Anolytic

Trying to have a conversation in clan-chat right now is like:

From today: I broke this one up just because you wrote about it. It's not proof of anything except that the output can vary a lot. Previously in the week I've been getting the same numbers as @Redman29 and @PG Monkey. If you've noticed less returns for more than a week you might simply be having a bad streak of luck.

For a solo/small-group player who mostly go to PvP-zones but wants to be part of big fights of many ships without having to join a big clan and go do RvR with all its investment and effort, this change will severely affect their opportunity to continue to experience the game in the same way. If they continue to look for interesting fights to join this is an example of how their PvP options would progressively restrict until they eventually would only be able to join the battles of one other nation: In this example the player is Polish, and the green checkmark indicates the side that he joined in each battle. There needs to be an exception for Patrol Zones at least, so this playstyle is still possible even if significantly limited.

As someone who voiced varying degrees of scepticism of all of these three mechanics, I submit that in my experience and to a greater extent from observing behaviour and feedback from members of my clan and nation these points are all true. Wind boosts - bring people faster between hotspots for PvP (PvP happens most often at either end of a journey, near the departure or the destination, and windboosts lessen the time players spend on the journey between contact points). Wind boosts also serve as ambush locations where people wait for passers-by. Which is negative, but positive also as it makes the windboosts themselves hotspots for PvP. Patrol Zones - I never liked them personally (mainly because of the RoE), but they serve their purpose and the people who enjoy them spend a lot of time sailing around them (in OW). Lokis - are interesting as you say. I would only hope that they would be fixed so that players cannot escape battle with the AI ship they lokied, but can exit the battle and hand the ship back to the control of the AI. And also that we get back the full reward for sinking lokis (PvP-mission) which made lokis much more tolerable to the victim.

When you see these icons.

I think you're looking at this from completely the wrong side. At least the opposite perspective of most (PvP-)players. When people go hunting for PvP, they're not looking for what side in a battle they can help. They are looking for what side in the battle they can hurt. You're hunting pirates, and you see a battle against pirates, you want to join against pirates. You don't care if it's danes, brits or russians attacking the pirates. If the battle is open you're joining. But now... if you ever joined a battle against danes, brits and russians you're not gonna be able to fight those pirates. Don't you see how this is HUGELY exploitable? Anyone who wants to be practically invulnerable better just bring a friend from another nation sailing with them while raiding. You see a gank squad or somebody chasing you that you don't wanna fight, just attack each other and you then have a better than even chance that your pursuers won't be able to join either side of the battle at all.

Sooo...you're saying that for every choice we make in PvP from now on, we are limiting our future choices in PvP? By definition we're all eventually only going to be able to join the battles of ONE other nation, if any. And that nation might be different for different people in the same clan. People from the same clan, sailing together, in the same group, will not be able to join the same battles. Did you take into account that alliances change? Or that a nation you're allied to might be enemy with another one of your allies? Or the fact that there are different clans within the same nation with different agendas. And sometimes you know that a particular clan is in an area or battle and you join against them even though you would not join against other clans in that nation. Does every exploit have to be countered by an extremely restrictive mechanic that punishes all of us, especially the ones who never abused? Why can't we just go on reporting abusers and they get banned, but the rest of us can go on using the mechanics normally.

Whoever reads reviews for a game they already bought though?

I'm pretty sure it used to be that when you would sink somebody that lokied into your battle, this would count as a PvP-kill on your PvP Hunt mission. I've seen my kill number rise after lokies invading our Hostility missions. And it makes sense. After all, when you get lokied, it's PvP and when you sink them it's a PvP-kill that comes up in combat news. And getting lokies run you the risk of all sorts of griefing, apart from the chance that they might successfully sink you, the loki might decide to run away with your AI to deny you the kill or just prolong the battle to waste your time. Sinking the player should be rewarded. Today I got the kill on a Loki in our battle. Yet my PvP Hunt-mission was stuck at the same number as before. I know for a fact that I never sank the same player before in my mission, because he sent me a message in-game and it was his first time ever using a loki and I never fought him in OW. So was this removed, or was it an illusion that the feature was ever there? In which case I would like to propose that it is added, for the reasons stated above.

The screenshots show clear abuse. And I can add that despite apparent pretence, both Belfast and STX1111 are chinese players, same as CNS. It seems they are working together. I'll leave the official repercussions to the tribunal, and I hope you get your ship back. But REDS do not accept this kind of behaviour of our players and the player Belfast will also be given sanctions by the clan.

Let's settle this. Ships are content. When you add new ships to the game, you add content. When we buy DLC-ships we buy content. So far, the new Victory DLC is great content. It’s a beautiful new ship-model that I’ve enjoyed trying out so far. Regardless of how disagreeable the chosen implementation of imported ships may be, and how counterproductive to gameplay (economy, warfare, consequential loss/victory) - others have elaborated on this before me, I’m not needed to rehash it - every ship model is content. Naval Action is a work of art. The map, the sky we look at, the waves that stir the ocean we sail across, every island and piece of land, every harbour with its buildings and every combat with all of its details. And every ship-model is a piece of that art. With a unique design, look, feel, sailing characteristics and sailing profile. And a lot of the ships that have been added to the game are truly great models. Every time a new ship is added to the game - for free or as a DLC - I view this as new content to explore. To study and appreciate every detail of the new ship model up close, to feel how it sails, and to see how it performs in combat. Every new ship is hours of new content. This is what I buy DLC-ships for. To experience every ship the game has to offer. I would buy them just the same if all we got was a crafting permission and not a complete, redeemable ship ready to sail. In fact the inability to craft the DLC-ships diminishes their experience by quite a bit. And this content that each ship represents is why I’ve always been regretful that the Yacht is not released also as a purchase-able DLC, as I was a few days too late to discover the game to get rights to the Yacht. This is also why I dislike that we have some ships in the game that cannot be regularly obtained by players. The Diana, Santa Cecilia and Admiraal de Ruyter. We may have the event going now, for the second time. But we have no way of knowing when, or if, they will happen next. The ships we collect now are practically irreplaceable, and for that reason will stay in most players docks or reserved for PvE, and never truly offer their experience and content fully. For a new player, coming to the game after the event has ended, these ships, along with the Yacht and Pandora are for all intents and purposes not in the game and not content available to them. These great and beautiful ships - and we cannot really enjoy them. If by some chance you missed out on both of the current Diana event weekends, you’re in the same boat, literally. On the other end of the scale you have the still awaited Trincomalee DLC which despite the fantastical price tag doesn’t actually add any content at all to the game for the price, seeing as the Trinc is already in the game since a long time ago and easily and effortlessly accessible at that. Indeed all it does is reduce content, by reducing crafting which is part of the content of the game. However, for now I wanted to appreciate the beauty of the new Victory model, and to share it, and to that end I made these videos to show off its form, alone and in comparison to the old Victory model (please excuse the paint). P.S. I previously made a similar video of the Christian VII:

I understand your answer completely. I'm speaking respectively in descriptive terms about what happened in the battle, and about how the mechanic should be improved. I'm saying the current mechanic is not working good and leads to a lot of unsatisfactory battle results with defeated enemies escaping under our noses. You're implying we were neglectful in that battle for making a tactical tack in the course of a hard battle 2v2 against heavier opponents with more BR than us so that we could reengage and finish off a target that we just completely disabled, kept shooting throughout, and had an extremely reasonable expectation would not be able to escape given he was on fire and pumping water and getting shot at. You're saying we should have been at his broadside. But this was a 2v2, not a linefight. PvP involves manoeuvring. Are we back to bow- and stern-tanking being a thing which we changed so much to remove before? Do we have to keep track of (guess) how much damage a fire is actually making, because it might not be enough to keep him tagged? Besides this being a completely new system that we have not had time to experience or learn, there used to be a premium on systems being intuitive. Defeated ships escaping is not intuitive. How will new players react to defeated enemies magically despawning right in front of their eyes after a half hour hard fighting? How does this case have anything to do with anti-griefing? What's the point of PvP when we have magical escapes? No. I'm speaking about if my boat is leaky but I have a really powerful pump that keeps up with the inflow of water. If all that's preventing the outside ocean from becoming the inside of my boat is a really powerful pump then my boat is not a very good one and I would buy a new one. Some who play this game have only time to do PvP once per day or less. How will they react if their battles conclude in the same way as you see in the video.

What about the fire? It should have reset his timer (realistically), but didn't. You're taking specific points out of context rather than responding to what can be seen in the video and is described in my post. Ignore what I wrote in the F11-report. I wrote that in a haste, as I was hurrying to get on with playing with my clanmates (the game is released, and F11-reports are no longer a part of the game exerience, but a courtesy), and only to give a reference point to the battle where this happened. What this is about is what can be seen in the video and is described in the post. Target was "sinking", maybe not technically the way you define it, but realistically, if I have holes in my boat that are so severe I cannot plug them, and I have to constantly pump it out to keep afloat, then my ship is sinking and I'm just delaying it. By this definition it would be impossible for a ship in sufficiently shallow waters to be considered sunk, because eventually the water on the inside will be as high as on the outside and will cease coming in, and we should be able to ground our ships to keep them alive and escape. And we didn't "let" the ship sail far away. We were tacking - while shooting entire broadsides at it. And Redman was still quite close to it. We were shooting at his stern, which is where his fire was located. How it is an anti griefing mechanic, that a ship can leave which is on fire and has people desperately trying to douse said fire, has to man the pumps constantly and urgently to keep the ocean on the outside from coming inside, and also has so low structural integrity that it can hardly move. Maybe it was always a flaw, but the new tag system has highlighted that ships with crew on survival should be considered tagged. Until you can repair your ship back to an integrity that will keep the water out of its own. The mechanic was meant to protect from griefing. In what way did El Dictator get protected from griefing? Sure, the mechanic let him escape when he realistically shouldn't have. Good for him, but that doesn't make it not broken.

But you changed the mechanic for keeping ships in this situation in battle until finishing it off. Before, shooting this ship with even one ball in the stern or mast would keep him tagged until you can reposition to shoot his side one last time. Now it is impossible to keep him tagged because he can sterntank entire broadsides without taking enough percentage damage to tag, because when you get down to 1 bar of structure you don't loose structure through the stern anymore, only masts if lucky (which is a reasonable restriction to sterndamage in most cases, introduced because we didn't want ships to be killed entirely through sterndamage without even damaging the sides). Again, I challenge anyone to watch that video and determine for themselves if his escape is realistic or constitute a reasonable mechanic. You say that this was like that forever and isn't going to "suddenly change", but you specifically just "suddenly changed" the tagging mechanic - which affects this situation and created this problem. So then either you need to reverse the new tagging mechanic or make additional changes to adjust for unintended consequences. Or we have to live with broken combat mechanics.

So what you're saying is that this is not a bug, but working as intended. But then the intention is wrong. It is neither realistic, nor reasonable that a ship that is on fire, with hardly any structure, low sails, and no way of running away, should be able to magically disappear from 250 meters away, while being constantly shot at. What is the purpose of this mechanic? Is it "griefing" that we have to tack our ships before we can finish him off? Should he be allowed to escape just so he doesn't have to wait 2 more minutes to sink? Even if the water coming in didn't keep him tagged (it should be, even if pumped out), then the fire should have. I called it a "bug" in the title (I only mention the word bug in the title) to be nice, but I acknowledge that it might simply be a bad mechanic. I encourage anyone to look at the video and decide for themselves if this is a realistic or reasonable conclusion to a battle. As anyone can see, the target ship is literally dead in the water when it escapes.

This morning we came across what appears to be a serious flaw in the new tagging system. It used to be that if a ship had any crew in survival, whether it was dousing fire, plugging a leak or manning the pumps, this would count as a continuous tag and the ship could not leave. This prevented such situations as a ship 50% filled with water escaping. This appears to have been neglected in the new system. An enemy ship was able to escape battle from right under our nose, while taking in water and being on fire all the way up until its escape. Oh, and don't think we neglected to shoot at it all the time until its escape. I recorded the instance here: And I sent an F11 report from the battle instance later: NAB-101635 At 4:25 you can see the ship disappearing from the instance. And the smoke from the fire is hanging in the air where it vanished. At 3:36, less than 1 minute before, I ask @Redman29 to confirm the ship is still on fire which he does. The ship had 1 bar of structure left and would have been taking water. Any ship with less than 2 bars of structure will be taking water, although until it goes below 1 bar it will usually be enough to have 30-70 crew on survival to continuously pump that water out. Still, this on top of the fire should have most definitely kept the ship tagged while we did our tack going back to finish it off. On top of this the fire, if we disregard the survival-crew-equals-tagged rule from previously, the fire burning away armour plus the repeated stern rakes we aimed at the target, should have easily been enough of a percentage damage on the ship to keep it in battle. This percentage damage needs to be calculated from remaining HP and not base HP or this is going to be a repeat frustration with the new tag system.

I'm on my phone and won't write here my point of view on the topic, but I will point out that the dlc was not billed merely as a gift, but as compensation for reduction in price of the base game, to those who have already purchased it at the original price, and as such people are free to judge this compensation and voice their opinion. Whether we were owed any compensation at all in the first place is another matter, games see their price reduce at some point after release all the time, however it was promised.

I've known some players to buy (more) alt(s) solely and simply for the added dock space to store their ships. Which is frankly a mark of a serious flaw in the system and extremely silly on many levels. I would support this suggestion, but I believe they are now supposed to be posted in the appropriate topic already made by admin and in the right format.

Very sad to hear.

Naval Action Community:

Port investments, seasoning, admiralty books, labour contracts. Oh, and teleporting...

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