Ideas for improving the game

[IndianaGeoff]

How I would change the game.  Again, as in my earlier post this is from the perspective of a Filthy Casual.  First off, you need a good onboarding experience that lets people grow in skill and usefulness.  You need a solid mid game for the casual gamer and you need top tier content for our rabid players.

You need useful things that can be done if you have an hour or two and things that require planning from multiple people who spend the time to get the job done.  This is a hard game. Nobody wants an easy button.  We want to work hard, earn it and show it off by putting it on the line.

First, onboarding.  This is the world of people grabbing missions.  Right now they are a bit too hard.  Give the first level the easy button.  Low rewards, but lots of fun.  Throw them into easy single ship missions and let them land in a cat fight with 4 friendlies vs 3 enemy plus the player.  They can learn how to play with other ships.  We make them wait too long before they get to fight with others.  Make the mission along the coast between ports.  Easy to find.

Once they get the first level (maybe 2) feed them a better ship with some variety missions.  Again throw a bit more variety into the missions without making them hit the fleet button.  Once they hit Second Lt, (120) go to the current system of missions.  I would let folks take one level lower than current, just lower the rewards.  If someone has fun grinding easy missions, let them have fun grinding easy missions.

I would collect experience, but have a formal promotion button with a server announcement at the port. You get your levels, a button appears that you press to be promoted.  That will build community and let someone hit the button when they are ready.  Seeing someone hit Rear Admiral and everyone cheering (or jeering) will build a good sense of community.  If this gets too spammy, then just do it at milestones (when you go from 5^th rate to 4^th rate ships).  I know I would buy people a snow as a promotion gift when I could.  For sure it would motivate new people to get that level announcement.  As it is, sometimes I leveled up and didn't realize it way back when.

You have already said you were going to fix the grind.  Do it.  Capping mid level AI ships is fine.  But I would let you cap any AI ship… just make it crap.  Perhaps give is a very weak core, weaker sides and part of the masts missing.  You can spend significant resources in port to rebuild it to a decent ship.  This is a way for a person who does not want to build a port and craft ships to catch and fix ships.  Just make it more expensive than crafting from scratch.  Lots of Gold and Silver coins are needed to pay the port plus mats.  If you want to cap a brig to do a trade run, that is fine, it’ll just be a dog.  Cap a 1^st rate, sure you can sail it, but it won’t beat a well crafted ship or even an AI.

Now for the mid-level.  No, Region Port battles are not for these folks.

I go back to the days of the port by port flag battles.  Every night you got on and someone was pulling a flag or planting one.  The Islands were a blood bath and there were fight all over the map.  Now I fully realize that you cannot model each port.  Don’t.  There is no reason why you cannot create 3 or 4 or more maps in the open ocean to fight.  In the days of sail, the fight could be anywhere.  Have an open sea map where one side tries to get control of a circle on one side.  Do the old style sink the other guy until you win fight.  Have a map with a bunch of small islands, a couple with forts.  Have a fight on a coast.  You pull a flag, sail to it and when you go in you and the enemy get to find out what the fight is going to be.  For sure do this for shallow water ships and do it for the whole Bahamas.  I would even give each nation one fixed port in the islands so any nation can stake a claim.  15, shallow ships would be fine.  Maybe 10.  Make it easy and small clan friendly.  I had more fun in this era than the ones since then.

Now for the next level, the 4^th rate battles.  Build it into the hostility or let them take ports around a region.  Same thing, you can pull a flag, but if you can win 2 4^th rate battles in a row, two days in a row, you set a port battle.  I would also go with the flag pull of some sort with warning.  Perhaps you pull a flag and a special fleet of trade ships is generated.  You find and sink/capture the head of that fleet.  The defending side and the attacking side then scramble to defend and attack the fleet.  Make the flag holding fleet the only one that can engage.  There can be a hundred different ways to do this, but you get a fleet of mixed ships out looking for something and trying to defend or sink it.  Make it something that requires 8 to 10 ships.  Give this nice rewards so it is worth doing just for the loot.  Put a couple nice Indiamen, LGV and Brigs with a very small escort… make everything cappable.  Get them out there sailing around looking for the win and being a target.  You need fast scouts and the big ships to do it well.

Now for the deep water ports, do the current RvR with some changes to hostility building.  I would just give each deep water just a port on either side.  Let the other ports be flippable in shallow or 4^th rate port battles.  Maybe give some advantage if you hold the regional capital.  Have them be open water fights.  If you take the ports next to a region, make it more vulnerable.  This would be a good place for war supplies.  Feed war supplies into a region and you build hostility.  Maybe a mix of getting a port, feeding war supplies and a 4^th fleet chase will set a region battle.

Make the big port battles with forts a big event on the server.  You want to stake a claim on a region, then it will be a fight.

I am not in favor of the clan system change.  In Global, one clan is vastly stronger than other clans.  Hats off to them, they earned in levels, skill and ships.  But as it is, they will be even stronger until multiple clans can fight head to head.  With the current player bleed, that is not going to happen anytime soon… or ever.  People join nations and want to fight for them.  But player bleed is killing it.  I think the Pirates need to be something completely different from nations.  But if you are continuing as you are now... just make them a plain old nation and be done with it.

I would ditch the free nation swap.  Maybe the bottom two in numbers can accept swaps for free, but end the “join the winning team” crap.  It is killing the game and it might be too late.  You can join the winning team, but you do it naked. 

Have a carry cost for having ports.  If you are not actively servicing them they start to degrade.  Maybe if you don’t feed a regional capital a steady stream of stone, provisions and Iron, then the forts degrade in power or even fail.  You want to have a huge network of ports, then you take care of it.  Maybe if you neglect a port enough as a nation it will revolt and join the weakest nation (or weakest 2 or 3) with them being able to loot the port (redeemable ships, cheap trade goods and killer missions).  You could just let them go neutral.  That would open a fire base in a neglected area.  Face it, there are vast swaths of the map where people just sail to and from a couple ports to grind money.  But nobody takes them because they are too weak in a regional port battle.

Fix the trade missions.  Make them worth it and reasonable.  I am not sailing 2 hours through enemy waters to double my money.  Make it worth it.  Cheap and quick for easy local missions and long and profitable for dangerous ones.  And give the trader the goods for the mission or at least put them at the port you are picking up.  It is no fun to sail half an hour to buy something that is not there.  If not, then do a mission board so I can run some captured stuff to a port that needs it.  Crappy missions are killing the morale of young traders.  Fix it or take it out.

Maybe ditch building trade ships altogether.  Just let people buy them in ports.  I would have Indiamen (and upgraded LGV’s) randomly go for sale in ports.  Gives a person a reason to go see each port… you might get lucky!  Give each port something profitable to move.  Maybe limit quantities, but most ports are an absolute waste.  And put the rare profitable stuff up on the map search.  Make the quantities produced a bit more lumpy.  Again, give a reason for a trader to grab a traders lynx and go from port to port looking for a score.

The fleet wrecks are fun.  Keep them.  The treasure hunts were fun, bring them back.  Introduce long sailing treasure fleets.  A well defended fleet of trade ships with good stuff.  Anything that gets a group to go out and mix it up is good.  You have mods.  Give them treasure ships and put them out there with special accounts.  Let us hunt them down and cap them.

We need a mix of big, medium and small things to do.  Right now, the medium and small things just are not worth it.

In business the hardest thing is to attract a new customer.  Once you have them, it is far cheaper to keep them than get a new one.  You are bleeding new and midlevel players too fast.  I have seen it over and over.  The guy I help out, he makes to to level 3 or 4 and then you ever see him again.  And I can't blame them.

[Skully]

2 hours ago, IndianaGeoff said:

Now I fully realize that you cannot model each port.

The engine can generate a normal battle (instance) just about everywhere. It would just not be a Port Battle map with its particular conditions.

[IndianaGeoff]

5 hours ago, Skully said:

The engine can generate a normal battle (instance) just about everywhere. It would just not be a Port Battle map with its particular conditions.

Yes, make the fully modeled in port battles something special.

[Jean LaPointe]

Back when the latest wipe was pending and there were concerns about the PVP server being merged, then left alone got me thinking about the one server direction a fair amount of people wanted. The idea that came out of it as was squashed was a small "safe" area for the PVE part of the game and the rest of the world was for the war mongers.  If the concept was reversed where you had hunting grounds where PVP was allowed or in other words a series of PVP fighting zones and non PVP fighting zones. The fighting zones I envision would be more in the center of the map as ports won and attained creates shorter and faster routes to the coast lines and other supply havens. Save journeys would be long circumnavigation routes, or at   best a complicated zigzag through the PVP zones. Miscalculated path will have you in a PvP war zone and that is your fault for taking a short cut and not paying attention to you sail skills. If you do not want to take a chance the it is a long trip to sell your wears.

PORT Battles  would be those ports that fall in the battle zones. 

This really allows PvE'rs to jump into the PvP world and experience a real human interaction from time to time. It allows the mechanics not witnessed in the PvE world and would broaden the horizons for all players

This seems to be a very easy solution and have all on the same server. You can move back and forth from PvP to PvE as you please.

 

I thought I would bring this up as part of the discussion,  no harm, no foul.

[Skully]

I was more talking about the triple circle win conditions of a Port Battle. It would need to be modeled for every port on the map.

W.r.t. to 3D models of ports, I want to point folks to the above work. It's excellent and I hope it will be incorporated at some point.

Edited August 20, 2017 by Skully