Development blog

Greetings, Captains!

A winter chill has blown in, and with it comes a number of holiday-themed updates coming in Update 13.11! 

Expedition to the North Pole

Captains, we want to remind you that the Expedition to the North Pole, featuring the adventures of Li Wei and Olaf Lundgren, which began with Update 13.8, will be coming to a close with the release of 13.11. With its conclusion, exciting New Year gifts will be waiting for you in the Port!

Starting with December 1st, everyone who log in to the game client will be able to collect their gift! Even if you didn’t have a chance to participate in the activity during previous updates, you will still be able to claim a Tier VIII tech tree ship as a guaranteed reward. Meanwhile, the most active participants of the expedition will receive a free Tier X ship along with additional rewards. You still have the time until December 1st to gather enough Expedition tokens to upgrade your ship and get all of those gifts!

So far we have announced North Carolina, Implacable, U-190 and Akizuki as available options for Tier VIII ships, while available tier X ships are represented by Schlieffen, Audacious, Balao and Shimakaze.

Stay tuned for our final revealing announcement about Expedition to the North Pole later.

Nordlyshavn Port

The first thing you'll notice when logging into Update 13.11 is that we have a beautiful new port with a Christmas tree! 

Once you take a closer look at the tree, you might notice it could use a little sprucing up (pun intended). You'll be able to add 2 different sets of decorations and ornaments to the tree by just playing the game and completing daily missions! 

By selecting the Christmas tree in the Port,  you'll access a dedicated interface to the decorations, missions progress, and your rewards.

Each day, you can earn one ornament by playing 2 battles, and another for a total of 7 battles that day. Progress for these missions will be displayed in a special window next to the tree, separate from the Combat Missions tab to keep everything neatly in one place. You'll have 10 different decoration slots to customize the tree to your liking!

Decorating the Christmas Tree will also enhance the appearance of the Port itself and you'll be able to enjoy the festivities from multiple perspectives!

Not only will you make the port look more cheerful, but you’ll also earn rewards for your efforts! Decorating your Christmas tree with 10 decor pieces will award you with 1 Day of Wows Premium Account, 1x Winter Strands permanent camouflage and a Santa's Gift Container. If you collect all unique decor elements, you’ll receive a New Year Sky permanent camouflage, 3x More Coal containers, and the By the Fireplace flag.

Festive Rewards

Our Holiday celebration would not be complete without some Festive Rewards to earn! We got overwhelmingly positive feedback for the quality of life improvements we applied to this feature for our 9th anniversary - so our Update 13.11 Festive Rewards will work the same way, the only difference is our themed New Year rewards! You can read more about Festive Rewards mechanics in our 9th Anniversary Development Blog publication.

Festive Rewards will be available for every ship of Tier V and higher in your port. To get a Festive Reward from a particular ship, you'll need to cumulatively earn a set amount of Base XP in any Battle Type. There is one festive reward available per ship.

Once again you can speed up the process of obtaining festive rewards, as you'll still be able to get them for all of your Tier V and above ships without having to play each one individually. To do this, you'll need to complete a recurring cumulative mission for gaining 1,000 Base XP. The number of additional rewards depends directly on the size of your fleet and should make it significantly easier for both captains with fewer ships and collectors with large fleets

In case you have gained more than 1000 base experience by the end of a battle (or several battles), the "leftovers" automatically carry over to the next iteration of this mission.

You will be able to claim festive rewards starting from December 1st until the end of Update 13.11.

Additionally, we would like to remind you of a mechanic which got introduced for our 9th Anniversary: even after receiving a Festive Reward from a particular ship, you can continue playing on her as long as you want to activate additional rewards for other ships in your port.

The rewards are very similar to last year - check out the list below!

Players can obtain the following rewards in exchange for Santa's Gift Certificates:

Additionally, you will be able to obtain Santa's Gift Certificates as an extra reward after completing the Event Pass. 

Updates to Santa's Containers

On December 1st our Santa's containers sales will hit the servers again!

As 13.11 rolls around, we'll be making a few improvements to Santa's containers. First and foremost, instead of the previous trio, there will only be two containers to choose from for this holiday event: Santa's Gift container and Santa's Mega Gift container. Since most players favored these two containers last year, we decided to simplify the container choices.

 

As usual, we've also updated the list of ships that can be found in Santa's Gift and Santa's Mega Gift containers for Update 13.11. We’ve removed 23 ships and added 18 new ones, resulting in a slightly reduced total of 145 ships, down from 150 last year. This means you’ll have a better chance of receiving one of the new ships! Plus, many of the removed ships can still be acquired through direct purchase in the Armory.

You'll find the lists of removed ships and added ships below. 

But that's not all! This year, we’re introducing a new and valuable reward to Santa’s containers: the Golden Gift container.

Golden Gift containers contain a variety of valuable rewards such as Research Points, Steel, unique expendable bonuses, as well as ships Chikuma II, Prins van Oranje, and Georg Hoffman, including their golden versions!

We decided to add the Golden Gift container without negatively impacting your chances of receiving the most popular rewards like ships or doubloons from Santa’s containers, so the drop rates for these items remain unchanged from last year. Instead, we’ve focused on removing or reducing the chances of some less popular rewards, such as New Year Sky expendable camouflages and expendable economic bonuses.

Here you can see the difference between the Santa's Mega Gift container from last year and this year's Santa's Mega Gift container.

Now you may be wondering what is inside these Golden Gift containers – let's get straight to it!

The Golden Gift container can only be dropped from Santa's Gift and Santa's Mega Gift containers. 

Remember that each type of Gift container, like all other containers, has a guaranteed drop mechanic for ships only. That means there is no guaranteed drop mechanic for Doubloons or, for example, containers. To receive a guaranteed ship, you’ll need to open 10 Golden Gift containers, 100 Santa's Gift containers, or 15 Santa’s Mega Gift containers, respectively.

And here is the new content of Santa's Gift and Santa's Mega Gift containers for this year!

Please note that all information in the development blog is preliminary. Announced adjustments, features and names of content may change multiple times during testing. The final information will be published on our game's website.