Another month, another big update. This time we are taking look at what’s coming to Modern Warships in July. The focus of this update is definitely the market function, although there are some other neat new additions. Let’s start with the undoubtedly most important one.

The free market

In addition to the existing item shop and the premium shop, there’s now a new place where can buy items, called the free market, sometimes also known as the flea market.

First, let’s start off with the new currency you’re going to be using to buy stuff from other people. It’s called “Artcoin” (lol art) and I kid you not it’s only obtainable through selling equipment you got from the battle pass. What if you don’t want to sell your items? You can also buy Artcoin for real money in the game’s store. Apparently, the reason Artcoin is not grindable is to prevent the Chinese bots from hacking it and crashing the market. Yes, you read that right. It was to prevent the “Chinese bots” from “hacking” it and crashing the market. And these are the developer’s words, not mine. 

The market is very simple. You put items on sale, someone with enough Artcoin buys it and Artstorm takes a 20% cut from the payment. Here in the alpha test, we’re broke as hell so people resort to selling equipment and buying it later for a lower price. However, you cannot control who you sell the equipment to or who you buy it from, which removes the ability for players to actually plan trades. 

Yes, you can also sell ships you got from the final tier of the battle pass. And the equipment you put on them will be sold with the ship too, same goes for upgrades. You can’t sell hero equipment and you can’t put hero equipment on ships and sell it with the ships either. 

There have been some market-breaking glitches as well, the worst one being people losing equipment they put for sale. This also happened to me once- I put my compound apache VIP pass helicopter for sale and it first said “common error” and when I tried again, it said “you do not own this item”. I checked my inventory and it was gone. My Artcoin number remained the same and it wasn’t on the selling market either. It just vanished. It got so bad, they had to disable the market altogether for maintenance. Luckily I managed to get my heli back when I opened a ticket in one of the game’s discord servers (it was unupgraded tho). Hopefully, the devs will be able to fix these kinds of glitches before the public release.

Also something funny: you know how the devs said the arsenal ship would be available for purchase in the free market? Well, it’s there in the alpha test. The problem is that no one has it so no one can sell it either. So we all made an offer to buy it for 1 Artcoin and no one got it lol. The offers are just sitting there.

New ships and equipment

Well, moving on to new ships and equipment we have the announced battle pass stuff such as the VIP exclusives BAE Tempest and Taranis aircraft, the new railgun cannon called Sahi-209, and a new carrier by the name of DCNS Evolved with a locked air defense slot. The railgun is available to everyone in the free pass. I hadn’t tested these things yet as the majority of alpha testers don’t get the new battle pass and therefore cannot review it either. I will edit this information in after I get it, tho. 

What we did get, however, were the new strike fighters called the Rafale M, and new ships USS DDG(X) (T3) and RF Breeze (T2) which I also tested. 

The Rafale striker is very good. It costs about 3 million dollars and despite the fact you can buy it in the shop with cash it feels like a VIP pass exclusive. Its missiles are very powerful (for now, the alpha test is unstable and there might be changes) and it also has torpedoes and AA missiles to combat basically anything in the air, on the water’s surface, or underneath. 

USS DDG(X) feels very similar to Admiral Gorshkov, the difference is in it’s HP and armament. The layout is the same, except DDG(X) has 3 missiles in the second slot instead of 2 and it has a 3X customizable AA defense slot instead of the locked 1x one on the Gorshkov. Yes, Gorshkov also has a locked Zircon while DDG(X) has an unlocked missile slot, but that can be neglected as it doesn’t really make much of a difference. It’s very powerful in terms of burst damage but still doesn’t come close to ships like Pyotr Velikiy and Jeongjo the Great. Also, feels a bit weak while you wait for the missiles to reload as you can only damage the enemy with the cannon during that time. 

RF Breeze is yet another boring missile and torpedo-focused T2 ship which doesn’t have anything interesting to set it apart from the other ships in the tier.

Graphics and interface

While there aren’t many graphics updates (blobs now appear on your screen when you’re flying through clouds), there are quite a lot of interface ones. 

Now there’s a “ready” button all members of a squad (except the leader) need to press in order for the squad leader to be able to start the match. There are also tier filters in the ship store now, meaning you can traverse it without the need of constant swiping left and right to get to your ship of choice. When you buy something from the equipment store now, the game won’t throw you into the inventory tab. This basically removes the risk of selling something you just bought immediately after buying it because you didn’t realize you’re in the inventory tab. 

Aside from a couple of bug fixes (yes the underwater heli thing was fixed), that’s about it. I will expand on the VIP pass section once I get it.