argument are carriers overpowered and not it's not actually an argument you you're not really arguing with the unicom players you're not arguing with the best of the best you're in fact arguing with wargaming's own metric so that's honestly an argument that should just be put to rest because every time someone says oh they're actually not that strong you're actually not that good at the game but what exactly is the goal of the cv rework well see i thought that at the start i think they actually attempted they hoped that they would make such an attractive gameplay that they would just drive more players to it without having to do anything else but the problem was that simply didn't work so the only really stated goal remaining the only thing that's really remaining from the spreadsheet is the one that matters to them most and that is maintaining the popularity of the class in fact that's very important to them because there are certain percentages that they have to maintain if they don't maintain those then the cv rework has been a failure in the eyes of corporate so what they need to do at war gaming is in order to convince convince the higher ups that the cv rework is in fact a success is to maintain a certain percentage of players playing carrier and i mean don't take my word for it in fact when pressed for it they kind of let you know okay so the first question is like you said your goal is to increase the civil population and i mean is that go achieved your goal is to increase the civil population is that i mean is it do you have a standard of which kind of civil population you want to achieve one of the goals was to increase the population uh and like we are okay at the numbers we end up with right now okay but the point is that while keeping all this balance in mind fun in mind class interaction mind if it drops to this level from product point of view it will be just waste of a lot of resources and like if if the same amount of people play carriers but we just we work everything what's the point so i think now you might be starting to see the problem when it comes to how they're balancing carriers balancing carriers is done entirely by the spreadsheet it is not the all the other factors enhancing aa ships making it a fun class all those things has dropped off the only thing that matters anymore is that popularity number in fact they even go even in more detail on just how important it is to maintain this popularity percentage of the class on the same topic it went from 15 almost to 30 and now it's leveled out around 22 or so so every time with any kind of buff day is obviously gonna affect it in negative do you guys have a critical mass percentage that you want to keep it at or above 18 19 for yeah for players i mean because basically if it gets unpopular you're going to buff it or nerf a and then you know it seems like kind of trade off in a way we certainly don't want to drop this be like lower than pre-rework numbers in terms of if if more players will include carriers in the roster but they play them rarely and the population is stable then it's fine but we of course we don't want to drop it and we'll monitor it very closely now that you understand their priorities the reason why i showed all of this to understand what their real priorities are um watch how hard it is for war game to war gaming to answer my simple question will they ever balance carriers to the levels of the other classes it's a simple question a yes or no answer will they ever make carriers equivalent to all the other ships in the game and apparently it's a simple question but it certainly doesn't have a simple answer right um the spreadsheets did show that the cv average damage is still the highest across the board and the influence on the battle was apparently still the highest i have to ask is this uh what you're intending is this your goal to have this class that already has such safety and utility to also be the highest damage dealer across the board the spreadsheet um yeah it does say that but uh what it doesn't say is uh it it based it is based on what happened at the end of the battle so like what happened uh in the full battle but it doesn't capture really what happens inside the battle based on like time stamps because there obviously is some point in the battle where it is decided and like say we think that there might be um [Music] at least some amount of damage uh from cv uh being in this uh not relevant area like say when there are a couple ships left and they well the carrier is more like powerful against single targets and so yeah it can uh in the in the late game where it is mostly decided but still not ended it can wrap up some more damage which is uh which will be seen in this uh battle influence graphics and uh we're actually trying to get our hands on these data because uh this data like there's huge amounts of this and there's just like some technical problems with storing it and capturing it but we really hope to get to the point where we really understand why we have the battle influence like like clearly um bigger than the other classes but the win rates distribution stays uh like mostly the same uh because like uh the win rate uh like the battle influence uh like uh uh this um much of a battle influence uh would uh naturally correspond to a more more skilled difference um but we don't really see that and that's why we're trying to investigate it up to some point but isn't a lot of the damage also incredibly powerful damage like doesn't the carrier have the highest cap reset rate of all classes as well yeah and it is captured in the battle influence matrix yeah and dd damage it's the only class that can do it consistently i mean i don't think you can just neglect the damage as unimportant because it can strike anything i don't elect it i just like state where what our current view of this is um as you see we dropped the battle influence already and i'm sure it will drop more with the gps change in 8.5 so we're working on it yeah my yeah my question was is your goal to drop it to the level of the other classes [Music] um our goal is to like yeah we we want to for it to be closer to the other classes uh sure but we also always need to keep an eye out on the cv popularity because we don't want to make it uncomfortable to play at all and that's also like we've seen this in the charts and popularity that this engine boosts affected it and so we'll need to find ways how to affect the battle influence of carriers and at the same time not make playing carriers like super unfun experience but doesn't it kind of sound like you're artificially boosting popularity by making the class stronger than the others no we we didn't like because we already are dropping it and we intend to drop it and we showed it to you so it's just that some tweaks may be more painful than others and that's what i'm saying like we we need to find tweaks that are less painful to playing in the class but at the same time affect the battle influence so yeah that was basically a four-minute answer of uh yes but actually no not really you'd think it would be a simple fact or a simple thing to ask will you make one class equal to the others but apparently instead the answer was that a lot of priorities a lot of popularity priorities a lot of not on fun for carriers and yada yada yada yada and this is really the state that we are in right now because you see wargaming made the mistake of well they wanted to make it so so simple that that was one of the big issues with the with the rts series was it was actually very complex it was a lot of things to micromanage you had multiple squadrons you have consumables you had to play around like you had to control your own ship and everything so wargaming were gaming to the sledge had a sledgehammer of stupid onto carriers they basically made them as dumb as they possibly could they removed everything that made the class interesting in the past planes couldn't land or take off if the class was on fire what does wargaming do well first of all they remove that entire debuff and then they make fires only last five seconds on the class and they well aware that the class is overpowered as well so they make it so the class can't detonate just to make sure that no accidents happen that can happen to any other surface ship that alone already kind of tells you that they have this special privileged status but they made some mistake in making the class so ridiculously simple so ridiculously dumbed down where the players can't even control their own ship they can't control their old own damage called cooldowns so in return wargaming just gave them a ridiculously long damage control cooldown which lasts what 60 seconds basically a minute of immunity to fires and floodings they went out of their way to dumbest down as much as they could in fact back then they claimed oh we're absolutely not making it so that it can be imported over to the console version but in fact now they basically copy-pasted the carriers that we have right now they basically copy or the gameplay they've copy-pasted right over to laos legends aka the console version so they basically made console gameplay on pc they made it so absolutely mind-numbingly dumb they automated the damage control their damage automated the fighters they automated everything about it now the problem is they hoped this would attract a lot of players but what happened was in fact that a lot of players played these carriers it was fun at the start like it was a new aspect but it quickly got really really boring there's not a whole lot to attract you in the carrier gameplay once once you played it you kind of played it there's not a whole lot going on there there's not a whole lot you can do about the enemy carrier there's not a whole there's not a whole lot of things you have to play around like defensive a no longer has any effect and you kind of just go around and left click things you don't have to care about your own positioning besides when the enemy team finally actually pushes in and like all the as all the tactical all the strategy strategical aspects that originally attracted people to cvs well those have kind of been erased and this is the problem because now wargaming are this issue where people are get bored of the class so they just stop playing carriers and now they have to desperately keep pumping up the numbers and that's why we see all these honestly ridiculous looking buffs to cvs uh where like removing the mid-range flag that that 500 000 upgrade that used to be so good being removed defensive a being being shredded like all these all these aaa nerves across the board because they have to keep that popularity percentage it's more important than any than any other aspect and that's why we're also seeing these ridiculous new ships being added it started with uh the manfred the manfred suddenly they gave ap rockets something they said they at one point they said it was toxic to have ap bombs or ap strikes well first came the ap bombers now came the ap rockets then they followed it up with another gimmick ship the fdr franklin d roosevelt which is basically completely ridiculously overpowered ship it is hilariously overpowered compared to even other carriers and wargaming just squeezed it out right right onto the market because they're so desperate to keep this popularity number up and this recent one is the one i'm showing of course now is the immelman where we now have skip bombers once again another new gimmick another new shiny toy with with which they're hoping so desperately to attract new players or more players back to playing carriers because if the popularity falls we'll gonna have some inevitable ridiculous cv buff or some ridiculous a nerf so to keep these numbers uh stable keep them basically floating and this is also because the class is so privileged this is also why we see sometimes things that make us scratch your head like was that really necessary a good example is 07 the american clan they ran these divisions where they would hunt the enemy cv they basically they played three dd's was it two uss kids and an akizuki or was it two akizukis and a kid and they would group up use smokes and defensive as to shred the enemy planes and they would push through and they would kill the enemy carrier basically they were doing everything wargaming and basically cv defenders tell that you should they were grouping up using consumables and blah blah and all of this and war gaming gave an official they given a warning to furlife who was the commander of 07 on na they gave a warning to him to stop running his division because they were setting a bad example for the community because well they were hunting down uh cvs and killing them they just don't want cbs being sunk early in matches because players complain like crazy when cvs gets sunk early in games and they're well aware once again it's not a debate they're well aware that the carrier is overpowered but when you have these divisions hardly countering them well that really messes with their popularity numbers and they really don't like that so that's why you need to understand that in world of warships carriers are stronger than the other ships and it is absolutely by design and it will most certainly not change anytime soon probably never because the gameplay that they have given us is such a pile of steaming garbage that right now their kids on xboxes and playstations playing the exact same gameplay that we have on a pc except they're using a game pad to do it every single stated goal of the cv rework has failed the only thing that they're desperately struggling desperately struggling to hold on to is that player popularity number and by god they're willing to do absolutely anything to keep that number up hence the gameplay that we see on the live servers right now tragic yes but that's where we ended up and now we have the commander reworked and following that they want to add submarines to the game and you better believe that the submarines uh considering how much effort and how much work they're putting into the submarines you better believe they have some stated quota percentage that they'll want to fulfill like xml the players need to be playing this class and you better believe that uh if the ca if they are as boring as they were in the early testing phase where people got bored out of their mind minds playing the subs they will be buffing them to ridiculous values as well they don't know how to balance because these days they balance everything based on their precious precious spreadsheet yep yep that was all for me uh if you watched the whole thing i hope you enjoyed it if you didn't well sucks to be you i'll talk to you guys later

Channel: Flamu

Views: 93,950

Rating: 4.8911223 out of 5

Keywords: flamu, flamuu, wows, world of warships, guide, tips, tricks, tutorial, help, how to, gameplay, modules, upgrades, captain, perks, skills, angling, armor, ap, he, citadel, preview, review, tactics, strategy, commentary, build, flags, signals, recommended, wargaming, wg, positioning, carry, commander rework, rework, new skills, cv, carrier, carriers, aircraft carriers, disaster, expose, imbalance, unleashed

Id: mWNgIfhfdOY

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/nikkisNM]

For me the plane spotting is too much. I dont even care about the damage CV does, but being constantly spotted and thus removing all the tactical play is boring as hell. FDR I would remove from the game and refund steel.

[u/Son_Of_The_Empire]

I remember the good old days, when AA mattered, the subreddit was positive, and when I could have a nice conversation with S_O.

Those days are long gone. It's funny when people complain about the negative attitude of the subreddit as if that's something the mods can fix without nuking 90% of threads - the way to make the subreddit positive is to MAKE THE GAME SUCK LESS.

I know the game won't ever be what I want it to be, but christ, does it have to be this bad?

[u/Talloyna]

It's been what 3 days, since salty potato has been kicked from the CC program and already I can guarantee you WEEGEE is regretting that decision.

[u/GBR2021]

Flolo Unchained

[u/ConnorI]

It’s fun seeing the mental gymnastics people go through while trying to say CVs are actually balanced.

[u/EidorianSeeker]

I'm only 3 minutes in to the video but I'm expecting to see a bunch of clips from the 2018 CC summit and how the goal is only having a baseline floor of people playing CVs.

[u/Citizen001]

I feel like he is saying here what we have been saying for YEARS! I am glad he can come out say this unfiltered now without WG breathing down his neck but at this point i am tired of having this convo. WG will never change their minds on subs, the CV rerwork, or the captain skill rework. WG doesn't care. All they care about is the money and as soon as that stops flowing they will lay the game out to pasture. Unfortunately if Tanks is any indicator this will never happen.

[u/Alepex]

And let's not forget, it's not just surface players vs CV players. Many of the world's best CV players agree that the class is problematic.

[u/dreiak559]

This is why I quit months ago. As a unicum, I am officially boycotting this game, all forms of paying and playing, and without actually addressing in game balance, I will not be coming back. Shitty businesses deserve to go bankrupt, and while I don't think this will happen immediately, I do think that their player numbers will decrease substantially over time because they care more about short term profit than long term health of the game.