Henry d'Esterre Darby

Thank you for the clarification. You and I are agreed in that we don't want a no-skill everyone wins from the first minute to the last type of game.

A quick thought - most larger ships historically can outrun the smaller ones, depending on the wind and direction of sail. As mentioned above, you likely don't use the largest ship possible due to cost. You use the ship you were assigned by the Navy, or if not a Navy Captain, you use the ship you can afford and own that best suits the task you're at. While losing shouldn't be blameless, Admin has indicated that they want to encourage people to fight in the spirit of the time. If you have to strike to a superior ship/force, you do so, that's the way it worked. We don't need to "balance" everything if the mechanics of winning/losing/ship replacement are done well and with good fun/challenge in mind. ETA: That's not to say that replacing a lost ship should encourage YOLO play, but you also shouldn't feel like the entire world is beating you down if you strike to a superior ship/force.

I'll make it easier on you folks. Fully automated and ready to use: http://wiredstar.com/nainsults/ Share and enjoy.

What do you mean by casual sir? Do you mean "people that know little to nothing about the Age of Sail, and have little interest in learning sailing and the art of war at the time, and just want to make loud noises with their mouse", or "people who have less than 30 hours a week to play"? Or perhaps something different?

I don't see anything in there that you couldn't say in public Admin, looks great to me. That's not to say that during the period, calling someone such things wouldn't result in a demand to step out. Personally, I'm a fan of You <adjective> scrub. Captains could also add "land lubber" or "lubberly" to their repertoire as well (e.g. "Admin! Stop being such a lubber and get your guns on that Victory!", or "That Mr. Darby's crew handles his ship in a lubberly manner.").

Do you have any firewall software or hardware running? Are you connecting via wireless or a wired network?

You may not have noticed it, but crew attrition does indeed affect the management and performance of the ship. Just ask a Victory who has lost a lot of crew how hard it is to make sail changes or fire.

Let's please keep this one civil and friendly. Languages in different regions tend to drift apart over time, as well as being heavily influenced by various foreign cultures that also settle the area. This usually results in different accents, spellings, etc. The effect, I believe, was far more prominent before the invention of long distance communications, such as the telephone, and radio and television. One might see spelling differences in a letter, but in general the pronunciation would still be in the local dialect. So let's step back a little farther. People still spell things the way they sound. It's possible the differences in spellings have evolved as the local cultures have begun to spell the same word differently to reflect the local accent. TextSpeak is an interesting study in this phenomenon quite frankly. In the end, what is "right", and what is "wrong"?? The English language has variations on numerous words that sprung from other languages.

Beginner, I understand some folks are getting a little sarcastic on this thread. No worries. Here's the basic deal. This is a game that is extremely early in its development. Someone posted a basic feature list above, and you're right, it likely could be better displayed on the web site itself. These guys are a small team who are focused working hard on the game, the web site is likely a distraction so it is being ignored while they push hard on an early iteration of Open World. Key generation is likely manual right now. Someone has to open up the email from PayPal, open up the database (maybe they have an internal management form for this, but who knows), copy the pertinent values into the database, open up the list of available keys they've gotten from steam, apply the key to the database with your payment, and then generate an email to send to you. This takes time, in fact, for a software developer, doing just that little thing costs around an hour or more of development time. This isn't an assembly line where you can stop the line and take a phone call, then fire the line back up and resume your work. It takes anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more for a Developer to restore the "picture" of what they're doing in their head so they can once again begin to make progress on their code. Right now, stopping every time someone buys a key would be crippling and remove a valuable member of the team from their primary job - developing the game. So, keys get sent out in batches. That's usually Friday, but I've seen cases lately where they send them out more frequently at the end of their day. The company itself is Ukrainian, their corporate entity is in the UAE. None of that actually matters on the internet. The question you ask yourself is - if I send them $40 via Paypal (not even exposing your credit card number to them, just sending them money via Paypal), will I get what I was promised, when it was promised. The scores of us on here playing, and posting videos of our gameplay to YouTube, streaming it on Twitch, all are proof that you get early access to Sea Trials by sending them $40. Again, where they are, what the company is called, none of this is important. They are a small business, with a product, and they're delivering that product to the people who pay them. I, personally, have gotten far less entertainment out of "completed" games that I've paid more for - $40 is a value as far as I'm concerned. As to this being a waste of money - that's a decision and perception that is entirely upon you to make. $40 for me is rather trivial. $40 for someone else may be their entire grocery bill for the week. Take a look at what is offered, and if there isn't enough value there for your money, go in peace and have a great week! Those of us here think we got a great bargain for $40, and we think you will too. So here's the deal. This isn't a finished game. You can't expect instant, dedicated customer service, servers that are always up, nearly bug free code, or the polish that would be present in a finalized product. It is, however, and extremely well put-together Alpha, there is new content being released all the time - new ships, new features, balancing, and very soon, a free-sail open world in the Caribbean for us to explore. All the Developers ask in return is $40 and your patience while they keep working on what is shaping up to be a great product. I hope this answers some of your concerns and questions. The Developers believe the Yacht is about $20 worth of content. I've paid $50 for a tank that I really wanted in another game. The $20 price point for the yacht is just their guess as to what something like that might cost down the road. Anyone who has gotten anywhere near Star Citizen can see how that kind of thing works - people are paying $300 or more for some of the larger ships there! The $40 is to buy the game early. The Yacht is just a pure bonus - frosting on the cake. To everyone else in the thread: Yes, there is some sarcasm flying around in both directions. The OP does, however, also have some good points. Let's focus more on education and helping the OP to understand where the value in this game lies and less on making fun of information that OP may have missed. We all want this game to succeed - please help the Developers to sell the game to potential new players and avoid making fun of them or tearing them down. We're all salesmen here, and the more interest from age of sail enthusiasts we generate in the game, the more copies of the game get pre-ordered, the better the game will be.

hrm, I kind of like the idea of a last ditch survival effort. This would be quite useful if you were trying to hang in there until nearby help arrived, or for use after the enemy was no longer a threat and you needed to work hard on staying afloat. Not a bad idea sir!

America's Cup Death Match eh? It may open a little slow, but who knows, people may enjoy watching the "dog fight" section of the match when a general melee erupts.

Please bear in mind that this isn't an even remotely finished project. Graphics optimizations are still yet to be performed, so I believe you can count on better performance, and better usage of resources in the various modes once the Devs circle back around to graphics/graphics optimizations.

Give you joy of your new command sir! Welcome.

The initial setup is really a chess game. It's easy for people to get impatient and rush in (I saw a 74 YOLO right into 20 enemy ships while playing last week while the rest of us were formed up in a group and carefully approaching - naturally he sank quickly, as did the half dozen of our ships that broke formation and ran after him - we lost). A little patience on the approach and you can hold a cohesive fighting force - everyone gets more damage. I suppose this will be a greater issue until there is a penalty for losing your ship (be it in repair costs, or whatever).

Sounds like something on your local machine - I don't know what. But something is messing with your driver settings. Have you tried a different (older) video driver version.

Not saying it's good or bad, I haven't formed an opinion on it actually. I'm not adverse to the idea at all, just trying to think it through.

So far, it sounds like it will be server based, with the server controlled by Game Labs.

Yup, love this. I posted the Team Vestas Wind wreck in a thread about shallows, grounding, charts, etc. Thanks for bringing it up!

This is the first I've heard of that particular problem on the forums. Have you tried troubleshooting your GPU crashes? An older driverset might be the ticket there - if I try to go to anything newer than two year old drivers on my machine, I get black screens of death constantly.

I had that thought as well Prater, excellent point.

We don't quite know that yet Andy. I'd like to see a system where striking to a superior force wouldn't cost you heavily in reputation, but that could be difficult to automate in code.

Would there be any concern that this feature could be used, in conjunction with TS, to have a fleet commander not otherwise involved in the match calling the shots?

Now that's funky. Could you please post if it happens again? I don't use AMD, so hopefully someone that does and may have insight on this issue can chime in.

That's an interesting idea Mr. Coffey. I found the following information with a quick Google search. The claim is valid for at least Windows 8, maybe also Windows 7. Read down the thread before trying it - you apparently need an SDK. Before going to the link, please read the following disclaimer: I have no idea how/if this will work, nor do I know whether or not it could cause system damage or serious performance problems. I have not tried it myself, and nobody but yourself is responsible for any damage or instability that may result. DO NOT attempt to file bugs related to display or performance issues if you're using this workaround - they will likely be ignored. Please use the following link at your own risk: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=371483

The team is pretty small and quite busy. Could you please send them another email with the original email you sent attached to remind them? Thanks.