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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You can kill dreadnaughts with them.
Can’t.
You can shoot machine guns at Amiens for 5 minutes, for example, but he won’t even notice. The probability of hitting with torpedoes tends to zero, this happens once in 20-25 battles, and he won’t die with one. It’s enough for him to hit 1, sometimes 2 times, which is much easier.
Most of the boat battles now take place between gunboats and frigates, the rest just get in the way, dying quickly and unnoticed.
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It’s because battlepass achievement and vehicle, it will go away. You could take destroyer, kill all Amiens and play your boat till the end of the match without them or get a plane and bomb them.
I really hope so. I’m getting tired of rounds with 5-8 of them on the opposing team.
He means the 3,3 Destroyers, most BR3,7 and for sure the BR 4 will pit you agaist DD and SKR so there will be no Amiens hunting.
happy hunting
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I’m talking about small fleet battles, not destroyers, etc. Although they generally have the same problem, only at medium and higher BR, when destroyers and light cruisers are almost as useless against battleships.
There is no small fleet battles on 3.3, they always mixed.
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