I think the reason why arcade modes get less players is because at top tier they’re poorly done.
For tank ab, thermal sights make name tags redundant as they are too slow to pop up compared to what you can see.
For air ab, well, balance is atrocious and most people use the biplane trick to get .3 lower BR (so same one death leaving), and missiles act similarly in both modes (okay, clutter isn’t simulated in ab but that’s about all).
So essentially you’re getting less rewards for the same gameplay.
Interestingly, in naval top tier, AB may improve the gameplay because of long range spawns and lots of battleships have slow ranegfinders, which AB has removed. It’s sort of inverse compared to other AB modes.
Certainly raises the question of why so many developer resources are being used on Naval when it makes up such a small portion of the player base. Do Naval Players disproportionately spend more money on the game or are Gaijin still hoping that Naval will somehow make a comeback if they just add X vehicle?
Of course the mudmover gamemode is more popular. you can play it as you jerk. Waste of storage space. Could’ve gotten proper spacing for planes and EC and other DCS-ish gamemode that is more PvE oriented if the game is not catering to an audience of w-ers that warrant HD ground unit detail and it’s own wing of development team.
It really is remarkable that they spend that much on a mode that only amounts to a little over 1% of actual player matches. It’s a shame because I’d say RB, at least, is as good as it’s ever been right now (other than the absolute death zone of 6.0-6.3, for reasons this article makes obvious).
Anyway, here’s a bonus stat: % of player matches played at the top BR of that mode, using April-May Statshark data. Shows how much game play today is at the highest (longest-to-reach, most-expensive-to-get-to-in-terms-of-time-and-money) top tier. If you think about it it shows a real problem with naval AB in particular… before the major update in March the same stat for naval AB was ~10%. This was probably already too high: where ground and air still have “entry modes” as you can see where you don’t need to get to top tier as much, naval AB wasn’t really performing that role. (Unfortunately now after the AB aiming changes, at least in the immediate aftermath it’s even worse… low-and-mid tier AB players are playing less, which has driven the top tier percentage up to where it’s now a hair higher even than RB).
I’ve kinda just assumed its less about the mode succeeding and more about making sure the other naval game loses by providing an alternative to it as naval enthusiasts are often very dedicated and its a niche market with few options so any players they suck away will have a noticble effect on other games
I remember the devs stating that Arcade mode is more popular than Realistic mode. I tried to find this statement in their Q&As, but I failed. The truth is, I don’t even remember where they wrote this.
I also remember that TEC mentioned this statement in one of his videos, but he has so many videos that it’s pretty much impossible to find this specific one (he probably also talked about many other things in this video). But I’m sure the devs confirmed this a few years ago.
You surely remember the 2021 “Ground Breaking” update activity changes. These changes made RP rewards heavily dependent on time alive in the vehicle. The problem is, to get very good activity and RP reward after these changes, you need battles lasting ideally at least 12 minutes. Most Ground and Air Arcade battles are just not long enough (with 6-8 minutes battles at average). This made RP difference between AB and RB game modes even bigger than before. Only Naval Arcade RP is still close to Naval Realistic RP after these changes, because battles there are longer.
If you want to reach top tiers, it would take ages in Air/Ground Arcade nowadays. A year ago I made a small comparison between Air Arcade and Air Realistic. I wanted to check how quickly I can spade the same vehicle in two different game modes:
to spade Russian Yak-9P in Air Arcade I needed 48 battles with 32 deaths, 104 air kills and 20 ground kills.
to spade Hungarian Yak-9P in Air Realistic I needed 9 battles with 4 deaths, 17 air kills and 8 ground kills.
Nowadays it only makes sense to play Air Arcade for fun. You won’t achieve anything if you want to actually grind in this game mode. I can also complete score-based events much faster in Air Realistic.
With such unfair rules, I would be surprised if more players still played Air Arcade. The difference in Ground is not that huge, but still significant. Even for new players, it just makes sense to play Realistic nowadays. Especially we have more and more vehicles in the tech trees, so RP is becoming more and more important.
It could still be partly true, depending on the metric. Casual players play fewer games each. So comparing the number of games played between modes could privilege a smaller number of hardcore players playing a lot of games over a broader base playing relatively fewer games each.
For me, “players” is a less interesting stat than games played. I care more about queue times and whether games are full or not.
For naval, I think CC Napalmratte’s comments this week that the June update is the “beginning of the end” are likely accurate. It’s not that they couldn’t try to alter core gameplay, it’s just that all the iconic “come try naval again” ships will be on the board, so there’s no cards left to play left for future audience lures. The other naval leak rumor this week, that they’re giving Gneisenau 15" guns, means they could try to buy themselves one more cycle by introducing the “paper” ships but, yeah.
I do believe it’s more of an ego/cope thing.
They certainly hope that Naval might get popular all of the sudden for some reason, but it’s also hard for them to pull the plug on a mode they spent a lot of time and money on.
Naval is pretty much dead and closing in fast on the EOL status. Ground Simulator should follow soon.
It’s said RP gain is normalized across all game modes, yes?
Like, correct - stat card says you get the same RP% across all game modes
However -
Give this a read.
Notice the “Play time” entry.
This does require a caveat for EC at least.
You can join/leave the same game multiple times, and the same game can last 90 minutes easily, if not drag out to the full 3 hours (rare, but 2 hours is not unheard of).
It’s not enough to make even an order of magnitude difference, but something worth considering if your perspective is how difficult it is to find a match.
Main challenge at prop tiers for me is less finding a lobby, and more finding a fun lobby (reasonable weather for visual spotting, reasonable map for dogfighting (not denmark), active fighter players who don’t run and afk at airfield due to useful actions system).
Due to this, “players” is a more relevant stat than games played. Having 8 lobbies of 4v4 denmark is less “healthy” than having 3 lobbies of 12v12 tunisia/sicily/stalingrad.
I would bet my money on the assumption that Naval was just implemented to create even higher entry barriers for potential competitors. Combing air & land seems way more easier than air, land & sea warfare.
Probably at least partly true, but it only works if you can basically reuse all the same core elements and not have to make a whole new game for that mode (matchmaking, scoring, progression, real-time physics, one player-one vehicle, primarily visual spotting limiting ranges). Which is basically what they’ve done.
It is these rules now that constrain naval from effectively expanding places the players would want it to go, and even make battleship play now a little silly, with the “spawn in a traffic jam” aspects, as Napalmratte put it.
Another factor I think may have been overlooked is the event “multiplier”(penalizer) system that grants excessive rewards of extra score points to RB & Sim while either nothing or a negative penalty for playing AB. As a long time AB player who doesn’t go out of my way to play modes/BRs just to get these inequitable “bonuses”, I find this unfair imbalance staggering. While some may say the few extra games required to get the same score tally in AB is slight, over the entire length of events, especially for the higher score required for the better vehicles is a lot. It renders the ability to earn the tradable coupon far out of reach for most AB players.
As I think about it, this has to be a big contributing factor to the rise in RB participants as well.
Something to consider, but yet another factor stats cannot show . .
That could be true as well, but in my opinion they have went overboard with it simply too much.
Naval in WT is developed more than enough to market it’s presence, so they should push the mode way back in priority and focus more on the much more played modes. In my eyes, any additional development of the mode seems like a waste of resources.
This move can actually make sense assuming the devs want to limit their involvement in the Naval game mode. This doesn’t mean they will just give up, I’m sure there will be more changes. But it’s possible these changes will be heavily limited in the future. I know it’s just guessing, but adding top battleships right now brings some serious questions. In particular, we already know that they have no plans to add missile ships, so where is the continuation? Locking the top BR for the next years doesn’t seem like a good plan. Especially they usually consider decompression only when they add the new top BR to the tech tree. Should we expect the top battleships staying forever at 7.3-7.7 BR?
They tried many different things recently to attract more players to Naval and, at least from what we can see, nothing worked. Adding more AI bots to Naval battles was only a confirmation that the devs see the problem with the low number of players. At some point they just have to focus on other things, because developing something takes time and money. If they don’t reach their goals, there is no sense to waste even more money. That’s why I was very surprised reading Naval Realistic players comments that they don’t care what will happen with Naval Arcade, because there is always Realistic. The fact is that losing players is bad for every Naval player, as it affects the future of the game mode.
At this point, any way I look at it, I just don’t see a bright future for Naval. I expect to see possibly even big increase in the number of players in June, because a lot of players would want to try Iowa, Bismarck or Yamato. The real test will be following months.
But maybe I got this all wrong. The devs said they will introduce submarines in 2025, so maybe they are rushing iconic battleships to add them all before submarines? Because submarines should be a huge pain especially against these huge battleships that won’t be able to avoid torpedoes. Maybe that’s the devs plan, so players can actually enjoy these battleships while they still can. Depending how submarines will be implemented, they could be a game changer. During the last submarines event, even frigates/destroyers had trouble dealing with submarines, and they knew exactly where these submarines were. They also weren’t attacked by anyone and they had planes to help them too. In my opinion submarines in this event were very, very strong, even with the limited range of the torpedoes. Much stronger than I expected them to be.
If nothing else, 2025 will be a very interesting year for Naval and probably the most important year ever, with top battleships and submarines added to the game. It could be the beginning of the end or maybe (if you are a very optimistic person) it could be the beginning of the great future with many new players joining this game mode. We will see.
This is going down a bit of a rabbit hole, but the quote from BVVD in Dec was “Yes, we have plans for playable submarines, but no further details on this yet.” That’s what he says whenever the change is (1-n) years in the future. I haven’t seen anything clarifying since that would trump that from Gaijin. I agree they’re a natural counter to BBs and are still likely to show up eventually. The real limiting factor on that was always the effort required to retool the subsurface areas of existing random battles maps, which are often simply not deep enough at present. But yeah, we’ll still likely see subs before carriers or post-war missile boats (both of which face much bigger obstacles). I just don’t think it’ll be 2025.
Getting back to the subject, I think it’s also important to note how balanced Naval is now at 5.7 and below. I think it’s one of its strongest features as a mode. One way to express this mathematically is the chance of being in the top BR of a match (yay!) minus the chance of being in the bottom BR (boo!). In a perfectly balanced game with 4 BR steps this would always be zero. As you can see from the graph below, naval isn’t doing too badly, up to 5.7, it’s keeping pretty close to the “fair and balanced” line. 2.0 is fun, 2.3 kinda sucks, from there it’s a pretty smooth progression up to 5.7 as the sweet spot, from there you want to skip right to 6.7-7.0. This will of course all change at the top end with BR decompression as I mentioned but the principle then will be the same.
