Excellent video documenting how WG develops ships and how they did things post split. Given the time passed since the split I doubt anything is gonna improve. WG itself were being hush hush about Lesta pretty much tells everything you need to know. There is no drive for them to improve, because Lesta is their only real competition. And thanks to the war, they don't need to compete.
The sad thing is that warships doesn’t have any competition unless you count war thunder naval but since that’s the case, they can do what they want even if it drives their veteran players away
Some fun-facts (depressing, actually) about recent models: 20:04 - On the tennessee's devblog, the preview image they added for it still had the californias hull-number on it. They couldnt even be bothered to change that. Wisconsin is literally just an Iowa but 23% lower in the water (same with Illinois' hull) On Libertard, they were so lazy at copy&pasting assets, they at one point literally shoved a single 20mm oerlikon into a quad 40 mount. The AP shells are also a 1:1 copy paste from conqueror but without the shortfuse. I think the best example of the copy & paste epidemic is numancia, that thing was so insulting that I went around checking other ships and found literally every single asset on it. (Hull, torps, aa guns, rangefinder, radar, bridge, life-boats, turrets, even the crane) But in general I do agree with the things you said here, there just isnt any new content being added anymore. The upcoming dutch cruisers are literally just copy pasted provincien/wiesbaden hulls with german 127mm guns slapped on it, with some boring gimmick noone ever asked for nor wants to play against.
Also, I've just gotten information from sources (which I won't mention again, sorry) that Wargamming and Lesta though seperate companies still kept up communication and shared stuff basically up to the point of the Michelangelo dockyard. That's why both Lesta and WoWs got Ferrucio/Kitakami/Micheangelo, and then there was a breakdown in communications due to some unresolved conflicts the two games haven't been connected since (which I suspect is also why not talking about Mir Korabli began also being much more enforced on the WoWs official Discord during this time). That actually explains why Lesta got the Bungo line (this was around the same time) first and why their devblog showed in development modelling screenshots while WG released their Bungo line Devblog 2 months after. Lesta literally made the Bungo line and then passed the assets onto WG.
Further note: my comment on Encounter's turret being new is actually false, because it's from Nottingham. That means the Commonwealth cruiser line is essentially 100% recycled assets.
Lesta were an independent company before they merged with the WG brand and were already located in St. Petersburg before development of WoWs started. As for reusing assets, South America and Spain didn't really design their own ships but rather either straight up bought ships from other nations, or asked other nations to design ships for them to build in the case of Spain. Almost all Spanish historical ships at the time are based on Brittish designs and Italy did a lot of design work for hypothetical future Spanish ships, most of the Venezia line past Zara is actually ship designs Italy wanted to sell to Spain or other customers. WG do deserve genuine criticism for not using actual built in steel South American dreadnoughts built by Brittain and the US for Brazil, Chile and Argentina like the Minas Geraes-class, Rivadavia-class and Almirante Latorre, they just needed stuff to fill out T6 and T7 to make a full line. It's just a lot cheaper to buy something already designed or built by somebody else and possibly modifying it than having to develop domestic design offices and shipyards. As for French torpedo DDs, if you actually did a bit of research there just aren't any real designs to work with as the last such ship designed by France before capitulation was the Le Hardi and before that the L' Adroit-class. The game is genuinely running out of real ships and real designs to work with which leads to a lot of of mix-'n-match to "invent" new shit.
@Arthion the thing is this is just what I said about WG using a convenient historical narrative to hide the fact they haven't modelled anything in fucking forever. As Lesta is showing, there are things you can model even if the well of ideas is going dry. But instead, we get a $80 Johnston Fletcher that makes money off the myths of the ship
La Argentina is unique, it was built by the brittish so it obviously looks like a Brittish ship but it was a unique class designed for Argentina (also arguably better than the Leanders and Arethusas Brittain was building for itself at the time) as for the rest, all ships those nations wound up with after WW2 were just surplus ships sold by US, Brittain, the Netherlands and Sweden etc. so post T5 all ships are either ships sold or hypothetical designs sold since South America doesn't have the dockyards to build cruisers themselves.
The aesthetics of WOWS is one of its greatest assets. The ship models, the environments, the shells arcs, the way ships move and relate to each other visually is unrivaled. I think they've lost focus on this in recent years.
WoWs is such a suffocating experience for new players that I have no idea how they think the ecosystem can be sustainable long term. Not just with the game economics which are bad enough, but how dead low tier MM is, just how many ships there are total in the game that you have to learn to play against, and WoWs content creators seemingly not hitting the alogrithm heights they used to (which means less effective advertising to bring in more new players). I feel like this is going to be a terminal issue regardless on whether WG can fix its skill shortage.
I am so glad I am not the only one that thinks that we got the worst deal of the split. I honestly want to give money to the game so it gets better, but I have not done so for months because I feel the game is getting worse and worse and worse. Nowadays I only keep an eye on IJN Ships releases and play Operations, that's it, since I cannot take part on Clan Battles and with the recents to containers and how to obtain Steel, I cannot really get a lot of it and most of my Steel went into Shinano. We got the money greedy con artists...
9:15 - this part is a bit questionable since lesta also got those "gimmicky copy paste" lines (gdansk, san martin, castilla) 28:50 - to be fair lesta went pretty hard into gambling as well. Like just these past 3 months they put out "zeus" (thunderer with a different perma camo) and piemonte (but as a t11 premium) which are both gambling only But I do agree with your overall message. On wg there's less content and it's of generally lower quality, most likely cus they've got fewer artists and devs
Oh absolutely, as I said in the top comment it came to my knowledge that WG and Lesta actually had a content-sharing relationship up until the Michelangelo dockyard, so these lines would have been before that. We don't know for sure how much of these lines were made by WG or Lesta, only really that Bungo line for sure I'm quite positive was made by Lesta (new hulls/guns, Lesta devblog showing modelling screenshot, etc). Also, Lesta is definetely not perfect. The comparison point to Lesta was drawn to show how much WG's modelling/programming has slacked since pre-split times.
@@FatFluffyPenguin Keep in mind a lot of the nations introduced never designed or built ships themselves like South America but relied on buying from bigger nations, or in the case of Spain just imported modified Brittish or Italian designs to build in their own dockyards rather than spend the money and trial and error designing unique ships themselves. Always cheaper to copy somebody elses homework. Outside of Brittain, US, Japan, France, Italy, the USSR and a few minor nations like the Netherlands or Sweden, almost no other nations designed and built their own guns and warships but instead purchased them from the previously mentioned. Hell Netherlands even relied heavily on imported guns for their own cruiser and DD designs since designing and constructing shit domestically is very expensive. As for new designs for the above, the well is running dry at this point, basically only the USSR has a lot of untapped designs left and WG probably no longer have access to Russian naval archives. To make new ships they have to either play asset swap or try to invent something completely new on their own which is obviously way more time consuming and difficult.
In fact, after playing both versions of Wows, you will find that the amount of game content is complementary. Every one to two versions of WG's game content increases, followed by one to two versions of Lesta's game content increasing, and the cycle continues without any competitive situation. In fact, there is no competition, so they must have long-term cooperation.
My only question is, if in the future they ever would go back to being one company. While far fetched, especially seeing that we're soon reaching 3 years since it all started, we can hope (not that Lesta is a saint, may players have pointed out to just as much predatory behaviour and gambling).
The bigger thing that really could use more emphasis is the issue of bugs. It's not just the fact there's bugs that are going a long time without being fixed: there's new bugs that get thrown in that also linger! A couple patches ago, Watchful and the two skills that improve Fighter patrol radius didn't work properly. While Watchful, IIRC, did get fixed, the two Fighter patrol skills that should be giving improved Fighter patrol radius actually do not work. This was documented around the same time as Watchful's bug, still not fixed. Any CVs that want to build into Fighters are effectively wasting 4 points that comes at the expense of the player to respec out of (and later back in to whenever the fix is implemented). Also to include with the bugs is when missions don't have the right text, but for some reason "can't be fixed" during the patch (ex: the one Enterprise unlock mission where a player had to destroy a ship within 10km, when the text said at least 10km away), a bug that a player would never have known if the player didn't engage in the numerous social media outlets WG and the WoWS community utilize. That merits reiteration: WG's bugs/errors come at the player's expense. The uptick in (predatory) monetization and expensive collaborations was already one red flag that WG's taking the game in the wrong direction. The lack of in-game info and resources that explains the various mechanics (even basic mechanics to learn the game, before gimmicks) is another problem in itself, with the account level system being so archaic that players can jump to T8 or even T10 without having commanders unlocked on the account. Much of learning the game, just to start, involves the long-dated "How It Works" series on TH-cam (not even in-game to learn something like angling/overmatch). Sounds like WG has one heck of a triangle of failure on their hands: aggressive monetization, new/persistent bugs that cannot be fixed in a timely manner, and poor in-game resources to learn how to play and advance in the game.
@betaflex1 oh yeah for sure. I didn't talk much about bugs because I was getting tired talking for 40 minutes straight, but there are also years ling replay bugs that just get shoved under the table. I don't like playing cvs, but even I've heard a lot about what you talked about
I have to wonder if, on top of the fact that Lesta got most of modeling and programing in the divorce, if because of the fact that WG is also developing Project Cold War and that new Mech Hero shooter that was announced at the Game Awards that their remaining modeling and programming team is mostly focused on that, leaving WOWS and WOT with a skeleton crew that can only make this trickle of content to keep the lights on. I won't speak on WOT Modern Armor and WOWS Legends since those games just pull assets from the other games for console (though do seem to have a different dev team handling balance changes, and WOT console at least must have some sort of modeling department for the cold war tanks).
Thanks for the informative and ete-opening video. I realized there were a lot of copypastas, but not that literally EVERYTHING is a copypasta now. I do think an unfortunate side effect is that nobody seems interested in these new lines. Castilla, Cassard, and Cerebrus are all super rare. I see San Martin sometimes but it’s a stronger ship. The pan am BBs give me hope, since they did apparently need to do some serious revisions on the superstructures and barbettes compared to the UK line. Maybe WG is slowly rebuilding the talent they lost. I do think the excitement about them will die down once they are no longer broken OP, though.
It isn't just that WG didn't get the talent at Lesta; they aren't even raising new talent. Recruitment and hiring for dev or modeller positions is practically nil, and most WG locations outside Europe are purely marketing only. AFAICT their shareholders have decided to mainly keep the game in 'semi-maint' mode and not create or invest in a studio with the same capabilities as Lesta to create their own branch of the game.
Finally someone spoke out I suspected a year ago that we got the slimy corporate types while most of the art/devs stayed in Russia. Since then the monetization has gotten increasingly predatory in contrast to their promise made back during the whole CC walkout. Who knows, perhaps that is null and void the moment they split with Lesta. - In a game about warships there is always going to be an element of copy pasta. A Prince of Wales premium would just be a copy of KGV and there's so many Fletchers yet to be added. However, it gets old real fast if that's the only thing WG is releasing. - Glad you brought up the devaluing coal but it's worth mentioning auctions. They used to be a "decent" way of picking up the occasional rare ship but now they have devolved into the same slob of supership early access, coal and rehashed Jolly Roger ranked flag.
Im playing both WOWS but also made a MK account since they had this starter thing going on where you got a Tirpitz, 5k dubs and tons of other shit for free after playing like 100 battles. So they are even more desperate for new players than WG. Most points of your Video are valid, but some are also just shittin on WG for the sake of shittin on WG. For example the new players thing or the Incomp and Napoli camo which exist since years (MK released the Incomp camo like a year ago) But that's just some nitpicking. Overall i think Lesta at this point just produces better quality content. By now they reworked the visuals on all maps, made actual new Tech-Tree ships like the russian Battlecruisers, which are both incredibly fun to play, but also rather balanced, since they just die when caught broadside. They don't have any over the top gimmicks, just an engine boost, solid armor when angled and decent guns. For the new USN DDs it's the same really, but im only at the T7 atm and can't say much more about them, other than that one feeling fun and also balanced. For premium ships they also cooked up some interesting things like the drum magazine on the Lothringen I own because of the 5k free dubs. That one is essentially a less retarded Hildebrand that also works as an actual battlecarrier, since it has tons of armor and secondaries. So it can actually participate in the game. But of course MK also has plenty of copy paste premium ships, but most of them feel seem rather interesting still. They also fixed bugs like secondaries nit shooting at subs at periscope depth and implemenged many other good changes like modules not being able to be permanently destroyed, or a minimap indicator for teammates getting spotted. However they sadly also didn't go through with the minimap spotting for some reason. I guess the way it is is perfectly balanced and not gamebreaking at all.
Good talk. I've been thinking about how WG is going to continue to make money as the player base declines and ages. The game isn't growing anymore. Is WG developing a Warships 2.0? And if so, will it be Age of Sail or Cold War to modern? They each have pluses and minuses. AoS would be easier to devslop since the mechanics would be similar to current just at a smaller scale and slower pace, right? Whereas CW era would be the opposite with missiles and air power. But AoS may not be as exciting or fun whereas CW may be more interesting to a younger audience. I hope WG doesn't rest on its laurels and just soak Wows for all it's worth and narrow their focus to WoT and its successor, though WoT 2.0 would be interesting to see. I hope WG comes out swinging and sets a new standard for naval war arcade gaming in the future.
you are right ......but you do realise Rodney its a Nelson class battleship.....like a lot of thinks you say are tru but not because of the copy paste ......
@VladislavVasilev-i6g yes of course, but the thing is instead of modelling something we just get another nelson. Or the 27th Fletcher in the game. Like ok? Can you make something new WG?
I love the game but I don't love the direction it has taken since about 2021. The focus on gimmicks is lazy and cheap. Rather than developing new line characterietics from plausible, realistic weaponry they just do an F key buff and copy paste the parts and call it a new line. This isn't a good sign for the future of the game.
Wows lost something after about 2021. Its as if the creativity stopped and new lines were just copy paste lazy money grabs. And then they got hooked on Fkey gimmicks and its not making the game better or more engaging.
What you are missing is the WG side got the CV and sub culture. Where the WG side is developing those two items, the Lesta side is weaning off them going main line surface ships. The WoWS player base has gone down when subs and the CV rework was done. Both of those game plays are bad for WoWS.
WG makes submarines? Soviet submarines, Super Submarines, Surcouf at the shipyard with sapfir, Pasopati and Shotgun send you congratulations from Lesta!
Excellent video documenting how WG develops ships and how they did things post split.
Given the time passed since the split I doubt anything is gonna improve. WG itself were being hush hush about Lesta pretty much tells everything you need to know.
There is no drive for them to improve, because Lesta is their only real competition. And thanks to the war, they don't need to compete.
The sad thing is that warships doesn’t have any competition unless you count war thunder naval but since that’s the case, they can do what they want even if it drives their veteran players away
Some fun-facts (depressing, actually) about recent models:
20:04 - On the tennessee's devblog, the preview image they added for it still had the californias hull-number on it. They couldnt even be bothered to change that.
Wisconsin is literally just an Iowa but 23% lower in the water (same with Illinois' hull)
On Libertard, they were so lazy at copy&pasting assets, they at one point literally shoved a single 20mm oerlikon into a quad 40 mount. The AP shells are also a 1:1 copy paste from conqueror but without the shortfuse.
I think the best example of the copy & paste epidemic is numancia, that thing was so insulting that I went around checking other ships and found literally every single asset on it. (Hull, torps, aa guns, rangefinder, radar, bridge, life-boats, turrets, even the crane)
But in general I do agree with the things you said here, there just isnt any new content being added anymore. The upcoming dutch cruisers are literally just copy pasted provincien/wiesbaden hulls with german 127mm guns slapped on it, with some boring gimmick noone ever asked for nor wants to play against.
take a shot every time he says "right", right.
Also, I've just gotten information from sources (which I won't mention again, sorry) that Wargamming and Lesta though seperate companies still kept up communication and shared stuff basically up to the point of the Michelangelo dockyard. That's why both Lesta and WoWs got Ferrucio/Kitakami/Micheangelo, and then there was a breakdown in communications due to some unresolved conflicts the two games haven't been connected since (which I suspect is also why not talking about Mir Korabli began also being much more enforced on the WoWs official Discord during this time). That actually explains why Lesta got the Bungo line (this was around the same time) first and why their devblog showed in development modelling screenshots while WG released their Bungo line Devblog 2 months after. Lesta literally made the Bungo line and then passed the assets onto WG.
Further note: my comment on Encounter's turret being new is actually false, because it's from Nottingham. That means the Commonwealth cruiser line is essentially 100% recycled assets.
Also, I was wrong in saying Gdansk and SM lines start at T8, they do start from low tiers but they are also mostly clones, so the point stands.
If only there was a way to migrate an account from NA to Lesta.
Lesta were an independent company before they merged with the WG brand and were already located in St. Petersburg before development of WoWs started.
As for reusing assets, South America and Spain didn't really design their own ships but rather either straight up bought ships from other nations, or asked other nations to design ships for them to build in the case of Spain. Almost all Spanish historical ships at the time are based on Brittish designs and Italy did a lot of design work for hypothetical future Spanish ships, most of the Venezia line past Zara is actually ship designs Italy wanted to sell to Spain or other customers.
WG do deserve genuine criticism for not using actual built in steel South American dreadnoughts built by Brittain and the US for Brazil, Chile and Argentina like the Minas Geraes-class, Rivadavia-class and Almirante Latorre, they just needed stuff to fill out T6 and T7 to make a full line.
It's just a lot cheaper to buy something already designed or built by somebody else and possibly modifying it than having to develop domestic design offices and shipyards.
As for French torpedo DDs, if you actually did a bit of research there just aren't any real designs to work with as the last such ship designed by France before capitulation was the Le Hardi and before that the L' Adroit-class.
The game is genuinely running out of real ships and real designs to work with which leads to a lot of of mix-'n-match to "invent" new shit.
@Arthion the thing is this is just what I said about WG using a convenient historical narrative to hide the fact they haven't modelled anything in fucking forever. As Lesta is showing, there are things you can model even if the well of ideas is going dry. But instead, we get a $80 Johnston Fletcher that makes money off the myths of the ship
9:20 BTW san martin line was from tier 1. But all of them were copy pastes. Gdansk was from tier 5.
La Argentina is unique, it was built by the brittish so it obviously looks like a Brittish ship but it was a unique class designed for Argentina (also arguably better than the Leanders and Arethusas Brittain was building for itself at the time) as for the rest, all ships those nations wound up with after WW2 were just surplus ships sold by US, Brittain, the Netherlands and Sweden etc. so post T5 all ships are either ships sold or hypothetical designs sold since South America doesn't have the dockyards to build cruisers themselves.
@@Alpherz yeah, I yapped impromptu so I had dementia
The aesthetics of WOWS is one of its greatest assets. The ship models, the environments, the shells arcs, the way ships move and relate to each other visually is unrivaled. I think they've lost focus on this in recent years.
"We're still relying on a fucking mod by ttaro" is the perfect summary of WG's approach to making quality of life improvments
WoWs is such a suffocating experience for new players that I have no idea how they think the ecosystem can be sustainable long term. Not just with the game economics which are bad enough, but how dead low tier MM is, just how many ships there are total in the game that you have to learn to play against, and WoWs content creators seemingly not hitting the alogrithm heights they used to (which means less effective advertising to bring in more new players). I feel like this is going to be a terminal issue regardless on whether WG can fix its skill shortage.
@@britmachine722 wows skill curve involving learning 7000 numbers and values
I am so glad I am not the only one that thinks that we got the worst deal of the split. I honestly want to give money to the game so it gets better, but I have not done so for months because I feel the game is getting worse and worse and worse.
Nowadays I only keep an eye on IJN Ships releases and play Operations, that's it, since I cannot take part on Clan Battles and with the recents to containers and how to obtain Steel, I cannot really get a lot of it and most of my Steel went into Shinano.
We got the money greedy con artists...
9:15 - this part is a bit questionable since lesta also got those "gimmicky copy paste" lines (gdansk, san martin, castilla)
28:50 - to be fair lesta went pretty hard into gambling as well. Like just these past 3 months they put out "zeus" (thunderer with a different perma camo) and piemonte (but as a t11 premium) which are both gambling only
But I do agree with your overall message. On wg there's less content and it's of generally lower quality, most likely cus they've got fewer artists and devs
Oh absolutely, as I said in the top comment it came to my knowledge that WG and Lesta actually had a content-sharing relationship up until the Michelangelo dockyard, so these lines would have been before that. We don't know for sure how much of these lines were made by WG or Lesta, only really that Bungo line for sure I'm quite positive was made by Lesta (new hulls/guns, Lesta devblog showing modelling screenshot, etc).
Also, Lesta is definetely not perfect. The comparison point to Lesta was drawn to show how much WG's modelling/programming has slacked since pre-split times.
wait wait what? T11 premium? what kind of pepega bs is that?
@@FatFluffyPenguin Keep in mind a lot of the nations introduced never designed or built ships themselves like South America but relied on buying from bigger nations, or in the case of Spain just imported modified Brittish or Italian designs to build in their own dockyards rather than spend the money and trial and error designing unique ships themselves. Always cheaper to copy somebody elses homework.
Outside of Brittain, US, Japan, France, Italy, the USSR and a few minor nations like the Netherlands or Sweden, almost no other nations designed and built their own guns and warships but instead purchased them from the previously mentioned. Hell Netherlands even relied heavily on imported guns for their own cruiser and DD designs since designing and constructing shit domestically is very expensive.
As for new designs for the above, the well is running dry at this point, basically only the USSR has a lot of untapped designs left and WG probably no longer have access to Russian naval archives. To make new ships they have to either play asset swap or try to invent something completely new on their own which is obviously way more time consuming and difficult.
In fact, after playing both versions of Wows, you will find that the amount of game content is complementary. Every one to two versions of WG's game content increases, followed by one to two versions of Lesta's game content increasing, and the cycle continues without any competitive situation. In fact, there is no competition, so they must have long-term cooperation.
more people need to see this video and they need to speak up
Really great video, i think most of us are at least suspicious of what you talked about. This will kill the game eventually. Thank you!
My only question is, if in the future they ever would go back to being one company. While far fetched, especially seeing that we're soon reaching 3 years since it all started, we can hope (not that Lesta is a saint, may players have pointed out to just as much predatory behaviour and gambling).
The bigger thing that really could use more emphasis is the issue of bugs. It's not just the fact there's bugs that are going a long time without being fixed: there's new bugs that get thrown in that also linger! A couple patches ago, Watchful and the two skills that improve Fighter patrol radius didn't work properly. While Watchful, IIRC, did get fixed, the two Fighter patrol skills that should be giving improved Fighter patrol radius actually do not work. This was documented around the same time as Watchful's bug, still not fixed. Any CVs that want to build into Fighters are effectively wasting 4 points that comes at the expense of the player to respec out of (and later back in to whenever the fix is implemented). Also to include with the bugs is when missions don't have the right text, but for some reason "can't be fixed" during the patch (ex: the one Enterprise unlock mission where a player had to destroy a ship within 10km, when the text said at least 10km away), a bug that a player would never have known if the player didn't engage in the numerous social media outlets WG and the WoWS community utilize.
That merits reiteration: WG's bugs/errors come at the player's expense.
The uptick in (predatory) monetization and expensive collaborations was already one red flag that WG's taking the game in the wrong direction. The lack of in-game info and resources that explains the various mechanics (even basic mechanics to learn the game, before gimmicks) is another problem in itself, with the account level system being so archaic that players can jump to T8 or even T10 without having commanders unlocked on the account. Much of learning the game, just to start, involves the long-dated "How It Works" series on TH-cam (not even in-game to learn something like angling/overmatch).
Sounds like WG has one heck of a triangle of failure on their hands: aggressive monetization, new/persistent bugs that cannot be fixed in a timely manner, and poor in-game resources to learn how to play and advance in the game.
@betaflex1 oh yeah for sure. I didn't talk much about bugs because I was getting tired talking for 40 minutes straight, but there are also years ling replay bugs that just get shoved under the table. I don't like playing cvs, but even I've heard a lot about what you talked about
I have to wonder if, on top of the fact that Lesta got most of modeling and programing in the divorce, if because of the fact that WG is also developing Project Cold War and that new Mech Hero shooter that was announced at the Game Awards that their remaining modeling and programming team is mostly focused on that, leaving WOWS and WOT with a skeleton crew that can only make this trickle of content to keep the lights on. I won't speak on WOT Modern Armor and WOWS Legends since those games just pull assets from the other games for console (though do seem to have a different dev team handling balance changes, and WOT console at least must have some sort of modeling department for the cold war tanks).
Thanks for the informative and ete-opening video. I realized there were a lot of copypastas, but not that literally EVERYTHING is a copypasta now.
I do think an unfortunate side effect is that nobody seems interested in these new lines. Castilla, Cassard, and Cerebrus are all super rare. I see San Martin sometimes but it’s a stronger ship.
The pan am BBs give me hope, since they did apparently need to do some serious revisions on the superstructures and barbettes compared to the UK line. Maybe WG is slowly rebuilding the talent they lost. I do think the excitement about them will die down once they are no longer broken OP, though.
It isn't just that WG didn't get the talent at Lesta; they aren't even raising new talent. Recruitment and hiring for dev or modeller positions is practically nil, and most WG locations outside Europe are purely marketing only. AFAICT their shareholders have decided to mainly keep the game in 'semi-maint' mode and not create or invest in a studio with the same capabilities as Lesta to create their own branch of the game.
This was really eye opening for me, I wont be spending any cash until this changes (if ever)
Finally someone spoke out
I suspected a year ago that we got the slimy corporate types while most of the art/devs stayed in Russia. Since then the monetization has gotten increasingly predatory in contrast to their promise made back during the whole CC walkout. Who knows, perhaps that is null and void the moment they split with Lesta.
- In a game about warships there is always going to be an element of copy pasta. A Prince of Wales premium would just be a copy of KGV and there's so many Fletchers yet to be added. However, it gets old real fast if that's the only thing WG is releasing.
- Glad you brought up the devaluing coal but it's worth mentioning auctions. They used to be a "decent" way of picking up the occasional rare ship but now they have devolved into the same slob of supership early access, coal and rehashed Jolly Roger ranked flag.
Im playing both WOWS but also made a MK account since they had this starter thing going on where you got a Tirpitz, 5k dubs and tons of other shit for free after playing like 100 battles.
So they are even more desperate for new players than WG.
Most points of your Video are valid, but some are also just shittin on WG for the sake of shittin on WG. For example the new players thing or the Incomp and Napoli camo which exist since years (MK released the Incomp camo like a year ago)
But that's just some nitpicking.
Overall i think Lesta at this point just produces better quality content. By now they reworked the visuals on all maps, made actual new Tech-Tree ships like the russian Battlecruisers, which are both incredibly fun to play, but also rather balanced, since they just die when caught broadside.
They don't have any over the top gimmicks, just an engine boost, solid armor when angled and decent guns.
For the new USN DDs it's the same really, but im only at the T7 atm and can't say much more about them, other than that one feeling fun and also balanced.
For premium ships they also cooked up some interesting things like the drum magazine on the Lothringen I own because of the 5k free dubs. That one is essentially a less retarded Hildebrand that also works as an actual battlecarrier, since it has tons of armor and secondaries. So it can actually participate in the game.
But of course MK also has plenty of copy paste premium ships, but most of them feel seem rather interesting still.
They also fixed bugs like secondaries nit shooting at subs at periscope depth and implemenged many other good changes like modules not being able to be permanently destroyed, or a minimap indicator for teammates getting spotted.
However they sadly also didn't go through with the minimap spotting for some reason. I guess the way it is is perfectly balanced and not gamebreaking at all.
Sad but true.
But as ukrainian I'd rather be with WG. I have an aversion to everything Russian.
quite understandable
Understatement :D@@Nassamest
The monetization part is complete bs. At least WG didn't make pay2win signals or must-have superlegmods on superships 150k coal each lmao.
I have an account on WG NA server and also on Lesta. I enjoy playing both.
Good talk.
I've been thinking about how WG is going to continue to make money as the player base declines and ages. The game isn't growing anymore. Is WG developing a Warships 2.0? And if so, will it be Age of Sail or Cold War to modern? They each have pluses and minuses. AoS would be easier to devslop since the mechanics would be similar to current just at a smaller scale and slower pace, right? Whereas CW era would be the opposite with missiles and air power. But AoS may not be as exciting or fun whereas CW may be more interesting to a younger audience.
I hope WG doesn't rest on its laurels and just soak Wows for all it's worth and narrow their focus to WoT and its successor, though WoT 2.0 would be interesting to see. I hope WG comes out swinging and sets a new standard for naval war arcade gaming in the future.
and lesta player almost d.u.m.b
thats true
you are right ......but you do realise Rodney its a Nelson class battleship.....like a lot of thinks you say are tru but not because of the copy paste ......
@VladislavVasilev-i6g yes of course, but the thing is instead of modelling something we just get another nelson. Or the 27th Fletcher in the game. Like ok? Can you make something new WG?
@ new like ….another Blue print …..I don’t defend them don’t get me wrong
great, less cheaters will be in the game.
I love the game but I don't love the direction it has taken since about 2021. The focus on gimmicks is lazy and cheap. Rather than developing new line characterietics from plausible, realistic weaponry they just do an F key buff and copy paste the parts and call it a new line. This isn't a good sign for the future of the game.
Wows lost something after about 2021. Its as if the creativity stopped and new lines were just copy paste lazy money grabs. And then they got hooked on Fkey gimmicks and its not making the game better or more engaging.
What you are missing is the WG side got the CV and sub culture. Where the WG side is developing those two items, the Lesta side is weaning off them going main line surface ships. The WoWS player base has gone down when subs and the CV rework was done. Both of those game plays are bad for WoWS.
WG makes submarines?
Soviet submarines, Super Submarines, Surcouf at the shipyard with sapfir, Pasopati and Shotgun send you congratulations from Lesta!