What Does it Take to Win Consistently??

[Guest]

A 2493 personal rating over the last 300 or so games is apparently not enough to win consistently. I just stay at slightly over 52% with many losing streaks thrown in for good measure. It seems you do all you can to play well but it doesn't translate into "winning." Good play cannot overcome terrible MM. I've lost count the number of times I've been #1 on the losing team. The lack of agency in this game gets very tiresome. 

Edited December 26, 2023 by Kalishnikat

[Snargfargle]

I've been on the losing team in some of the best games I've played.

[xamdam]

I watched a stream by "John the Ruthless" or similar a few days ago. A young guy playing a Colbert with his brother smoking him up in a Gearing. It was pretty hilarious (their banter) and destructive at the same time. He's obviously a good player.

Smart division play would certainly improve your chances. They didn't ALWAYS win, but he was carrying a lot of teams.

Personally, I'm way too old for that. I'll just continue playing Ops and Asym while they last (and as long as my computer is capable). I used to play other games with my son before he moved out and we did quite well. He never did care much for WOWS though.  

[Bumblegoose]

Winrate certainly does not capture the entirety of a player's performance. For example, repeated outstanding contributions to losing teams are not registered or recognised in the winrate.

Still,  a 52% winrate is pretty good, about in the top 20% of players. Well done.

[Guest]

3 losses in a row today despite 3721 personal rating. So, again, where and when does playing well lead to the elusive "wins?" MM decides 90% of the games, it literally has nothing to do with how well you play. 

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Bumblegoose said:

Winrate certainly does not capture the entirety of a player's performance. For example, repeated outstanding contributions to losing teams are not registered or recognised in the winrate.

Still,  a 52% winrate is pretty good, about in the top 20% of players. Well done.

Outstanding contributions to losing teams are not recognized in any way by WG. You end up with less credits, XP etc than some schlub on the "winning" team. 

[pepe_trueno]

1 hour ago, Kalishnikat said:

A 2493 personal rating over the last 300 or so games is apparently not enough to win consistently. I just stay at slightly over 52% with many losing streaks thrown in for good measure. It seems you do all you can to play well but it doesn't translate into "winning." Good play cannot overcome terrible MM. I've lost count the number of times I've been #1 on the losing team. The lack of agency in this game gets very tiresome. 

the easy way is play coop and even then you will have a defeat every now and then.

 

jokes aside if you want to win more in randoms there are only 3 ways 

1) platoon with good players: platoons are a power multiplier so 3 good players will carry harder than anything else

2) become a 1 man army: easier said than done but a few chosen ones in strong ships can carry hard enough to achieve 60%+ solo win rate.

3) be the team member no one is: play ships with high impact like CV or DDs and support the team so hard the only way they can loose is turning off the PC. For instance a DD that screens ahead of their team, kills the enemy DD and keep the enemy ships spoted may not get huge amounts of exp or personal rating but is sure going to contribute to a win way more than one sitting in smoke farming damage.     

[I_cant_Swim_]

18 minutes ago, xamdam said:

I watched a stream by "John the Ruthless" or similar a few days ago.

I followed one of his streams as well. He is indeed very good at the game. Good commentary, too. 
as for more consistent wins: in my book that’s divs, divs, divs. Good ones, that is. I am a Coop main still, and don’t venture into randoms much. When i do, it’s usually with a couple of guys who are just awesome good. This has raised my WR enormously, (69%) though I’m gonna blow it in the coming year when i go more solo into randoms.

[Subtle_Octavian]

1. Positioning

2. Mini map awareness

3. Good aiming

4. Impactful play

5. Correct usage of spotting and consumables

6. Correct timing of capture points by being aware of time and points

7. Using concealment, but also dropping concealment to make an enemy feel threatened.

 

Let's examine them in order:

1. Positioning

As a destroyer, you want to be positioning to catch the enemy destroyer. This means instead of pushing into the cap, you stay at the edge of an island to detect destroyers, or you run aground and back up into a cap to be able to run. I would never advise you go bow into a cap, ever. You trigger radars so they waste them. You spot destroyers so team can chip them down. You use radio location to send torpedoes in front of unspotted ships, to outright kill them or to make them slow down, making them easy targets to shoot. If you are a gunboat destroyers, you prioritize killing destroyers, especially weak half hp ships with no heal. Certain ships excel at shooting from range to chip down ships while being hard to hit. Never try to yolo any ship from behind, they can easily dodge. Remember that under 3km most destroyers can easily citadel light cruisers. 

As a cruiser you are looking to assist the destroyers early game, then mid game try to burn down weak battleships. If someone takes a torpedo, you start fires on them after they dcp. You should have your head on a permanent swivel to target people who blow DCP. You save your hp and push mid and late game. Some cruisers have more battleship type of roles, or more direct damage roles like dm/salem. Some are damage sponges with poor dpm and are only mildly annoying until end game when battleships have low hp, and then they become very deadly. Conserve hp and try to stay hard to hit until late mid game and then use your range and position to attack distracted ships and finish them off. There's a lot more to this but that is the general plan.

Battleships, you stay mid or near the cap to support. You only fire at good targets, and you go dark so people lose focus on you. For brawling ships, you try to conserve hp for mid and late game, push and crush almost dead ships. For long range ships, you try to get the broadside of a flank, and farm them. For DOT ships like thunderer, you juggle fires while managing hp, and try not to kite so far away you become useless in end game. There's a lot to battleship, more than I can mention here.

2. Mini map awareness, map awareness.

You should be looking at the mini map every 2 seconds to look for opportunity, risk, empty capture points or gaps to exploit. You will notice most super unicum players head to specific spots, that offer advantages. You should learn them as well. Bad players always "chase the carrot" meaning they always go full speed to a buff or a cap, and you can kill them with predictive torps, or ambushing from cover. Most will have their guns aimed forward, completely unprepared from a side attack. 

3. Good aiming

This is incredibly important. If you find you are always under or over leading, you need to play a lot of coop to get the aiming down. This is very important on low gun count ships like incomparable, and on lofty shell ships like Worcester, etc. If you master lofty shell aiming, you can make even range mod cruisers work. Aiming is absolutely critical to your impact. Knowing where to aim on each ship is also important. Aiming at the water to arm a shell to kill a light cruiser, vs getting only over penetrations. This is highly skill dependent, and requires knowledge of all the armor layouts and shell characteristics. There is no easy solution but memorization, and intuition based on repeat play.

As a destroyer, you need to learn to lead more when an enemy is coming out of a turn, as they will accelerate. When they have hydro, drop staggered torpedoes so they slow down into the second set. If they have no hydro, notice if they have been straight lining the whole game or not. Straight liners are the easiest to kill. Learn to aim where ships want to go, not where the white chevron says to aim. If a ship is fleeing, and there is one gap, aim for the gap. Psychology of the target plays a lot to where you aim. Learning how to layer your drops so the dodge is hard is critical. Dropping all three sets in the same white chevron will stack them up, and leave predictable gaps! Stagger your drops. 

As a submarine, aim ahead of an enemy so the torpedoes turn into them when you ping. Aim for the bow, so even if they dcp, the torpedoes will still catch the back of the ship. The worst place to aim is the stern of a ship, unless they are running directly away.

Battleships can stagger their shots to hit maneuverable ships by aiming at the water line, one low, one high. They will generally turn in or away when you shoot, and staggering throws them off. This works for speed juking, one shot ahead, then stagger them backwards  to counter the speed juke.

This is just a general guide.

4. Impactful play

Are you spending all game camping a rock and radaring? You are useless. Are you a battleship that is too close to an island to shoot? You are useless. Are you a destroyer stuck behind a rock in cap the whole game? You are useless. The real impactful play is to get where the enemy cannot angle to you, and to farm them. The absolute worst kind of play is to get stuck bow in, the entire game, backing up. If you limit your ability to do damage to near zero, you contribute near zero.

5. Correct usage of spotting and consumables

Bad usage:

Using your radar too early when the enemy is behind an island. Using smoke and then sitting in it, blinding your team. Using hydro far too late or far too soon. Panic smoking that blinds your team. Burning through all of your consumables early in the game. Smoking at all unspotted early game, as it tells people what ship you are in and where you are. Shooting early game blindly towards enemy spawn. Good players can see the incoming shells and recognize the caliber and arc, telling them what you are and where you are.

Good usage:

Managing your heals by going dark to recover fire damage. A bad player merely mashes heal and repair without timing or consideration for spotting. Try to heal in darkness, to get the full heal. Try to repair only at your spotting limit, so you repair and go dark at the same time. It's far better to heal all the fire damage then to just get 2 more fires in 10 seconds while healing and lose most of your hp capacity. 

Using smoke to conceal high impact ships like colbert, atlanta, etc and then spot for them to win games. Taking focus off battleships "STOP SHOOTING GO DARK I SMOKE NOW" can save your battleships and win games. Using smoke to help unicum players will win games.  Spotting from behind enemy lines in a dd wins games, especially late game. When the enemy can no longer go dark and heal, they will be burned down. If you do this, NEVER TARGET a ship when behind enemy lines, as it tells them someone has direct line of sight. Untarget and avoid directly aiming at a ship to avoid auto target. Just spot, and torpedo where the enemy wants to go. You don't need to lock on to do this.  

6. Correct timing of capture points by being aware of time and points

If the enemy is winning, but intent on chasing your Thunderer to the j line, let them. March up all the caps and take them, then take a flank and slow them. By the time they notice, and turn around they will not only show broadside to your ships, they will most likely never be able to capture again in time. Avoid them and simply re-capture once they are on the next cap. Denying the points to the enemy in late game wins games, and even if your entire team dies, if you have all three caps and time is low, you can just run for a corner and win the game by not dying. Basically, when there is 9 minutes left, you should be flipping caps and using whatever you have to stop them from returning easily. In standard battle, trying to capture the enemy base takes too long, and someone will typically get back in time. Only useful to buy some time by breaking up an enemy push to your base.

Entering into a cap at the very edge to stop the clock (points) and let your team win is crucial DD play. 

7. Using concealment, but also dropping concealment to make an enemy feel threatened.

High threat ships when spotted can completely stop a push. If I see my flank faltering, and I am in an asashio, shooting to be spotted while getting behind cover lets them know you are there, while minimizing risk. Its often enough to stop a push cold. Same for submarines. Simply pinging at range so people know there is a sub there is enough to make half of the ships leave for another cap. 

Pushing down a flank in a battleship or cruiser in a losing game and rushing the carrier will get at least half the fleet to recall. Sometimes this desperate tactic can win the game, especially if you actually kill the carrier. This also applies to many high threat destroyers. If your team is winning and you are suddenly aware of a high threat behind you, most pushes will slow, reverse, split or even stop. This can buy enough time for ships to go dark and repair and turn the tide of a losing battle. 

I would highly recommend you watch some good players archived videos on twitch. Turn the sound off, and watch how they position, when they choose to disengage, the critical kills they make, and how they push to the win in late game. All you need to do to bring win rate up substantially is to blindly mimic what better players do.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Subtle_Octavian

[WES_HoundDog]

Playing against a bunch of bots does not = good pr= good win rate.

[tocqueville8]

36 minutes ago, Kalishnikat said:

A 2493 personal rating over the last 300 or so games is apparently not enough to win consistently.

Your recent WR is more like 56%, which is basically a whole level better than your baseline 52%.

Also, PR takes into account:

• damage, which can be meaningless if you deal most of it once the game has already been won/lost, or if you face a lot of bots and focus them instead of the human opponents, obviously the bigger threat in the long run
• what the rest of the playerbase has done in the same ships. Considering you're playing mostly Tier 3-6, the comparison is largely with newbies or just bad players in general, especially when you play tech-tree ships, as people are more likely to play them when they don't have many premiums yet. The same "performance" can be rewarded with much lower PR on a ship mostly sailed by good, experienced players

As for what it takes to win, honestly, one could write several books about this game imho: some matches are won by tactics, some by strategy; some by patience, some (fewer) by initiative; still, about a third are unwinnable and a third are unloseable.

Edited December 27, 2023 by tocqueville8

[BOBTHEBALL]

20 minutes ago, tocqueville8 said:

 

• what the rest of the playerbase has done in the same ships. Considering you're playing mostly Tier 3-6, the comparison is largely with newbies or just bad players in general, especially when you play tech-tree ships, as people are more likely to play them when they don't have many premiums yet. The same "performance" can be rewarded with much lower PR on a ship mostly sailed by good, experienced players

 

Yeah it's much much easier to pad your stats in lower tier ships as that's where most of the bad/newer players are. Because their stats in those ships are being hones pretty terrible it's incredibly easy to get unicum and even superunicum stats in majority of them.

[Snargfargle]

This is why I keep losing games. I can't count how many of these I've seen running around trying to torpedo DDs.

[ArIskandir]

First mistake is equating PR to good play... You can farm PR while throwing a match.

[torino2dc]

1 hour ago, Kalishnikat said:

3 losses in a row today despite 3721 personal rating. So, again, where and when does playing well lead to the elusive "wins?" 

PR doesn't care when you do your damage and your kills. You can do a ton of damage and get a ton of kills after the game is already beyond recovery. That makes for nice PR but doesn't help you get better as a player.  

WR does care about the when. Every little thing you do to gain your team an advantage adds up with interest, so the earlier you start banking damage and the kills, the better. 

1 hour ago, Kalishnikat said:

MM decides 90% of the games, it literally has nothing to do with how well you play. 

First off, during the holiday season reasonable gameplay goes out the window. There are so many complete beginners in the matchmaker which translates into more stomps. 

That aside, in 12v12 randoms there are generally ~35% of games that are unwinnable solo; there are also ~35% that are unloseable solo. The remaining ~30% in the middle are entirely up to you.

Learn to mentally sort each match into its category, and focus on the games that were winnable but slipped away.

If you genuinely believe that there is nothing you could have done better, then post the replays and we can take a look.

[New_Jersey_prpr]

Just keep in mind that 60-80% of the outcome of a match are decided by your luck, the rest 20-40% can be decided by impactful players in the match (depending on skills)......

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by New_Jersey_prpr

[Ensign Cthulhu]

2 hours ago, WES_HoundDog said:

Playing against a bunch of bots does not = good pr= good win rate.

I'm not here to develop a strong right hand while I stare at my stats.

I'm here to shoot things, have fun and win as much as I can while doing it. 

33 minutes ago, torino2dc said:

PR doesn't care when you do your damage and your kills. You can do a ton of damage and get a ton of kills after the game is already beyond recovery. That makes for nice PR but doesn't help you get better as a player.  

WR does care about the when. Every little thing you do to gain your team an advantage adds up with interest, so the earlier you start banking damage and the kills, the better. 

Unicums know how to pad their PR in a way that helps their team to a win - the rest of us, not always. 

[Snargfargle]

A lot of the time teammates in chat can be of little use. However, there are times when a bit of firm nudging to do the right thing pays off. Our Kagero was sort of running around in circles trying to decide on whether to chase a sub or a CV. I may have sounded a bit harsh but I pointed out that the CV was the priority target, not to mention the closer one. He took out the CV and then went to the cap and took out the sub, which were the final kills we needed for the win.

 

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Snargfargle

[Verytis]

28 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Unicums know how to pad their PR in a way that helps their team to a win - the rest of us, not always. 

Unicums know how to work with their given teams, but also how to carry above their own weight.

It's less "padding", and more applying dmg, both in good quantity and quality.

 

As a player who prefers a more supportive role. I enjoy having a low PR but high WR, speaking relatively.

But I'm all too aware I need to rely less on the team, and output more consistent dmg if I care to improve further.

[Admiral_Karasu]

10 hours ago, BOBTHEBALL said:

Yeah it's much much easier to pad your stats in lower tier ships as that's where most of the bad/newer players are. Because their stats in those ships are being hones pretty terrible it's incredibly easy to get unicum and even superunicum stats in majority of them.

Please go on, this is quite interesting. ✍🏼️

[Jakob Knight]

What does it take to win consistently?

 

The only reliable way is to ensure you only fight players well below your own level and refuse to accept battle where the other team is competent.  

 

In a battle where you are well-matched, you will have a significant chance on losing due to circumstance and skill on the enemy's part, and the challenge will be noticable.  Accepting a battle where you can't win easily means you will as likely lose as win.  Doing both these will result in somewhere in half the battles going your way, and half not, which is not consistent winning.

 

Personally, I value the 50 percent win raters, as they show they are not afraid of challenges, are willing to pit themselves against their equals, and take chances that might cost them the game in order to give their team the chance to win as well.  A player with a win rate in the 60s or more I distrust, because it means the odds are that they aren't up against worthy opponents or are taking extraordinary steps to ensure they don't lose, such as playing mainly as part of a division.

 

 

 

 

[Ensign Cthulhu]

10 hours ago, Verytis said:

It's less "padding", and more applying dmg, both in good quantity and quality.

That's basically what I was hinting at, especially that last part.

[Itwastuesday]

Play strong ships with carry power rather than PR farms.

[YouSatInGum]

16 hours ago, Kalishnikat said:

3 losses in a row today despite 3721 personal rating. So, again, where and when does playing well lead to the elusive "wins?" MM decides 90% of the games, it literally has nothing to do with how well you play. 

I've taken an interest in this subject in the past and ran comparisons out to 300 game samples.

It's not 90% but is still in 20 to 30ish range depending on your criteria for "already decided."  At high tiers, once the team average WR differential exceeds 3% then there is at least a 90% chance that team will win.  That happens between 20 and 30 percent of the time.

People like John the Ruthless are literally some of the best players in the world and such probably not a relevant discussion item for us more "normal" players.  He can "see" very early on...where shots at him are going and react accordingly.  It's a special ability to have and fits hand in glove with Colbert.

Back to your original question.  If you want to win....div up with other good players.

Basically it's a legal "cheat" that allows you to stack your own team before the MM has any say in the matter.  It's also the number one reason why the random matchmaker is anything but random.  I can just about guarantee you that your solo 52% rate with become 62% or more depending on the players with you.

 

 

[Justin_Simpleton]

2 minutes ago, YouSatInGum said:

Back to your original question.  If you want to win....div up with other good players.

My question is:  will the good players div up with me?  It will bring down their win rate, right?  What would be their incentive?