In a game where teamwork and a general understanding of your ship's role is what leads to fun rounds, there are way too many people who simply don't know how to play. Solo queuing in this is so bad, being in an active clan is almost necessary for some decent rounds. Many of the games end up being one-sided blowouts because destroyers and subs choose to spot mountains and rocks instead of ships and caps. Battleships and cruisers charge directly towards unspotted caps and get wrecked in the first few minute. Aircraft carriers who don't even know about the minimap and just manually park at the furthest edge of the map all game. I can go on for days about the player base, gameplay, and predatory monetization.
I play because I love the history of Naval combat. Around 1000 of my hours played were some of the most fun I've had in a tactical game; but that was years ago, before tech tree ships were power crept to hell by 100s of fantasy ships that only existed as blueprints, drawings and/or concepts in the real world. Another 1000 hours or so has felt like an efficiency grind in order to unlock new things. The last and most recent 600 hour has been 5 years of uninstalling and reinstalling this annoying game. Current state of game is 4/10, peak was 8.5/10 and worst was 2/10 during some past buggy updates. The one definite good thing is the graphics, a lot of the imagery is highly realistic, I still look at the water and feel a sense of awe.
Newbs are going to be able to extract more fun out of the game than long time players who own hundreds of ships at this point in time, simply because ignorance is bliss, and tis folly to be wise. So not all is lost in terms of recommending the game. It is free, and spending money is not necessary to participate or even do well. The early game was fairly engaging. If you are of average skill and looking to return, it is going to be pretty rough time. I'm just hoping some of the old vibes of this game come back before something better comes along.
The developers of ever-green games like this have the chance to create massive global communities of life long spenders. With the cost of ships at rank battle tier being approximately $50-$500 as if what you are selling is tangible, Wargaming shows that they just want to milk 2% of the player base and have everyone else see those ships in action on youtube and twitch. The player base would be like 5x larger and less than 50% of players would be F2P if they sold ships for pocket money, they could even sell merchandise for profit. They chose to make 80% of players feel alienated as opposed to part of a community. World of Tanks has these same problems and Wargaming puts far more into that game.
