We’ll be fine

I’m not sure if anyone is reading this blog. I stopped following gaming blogs, didn’t do much gaming either and I like my life better this way. I don’t expect to write more posts, regardless how this one is received, but I didn’t expect to write this either.

A bit of perspective often helps. When you are busy doing something, your mind gets locked into a box defined by the thing. Your actions give a behavioral feedback of the thing, any deviation from it would create cognitive dissonance and you don’t really have time to think about anything but the technical issues of “doing the thing”. When you stop this loop for a time, answers come more easily.

I kept thinking how could I defeat the socials who carry the morons and slackers in games. Then I noticed with dismay how gaming itself – along with social media, conventional media and art – got consumed by an extreme version of the socials: the social justice movement. I saw them as lunatics who claim obviously wrong things (hello women with penis) and yet they gain power and influence instead of ridicule. Even worse, in the most recent years we see those who refuse to follow their madness get censored and banned. It was the 1930-es again, going head-first into a bizarre dictatorship where genocide is not only accepted, but explicitly desired. The social justice ideas are like grabbing a bunch of Nazi texts and replacing “jew” with “white male”. Literally.

Fighting them all day in games and gaming media left me no time to see a huge inconsistency in this worldview.

The power holders who decide who gets censored, who gets tenure, who gets a TV show or a movie are absolutely not the “target audience” of the social justice movement. On the contrary. Zuckerberg, Soros, Bezos, Zucker and nearly all media, social media, gaming industry and entertaiment giants, along with university presidents are white, heterosexual males who are obscenely rich, live in walled mansions and emit more carbon dioxide than all the “white working class”. How can such people believe in the social justice movement? How can they not see that if the social justice activists ever get into power they will tear down the megacorporations and the oligarchs will be #cancelwhitepeople-ed with the rest?! How can they carry water for the lunatics?!

The obvious answer is that they don’t. It’s the other way around. The social justice lunatics are a tool in the hand of oligarchs for reaching what Piketty found:

It’s absolutely not a coincidence that the more “progressive” a country is in terms of “social justice”, the more money the top 1% has. That’s their purpose.

Let me explain. The progressive, educated youth was always a force for socialism or at least social democracy. They were fighting for the “little guy”, the “working class” against “exploitation”. This always created swarm of activists who organized strikes, marched and agitated for higher taxes and welfare programs. This is considered obvious and is usually illustrated with the Churchill quote “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”

The social justice movement is a tool in the hand of the oligarchs to break this. I mean the educated youth is still “progressive”, but it no longer means social democrat. These “new progressives” don’t fight for the working class, for living wages, no wars or for healthcare. They are too busy fighting for transgender bathrooms, proper representation of minorities in entertainment products, pronouns, diversity quotas and similar marginal nonsense. The working class is now renamed “white working class” and is a target of hate for telling dumb jokes about different people and dog-whistling women on the street. Because jokes and whistles the totally the biggest problems of our time. Never mind all the people dying in conflict zones, poverty even in first world countries, illiteracy or lack of affordable health care.

The social justice activists are supported by the oligarch not because they fight conservatives. They are supported because they are fighting social democrats – and as a by-product get conservatives elected. They reject social democrats as “racists, sexists, homophobes” by creating bizarre standards which are failed by everyone except by the most “pure” zealots. You can “become” a transphobe after a life of progressive activism and being “LGBTQ person” yourself for … rejecting dudes in women’s sports. Bernie Sanders, who spent his whole life fighting for a progressive agenda lost among the progressive voters to the butcher of Libya because he didn’t pander to BLM and the other fringe crazies.

Have you noticed that the conservatives are doing nothing against the “censorship”? Putin or Trump didn’t start their own Facebook despite they easily could. That’s because the bizarre behavior of social justice activists frighten and outrage moderates so they vote for “conservatives” like Trump, Putin, Orbán or Salvini. I did that too. Please also note that “censorship” isn’t really silencing the conservatives. They “somehow” always get the word out and then the conservative media can talk about this or that guy being censored.

We’ll be fine. There won’t be any kind of social justice dictatorship with gas chambers to #cancelwhitepeople. They will never have any power as they have none now. They are just puppets moved by oligarchs to defeat the working class. We will live in capitalism, under leaders like Trump, Putin, Orbán or Salvini as long as the millennials who are most infected by this nonsense die out.

The only downside is that to serve their purpose, the social justice crazies have to dominate the universities and the media, both to be able to crush social democrats – who used to live there – and to disgust everyone else. Watching them censoring and abusing innocent people on the internet is the very act that make independents go to the ballot box and place an X next to a “conservative”. Yes, it means that “we” must leave the media at large unless we want to be the censored and abused ones. I sure won’t be around to serve as a martyr.

.

PS: I do not claim that the social justice activists are willingly cooperating with oligarchs. They honestly believe their nonsense and would spread it anyway. However they could only preach to the pigeons in the park like lizard men believers or the flat-Earthers without the huge media and social media support they receive. I also do not claim that the individual conservative is not hurt by censorship, does not feel silenced or is somehow colluding with the censors. He is just a foot soldier picked for martyr by his superiors against his will or without his knowledge.

Goodbye, dear readers!

This blog started on Sept 6, 2008 with the goal to give goldmaking advice to World of Warcraft players. Back in the day people were farming gold, aka killing monsters in large numbers for their drops. Their income was ridiculous. I could make much more money on the AH and I wanted to share my ideas.

Later, I realized that the reason people were poor wasn’t simply being unaware of techniques but having a wrong mindset. They spent too much time helping bad players. They knew nothing of opportunity cost. They considered “buying low, selling high” evil. I coached them for the better. The blog thrived, new readers were picked up by the hour.

Then I took this idea to raiding and did what most players considered impossible: raided current content in blue (low item level) gear. That was a definitive answer for those who carried morons and slackers, blaming their gear, not their low performance.

But times started to change. Game companies realized that money comes from bad players too, so they started to nerf their games. First, the developers and the community despised this way dictated by the suits. “welfare epics” was the name of the easy-to-get gear. Then the old guard died out and the new people considered this “right”. It happened together with the rise of the “social justice” crazies in real life, who preached that all kind of failure is the product of some weird imaginary oppression.

World of Warcraft, the most popular game was spearheading this pathetic change. In the meantime I played some World of Tanks and found that their “random battles” were anything but random. They set everyone’s win chance to 50% to keep the baddies play – therefore pay. Finding this was a huge traffic spike and wide recognition for my blog.

As WoW becamse worse and worse, I left for EVE Online, then Black Desert Online, then Playerunknown’s Battleground, finally World of Warships. But it was like the Indians moving west to escape from the growing civilization. It kept coming and I’ve reached the western ocean coast. All games became like this. Easy rewards are now celebrated. Strike that, they are sold. In gambling boxes. “Rigged” matchmakers are now advertised as vehicles for “more fun”.

Players no longer need to be any good to progress. They just have to log in and open their wallets. The morons and slackers who couldn’t clear Karhazan back in the day, now clear all the content, because it’s tailored for their pathetic performance. They don’t have to learn anything to succeed, so learning became “tryhard”. They became the dominant culture in gaming. Being any good became “elitism”. “Gamers are dead” is the new slogan among developers. And don’t even get me started about mobile crap.

As a result, any kind of good information is rejected and actively hated. When I found how to get to the toplist of PUBG, all I got were downvotes and hate from the “community”, for ruining their “fun” of mindlessly killing each other. When I disproved the bizarre conspiracy theory that baddies made up in World of Warships to explain their defeats, I got banned from the game’s subreddit. And let’s not even mention CCP Falcon and his antics.

There is no more point in trying to play well, so there is no point writing about it. So people stopped doing so. There were no one left for inspiration. The remaining gaming blogs are personal adventures and maybe game reviews, but not teaching anything about games. Blogging in general went nosedive, giving way to “streamers”, acting in clown (or slut) costumes for money.

I tried longer than most. I hoped that the tide will turn. But it’s time for me to accept that my hobby went the way of television: once an intelligent entertainment, now targeted to the lowest common denominator.

There is no point continuing this blog, so I stop. I will keep playing games, for my own entertainment, using self-imposed (scrub) limits to challenge myself, but there is no value writing about it.

Take care, dear readers!

Ranked out in a Yügumo

According to the ship statistics, Yügumo is one of the worst winrate ships. It’s completely alien to the “contest caps against other destroyers” meta, dominated by Jutlands and Blacks.

Yet, I’ve ranked out, playing only this ship. It took me 237 battles, but only because I was unaware of the most important advice I can now give. In retrospect, my winrate was over 60% for the battles where it was kept.

Still, considering all battles my stats are way over the average. Not only the total ship averages. The ship leaderboard can be sorted by battle count and let’s only consider those who have more than 80 battles to discard those who just played a few games while drunk at rank 17. The 80+ battles players are a better comparison:

How did I do it? The in-game strategy is simply: flank. I mostly ignored caps and started the game going the side where the buffs were not. Using RPF I avoided enemy destroyers and got to the battleships (and Kronshtadts) sinking them. Not too complicated, exactly what you’d do in random battles. If I got located, I either ran back to the team and hoped to get carried or yolo-rushed the battleships. But it was rare, as most enemies were close to the middle, locating each other.

The general Yügumo gameplay isn’t hard and I think a tolerable player can rank out using this strategy, assuming he follows “the advice” that makes or break this strategy. What is that? Don’t play in peak times or weekend! Play only at late night or in the morning at weekdays. Why? Because “weekend-type” players can’t adapt. They keep rushing mid, engage outnumbered and die, while busy typing insults to me. Or just yell, try to teamkill and throw. The off-time players realize that they can’t fight for mid buffs and play defensively. In these games the first blood is usually mine (or me, followed by a “just a flesh wound”) around 13 mins, because other destroyers are extra careful. The enemy doesn’t know they could press mid, since they assume we are all lurking, while I’m already approaching their battleships.

I don’t have to sink the enemy battleships to destroy them. After they get a torpedo salvo, even if they weren’t hit, they panic and start running, giving broadside to the friendly battleships. Their destroyers run back to hunt me down, not realizing that even if they succeed, they remove themselves from the battle while they chase me to the corner, while I’m still launcing torpedoes while running.

So this is how I ranked out in one of the “worst” ships.

Subnautica isn’t bad, it’s just a bad game

I left subnautica quite disappointed. I realized that the game can be completed pretty fast and vast majority of its content is cosmetic. You don’t need the complicated base building system. You don’t need to visit most of the landscape or interact with its items or creatures. You need to be really careless to die. The story is fixed, every replay is the same, there is no reason to play again.

Then for some reason I was recommended the sequel. It’s early-early access, so I won’t play it. But it was interesting enough for me to reinstall the old game. And it was fresh, interesting and fun. Also, long bases are still fun to build:

How? Because I forgot where the things are and had to re-explore. I was inefficient again, so I had to think how to solve problems with my limited knowledge. I made mistakes I had to fix.

Exploration is fun. Problem solving, optimizing is fun. Subnautica is fun. I like it, just as I’ve liked it back then. Too bad that once you’ve completed it, you can’t replay with any of the fun of the first play. There is no endgame to challenge yourself, besides building “beautiful” structures. People on Subnautica reddit show their “artwork” and funny or beautiful screenshots, not gameplay.

Subnautica isn’t bad, but it’s not a game. It’s an unstructured toy. It’s like building a sand castle, just because you like building stand castles. You can’t really win, you can’t compete, you can’t challenge yourself. Yet people build sandcastles and “play” Subnautica.

.

PS:

Capturing takes 3 minutes

In the current World of Warships ranked battles you can win 3 ways:

• Kill all enemy ships
• A circle arrives about mid-game. Capture it by staying in it while no enemy is in it. If you succeed, it gives you 10 points per second. Reach 1000 and win.
• The match ends after 20 minutes playtime, whichever team has more points wins. Points are awarded for killing enemy ships and capturing minicircles that provide buffs.

Understanding how the capture mechanic works is obviously a crucial knowledge for competitive players. For example knowing that a single player needs 3 minutes to capture the big circle should be well known. It’s not:

This isn’t an exception. In most games where points are relevant instead of one side dies, I see statements and behavior obviously betraying the ignorance of the players. I screamed a pair of idiots to run from the circle because the game is won if they don’t die, but they kept guarding the circle. One died, the second survived with a few points of HP left when the timer ran out. Or the idiot battleship who kept eating torpedoes in the circle with me telling him to get out as I’m already blocking it with my very low HP destroyer behind an island. Or … every game where destroyers were fighting for the circle, the one side ahead in points is stupid to be there.

These are not first day newbies. They are players who reached rank 5. They are the top 5% of the players. They can pull really good play to get to the gate of the victory. Then throw it away because they don’t know that you can’t capture a circle faster than 3 minutes. This is what I’m talking about when I point at “bad” players who play at peak hours. Despite they have thousands of games behind them and can aim perfectly, they fail to understand anything about the game than “see red, shoot red”. Any kind of strategical play must exploit the stupidity of the enemy players like this and somehow mitigate the stupidity of the friendly morons. One way is to not play competitively in peak hours when they are swarming.

.

PS:

The goal

Some commenters questioned what is my goal currently. Simple: what it was always with my blogging of more than a decade. To create a method in a game which isn’t “doing better” or “doing more” than the other successful players, but “doing differently”.

In WoW raiding people were hell bent on gearscore which is gained by grinding gear. Then I paid a bunch of raiders to clear Ulduar in blue gear. In World of Tanks I got to the toplist with well-chosen newbie tanks (and proved that the matchmaker is rigged, making an even bigger traffic spike). In EVE I transported implants instead of killing rats and got as rich as whole alliances. In Black Desert I hoarded toplist-worthy money without killing mobs. In PUBG I got to the top 100 with 0.1 kill:death. All my actions could be copied by a newbie, all of them were different

In World of Warships I want to create strategies that does not involve aiming guns. It’s a very complicated task, because – unlike most shooters – it’s easy to get a non-damaging hit. Overpenetrations, shatters, ricochets and “AA-mount down but no HP loss” hits are common. To have actually damaging hits, you need to know the armor structure of all ships. This is a central part of the game, as it sells ships, so they need to be different, but they want to avoid “ship X is just better than Y” situations, because then Y won’t sell. So one of them have higher citadel, the other has “better angles”, the third has a lower superstructure and so on. You have to learn how to damage each of them, to be effective.

Well, not me. I’ve ranked out in every season and miniseason since I’m having a ship for it. All of them were torpedo destroyers, AA destroyers and aircraft carriers. I simply ignored these complexities of the game and want to create more strategies of the same kind.

If they make torpedo destroyer play irrelevant and aircrafts too skill-based? I’ll find something else. Some other way to play that needs no practice, but understanding how others act and figure out a ship and build that defeats them. We’ll see what I’ll find next season or miniseason. But it will never be “practice with guns and learn what other ships do”. Hell, without my printout next to me, I wouldn’t know that Saint-Louis has no radar.

Yügumo in ranked

Statistics shows that Yügumo is one of the worst winrate ships in this ranked season. Why do I stick to it? Because “playing the meta” always means that your results aren’t from thinking but from better mechanic skills. The highest winrate ship is Jutland. Why? Because the current meta is that destroyers fight each other in the middle and the one with better aim wins. I never play the meta, because that adds nothing to the community but one more “skilled dude” who does what everyone else does, just better.

Instead I do the opposite of what other destroyer players do: flank wide, run from other destroyers and sink battleships. With that I have 53% winrate, 8% higher than the average Yügumo and I expect it to rise due to finally collecting all necessary knowledge to do it well, including peak time – off time. I have 64K average damage instead of 44K, like the ship’s average.

Why does it work? Because unless the teammates are braindead, they do not engage outnumbered. Sure, you sometimes get a “special needs” Kitekaze who contests the middle buff all alone against a Black + 2x Jutland, but most of the time the fellow players just resort to insults for “not helping” and avoid engaging outnumbered. The enemy is expecting all of our destroyers to play by the meta, so they don’t push aggressively, despite they could. Most enemies don’t have radio positioning, since they use all their points on more gun power. But even if they have, the nearest of us will be someone in the middle. Cruisers aren’t particularly popular this season, so the usual radar threats aren’t there. So – played well – a Yügumo can flank the enemy and get to the battleships at the back.

How to start? I wait for the buffs to arrive and go to the side with no buffs, because the side with buffs will likely have volunteers. There are exceptions, like when friendly destroyers want to go that way, but mostly it’s safe to turn towards the empty side. Especially if the first far side buff is concealment which the destroyers love. This doesn’t mean I won’t make a U-turn immediately if I see lemmings behind me.

RPF is mandatory for the Yügumo. Other captain skills are concealment, torpedo reload, +HP, last stand, adrenaline rush and preventive maintenance. Forget smoke, if you’d need it, you’re already cornered. Have torpedo reload booster, those extra torpedoes at the best moment are great. Throwing 16 fishes to unsuspecting battleships has great results.

Also you can fire spread torpedoes if the enemy is maneuvering use torpedo reload booster (8 seconds) count 8 more and fire another spread. If you are lucky the first spread caused flood, he used DCP, it has 13 seconds duration and the second spread will flood him for full time.

Your goal is not flanking, it’s sinking undefended battleships. Flanking is the tool for the goal. Ergo, keep doing it, until you

• Find and sink battleships
• Notice that the battleships are moving away from you
• You are radio-located and keep being located after going a bit wider.

If any of these happen, just abort flanking and return doing what destroyers are generally doing. A Yügumo is bad at trading shells, but are still better than being useless, away from everything. If you get hunted by enemy destroyers, get back to the team, or if that’s impossible, steer towards an island, hide behind it, watch his angle via RPF and torpedo rush him.

While hunting battleships, reist the siren song of buffs. Don’t wait for more than 20 seconds for a buff, unless you want RPF to clear or torp to reload or something. If you have somewhere else to be, don’t delay that for +5% whatever. Don’t forget that if the enemy is playing the meta, your team will be fighting outnumbered when someone engages. By the time it happens, you should be sinking battleships, not counting buffs.

Don’t yolo-rush battleships! The problem isn’t that it often ends up with a dead Yügumo. Trading one for a Missouri or Mushasi is great. With some practice, you can do it with acceptable results. The problem is that rushing doesn’t need torpedo range or concealment, therefore Yügumo isn’t a good pick for that tactics. If you want to regularly rush, play absolutely anything else because they all perform better than Yügumo. Especially Z which can Hydro behind islands and can move to action in the perfect moment. With Yugumo, only rush when cornered.

Watch the pre-game building numbers, if it doesn’t have at least 2×2 battleships, don’t join!

Don’t give up early, just because the team is behind. There are comebacks, work on them. One thing an RPF Yügumo is good at is blocking the final capture circle behind the little islands in it. RPF constantly tells where the enemy will come from and you can either keep running or turn and torpedo-rush.

Afternoon defeats and victories at night

I wrote in previous season how losses predicted losses and wins predicted wins. Now I had a more sophisticated method to analyze patterns, because I was thinking about the “why”. I recorded the times of the battles. I’ve reached rank 5 at the end of Sunday, so this week I only recorded top bracket battles. 84 of them, I was somewhat busy, and that’s just Monday to Wednesday (I wrote this post before playing on Thursday).

I had 41 games in the “afternoon” defined as noon-9PM. I had 22 defeats, 4 star save defeats and 15 victories. That’s mere 34% winrate, the performance of AFK-ers.

I had 43 games at the “night”, defined as after 9PM and early morning. I had 16 defeats, 2 star save defeats and 25 victories. That’s 58% winrate, very good.

There are no actual patterns inside, no full streaks. The reason seems obvious: in the peak hours the random players are unable and unwilling to play strategically. They curse at me for “not helping” and attack the enemy outnumbered. The more dedicated and experienced players at off hours realize that they cannot win head on and try to save their star, not losing ships before I complete my flanking and sink the enemy battleships. What I realized is that I usually get first blood, somewhere around 7 mins after start (13 mins left).

But I can be wrong, but it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that I should not play in the afternoons and should play in off hours.

.

PS: it seems I wasn’t wrong. On Thursday I started playing late and:

What I seek in a game

My recent revelation that my current game is constantly changed into a Fortnite-like lolshooter made me think what did I actually like in World of Warships.

Not the torpedoes per se. But the ability to win games based on thinking ahead instead of just aiming properly. Playing a torpedo boat needs you to understand the placement of ships to avoid a surprise Worcester. It needs predicting enemy ship movement to aim the torpedoes a minute ahead.

But I didn’t just like the torpedo destroyers. I love playing an AA Grozovoi, despite the gameplay itself is trivial, as air defenses are automatic. I still won 6 out of 8 games in ranked and absolutely massacred the “overpowered” carriers. What I enjoyed is figuring out a new strategy. Inside the game it was just avoiding the lemming train, capping points and sinking carriers.

I don’t know what gameplay I’ll have after the radar buff and flood nerf. I think the devs like the “lemmings vs lemmings” gameplay, because it’s “fun” for the morons and slackers. But I will figure out a way to play away from the blob. I am now much more positive about World of Warships than yesterday. I’ll analyze the new meta and adapt. Luckily I have lots of free XP and captain XP for the job.

.

PS: till then:

This isn’t going to last long

You probably know the feeling when you still play the game but you know that your days are numbered. While I didn’t ragequit over meeting a bizarrely overpowered pay-to-win ship, after reading the recent radar buff and torpedo nerf plans, it’s very unlikely that I will play World of Warships. The change is pretty straightforward buff of radar cruisers and destroyers, most of them are pay-to-win ships. They receive 3-5% more radar range and 10-20% more radar duration (if you wonder, yes, they buff Black). Flooding will do 25% less damage on battleships and a 60%!!! less damage on cruisers and destroyers.

Both of the changes are aimed to obsolete the original IJN destroyer line. I assume 30-40% decreased damage in randoms (mostly due to earlier death to radar ships) and by far the lowest winrate in ranked for them.

Why are they doing this? For the same reason as they removed stealth-fire, put extra caps in form of buffs to ranked battles, changed carrier focus to destroyer hunter and introduced IJN gun destroyers as replacement. Because they want to change the game from strategic to “mindless fun brawling” game. The stealth-torpedoes of destroyers are “not fun”, as the attacked ship has no way to retaliate. Sure, his teammates, especially gun destroyers and radar cruisers can hunt them down, but the attacked ship cannot. They probably recorded how many players ragequit over a torpedo devastating strike and decided that it should not happen. Sure, ships can and still be defeated by certain other ships, like a Yamato will win 99% against a Bismarck in random battle, but the loser ship can still make (quite ineffective) hits and actively play, while he cannot do the same against a Shimakaze.

The new plans seem to be redefining destroyers into escort light cruisers who travel close to bigger ships and shoot, relying on distance and evasions for survival, not concealment. Sure, a battleship has trouble hitting a Khabarovsk, but he can try, therefore feels he is not hopeless and blames luck when he misses.

I’m not sure what will I do after the de facto removal of torpedo destroyer play. Mostly it depends on aircraft carrier prevalence, because I liked the AA destroyer play. It’s a last hope, I have to add. However I do expect them to give a similar refund for IJN destroyers as they gave to carriers after the rework.

Update: I can’t believe that reddit agrees.

.

PS: it’s weird after a post like this, but: