For sure Moffets vs BB 24/7 were they can’t even shoot for 10 first minutes is new Meta.
Yeah I’d think 2x is more realistic than 3x. It will always be a very small part of the game compared to other modes.
I think RB probably has more space to grow here. It’s not just the aiming changes; it’s that in the other modes, there’s significantly more players in RB and that proportion grows the higher tier you go, so AB is acting as the gateway and RB is what you eventually switch to.
Naval has pushed against that trend for a few reasons. One was RB was a poorer experience than AB for a long time, too heavily botted (both by Gaijin and cheaters), making the air side unplayable whereas in AB it was mostly human players, so AA was much easier to deal with, and you made more cash because human players earned you more.
So what’s changed since Jan? Bots were added to Naval AB by forced 16v16, removing that advantage for planes; bots earn the same as player kills now and higher rank bots were introduced, so rewards in RB are significantly higher than AB now; and most recently AA was heavily nerfed. AB was hanging on since March in top tier only, the inverse of where a starter mode should probably be focussing; now we’ve seen RB top tier numbers actually pass AB with this latest update. (Also they haven’t slacked on the fighting cheaters, NRB is really cleaned up now compared to two years ago.)
Would it be a net win for Gaijin if naval RB continued on the current track and grew to 2% of matches and took over the higher tiers like the other RB modes have, even if AB didn’t grow or sunk a little and became the entry mode like in air and ground? Possibly? What’s looking now like stagnation could just be inversion in popularity, with growth in one mode obscuring loss in the other, that’s what I find interesting about the mode.
Is that another way of saying NRB is “getting all the love” right now, and players are responding? Probably…? What I can’t decide if that’s Gaijin’s deliberate strategy or not.
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for sure, that’s why Soyz, Iwoa, Yamato got better rewards in NAB.
Keep in mind that what you see here are only the rewards earned from actions. In Arcade there is usually more action than in Realistic, so rewards from actions are often higher. But there are also mission rewards, which are not included in these stats, and they are higher in all Realistic game modes due to better multipliers.
In general, I would say that the final rewards (action + mission) are similar in both Naval Arcade and Naval Realistic game modes. This is the only game mode where that’s the case. You don’t need to worry about the rewards in Naval game modes - just play whichever one you prefer.
Yeah, I would agree they’re comparable now, or RB could be slightly higher on net.
That’s a big difference from last year even, when RB rewards due to bots being only rewarded at 1/3, meant RB was about a third lower than AB.
One can always cherry-pick data to find some RP deltas where RB is lower (but much closer than it was before). One could just as easily point in this month’s data to Amiens (RB 28% higher), SKR-7 (RB 68% higher), Frank Knox (RB 136% higher), Scharnhorst (RB 26% higher)…
Average score is also notably higher now in RB… 1186 across all players vs 1124 pre-multipliers. On net an average game in RB earns 22% more modified score than an AB game.
Events actually have very little effect on games played it seems. At most it seems to be a multiplier (with current players playing more).
What does have a disproportionate effect is the Battlepass vehicles challenge, especially if it has to be done with a naval vehicle.
Just some fun stats to share, which help prove the point:
June to March doesn’t allow us to drill down too far because of all the naval BR changes, but they’re perfectly good for comparing other things. Here’s some stats on all AB/RB games played by everybody, broken down by mode and nation, comparing March and June.
Spoiler
The chart shows total user sessions (1 per player per game, so < “flyouts”) in June and also in March. “Change” shows how much they changed March to June in absolute numbers. “% of total” shows how much of the June sessions were in each mode and country. “% change” shows the March-to-June change results in relative numbers.
So what you see here is that the Ground RB growth I’d previously commented on is happening at the same time by a significant decline in air games. This is despite the fact that in March you had the Strasbourg and FIAT events, and in June you had half the HF-24 and the T86 event so if vehicle events made much of a difference, we should have seen higher air in June relative to March and lower ships. But it’s the reverse.
(Also surprising to me was how strong Japanese ships is now, comfortably beating out Britain).
But the outlier here to look at is French naval AB in June, the second-highest percentage growth other than Japan in naval RB. That HAS to be a reflection of all those Amiens being played for the Battlepass challenge. Basically all of AB’s growth March to June is in the France column (there were 230k AB and 107k RB games for the Amiens all month, according to Statshark, so about 2/3 of all French games in June in AB and 1/2 of French games in RB). It’s a strong indicator that those Battlepass challenges have a lot more to do with attracting players to naval and keeping naval alive than the vehicle events.
Overall user sessions by country, in case anyone was curious about how that’s been changing too:
| June | March | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| USSR | 64,278,376 | 70,993,155 | -6,714,779 |
| Germany | 61,857,553 | 58,849,728 | 3,007,825 |
| US | 59,424,649 | 64,825,359 | -5,400,710 |
| China | 14,685,691 | 14,856,893 | -171,202 |
| Sweden | 13,923,438 | 14,167,356 | -243,918 |
| UK | 13,643,230 | 14,235,810 | -592,580 |
| Japan | 12,751,081 | 13,990,058 | -1,238,977 |
| France | 11,947,816 | 14,150,264 | -2,202,448 |
| Italy | 7,538,143 | 8,097,048 | -558,905 |
| Israel | 5,587,453 | 5,110,385 | 477,068 |
Overall games played (AB+RB)… UK drops from #5 to #6.
(Come to think of it, those somewhat over 300k Amiens games also gives you a pretty good idea how many players do Battlepass intensely enough to have to do that challenge… if it was, say, 15 games to get the BP challenge done, means currently about 20,000 hard core Battlepass players, +/- 50%?)
For RP nope, AB got better with arrow researching which multiply ALL gains(eve) on 1.3 in NAB and 1.1 in NRB.
I realise this response is about a month old but my guess here is, its all the Naval AB players moving to ground since their mode was killed off.
Check the chart in my last post, it may give some ideas.
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