In the last 14 days, there has been significant review bombing on Steam for World of Warships. Players are complaining about a change to the summer event made by the developers. While Wargaming is somewhat backtracking in their latest announcement, negative reviews are still coming in, also because players are frustrated about some general changes.
What is making players so angry? On August 10, the developers announced their event for the 8th anniversary. This is a highlight because you can quickly earn many interesting rewards. However, this year, changes were announced that many players were not happy with:
- Previously, the event revolved around players having Tier X ships in their port. For this, there was a reward of one supercontainer per ship. The ships in the lower tiers did not play such a significant role.
- However, the rewards were changed and simultaneously reduced this year. Instead of directly receiving containers, there are now festival tokens.
- While you get a hefty 200 tokens for a Tier X ship, only the first 30 supercontainers cost exactly that much. For all thereafter, you pay 400 tokens, which is double.
This change tipped the scales for many. Since 2021, there have been constant small adjustments that made World of Warships less appealing to players.
Additionally, the Discord server for World of Warships has been heavily criticized. Players are complaining that criticism regarding the summer event was simply deleted. Therefore, many resorted to Steam reviews to make their voices heard.
How are players showing their discontent? On Steam, World of Warships received 5,121 reviews in the last 14 days. A hefty 4,671 (or 91.2%) were negative. Previously, the game had a total of 83% positive ratings.
Wargaming has since made some adjustments to the summer event. However, this is currently not slowing down the negative reviews.
Wargaming is backtracking, but much of the criticism remains
What has Wargaming changed now? In a new blog post, the developers announced that each player can now purchase 110 supercontainers. Additionally, the bundle with the 400 tokens has been removed, and further tokens for “performance bonuses” have been introduced.
The post also explained why the change was announced this way. The current system addresses an issue in the economy of the game:
We want to make it transparent that we need to reconcile a generous anniversary system with the economic health of the game. Over the past 8 years, the selection of ships in the game has grown to over 600 […].
This means that with the growing fleet, the number of anniversary rewards that players can collect each year has also increased. Last year, a player with all ships received rewards worth more than 180,000 doubloons. This ongoing trend puts a strain on the economic balance of the game, and we regularly take measures to optimize our systems.
How are players reacting? On Reddit, this is being celebrated as a victory for the players. They have stood up against the “evil Wargaming” and even left a bit of praise for the developers.
However, essentially, a criticism point shared by many has now been addressed.
With over 11,000 concurrent players on August 28 and over 411,000 at peak, World of Warships is among the largest MMOs on Steam (via SteamDB).
Focus on monetization, not on the players
What are the Steam reviews criticizing still? The reviews complain about several things, such as general monetization with doubloons and tokens to obscure real money expenses, the shutdown of the official forums in July, and generally fewer in-game rewards while simultaneously focusing more on the shop.
One player comments: “At the moment, we have an unbelievable 7 sales events, plus loot boxes, plus a premium account, and of course, there’s also a battle pass. Have I mentioned premium ships? So, for those who like to spend a lot, they can easily sink their monthly rent here.”
However, the statement about the economy is causing concern among some players. Especially new and casual players seem to have trouble keeping up with the larger accounts.
The general sentiment is: The developers are focusing too much on the shop and too little on the players.
What do you say about World of Warships? Do you play it actively yourself or have you stopped for exactly these reasons?
Lastly, we recently conducted an interview with the metal band Megadeth, who are also active in the game: The singer of one of the most famous metal bands explains why his music and gaming fit so well together.
