Fargo

Sure it would be nice to have this option in case you really care about your nation or your cargo is super important. But then dumping cargo needs to be a decision you really need to think about. Like in RL, where you wouldnt have been treated very friendly after dumping enemy treasure. Even then it might not work, when the chance of no reward is still high enough to scare off the majority of players. We dont care about our lifes, thats the issue. It would be cool though if we did. You could make cargo dumping work, as well as surrendering in a very realistic way. If someone surrenders you could let the player decide to kill him or not, depending on the person, his previous actions, and how moral you want to be. Moral decisions that would have concequences and would define who you are, instead of just choosing pirates to be the bad guy. Just slaughter everyone, and you are likely to get killed aswell.

You are complaining about expensive ships! Doubloons should be removed as a crafting material, but the ships should remain expensive by consuming way more resources, so labour and reals.

You dont think there are lot of ships in between?! I dont care what you believe. Fact is there is more income than battle rewards. Ship cost totally depends on how many ships are lost per day and player, so the ship lifetime. This needs to be figured out. What you believe is irrelevant. Lets not talk about doubloons, they are problematic. Your point is that you need to farm 9 ships to get a new ship. But thats wrong. You could just sit in the harbour trading stuff and selling your daily labour, and you would be able to craft/buy a first rate at some point. Maybe youre still not getting it: You are not supposed to sail first rates 24/7.

You know that there are other ships in the game, and other activities than sinking first rates? You know that labour grants you a constant income, even if youre not playing much? You know about free insurances? You know that if economy would work you could buy everything you need for reals, even the ship itself for reals on the market?

The question is why do we need doubloons then? The purpose of PvP marks was to force people into PvP. Stupid, but atleast there was a reasoning behind it. When you get doubloons for the same actions that reward reals, why not reduce it to reals?! To have doubloons in the game for historical reasons? You can do this by letting players place contracts in reals or doubloons, what would be way more accurate historically, and by removing them from crafting. The whole issue is that doubloons arent used to buy materials for crafting, but they are the material.

Mechanics have to work, and nobody would ever design a game that lets players fool around with each other. Because this is simply not fun. Sure it might be fun for someone to piss off someone else by dumping the cargo. But when every trader/ship would just dump its cargo to piss off the enemy, players would just stop hunting traders/players for their cargo. No satisfaction anymore for him, less gameplay options for the others.

Why do you need to place loot in cargo to achieve this? When you want randomness in loot, you can do it either way. Sure its realistic to loot the cargo. But realism isnt focussed on anywhere else. Why here, at huge quality of life cost for the player, and tribunal effort for you? Whats the reasoning behind it besides realism?

And sailors would probably care about there lifes much more than about cargo they dont even own. But its hard to represent this somehow in game. An idea could be to give your sailors a chance to protest. So your ship could just stop and cargo dumping fails. But still you would push that button every single time after the point of no escape is reached... Same, you would just push that button every single time you can.

So you could steal your allies loot, and when he attacks after 3 warnings you can sink and loot him aswell? There might be no need for actual enemies anymore then.

How are you rewarded as the merchant by dumping your cargo? For you its no difference, youre loosing the cargo so or so. A mechanics that just frustrates other players and does nothing else, is very bad game design. A mechanic that players use every single time in a certain situation without thinking, is bad game design. If they want this in the game, dumping cargo should have a serious drawback, so it wouldnt happen very often and players would need to actually make decisions. Something like reduced reputation, if there was reputation. Or reduced crew capacity for the next 24 hours, but traders probably wouldnt care. I dont think there are good ways to balance this, so it should be removed. You could slow it down extremely so players would atleast need to evaluate the point of no escape right, but they would still use it every single time. I think it should float inside the instance then, because it makes no sense that you need to leave the instance to loot what the trader just dumped right infront of you. But thats a good idea, making the hunter choose between ship and cargo, and the trader needs to dump early enough. If he doesnt though the chase just takes much longer.

Could you stop this nonesense? I would have banned you 10 post ago for spamming unfounded claims, that are mostly just wrong. You have absolutely no idea what your talking about. What ships people use, how well PvP and RvR work, and how population develops is a little more complicated. And its disgusting to claim that all NA is worth playing for are first rates and the rest is shit. What BS people are allowed to post is insane. A similar amount of work went into every other ship, and the goal is obviously to make people use a variety of different ships. Besides that there needs to be long time motivation, and a balanced economy is 100 times easier to achieve with balancing focussing on affordable mid tier ships. Its basically a pure design decision, that absolutely makes sense in this case. And when devs want large ships to be rare, then you have to respect that. That the way they are trying to achieve this is questionable is another topic. You can sell/buy doubloons with contracts.

Economy could do what just PvP marks or Dubloons can't. It could promote complex RvR gameplay and PvP naturally. It could make unfamiliar players work together and take risks. It could connect trading, PvP and RvR. It could make all this gameplay meaningful. With dubloons for example, why should you help allies instead of letting them die, to kill and loot the enemy afterwards? Or when multiple allies are hunting one trader, why should they work together against appearing enemies? Why should you take risks? "Ganking" (=pick and choosing weak targets) is heavily promoted when its all about pure rewards. Its all about rewards/dubloons again. What about the resource value of ships? Redundant. If sinking enemy resources would actually effect their economy, this would be meaningful and fun for many players. And it would be quite easy to balance this by making 6th-5th rates very cheap, 4-3rd rates affordable, and 2-1 rates really expensive. Inflation would be super easy to handle with large ships beeing an ultimate money and labour sink. So what is the purpose of multiple currencies?! It seems it just makes balancing very difficult. When dubloons are the bottleneck in production, everything else inflates and becomes redundant. Economy cannot work with dubloons or victory marks interfering with the resource system. To make the crafting economy work it needs to become a bottleneck, then dubloons and marks would be redundant. Right now you could get rid of resources, labour and crafting all together like you did with materials, and nobody would miss anything of the current system.

Its a sandbox game! Meaning there is no need for artificial content youre having in mind. "Making ships" means complex and dynamic economy."Fighting" means dynamic conquest. Player made content, thats all content it needs. And still both isnt working, possibly because people having no idea what theyre talking about are complaining about "additional content" all the time. They didnt focus on that since years. All the time additional content is tested. New missions, new events, new ships and upgrades, new perks, new currencies, new mechanics like fishing or bottles, etc. Im not saying all this is bad in general, but it wont do much if the foundation isnt there. Also lots of stuff would just become redundant if economy for example would work properly. Wasted resources in multiple ways. Then what additional content are people thinking about. Either it contradicts "sandbox", or it would be redundant with functional core mechanics, or the effect would be minor compared to the work they would need to put into it. There arent many options. Possible ideas for example include complex AI. AI cant even handle larger ships and only follows fixed OW routes, so what effort would it take to make complex AI scenarios work. Exploration would make sense, but how do it without on land mechanics, and without lots of handmade stuff to not make it repetitive?! Impossible for such a small team.

A limited amount of labour/production per day is what would make players trade and interact with each other. Current economy would be all about trading labour, unless you drastically change and restrict the amount of different goods a player is allowed to craft and produce. (More professions would be a very good thing in general) And still this wouldnt work... The great thing about limited labour/production capacity is that everyone has similar power and everyone can be important. No matter how rich you are, how casual you are, how much you grind, and how new you are. Your are important for others, and others always remain important for you. It should be more than obvious what happens without such limits. And we saw it to some extend, just that eco was broken already when you introduced labour for marks. Think about what happens when single players are able to supply a whole nation, and why this is incredibly bad game design. Also it is independent from currency inflation, that otherwise directly makes materials and ships redundant. And currency is difficult to balance. Labour balancing is much easier, because you can define accurately the amount that players generate. Maybe you can elaborate what your alternative plan is for economy, maybe its genius... But if you want to make the current eco idea work, as a very first step labour contracts for marks/in general would need to be removed again. An important difference (especially for you) is that with production over time players need to log in more often to get the maximum out of their production capacity, instead of just logging in one time each two days. For the player this would mean that they need to manage production and plan for the future. Thats fun, adds depth and difficulty. Sure this wouldnt bring those players out to the sea directly, but it increases the probability that they would join someone asking for help, or that they decide to keep playing. Besides i would argue for the player it "feels" better and more real to craft something over time. When the problem is that alts provide economic advantages, removing economy is not a solution... Economy needs players to be limited by production capacity and professions. Therefore there most likely isnt a way to fight eco alts. Cause of the problem is that alts got accepted as part of an economic game, and thats now one of the downsides we have to live with. I know you dont want to remove anything, but making something redundant is basically the same, and even worse cause it eats resources and might be annoying.

So is anyone paying for the insurance, or is it a gold print? If its printing gold it wouldnt really do anything. If you add another gold source you would need to adjust others, ergo ships would need to become accordingly more expensive to produce. To combine insurance and economy you somehow need make the guy never loosing ships pay for the players loosing more often. In general how is the material cost determined, that depends on the current labour value, that depends on current inflation? Or is it the resource cost?

100%. They are probably going to change some numbers again and call it a new economy. I wouldnt expect serious changes. Just think about how many things would need to be changed/removed that hinder and contradict economy before you could make it work. Then how many things would become redundant when economy would be able to drive gameplay. They wont just remove all this, admitting that they wasted lots of resources and time for lots of nonesense. Also some people would always be pissed off by drastic changes. Devs care that people are pissed off, not if those are able to justify beeing pissed off. Its all about likes, not rational decisions. About pleasing people, not developing a long term functional game. Why should this suddenly change after release?! Imagine the shitstorm when you would make first/second rates rare (very low efficiency cost wise). Besides that you wont see a single proper argument explaining why largest ships should be common... its simply necessary to make economy work.

This would make most sense... but probably suggested 10 times already. Maybe this time were atleast going to get some reasoning. It makes zero sense to balance something with different rule sets, so this would be interesting to hear. Give people one general rule set that makes sense and reflects realism and doesnt change. Spawn distance is a very similar thing. While after years we slowly understood that escaping 10 meters infront of someone is bad even if we ignore the realism aspects, why allow spawns so close?! Or so far that defensive tagging is an option. Whats bad about a fixed spawn distance, that could depend on calliber/effective cannon range? We should atleast test stuff like this... Most restrictions are only needed because such basic mechanics arent working properly. Its stupid to change fundamental mechanics. Besides the argument of realism what nobody wants to hear anymore, it makes the game more complicated, in a bad way. In the end youre going to need a manual explaining what youre not allowed to do with what ship under what circumstances, etc., explaining all the restrictions, different zones, different timers, different mechanics... for a sandbox style game.

Diplomacy would also be necessary for proper trade between nations. This could only work with trade agreements, properly implemented with mechanics that inform and punish violation. When RvR works some diplomacy would probably happen between clans nevertheless. Not including it in the game just makes it more complicated/annoying and excludes many players. Goal should really be nation vs nation, not totally clan based RvR. Sure limited slot PBs will always be clan based and organised, but there is so much more to it.

This is a sandbox offering a huge open world, not esports. Freedom, not fairness. It is fair, but on another level. Its more then just battles. It requires skill to survive, to estimate the risk youre currently taking, to position yourself right, to predict enemy movement, to communicate and organise with hundreds of players, etc. When you got outnumbered, you usually made mistakes or you took a calculated risk. This ofcourse changes when the risk somehow becomes high everywhere. And only this is frustrating, loosing without making mistakes. For example beeing jumped by 10 guys next to your capital with no enemy in sight when you started the battle. Thats just extremely frustrating game design. Problem is you cant base mechanics on good will. They need to make sure that good/fun gameplay also is most effective. If running and picking weak prey is most effective, people will do so. If Hachiroku would need to start playing efficiently to make his team win, or for special rewards, he most likely would do so aswell (He wont admit^^).

Thats an analysis why gameplay sucks. Good gameplay and realism, thats the overall goal, not just my opinion... And if your opinion is that you dont care about anything else but hunting, you seriously shouldnt post here.

There is: People pick and choosing only favourable fights, while the game allows them to escape nearly every situation at any time. Ofcourse the actual problem is not people outnumbering other people. This is a sandbox, and a war game. War is all about getting advantages. The problem is having no chance to do anything against fast ships picking weak targets even very close in your capital area, for example with a local coastguard. There are safezones now because the coastguard, that always was very active and fun gameplay, was unable to defend the capital area, and sadly nobody analysed the issues: 1) No objectives players would fight/take risks for. 2) Imbalanced weak fir ships not capable of combat, basically made for running. There is absolutely no point to have such builds in a game like this. 3) Timer based RoE not allowing blockades, or to intercept ships that instead are able to sail right through you. Also allowing defensive tagging. Straight buff for speed. 4) Mechanics allowing fast ships to escape very easily, even if they already got in close combat. Especially a repair system allowing repair back to 100% without any real drawback. 5) Speedcap. (Idk if its still effecting the game. If it isnt, why is it still there?!) Allows best sailing profiles to become 100% uncatchable. Even a fast ship should give you a very hard time to get out of combat once it got close range. Speed is powerful already in the OW and for controlling an engagement, thats realistic and fine. That it also allows you to get out of actual combat that easily makes it too powerful and results in annoying and stupid gameplay, whatever you want to call it.

Sorry then i misunderstood. But you could have made clear that you want to increase ship cost accordingly a few posts earlier. But then i dont get your idea, because its not changing anything?! Its just worse having to buy/craft multiple ships at once gameplay wise, and ofcourse bad for realism. Whats the difference between knowing that you have two durabilities left, or two other seperate ships, or currency to replace your ship two times? Btw to fit a 3 dura ship you would also need 3 times the upgrades and cannons. Admiralty Connections atleast dont grant huge advantages. Warehouse slots are nice, but just a quality of life thing. I still hate it, because i already payed 37€ for the game. If this would be free to play paying for quality of life would be a fair deal, but not like this. PoE for example does exactly this, offering an extremely fair and successful payment system. You get more buildings, but not more labour. Its still bad, because it reduces player interaction for a game that is all about player interaction. Thats also why dlc ships would still be bad even if you would have to pay a fair amount of gold and labour as redeem cost.

Your argument is to remove economy because dlc ships are broken. Just give free ships to everyone.... Thats not going to work. Once again, an economy needs to be balance, no matter if you personal care about it or not. Once again, there is no reason to increase durability instead of reducing ship cost for the same effect, but without magic. Stop ignoring these arguments. Read my points about redeem cost to remove the economic advantage of dlc ships. Whats the problem with that? Just balance those dlc ships. Adjusting economy to free dlc ships, and doing this with durability both is nonesense.

Yeah, all it really does is increasing this time by 200%... For the same time period thats 200% less ship cost, 200% less resources and labour needed to be replaced by economy, and 200% less ships demanded. Not a minimal effect. Once again, the game, in this case money print vs. money sink and labour generation vs. labour sink, needs to be balanced. You cant just make stuff 200% cheaper. And if you could, you would just decrease the cost by 200%, without touching durability. Same effect, but no magic. In general why would you mess up economy just to make it more fair compared with dlc ships, instead of simply changing dlc ships to be fair compared with economic production?! Quick ideas are labour cost for redeeming a dlc ship, and dlc ships providing less currency rewards. You get a special ship you can have fun with without any effort, but no serious economic advantages. Otherwise crafted stuff would even need to become more expensive to compensate free dlc ships, depending on how popular they are. I dont see the point to compare dlc ships with durability. In the same way crafted ships would translate into much more durability than 3, when people stack similar amounts of labour and gold again because eco balancing is not existent... Its just an balancing issue. What you call multi dura is basically free labour and gold you get each day after buying dlc ships. The easiest way to balance this would be to translate materials needed for crafting into gold and labour, and make it the redeem cost.

Youre not understanding durability. There is not a single valid argument for multi dura. Economy needs to be balanced, meaning the cost per durability needs to be balanced. Besides plausibility, the only difference between a 1 and a 10 dura ship would be the entry cost, you would have to buy 10 ships at once. What isnt really a good thing.