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Forewarning: Please do not link me the thread on tiers and other things as I have already read them and don't need a rehash, please just read through this with an open mind. Also I will reference the PC version so please don't give me the whole this is it's own game thing, i'll explain in a bit. Likes: Being a current PC WoWS player but dedicated console gamer, I was excited to see this game coming to consoles, I applied for alpha but certain circumstances made me unable to partake back then, so seeing this game up close in CBT has shown me a few things. I heavily like that the whole feel of the game coming from the pc experience has been successfully ported over to consoles and quite wonderfully I might add. DD's play like DD's, cruisers play like cruisers, and BB's play like BB's. There were at times moments where I felt that damage was reduced by torps and such but further testing showed that wasn't the case. Now to the nitty gritty and i'll start from the beginning; Loading up the game was nice and easy, everything looked clean until I hit the menu screens and the port. The port itself is fairly bright, and combining that with small white text on the bottom of the screen where it tells you if you want to go into battle or not, was extremely hard to see when sitting at a distance from my tv. A simple fix for this would be to A: make the text larger, or B: give the text a black outline of sorts. Another suggestion I will make below in my suggestions section. Now speaking of large, the UI in the top left, yes the whole thing that tells you what kind of battle mode you're playing, holey heck that thing takes up so much space in comparison to the rest of the UI, preferably a wise move would be to perhaps make it smaller but I ave a suggestion for that later. Now on to the menu and UI suggestions; I suggest to fix these issues I outlined by a simple fix, An overhead bar similar to the likes of WoT and WoWS PC, with a tab structure which has done fairly well on WoT console. This would alleviate the issues I outlined as the type of battle and the start battle button would be in their own dedicated location in the top middle of the screen, with tabs that can take you to the tech trees, stats, eventual clan pages, etc. The main reason for this is that I d find having to go back to a different menu just to change battle type or look at other things takes alot more unnecessary effort than just having everything in front of you. To add on to this, finding the stats of your ships requires you to go to a whole different menu to look at, so instead I suggest that the stats of each ship you own to be displayed in the top/middle right of the port screen so that no matter what ship you have highlighted you have immediate access to stats. On to the next; Commanders: This is a hot topic of controversy for which I had many a conversation. My whole opinion is that the commanders are extremely limiting and force you to play a certain way that the game wants you to play rather than yourself. Each commander comes with their own list of perks and skills the player can choose when leveling up their commander in a tier format, where the skills are built and added based on what kind of ship that commander was built for. The issue with this is that not everyone wants to play by those preset rules and not every commander is going to have those perfect skills that you want. A simple answer I was given is that WG wants to avoid the PC meta and wants players to make hard decisions, I feel that is a simple cop out of a much bigger issue. Let's take the tirpitz for example, the way I play tirpitz on pc is close range, kinfe fight, torp, and get out. With the way these commanders are currently set up, I would have to, with a bb commander, focus on long range skills rather than what I need to help my playstyle out. I'd rather not have to choose between a cruiser commander and battleship commander because one has one skill I need and the other has a different skill I need, meanwhile everything else is useless to me. It just to me seems at this point like the whole let the player play how they want to play is being limited by forcing them to pick mediocre commanders with skills that encourage certain playstyles, even if the player them-self doesnt play like that, thus forcing them to be uncomfortable playing in a way they are not use to, which could cause frustration and ultimately being tired of the game and quitting. The fix to this is just by getting rid of commanders and go back to the PC style of perks, but seeing as how this game is built around this feature, just hope that the devs see this and realize that there needs to be more option. Evn a more simplre fix would to be keep it tier based as it is now, and add EVERY perk to the skill trees and tiers, but make players choose between them then as you can only pick one per tier. All this would require is balancing the perks so you dont have a bunch of really useful perks all in one tier thus only allowing you to pick one. Anywhos let us move on to the next and last item; The tech trees and more specifically tiers: Now I have sen a lot of comments as well on this topic, and the understanding partly from the devs is that tiers higher than 7, console players would have a harder time grasping all the different mechanics of ships that make up those tiers. The issue with this is that by tier 5 a player has seen everything this game has to offer in regards to mechanics, and that it also wouldnt be a problem if the players were educated to these mechanics in game, but currently there is no system in game that teaches players about the different mechanics they will see, nor how they should play different kinds of ships. This is why in game tips and tricks are needed, or an updated tutorial system that teaches players correctly. It is pretty ridiculous that the tiers are currently limited to 7, though they did say the ceiling will most likely raise, but if it does raise to 10 eventually that would require an entire rebalance and an entire tech tree shuffle to put ships back in their proper place. The one thing that never should have changed when bringing this game over was the tech trees, but somehow that got messed up and dumbed down to the point where it feels like an insult to console gamers because they think we are too stupid to comprehend "more" mechanics. That also includes the linear progression in the tech trees. I get that we as console gamers cannot comprehend PC individual modules and packages, but did it really warrant this game to be simplified to the point where I cant even use equipment on my ship unless it has a slot predetermined by the game? An at that I can still only choose between two pieces of equipment that the game "thinks" I need? It just really seems that alot of player choice is being thrown out the window and I hope i'm wrong. Customization; where is it? It is nice that ships all have perm camo on as it sits but it would be nice to test out customization in the future such as camo, flags, etc. But that isnt that important. Anwho's I hope yall could read my wall of text, and I hope that we can have engaging discussions here so that we can see both sides of the coin, thank you for your time.

Not everyone who registered got a code and the closed beta was only for one weekend, but more are planned as well as more code giveaways. We don't have dates yet for future closed betas, I believe T33kanne said it would be at least half a month before we know when the next beta weekend will be.

Ok now you are labelling console players as being just too lazy aka "casual" to handle more complex gameplay mechanics instead of being too stupid. I dont know if that makes me feel any better...

Had this delivered today: “Japanese Warships of World War II”, 1966. I was blown away to learn two “battleship-carriers” were actually built and participated in battle! EDIT: Apparently these exist in Blitz... which I don’t play so was clueless about.

I cant tell you yet when exactly we plan our next testing but it will take a bit, atleast 1/2 months until we can give you more information. We are currently working on a lot of stuff, bugfixes etc. (And of course Holiday in russia :))

Not everyone who registered got a closed beta code. I think it was a random drawing iirc. There will be other closed beta sessions so don't give up.

From my understanding there will be at least 1 more closed beta session, but no date has been set to my knowledge.