Yeah, from what I saw last night it was a combination of 'anime is for kids', which is laughably wrong, and 'my experience must be pure!', which is at least subjectively possible but has already been fully accounted for by Wargaming. Sometimes the reason people are whiny bitches is because they're attracted to whiny bitchiness. All you can do is point and laugh to maintain your sanity.

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Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Then again I suppose it could also be a concern about how to handle their ability to submerge (mostly, again, I'd assume from a game balance/implementation concern)

There are, as far as I can tell, a couple of reasons, and even though I like subs too, I tend to agree with the developers that they're good ones. One is that submarines are, by their very nature, starkly unfair in a way that would never fly with the audience. They're optimized to perform virtually instant kills with relative impunity. Not many people are going to stand for that in an online battle game. People bitch enough about being torpedoed and sunk by destroyers, and you can at least see and theoretically shoot at those little bastards most of the time.

So they couldn't really be allowed to do that. Trouble is, and this is the other of the aforementioned couple of reasons, submarines are useless for anything else. They're painfully slow on the surface and even slower submerged (keep in mind that the tech trees in World of Warships end in about 1950, so we wouldn't be seeing nuclear subs, or even diesel-electrics with vaguely modern hull profiles), they have guns so pitiful they make Japanese destroyers look like ballistic powerhouses (the ones that have guns at all), and they're basically made of cardboard. If you as a sub skipper actually tried to stand and fight at any point, that would be as useful as antlers in space, just like it was in real life.

(Plus, real-life submarine combat was the absolute pinnacle of the old joke about how being in the military is long stretches of mindless tedium punctuated by a few minutes of sheer terror, and World of Warships battles are only 15 minutes long—way, way not long enough for any sort of decently modeled submarine engagement, even for the tiny percentage of the player base that would actually be into that kind of thing.)

The only way you could ever accomplish anything with a submarine in World of Warships would be to know the choke points of the maps already, hustle like hell to get there and submerge in the opening phase of the battle, and then wait to torpedo anyone who comes along. Even if you manage to do that without getting caught in the surface, then if nobody does come along, you're stuffed, and you go bitch on the forums about how boring playing subs is; if anybody does, and you one-shot them without them even knowing you were there, they go bitch on the forums about how submarines are basically developer-sanctioned cheating. And neither of you would really be wrong. Before long, most everybody would know where all the "sub spots" are on all the maps and just avoid them; beyond picking off noobs who don't know better (which I believe is called "seal clubbing" in Wargaming circles), the best a sub captain could hope for then would be to tie up a bunch of the enemy's destroyers doing ASW searches. Which for the average DD player would be about as much fun as watching paint dry, so they wouldn't do it.

The end result of all this is that it's just not worth the tsuris for the developers. It would be adding some fun for a teeny slice of the player base, taking some away for a rather larger slice, and being a massive pain in the devs' collective ass in the process, so they have, I think wisely, made it clear from day 1 that they were staying the hell away from it. It's just not a casual-multiplayer thing.

TL;DR There aren't subs in World of Warships because it would suck. It's bad enough they have aircraft carriers. Filthy map clickers. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I've seen a couple of gameplay videos of the "ARP Kongō" (so labeled, makes me think of a version of the ship made by the synthesizer company), and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed at how obviously little Wargaming were arsed when they implemented the Fog mod. It appears that, apart from the commander's picture and a few sound bites, it's literally just a skin with the Alien Dazzle Camo on it.

I'm not talking about actual gameplay changes here, I wouldn't expect the Fog ships to actually be virtually invulnerable and capable of obliterating any conventional vessel with contemptuous ease (although, hilariously, I understand the Fog ships were still both of those things when they appeared in Kantai Collection), but they did no gameplay cosmetics at all. There are no changes to the visual or sound effects on the gunfire (outgoing or arriving), nor any representation of the Fog's Klein-field armor; they didn't even bother to omit the smokestack smoke. C- for effort, guys, seriously. If you're going to do a cross-promotion, at least do a cross-promotion.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

FWIW, I think they would have left the funnel smoke even if they had decided to do a complete set of graphics for the Fog ships; the direction and length of smoke serves as a telltale indicator of what the other ship is doing (especially with captains using the, oh let's be polite and say "unorthodox" tactic of trying to reverse their way out of a fight), and the uproar on the forums when a graphics tweak broke funnel smoke last fall was even louder than the raging at all this <sarcasm> glowy weeaboo heresy corrupting our precious, precisely-historically-accurate naval combat simulation </sarcasm>.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."