Commanders,

There has been a lot of controversy in the community lately regarding the recently-released Premium Ship Graf Zeppelin. We would like to share an update on the situation, as well as our thoughts on how we believe we should proceed.

First of all, we realise the ship definitely did not meet the expectations of the community. It is clear that we didn't put enough effort into fine-tuning and finding the right balance and play style for Graf Zeppelin. We really wanted to release her for Gamescom and uphold tradition, but could only do that with dive bomber setups. Torpedo planes on Graf Zeppelin had been positively received in the first round of testing, but they were too powerful and we did not think it was suitable to release her with torpedo planes.. This was a technical limitation, but also a choice we were fine with, as we thought we could balance the dive bomber setups to be competitive.

To make things worse, the final changes that were done for her did not through the usual procedure and community contributors did not have a chance to correct the previews that they had prepared, which meant that what they showed to their audiences was different from what was eventually released on our live servers. We admit that the decision to release this ship in the current condition was wrong. We should have spent more time working on it and we need to take responsibility for this mistake, as well as apologise to the community.

A separate but very connected topic is the situation with iChase and his removal from Community contributor program. After reviewing our decision to remove iChase from our contributor program, we agree with iChase that our decision was hasty. In hindsight, we should have reached out directly to him and talked about our concerns. iChase has been developing great WoWS content for years now and deserved as much. We would like to apologise to iChase for our hasty decision. In our passion to protect our development team, we acted too quickly. We will learn from this and use this situation to improve our Contributor programme. We admit that the decision to release this ship in the current condition was wrong, and we should have spent more time working on it. We would like to take responsibility for this mistake and apologise to the community.

However, we know that a simple word of "sorry" is definitely not enough in this case, so we will do the following:

First of all, the refund policy for this ship will be changed. No matter how many battles you played on it, until it is fixed you can request to have your purchase refunded by following this link https://asia.wargaming.net/support/tickets.

How to get your refund:
1. Click This Link
2. Click "Submit Ticket"
3. Click "WoWS"
4. Click "Billing Support"
5. Type "Refund"
6. Click "Problem Not Solved. Continue"
7. Type "Refund for Graf Zeppelin" in Message box, then click "Continue".
8. Click "Submit the Ticket".

To those players who would like to keep the ship and help us make it better, we would like to invite you to participate in further balance testing.

This would follow the steps below:

Starting from now we will remove the ship from sales.

All owners of Graf Zeppelin will be invited to provide feedback about her and to communicate with the dev team alongside community contributors, super testers, and WG employees in a special Facebook group created specifically for this purpose. This could take a while, as we believe there will be different options to try out. It will also be the first time that we try something like this. We hope that together we can get it right and make Graf Zeppelin great again.

After the re-balancing process is complete, the finalised version of the ship will goes live with an exclusivity period of 3 months. This means that Graf Zeppelin will not go on sale during this time and will only be available to the owners who have chosen to keep her.
We will also create a custom permanent camouflage for Graf Zeppelin, which will only be available to players who bought the original ship. Players will also be invited to take part in the creative process to figure out what this camouflage will look like.

We are sincerely sorry for this situation and for causing frustration where there should have been only satisfaction from getting a great new ship and a boatload of fun.

We're now manning all action stations to fix it and to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Signed,

Daniil Volkov, Development Director World of Warships

Alexander Nikolaev, Regional Publishing Director, World of Warships, NA

Artur Plociennik, Executive Publishing Producer, World of Warships