In Defense of the Current Ship Quality System (and a few suggestions)

[Preble]

If I can impress upon the developers, the quality grades system is one of the differentiating factors of Naval Action and its positive attributes will become more pronounced once the game is fully released and new players begin to populate the servers.  Nobody tries to make a bad ship, but ships in real life often have different intrinsic characteristics based on the skill and experience of the designer and builder (look at the differences between the original six frigates of the U.S. Navy, for example, Chesapeake being the great negative standout).  Moreover, captured ships are not inherently of poor quality--reference the way the British captured and refitted many excellently built French frigates into the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and used them to great effect.  The French vessels were superbly constructed, but their crews were typically simply less experienced than their British counterparts for lack of time at sea.

Mid-grade ships sacrifice some qualities and upgrades for a lower purchase price, thus allowing newer players to afford a larger ship, if not the most finely crafted one.  They are also ideal lower-end fleet ships, as one does not want to spend too much on a vessel to escort/accompany the player but only has limited utility in battle.  From a crafting perspective, they also hold great potential as stepping stones to higher blueprints--if perhaps the blueprint system can be retooled such that the next blueprint can only drop when one has the ability to build exceptional ships of a type (so one has to work up from basic to common to fine to mastercraft to exceptional), the midgrade vessels will regain their viability.

I hope you will take these thoughts under consideration.

Many thanks--

(reposted from the Forthcoming Shipbuilding Changes thread)