Mouse Droppings #3

How was your week?  Mine was interesting.

I recovered from the plague by Tuesday and rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in with some more playtesting of Vanguard.  Wargaming had dumped a whole brand new set of updates on her and I was very curious to see if they'd finally hit that sweet spot for balance.  I believe that they had. I submitted the feedback to Wargaming detailing as much on Wednesday. To prepare for my review, I began ramping up the number of games played, taking more detailed notes and ear marking things that had to be tested specifically.  It should have been a fun week and I was hoping to have the full review out within seven days time.

Well, they hucked a curve ball at me on Thursday with the announcement that Dreadnought and Vanguard were both being released within 24 hours.  I was nowhere close to ready.  Wargaming has blind sided me with surprise releases like this before.  Ashitaka, Makarov, Musashi and the infamous Graf Zeppelin all come to mind.  This sent me into a bit of an angry panic until I finally just accepted that there was no way to keep pace with this hectic release schedule, especially with so many other premiums (13 in total) that could be coming out soon.

It's proven to be an important decision for me.  Rushing content out just means that I won't enjoy making it.  The moment I stop enjoying this is the moment quality begins to suffer and I won't be proud of what I'm doing anymore.  Still, I was able to reach a compromise and still deliver a general impressions article the day they're released and continue to work on the full review in the background.

So I'm still plugging away at Vanguard currently.  One of the biggest hurdles (and wastes of time) has been trying to map her dispersion.  Her guns experience a lot of what I call "downward drift".  The guns gradually track away from where they're locked, even when you don't touch the mouse.  This increases the dispersion area of shell fall when I'm trying to map it -- in this case, quite dramatically which makes it objectively useless for drawing comparisons.  I've tried twice to get this done, each time wasting a little over an hour on each before deciding it all had to be scrapped.  I'm going to give it one more try but it may be something that I have to leave out because of how bad it is.  This doesn't affect how the ship performs in game, it's just a bloody nuisance for trying to make a graphical representation out of it.

What else did I do this week?  Oh, Wargaming let slip the deceleration rate of AP shells when they strike an armour plate.  I have the impression that what they disclosed was only a simplified formula rather than the actual one.  I'll need to do some more testing to be sure.  I'd like to include a small example of it in Vanguard's review to show the importance of her longer shell-fuse times compared to other Royal Navy battleships, but I'm struggling to figure out how to show this graphically in an interesting manner.  Oh well, I'll figure something out.

I'm hoping to publish Vanguard on Tuesday or Wednesday at the very latest.  Work then begins on Dreadnought.  At the same time, I'm very aware of the Black Ships (Atago, Massachusetts, Asashio, Tirpitz) due out this week.  I had only planned to do a cursory overview of each with little notes on how they may have changed from previous reviews.  If the proposed changes go through for Atago and Asashio, it may be worth giving these ships a full rework after the holiday season.

That's how everything's looking for now, though.  So there should be a full review this week and another mini-review of the Black Ships due out on Friday.  Dreadnought should be done by next week if nothing blows up.

Happy Thanksgiving to my 'Murican readers.  The rest of you, stay safe.  ♥