Fargo

Assuming youre going to fix and balance economy after the next wipe, how is the effect of free ships (= free labour+gold) generating currency going to be compensated? Especially if larger dlc ships get introduced, it could result in one half of players having to pay with more expensive crafted ships for the free ships of others. I would suggest to keep dlc ships small, or to reduce currency rewards for dlc ships. And to finally make the largest ships an expensive ultimate currency sink, so people always have something to invest extra currency and labour in while smaller ships can remain affordable for everyone. Maybe also redeeming a dlc ship could cost some amount of labour, as kind of a middle way between just buying a dlc blueprint and getting the free ship. Also increase repair cost for larger ships by alot, so in general PvE farming isnt several times more effective than using medium ships or doing PvP. With exponentially raising income a medium ship cannot be affordable for a mid rank captain, while remaining valuable for a high rank captain. Also crafted repairs should be significantly cheaper than npc repairs to generate demand for crafted repair items.

Everyone has to care about the OW stuff, because years ago the decision for this was made, and everyone should respect that. But do you understand that there only are traders you can hunt if trading makes any sense for other people to do it? Do you understand that people would give you a good fight when they had meaningful traders to defend? Assume loosing would matter somehow for you, say there is a kill/death ratio providing rewards at season end. Why should people not run from any unfavourable fight? Not caring about anything but PvP is extremely short minded, while whole PvP basically relies on everything else. You cant just add PvP to this OW. You have to make it work somehow. And the lazy route of just forcing the gameplay you want with conquest or trading marks does the opposite.

Eve has meaningful gameplay, because it has a working concept and thoughtful, working mechanics. Why is nobody understanding this? People dont play these MMOs just for fun combat, but to make progress and to achieve something in the game. You simply cant do this in NA. Player statistics and NA legends (cancelled?!) should prove that NA just as a meaningless combat arena isnt working. How obvious do things need to become?! Just take the economic aspect. Eve has an insane amount of professions/skills/careers. You have the freedom to do whatever you want, and it always will be meaningful and demanded by other players. NA has exactly one profession, and this one profession is absolutely meaningless. Since people can farm and trade labour, a single person could in theory supply the whole server with everything, while everyone else just grinds. Eve wouldnt even laugh about this, so ridiculously bad is this game design. And it would be easy to improve. Trading, resource production, material crafting, low mid and high tier shipbuilder, upgrade crafting that also can be divided. Possibilities are there. But devs have this "the game needs to work for a single player" mentality, what is simply nonsesense. Then further you can base conquest/politics on e.g. gold and silver, strategically located, needed e.g. to craft the best upgrades, or maybe to allow you to craft 3/5 ships without RNG, just make it important without making it restricting. In addition, vary the production efficiency for different goods in different locations, to also make trading meaningful. Thats a concept that can work. PvE or PvP doesnt matter if you make it work. But there is a simple reason NA needs to be PvP focussed. Its just so much less work to give players the tools to generate their own content, compared with doing basically the same stuff (and most likely worse) with AI. AI cant even control large ships properly, how do people seriously expect complex PvE content from a small dev team? PvE content can always be added later without problems. But NA needs a working core game at release.

Just that the first sale was relatively late.

You were talking about interest. People giving it a try seem interested in the genre and age of sail. Why they dont stay is another question. Returning of players after the wipe last year to the level of 2016 also shows that the interest is there. Dont just generalize everything. Could be, could not be, neglectable. Analyse the game unbiasedly and you will figure out that there are issues. NA also didnt loose 90%.

I think they missinterpreted "community driven development". Because this doesnt mean that you dont need any concept for your game. Players know what they like, but not how a game works. Devs have to figure this out and then keep it on the right path. They are responsible to ask the right questions and to check if complains are reasoned. That they blamed the community already for "bad" decisions shows that they arent aware of their responsibility. How do you explain past player counts beeing up to 6 times greater? You should rate a game based on how it is promoted, not on how much hours you got in it. A game threw away its potential, its going to get a bad review even after 2000 hours.

You can spawn ships at the distance you want. For example at 700m barely inside control range. I dont get your points why it shoudnt be possible. When a ship appears infront of you and he has the wind, then thats how it is. Why should you magically get behind him?! You can manouver as much as you want, when you get within effective cannon range combat starts as it would in reality. Battles arent fought at 700m, there is plenty of room to manouver. You can also increase control + spawn range for more room, at cost of longer lasting chases. Engine limitations?! We only change the condition for the instance to open.

Im just talking about balancing and there is no reason this should not be possible. You could keep npc goods. But these dont justify labour and gold inflation. They never properly tested anything... And if people hate that they dont get free first rates anymore we shouldnt care at all. If it turns out that low and medium ranks have problems to get ships thats completely different, but no reason to cause inflation. We could make small and medium ships ridiculously cheap, if just other ships become more expensive accordingly, without effecting inflation. Infinite possibilities to set this up. They not tried one, and if you ask devs they dont care about inflation at all. Dynamic trade between nations or just production port and capital is a more complicated topic. But if players would just trade their labour on the market, it would already improve alot. What has afk sail to do with economic balancing?!

Why.... Why make 80% of resources, the whole player production worthless and 20%, npc goods artificially made rare, extremely valuable?! Why refuse to fix labour and gold inflation?! Why not just balance labour, gold and production rates to balance player production / to make all produced resources valuable? Keep npc goods, but they arent necessary and bad for several reasons. Why not vary production rate and labour cost to make special resources more valuable and rare, while prices remain dynamic?

It doesnt matter if we like current marks or not, its simply not working and bad game design. OW isnt required for this kind of PvP. Same goes for PBs motivated just by marks, works perfectly without OW. The result: A redundant annoying OW that just slowes everything down for no reason, enables exploits and promotes unfair behaviour. We need to figure out how we can make the OW work from economy to conquest, not how we somehow generate more PvP. Otherwise everything you do will remain meaningless. Make marks as valuable as you want, your action wont serve any purpose in this OW. Now imagine you had to deal with that on multiple full servers.

Why? Ofcourse its a buff for ships missing chasers and its ment to do this. Its just a fair and reasonable mechanic, why should something like this be a perk?

Magic is only the ability to escape while still in gun range, and to prohibit escaping based on a meaningless gun hit. Real fights started and ended based on distance, it would be 100% reasonable to adopt this for NA. For years it was most annoying to see ships escaping right infront of you, good to finally see this improving. Hopefully they extend it to all ships and fix ships spawning ontop of each other aswell.

Why would you try that when you can avoid it by thoughtful game design? PvP marks are the opposite. Seems pointless to discuss with shortminded PvPers. Realise that NA is not supposed to be a brainless PvP arena.

Im not a PvE player, and crafting has nothing to do with PvE either. So how are you going to handle punishment with multiple full servers? You dont. No its not the same...

And with such mechanics its never going to grow. They are valuable, because their rewards are special npc goods artificially made rare and OP/highly demanded. Such marks and items are designed to force specific gameplay. Thats not a good thing. Especially when the headline says "sandbox". Marks just reduce it to PvP for the sake of PvP. In their current form they even demote you to play together while everyone is hunting for the kill. PvP could be so much more than this. I wonder where this is going. Trade marks? Crafting marks? Place contract marks? Shipbuilder marks? Surrender marks? Sail no firstrate marks? Just need to design enough demanded items... If you want rankings, why not do a proper ranking system based on win/loose ratio and enemy rating. With BR and based on battle outcomes instead of pure kills you can do this in a very fair and reasonable way even for all kind of group fights.

And you would call this a "basic" supply?! Furnishings can be bought via marks/PvE btw. Why is this safe zone active while your nation owns half of the map? Shouldnt it only activate e.g. when a nation gets reduced to a few ports? Newbies can be protected by their own zone or mechanic. What about seperated, risk free and highly rewarded PvE. Intended? I dont think so. I guess some people moved production to where the ships were needed because towing was disabled back then.

Thats promoting selfsupply. Even if you would restrict it for single players with professions for example, you cant stop clans from organising themselfes. What is totally fine and not necessary. But we must not promote this, to atleast give clans no reason to not use the open market. With a complex fair tax system it might work, but we dont have that. In case thats true, define basic selfsustainable economic growth. You should agree that 100% efficient gold grind and 100% efficient resource production is more than that, and obviously not working for the game. Efficiency seems a good way to promote gameplay in a plausible way, instead of forcing it with restrictions. Only requirement: a balanced economy to give efficiency a meaning. To make people produce resources in multiple/far ports, make production less efficient the more people produce the same resource in the same port. Decrease the production rate to a minimum of lets say 40%. Going for 100% you need to spread out. The larger your population, the more ports are required -> conquest motivated. Plausible, and fair for different sized nations. Thats also how trading based on economy related resources could work, without ever restricting the ship production. Different production efficiencies in different locations naturally would result in different prices. Just vary labour cost and production rate. Then enable viable trade. Add politics including trade agreements -> less risky trade between nations. Make the use of trade ships a specialisation to make people sell in production ports -> short range trade/nation internal trade viable. PvE needs to be balanced as the major money printing machine, or this concept of PvE funding all resource production needs to change. Besides that mission rewards could also decrease, e.g with the number of missions taken the previous day in that port. Plausible, more candidates usually results in less payment.

Seems were back where we started. Poor screening guys have to beg for marks / nations need to organise mark distribution by themselfes. Issue with npcs: If npcs are freekill, thats just annoying grind. If npcs are challenging, youre just loosing against any players joining. You get gameplay thats either annoying or frustrating. The problem might be kiting, outside or inside the instance. Maybe hostility just isnt a good mechanic. Wasnt it ment to simulate front lines? Atleast thats how i remember it. The question then should be if it achieves that goal. If the frontline part isnt working, whats so bad about flags. The time between flag and attack can be set how we want it to be. It could e.g. provide enough time to tow defensive ships to where theyre needed. Buying flags atleast seems a good way to consume crafted materials, war supplies are in the game already. When people buy lots of fake flags they just seem too cheap to craft.

It didnt work because once you got a large ship your grind income increased exponentially. Also conquest wasnt working, people had just all time to grind for the largest possible ships. When no ships need to be replaced, you can make ships as expensive as you want without effect. Those ships need upkeep/repair cost that results in similar or even less income than mid lvl captains earn. Balancing in general becomes impossible. You cant make mid lvl ships well accessable for mid level captains and at the same time still valuable for high rank captains like this.

What? I try to point out issues/ to improve based on your information what NA is aiming for. Realistic ballistics and cannon performance of the period. This is misinformation. Then you told me carronades are realistic. A carronade looks like a carronade, thats the only thing thats currently realistic about it. Neither performance/penetration nor trajectories are realistic. Your penetration even contradicts basic physics. You totally ignored that and knowingly lied about trajectories. Btw. regarding easy aiming, realistic trajectories would mean flatter trajectories and less aim prediction.

I dont want this to be realistic, youre telling us its supposed to be realistic... Just make clear what you want. Its your game, i dont really care what this is. I do care about wasting my time because of misinformation and bad communication. Sorry for my research, wont try to help again. Maybe people would like exactly that, because thats immersive. And wouldnt tracers or hit markers be a better solution than slow melons?! Did you try atleast to speed up the melons? Okay ill stop now.

In this case yes. But a cannon at distance x would cause exactly the same damage/splinters than a same caliber carronade would cause point blank. Dependant on distance and angle a cannon could cause even more damage than a larger caliber carronade point blank and 90°. To simulate this damage would need to depend on your penetration (affected by distance) vs. target thickness (affected by angle). You then would only define that a 24 Pd barely penetrating does e.g. 60 damage, damage for long, medium and carronades would be calculated realistically.

I dont intend to buff or nerv carronades. Penetration values are 0% realistic while you advertise realism. You cant just model your own penetration curves. Penetration is tied to velocity/physics. For balancing we can only adjust muzzle speed and accuracy. Trajectories arent wrong, but muzzle velocities are. I tested 18 Pd long and 32 Pd carronade by measuring time over 250m and comparing trajectories of different velocities. Your 18 Pd seems to fire with ~300 m/s, the carronade with ~150 m/s. Those guns wouldnt penetrate anything in reality. If your speed of sound is accurate it also shows that balls are too slow. What also is not realistic. But thats a minor issue.

Totally not what im talking about. Seems youre neither dealing with the market nor caring about profit. Ofcourse you can give away stuff for fun or wellfare while youre rich nevertheless. Its fine if thats fun for you, but respect that its not working like this. What makes shipbuilding fun and effective is figuring out stuff, competing on the material and ship market, maximising profit, etc. Youre just selfsupplying with materials to craft what people tell you to craft. Thats fine, but dont try to teach me about shipbuilding and stop blanishing an economy youre not participating in.

Whats your profit/LH, thats the important part. Imagine i would compete with you throwing ships on the market using hundreds of labour contracts. Do you think you would be able to make reasonable profit with ships? Exactly this is happening, just that youre competing with all this organised crafting by request thing. Much more supply than demand. Selfsupply in the first place. Ships are not more than gold + labour. Gold worthless + labour worthless = ships worthless.