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.