Christendom

I like the exploration idea. Maybe turn them into what bottles currently are and somehow make it an "exploration mission". Sail to XYZ and find a shipwreck near a deserted island or something to that extent. Get a little bit of loot and a little bit of sailing XP. This game doesn't have to always be about PVP or end game RVR. Sometimes you just want to listen to music and sail around, this would satisfy that. To be honest, the highlight of my enjoyment of the game was when everyone was running bottles out of cayman brac. The ganking and the "chase" was always guaranteed.

Feel free to actually read the post there tough guy.

My bermuda cedar / pirate refit reno with gold studding sales was outrun in OW by a surprise the other day going pretty much going 0 - 30 off the wind. In the battle instance I can get it up to 17.1 knts. With the wind the reno on paper has a better sailing profile. It feels like the ship attributes that effect it in the battle instance don't translate into OW, but this is just anecdotal. Edit - thx for the reminder hodo. Copper Plating - Speed Trim - Studding Sails all gold as mods.

Explain to me how, and this is an example, US based players found life in France or Spain to be hostile and not welcoming is similar to nation balancing after a wipe. I'm not choosing to not join Sweden because I don't like the people or the nation is hostile. It's because there will be no one there and unfortunately this game requires resources and ship building to be centered around end game RVR content. No people = no RVR. More importantly players cannot nation swap, unlike the circumstances you seem to be describing. If 10 people go Sweden after the patch and decide, shit no one is here they either have to suck it up or start over as a lvl1 again elsewhere. The situations are not the same. Stop being spiteful.

Cmon over.

If your nation can't field a full 25 in a PB vs nations that can, you're at a disadvantage. Short sighted development decisions pretty much are heavily imposing the larger nation format on us. The US on pvp1 was the smallest nation I think and we could not field a 25 man PB consistently for most of my time playing. It sucked. Even when we had numbers we were highly dependent on our usual attendees being there and only a couple people missing would make us ineffective. Id rather not go through that again. If the powers that be want to make nation switching viable I would happily swap around after we see how the global climate pans out. Admin likes to reference other MMOs. Most have faction switching options. Unfortunately we still don't now the server makeup and it's too much of a gamble getting stuck in the SE with a 15man crew. This is a game after all and there are no special points for super hard mode US and GB plan to fight. I've spoken with those guys a few times and we'll make sure we keep fighting. I'll miss seeing the regulars in our battles, but such is life. No alliance system will also help.

I see you'll be rejoining D-K. Way to help balance the new EU server bud.

To be frank, it's not our responsibility to bring players back to the game. According to the developer's own numbers, they've sold at or around 100k copies of NA on steam. Over the past month or 2 there have been maybe 1000 people playing the game at it's peak. That's a 1% player retention rate. If this were a restaurant or other business that doesn't collect money upfront, it'd be out of business. I'm coming up on just about a year of playing and it doesn't feel like the game is one step closer to release than the first day I logged in. It feels even further away. The game has zero advertising, hasn't been on the past couple of steam sales and is full of negative reviews. Not much we can do. Good games have player retention.

@PIerrick de Badas lol...good luck over there. You're gonna need it.

Just to clear up a couple of things... the PVP 1 US and Brits have decided that even though we're best buds, necessity dictates that we need to fight each other. We'll make sure there's no alliance between the 2 nations. Neither of us have a desire to 1 port or inflict damage to the other, fighting RVR casually with people you don't dislike might be a nice change of pace from the PVP1 EU cesspool. Things of course might change should our misbegotten friends from the EU server decide to join us. A large portion of the PVP 1 US were going to join Sweden along with a couple other clans from PVP2, but due to the recent delivery/sailing and of course no nation swapping changes it was decided that Sweden would put us too far out of the action. The players that were already going to join Sweden I believe are joining France and will be adding to that population to make the nation viable. One Point I'd like to bring up is EU timezone players are going to be considerable fewer on this server and It might be a good idea for those players to coordinate either joining the US or GB. It seems both nations will have a large(r) portion of EU players and it makes sense to go to one or the other to do RVR successfully during the day and actually have people to play with. As for another PVP Global Meeting, there seems to be no point. We're not going to be changing the minds of most people anyway. Our first meeting was intended to be sort of a meet and greet and get an idea of numbers, which was moderately successful. If someone else feels inclined to still have one, they can organize things. Due to some recent dev announcements I've kinda come around to the opinion that it's not our job to balance someone else's game, we're just here to play it. Folks should be able to flock to the larger nations where majority of the action will be. All the proposed changes by admin seem to be steering players towards making the "mega" nations, might as well oblige him. I believe @Chijohnaok was talking about setting up a PVP Global US meeting / mixer to say hello and talk about things like TS and Discords.

Definitely stay US now. Anything north of Saint Mary's is going to be EZ mode, AFK sail to our hearts delight. OW hunters aren't going to sail 2 hours from the closest enemy port to come and gank us now. I thought the idea was to NOT make it so easy to move resources around without consequence.

Freetowns near "fronts" will shine, as they do now. FTs in the back of a territory not anywhere near non-national ports will be useless. The border freetowns will continue to have ships being sold, kits being sold and resources. People will trade there...because that's where the people are.

Some freetowns will shine. Hence my bit about the removal. Are you still keeping the ability to type in trade chat at freetowns? edit - @admin have you also thought about allowing players to choose where their TP would take them? Instead of TP to capital you can set it and change it (for a fee) to a certain national port?. This might open up a happy compromise when we lose the cutter TP and tows.

@admin Have you thought about just reducing the number of free towns? Removing fast travel will pretty much ensure areas of the map will become bastions of PVE farmers and pretty much safe zones, take the Northern areas of the US territory where Wilmington is. Folks up there will never see an enemy hunter, it'll be a minimum of an hours sail just to get there. This will pretty much take a way a lot of the risk/reward things you were talking about in earlier posts. I like the idea that this will create fronts and conflicts around them, but removing the current hostility system and introducing some form of flag system as you proposed will do that anyway. You'll goal is to force us on to the open water more and that's fine. It would be nice to run into other factions while we're doing it though.

Your first part makes zero sense, But I'll respond to this. I'm 100% absolutely not worried that "my" server won't have enough numbers. Just from anecdotal observation I'm guessing the global server will be more populated than the EU one. Regardless, it'll be more people in my timezone than I'm normally used to on PVP 1 EU and that's fine with me. As I indicated in the discord I'm overall elated to be rid of the whiners, bigots and colluding forum reporters beyond words. I'd like nothing more than to say adios to some of you and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Trust me, remorse or apprehension is not something I'm feeling. However, I am worried that both servers won't have the numbers because the overall playerbase has been diminished significantly, we're talking long term picture here, to survive indefinitely. Considering the econ changes being proposed, it sounds like shuffling up the servers and time zone locking one of them will be detrimental to the testing process. This is an early access sandbox. We're supposed to be testing. When it comes to release and the testing proves different servers is the way to go, sure. Right now we've never tested 1 large global server, it's time we do it. More players is the answer for everything that ails this game.

Good luck trying to talk to other nations without global :-) And this game is either a sandbox or it isn't. Anything goes in the sandbox, including battles at all times. Or is this going to be a slightly restrictive sandbox now?

It's doable now because there's an alliance system. Back when there wasn't an alliance system the game had considerably more people.

I'd be curious what a poll would say now. The last one was against, would it still be so?

Technically, no one plays on this new "EU" server....... right? It doesn't exist. @Aventador and myself both play on PVP1 EU currently FYI.

A larger player base will be necessary to test the new OW mechanics and more importantly, a player only driven economy. Lets hope people can move past the selfish notion that the game shouldn't be played by others while they are asleep. As the devs have acutely made aware to us, this is early access testing. Your ports mean nothing in the big picture. It's time to test one "large" server and give the new changes the best possible resources to succeed.

you should agree more often, you might like the dark side.

Still would hurt new people the most and this game desperately needs new people in it and sticking around. As for perks thought, you could call it "Sailing Master" or something to that effect. Since most masters were the navigators.

hmm I like it, but easily abusable with alts. Might just be easier to stick with the auto sail shipping lanes

good point. would introduce "shipping lanes"

This game isn't sputtering because of GPS coordinates on the map. If anything you probably kept a few people playing by adding it in. I'll agree that this game needs to "sell" the person on an experience to keep them interested, GPS won't make or break that. You can make the game more immersive without making it more difficult for new people.