Loading...Hey guys, today I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at one of the most upsetting changes that WG made: removing flags as achievement rewards. We take a look at how this has affected my account, an account that is played on a regular basis and often ran with premium ships and time.
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Well, one can simply limit flags to competitive playing if he ever does that. You do can play this game without flags. People too often allow companies to “force” them to get every possible advantage, but that’s not really needed to have fun. I haven’t bought premium for ages, I stopped buying premium ships long time ago as I have dozens premiums and special ships with very different play styles. Long ago I stopped to try to get every possible tier X, but I do want to have Attilio Regolo. Getting it will take me many months. Yeah, I could just throw money and get it much faster, but I can train my patience and resilience to gaming companies tricks :).
Exactly. That’s exactly what i do: I only ever use flags when i 1) play ranked or i 2) run full economic flags and don’t feel like randomly detonating. In normal gameplay (=random games, non-competetive etc) i just don’t care. Jesus, i’m sitting at over 600 detonation flags.
It’s literally random battles, no reasonable matchmaking anywhere to be seen. Why the hell would i waste my flags on that?
Repair and Fire flag are required for BBs, Secondary Flag also required for Secondary BBs. They are balanced around running those flags. It doesn’t hurt a DD or Cruiser nearly as much as a BB if they don’t run flags
I agree. You don’t need combat signals in random and a 21 captain to play well.
@Stefan IMO that’s fake news.
I was right at having enough to get the Georgia, my home state, and they pull her. A week later guess what I get the Georgia in Blitz from a drop. To powerfull here ok put it in Blitz. Love how WG thought process works. OOOHHHHH CRAYONS!!!!!!!
I’ve run most of my flags out since the removal of achievements. 90% of my games are now naked with basic camos. The game lost alot of entertainment value, went from playing a couple games daily to maybe playing a game or two on the weekend just for the weekend games.
Me too. I went from playing several battles everyday to maybe one or two and sometimes I don’t even login for that supercontainer. I feel like everything WG does now is to piss us off.
They need to have a flag you can buy for credits, free xp and coal that lets you earn research points whiles playing any game mode on your ships, I’m tired of regrinding lines and this would bring back a way to earn your legendary modules for T 10 ships.
Wargaming has broken its economy. It used to be the main reason why I stopped playing War Thunder and switched to WoWs. WoWs had a fair economy. I felt like I got rewarded for playing but not anymore. I have already reduced my play time heavily because the game became more of a grind and less rewarding. As a result I will no longer buy premium time. I fully expect that this will make the game even more of a grind and I will stop again. But let’s see if I will actually stop. It used to be fine to pay for things in WoWs because I felt it was a fair game and I enjoyed it
But forget your account with your 400 million credits and not being able to afford all flags. Most players don’t have all tech tree ships. Lots of them have below 10 million credits and are just trying to afford the next tech tree ship that they research. They are the main losers of this. And unfortunately, it seems like WG is concentrating on the people with 400 million credits and they are trying to get rid of their credit stockpile while as a result preventing any “normal player” that does not sink his life into this game, from advancing any further in the tech tree or at least heavily increasing the play time needed.
And why would you even want to get rid of people’s stockpiles? A huge part of the economy is the buying of new ships. Once someone has all ships, of course they will be stockpiling credits. That’s the nature of the economy. Once someone plays thousands of TX games, of course they will stockpile credits because they get rewarded each game but there is no next ship to spend it on. If you try to get these people to get rid of their stockpile, you are at the same time getting rid of everyone’s stockpiles and the ones who lose out first are the guys that have less than 20 million credits.
It’s a flawed idea
Thx for your balanced reporting of this game! Im barely hanging on since 2015. Its fun on occasion but its gotten downhill and WG usually makes crappy decisions to cater to their wallets and new players.
I don’t understand why it took so long to complain about this, though.
In my openion and this is just my theory the signal flag removal was aimed at the hard core and unicum players that play this game non stop and very regularly cus if you just play the game casually and are an average player signals and camo are not a problem. The signals in the daily containers and mission are enough and as a causal player myself I have more signals then I need and I sometime sell them for credits. Now this can be considered as a way to slow the progress of such player so that the rate of content added can match , a way to make money off player that are competitive and to whom stats (PR Wr etc) matter or both.
I, as a casual am slowly running out of all my signals.
This is basically a sign that wargaming doesnt respect my time, im not interested in grinding my face off as hard as the average hardcore player just to get some flags, i have other responsibilities irl than to deal with crap like this. Its already difficult enough for me as a casual player to get enough credits just to buy a new battleship. World of Warships is not my main mmo game and i will never make it my main, why? because there are other way more fun, less punishing, and more time respecting games out there for me to play.
I agree with this. About the only flags I ever earned in match play, as an average player (49%) was the occasional detonation flag.
Over 3 or 4 years I’ve played off and on in 1500 battles, I’ve had 17 high caliber, maybe 1 witherer, and a handful of first blood.
The way I get flags, primarily, is from not playing for stretches and accepting the freebies WG throws at ya to get you back.
Most recently, that was 2 months of 200% XP and some economic flags, and premium time.
I also get flags from the leftover tokens from the early access events like the pan Asian cruisers and the Dido / Canarias event.
I get flags from the missions that give boxes that are unlocked, I think, by reading through the news and getting codes from watching some of the WG vids.
Again, match achievements were the smallest source of flags.
Updates went downhill from the cv update onwards. It’s amusing to see them shooting themselves in the foot everytime gradually pushing and pushing until they reach the point where they lose the interest of the players until it kills the game and the companies profits. They’ll come out claiming they’re surprised and don’t understand why the players stopped playing. The only idea they have is more ships and eventually they’ll run out of ships to release. The old line of we have no competition is false. They might be one of few who have a warship or tank games but the point they are blind to is they’re actually competing against all video games and there are many that are more fun, compelling and not as grind, expensive, much better relations and public relations with players. WGs strategy is not profitable or sustainable in the long run.
They won’t run out of ships. There will always be new Tech trees, Tech tree splits and ship classes. Imagine just the amount of national Submarine crap trees they can now invent. In parrelel they have invented Spain and Holland that can receive imaginary Tech trees. Then they can invent the battle Cruiser split from regular BB tree, and people like our Youtuber here will celebrate WG for IT. So no, they will never run out of ships
The game hasn’t really evolved it’s gameplay from where it started 6-7 years ago, just found more ways to monetize its existing player base. This unfortunately makes it less and less appealing to anyone new ( they just see loot boxes, time sinks, and no clear way to catch up to players who already have 150+ ships).
I introduced a friend to the game earlier this year and **I felt embarrassed** trying to explain all the loot boxes and layers upon layers of time and money sinks. It’s really hard for an existing player with 150+ ships to level up with someone just starting out when you realize they can’t even buy that next tier ship they unlocked because they ran out of slots, don’t have enough credits and are realizing they may have preferred one of the other ship classes/tech lines.. Bloat..
I returned after being gone 2 years and only recently unlocked research burea. I realize why it’s their favorite new way to gate keep content like legendary modules, ships, etc.
Yeah you can get your 3 free daily crates, and watch streams for drops, and participate in pts and get a couple flags here and there (never got my rewards for pts last week though, wtf wg) but that’s a couple hours of my time every day. The last week I’ve seen a lot of steamroll matches so I can’t bring myself to do even that.
Again, I can’t stomach to introduce anyone else to all of this and unfortunately new people is what this game needs. Instead the game continues to become less appealing to anyone who wants to play this somewhat casually.
I realize free to play isn’t really a thing and I’ve spent plenty on the game over the years including the first two years of Santa crates, a couple premiums here and there and lots of premium time. today my 3 month premium I bought at the end of the year just ran out and I realize things will go even more slowly unless I spend more…
Yeah I’ll still play a bit here and there, but i think I’m done giving them money for a product that lacks innovation. I have better things to do with my time.
**appreciate your vid’s by the way and that you speak candidly on topics like this**
Wargaming is so crafty, they know exactly how to play on peoples insecurities. Myself included I was caught in the mis-belief that I needed to run max flags to have a chance. I forced myself after the commander rework to only use one or two flags or sometimes none at all for randoms and only loaded up in ranked battles and even then sometimes only for pivitol battles. Flags then start to acccumulate and you also notice how they are not required to have good fun. Better play decisions out compete flag selection by quite a bit.
This is an expensive game, no question. I have several games in my rotation and when I play WOWS often times I’ll play co-op games where you just go in and blast away for fun. Cheap cam, no flags needed. Then once in a while I’ll do a couple months with my top ships, top commanders, all the flags, etc until I run out of the money I’ve set aside to play that round.
I tend to only run flags on ships I’m grinding and in Clan Battles, and I tend to take one or two of my daily containers as more signals, which has made me able to build up a stock pile (100+) of most flags and keep my account over 100mil credits.
I think the actual trick WG has pulled on all the players, including unicums, streamers and YouTubers, is the idea that you can not go into battle without flags.
Sure they can make noticeable differences, but it’s not like the old premium/non-premium consumables which was a large and very painful disadvantage.
Flags definitely help, but they’re minor buffs and so you can actually live without them if you don’t want to bleed credits to the armoury.
What pisses me off even more is when the community managers like Askance and Maredraco try to spin this in a positive way, saying that from their perspective they are giving out the same amount of signals. Geez. It is insulting to our intelligence.
I feel the detonation fear is overblown. I’ve been playing since June 2015, and have been detonated a whopping 76 times. So that isn’t even once per month. As for credits getting harder to obtain, I hope this is WG’s effort to make mid tier game play better. One of the things I feel WG did right in Tanks was make tiers 9-10 so expensive to play that players needed to go to tiers 5-7 to earn credits to run the top tiers. And the boost of people playing lower tiers helped matchmaker make even in who is top tier/bottom tier. I have several tier 8 premium (and techline) ships I loved to play. But when it feels every match I am going up against tier 10s, it loses the appeal of playing them since my only realistic choice is to hang back and spam HE to have a chance of doing anything. But back to detonation: I’ll still take it over the Arty spam over at Tanks.
Try playing huanghe without deton flag then tell me what you think about it
At the very end of the video, you hit on the trick. The key is don’t run signals in every single random battle. Randoms aren’t worth it. The only ships I run fully signalled in random battles are ships that need the signals to function properly, like German battleships. To date, the only signals I have been buying from the armory are the two newer signals that never dropped for achievements (and don’t seem to drop in containers), and the fire chance flag that I have always seemed to be short on for some random reason.
Honestly; I have not been having this problem. I’ve been getting plenty from the signal boxes they provide. The only flag I’m missing most of the time is the detonation flag. But with how infrequent detonations are, it really isn’t a problem.
I also agree with several of the other comments in here; this adjustment was aimed at higher level players, stopping them from farming specific flags. It really doesn’t affect the general player base.
Never found Det flags to work as detailed anyway. That said, yeah WG has really just ground down this game’s entertainment to a fairly low point for my personally. I don’t mind spending a bit of irl money on a game I enjoy, hell I used to have a fair number of the premium ships and an average of 600 days of premium time. Now I am just tired of the tricks to make money at every single turn, tired of time gated events (Clash of Courage type things, which don’t start until 8:30am / 12:30pm daily), and tired of the general attituded WG takes towards their cash cows… sorry I mean the general community of the game. TLDR – I like the idea of the game, I hate how it is being handled in the last several years.
overall its pretty rare to be detonated, even in dds, through I can see not wanting to take the chance in competitive. achievements really only seemed to matter to the top players who could rely on them for earning more flags. that said, i still feel wg should have left that in there and given the less good players an option to buy them.
My biggest issue was how some flags would greatly enhance performance like 20% less fire and detonation removal and the heal flag which made heals more efficient that is my biggest issue with the flag removal
I made it a habit from the very beginning to not rely on flags for randoms unless I’m running them for specialized builds (secondary, smoke, etc) The detonation flags, I only run them on destroyers in competitive modes.
Thank you! been hoping someone would do an achievement video. I relied on the rewards on the rare occasion I’d get them. What really kills me is they remove the “reward” for the achievement then they “add” div achievements. Don’t really see why they just didn’t remove achievements altogether. They could have reduced/cut in 1/2 the rewards. I haven’t given WG any real life money since the CV rework. I keep working out the real world cost and just can’t justify paying the cost. Thx for the content, been following for about a year