World of Warships Celebrates Launch With Streams, Giveaways, German Battleship

Normally, when a ship launches, there's a grand ceremony and a bottle of champagne that gets shattered against the hull. While Wargaming doesn't seem to be sacrificing any alcohol today -- well, not on the hull of a ship anyway -- it does have plenty of other stuff to celebrate the full launch of World of Warships.

Ranked battles officially go live today, and there's a 3x XP bonus for your first win of the day until Sept. 21. You can also tune into the Wargaming Twitch channel from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. PDT, where the team will be streaming gameplay and giving away prizes. Or, for more guaranteed loot, complete this survey about Wargaming's livestreams to get 250 gold or doubloons.

Along with the launch comes the game's first German ship, the enormous battleship Tirpitz, which can be yours for a not-insignificant number of deutsche marks. This is probably why Germany racked up so much debt in the World Wars...