Christendom

ah yes, that fine line where players try to match their in-game preferences and fit them inside real world stereotypes. One of the many reasons we should be clan based rather than nation. If only more folks treated this game as simply......a game, imagine how much more fun it would be.

This is an excellent idea. Navasse for example has been french since almost the beginning of the merge and hasn't changed hands once. We need a mechanic to prevent long term holdings.

Server pop has depleted over time in every iteration of this game. Flags, no timers, EU/Global only timers and the current iteration with the merge. Every single time. Even now we have an option to mitigate night flips and the game can still not sustain itself. Maybe 5% of the current valuable ports are owned by US based clans...the rest are EU based. Night flip impact is minimal. The game still dies in between patches. Why? Because we lack content and after hitting max rank it gets boring AF if you aren't a huge PVPer. EU server was barely cracking 400 on a good day just prior to the merge. An interesting suggestion. Here's a variation of your idea that I like. A port has 3 options. - No timer - 100k hit daily - Mixed use timer (20:00 GMT to 01:00 GMT) - 300k daily - Specific 3 hour timers - 750k daily Mixed use timer would intend to try and overlap late EU times with early evening US times in an attempt to prevent extreme day/night flips, but still promote overlapping content for both player bases. Think of this as a weekend timer. Either option I think we need to address the fact that the game is spread very thin with 400-500 players in 11 nations. We need to remove some and hope populations shift a little bit more and mix to help with coverage making the mixed timer option a valid play.

I like this idea. Enable drop in style battles for every grid square.

Well when they and and their allies lose 3/3 ports in a multi flip its only logical to move on to softer targets.

Our intent is to flip a few US shallow ports we don’t want in hopes that both of us get fights and you guys try and flip them back.

Harbour Island PB - Pirates (Christendom) vs US (unknown) GF US guys, thanks for coming out. Had to call in the VCO banners on this one and brought out the EU guys. We actively stopped capping circles and tried to drag the fight on for a change instead of just winning instantly. Kinda worked. US could of done better if they grouped up and didn't flee immediately.

Apples and oranges. Don’t distort what points they are trying to make here by being a homer. Release and full wipe is months away. Maybe. If contracts are stopped for a while and ports make little to no income this could adversely effect some clans. This needs to be a quick bang bang transition or port costs need to be suspended.

Usually fishing for US sea bass.

He said respectable. As pirates, we esteem to be anything but.

^^ Healthy PVE creates more fish in the sea for sharks to enjoy. We've spent patch after patch addressing perceived "holes' in the RVR or PVP systems of the game without addressing the elephant in the room.....the lack of players. Lets say we get a steady population of 1500-2000 players on consistently. PVP hunting becomes far more plentiful and far more dangerous. I'm sure Hachi remembers what it was like sailing around la tort/mort area right after the wipe the EU server with 1000 people on for that first 2 weeks. With that many players on the server hunting around capitals would be suicide in small numbers and it would rectify the safe zone protections issues we currently face. As for RVR, 1500 players would make far more ports in the game viable and profitable....making RVR worth it again. Even ports in the gulf would start making money as players expand outward away from the higher traffic areas to PVE and trade in peace. In short, it's time to take care of the casual / PVE players in this game. It's the only way to fix it.

I played from friends and family alpha of vanilla WoW up until the start of legion (2017 expansion). You'd be surprised how many old players are still around. Almost all of them are casual though. Most of them stopped playing due to life and growing up, starting families and shit rather than the game getting stale. There is some truth to what you say though. I'm not expecting NA to be WoW or EVE, but you brought it up. I'm simply saying that the notion that players don't like killing AI is wrong. Players are fine farming AI over and over if the juice is worth the squeeze. The cornerstone to most MMO games is still AI/NPC content, there is no reason why NA should be different. Hard to create content in a period naval game that does not involve sinking or transporting......but here's a couple that have probably been suggested over the years. Exploration Missions - Sail to patch of ocean x and return to island y. Collect something along the way or maybe take some soundings of a coast line for a hydrography mission issued by the Royal Society. Escort Missions - Players queue up in some sort of system/lobby where they can request escorts to a certain destination. Maybe call it a convoy mission or something. Timed runs/races - Create events or achievements based off how quickly a player can reach a certain destination. Fastest time from Shroud to La Tortue in a cutter.....etc etc. Introduce a reputation system into the game where PVP kills against certain nations makes them outlaws (pirates) and limits their access to certain ports. This would open up outlaw battles to all nations and there will be consequences for excessive killing of players in one's own nation. When a person automatically hits a certain level of negative rep they automatically become a pirate and have a auto generated bounty on them that other players can accept and hunt them down with. To expand a bit, lets say Player HachiRoku has 60 kills on french players in the game over a certain period of time. This auto generates a bounty in french capitals and players can take the mission and hunt you down getting reputation, money or whatever.

WoW has 10+ mil subscribers 14 years after it was released. 90% of wow players don’t experience the higher forms of end game raid content. 75% of them don’t PVP. What keeps them occupied is character progression, achievements and collecting various types of loot. That’s a lot of players killing bots. Naval Action falls short in regards to player progression. We have no achievements other than screenshots. Limited amounts of “loot” to collect. Pretty much zero cosmetic ship customization. All you can do is basically sail out and kill the same 400 players or the same tired old AI. This is boring. Killing AI in any game is mundane and not really challenging. What other games manage to do that NA has yet to figure out is how to make it rewarding. People will do almost any grind as long as that carrot at the end is juicy enough. While I don’t have all the answers, successful MMOs figure out how to keep casual players engaged with a healthy mix of customization, rewards and progression . Make the game full of players again and PVP / RVR will work themselves out.

Stay off the bath salts bud. Everybody sinks and everybody ganks. Thus is the nature of full loot MMOs. Folks have been crying on the forums for years now looking for more rewarding and challenging PVE content. If you think the majority of players in this game go out and actively seek PVP content you would be wrong. PVE encompasses killing bots as well as hauling trade goods around. Most players will log on for an hour or 2 after work to blow off a little steam, sink some bots or haul around some resources. Most will only PVP when it finds them. They quit for a litany of reasons, but chief among them is the content level on day 1 of the game 2 years ago is the same as day 2000. It's boring, hence the need for more varied content that @admin is working on. I don't PVE. I have maybe 7-8 ships with full 5 slots unlocked, most of which was done via player kills. My content is other players and anything that will put more of them on the water and keep them there long term, I'm in favor of. It amuses me when other players think otherwise.

I’ve been to Mexico several times. Always go for the salsa verde when in a taqueria. Usually the tomatillo sauce is the spicier one. Tapatio is a good everyday sauce for us gringos

Zergggg

I miss LV

Your level of spicy is Tabasco. It's weak. Tapatio is bare minimum level of spicy I'll accept on my tacos.

zzzzzzzzzzz

Oh we found resistance at Key West, it just wasn't very difficult. You stopped fighting GB after they won once or twice during the daytime and before they started night flipping....so I'm a bit skeptical at the fortitude of Spain's resolve. You sure do give up easy. There are 2 certainties in Naval Action while waiting for patches. 1 - We wait 2 - Spain quits As for the night flips, you only have Jags to thank for them. He perhaps should not have interfered with Pirate and French RVR in the evenings if Spain was unable to adequately defend all of it's timerless ports at that time. Just a thought. #thanksJags

PVP keeps me in the game, but content is not created in a vacuum. This game needs PVE oriented content that keeps the casual/not pvp inclined players interested in the game so players like myself can club them. If you checked out the test realm at all you'd notice that there are more mission types and challenges that will hopefully keep the bulk of the players interested. It's a good start and hopefully not too little too late. We'll see. TLDR - We need more stuff to do.

Que?

chop chop

World of Warcraft has had mutli-boxing players since the early days back in 04-05. I remember getting blasted by a dude on my server who would multi box 5 mages in pvp battle grounds and nuke players down instantly. It was annoying, but perfectly allowable. WoW has been going now almost 15 years, so clearly multi-boxing is a non-issue. If you want to gripe about something, gripe about the lack of content.

While reading and thinking about this post an idea came to me. Let's say players have the current 10 standard outposts. Admin want's to charge dubloons (sp?) to swap between them in the next patch (which is idiotic). How about a compromise where players can purchase additional outpost slots with dubloons and then you have to pay to maintain and teleport to them. Let's say a max of 5 additional. This would create a money sink to the hardcore folks who need and want these outposts and while casual folks, who will be the most affected by the pay-to-tp change, don't have to worry about it they don't want to. These could be remote PVP outposts where you don't need to TP to them 40x a day doing regular stuff.