Nelsons Barrel

I am eager to see the steam review graphs this month. Will Gamelabs advertise as promised years ago the now released game with its precious 58% rating? Will the rating drop down as expected by me below 50 or will it even raise? How many people will actually go back and play it, if so, for how long? 2 days, 2 weeks or even 2 months? When will the server be shut down, end of this year? Next year or even 2 years? I guess only the future can tell.

You can close your eyes and tell yourself that you find thousands of boats on the whole map but at the end of the day you know the truth.

Steam itself shows you a graph of that.

Nobody forces game developers to go early access (especially through steam store). Thats the risk you take to make money with an unfinished product. People pay, people play and people will review, while you earn cash. If you want your product to be reviewed when its finished you should simply consider to release it only when its finished. Blaming an unknown group as the bad guys because they review an early access title that you like is pretty simpleminded. It's kind of cute that you guys consider 6 reviews already a review bomb for a game that has 110 recent reviews and a total of 4051 reviews. How many of those are now actual alt accounts? Does that amount impact the overall rating that much? Don't forget, as many as negative reviews there are, there are the same amount of unhelpful oneliners that give a thumbs up just to 'counteract' the impression of a negative bombing. Those should be seen with the same judgement as negative ones.

I reviewed this game already back in the days of 2016. The biggest flaw of this project was from begin the missing 'big picture' as I called it. Starting an early access title and not knowing what the actual finished product will be can't work out. You will always disappoint a chunk of your buyers and those will clearly state it out loud. The development process exactly looked like I expected it. 3 full years of going back and forth edging every single group of players resulted in lots of negative reviews and a dramatic loss of players. Only a group of hardcore players, one could call them addicts, stayed, stating their opinion of how this game has to look like, neglecting the truth that as players their opinion would always be biased to their gamestyle. A developer that might have been too close into discussions with those instead of just creating one vision, he followed some loud but actually minority opinions. Passionate critizism was answered with bans, leaving only some weird kind of people in this forum that does not replicate an actual image of the overall playerpopulation. And now we see this project becoming one of those 'never be done'-projects, developers that run out of money forcing them to sell pre-release DLCs to keep afloat, resulting into more difficulties ingame- and review-wise. Would I recommend this game? I played it a few thousand hours with multiple accounts each, I enjoyed a fair bit of this time, but was disappointed about the development changes a lot of times. Seeing a game become a huge timewaste just to promote people to stay online, selling it as some kind of content... Well, I was addicted back then too, so I didn't mind so much. But for somebody with a real life? Unsustainable. So no, of course my review is and will stay negative. Stay away from timewasters like these. Stay away from early access projects that dont state a clear roadmap for the big pictures the project shall become. For me Naval Action will stay in memory as a project in which its devs simply overestimated their own skillset to create a game people actually want to play. Creating it is more than to just prototype a combat simulator, you need knowledge in economy (ingame and real life), basic gameplay mechanics, marketing, public relation skills (how and how much do you interact with players), an understanding that the average player cannot stay ingame for 8 hours a day and the fact that MMOs are a premier league of game, most challenging and definitely not the kind of game you want to start with in game-business.

Grinding is a content.

Grind is content.

RvR in a game with stagnant playerbase is tedious anyway. There is just a percentage of players willing to RvR and at some point you have fought every single player participating in it. You know what to expect, you know your chances to win, all possible metas have been played. The 'new' is just gone and it gets repetitive.

One or two pve missions or a trade run.

For real progress you always had to be online at least 12 hours a day with more than one account at the same time. This game was from the beginning for addicts with battles taking for 1.5 hours. More and more changes made the game even more time consuming. There is simply no chance get anything done in this game if you wanna have a real life and a job at the same time. I spent in over two and half years over 4000 hours in this. What did I most of the time? Afk sailing and netflix. Will a game like this be ever favour a bigger group of gamers? Definetly not. Be an addict and you will have some fun with this game, if you don't, don't even consider buying it.

For all the alt account users out there +googol

Eco alts are usually not end rank as you delete them to put them in other nations when the port you depended on switched flags. So yeah, the importance would have been increased in that aspect. Another aspect though is that stuff does not magically spawn anymore in ports but in OW AI traders. That might limit your dependence on teleporting through outposts all the time. See for this:

But what will this change from what i wrote above? The game is not subscription based, so no need for devs to put more effort in to keep players paying. They deliver what you bought as EA and thats it.

Every game has a certain lifetime. You can't change that fact that at some point somebody will pull the plug and the servers go down. Every game starts with a huge amount of players and soon or later players move on to different games, so the player count drops. In this regard Naval Action faces two major problems: First Naval Action is no roleplay game with individual chars you can skill and perk for special things, so you could repeat it. In this regard, Naval Action chose to be a game where every char can have the same skillbooks, crew counts and can sail all ships. So once achieved, there is nothing to grind for a second time to achieve a possible differend outcome. Pure player-based skill determines how good you are in pvp and overall in this game. Second the limited amount of so called content and its straight forward connection towards online-player-numbers. There is just so much you can do when you play alone. Kill npcs (new pve-missions just let you focus more at what to kill, but the pve game is and will be the same as before) and trade. Everything else in this game is depended on other players online. You necessarely need a player pirating your traders to make it more exciting, there is no npc who will replace that player in hunting traders. Going out and do pvp... depends on players being present and willing to fight you. And not to forget, there is no RvR/PB without players around it to screen and fight them. To bandaid the lower player numbers devs go and reduce the amount of ships in a PB by just raising the average BR of ships. This helps a bit. But they dont shrink the map nor do they force us to be closer together in one spot of the map. We already reached some playernumbers that nations can't do 2 PBs at the same time or even screen for only one PB. Remember some days with over 6 PBs each 25 vs 25 players were filled up. You won't see that happening anymore. Huge clans with over 100 active players wont be there anymore and to fix this, people started to get alts to compensate for the lack of players you could depend on. You can of course say that is because of this and that, and this must be fixed. But this is not gonna change the fate of the whole game. Naval Action started big in numbers when they released it to steam. Sadly it was an Early Access title. The devs brought to us a half baked game with many loopholes and many gamemechanics to be fixed (and some are still not fixed). And devs simply tried a lot of things that has cost a lot of devtime. Since that releaseday numbers are dropping and that is just a natural thing for every game, some take longer, some take shorter. Accept that fact, stop dreaming about a huge influx of new players because of one 'release'-state and just move on as 99% of all copy-owners already did.

The real problem is that the warning pop up is static, it does not tell you what ships you gonna loose when you continue.