New ARCADE aiming

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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69

It’s not higher across the board

Torpedo speed multiplier in AB:
Up to 4 km the multiplier is 3;
From 4 to 8 km multiplier drops linearly from 3 to 1;
Over 8 km the multiplier is 1.

This was introduced in Update “Red Skies”.

Rupert64
sure - torp speed is higher in AB as in RB - this and the missing torp reload makes pt boats much less of use in RB. attacking larger ships is not easier in RB then - their ai guns shoot at the small boats so sneak approach is very difficult…

Generally there’s a lot of variety in ship performance between the game modes. E.g. I would never take Shimakaze into RB 7.0, but I constantly take it into AB 7.0, cause she’s great out there. On the other hand, fragile and mobile bluewater vessels with good guns (e.g. French cruisers) tend to perform much better in RB than they do in AB.

Either way - isn’t that discussion going a fair bit off topic? 😅

To get it a little bit back-on-track - the core point is that simply telling people who dislike the change to migrate over from AB into RB is very much misguided, if not to say that it’s actively discouraging people from playing the game all together.

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70

FYI: It’s under the guns… pretty much always. It’s not that hard to remember. 😅 And the spread most of the guns have makes it borderline impossible to pixel-hunt (even if this update does lower the spread for most of the naval guns we have in the game).

71

Playing tournaments, first-good-salvo ammo-rack kills were VERY common. And that was in RB, with aiming. Those same players will delete newbs on sight in AB, in a way they can’t today; ranges are too short in the game on most maps for dispersion to matter much. That’s why I suspect this is a mode that will struggle now under the new rules, or if not, be thinned out in terms of player base dramatically at higher ranks.

The funny thing is that with bow-tanking removed as a strat, and everything being more accurate and deadly, just as in those tournaments you’re going to see AB become even more a “hide in the islands and snipe from behind them” fight, because it’s pretty much the only damage mitigation you have left. In the long run, there’s a point of diminishing returns here with the “make it dumber” strategy: the farther and farther they get from anything recognizably naval. At some point naval fans will want to play an actual naval game where ships behave as ships did.

Another thing you’ll likely see is more ships running with completely empty racks in some cases, especially on the poorer secondaries, to reduce explosion risks. If you can kill with main guns and first salvo matters most, absolutely no point to keeping anything explosive on board that can’t help you with that.

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72

Right, in tournaments, player prefer to carry less torpedo, less secondary ammo and appropriate main cannon ammo to avoid mag or shell room explosion. It is the same in top tier battleship match in RB. But except the first hit kill, the movement skill is also important, that is the point what I say above all, appropriate movement skill can disturb enemy’s aiming, especially when u enemy highly depends on FCS. The same reason, it can also disturb new AB aiming mechanism, but if one player always low BR match like 4.3-5.0, in this BR most of his enemies are newbs, he will not meet too many skillful players who have good movement skills.

73

Naval Arcade is basically my main mode in War Thunder at this point.

I’m very opposed to this change. I don’t think simplifying the mode any further makes it better, as many have pointed out this will only make ships that are already too strong in the meta even stronger while making evasion in nearly any ship impossible.

Naval as a whole, but particularly naval arcade, needs more strategy and depth, not less.

EDIT: The fact that this enormous change was made without consulting players and without any kind of testing or survey just goes to show how little Gaijin thinks of their own playerbase. Naval players might as well not exist to them, so why bother asking them what they think?

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74

Despite the similarities, all Arcade modes prepare you for Realistic. But with this change, you are NOT prepared in any way to play Realistic. Movement from Arcade to Realistic STOPS except for those of us who will leave with this new Aiming disaster - which will be most of us. Additionally, when people complain about “pay to win”, whoever can afford the best graphics card and the largest 50+" monitor will be Arcade Gods with this new change because it will become simply a matter of pixels and who can see and put their curser on the spot.

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75

After more than 2 years in the game I finally tried Naval with the last update and it has become my “go-to” game-mode. But this was after months of test sailing ship after ship to learn the aiming mode, both Arcade & Realistic. And with the last changes, shortening the que times and increasing SL for bots, I have seen the lobbies grow almost double from when I started less than 3 months ago. I have yet to see a wait time of over 2:00 and what used to be 4-6 players per match it is now 12-16 per match and growing daily. That and migration from WoWS is very evident. Gaijin needs to give these changes time to take effect.

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76

In all modes, Arcade “prepares” you for Realistic. There is a reason people’s first match in ground is Arcade, in order to learn the basics. And then after a few missions, you are allowed to choose Realistic. This will no longer be true in Naval. Arcade will NOT prepare you for Realistic. I will cease playing Arcade and either play Realistic or quit playing Naval altogether. (Question: How does this system work in Coastal?)

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77

Should work the same way, just point and click. I don’t have much coastal experience but it almost sounds worse for coastals as your survivability depends on being able to dodge, especially so if you are bringing one to a bluewater match.

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78

I think the fact that it will be much harder to dodge after this change is being missed by a lot of people. The “everyone gets 2 second targeting” was also a nerf for people who actually maneuvered their ships. That was the only way to be competitive in some cruisers and destroyers against larger ships. I see some of the same people that complain about it being “impossible” to fight a battleship with a cruiser liking this proposed change. It’s counterintuitive.

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79

In fast boats at distance it might actually be slightly easier to dodge this way, in some cases.

Whereas before you had no way of knowing whether you were turning into the lead indication, now when you see the rounds fired by an appointment, you know exactly where they’ll land… Right where your predicted location said you were going to be at the moment they were fired. The rounds can’t change their trajectory in flight… given a few seconds of dodge time and speed to turn and dodge (so, PT-boat at 5 km vs DD main guns) against a single opponent you could still be pretty hard to hit.

Not defending the change, just thinking being able to plant your rounds on a target with total certainty works both ways.

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80

I can see your point. I was thinking of the old system, when ships had different times to acquire a fire control solution. If I knew a ship took 10 seconds to get a targeting solution, it was much easier to throw off my opponents aim. Conversely, when I’m sailing the HMS Tiger with a VERY quick time to acquire targets, it was very hard for my opponent to dodge, so I could hit PT boats easily.

I just fear this dumbing down isn’t going to do anyone any favors except for brand new players who will quickly tire of the boring and dumbed down gameplay.

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81

All of which are arguments to roll these updates back, not continue to dumb the system down and ruin any skill or fun in the game mode.

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82

Please show me where I have ever advocated for these changes. I’ve made it clear on many posts that I loathe them, and think they will ruin naval.

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83

I think that’s out of the question, the devs never cared about Naval players and never asked about any Naval changes. It’s like they are desperate and just want to add more and more changes, hoping some of them will somehow attract more players at some point. I don’t think they have any smart plan here, these changes are just pure desperation.

If you think about this, the damage model in Naval and overall whole game mode is changing basically every 1-3 major updates. It’s not the first time they are trying some huge change that forces current Naval players to re-learn everything they know.

At this point, they clearly don’t care they can lose some of the current Naval players. I’m quite sure their way of thinking is: “Naval don’t have enough players to justify resources spend on this game mode, we have to do something about this, let’s change everything step by step and see what comes out of it”. This is something that Bruce already mentioned, and I agree with that. From the devs perspective it doesn’t really matter if they have 1000 Naval players or 500 Naval players, because both values are just not enough. If you look at this from that perspective, they don’t really risk anything.

I still think this is the wrong way of looking at things, but this is the only reasonable explanation for such major changes being added without consulting it with actual players.

Just think what would happened if they made the same change in Ground Arcade. They could easily add automatic aiming there, the player would have to point an enemy directly and the gunner will make all the corrections (based on enemy movement) to hit the exact spot the player aimed at (like e.g. the MG port). If they ever wanted to make such change in Ground Arcade, I’m sure there will be so many unhappy players, you would see something similar to what has happened in 2023. And the devs know this, but also Ground Arcade game mode is popular enough that changing its aiming system doesn’t make sense. In Naval Arcade the situation is very different.

I would personally prefer if they tried to fix Naval bugs, think about the ways to bring the balance back to this game mode (try to explain to new players why 4.3 boat is not equal in strength to 4.3 ship and why you should avoid enemies 1.0 BR higher than you are). Actually, my friend wanted to try Naval some time ago, we played custom and then random battles together. He learned aiming system very quickly, in a few hours (to be fair, he only had problems to understand shell inertia). After we played Naval Arcade for about half a day, he decided that the thing he doesn’t like in this game mode is actually the lack of balance. We started from boats and he just couldn’t understand why I’m constantly saying not to attack or even hide from specific enemy vessels. He is a Ground Arcade player, and even in full uptier he can kill everyone (aiming for weakspots), because he is actually a very good player, much better than I am. But in Naval, there is no balance between vessels. You can’t take 4.3 BR boat and just attack 4.3 BR destroyer with guns. It used to work differently, but that was a long time ago, before the devs introduced ship damage model to the game. But when they did this, they never increased the BRs of vessels with the new ship damage model. Understanding this is actually a huge problem for new players. By playing Naval, you have to accept this game mode is not balanced. In theory vessels have their roles in the game (and it’s definitely not boats job to kill destroyers), but in practice it’s a huge mess currently.

I know that many players claim that the boat can still destroy destroyers with torpedoes. Well, not every boat have torpedoes, and this way of thinking is also very dangerous. Using the same logic, a 1.0 BR BT-5 can kill a 5.3 BR M4A3E2 Jumbo from the side. Does this mean both vehicles are equal and should be placed at the same BR? Unfortunately, this is pretty much the situation we currently have in Naval game mode. And in my opinion this is the first thing that needs to be changed to attract new players.

BTW: I hope everyone understands that we are talking to ourselves here. No dev will ever see this topic anyway.

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84

fully agree - (btw. a BT5 can even kill light tanks at BR 7 or BR 8 easily)
If they tune naval AB down to a brainless click game then naval RB should be “rescued”
But I am sure this will never happen - I have a number of suggestions to improve RB but why posting them here?

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85

Aiming system was among top-3 complaints to the naval mode (the other two being maps and battleships slapping cruisers when they cannot respond).

It’s a good sign that they try to fix it, just the way they picked seems… somewhat inconsistent and surprising (see: New ARCADE aiming - #20 by Jareel_Skaj, to avoid repeating myself).

86

a few years ago there was no lead indicator (for ships guns) at all - even in arcade. They added then more and more indicators and aiming assists. GJ should not listen to naval newbies which have problems to hit from the start. Some people come to a new game and expect to get 10 kills per round - if not they start to complain. The next logic consequence of GJ would be to mark a target and the guns aim and fire fully automatic - as already and often mentioned “putting a brickstone” on the mouse button - fine for botting!

This update will turn into a announced disaster for naval (arcade)

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87

To be honest, lead indicator in Naval Arcade makes sense, because it literally teaches new players how to aim. It’s also consistent with other Arcade modes. In Air Arcade you have real-time lead indicator on enemy planes. In Ground Arcade you have penetration indicator. So every Arcade game mode has this kind of helper for new players.

I personally don’t like the lead indicator in Naval Arcade, but I don’t think it was a bad decision to add it. It definitely helped new players. I played Naval Arcade for a very long time, and after the devs added this lead indicator, this game mode became much harder for me. Suddenly everyone was able to hit me, I lost a lot of advantage, so this change was obviously negative for me. But it made aiming much easier for new players, which is fine. That’s something I can accept, even if I don’t like it.

The problem is, with this new system, aiming will be so simplified that the whole skill will be basically gone. New players will just keep pressing left mouse button to shoot. Experienced players will try to fight with the system and try to predict enemy movement changes. But it will be irritating, illogical and completely unpleasant experience to aim with this new system. That’s why I’m quite sure that most experienced players will just stop playing the Naval game mode.

For me personally, this aiming change is one step too far. Instead of this, I would prefer fixing some annoying bugs, like the aiming bug I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Especially the change to make lead indicator almost instant in Arcade happened very recently. It’s strange that they don’t even wait longer for the effect of this change, but decided to completely change aiming in this game mode.

The devs see all the stats obviously. Maybe the almost instant aiming update reduced the number of players in Naval Arcade? Or maybe it just didn’t attract enough new players as expected? That’s why I wrote in my previous post they look desperate. It’s not good to make such big changes so often without even giving the previous change some time to stabilize the situation. For me, it looks like they realised this change was a mistake, but they don’t see moving a step back as a good solution, so they decided to try something even more extreme.

I don’t see how this change could attract more players, but like I mentioned before, they probably think they have nothing to lose right now. Unfortunately, the remaining Naval Arcade player base is too small for them to care about.

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88

yes I made the same experience after implementing the aiming indicator - but I got used to it. And ok its fair to new players - but if they want to create a WoWS clone the players will go or stay at the original - and as mentioned even this game has a lead indicator…
I hope they don’t set the update live during the actual naval event - but setting your hope into GJ is useless…

1 Like