Fargo

1 dura done right would even reduce ships prices, because of more competition. When you double the dura, you cut resource cost, the outfitting cost (mods) and LH by half, to keep the current balancing. When you want to keep the carriages, cut the resources and LH for these by half, or reduce other materials instead. (Short about LH: they define the crafting time/ship supply, but they dont make ships more expensive. For example if you double all LH needed for ships the ship prices would rise, but because of lower supply. If supply is still fine prices wouldnt change, this would only drop the value/LH. This is why you should balance income with resource cost. The amount of LH for ships depends on the LH generation/palyer and the amount of ships sinking. When on average each player sinks (not captured) one ship each two days, each palyer needs to generate at least half the LH needed for an according ship per day. You can see the value/LH as an inflation indicator. With constant resource costs more money on the market rising prices would only rise the labour value. If LH make 80% of ship prices its either bad balancing, or massive inflation, or both. In short to increase the cost you increase the resource amount or resource production cost, to lower the ship supply you increase the amount of LH. How you spread cost and LH over different materials doesnt matter.) They should at least give us a reasoning why they think its a bad idea. If there are technical limitations, im fine with that. Or if it would be too much work to change eco and mods e.g., but they want to change these nevertheless. But ignoring rational discussions because they cant compete against 1 dura this way?! We wasted a lot of time here then. But we can proofe this wrong, thats the point.

Its not like NA needs 20k players, a few thousand would be fine and NA had these players already. There was a second pvp server, because too many players. Mechanics were very simple at this time, and the game was harsh, but it was functional and never restricting. It took twice the time to get to max rank back then for example. No AI fleets or BR mechanics protecting you. All ships craftable. NPC economy. I think ow speed was also slower. But people had fun with that and just the feeling you had in NA was great. I dont see forts as a problem, but AI fleets are bad in every way. I think you can look at pvp as a result of functional economy-, shipbuilding-, conquest- and RoE mechanics. Eco needs a reset, shipbuilding and conquest is too restricted. RoE problems refer to AI fleets. In addition everything lacks major balancing.

Hmm youre right, i didnt have refund policy in mind. But thats the purpose of the refund button. If already loosing a few cutter missions makes you give up on exploring the whole game, you probably wont have fun with it in general. You sometimes loose alot in NA, and you need to learn the game. But youre right, some people just trying out the game without beeing really interested would refund.

Totally baseless. I believe nobody buys a game like this for 40$ and quits after a few failed missions. I think some people dont notice that they can upgrade the basic 4pders. Maybe give them a few free 6pd cannons, so they also dont sink necessarily in the first mission.

Of course you need basic mechanics that define the game... but these are already in since steam release. Your example is fine, the devision in shallow and deep water isnt an artificial restriction. But thats part of the conquest mechanics. Im just saying that neither focussing on new pve content, nor focussing on new artificial pvp content would help the game in its current state. Roleplay just means that you imagine a backgroundstory for your character, mentality, etc. and act accordingly. I have seen a little bit role play in NA, but i guess its rare in most games unless there are special rp servers.

Isnt that how it should be for a sandbox?! New players get thrown into a busy open world providing the freedom to do whatever they want, with lots of helpful people around. Figuring stuff out yourself makes it interesting, and its not like you can loose anything when joining the game. We dont need guiding content or a world full of events. We need players organising stuff in the chat. Just for fun, for serious pvp reasons, role play reasons, groups for pve/grinding, rescue missions, escorts, conquest stuff, whatsoever. There was no problem with boredom when NA had stable 1k+ players. No, youre missunderstanding sandbox. It depends on the content. This type of content is trying to force people to sail different ships and do certain stuff. The devs already tried similar with crafting restrictions and PB restrictions, forcing players to do certain stuff in the ow, without any good reasoning. In your case instead of restricting PBs for certain ships, you should work on an environment that makes people use different ships by themselfes. Of course thats not as easy as simply putting restrictions, but thats how a sandbox works. Its different for optional pve content, you can do whatever you want. More diversity for missions would be great, exploration could be a good way to tell some storys. The question is if it would be worth the effort. You probably dont want to do the same 3 stories again and again, complex missions would probably need better AI, etc. The point is you can add better pve content any time later. The priority for a sandbox game should be a proper sandbox environment. More conquest type content, what should this be?! Ships were used for trading, protection, war, piracy and exploration. A functional sandbox provides several reasons to log in for several types of players.

Only if pve players can find enough ships in the same time. Dont want you to stop testing, but you should keep track of important numbers like crew loss and time spend. They probably know the direct rewards for sinking specific ships.

Ok nice, but are missions going to stay?! Of course its not working with 5 players on the testbed.... also with redeemables you dont need to buy anything. If you run out of money/ships.... reinstall the testbed. But you cant produce oak without any demand, and then use the cost to argue the income is too low. In general balancing the combat income means balancing the money flowing in the market with money going out of the market (pure resource value sank, taxes, etc.), this has not much to do with personal opinion.

Good job, but are missions not going to be removed nevertheless?! Didnt they also say that gold rewards for damage are going to be removed in the future as well?! Otherwise you should stop the rough time for a mission, and note the crew loss. Assumed 20min/mission this is 114k gold/hour + LH value. Not too bad while e.g. the resource value for a 5th rate is only 60k/dura?! Its hard to say what income would be "enough", but thats not our task. Also your oak production cost will be paid by your customers when you sell it + additional income. Crew cost will drop depending on med kit value, med kit value depends on LH value, LH value depends on money value. Upgrade cost, unless they become consumption goods, shouldnt be considered. You should assume about 2k players/server, unless you already gave up on NA.

@JollyRoger1516 Would it be allowed to set an "important:" note in the steam description saying that you dont want multiple accounts and you would punish violations with perm banns? Behind this a link to a formular for people playing on the same IP. If you bought a second copy accidentally you would still have the 2 weeks refund. This would at least limit the number of alts. For NA in general there is no real problem with some alts around like we have it now. But imagine, after some steam sales e.g., 50% using alts. Then we would notice this. Assume 2k players playing and sinking ships, but actually 3k players producing stuff. They would need to adjust some balancing, e.g. the labour generation/palyer. This wouldnt be in favour of single account users. Ofcourse purely hypothetical and dependant on eco mechanics, but it is a risk you take keeping mulit accouts legal after release. Reviews saying nice game, but you need to buy two copies would discourage lots of people from buying. Another option would be an abo model. The problem now is the longer you play the more value/money you get out of an alt. Monthly cost would make alts probably not worth the money for most players.

Pretty good for you, but pretty bad compared with the guy doing 22 first rates. "Only" 1000 LH just doubles your production power. And again, actual eco has no meaning. There is no competition when everybody owns enough of everything. Fine, then the only question is about future prohibition.

Thats not my point. Try to compete as a crafter without alt, with sombody owning an alt. There is no way, no matter how much more time you spend. Im not so sure about it, but thats not my subject. If there is no legal opportunity to deal with current alts, we dont need to discuss this. But please make sure youre absolutely right on that. Prohibiting additional alts then seems to be the only option. Im critical because u usually dont get refund in early access, no matter what devs decide to do with your money. Also when i loose a second copy, i dont loose any access to the game. People bought a second copy for a second character, what is the problem moving this char to their main account? Ofcourse you need to be sure its only one person and there might be technical or effort problems. But in theory it should be fine.

When you play NA for the only reason to sail first rates, im sorry for this, beacause there is much more to the game. If anything else, all other ships arent worth sailing in your opinion, its only your problem that you cant enjoy the game until you got to first rates. Of course first rates should never be so expensive that solo palyers cant afford them, but i dont think this will ever be a problem. You are never able to totally please everyone. We cant focus on players only picking the carrots out of the soup.

Alts are pay to win for crafting focussed palyers, because you cant compensate the additional LH and contract count by playtime. Thats my view, because there is no clear definition for "pay to win". Alts, obviously only used to support the main char, just make no sense. Even the devs would make more profit if they would sell fixed amounts of LH for real money directly. Alts generate infinite LH over time = worse for everybody. They could call players to exchange their alt account with redeemables, an additional char on main account, whatsoever. If players hide their alts, thread with ban for the alt and or some reasonable punishment for the main account. Alts doing nothing else than placing contracts are quite conspicuous. I dont think there is a problem to say that the use of alt accounts just to support the main account wasnt expected, its bad for the game and something needs to be done. Isnt money you spend in EA basically voluntary support and doenst provide any ownership rights?! Also if you complain about this, you would admit that you didnt spend money to support the game, but to "cheat" in an EA game. In the worst case just prohibiting additional alts after release would atleast make them rotate out of the game slowly.

But there need to be fair steps to favour people spending more time in the game. Its not only about fun, but also about motivation. It would be super reasonable to have cost and time barriers for first rates. Nobody needs these ships, when 3rd rates are the PB meta. One fraction might play for fun only, but another fraction plays also to achieve something. As long as you can play the whole game/ use all features without the need to own a firstrate, there is nothing restricting you from having fun. Nobody wants fewer 3rd rates, but the opposite. Making large ships slower would favour small ships in 1v1 situations even more.

Timers should be set in a reasonable way and can be adjusted. Why should boarding be eased? The frigate cant spawn right next to you anymore, and to keep you in battle he needs to stay within your cannon range. In general if boarding becomes the common tactic, then something is wrong with boarding mechanics, ROE has not much to do with this. If your point is that defensive tagging wont help you anymore.. no chance.

Nothing personal... but you dont read the topics, you dont even try to understand coherences or atleast try to think out of your personal box. If your opinion is that this should be another game, keep out of this. If you read my posts you would know that im the first guy arguing against unnecessary restrictions. BOT: another option is to increase total XP again, so the player peak moves from max rank to rank 8/9.

When you just claim something isnt possible, someone should deny that. Many folks want the biggest best, thats why it shouldnt be possible to limit this?! There are multiple ways to limit first rates without any restrictions. Sailing first rates is most boring to me either, but i can keep my own opinion out of this. And why do we talk about frigates regarding this at all?! Guys like fox2run would play world of warships: age of sail if they could. We should be careful listen to them. They need to understand that we are here to make a sandbox game work, not to listen to everybodys wishes. Sadly there is nobody keeping this discussions clean...

No thoughts!?

Because either 3 3rds are stronger than one first and there wont be use for firstrates anymore, or the other way round the best pb fleet would consist of only 8 first rates. Probably first. Wrong.

There were plenty of 3rd rates, but we have plenty of first rates. Instead of 3rd rates beeing valuable and firstrates beeing special, 3rd rates are useless and firstrates the common PB ships. Then you have all first rates sitting in front of the ports. How do you explain them why they are not allowed to join? Then i would prefer to restrict the crafting.

That would be another artificial/unnecessary restriction in a sandbox style game. A good way to achieve less first+second rates is to set appropriate costs for first, second and 3rd rates. E.g. assumed a first rate is 40% stronger than a 3rd rate, then the cost could be 80% higher. Of course 3rd rate cost needs to be set to make these ships quite valuable already. No restrictions, no new mechanics are needed.

Well, the problem with good ships for a long time was the 50% speed chance. On average this doubled the cost+time for a good ship. Given the amount of golden trash ships around i doubt there would have been a problem with the amount of ships. I mean direct restrictions saying you are not allowed to do x, if... like br limit, defensive tagging used to refuse pvp, having to spend perk points for better game mechanics, ROE ofcourse (but thats more complicated). Lets say you would have to collect pve points to be able to attack a player, similar to hostility. There can be a lot of stuff restricting pvp directly. Fear of loss is restricting you indirectly. This means there arent enough (competetive) ships around, so ship value becomes so high some people dont risk sailing. Of course thats really bad. There should be very valuable ships, but these should not be needed to be competetive. This would be a win win situation. There would be a motivation to play for the perfect ship, and it would be the perfect inflation control. With more money around people would buy more golden ships, not really worth the money. All you need is balancing, and that is the problem. We cant say ok lets make fine ships competetive with golden ships and increase the cost to make it perfect. This would need some time.

I think the majority in a game like this is neither pvp, nor eco fan, but a healthy mix. And for a good amount of these palyers pvp only isnt enough to keep playing. Looking at two years of economic development after starting with a very simple system, its consequential that many palyers left, at the latest after hyperinflation messed it up completely and devs didnt care about it. Some people want to activate pvp with additional pvp content, but pvp doesnt need anything in that direction. If there are players, ships, and nothing is restricting combat, there will be pvp, its as simple as that. Of course players leave faster and faster as the palyerbase shrinks and less pvp is happening, but thats not the cause of the problem. The economic part is important, like it or not. When youre forced to craft as a pvp guy, then because the eco guys left. If i was eco only, i probably wouldnt be here anymore. Of course its not only about eco. More and more restrictions for lots of aspects probably made most palyers leave. Of course eco is required for pvp, in the same way pvp is required for eco. As a pvp player within a functional economy your "job", and the best you can do for it, is sinking as many ships as possible and maybe producing some resources. Nothing forces you deep into it. And regarding one dura, especially for pvp players it would increase the income, captured ships would be valuable. *otherwise i very much agree on all of your points in this post I guess you cant really define it, you need to figure it out. In general i would say your ship is not competetive when it restricts your gameplay. When by default fast ships are too slow to catch anything. When combat ships cant negate the material disadvantage through skill against average skilled opponents. When you cant win against another boarding ship because he got better marines.

Markets are dead right now nevertheless, just ignore that. We have lots of resources, but most of them are used for the same purpose. Imagine we had professions, there wouldnt be much choice. But forget about it, its really not important or worth to discuss.