Christendom

The new player experience, after his third time being ganked that evening.

The only zone I've been able to successfully hunt in is the shallow zone. Every time I've gone into the other ones I just end up getting gang banged by late joiners. The only Solo PvP I've been really able to do is mission jumping and ganking traders outside capitals. Dealing with the AI reinforcements is a joke.

Looking for solo PvP? It doesn't exist.

Because the green zones were recently changed and are not doing their job? People are unhappy about it. I agree about focusing on the OW, if you read the post. I also think that this games future relies on new or returning players and if the game continues to allow them to be farmed literally 20 seconds out of their starting areas we’ll never pick up momentum. Look at this write up for another Open world full loot MMO that just launched. People are upset about veteran griefers killing players right outside the safe zones and reviews are not good. Sounds eerily familiar right? Imagine that, new players don’t immediately like to jump into a PvP zone 30 seconds after leaving the starting zone... who’d of thought. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/10/wild-west-online-launches-onto-the-dusty-trails-today/#more-541801 @admin and everyone else anti safe zone. Go watch Mighty_Mo for a couple of hours and watch how easy it is for him to get mission jumped and/or ganked running missions. This is the new player experience and probably the reason why we have so few new players. Granted he gets stream sniped, but watching him getting ganked over and over right outside the capital, while entertaining, is just laughable.

^^^^ reputation system

Only thing that will bring back players is new content. And yea cancelling only 3 missions a day was an absurdly stupid change. Still no idea why it was introduced.

You were far out of the effective range of chain - get a good tag and run prepared - be in a faster ship.

So Safe zones. We're in a bit of a pickle between the wolves of the game wanting the ability to hunt outside capitals and then on the flip side the game does need to offer some basic protections so newer players can start to turn into veteran players. Without safe zones, the population drops. In a perfect world this game would have 2000 players and capitals would be protected mainly by other captains of that nation. Also in that perfect world with 2000 players capitals would be far too busy to hunt and most ports on the map would be populated enough to be able to hunt them with frequency. But we're not in that 2000 player paradise and we're barely cracking 400-450 during a busy EU prime time and for some reason we still have 11 nations to dilute our base... anyway.. Introducing: The Pax Christendom Solution to all our Reinforcement Zone Issues Step 1 Introduce 2 zones around a nation's capital and it's protected ports. Note - obviously not to scale, just emphasized for this post. Rings would need to be smaller Red Zone - Capital Area. Zero PVP. Players cannot tag other players at all. Players can still tag AI and more importantly, lower level missions spawn in this zone. Let's say up until master & commander. Loot potential in this zone is greatly diminished. Similar to how crappy the loot is in hostility missions. Only the "basic" stuff drops for newer players. Blue Zone - Reinforcement Area. Players can tag and be tagged. Mid level missions spawn here. Something like Master & Commander - Captain. AI can also be tagged for a slightly higher increase in loot potential. Missions and AI battles close after a certain time period. Players that are tagged automatically call for PLAYER reinforcements. Player vs Player battles stay open for 30mins. If there is a way to increase the starting distance automatically I think that would also be a good idea. This way, despite a good tag there is still some hope for the player and give others an option to join. Another thought would be to immediately call for reinforcements, but delay the battle start 60 seconds. Step 2 Introduce a new feature called hot zones. When a player is tagged and hits the reinforcement button in the reinforcement zone (blue) a message from clerk goes out into nation chat "A Semaphore Tower has Signaled that a British Ship is in Distress and Needs Assistance". Then a red circle/zone/spot will appear on the map in the general location as to where it is. Something like this. Step 3 Protections against jumping missions. Let's be honest here, popping into missions and/or AI battles is highly weighted towards the attacker. It also ruins the gameplay for new players. While making battles inside the blue zone close after the standard amount of time will help, people will still get jumped. Any hostile players that join a mission or AI battle should automatically spawn AI reinforcements for the defender AND create a hot zone on the map. aka - preventing ganks and creating more "honest" pvp. People hate ganks, mission jumping is ganking. Most folks don't mind losing in honest fights. Step 4 Create 2 types of missions. Low risk - spawns in the blue zones. Decreased loot chances, mission XP and gold payout. Battles close after 3mins High Risk - spawns outside of any protection zones. Increased loot chances, mission XP and gold payout. Battles close after 30mins Players can pick their poison. Step 5 Getting players outside of the safe zones. - as above, increased payout and loot potential for missions and AI fleets - crafting inside player owned ports has an increased chance of creating gold/purple ships (safe zones/capitals should have a 0% chance) - increased PVP payout. Introduce a pvp mark "bonus" called "Open World PVP Bonus". Maybe an additional mark per person based on the ship class. ---- Thoughts and feedback would be appreciated. This actually took a little time to put together so @admin better read it or I'm gonna go weep in the shower and re-evaluate my life.

I believe names were added to keep people honest. We had alt farming galore when things were more anonymous

I like the idea of clans being able to restrict acesss. If I’m footing the bill I should be able to say who gets in. Iwould alter it so all members of that nation can enter and repair, only friendly clans can create outposts and purchase items in the shop. Maybe change the smuggling mechanic slightly so that if you enter in port, everything immediately is 50% more expensive. For example clan x isn’t on my friends list but they still can pop into port and purchase items using smuggler flag, but they gotta pay for it. The downside of locking out non friendly clans would be a decrease in revenue. Seems like a fair trade off to me.

< -- was not in command of the fight. just a peon this evening. Was ok fun, but stupid mistakes and a dude going AFK and getting out of position (and sinking) was embarrassing. You're lucky Hammy got that kill on you, I was looking for some new iPhone wallpaper.

All I know is back when we had the strong hull ports, ships were easy to produce and easy to sink. No stupid OP mods. We had more port battles going on with about the same population or less than we currently have daily. RVR needs to mean something, or no one will do it. More folks sailing goods to ports to craft ships is exactly what we need. More traffic and targets outside of the safe zone. The fact that you can craft purple/gold ships inside the safe zone just astonishes me. There is zero benefit to crafting outside of it now, other than labor hour reductions which can easily be mitigated with combat mark labor contracts.

Hauling ship parts = people on the water. Not a bad thing.

Ok so let’s all stop RVR completely then. Alts can do everything. Why take any new ports, which is currently the issue. @Teutonic‘s got some good idea here. We need to breathe life into a dying RVR system where only 4-5 ports on an entire map of a couple hundred matter. My only concern is that with 11 friggen nations not everyone will get a strong hull or the equivalent in this new system. Then what? Personally I think the chances of crafting a purple or gold ship should be zero if it wasn’t crafted in a player owned port. An excellent way to get folks out of the safe zones. To coincide with your proposed ideas I would also increase the cool down on attacking ports again after a defeat. 24 hours is not long enough and deters folks from setting up shop. Also the cost and mats of the shipyards are a prohibiter.

A simple solution would be to not allow them in certain port battles and/or increase the BR. It would be nice if the capital port in most regions was 1st rate 25/25, but the smaller ports were all BR based and the 1st rate was not allowed.

That sure is a lot of colors on the water there....

Easy tiger. Much Overreact Ruining immersion (when the game already does a good job of it for you) for a couple of guys is a stupid reason to not include a HIGHLY desired feature that clans/players have been asking forever for. Adding in features that players can use to customize their ships and charging for them will also allow the devs to have a DLC style revenue stream to help continue the development of this game. Nothing will ruin the immersion for more you can it getting shut down.

So the ships sailing through land, super speed on the OW and the lack of nation flags on the water DOESN'T ruin the immersion, but customized clan pennants on ships will?

I actually do 10x the amount of solo PvP you do. Do you even remember what that is? I don’t roll out in first rates in the patrol zones or hide out on TS until I have enough people to show my face out of port with. Most of my marks come from solo hunting during our off times (EU prime). I’m exactly the type of feedback admin is looking for here. But leave it to you to grind that axe on every thread. If this game has 2x or 3x the amount of players I would agree with you. But it doesn’t. With peak times in the 450 players range split into 11 different nations...The ability to put up a constant coast guard isn’t really an option for new people. In lieu of the players protecting rookies and traders, the game itself has to. If our goal is to retain players anyway. If not the we should by all means continue on the course we’ve been going, we’ve been quickly running out of seals to club. What then? Another thought would be to provide game incentives to those who coast guard and protect traders and rookies. Maybe more PVP marks for players killed inside the safe zone? Would that encourage people to leave them though? Doubtful. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do know that letting veteran players beat up PVE guys and rookies pretty much unchecked is a very good way to get people to quit the game. I suppose we need admin to officially come up with a goal of how effective he wants the safe zones to be

Chain just requires you to be smart enough to know at what range it will do real damage.

Another item we need to carry in our holds?

I'm not connecting safety with online. But if you want to have an MMO that continues that retains it's players for longer than a weekend you need to put in some basic protections to ensure that your new players turn into older and satisfied players. Most MMO games attempt to accomplish this. Can you name me 1 MMO where a brand new player can travel forth 2mins outside his starting area and immediately engage and lose in PVP? I can't imagine historically that sloops and smaller frigates were openly sailing up to larger protected ports like Port Royal and capturing traders within clear view of the harbor? Doubtful. The trade lanes to these ports were raided, which is precisely what needs to be happening with our game. We should be having conversations about how to get these players OUT of the safe zones, not having conversations as how effectively one can raid inside of them. We seem to be tailoring PVP to lazy captains who don't want to go out and properly hunt. Why? We should be thinking up ways to embolden the sheep and turn them into wolves.

Hard to have one of these when people aren't even safe sailing 2mins outside their own capitals.

Yea but PVPers already have EVERY advantage in this game. You need to throw a bone to the little people or they will stop playing. Which it seems they already have. Players like Dron and Moscalb are going to sink players wherever they are found regardless of what changes are made to the game. We shouldn't be making it easier for them. We should be making it easier for the guy who's been playing 2 days and just sailed out in his brand new surprise outside his nation's capital where presumably he thinks and HISTORICALLY he would be safe. Except now he isn't. This perhaps the only MMO i've played that has factions (nations) and if you travel 2 mins outside your capital you can lose everything. This should not be a thing.

Determined defender did not help these players. There is a considerable amount of precedence in the history books of privateers/pirates jumping in at the weak point of a convoy, boarding the ship and getting away with it. Ganking traders in the reinforcement zones is very similar in this regard. Traders typically ran barebones crews to maximize profit and were heavily susceptible to boarding actions. As they should be. My gripe is not that there is DD, just that it is too OP in it's current state. I've completed demasted larger ships and taken 80 crew off of them and still cannot board. The DD perk highly bends realism and ruins gameplay. Revise the perk and make it cost more so not everybody and their brother can run it without sacrificing something. Another situation in brit waters this weekend where I tagged a lone trinc in my trinc. He spawned the AI reinforcements and stayed with them. I didn't attempt to board since our crew levels were similar. A little bit of chain on him and the AI and it was easy to manage fighting both. He ended up sunk, just took a little longer. the new super AI hurt, but they are still AI and get stuck constantly. I got a bonus in this fight also. A random player joined in a brig to help and I just sailed past the AI and sunk him too. The only hinderance the new reinforcement zones are to solo hunters is you need to carry more repairs.