Sure
Going forward please take all personal arguments to PM.
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I would take the statshark numbers with a grain of salt. Low tier ships require fewer battles to spade. For example, I finished the Grecale in just 3 fights. I will not go back and play it again. Of course, the stats about the number of naval battles dropping overall are probably correct, but don’t automatically assume that fewer low tier battles means fewer new players.
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Well, if new players joined Naval, they had to start from rank 1, so we would see an increase especially in the player count stats at lower ranks.
There is one exception, if new players bought premium vessels without playing lower ranks at all. This is something we can’t easily check in stats (technically you could analyze all premium vessels data, but this would require a lot of time). In theory it’s of course possible that all new players bought premium vessels at higher ranks and never played ranks 1-3. This would mean that even more old players left Naval and they were replaced by new players. But even if that’s possible, this is very unlikely. We should always follow the scenario that makes the most sense, not the scenario that is only possible.
If you think about this, considering Naval lost about 200000 players at BRs between March and May, but there was an increase in the number of players in top ranks, which scenario is more likely (I’m showing extreme examples):
- 200000 new players joined Naval and they all bought rank 5 premium vessels and only played there, never touched lower ranks. At the same time, 400000 old players had to leave Naval.
- 200000 old players left, which created more empty battles, and many remaining players moved to higher ranks.
Both these scenarios would cause what we see in the data. And everyone is free to interpret this data as they wish. The real scenario could be the mix of both. But if the first scenario is correct then the devs gained a lot of money from this change.
Personally, I don’t think that all new players just bought premium ships at top ranks to try Naval with the new aiming. Do you think how many players who have never played Naval before would buy something like IJN Yamashiro for 70€ just to grind through lower ranks? I don’t think there will be many of such players, especially they wouldn’t even know before buying this ship if they like Naval or not. And if they had tried something from the reserve vessels first, we would have seen it in the player count at BRs stats.
But I agree that interpreting stats for us always involves making assumptions. Only the devs can see the whole picture (e.g. how many premium vessels they sold in these months). In theory it is possible that they gained more money in these months, we just don’t know this. But there is no reason to assume a scenario that is much less likely to occur.
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Agreed. Why there is some of that, as I understand it, the MAJORITY of players in F2P monetization are NOT paying. Anything. And then if they are, they’re usually doing little things. Lower tier/Cheaper Premiums. Maybe premium time.
Again, agree, only the devs know for sure but… you SHOULD be seeing lowest tiers bumped up as players funnel into the game mode. That’s the only entrance for the majority of Free to Players. The tiny percentage buying in likely isn’t significant.
This is also true. It doesn’t take long to get into rank III. I think a few days to get solid into the Rank IIs. But we should still see a ton of players in Rank II and III.
And those Rank I numbers should still show up as they’re monthly counts.
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GJ needs to rename this Battle Pass to the “Battles of the French fleet vs the sniper bots”
Also has anyone else noticed that the bots A/A do not take pause to reload, I noticed that on the German Flakvierling. They continusly shootinhg like they are gattling guns
To best way to check this is to look at the Player Count stats, which is basically number of unique players that played at specific BRs.
Even if someone played 100 battles at 2.0 BR in specific nation, you will see +1 Player Count from this player at 2.0 BR for this nation. Of course in this example I assume that all these battles were exactly at 2.0 BR, which is pretty much impossible (more on this later).
You can also do something interesting and just look at the number of unique players that played Naval Arcade in the last month (select Ship Arcade, Win Rate, Monthly Statistics). This way you will see there were 158617 unique players in total (sum of all values) that played at least one Naval Arcade battle in this period. Just keep in mind that this stat is updated every week, so it’s best to note it with the release of monthly stats.
From monthly stats, we know that in May Naval Arcade had 549307 unique players in BRs. So the average Naval Arcade player played in 3.5 different BRs during the month. Which is not much, considering we have 20 possible BR lineups (from 1.0 to 7.3) and 7 nations. This low number of 3.5 suggests that many of 158617 players had to play just 1 battle. That’s because if you play many battles with the same lineup (let’s say 2.0 BR), some of your battles will be 2.0, some will be 2.3, some will be 2.7 and some will be 3.0, so you have 4 options with just one lineup (StatShark counts battle BR for every player). Because the number of possible BR placements with one lineup is 4, and we know the average player played in 3.5 different BRs, many Naval Arcade players had to play just 1 or maybe 2 battles in total last month, so this stat could be that low. Because there were surely players, who played at more BRs.
If that’s still not clear, a simpler example of just 2 players. If one player played just 1 battle in last month, he would be counted as just +1 player at specific BR in Player Count, and +1 player for win rate stats. If another player played at 6 different BRs last month, he would be counted as +6 players at specific BRs in Player Count, but still only +1 player for win rate stats. Both these players at average played in 3.5 different BRs (7 unique players at BRs divided by 2 unique players).
All this suggests that most players in Naval Arcade don’t like switching nations too often, and also prefer to play with just one specific lineup whole the time.
BTW: If anyone is wondering, 306402 unique players played Naval Arcade from February to May.
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Me in a nutshell.
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I have grinded out nearly all coastal trees, actually only the german “Schütze” is missing
Just wanted to say I haven’t seen many people come to the changes defense, and I’ve gotta say I’m having a lot of fun in Naval Arcade at the moment.
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Tbh i cant defend them because my dislike of them is genuine
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Wondering why… this boat is impossible to spade…
i play mostly german top rank coastals where the grinding of Schütze is very slow
Another way to look at the structural problem with naval right now is to compare median Kills per Spawn between modes:
In very general terms, the lower the bar, the harder the mode is. Because we’re talking median values, it means other people are killing more things than you. This can be because of experience or other forms of player inequality. There are still ways to succeed in a low KpS mode (bombing bases in air for instance, or playing only low-tier), but you are still ceding the killing game to other, better players (again, on average, across all BRs in that mode).
In Air and Ground, the progression is what you’d expect. Arcade is the easier mode. When you want a greater challenge, or a more complex gameplay feel, then you can “upgrade” to the Realistic mode. Arcade serves, for Air and Ground, as expected as the “entry mode.” The lower the bar, the more player skill is posing a barrier to entry, on the theory that if skill didn’t matter at all (winning or killing other players depended as much on skill as a coin toss) that number would be basically 1.
In naval, there’s a problem that this graph shows well. Compared to air/ground both modes are absurdly easy/low-skill (there is no way mathematically for a KpS median to be higher than 1.0*, so 0.9 pretty much indicates that mode is as easy as you can get) in terms of getting kills in. This is largely due to Gaijinbots of course, but kills equate to SL and to a lesser degree score and RP, and in naval the skill floor for being a shipkiller is very low.
However, the problem is that AB is (not just recently, historical figures were similar) still significantly harder to get kills in than RB. Still pretty easy, but despite the recent aiming and bot changes, RB is still easier on the whole. So in that sense recent changes to AB didn’t really work in making it the “entry” mode. Mostly because the mode was already pretty low-skill to start with.
The other problem is that there’s really limited places for the mode to go to fix this now. The KpS numbers suggest you can’t really make AB any easier than it already is (other than by maybe dumbing down the bot AI in that mode extremely, making all the Gaijinbots even more SL pinatas than they are, or adding airbots as well… that could work).
Making RB drastically harder and more challenging isn’t going to GAIN you players, so you can’t get the Arcade/Realistic gradient going that way really, either (although if there’s any room to improve as a mode now, it probably lies in that direction, in the form of adding some more realism factors on the RB side and hope players like them enough not to leave… I still have hopes for surface radar or ASW adding new complexity in that regard).
*Poul points out in DMs you can go to a KpS higher than 1 if you have a lot of bots, or factor in AI kills, or offer “free kills” in some other way, as you do with Ground AB killstreak planes. Yep, agreed. But that just shows, to my mind, the only way you could really make the skillfloor on naval AB any lower now, too.
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I do not agree with your conclusion on this point, at all, not even a little bit. Before and after the NAB aiming changes, I can get 2x-10x more kills per spawn in Arcade over Realistic. Imo, the reason you are seeing such a big discrepancy between NAB and NRB is because effectively all of the NRB players have been playing for multiple years. Unlike with ARB and GRB, new Naval players effectively never join NRB, or if they do try, they get ROFLSTOMPED into oblivion by the other VERY experienced NRB players. Even I get curb stomped in NRB, and I have been playing Naval since it came out. I detest NRB, and a big reason why I have simply stopped playing Naval all together since NAB aiming was ruined.
I always appreciate your data and deeper digging with the data, but I urge you to reconsider your conclusion that “NAB is harder than NRB”. Imo, your conclusion is heavily biased by your time playing more NRB over NAB.
Furthermore, if the stats are still showing more KPS in NRB over NAB, even though NAB is now a brainless point and click fest, this helps support the notion that it is player skill making such a huge difference rather than the game mode. How could NAB be “harder” than NRB now?
No, NAB is not harder than NRB, never was, never will be.
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Historically, in terms of KpS, AB has always been the higher skill floor mode. For a few reasons, talked about elsewhere:
- More players, fewer bots mostly; but also
- Faster
- More effective air
- More, faster torps, combined with
- Similar systems in all other respects (including repair time and aiming, which before this year was always basically identical).
The historical data shows a KpS for naval AB of 0.875, vs RB of 0.909, still lower (meaning higher-skill) for AB. But all modes’ KpS have drifted up over time.
I try not to argue from service records. I used to do that on this forum, and in the end I think it just adds toxicity to debates without adding clarity. If you say you were getting significantly higher KpS in one mode before March I’ll take your word, but the average of all players here in May-June is telling a different story (link). And relative playerbase experience in a mode could have an effect (effectively making the mode easier because everyone who plays it to a first-order approximation is already very skilled), but then you’d also be seeing differences and non-normal distributions on graphs like average score, win rate, and position on team as well as KpS between AB and RB and from StatShark - See All Player, Missile, and Vehicle Statistics, you’re not.
I think the difference here from the game you and I both knew a couple years back to what it is now is very much the forced 16v16 and the bot scoring changes as it is the AB aiming changes. 16v16 added a lot more bots (to both modes )and the bot scoring change made them lucrative to farm in a way this year they weren’t before. It’s very hard NOT to trade 1 K for 1 D given mostly-bot opposition… but a year ago you could kill a bot in RB and still not make much score, in return for being hammered a minute later by a human player. Now that same trade, netting triple the rewards you used to get, would already put you significantly cash-positive.
Also currently, at the coastal-only tiers in RB, new players often face 2v2s, same as in battleship BRs, with 14 other bots each side to farm as targets (because it’s a pretty empty mode, ngl). I’ve done a couple naval events at very low BRs and the score you can make playing basically a PvE game is really quite remarkable.* But it doesn’t require any great skill. They’re bots.
And this, not aiming, is still the greatest difference between the modes. AB still has more human players than RB (66% human in mid tier in AB vs 51% in RB) (link). That is all that’s really making it “harder” here.
*and of course none of that RP you earn in those coastal-only 2v2s helps you grind out what you really want on the bluewater side because of the tree split, so it’s basically a waste of time… but if you start right in destroyers however, you do get hammered, ironically often by spaded mid-rank coastals: that’s the core underlying problem, the tree split making it so tempting if you have high rank coastals like SKRs to just farm the newbs. That’s an artificial inequality issue, but it’s not a skill/experience issue.
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I think I still disagree 😂 HOWEVER, that’s just my opinion, and I don’t have any data to back up my bias lol. I always throughly enjoy reading through your insightful posts, and I appreciate your response and the time you spent on your reply. Cheers 🍻
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They not so insightful as it may seem, more like cherrypicked and biased to proof his points therefore tendentious
Now it is completely unclear what small torpedo and especially machine gun boats are needed for, because it is impossible to play on them - each BR has huge gunboats or even frigates that can destroy small boats by the dozen with 1-2 hits. Thanks to the French branch…
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