WoWS Q&A – 22th July 2016 #2
Posted by Sebastianul
Thanks to Carnotzet

Here are some explanations from Sub_Octavian about why they decided to give everyone Basics of Survivability after Situational Awareness is gone.

According to the studies, be it old (before 0.5.3) or new, they conducted before the patch, the most popular tier 1 skill on all classes of ships after Situational Awareness is Basics of Survivability. Even on destroyers, and even on gunboats.

If he had the choice, Sub_Octavian would have also preferred BFT on certain destroyers. But the technology used does not allow them to give commanders with only one tier 1 skill the choice, so they followed the choice of the majority of players. Players have to understand that they really do not care what skill they should give players. They based their decision on what most of the players played with.

If they would give players another skill, the dissatisfied group of players would only be different. The only difference is that that group would be bigger, and in some instances, much bigger.

The change made to Situational Awareness (that it was made baseline for everyone) was needed in their opinion and since they also improved visibility mechanics, they believe it came at the right time.

The data they based themselves on is rather large and was collected from different samples (by class of ships, servers, etc.).

Commanders with 1 to 5 skill points were not interesting for them since this problem concerns high level commanders, which have already gathered a lot of experience.

In other news (but still in the same thread), an explanation about the changes made to commanders’ retraining.

Regarding the changes made to the retraining of commanders, Sub_Octavian explained that no experience will be lost. So, for example, if you needed 100k for your commander to be fully retrained and you had already accumulated 90k, then, when the patch hits and the retraining experience points needed drop down to 50k, your commander will be fully retrained and in addition will receive 40k “bonus” to his experience points.

If, for example you needed 100k and you had accumulated 20k, when the retraining experience points needed drop down to 50k, you will still need to gather 30k to fully retrain your commander.