Mouse Droppings (Patreon)

I would like to thank you all for your suggestions on what to name this weekly blog dump.  A couple of you suggested "Mouse Droppings" and it made me giggle snort, so that made it a shoe-in.  Welcome to the first of what will be a weekly series of shitposts going forward for all of my Patrons.  Here I can do just about anything, from talking about upcoming reviews to what I've been up to or just venting.  I think it should be pretty fun and it should live up to its title.

So, what's been going on in the wet, wild world of Mouse?  Well, let's start with bote-news.

My head was down on with testing the newest version of the upcoming ships this week.  Wargaming reissued the Community Contributors with Vanguard (tier 8 British battleship), Dreadnought (tier 3 British battleship), Prinz Eitel Friedrich (tier 6 German battleship), Bourgogne (tier 10 French battleship) and Wichita (tier 8 American cruiser).  Each of these ships had some changes done to them since the last time we had them so I was busy documenting these changes and adjusting my notes.  I put most of my focus on Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Vanguard.

You see, the last time we had access to good ol' PEF, I had made the mistake of thinking that she was pretty darn close to being finalized.  Out of the ongoing reviews I'm working on, her's is the closest to completion -- or rather, it was.  I had felt the ship was well balanced during her last iteration (and had delivered said feedback to Wargaming) and began work assuming she'd be out sooner rather than later.  Welp, Wargaming surprised me and nerfed the Hell out of her.  This, of course, invalidated the assessemnt I had been writing.  It also means I'll have to redo some of my graphics.  This is a little disappointing, but given how the week shaped up, this was only a minor setback.

As for how I feel about the changes to PEF, well, she's worse than she was.  She's not terrible, but she's had her teeth kicked in.  If rumours floating around Reddit are to be believed, PEF may end up being a giveaway ship over the holidays in the same manner of Admiral Graf Spee in 2016 and Duke of York in 2017.  To this end, Wargaming would likely prefer a less-than-impressive specimen as a reward vessel.  Her current iteration has "mehbote" written all over it.  I've updated my notes but with all of the other CCs and testers flooding Wargaming with "CHANGE IT BACK!" feedback, I'm reluctant to put any more work into the review beyond the notes I've already taken.  I'll wait until Wargaming says she's final and then go hog wild.

Speaking of ships that have been changed, HMS Vanguard sure got buffed.  She was downright appalling in her first test iteration with sluggish gun handling, horrible fire arcs, poor AP shell performance and a citadel hiked up like a pair of old-man pants.  They've given her a waterline citadel, increased her turret rotation speed, given her a very nice Repair Party consumable, padded her agility with an excellent rudder shift time and buffed her AP performance with longer fuse-timers.  I still hate her -- her gun firing angles are worse-than-terrible, reducing her to what's effectively a 4-gun battleship.  She can't swing her butt out to fire her rear guns safely, which seemed odd to me given her improved rudder.

One of the first tests I usual do when I'm given a ship is check their agility stats.  Well, in this case it turned up a bug.  Vanguard in her current work-in-progress test is supposed to have identical agility (save rudder shift time) to Jean Bart (tier 9 French battleship).  I had just finished reviewing Jean Bart early in October, so I was familiar with how she was supposed to handle.  Vanguard wasn't matching this, though.  She felt sluggish despite the same speed and 850m turning radius listed in port.  Timing and doing the math confirmed my suspicions.  Vanguard was operating with an 1030m turning radius -- no wonder she was having problems unmasking her rear guns.  I illustrated the issue with Lert's help and sent the feedback to Wargaming.  Having something as intrinsic as the ship's agility bugged put a hold on any further testing.  Time will tell if the 1030m turning radius is intended or an accident.  I sure hope it's the latter or this is going to be another agonizing ship to evaluate.

Here's a link to the graphic:  https://i.imgur.com/545w5OP.gif

That's as much time as I had to devote to test-ships last week.  Hopefully Wargaming can give me a better idea of release dates so I'll know what to focus on in the days ahead.  If they can't give me anything, then I'll probably poke Wichita and Bourgogne just to get an idea of their current builds and provide feedback.

Speaking of feedback, the rest of my time this week was spent jumping up and down and throwing things at the devs.  Well, it wasn't that uncouth, but I certainly found my patience taxed with the proposed changes that are up on the Public Test server.  What concerned me most was that any penetrating hit ribbons would cease to deal zero damage.  Currently this is possible if a shell strikes an anti-torpedo bulge but fails to penetrate the belt behind it, if it hits an armour void or if a shell arrests inside an external module like an anti-aircraft or secondary gun.  You'll receive a penetration ribbon but you'll do zero damage.  The change was to have these penetrations always deal a minimum of 10% of shell damage.  I was immediately concerned given that many battleships have extensive external anti-torpedo protection.

The issue was that where said battleships were currently capable of angling and tanking shells with their belt armour, under the new system, they'd end up taking damage.  In the case of brawling situations, this could add up to sizeable chunks of damage where even wonky battleship accuracy could easily net 5 or 6 hits per volley.  A ship that was well angled to tank said shells with their belt might suddenly find themselves suffering between 5,000 and 9,000 damage from such an attack which is all kinds of concerning.  This is especially damaging to mid tier battleships where there are plenty of guns capable of overmatching their anti-torpedo bulges, guaranteeing damage no matter how they angle.  

Higher tiered battleships didn't get off scot-free either.  Their bane comes from increased vulnerability to cruiser-caliber HE shells.  Their anti-torpedo bulges open up another area where spam no deals guaranteed damage where before they might have shrugged off the occasional shell.  This wouldn't be an enormous increase in of itself, but for ships that are already overperforming like Worcester, this just made them all the more powerful.

I spent a long time cataloguing and making my case for why this was bad, cautioning that it wouldn't readily show up in numbers that the devs might be looking at.  Brawling in battleships isn't a common occurrence so it wouldn't be likely that a limited test like the public test server would deliver sizeable chunks of data needed to see its influence (that's if the devs could isolate the brawling data in the first place).  Moreover, I stressed this design change would affect how people played certain ships, including several premiums.  It was very difficult to keep my cool over this.  Thankfully, Sub_Octavian put out a message on Friday on Reddit that they were aware of the concerns.  Whether or not this means the changes will be rescinded remains to be seen.  It's a holiday in Russia today so we'll have to wait until at least tomorrow to get more news.

That summed up my work during the week in warships.  Over the weekend, I've had my head down going over the replay submissions sent from you guys for the AngryYoutuber tier.  I'm almost done!  I hope to be sending out the links later today or tomorrow, providing the world doesn't blow up.  With the devs busy, things should remain quiet.

Whew, let's call that enough for this week.  I could ramble on for another couple of hours about my date on Friday, my family outting on Sunday or my morbid fascination with watching Blizzard shit the bed at their titular convention over the weekend. Lemme know what you guys thought of this one and what you'd like to see in the next one.  This is still experimental after all.  The science will be happening every week going forward and you're all my unwitting test subjects.

Ciao!