Anolytic

I would really like to see the "hanging" St Andrew's Cross from 1710 in the game. As seen here on the Poltava: Source: https://flot.com/publications/books/shelf/flag/3.htm Also, I haven't seen this exact flag in any sources yet: But I really hope we will see in-game the naval jack where the St Andrew's Cross is thicker and in blue:

How can Banished be at fault here? According to the screenshots he got tagged and is therefore the only one who had absolutely no choice in what side or any to join this battle. There is a question about what considerations players should make in choosing what side to join in a battle. Based on precedence I'm not sure the rules are clear enough on this and I also don't know the circumstances well enough regarding why BF-players ended up on the opposite side of ALOHA. As far as what happened once inside the battle it is hard to find a case for any specific rule violations. As long as there is no green-on-green fire or ramming, and no intentional blocking then beyond that it is hard to make any judgements on any possible behaviour in a battle without severely limiting player tactical choices. Regardless of what was the reason here, it is often reasonable in a PvP-fight to pass heavy ships without firing while fully reloaded, and instead fire on smaller ships in order to get more guns out of the fight faster. Worth noting on admin's post that is referenced above here is that if viewed in context it is clear that it refers Port battles. Besides, based on the screenshots, all accused players got several assists and kills, so it cannot be said that they did not fight in this battle.

Nice!

As they should. But please reduce the relative price of 3rd rates significantly compared to 1st and 2nd rate ships. 3rd-rates should be the workhorses of the open sea, as they were historically. And give us more ways to meet those costs. RvR should (almost) be able to pay for itself if your team is averagely successful. Apart from buying and transporting resources each player should not be forced to do a ton of PvE/Patrol zone grind in order to fund his RvR. In RvR, logistics should be the bottleneck, not grind.

Cut off date is release I believe.

Cool. Interesting, however I think the shallows might rather loose some of their charm with a bunch of 5th rates sailing around. I still think this is very good to test however. Especially now that tutorial allows everyone to bypass the lower rates and jump straight to 5th rates if they wish to. One thing though: Make max rate (for earning rewards) 6th rate in the shallow patrol zone. Hmm. I'd rather not to be honest. Why are we going back to this exactly? You have me waiting on pins and needles.

It was a good idea, and devs implemented this feature in a very good way. But the gameplay results just weren't that good. It focuses RvR very much on very limited parts of the map, quickly creates a winner-takes-all game, and most importantly: RvR-gameplay is imposed on those players who have little interest in it. As much as possible, RvR should be an autonomous and self-motivated system that does not affect non-RvR players overly much. Non-RvR-players don't care if they pay taxes to one clan/nation or another. But they care very much if they cannot sail the same quality ships as their counterparts for reasons that they have no impact on.

AFAIK it will still be there when you log on next. You definitely don't have to claim the reward on Monday. It is only the first opportunity to do so.

You cannot claim the reward until after maintenance on Monday (next). Your reward is based on your rank on the leaderboard after the whole week.

Personally I don't think that the incentives are the main problem. The cost, i.e. risk, is the main factor. Considering it is easy for absolutely any conquered port now to make profit for the owner with little effort, the owning ports is actually more profitable now than before. The problem is that the rewards do not match the risk, and the amount of grind required both for rising a port and for building the ships. If successful RvR would offset some of the grind, i.e. by rewarding owning clans with a pension of doubloons balanced to allow rebuilding RvR-fleets that are lost. Another option is clans that own ports will have extra insurance on their lost Lineships. Insurance that also recovers say 60-80% of doubloon cost of a ship. Those who want to use a Lineship only to grind AI in reinforcement zones can afford to grind a couple of thousand doubloons to build their lineships. Those who want to do RvR every evening cannot afford to have to spend 3-4 evenings grinding doubloons for every lineship they have to replace. So the insurance would work that as soon as you participate in RvR your RvR-ships have extra insurance. Screening is definitively a problem also, exacerbating the risk/reward factor. This has been pointed out an endless amount of time, but if we ever get back to a well populated server, most port battles are never going to happen simply because it is extraordinarily easy to screen out any attacking fleet now that all ports have very limited BR rating. Sounds like a worthwhile idea, but I don't see it as really changing that much. Currently this is not necessary. Again. Ports can easily make profits now with relatively little effort from port owners. With a higher population, ports will automatically be profitable. Your plan to improve the economy to implement distances in trade goods profitability - if you also implement it to make trading equally profitable outside of capitals - will make most ports on the map into potential gold-mines. I don't agree that this is a factor at all, but I nevertheless agree that Victory Marks should not be possible to convert from doubloons. I would rather seriously consider making the reverse conversion possible though, turning victory marks into doubloons. It would expand the RvR pension as I suggest above, with much less coding. Yes. For ships - NO. Just no. I do not get why we are constantly getting back into this track of suggesting changes that enforce certain playstyles. I want my playstyle enforced on other players no less than I want others' playstyles thrust upon myself: I refer to your post in the link above. Moreover, we simply cannot have the (semi-)clan-based RvR that we have now and then add on top of that RvR-exclusive ships or content. This will give to clans the ability to arbitrarily restrict core content in the game from players. Giving control of RvR to clans is a good thing as we have got now. But then you must be careful what dependencies you build between RvR and other content. It is bad practice to tell people who want to sail all the ships, but simply cannot get into an RvR-clan for whatever reason (teamspeak, past history, general likeability, etc.) that they have to go re-grind on the PvE-server to get access to some of the content. YES. Absolutely. Docking fees sound potentially interesting. I do however completely oppose the idea of ports locked down by clans. At least for as long as there are RvR-strategic crafting-resources with limited availability. In RvR everybody has to have reasonable access to the same strategical resources and modules. Otherwise those who do not have access will feel like they have no chance and cannot get ahead even if they work hard, and that will tear on communities and in the end reduce RvR and challenges. Maybe the clan that owns i.e. Cartagena should get some drops of Tar for free, or have access to cheaper bidding. But RvR-important resources such as for instance French sail and Cartagena Tar should be available to all that can afford to buy it. Winner-takes-all sounds cool until the looser tires of it and quits and then there's nobody to challenge the champion. This is boring for the winner as well. Whoever is the dominating fleet on the server at any time needs to be constantly challenged, and for that to happen it needs to be easy to challenge them and recovery after a failure needs to be quick and easy. Even the winner has more fun successfully beating back attacks 19 times only to be finally defeated on the 20th run, than if the challenger has to give up after 7 attempts.

It is a know bug. You do indeed claim it after maintenance on Monday, so before maintenance you would not have been able to anyway, but if you are not able to claim it now then it is a bug. Try accepting the new event, then just try to click into the event and the leaderboard a couple of times and it should eventually claim the reward for you. If not, make an F11 report and contact Ink.

We already tested severely limited ships of the line in Summer 2017, and since then I think only a small, but vocal group - players that don't do RvR and don't themselves sail big ships - has asked for a repeat of the experiment. First Rate Spam hasn't been an issue for most players for over a year. After conquest marks became abundant, but still required participation to get, First Rate accessibility became quite balanced. Patch 27 broke that balance. Because he might be able to afford 1st rates, but his clanmates/nationmates who do not have the time or motivation to grind for doubloons cannot. And because even if he builds 25 1st rates to give away, he still needs 24 clanmates to log on and sail them. It doesn't help to have a few very rich players when they have nobody to play with. I see fewer and fewer people log onto my Teamspeak and in my clan each day as even the most dedicated and optimistic players tire of grinding the patrol zone for doubloons and see no reward in the form of end-game content. And the prosepect going out in big fleets again like we had so much fun doing before seem farther and farther away. The grind to fun ratio has skyrocketed for anyone who play the game now mostly for the end-game (RvR). I have probably 30 2nd and 1st rates in my docks, and I sometimes take them out alone or with 1 or 2 friends. But even so I am acutely aware that the risk to reward ratio makes it outright wasteful. Replacing a 1st rate means at least a couple of evenings of boring grinding just for the doubloons. This is completely different from having to maybe wait a couple of days for another Victory Mark, which can be bought or borrowed in the meantime if you cannot wait, or having to collect and sail resources which is a completely separate type of gameplay which brings its own risks and joys, and which a clan can help each other out with. This might be a Prussian problem to deal with, but it is not a general RvR problem. Most RvR-clans craft ships in their own nation, and no clans would rather pay tax with their alts to an enemy nation for valuable resources than own the port themselves and collect the taxes themselves as well as being able to use the alts for something else.

It's a novel idea, but in practice there would be no valuable woods for whoever sailed to those ports anyway. Goods would be monopolised by players with more time to teleport in and buy up all the stock at regular intervals (or an alt permanently stationed that just needs to be logged in a few times a day. This would only serve to make contracts absolutely useless, as there would be no resources left over at maintenance to deliver to the contracts. The good thing about contracts is that they facilitate price competition. This makes it an actual auction rather than everything going for a set price from AI. What is wrong with those with deeper pockets winning the bidding war? Merchants would never hold onto their stock just in case some customer came by and sell it dirt cheap at that, rather than making a profit by selling to the highest bidder. People with contracts also have to transport their goods out of the ports when their contracts are filled. Unless they craft in that port, in which case other materials need to be brought in. There is no less open world sailing if you sail there and are guaranteed to get what you need, or if you sail there to pick it up only after you have stockpiled what you need. The only way your proposal could work would be if: Contracts only fill at maintenance. AI stocks the port with goods during the day. However to buy a resource directly from port without contract you have to pay 100% above the current highest contract bid.

Again though, do you know this? Because again, the wording hasn't changed since the patch that changed ports from "producing" trade goods, to being supplied with trade goods. Moreover, provided you are right and they did ninja-nerf the "trading company" option, then that would make it a fake feature. Btw, to get back to OP's original question, the question of how trading company works is kind of a derailment. As OP is wondering why his ports appear to drop no resources whatsoever. That would have nothing to do with trading company level though, because whatever it does affect, it gives a 50% bonus to drop rate/production, and 50% of nothing is still nothing.

It says "all" resources. So nothing about this being only from our buildings. And the "production" part is left over language from when trading resources was still produced by a port and not delivered by invisible NPC traders.

In this case the mechanic is very incorrectly named. After all it's "trading company level 2" and not "production company level 2". Also it makes it a completely useless mechanic (also known as a fake feature), since our production buildings generate way more resources than we have the labour hours (or need) to collect. Are you sure about your assertion that the trading company upgrade to ports only increase production in buildings? At least it used to be that we used to apply this upgrade on ports in order to increase generation of trading goods and of special resources (cartagena tar, copper ingots, etc.) in particular. Not completely sure if it ever worked though.

Could we discuss not just what loot you can get, but also the looting mechanic itself? Looting is now one of the most important and prominent features in the game, and yet it remains the most frustrating, game-breaking, time-wasting mechanic imaginable I'm sorry to say. Every time I have to sail upwind for five minutes to loot, with nothing else to do except to wait while my ship fights the wind, and everytime I just can't loot because the wind just started turning right in my face, I get the brief impulse to uninstall.

I agree with this in principle. But having been pirate once (for all of two weeks), my experience is that most players who already play pirates are care-bears that just wanna role-play Pirates of the Caribbean or some other cartoonish pirate movie against AI (nothing wrong with that btw). When I was there we still had outlaw battles and even that was waaay too hardcore for most pirates and it cannibalised the population and caused non-stop whining (until we organised some clans and chased the watch-the-world-burn-types far away from Mortimer). There's no way any of those would be able to handle being in a hardcore nation. They joined pirates because they liked the black flag or because they didn't feel the appeal of any other nation. Pirates are a catch-all nation like GB, that people choose for role-play (cartoonish) reasons and safety in numbers (ironically). At the very least, if pirates were made hardcore, all current pirate faction members would have to be given a free set of Forged Papers to be able to scurry away to more noob-friendly nations.

That's a good idea. I wonder if nobody thought of that before? Though I think it would maybe be better if our false flag was randomly selected from the DLC-flags and standard flag when we joined another nation in battle.

Wait, this shouldn't even be possible? If someone from a 3rd nation has chosen side in a battle, then members of his faction are locked to joining that same side as the first. Unless there is a pirate exception to this. This seems like a green-on-green violation if he rammed you and blocked you. But it also might be worth looking into if it's a bug that he was even able to join the side he did.

Yeah. That sounds about right. I had that bug too on Monday, sent an F11 report also, though my guesses about the cause were somewhat off and I was suddenly able to get my rewards afterwards. On monday I clicked in on the event. Instead of being able to claim my rewards I was only able to take the mission anew. I even entered the event and looked at the leaderboard a couple of times. Then I sent the F11, and after that, when I went to look at the description again to see if they would clear up my confusion, the doubloons were suddenly redeemed.

A lot of people tell me when - and why - they leave, and no, that's never been it. Lineships being too restricted however is a frequently mentioned reason. First: Shouldn't the game be made for the players, rather than the players for the game? By that logic, some players adapt by playing other games. Also, I clearly remember some players asking for the referenced playstyle before it was implemented. So your claim rings a little false.

According to my screen, looking at the leaderboard you have only 5 kills. So you should have 5 left. Some more description of the event in the UI would be very helpful, as I got really confused first time I did one and when i tried to claim the reward yesterday. But from what I have experienced and seen, only kills while you are in a 4th rate counts. If the leaderboard as I see it is correct, only the kills you describe doing in a 4th rate has been counted.

Lol. Thanks. I guess size of the vessel = size of the mind. For your information, if you don't see me on the water, it's you who are in port. I see plenty of ocean every day, thank you. I make the arguments I make because I actually care about other players and their enjoyment of the game. I listen to the concerns and complaints I hear from others even when I don't share them myself (I remember arguing to test limits on lineships only because I heard you rover-guys constantly complaining about there being too many players only in big ships on the sea). And in my clan and nation I help new players get into PvP rather than always instantly telling them to go to the PvE-server. Jeez, we're constantly hearing that we shouldn't be so negative in the forums or we'll loose potential buyers, but wonder how many players we could have kept if the first thing new players hear when they voice their troubles with the game in the forum or in global chat wasn't "go play on the PvE-server" or "can I haz your stuff". I can still play and enjoy this game solo or in small groups, but I admit that I enjoy it more when I'm with 49 friends going at each other trafalgar style. You talk about "fear of loss", I'd argue that it's more "fear of grind". You say that after a break you learnt not to fear loss, but what I really hear you saying is you stopped sailing big/expensive ships, so isn't what you actually got rid of risk? You can't loose if you don't risk. I don't like to loose what I spent time getting. But it's part of the game and I don't fear it. I still sail fully decked out 1st rates. I sail my Christian VIIs. Everything can be replaced and I play enough and with enough alts that I can afford to do so. It's a chore, yeah, but without risk there's no fun and no point. You can dream of convincing everybody to stop their "fear of loss", but I live in the real world where some players will always fear loss. It's a multiplayer game and it has to be accommodating even to more than just one individual player. Or there will eventually be a population of one.