Helbent

Do you have a map of what this actually looks like?

This! If funding is what is holding you back, let the players who are active and want the game to succeed give you money through something other than buying alts...

But why does that need to be the answer? Why can't we try to make this game more fun? Honestly, Legends doesn't appeal to me. I have enough "arena" games to play. This game was unique, which is what brought me here and what keeps me here. I know it's not your intention, but comments like this really do make it sound like you have given up on this game. and just moved your efforts to Legends.

@admin I think everyone here wants the game to succeed, and the goal of coming to the forums is usually to help find ways to make that happen. I get that steam reviews can be very slanted and that is frustrating, but the fact is some of them have a kernel of truth. And the ones that don't are obvious trolls that most intelligent people considering the game can see for what they are. The hard part is what is the goal? Some new mechanics you put in get complaints, but they get left in for extended periods of time. Some new things get added and within 2 weeks of the patch rolling out, you announce you don't like and are working on a replacement. I get that you have to test things, but it can be hard to tell what the different is between those two cases and why one gets removed and the other left in. Was it because something clashed with the overall vision for the game? Because the "right" people complained? Or because you pulled data off the back end that we don't have access to that showed a deeper problem? You are the dev and don't have to spill all the info to us, but knowing what is causing these things can help us defend the game and explain what is happening the way you are hoping we will.

The alliance system is actually a perfect example of a complex system being added to attempt to fix the flawed PB mechanic. It wasn't a simple system with all the ROE changes, and because it was determined by the majority it increased the "meta-game" emphasis even more.

If I am honest with myself, I think port battles themselves are the root of a lot of the RvR issues right now. They are a flawed mechanic, and we keep introducing more and more complicated solutions to try and make them work. I would say it is time to just remove them from the RvR portion of the game, to return with some future TBD mechanic. Instead we do something like: 1. ports get flipped when they get to 100% hostility. no PB scheduled afterwards, the grind to get it to 100% is all you have to do. 2. Change the rules for generating hostility so there are only 2 ways to increase hostility: OW PVP (adds killed player to BR instantly just like current mechanics), and timer-based mechanic that will add say 25% ship BR to the hostility for every 15 minutes of being in the OW in a counties "zone". Entering port or leaving the zone reset your timer to zero, and entering a battle freezes the timer so it stops counting but as soon as you come out of battle and can be attacked, it picks up where it left off. No more PVE, and the PVP method should be significantly more efficient than sitting in the OW doing nothing. 3. The amount of BR required to reach 100% hostility scales based on nation size. So if your nation controls 1-5 regions, the needed amount to flip is the "base" value, 6-10 regions is 2x the base value, 11-15 regions is 5x the base, and 16+ is 10x. If you really want to zerg the map, you still can but the effort required is significantly increased as you grow which hopefully encourages people to focus efforts on what they actually need and have strategic value, and not just spread out for the sake of colored dots. This should also make it much easier for a small nation to take a region from a large nation than it is for the large nation to take it back, which will also hopefully encourage some more balance on the map. The goal would be to more tightly couple the RVR game with the rest of the game, and remove the artificial "set-pieces" of PBs which cause more headache than they are worth. While it is a nice idea to have an "equal footing" battle to determine the owner of a port to give the small guy a chance, the reality is all those set-pieces do is force the creation of a fleet of PB-specific ships that still gives an advantage to the larger nations, and consolidates power in the large clans as they can afford to have this fleet of single purpose ships. Letting clans control individual ports within their nation and what that means and how it works is still something I would like to see more work on, but I don't think clan-based warfare applied to the existing RVR mechanics is really going to solve the issues.

While I agree we don't have enough players currently to fill the servers, saying we wouldn't recommend the game to someone because of that is self-defeating. No way to fill the servers without getting people in. That said, I agree in its current state the game has a terrible new player experience. The learning curve is very steep, and if a new player doesn't get hooked up with some people in nation that can help them get on their feet then they likely won't stick around long. I would say that as many issues as there are with the late game which causes many of the complaints on steam the new player experience needs to be the top priority for the devs to fix. I would guess 95% of the people who bought the game during the summer sale quit before they got to rank 3, and never experienced most of the issues the vets complain about on a daily basis. Fixing the late game may help with the bleed of vet players (and may even bring vet players back), but it won't fix the stability issues of the game if new players aren't sticking around. Every game goes through population ups and downs, the ability to bring in new players (and keep at least some of them) is what determines if a game survives.

That trip was an Indiaman and a traders brig. I ran into several players on that trip, but with the agreements we had at the time I had no issues. Had to dodge a few Frenchies on the trip home, but made it back without losing anything.

My last trip from Willemstad to Christiansted got me about 350k in profit. Shorter trips from say coqui to WS are usually closer to 75-100k but are pretty short trips. I don't disagree that if you can grind max rank missions they will generally net you better returns for the time investment, but I have no trouble making enough profit via trading to make it worthwhile if you can't do max rank missions due to ship or rank.

Ya, I interpreted this as port ownership no longer matters. Which means no need for cross-nation alts (a good thing IMO), but it also means people will just move from one port to another looking for the lowest tax rates. My guess is there would be lots of activity right after a reset to claim areas, but after about a month or so we will settle into the same stagnant map we have now, and alts will now be the way to safely store goods (ie take a port, then never use the "company" warehouse, just give it to an alt thats in a clan and have them store it safely for you). If you own the port and are collecting the taxes, then there is 0 cost to you to do this.

What does this mean for production buildings? Does port nationality really not matter anymore and we can build outposts/buildings in ANY port, and all we are really worrying about is what the tax level is in a given port? That seems... Boring. I don't mind the idea of shifting RvR to a clan-based mechanic, but the idea of essentially making nations a cosmetic thing seems like it would really dumb down the map, and also would seem to imply that we can teleport all over the map again?

There are a lot of issues here honestly. I could have done a lot of things differently than I did, but I honestly thought that once I got the kill and the scoreboard showed him as sunk that it meant he was dead and I didn't need to worry about it...

Fair enough. But if the crew is on my ship in a boarding action, why am I getting notifications about them being killed? If they can still fight and take my ship, saying they are killed is incredibly misleading as it implies things are over and you have won. Which in my case is exactly what happened and that confusion cost me my ship. Honestly, if you're not going to give my ship back then fine. I'm not going to demand stuff or try to hold anyone hostage over this, it is what it is. But this was an extremely frustrating experience that really left a bad taste in my mouth. No matter how you spin it, this IS broken, and needs to be addressed one way or the other.

I hear and understand. But why is this situation treated differently than any other action? A player that's killed is killed. A capped ship becomes the "player" and an empty ship they leave behind counts for nothing. So why is a "kill" in this case not counted as a kill, just a temporary thing? I could have actually played the boarding game if I thought it mattered and maybe kept my ship but I had a kill so I didn't really pay attention since the "player" I was fighting was already DEAD...

I understand the "realism" but from a game mechanic this is broken on so many levels when you look at it in context of the rest of the battle and how it behaves in other situations. At a minimum, the UI is completely broken and kills should not be awarded if the player isn't going to actually be considered "killed". Whatever, lesson learned. I guess ill see if after I cool down from losing this ship if I come back since I just lost weeks of playtime to this glitchy mechanic and I don't know if I will have the motivation to start that grind over.