Another way to look at the structural problem with naval right now is to compare median Kills per Spawn between modes:
Spoiler
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.
