World of Warships- How Wargaming Is Trying To Force You To Pay & Play More

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.

Music:
Ross Rowley:

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

Outro Music: Stranger Think- C418

Music: Stranger Think- C418

[anthrax]

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.

[dangoodall]

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**

[FluppiLP]

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

[lcarus]

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.

[bigdata]

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.

[wojtek]

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 :).

[megarogerish]

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.

[Nick-dwsv]

Yep I agree totally, ive played around 20k randoms. in the last 9 months I played for one week during the snow ❄️ then a few clan battles... WG think they are so smart but they don't really understand or care that they push ppl away from this this game use to great.

[lordzortak]

I remember when the community mattered more than money. Those days are long gone. I have near 200 premiums years of premium time, flags have me down to under 10 mil on the account. I have played 3 games in the last 2 weeks, burned out needed a break. You kind of touch on why here. Keep up the good work big guy.

[admiralbofors]

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.

[AndreRighetto]

I say: Let it burn! Let it Explode!
In other news. KOTS and other competitive championships are held in the training rooms and no sign or camouflage is spent there. You can mount all 21 signals and use your fanciest camouflage, none of them will be deducted from your inventory.

[smoothkirito]

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.

[latch]

They can try all they want, my game has gotten stuck on the loading screen for the past 4 months

[microwave]

not surprised anymore, it's really hard to play the game as an F2P player knowing the fact that credit grinding is really hard EXCEPT with *premium account* plus the post-battle service cost makes it even harder, some of us even sold their tech tree ships just to buy a new one :)

[logannicholson]

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

[jasonhand]

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.

[richardbell]

As a co-op player, I only fly signals on certain operations, when there are mission rewards for credits or various types of xp (except base xp). I stopped getting flags in battle when they dropped all achievements from co-op play. I have not really noticed that I am slowly running out of flags. I will not miss them.

[sgoldsworth]

The changes documented have put a pinch on my ability to grind/acquire ships. Because the flags are so pricey, the cost in credits and coal, I have had to choose between getting signal flags or buy modules or buy tech tree ships; between buying signal flags and having enough coal to buy a premium ship. Thank you for the video.

[matthewlofland]

Well for me I have played this game for over 5 years . Spent money on ships, containers, ect . But since Christmas of 2021 . The game to me has made it so I almost dont hardly play anymore. People throw games we where winning for no good reason in random. Then we had subs and then they pulled them . And now every game I get into is a torpedo fest . 4 to 5 dd on a side or many crusiers and dds makes this game pretty much a waste of time now. Also I stopped spending money on this game almost a year ago . So now I will jump in play until I get my second container and log in bonus for the day and quit . Also they need to stop adding all these new ships every time we turn around let's us get used to the ones we got last month before you add new ones this game as gone insane with new ships everytime we turn around.

[deaks]

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.