Aetrion

I really like the idea of having crew be a limited resource that needs to be preserved more than ships, but at the same time, I feel like if the game has a crew system that gives such a significant drawback to using a ship of the line then the fact that they have arbitrarily reduced durability just kind of turns into a double tax on them. It also seems to me like losing crew only when durability hits 0 just further encourages scrapping 1 durability ships instead of taking them back out to sea to avoid the losses. Personally I think having the game based more on your ability to recruit and retain crew than on making captains buy their own ship makes a lot of sense. It opens all sorts of avenues for interesting gameplay that is more in line with how battles were really conducted back then, because a huge amount of it comes down to a human element, where morale and honor and loyalty were just as essential as gold and cannonballs.

This game doesn't really have PvP, it's more RvR (Realm vs. Realm). Viewed on a grand scale of empires being at war with each other the game makes sense, since unfair fights are a normal part of a war. On the small scale, fight by fight it's not really balanced for satisfying engagements though.

I think there is an argument to be made that crew should be a limited resource and capturing ships should "cost" some crew.

Which then also means "Independence doesn't exist in PvP games", and that's kind of a dealbreaker for people who want to be able to just log in and have some fun and not spend all their time following a group around. Problem is that independence and going off on your own is kind of a quintessential part of the appeal of the age of sail, so once again the game screws genre fans for the sake of the clanwar crowd.

I think what's better than moving on is coming back later. Of course every game has a limited lifespan, and trying to design it as though it will never end often means it misses out on being as good as it can be during it's life cycle. But a game doesn't have to occupy people's time for a solid block of time and then they quit forever either. It should be an inviting place to come back to visit, and embrace that people sometimes want to do other things and then come back later. This is why I feel strongly about allowing more casual play. For a lot of people leaving and coming back to a game isn't something that happens over the course of years, but something that happens over the course of months or weeks. I find myself totally obsessed with a game one week, and playing another the next, and it may be a month before I come back to that game. There will never be an MMO that I won't ditch for 3 weeks when a new Elderscrolls comes out, so any MMO that can't handle me being gone that long is running the risk of not getting me back afterward for example. That's why I have a problem with the game being so clan centric or based around constant upkeep, because that completely disrupts that way of playing. If you really need a clan to do anything worthwhile in the game you run into a situation where you can't just leave for a month and come back later. Same with losing progress in the form of ships. If you leave while you're on the bottom of the fun-curve you might not ever feel like coming back, which is why it's better to have systems where you naturally recover after some time. Especially right now in early access there is nothing wrong with people popping in to check out how it progresses and then playing other stuff again. That should be expected during early access. People don't have to prove their devotion to the concept by spending all day in an unfinished game, it's perfectly reasonable to explore other games and let their experiences with other products flow into their feedback here. After all, it's better to learn from a man who has read a thousand books than from one who has read one book a thousand times.

Money isn't the main problem though, it's the fact that replacing ships isn't reliable unless you go for the 6 pack economy versions. They should just let you rebuild ships that you already had at the very least. Overall I think this game is really ruined by the whole ship loss thing in it.There are so many better ways they could have done loss mechanics that wouldn't result in basically having people avoid fights alltogether and making playing outside a clan just painful.

I think there is room for the game to be a bit of both. An RPG doesn't have to be a strict progression from one thing to the next most powerful thing, in fact a lot of games are gravitating away from that again just because of how much it taints the genre. Instead a lot of new games are trying to go more into what is called horizontal progression, meaning instead of getting more powerful you gain versatility or deep specialization. I think that goes together well with wanting to build a system where there is no such thing as a "top tier ship" that is simply better than the competition. I'm going to bring up Black Desert again, because that game does IMO an incredible job at having that global tactical endgame for guilds in combination with a crafting and trading system that runs through the acquisition of real estate and hiring of workers, making moving of goods into a major activity, and all that while also being an open world action RPG with full PvP that you can casually enjoy because big risks only kick in when you're stepping up to conquer a kingdom or some big reward activity like that, not if you just want to fight people for fun. That game just has a lot of great ideas on how to run an open world game in a way that is both extremely deep and accessible. This game could really benefit from similar systems. The one major thing this game needs to solve beyond that is figuring out how to make the various ship types all be desirable to use somehow, rather than having them just be a progression from weakest to strongest. What if you picked a style of play between "Combat" "Survey" and "Commerce" and ended up captaining ships of the line, frigates or indiamen accordingly? Rather than building the game from the ground up around the idea that every ship is simply a collection of hitpoints and guns you go straight to "What is the ships actual mission?" and build gameplay around that. The game doesn't have to disallow combat between those different types of ships, but it can simply separate their purpose and lines of advancement in terms of what the admiralty actually gives you gold for doing with them and what type of XP you earn by running them. It simply doesn't have to force someone who just wants to fight to grind to get the right sized ship for a battle, nor does it have to deny someone who wants to explore and patrol a meaningful path of advancement by just placing all the ships that do that mid-tier somewhere with no deeper advancement. The commerce side of things is entirely neglected by just having these weird trade versions of tiny ships that can carry enough materials to make entire ships of the line somehow, that needs to be expanded on anyways.

So that's somehow not an argument in favor of having a bit more nuance in the game? I personally find it a total joke that people can just fart conquest flags at each other all day long and to some people ships are basically meaningless. I'd like to see systems where attacking a port is a much bigger deal that has a lot more collaborative lead-up. I think it also depends heavily on how you go about earning money.

The current leveling system is flawed because it's conceptualized as a progression toward bigger ships, which the game then contradicts by slapping huge pricetags on big ships that make your progress meaningless unless you put in the hours to actually continuously afford those vessels. The result is a game where the progression system is stalling out the people who want the strategic warfare and the strategic warfare is stalling out people who want the progression. That's exactly why we need a redesign of these ideas that let them make more sense for both kinds of player. To make leveling up motivating you need to actually get something for it. Something that's yours to keep. Simply being allowed to use bigger ships in a game that is choke full of systems that are meant to discourage using bigger ships just doesn't make for a positive experience in leveling up. At the same time to keep the strategic warfare of the game motivating you need to give people the ability to meaningfully increase their capabilities by being successful in warfare, and to deny those capabilities to their opponents by defeating them. Both of these ultimately require that there are ways in which you can increase your power that don't come down to just owning a bigger, better ship than the other guy. The fact that right now the entire game is built around ship = power and ships are restricted in both ways just makes for a less than ideal experience for everyone. People who enjoy just plugging away to improve and customize and upgrade their ship can't get what they want, and people who enjoy looking at ships like buying units in an RTS also can't get what they want. You basically have roleplaying game sensibilities and strategy game sensibilities rubbing against each other in a counterproductive way. They need a little more distance from each other, and that means the game can't try to force both of them into one single object that determines 100% of your capabilities.

Nobody is asking for the devs to "rewrite the whole game", just to consider going forward in a direction that keeps the essential thematic aspects of the game free from all the clanwar stuff that most people don't have the time or inclination to deal with and instead have some other goals for people to go after. You can't expect people to simply change what they enjoy until the game suits them. With that logic I might as well say you should just play bejeweled all day and change your tastes till you like it. Why are you so angry at people who just want the game to accommodate multiple different styles of play? It seems utterly irrational. Nobody is trying to take anything away from what you enjoy, they merely want the devs to also add some of what they enjoy.

So stop playing the game? I guess that is what you want everyone who doesn't enjoy the same things as you to do. Stop acting as though people are somehow deficient for not wanting to be cannon fodder.

Again, the fact that most of the people who are currently playing this game enjoy the one thing it does doesn't prove anything other than that everyone who doesn't like that thing isn't playing the game.

Elite Dangerous has exactly the same problem though, it gives you absolutely no incentive to play the game if you don't have the time to pay the absurd upkeep for the good ships in it, since there is effectively no way to get stronger that doesn't boil down to putting equipment on the line that you simply can't afford to lose unless you're an obsessive grinder. Going on the PvE server usually has very little to do with not ever wanting to fight another player, and is more about wanting to be able to go to the bathroom or refill your coffee without getting ganked. The problem is not that people can't figure out how to protect their stuff, the problem is that they find the game boring as hell when they are forced to play that way. Avoiding fights is easy. Having fun in a game where you avoid fights is hard.

I would actually really like having admiralty rules in place, but the rule against engaging lower rate ships said you had to offer them a chance to surrender before opening fire, not that you couldn't fire on them if they refused or opened fire on you. Larger ships generally weren't all that much slower than smaller ones. Even their maneuverability wasn't that much worse once they started turning. The main difference was that making any change at all to how their sails were set took a lot longer. Ships simply didn't have "responsive controls" so to speak, every move had to be planned in advance, and the bigger the ship the further in advance you had to plan it.

I don't see why we can't have both. Add a meaningful progression system where you can keep what you earn to the game that takes a few hundred hours to fully get through, and most of your "casuals" will be perfectly content while all of the hardcore people will blaze past that in no time anyways. All the systems that the hardcore players want and need are perfectly possible without crapping on the more casual side of things.