…British!

through the history, Great Britain was perhaps the most influential navy in the world. From their island country, the British forged an unparalelled empire through the might of their navy and therefore, it’s only fitting that the British line would be the third one (since the first two were American and IJN).

Like that? Logical, no? Looking forward to sail with the HMS Hood? Well, fuck you then, because the third line will be Russian.

Yep, instead of possibly the mightiest navy in human history, we’ll have the Russians, whose naval achievements include losing to the Japanese at Tsushima and that’s pretty much it. The reason for this decision is purely economic one, since there are simply many, many Russian players and they have a “sense of national pride”, as one developer puts it. Don’t believe me? Check this out, here’s the original post:

The Stalin dev butthurt made me chuckle. But seriously though, this part is important:

Russian and British ship models are being developed in parallel and while we originally planned to release the Royal Navy first, we’ve since changed that decisions for business reasons. We are currently planning to bring in the Russian Navy as the first nation after release, followed by the Royal Navy.

To be honest, I believe that if we manage to create an immersive and fun game, fans of British ships will play it anyway. If they don’t like it and, as a result, don’t stay in the game then introducing those (or any other) ships won’t change that. The oldest Alpha Testers are painfully aware that I am quite passionate about the ‘gameplay vs. history’ line of argumentation. However, we do have a very large Russian community, who have a very strong sense of national pride, which in essence means that they like to play Russian tanks, planes or ships. Therefore, we see no compelling business reason why the Royal Navy must be the third nation.

You know, it’s logical. The Russian tree is probably the same thing as the Chinese tree in World of Tanks. Noone really wanted it apart from that respective nation, the machines in it are neither attractive nor historically important, but it just has to be there to cater to that certain large playerbase (Chinese tree is very popular on Chinese server and I would not be surprised, if Wargaming agreement with Kongzhong actually involved a part, where Wargaming is obligated to release new Chinese tanks in 2015).

I actually get it, it’s a pure business decision and that’s how it’s honestly presented by the developer above. I can live with that, because after the WoWp fuckup, the pressure is on and the game really should be a commercial success, otherwise – who knows? Luckily, the game will not have much competition in that specific format I think (Gaijin already posted somewhere they are putting their development of ships on hold), so it’s not like in WoWp case, when a (better) game was already developed and WG people had to compete hard from the start.

What DOES piss me off is the inconsistency of Wargaming rhetoric. On one hand they admit openly they want to cater to large playerbase. Cool. On the other hand, you have two out of three largest player groups on EU server being repeatedly told they can’t get their own branches of tanks, because they would be full of clones (lie – and oh look, here’s another T-54 clone for the Germans, enjoy!) or fake tanks (another lie, plus – how do you like your “historical” WT E-100? What, you don’t like fakes? Okay, here’s the T28 Concept, TOTALLY historical *snicker*).

It’s this hypocrisy and inability to stick to their own line that annoys me. Make up your mind, Wargaming. Either business interests decide (gief EU tree), or historical importance decides (kick the stalinboats out). Otherwise it makes you look like twats.