greybuscat

I won't miss R-zones. In my experience, they were mostly used to troll nearby enemy ports that somehow existed on the edge of the zone, a la St Mary's. They were never very effective at protecting, say, unescorted traders. As for "new players," everyone I've sailed with tends to let people go if they are low rank, with storebought ships, etc. Failing that, we've offered to give them the ship back. And I'm sure some of those are just alts slipping through the cracks because, honestly, how many "new players" have we really been getting the past few months. "Seal-clubbing" isn't really seal-clubbing if the seal is a Rank 8 in an Indefat who refuses to leave the kiddie pool. "I'm not confident at PvP" and "I don't like being ganked" are not the same as "I just got here and am learning."

I don't disagree in theory. I agree in the sense that books confer the biggest advantages, by far, and the best books are usually held by the best players, who don't need assistance beating up the have-nots. I also agree in the sense that ship XP is a dumb idea that should be removed. The rest of it is going to be wiped already, isn't it? The fact that so many players see books and ship XP wipes as deal breakers is a sign of bad game design. I cannot stress this enough. The problem is, there will always be new players as long as the game is active, and they will face the same problem of being in a caribbean full of DLC ships, well-established clans, and experienced players. DLC ships can always use tuning, so that they aren't perceived as P2W, but you can't protect new players from them in the long-term. I think you have a mix of good ideas and bad ideas for achieving a fair experience at launch. This, in principle, I strongly agree with.

There are lots of things I have spent a lot of time doing in my life that I wouldn't recommend to other people, and I still indulge in some of them to this very day. I don't see why time in-game means anything other than "this person probably knows what they are talking about." Additionally, you have no idea when those hours were played. If someone fell in love with the game in 2016, that game no longer exists. Are they bound to recommend a game new buyers can't actually play? I think this is a lot of presumption and hogwash being presented as a fact. People leave bad reviews for all kinds of reasons. Rather than trying to type everyone into a particular category, so you can ignore them, why not engage with their actual complaints and judge them based on their merit? 'Cause that would take time and effort? See above. This, at least, I can agree with, but I'm not holding my breath that they'll stick around for very long if they do. New Steam review moderation notwithstanding, who should get to decide which reviews are "honest?" That seems like an unproductive way to tackle the problem of negative reviews. As for "poor behavior," I've seen people get forum banned for honest criticism, for meme posts when a certain administrator was having a bad day, etc. The definition of "poor behavior" seems to be relative, but it should be obvious that if you remove a player's ability to give feedback in a place like this, they're going to use whatever other options they have at their disposal, whether it's Steam reviews or a subreddit.

My only problem with this is that, in practice, you often don't get to fight what you see with extremely short timers. If this is the intent, any battle within your horizon (or for any ship within a hypothetical second, much larger circle than the pull circle) should stay open for as long as it is within your horizon, with little to no regard for time-based limitations.

You basically broke repairs. Increasing hold sizes would help, but repairs are so expensive already, you should just have repairs give more HP per repair, relative to the recent HP increases.

Not sure this is really the case, considering that they are stackable to a degree. As far as a return on your time investment, PvP and combat PvE for doubloons are mostly a sucker's bet, and this meets or outpaces hunting AI traders for them, which easily beats out the dedicated PvP zones. It also carries less risk than all other methods and is probably more consistent. It might be boring to the "advanced" players, but it's at least as or more efficient. If your goal is having enough doubloons to subsidize RvR or PvP, efficient is a good thing.

On that note, I wonder if there any good deals going on for 1440p monitors at the moment. That's not bad, at all. Though if I understand the mission descriptions correctly, if enough people start doing those, you'll run into the issue where someone with a head start already took the same mission and you get nothing? Or does "if someone else delivers it" refer to getting captured, your "cargo" looted, and an enemy player delivering it instead?

About how long do you think that took you, roughly? Just wondering if it would be any faster than killing ~20 AI traders, for the same amount.

The usual suspects are like:

I don't understand why they don't have two different locations going every day, one for group, and one for solo. Why even tie the two together, at all?

Please do, 'cause this is always bull&%#^:

This isn't really a problem. Ranks don't have to carefully follow real-life naval structures. For example, the real-life pirate nation's real-life pirate navy didn't even have Marauders and Demons. 🙄

Thank you for clarifying

Wait, so you nerfed or buffed low rank NPC turn-rate? I don't understand if (they like experienced rear admirals) refers to new behavior or old.