I've made it to Tier7-8(*) in World of Warships and I know understand why some people call it World of Wargrind(ing). Game time has increased to some 30 hours per week. In terms of skill I can now mostly hit what I aim at and also get away with it without dying in the first 10 minutes. I usually score around the middle (every player gets awarded points according to some wizard formula that evaluates how well you played the game). I've had several #1s (MVP) and I don't place last anymore.
(*) There are 10 tiers of ships reflecting the increasing size/technology level of warships between roughly 1900 and 1945. Matches happen between 6-12 ships of roughly equal tier +/-2. If you show up in a ship that's lower than average for the match, you're said to be "undertiered".
Skill makes a difference (hit what you aim at), but doctrine is also important (don't overextend, support your local destroyer, always think about egress).
At this point I have about 250 hours of total playing time. In ERE book definitions that would make me an "apprentice": Trusted to do simple jobs w/o supervision. That sounds about right. I still can't do strategy like making decisions of where and when to push the objectives to turn the battle. Basically, I can tell when single ships are about to do something tactically stupid (and mostly avoid it myself) but I can't "read the map" and see the strategic flow of all the ship movements, so I just try to follow along. Strategy is still a random component for me, but it is clearly not for some of the more experienced players. (In comparison 30 hours per week is a lot, but it is not the highest. 250 hours is so-so but not compared to thousands.) OTOH, I am developing a bit of a personal doctrine for the ships I play.
There are 5 ship types: submarine, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, and carrier. As far as I can generalize, doctrine should very much match the exact ship you play. E.g. don't play a fast ship like a slow ship, etc. This is harder than it sounds. Books like The Inner Game of Tennis come to mind. What characterizes a good player is not how they pull of heroic moves but how they don't make mistakes. I've also spent a disturbingly large amount of time reading about warship armor configuration and projectile penetration. Nerding out actually matters because my previous strategy of googling "what is the best ship" backfired a lot... What was a good ship two years ago might be a mediocre ship today because the old ship was "too good" and became nerfed in the mean time. In order to do it right, you pretty much have to know what you're doing. You can't just lean on copying others and expect the same level of success. Sounds similar to personal finance, doesn't it?
A lot of my experience tracks with
https://sirlin.squarespace.com/ptw which I think was posted earlier in this thread. It describes certain player types and warns "not to be that guy". Don't be that guys are definitely present in the game. I'm at the point, where I sometimes catch myself being frustrated with certain other players and developing opinions @#$@#$. This takes the fun out of it a bit, so I just try to work around it.
At this point, I would compare my level of play to where I was with pickup inline hockey. Matches are basically random players doing their own thing. Coordination may happen spontaneously (in which case it's a beautiful thing) or it may not (in which case it's every ship for itself, usually leading to defeat). Fortunately, the game is both old (8 years+ I think?) and big. There is a possibility for ranked battles and divisions which is something I haven't touched yet.
In terms of the economy. Yeah, I'm now rather well aware of how the wargrinding works. The game economy has multiple different currencies. You can't trade with other players, just the game, so basically PvE-style. The economy basically determines which ships you get access to and what matches you get to play. E.g. each game rewards a certain amount of credits depending on how well you played and which ship you played. Thus if you're not performing well---likely you're in a game with the big boys and get totally smashed---it'll cost you more credits to play than the pay out. When your account hits zero, that's it for that ship. Back to the junior leagues with you. This is a pretty brilliant way to ensure that people don't "play above their paygrade", at least not for very long. Much like the real world economy. (And much like the real world economy, you can use USD to get some advantages, but eventually that value flows to players with actual ability. E.g. you could support a fancy ship with actual dollars, but you'd likely get killed more often than not because your skill doesn't match your ship. This in turn lets to skilled players winning more often making them able to sustain their fancy ships without paying USD.)
Does gaming feel meaningful yet? Nahhh.. I think I need a better definition of meaningful though, since I've been almost exclusively focused on "throwing starfish back out in the water" over the past 15+ years. Is it fun though? Clearly! Perhaps more importantly for retirement is the constant availability! Unlike, say, pickup hockey every Tuesday and Thursday between 7 and 8, this is really something you can spend 30hrs a week on---indeed 168 hours if you wanted to. (The main reason I don't do more is that my brain is fried in a way that it hasn't been since undergrad quantum mechanics.) There are ALWAYS players on the servers, even at 6am on a Monday morning. I'm one of them.
