YMMV / World of Warships

• Awesome Music:
  • World of Warships features tons of great music from the soothing port screen tracks like Follow Me!, uplifting militaristic I'll Come Back to dramatic battle tracks such as Line of Defense. Wargaming has made all of them available to download for free here.
  • Wargaming produced a video clip for Sabaton's song ''Bismarck'' as a promotion for the game.
• Breather Level: Out of all the scenarios, Narai is by far the favourite in the fanbase. It is relatively easy, has no randomness, one of the secondary objectives is easy enough for a single destroyer to complete and the other can be done by one good player in a light cruiser and the finale is a short, intense but not overwhelming attack by a dozen ships of various classes. Players could rack up impressive damage numbers, there were enough ships that all of a team should be happy enough with their contribution and it was able to be done by Tier 7 ships, including premium ships like Atlanta and Scharnhorst that are amazingly suited to the scenario, allowing players to gain extremely good rewards often comparable or better to a good multiplayer game.
• Broken Base: See here just for the times and ways the community can be split in half.
• Catharsis Factor: A large amount of the player base hates CVs (Aircraft Carriers) for ruining the game balance by effortlessly spotting and attacking with their planes anywhere at any angle on the map without risking their ships. So for them, it's an enjoyable time blowing up a CV, especially early in the match.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Any attempt by Wargaming to make the Ranked & Ranked Sprint seasons anything other than 7v7 Tier 10 Domination will generate a wave of complaints. Also, a number of captain skills fall under this:
  • Situational Awareness and Priority Target: Situational Awareness in it's first incarnation was mandatory to let you know that you'd been spotted. It became so common that it was upgraded to just being part of the game as normal even in an untrained captain. The reworked version Priority Target is still extremely important to most players as it will give you an indicator of how many enemy ships are locked onto you. If you have no ships shooting at you, good. If you have a small handful, you might want to look for cover or to retreat. If you have 6 or more aiming at you, you're heading for the bottom of the ocean very quickly if you don't take drastic action.
  • Adrenaline Rush: Getting a reload speed boost after taking damage is such a universal buff there aren't a lot of builds where you don't take it.
  • Expert Marksman: Battleships are slow to turn their gigantic turrets, and this improves that. The improved version of this skill that many of the special captains have is the biggest reason players will grind or purchase those special captains as it greatly improves the performance of large guns in short range battles.
  • Concealment Expert: Considering that spotting the enemy first is such a critical aspect in the game, a skill that gives a blanket passive buff to your ship's concealment is considered an automatic must have for anything but certain niche battleship builds that use their 4 point skills on Fire Prevention and Manual Secondaries instead.
  • Last Stand: This skill allows a ship rudder and engine to keep operating even when damaged, but at reduced effectiveness. It is nigh on mandatory for destroyers considering how easy it is to disable their engines and rudders.
  • Inertia Fuse High Explosive: IFHE boosts the HE penetration of a ship's shells by 30%. Guns in the 152mm class cannot penetrate 25mm or 32mm armor, which are important breakpoints. However, with IFHE, 152mm guns are capable of penetrating both 25mm AND 32mm armor, massively increasing their damage output with only an insignificant loss to fire chance. This makes IFHE a requirement for all light cruisers and ships packing lots of 100mm-120mm guns. It was such an obvious pick, and combined so well with so many light cruisers that it changed the game meta to the point that the developers needed a major game rework to reign it in.
  • Superintendent is a must have for any ship that has access to the Repair Party consumable, since even having one extra use vastly increases your potential healthpool and survivability. You'll rarely find a Tier IX or X cruiser or battleship without this skill. Generally speaking, it's only a battleship with a full secondary build such as the Bismarck who don't take this, as they may take Basic Firing Training instead. An early 2020 patch that removed the premium vs non premium consumables, giving every ship an extra usage may make this less mandatory for some builds. The skill is also very useful for high end players who can take advantage of an extra radar or smoke usage, as well as Russian ships that work on limited damage control.
  • Fire Prevention: In 2019 the game meta shifted toward light cruisers firing HE shells & setting enemy ships on fire. This skill which changes the ships superstructure from 2 fire points to 1, and reduces the chance of fire is another skill it is practically suicide to avoid taking on battleships.
  • The Modification system is intended to allow ships to be widely varied, but ultimately resulted in most classes taking the exact same set of skills. For example, high tier Battleships would usually take the main armaments mod in slot 1, the damage control in slot 2, the dispersion reduction in slot 3, the other damage control mod in slot 4, concealment in slot 5 and the range mod in slot 6. Even builds outside this like a secondary build, would only change a few of these.
  • After the captain skill rework, the skill Deadeye became the go to skill for battleships, as it provides a massive dispersion buff to battleships that fire from long range. This means that not only do battleships get more accurate guns, but by staying in the back to keep the Deadeye buff, you're too far away to actually be attacked by cruisers and destroyers so you don't really need to heavily invest in survivability skills.
• Creator's Pet: After the implementation of the CV rework, many players began to feel that the developers were devoting disproportionate attention to carriers at the cost of every other ship class. Many players have cynically theorized that in order to avoid the image that the rework was a failure, Wargaming deliberately made carriers incredibly easy to play and overpowered in order to artificially boost the carrier population... Something that was later found to be TRUE, effectively punishing everyone who didn't play C Vs (a large amount of the playerbase) for a small (by comparison) group of people. Some of the changes the developers made to ensure carriers had an edge on every other class include:
  • Immunity to detonations, which is a highly hated mechanic that other ship classes still have to deal with.
  • Pre-rework, fires would disable a carrier's ability to launch and recover planes, making it one of their biggest weaknesses. Post-rework, this weakness was removed so carriers to could launch and recover planes regardless of being on fire.
  • The post-rework Damage Control consumable for carriers is extremely efficient with a long active time and short cooldown period. This means it is practically impossible to inflict any major fire or flooding damage on a carrier as it will almost instantly repair them, even under sustained fire.
  • The AA capability of all other classes was heavily nerfed, with damage values being lowered to the point where even dedicated AA ships could not meaningfully ward off fighters. Defensive AA Fire was rendered useless as its side effect of making aircraft attacks less accurate was removed. The Fighter Plane consumable was also rendered useless as the fighters were too slow to actually intercept enemy planes, even if deployed ahead of time. Of course, the only ships that didn't have their AA nerfed were carriers themselves.
  • Shortly after the rework, Wargaming released a number of premium carriers that are all widely considered to be Gamebreakers.
  • With the implementation of submarines, carriers were given a special consumable that would call an ASW airstrike to drop depth charges on submarines. However, unlike cruiser and battleships ASW airstrikes which have to be manually aimed, carrier ASW airstrikes are completely automated like their damage control. In addition, carrier ASW airstrikes have a longer range, deal more damage, and far more accurate than regular ASW airstrikes. This has created situations where the carrier player could literally be AFK and still kill multiple submarines.
• Creator Provincialism:
  • Despite the fact that it's locked behind a 28,000-Steel Clan Wars Paywall, the Stalingrad Cruiser plainly smacks of Russian Bias because it has an insane 72500 healthpool, high survivability battleship-grade armor (which also includes anti-torpedo bulges), and high accuracy extreme-range fast-reloading RAILGUNS that can crush both battleships and cruisers alike.
    • And in a completely coincidental series of events, every ship that has ended up being a meta pick to counter Stalingrad has ended up getting swiftly nerfed, such as Hindenburg, Henri IV, and Venezia, while Stalingrad itself remains untouched.
  • The entire Russian battleship line, which mostly consists of ships that never left the blueprint stage. As a result, they have wildly exaggerated capabilities and are specifically armored to be extremely good against the game mechanics normally used to combat battleships.
    • The Kremlin, the Tier 10 ship at the end of this line is a behemoth capable of tanking half an enemy team. It has incredible armour, a massive health pool, the fast resetting Russian damage control for fires & floods, it sits very low in the water, showing half as much central broadside as other high tier ships like the Yamato do. It's only major drawback is it's guns can have really bad RNG at long ranges. At medium & short ranges the guns are have railgun fire arcs and are extremely hard hitting.
  • This is also an accusation levelled against the developers for the reason why the majority of German ships seem underpowered or underwhelming.
  • The Smolensk is a vastly overpowered Russian light cruiser. It never existed beyond a sketch design, in game it is armed with 4 super quick firing quad turrets (that would have been almost impossible to get working in real life, and would have been obsolete anyway in the face of the new anti-ship missiles) that launch enough HE rounds to burn battleships to the water in only a few minutes. If it were just that, it might have been okay. But it also got smoke, letting it sit invisible and pound ships that can't fire back. And for no reason at all, it got torpedoes just in case the enemy did get near it. And to top it off, it has a troll armour scheme that takes advantage of the over-penetration mechanic to ensure that in many situations, a Battleship firing it's usually loaded AP round will simply go straight through the lightly armoured ship and out the other side doing minimal damage.
  • The sheer number of Soviet ships in the game, most of which were only ever on paper and never actually existed, is massive compared to the other nations that had vastly larger and more developed navies in World War II, and there still remain a great deal of historical ships that have not yet been incorporated into the game. Nearly 60% of the entire Soviet fleet in the game is either laid down but not completed (Imperator Nikolai I, Kronstadt, Kiev), a paper design (Udaloi, Riga) or fictional (Kremlin, Khabarovsk).
    • The most common way that a Soviet ship is balanced is to give it extremely good stats in the most important elements the game has in that ship class, while giving it defects in nearly irrelevant aspects of the game meta. There's a running joke the only nerfs that get given to Soviet ships are "reduced AA turret health by 5%" or some other equally pointless change.
  • The Soviets also get the best Commander in the game. Nikolay Kuznetsov who was the Real Life Soviet fleet Admiral in World War 2. His first skill is getting an additional heal & damage control charge should his player get the first kill of the game. His other skill is by far the best Captain skill in the game, "Will to Victory". This skill activates when his ship goes down to 10% health, and immediately applies a free damage control (stopping any floods or fires), increases the dispersion of enemy shells by 20% for 30 seconds, and heals up to 7.5% of the ships total Health Pool. Unsurprisingly, he is commonly placed on the Kremlin & Stalingrad ships. This repair skill can potentially heal a Kremlin back up to a total 18,950 health points.
• Fan Nickname: Much like World of Tanks, an entire page's worth.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • A lot of KanColle players play this game as well, as evidence by the extensive use of KanColle-related memes in the text chat, most notably Yuudachi's "poi~" (As elaborated by this article on Kotaku.) Opinions are divided on whether this is hilarious or irritating, with those in the latter camp referring to KanColle fans as "shipfuckers". Moreover, in Russia both franchises actually share their Fan Nickname, both being dubbed "Lifeboats" ("Шлюпки"), as their fandoms indeed heavily overlap.
    • With the September 5, 2016 announcement of a split in the Japanese destroyer line, with the second line including Shiratsuyu (Yuudachi's actual class), within hours some expressed dread that there would be a new influx of "poi~" spam in the text chat. Which (of course) resulted in responses of "poi~". More than two years later, Wargaming announced at an offline event sponsored by their Japan branch, that the actual Yuudachi itself will be released in 2019 as an upcoming premium, thus cranking up the "Poi~!" spam to an absolute fever pitch.
  • Also thanks the announcement of collaboration efforts between Ark Performance and Wargaming, not to mention the appearance of Heavy Cruiser Zaya (Maya, but with Takao's Fog Fleet markings) as part of April Fool's Day Space Battle modes, has led to some fandom cross over between World of Warships and Arpeggio of Blue Steel. As part of a year long event, with the order of release differing by server, the Fog Fleet versions of Kongo-Class ships Kongō, Kirishima and Haruna as well as the Myoko-Class cruisers Myoko, Haguro, and Ashigara, which by default, replace the standard announcer with I-401 Iona's voice. As of July 6, 2016's patch 0.5.8 release, with the inclusion of an option to change the announcer's voice to game regional language standard to ships national voice over, Kongō and Haruna's voice packs have also been added as announcer options. And on September 1, 2016 another Arpeggio event was implemented, adding Fog Fleet Hiei and Ashigara.
  • As with World of Tanks and World Of Warplanes, it has a rivalry with fans of War Thunder by Gaijin Games, who also seek to release a Naval Combat mode. However, with Gaijin's initial focus on smaller vessels (At the time of its introduction, destroyers were the largest playable ships in that mode. Everything is some sort of PT or patrol vessel. Larger classes of ships like cruisers, going up to as big as the Admiral Graf Spee, have since been added to the playable roster) this initially ruled it out as a direct competitor, though pre-war and WWI-era dreadnoughts and battleships, including HMS Dreadnought herself, were announced in late 2020.
  • As with World of Tanks, a lot of players read Poland Ball. This makes sense given that each country in the game tends to have ships trending towards a certain flavor which opens up opportunities for jokes about national stereotypes (like Poland Ball).
  • Like KanColle above, Azur Lane players also count, albeit in lower numbers. It also helps that the developers for both games have multiple collaboration events starting from 2 April 2018.
• Game-Breaker: an entire page's worth.
• Good Bad Bug: The "Survivability Expert" skill used to add 400 HP per ship tier, and that would let people earn the "Dreadnought" achievement for taking 120% of the ships health pool in damage & surviving as it would only use the basic health pool of the ship to determine the achievement. It has since been fixed.
  • A similar situation can happen in the Arms Race special mode, where the teams fight for buffs such as reload speed, manoeuvrability and ship healing. Stacking enough heal buffs can lead to Destroyers getting Dreadnought.
• Low-Tier Letdown: It's generally accepted that tech tree Tier 9 ships are weaker in a tier for tier comparison to the Tier 10 ships above them and the Tier 8 ships below them. There are also some tech tree Tier 9 ships that are legitimately, purely inferior to the prior Tier 8 ships in their line. Using the Free XP currency to skip Tier 9 ships is a common use for it. Destroyers suffer less of this power gap than Cruiser & Battleships as their role in the game is not in the raw damage output or tanking ability that Battleships & Cruisers are measured by.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Usage of LOLCats style nicknames:
    • Instead of a user saying "ship" you'll often find "bote". A common example is when comparing how good a ship is, a high quality ship will be a "gud bote" and a mediocre ship will be a "meh bote".
    • Destroyers are "Lolibotes" or "underage ship". Occasionally people refer to Cruisers as "teenagers". Obviously it follows that Battleships are the adults. Smashing a ship in a size class below you is called "Bullying", eg "my cruiser bullied that lolibote".
  • What do you do when you're down and out, with no hope of escaping? Charge full ahead and VERY HONORABLE whoever's dumb enough to stay in your path.
  • For those scrub players who are whining in the chat, there's being called "salty", which is essentially this trope and more or less a Fan Nickname. While calling people "salty" (as in the salt from their tears) when they whine predates World of Warships, it has special relevance to a game that takes place entirely in the ocean which is made of salt water and thus the term is much more universal than in most other communities.
  • One of the most rookie mistakes a player can make is to show their broadside to a Battleship because not only are you exposing your thin side armor, you're also presenting a bigger target and a better normalization angle for a citadel penetration. As Jingles would call this, thanks to a certain quote from The Simpsons...
  Sailing broadside on to a Battleship? That's a paddlin'.
  • Due to one atsf, setting up Eurobeat music with impressive torpedo dodge montage has become quite popular. The mention of torpedobeat generally follows.
    • In addition, his usage of the main theme for Space Battleship Yamato (particularly the epic remake for 2199) for videos involving the said Tier X Japanese Battleship (which also was adapted by The Mighty Jingles) makes such video montages more epic.
  • Ships whose main guns have a particularly flat trajectory are referred to as "railguns". A railgun on a destroyer or cruiser would typically mean a muzzle velocity of 900+ m/s, while somewhat lower velocities (like Izumo's 870 m/s 410 mm guns) qualify when dealing with battleship guns, though how well the shells retain their high initial velocity is also a factor to whether the gun counts as a railgun. Russian and Italian main guns tend to be railguns, given that both nations' naval designers (who collaborated with each other frequently) placed very high value on muzzle velocity and heavy shells. In real life this resulted in both nations' ships having to replace their barrels very frequently, but that's not an issue in a video game.
  • Whenever a Soviet ship performs extremely well in a game, the fans will cry "RUSSIAN BIAS!" This stems from the fact that Wargaming is a Russian company, and apparent disproportionate focus on the (relatively insignificant) Soviet Navy instead of larger, more famous navies like the Royal Navy, in addition to the fact that Soviet ships very prominently include a few blatant Game Breakers (of the premium ships that have been deemed too overpowered to ever sell again, half are Russian).
  • "FUN AND ENGAGING!" is typically yelled whenever a ship is detonated, mocking how Wargaming described the much reviled mechanic as making the game more "fun and engaging." As a side note: Professional games and tournaments IMMEDIATELY restart matches where a detonation occurs.
  • Typing No one shoots like ''Gascogne''! (or some other verb) has become almost mandatory when talking about the Tier VIII premium battleship Gascogne. Even the Wargaming wiki got in the fun.
  • NO TO NTC/NTC8. To say players were not happy with the (initial) announcement of "Naval Training Center" ^note A mechanic where players could de-research tech tree ships multiple times for bonuses, which were initially buffs to ships before player outrage forced WG to backtrack and change the bonuses to rewards such as premium ships would be an understatement. Several people on the forums remarked that it has been the most united the fandom has every been on something. On the forums, people started adding some variant of the above two^note  The later referring to the date of a planned protest by logging off the week of July 8. to their signatures.
  • Diapering Ships. On the NA forum, somebody who clearly didn't understand the stealth mechanics made a post about "Diapering" ships. The whole of the NA forum pretty much came together to laugh at it, and Diapering has become a short hand for people who don't know how stealth works.
  • "Just Dodge", becoming the meme response to any complaints about the new carrier mechanics, which turned them from an RTS style command system into users flying the planes directly, with ships having virtually no chance to escape any attack. Destroyers in particularly can be obliterated in 2 or 3 passes from the rocket planes.
  • Lemming Train. The name for when all or almost all of an entire team follows the same path, usually down one side of the map on the single map, most often found in the single base "standard battle" game-mode. If both teams lemming train the opposite flanks it can ruin the game.
  • "Spreadsheets": Players who are frustrated by what they feel is Wargaming's data-driven game balance (or marketing) without any consideration of other factors like human feedback (either from players or community contributors) tends to use this to derisively refer to decisions they hate, especially it seems superfluous and contrary to what players have been talking about.
  • "Animal Research": When the very divisive Youtuber Flamu^note A super-unicum player who's probably got the largest audience among World of Warships streamers. Some hate him for sometimes being toxic both in chat and his commentary, while his fans feel he "tells it like it is" and love how he pulls no punches when calling out Wargaming over elements of the game he doesn't like. got kicked out of the community contributor program in February 2021 allegedly for stat-shaming other players^note Something he freely admits to doing, but which he'd been doing for all the years he'd been in the program, so the official reason was widely perceived as being just a pretext. It's widely assumed Wargaming wanted him out because of his intense criticism of many aspects of the game, and especially the aircraft carrier rework which he (and a huge portion of the playerbase as a whole) regard as a disaster. This resulted in much repetition of an old line of his where he referred to looking up the stats of bad players as "animal research".
  • Wargambling: The exponential increase in lootboxes (which amount to gambling) as the main monetization system in 2021 has resulted in this name being applied to Wargaming.
  • "TORPEDO THE YAMATO!" from one of the commercials.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The "Target Hit" sound when you hit with your main batteries. Even more so if the noise that follows is the sound of the enemy's citadel being penetrated for massive damage, and the announcer informing you.
  • The noise made when an AP shell does critical damage to an enemy ship. Alternatively, when an HE shell makes it's signature "ping", coupled with significant damage followed immediately by a "Set Afire" message. Bonus points for causing multiple fires.
  • For anyone armed with Torpedoes, the sound of a confirmed Torpedo hit, followed by the an award for causing flooding.
  • "You've Destroyed an Enemy Battleship!" or "Enemy Aircraft Carrier blown up!". Extra points if you did so with a Destroyer. Or bonus points if it sank due to flooding and/or fires.
    • "Enemy Destroyer Sunk!" is a pretty relieving sound if you're in a battleship.
  • The silence after sonar blips, when you just made it unharmed through spread of torpedoes is immensely satisfying.
  • The "clang" and "thunk" sound when you are hit by AP shells which bounced off your armor or failed to penetrate.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The "Division" mechanic, which allows two or more players to join a match together if their ships are within a tier of each other. Sounds great!... until you realize that the matchmaking system will use the higher-tier ship as the base tier number for putting the ship in a match (the range of possibility being two tiers above and below the ship). Therefore, a division with two tier 4's and a tier 5, for instance, can see opponents between tiers 3 and 7. The 4's/5 division can very likely find itself matched into Tier 5-6-7 game, often dooming both the division and the hapless team they were assigned to. This is why a mixed-tier division is known as a "Fail Division". Originally, the system allowed for divisions that were within four tiers of each other (using the example above, entering a 5-6-7 match with a tier 5 and two tier 1's), but this was changed after it was invariably used for trolling; often teammates would summarily execute the lowest-tier offender out of sheer frustration.
    • Hilariously enough, one of the battle loading screens shows a Clemson (Tier IV destroyer) making a torpedo run on an Izumo (Tier IX battleship), which would've been impossible in the actual game even with a Fail Division. Probably a relic of the Closed Beta or even Alpha test days, when matchmaking spreads were much wider and could (even without Fail Divisions) result in 5 different tiers of ships placed into the same battle.
    • Before the restrictions on Fail Divisions, it was popular to bring the Tier II Japanese destroyer Umikaze into Tier X battles. In this case, the intent of the Fail Division was to troll the enemy team, because Umikaze is extremely stealthy (5.6km detection range normally, 5.0km with Concealment Expert) and has 8.0km torpedo range with a lightning-fast 24 second torpedo reload. While the actual damage of the torps is so low as to be laughable against Tier X battleships, the tactic used would be to sneak up and shoot a Yamato or Montana in the bow and hope to cause flooding, then wait for the flooding to be repaired and torpedo them again while repair party is on cooldown. Then laugh as the enemy ships loses up to 60% of its health over the next 90 seconds. This was also one of the best ways to farm Liquidator (sink a ship with 40% of the damage caused by your flooding) and Witherer (cause 60K damage by flooding alone) achievements.
    • Since aircraft carriers have 100% mirrored matchmaking (both teams will always have the same number and tiers of CVs), putting a CV in a division can allow for a Fail Division without the usual risks of being dragged into higher tiers than normal, which is known as "division anchoring". As Yuro explains in his video, the usual practice is to either pair the carrier up with two 1-tier-higher ships with strong AA, or to protect a battleship that has poor AA by divisioning it with a strong AA ship and a one-tier-lower carrier. This is regarded as rather unfair to the opposing carrier (who relies entirely on luck of the draw as to whether his own team will have similarly strong AA ships supporting him)...unless two different carrier players attempt the same trick simultaneously and both get dragged into the same higher-tier battle◊, in which case it's regarded as a hilarious case of karma.
    • Even aside from division anchoring, even a CV divisioning with a pair of strong AA ships of the same tier can make life hell for the enemy CV player who's not doing the same thing. Strong AA ships can provide a virtual no-fly zone that the divisioned CV can either pull back his bombers to for safety or try to intercept the enemy fighters near it. This can be especially brutal if one of the ships in the division is stealthy enough that its maximum AA range is greater than its aerial detection range (Tier VIII premium American destroyer Kidd and Japanese non-premium Akizuki, as are the Tier X Soviet destroyer Grozovoi and British cruiser Minotaur); they can keep their AA turned off while the friendly carrier baits the enemy to chase his planes into an area where there's seemingly no ships...then turn the AA back on once the enemy planes are deep inside. In addition to this guaranteeing that the divisioning CV will have strong AA ships on his team while the enemy CV is at the mercy of the matchmaker as to their own support, it's generally unlikely that ships not in a division with a CV will be running a full AA build. In particular, the "Manual Fire Control for AA Armament" is an expensive 4-point captain skill, and thus is generally considered a poor choice since it's useful only for AA purposes and thus will be of limited use in the majority of battles (even the Asia server, which proportionally has the most CV players, has them show up in less than half of all battles). But for any ship that has a lot of high-caliber AA guns, that skill can be brutal against planes, and being in a division with a CV guarantees there'll be an enemy CV every battle. Combined with the huge impact a CV can have if the enemy CV is neutralized, divisioning with a CV makes this a wonderful skill to have on ships with strong AA power.
    • In addition to the problem of Fail Divisions, using the division mechanic correctly (everyone in the division uses the same-tier ships) is problematic because it can still distort the matchmaking into creating uneven teams because those 3 particular ships have to be on the same team. If there's not enough players that have queued up within the division's matchmaking spread and the division is mostly or entirely DDs, it's entirely possible that a battle could end up with one team having more destroyers and higher average tier for its DDs. Which would put the division's team at a decisive advantage, since they're better position to grab cap circles early and build up points. And in a close battle, most of the time the winner will be whoever still has more DDs alive since they're the only class that can reliably kill from stealth.
    • Another issue is players forming divisions with ships possessing a wide array of consumables. Typically, these types of divisions consist of a mix of cruisers and/or destroyers with smoke generators, who will just rotate their smoke uses so their ships are always concealed. Additional consumables like hydro-acoustic search and radar are just bonuses.
    • Another powerful division setup is a Tier 8 carrier and two Musashis. The carrier will use his planes to spot the enemy carrier, while the Musashis can use their extremely long range and heavy caliber guns to bombard the enemy carrier in his own spawn. When played correctly, the enemy carrier can be killed in a little over two minutes into the game.
  • The Detonation mechanic. In every game, every time a ship suffers a hit, there is a small chance that ship will instantly explode and sink, regardless of how much HP it had. Allegedly, this was implemented to try and shorten the gap between skilled and unskilled players by introducing some random chance in the mix. However, in reality, this just makes it frustrating when you instantly die at the start of the match because you took a random shell hit through no fault of your own. Naturally, a mechanic that has a random chance of instantly killing you in every game did not go over well with many players. Wargaming finally seems to have realized this and as of Patch 0.7.2, ships can only detonate if they have 75% or less of their HP remaining.....which still does nothing against one-salvo detonations, in which one or more shells do enough damage to drop the ship to 75 percent or below HP, and then one or more shells from the remainder of the salvo score magazine hits and trigger the detonation dice roll. Which particularly can happen if a battleship scores citadel penetrations on a cruiser, which is not an uncommon event at all.
    • Further compounding the problem the discovery that a ship's detonation chance is at its maximum, WHEN THE MAGAZINES ARE AT FULL HP.
  • The Team-killer punishment. At present, the game punishes a player who kills a teammate with a given number of matches with the pink designator, and any further damage to teammates or team-killing will lengthen the punishment. However, the comparative fault of the team-killer is never taken into account: accidentally touched another player who only had 1hp left? Doesn't matter, team-killer. Did another friendly player do all the damage except that last 1hp? Doesn't matter, you get the pink, they don't. Accidentally touched another friendly player with team-killer status on, or even deliberately rammed by them? Doesn't matter, your punishment is extended.
  • The afk / quitting punishment. It makes the player pink just like the team killer punishment and has all the same penalties. However it activates even if the game crashes and there really isn't any reason for the penalties to team damage. In fact its kind of strange that they are marked the same team killers as you are dealing with two different problems.
  • The concept of "trap" capture points. There are a number of maps in the game where one of the capture points is visibly isolated from the rest of the map, usually by a large island chain or placed far from the action. In theory, these types of capture points are meant to give the faster ships in the fleet something to do while the bigger and slower ships brawl at the closer points. In practice though, the slower ships will congregate to these points to avoid taking enemy fire, but will prevent themselves from being able to fire on the enemy as well.
  • The game has multiple game modes, though some are heavily disliked:
    • Standard Mode: This essentially puts one capture point on each side of the map, with the objective either being to seize the enemy's capture point, destroy all enemy ships, or end the game with the most points. However, since teams have little incentive to be aggressive, most games devolve into one team getting an early lead by sniping an enemy ship and then retreating back to their base to protect the lead. Standard games essentially turn into 20 minute slogs as both teams attempt to out camp each other. Also, originally Standard Battles used the same capture system as World of Tanks, namely, capturing the enemy base being binary yes or no, and the only way for one side to win is to either capture the enemy base, or kill all enemy ships. This leads to high number of games ending in a draw because last surviving enemy ships would run and hide to deny enemy victory. Thankfully, the developers fixed this issue by implementing Domination's point system into Standard Mode.
    • Bastion: This mode was widely despised due to the presence of AI-controlled forts on the map that either side could capture. These forts were heavily overpowered, packing large caliber guns that could easily sink any ship in the game, and had enough armor and HP that the only ship that could reliably kill them were battleships. This meant that whatever side managed to capture these forts first was far more likely to win. Bastion mode was so unpopular that Wargaming eventually removed the entire mode altogether. Though as of Summer 2018 there's consideration of bringing back a variation of it, since a more balanced version of forts has already been introduced in PVE Scenario Battles.
    • Epicenter: In this mode, all of the capture nodes are consolidated in the center of the map in the form of concentric rings. The idea was to encourage ships to battle for the center of the map where the most important objective was. However, the main failing is that the center capture point typically had very little cover and could easily be shot at from all sides of the map, making it effectively suicide for anything larger than a destroyer to sail into it. As a result, most Epicenter matches ended up with the capital ships hugging the edges the map and avoiding the epicenter entirely while the destroyers were left to do all the work.
  • For 2019 Christmas/2020 New Year's Event, Wargaming introduced a Tier-X Reward Premium ship, "Large Cruiser" Puerto Rico, which is based on one of Alaska-class's design proposal.^note Namely the CA2-D design, adding a 4th turret towards the stern for 3 more 305mm guns, and trading some of the lower caliber AA guns for 2 more 127mm twin-barrelled Dual-Purpose guns When first previewed by several Community Contributors, people liked the design, as Alaska is considered a very good premium ship, and were further interested by how Puerto Rico was to be earned via the new "Dockyard" mechanic. Rather than just completing missions, directives, or lootboxes/containers to complete event, players would instead earn points and improvements/boosters to a dockyard that would build their Puerto Rico overtime, with improvements granting a large sum of "build points" and increase the amount of XP they gained overtime. Players would earn rewards as the construction process progressed and watch the ship get built right in front of their eyes, while also learning the history about naval warship building and the work put into building them. The event was timed however, but Wargaming kept insisting in the lead-up that players would have a fair chance at earning the ship for free by putting some effort into playing, and that if they desired, they could spend Real Money/Doubloons on Premium Ship-building boosters, or auto-complete the ship by spending an amount of Doubloons dependent on how much progress was left to complete. When the event left the Test Servers and went live in the game proper, what followed quickly led to a very angry player base at an obvious and greedy cash-grab and Wargaming's late-entry into "Worst Game Company Move of 2019".
    • The First thing people found out, was the costs to unlock the Dockyard upgrades and boosters were jacked up massively from their test server iterations. Notably, the Premium Boosters went from 1000 Doubloons each to 6000, 8000, and 10,000 Doubloons. There are Tier VIII Premium Destroyers that cost 8000-9000 Doubloons, and for 24,000 Doubloons, one can buy several Mid to Higher Tier Premium ships for that money. Buying the 25,000 Doubloons Package from the Premium shop cost $99.99 USD on its own, 24,000 Doubloons from the "Any amount of Doubloons" option is $96 USD and doesn't guarantee you'll earn enough build points to complete Puerto Rico in time. By Comparison, the Test Server version of 3000 total for the 3 ship-building boosters would've cost a much more easier to swallow $12
    • The "Free" Upgrade/boosters require special event tokens to purchase. The tokens in-turn are earned by Daily Log-in bonuses, missions, and directives. However, the Directives were much harder than usual from the start, and unless the player clicks on the objectives, may miss certain critical detail's about the Directives Objectives. For example, Directive No.1's "Pyrotechnics" objective states at first to deal 165,000 Fire-Damage, but has the catch of requiring it to be done in a Tier 5 Carrier or Destroyer.
    • By Directives No. 4 and higher, the chance of completing enough objectives to unlock further directives and tokens leaves the realm of possibility for anyone who's gaming time is limited by things like going to work/school, busy shopping for gifts for family and friends, various parties and gatherings one might be expected to show up for in December, or minor daily habits like bathing, eating, sleeping, or using the restroom. At this point, you're expected to do things like earn over 200 Citadel or Torpedo hits with specific Nations' Cruisers, grind out 25,000 to 50,000+ base xp, score 7200 Secondary battery hits with German and American Battleships^note German Secondaries tend to get built around around range and rate of fire, not accuracy, while American Battleships have very few secondaries with exception of the Tier VIII Premium Massachusets.
    • If by some chance someone has the skills and lack the need to do anything that does not extend further than 3 ft from a computer running this game, No.7 Directives expect you either earn 1,100,000 Ship Experience in certain nations and ships, or 350,000 Free XP. Multiple times. And Directive 7. is designed to not unlock until there are only 7 days left to complete Puerto Rico. Free XP is granted at such a slow rate, it is impossible to earn enough of it multiple times in 7 days, let alone in the time one needs to unlock the dockyard upgrade for increased Build speed. Further more, the amount tasked to gain, is more than enough to complete entire Tech Tree Lines, or unlock multiple "Freemium"/Free XP ships. The player's "Reward" for even completing any of these Herculean tasks? A paltry 250 Steel resource for each completed Directive No. 7 Objective. Tier X Ranked battles grant 200 Steel for simply ranking up by comparison.
    • Back down in Directives No.1, 2, and 3, one can speed up the process of completing enough objectives for a Directive by completing missions exclusive to Tier VII Goriza, which cost a Minimum of $35.20 to purchase. Not even the "Free" pathway is free from the push to spend quite a bit of real money for an in-game item.
    • Wargamming's Sub Octavian drew the short straw to provide the Official Response on the World of Warships subreddit. Rather than an apology for how awful the event's Directives were designed and laughably false the "free" path was, the response instead is incredibly dismissive of the point of the players complaint and issues with the event, writing it off as poor communication:
    Sub Octavian: In hindsight, it is clear that our communication about this event was rather poor and as a result we created an expectation that the ship was going to be more accessible to the general player base – we own that. Only hardcore players with a fair number of special signals and camouflages can be reasonably expected to obtain Puerto Rico entirely for free.
    • In response to the above, Community Contributors began posting videos using the Official Response's own tables and guide that the only way the Free Path is possible is to spend a minimum of 18 hours a day playing the game with no interuptions. And that the user must have an extremely large supply of consumables, like special camoflauges and flags, some of which are very rare, and have an unreasonable number of very good match results. All while completing directives anywhere between less than 3 days. The official Wargaming response noted players needed to complete Directive No.7 (see above), in less than 24 hours. TheMightyJingles posted a nearly 30 minutes rant(NSFW, language), pissed off that he and others had generated positive responses with their earlier videos when talking about the Dockyard mechanic, only to learn the full nature of the event was a complete dumpster fire. Flamu also had his own, (definitely NSFW) rant and then pointed out that Alaska gives much of the same, and possibly better experience for a fraction of the effort and cost in another video. And many more followed from iChase, NoZoupForYou and others.
  • The lack of "irrecoverable" levels at a high level in Ranked seasons. Even though there is a split between Ranks 1 to 5, and those below in the matchmaking for Ranked, the last irrecoverable rank is Rank 12, which means that a player could possibly rise to within one win of ranking out, then lose 33 games in a row and drop right back down to 12.
• Scrub: You can guarantee to run into a player who thinks certain ships or ship types are illegitimate. In the worst cases they will say that only their ship type is legitimate.
  • Ditto for consumables, especially radar. It's not unusual to see destroyer captains brag about how they reported the enemy radar ships.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: This game can be ripe with them.
  • This is especially the case when you have a player outright demanding everyone follow his orders without question, and will even threaten to shoot friendly players that 'refuse to listen'. World of Tanks players will certainly be familiar with these guys, and more often than not, they're just ignored.
  • Criticisms about play styles have been leveled more at destroyers, and carriers, for their ease of access to torpedo armaments. It's not unusual to see captains of such ships being told by enemy players to "learn2play scrub" or "get some "real" skills" for earning a Torpedo-kill, especially if the enemy ship that was sunk was a battleship. This is especially true if the ship sunk was a friendly ship. Often times, players with torpedo armed ships will attempt a last-ditch torpedo run when low on health, and often times don't pay attention to what's on the other side of the target when they launch. This often causes an enormous amount of frustration from both parties, and can lead to a Flame War within the battle, or even later on the forums.
  • There's also those scrub players calling teammates "noobs" or "morons" for not doing things such as targeting certain ships or capping points, even when the team in question is already winning. Unsurprisingly, a lot of flame wars can break out in the chat even in the middle of fighting. Make that of what you will.
• Tear Jerker: "Wait For Me" promotional video, based on the 1941 poem of the same name by Soviet author Konstantin Simonov.
• That One Level: The game has multiple maps of varying quality in the opinions of the players, but there are a few that are universally reviled:
  • Ocean: This is essentially a map with zero islands or obstacles, and is just open water. This map is inherently stacked against ships with poor concealment or armor, as they have no way of avoiding being focused on by the enemy team.
  • Tears of the Desert: This map has a ring of islands strung about the outer edge of the map, with completely open water in the center. Usually, games on this map devolve into the naval version of trench warfare, with ships camping behind the islands since trying to sail out into the middle of the ring in anything but a destroyer is practically suicide since any attacking ship will be instantly picked apart by the well covered ships on the other side. To make matters worse, Tears of the Desert is one of the maps used for the Epicenter game mode (with three concentric circles to capture rather than separate cap circles) and in that mode teams have to enter the shooting gallery of the center ring. The map is hated so much by the community that it's commonly nicknamed "Tears of the Cruiser". The outcry grew so bad that Wargaming finally modified the map in Patch 0.7.1 to provide more cover for cruisers.
  • Okinawa: The problem with this map is that there's only one mode: domination, where Point A is a trap point that makes interacting with the rest of the map extremely problematic due to mountain range blocking, and Point B and C have so few islands it ends up being like Ocean in essence. Wargaming eventually changed the map in Patch 0.7.12 to make Point A less isolated while giving Points B and C more island cover.
  • Mountain Range is a horrendous map, it has no useful cover in the middle 70% of the map, leading to everyone running for the edges because getting spotted is invariably fatal. 2 of the three flags become noob traps where anyone who isn't in a DD will get sunk easily, and both of the sides of the map are filled with a huge amount of small islands causing people to go in and out of spotting constantly.
  • Out of scenarios "Ultimate Frontier" is generally the most hated. Its generally agreed to be the most difficult scenario overall, which is fine for some players but not others. However the point of contention is that It's almost impossible to five star after its rework. One of the objectives is to save three of the four forts, which is hard to do even if you are only focused on doing just that because the forts are extraordinarily squishy. However its the fact that you have to have at least on battleship defend the north east of he map while the other objectives at this stage are concentrated toward the south west that makes it simply not worth it. Saving the forts generally means failing one of more easier objectives which make it not really worth it.
    • Post carrier rework, Defense of Naval Station Newport has become rather unpopular as well due to the much higher difficulty in completing it. Originally, the second attack wave consisted of a carrier, battleship, and two destroyers, which were relatively easy to deal with since the carrier and destroyers were simple to kill. However, after the carrier rework, the enemy carrier was replaced with a second battleship. Having to deal with two battleships forces the defenders to expend more time and effort to sink them, increasing the risk of them being unable to respond to the third attack wave. In addition, one of the rewards for completing side objectives was the defenders being granted access to an AI-controlled Lexington-class carrier which would provide critical air support against the final attack wave, which often included a Tier IX Izumo (only Tier VI ships can participate this Operation). After the carrier rework, the Lexington was replaced with a Baltimore-class cruiser, which is pretty much useless in assisting the defenders.
• That One Side Quest:
  • Update 7.6 included the option of earning a special upgrade for each tier X ship that was in the game at the time. However in order to do so, one must complete a five stage mission with the objectives of Earn 100,000 XP, Earn 8,000,000 Credits, Earn 15,000 Free XP, Win 15 Battles, and Earn 40,000 Base XP and all of this has to be accomplished by playing just that particular tier X. This can result in quite a lot of effort and while some of these upgrades are great, others come with severe penalties or the generic upgrades are a better fit for the ship.
    • In 2020 these upgrades were changed from requiring playing the ship itself to grind the upgrade, to "Research Points" acquired by resetting lines the player has already got to Tier 10 and doing the whole line over again. This doesn't even go into the fact that in order to reset a line, one must have the Research Bureau unlocked, which itself requires that the player have FIVE different Tier X ships unlocked.
  • Everything about the Puerto Rico event. Suffice to say, despite Wargaming's claims Puerto Rico could be obtained for free, the actual requirements were so high that you would need to play a minimum of 18 hours a day in order to meet them before the event expired. To put things in perspective, to obtain one tier X premium cruiser, you would need to grind enough base and free xp that you could fully progress multiple tech tree lines from tier I to tier X. The leaderboard (which is only populated by those completing all quest), has less than 100 players who managed to complete this.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As TFWiki.net notes, the Transformers collaboration doesn't involve G1 Broadside or Unicron Trilogy Tidal Wave, Transformers with warship alternate modes.
• Too Dumb to Live: Far too many players, including Aircraft Carrier captains who refuse to move their ships because they can attack with their aircraft instead. And who proceed to fly their bombers back to the carrier in a straight line, allowing the enemy carrier's fighters to follow them back and thus discover exactly where to send their own bombers, rather than having the bombers fly over friendly cruisers who can shoot down or at least deter the pursuers. Also, players of any ship class who continue to move in a straight line at the same speed despite having spotted an enemy destroyer, being detected (most likely a destroyer, because they are fast and stealthy) or seeing a destroyer's smokescreen - and then getting hit by torpedoes launched from said destroyer.
  • Driving in a straight line in general is a too dumb to live move, because it allows any enemy with you in range to dial in citadel hits.
  • A lot of players will head to a completely different area of the map than their team. It can work out for lower tier DDs, but once radar becomes a factor the enemy team can easily slaughter lone ships.
  • In-Universe: We have Parker from Operation Dynamo. He chickens out of the operation and tries to retreat, by sailing into a minefield. The results are predictable. Out of universe, Some people actually follow Parker's advice and follow him into the mine field clearly marked on the mini map. Whoever coded the mission also had a bit of fun. Parker's internal name is "IDS_OP_02_04_IDIOT_1_NAME"
• Underused Game Mechanic: Some of the Commander Skills are particularly lackluster at best, and virtually worthless at worst.
  • Survivability Expert, that gives you 350 HP per Ship Tier (up to 3500 for Tier 10 ships) sounds like a skill that would be generally useful for every class. However, it has a trap for people who take it on cruisers & especially battleships. Being set on fire works by ticking damage based on the overall health pool. Adding 3500 HP to a high tier Battleship means that fires become even more damaging, as the amount of time a fire lasts depends on which class of ship you're in.
  • Expert loader from the level 1 skills grants a 50% reduced reload time when switching from the currently loaded shell type of AP or HE to the other. This in theory sounds great for Cruisers and Battleships for dealing with a new target popping up, but not having the most appropriate ammo loaded. However, not mentioned, is the fact that it only works if all main batteries are currently loaded. Some of the special commanders, including Steven Seagal, have a skill that gives it a gigantic 75% boost, dropping the change in ammo to as low as a few seconds, making it more useful, as did the gameplay mechanic change that made Armour Piercing ammo shot from big guns only ever do 10% damage increased it's popularity.
  • Fire Prevention before it's rework was almost entirely useless due to the way it was reducing the fire chance from incoming shells. Later when the captain skills were reworked it has become a mandatory skill for Battleships and large cruisers, as the reduction buff was improved and it reduced the amount of fires a ship could have from 4 to 3, by combining the fire zones of the centre of the ship which is where most ships get hit by HE shells. It massively reduces the chances of being set on fire twice, and makes it incredibly hard to have three.
  • Dogfighting Expert at level 3. This is a case where at one time, it was a far more useful skill as there was a fair chance a Carrier player could face a higher tier Carrier, and gave their fighters a chance against the enemy's. However, after a series of rebalancing and match maker changes, this is only useful if you're stuck using stock fighters vs higher tier enemy fighter aircraft, or if the enemy player happens to be the U.S.N. Tier 7 Premium Carrier Saipan, which uses Tier 9 aircraft.
    • Like with Fire Prevention, this skill received a rework with Update 0.6.0. It is now a Level 1 skill and gives fighters an increase in their ammunition capacity in addition to the previous effect. It can be also particularly useful for Langley at Tier IV since the Japanese Tier IV Hosho gets Tier V planes and Langley does not.
    • Its also popular among Enterprise and Kaga captains since their aircraft are one tier lower than than their respective ships meaning unless they fight another version of themselves they will be able to get some use out of this skill.
  • The "Evasive Maneuver" skill sounds powerful for a tier 1 carrier skill but is actually rather lack luster. It substantially boosts the hp of bombers and reduces the the detection range of bombers that have already dropped their bombs. However this comes at a cost of 30% slower speed on returning bombers. This actually translates into a noticeable DPM loss for carriers, especially carriers that specialize in having low turn over times between strikes like the Saipan. To top it off the added protection to returning bombers isn't even as useful as it sounds and the added slowness can make bombers even more vulnerable to enemy fighters. To get any utility at all out of it requires using it only selectively, by manually putting your returning bombers on a course back to you carrier and only giving the actual order to return when they're under attack. Particularly if you see that the enemy fighter squadron is lining up for a strafe. But this of course requires even more micromanaging of your squadrons than was already the case for playing carriers, and can take your attention away from other possibly more pressing needs.
  • The "Last Gasp" CV skill. It sounds pretty useful for a level 1 skill, the active squadron has its boost replenished if its on its last attack flight or has been reduced to the equivalent size. Unfotunatly you are most likely going to retreat and recall the squadron before you get to the last or you're going to be using them on a target so vulnerable that the extra boost won't matter anyway. It can be useful when intentionally reducing the squad by "Cold dropping" munitions on the way to the target, but that tactic itself is already falling out of favor and the extra boost is almost excessive at that point. It seems it would have been more useful in the developer's original vision for the CV rework, but the meta evolved away from that almost instantly.
  • The tier 2 skills Torpedo Acceleration in particular, and Torpedo Armament Expertise to a lesser degree are uncommon to see even on destroyers that would get the most use out of them. The Acceleration skill was nerfed into the ground for being too good, where it now takes away 20% of a torpedo range dropping 1km of range per 5km, for a tiny 5 knot speed boost. Expertise is uncommon for two reasons, firstly because it only saves 6 seconds per minute of reloading time, and because of the Inertia Fuse for HE Shells skill, which is very useful for Cruisers & Destroyers by greatly assisting their guns HE penetration, for only a small reduction in fire chance.

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