I just want to remind that two years ago (in May 2023) Content Creators were asked to send their questions to the devs. One CC asked the following question (which was actually a suggestion):
Q. I would like to see if WT naval arcade could be made a bit more arcadey to attract more people to the mode, mainly by making rangefinding faster so it might be more fun to play. Maybe also add what ammo to shoot at which target so people have more of an Idea when to use AP or HE and SAP.
- We agree here - We’ll try to do something to make the mode more approachable, and will likely start with rangefinding.
This is where things started to go wrong very quickly. The devs made a lot of changes to make especially Naval Arcade (but also Naval in general) easier to play. In theory this supposed to attract more players to this game mode, but I only saw the opposite. Two or three years ago, I never had problems with waiting times in Naval Arcade queue. After they started making things easier and easier I only saw more and more players leaving this game mode. We recently got more AI bots added to Naval battles, because eventually waiting times became a huge issue.
It looks like the devs still think that the problem of Naval is that this game mode is too hard to play. So they keep adding changes to make the game mode easier and more accessible, and they hope that new players will join in at some point.
Like I said, in my opinion this is a wrong direction and it has the opposite effect. Some changes, even if in my opinion unnecessary, are not a big deal (like the camera position changes, shell penetration indicators, ability to control vessels with a destroyed bridge etc). But many changes were just too much (making fire control calculations faster, eventually almost instant, FCS interface that tells you exactly where your shells landed, now this whole new aiming system that automatically aims for the player). I don’t even remember how many damage model changes we had over the last two years, and having to learn it all over again is a terrible feeling to me.
The funny thing is that none of these changes attracted more players. But because of so many bad changes and the devs messing with the game mode basically whole the time, more and more players realize that continuing to play in this mode makes no sense. There is no stability, there is no break, it is difficult to enjoy something that is constantly and dramatically changing.
I dread to even think what stupid ideas they are working on now that will be added to Naval in the next major updates, to make this game mode even easier. Well, I left Naval Arcade, so it’s not really my problem anymore. In fact, if they made similar changes to any other game mode I play (Air Arcade, Ground Arcade, Air Realistic) I would have left it as well. So I’m not sure if that’s a good direction for the game, but I’m not making these decisions.
I just wanted to remind that this is a long-planned strategy by the devs that was intended to attract more players to the game. Because I see some people started thinking that just one suggestion that was rejected by the community and never even passed to the devs caused all our issues, but that’s clearly not the case.