Look. All the mechanics changes post Hornet have just made the game more bot/camper friendly. It’s insane that they have anyone defending it. I thought BB combat was slow and uneventful BEFORE. Now… they’ve reduced what little thought it takes to play. I just… don’t understand what they think the appeal of Naval is. It’s feels a lot like people who have NO interest or love in the game are trying to come up with solutions to attract more players… but are completely missing the point of why people play.
People want to do things. Not do less things! ;p lol
I’ve added another suggestion to reintroduce HUD to Naval Arcade. Just, to give us more information about what’s going on. Where guns are at. How they’re tracking. We’ll see if they even allow it. They didn’t last time.
this is one motivation for my proposal vs. the insane precise shooting - this should solve the spawn-kill issue which started last year with the instant target acquisition time and was even worse with the aimbot update
Apparently, they think the appeal is loud noises, big guns, and impressive models. The gameplay, as it seems, is not the point. Given certain members here have literally stated that they don’'t understand why people would want a game to have a difficulty curve, it seems gaijin played to their wants, only to find out they did not represent the majority of the naval community (despite polls showing as such even before the update).
Yeah, the instant target acquisition feels like it was part of a march by the devs- they cut acquisition time over a couple updates, bit more each time, until it hit near instant, and THEN went to this past update of eliminating ranging altogether.
I mean, I’m in here so I can still know what I’m talking about. All these folx are doing is rocking back and forth. Forward a bit. Backward a bit. To fool the AI gunnery players aer dealing with. I’ve tried a tactic of NOT targeting a ship and lobbing shells center of where they’re rocking back and forth to hit them but… this is Dumb AF. Sure ain’t no naval gameplay. It’s gaming a system that isn’t adding to the experience, and is just taking away from it.
To be fair, the dispersion bug that wildly throws your guns off if your ship is even slightly turning is probably still unfixed. Hence all the players are just shifting back and forth rather than touching the rudder and screwing their dispersion up for the next 30 seconds.
I mean, look, if the “point at a ship and all the guns calculate correctly to hit it” function was flawless, I’d still be grumpy about killing the skill BUT, at least you could play with it.
The fact that there’s NOT information for the player means they can’t play the game. Without knowing where the guns are, it’s hard for us to know when something is off, or not working as intended.
The fact that turning destroys accuracy is just [chef kiss] perfect.
That this patch came out with 57 bugs, doesn’t absolve the damage they’ve done to the game mode, or to the player base that loved it so much. And Kweedko dismissing everyone is salt on a wound. [shrugs]
My latest suggestion is a request to return some Information to the HUD. The old lead carrot (even if it’s not used. It still give players an idea of how to lead later, and how the game calculates lead, versus player movement), and the dots representing the barrels on turrets, to give players a sense of where the guns are pointing.
This information is just so wild. We’ve got a guy in here who’s been dismissing our every issue, and I’m just now discovering that for like… the entire release of this aim change, you can’t turn and shoot at the same time. …it makes a lot of sense.
I used to do donuts in my American destroyers, leading and hitting evading Moffets, and killing them… and it felt AMAZING to understand the physics of the game that well.
And now you can’t turn and shoot at the same time.
Just dropped in a match and can confirm, when I feathered the rudder, aim went wild.
lol. If Naval and Naval Arcade are going down the tube, it’s because they’re releasing mechanic changes the community didn’t ask for, and they’re doing it like they’ve got three student interns vibe coding this whole thing.
Just… put it back like it was. lol for the love of gahd. Go to github, find the last stable naval version, load it back up in the next patch, let’s move forward from there.
It wasn’t the aim mechanics that was problematic. It was this Phantom Russian Coastal Navy sowing misery, unbalanced and unchecked. It was boring open map Bluewater matches. It was ANY map, or mechanic, that didn’t give players the opportunity to learn, grow, and DO something.
We’re like, two…three months into this patch and you can’t TURN and Shoot.
This is of course guessing, but I actually expect a huge increase in the number of Naval players, especially in June. I suspect that even May can have the increased number of players.
Like you mentioned, players have to grind all rank 6 ships first to get access to new battleships. If I were still playing Naval Arcade, I would be grinding all the missing ships as soon as I heard the leaks about the iconic battleships being added to the game. But since I stopped playing Naval, I don’t have this problem anymore.
That’s why I expect Naval Arcade player count to start dropping in the coming months after the update. The question is, will these players just stop playing Naval completely or switch to Naval Realistic. It will be interesting to see if Naval Realistic will eventually become more popular than Naval Arcade.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s any chance of reversing these changes now. There is a much higher chance that they will try to make even more drastic changes and simplify Naval Arcade even further. They clearly don’t care about existing Naval players, their goal is to attract new players.
If you look at the global stats, you can understand their logic here. For example, Ground Arcade alone in February had 10 times more players than Naval Arcade, which is crazy if you think about this. And I’m not even including here much less popular Naval Realistic vs much more popular Ground Realistic.
The truth is that even if they lost all Naval players, it wouldn’t hurt them that much. They want this game mode to be much more popular. If you look at things from this perspective, constant changes they do makes sense. They simply try something, it doesn’t matter if it instantly works or not. They hope that eventually new players will appear.
The iconic battleships will be the first serious test of the current state of Naval. They hope that many players will join Naval for the first time and think: “Oh, this is really easy and I can get good results even without any experience!”. In the short term, this strategy may actually work. The devs certainly won’t cry when I’m replaced by 3 new players. This is exactly their way of thinking.
and to add one comment - alone the total absence of communication with the existing playerbase show their total focus on potential new players…
In ground and air mode its the opposite - there is a lot of feedback to several threads and issues…
It is more alive than ever , with that being said the issue of unbalanced vehicles are still not being added. I am sure as hell happy for the new 8.7 being added but the power different between 6.7 and 7.0 are still extremely big. Thank gaijin for adding new stuff but when I give a Sharnose 5 salvos into her magazine and did nothing just for her to do 1/3 of her salvo into my magazine I lose 60% of my crew. I would love for bigger map as well
I’m not as good as Bruce with creating interesting graphs. But I tried anyway and here is what I managed to do in Excel (based on StatShark):
Is anyone looking at this graph really surprised by what devs are doing? Keeping the same number of players in Naval mode is certainly not the devs goal.
Thanks for the compliment. And this at a time when the SL you get for playing the top earning ship is 10x the top plane (Ju288C) and 5x the top tank in AB. (In RB it’s more like a 4x multiple for both).
After successive massive buffs to earnings in June 2023 and March 2025, with the mode earning players 4x as much SL now compared to other modes, they have managed to get naval up to… 1.5% of random games played and <5% of players.
That was the whole point of aiming changes. I see you are a new player in Naval, and your average SL per battle in this ship is 86111, which is higher than the average players SL per battle in the same vehicle according to StatShark, which is 57739. So, as a new Naval player, you are already above average, also because of the aiming system change.
This new aiming system doesn’t require any knowledge and this is good for new player, you don’t really have to learn anything to be effective. The only problem is that you also can’t improve much in the future, because this new simplified aiming system doesn’t really require any skill. I’m sure at some point most players will get bored with it.
In the short term this might work. We will see when StatShark release May/June stats. But it will be much more interesting to see what happens next. Whether new players will stay or get bored and leave. If they stay, it will be a huge success for the devs. If they leave, well Naval was pretty much empty anyway, so it was worth a try.
yea I played realistic naval before and biggest issue was waiting in queue 5 minutes to join match. Aiming isn’t bad but I can’t imagine playing it when Im doing so well on arcade battles. Also I think future of the naval mode is uncertain. Yamato and USS Iowa will rule the seas.
Is the lags still common in naval? Play 2 battles, after looong time and first battle was ok, next was soo laggy and cant hit anything… So? Common as was, am i right?
