Patrol Areas : Misleading Infos

[Zlatkowar]

Aloha,

Here's a few things that need some adjusting regarding patrol areas. Right now, you either know how it works from experience / Global / Forum, or you will make mistakes and waste your time. Let me explain.

Today's patrol on PvE was between Nippes and St-Nic. This is what the patrol area hover info shows.

Inner circle :

I do understand that this was primarily introduced and meant for PvP server, but the "Solo PvP" is quite confusing. In addition to that... If we're supposed to be able to kill AI's on PvE instead of players, then something has to be done regarding AI spawn in this area. I was in a 5th, I could only attack 5th, and in the whole time I spent there I only saw 2 5th rates. All the rest was SOLs. Anyway... Back to my initial request.

Outer circle : 

At first I thought okay... There's just a BR limit here, no mention of a specific max rate of any sort. Let's just go there with the Vic, as I did few days ago during Hispaniola patrol. I engaged an enemy ship, noticed I am not in the "patrol area" battle type... And of course there's no damage registered at the end of the fight. I'm then guessing that the 5th rate limitation applies to the whole patrol area... I jump into my pink Essex (which I wanted to see in flames anyway), engage a Wasa and get annihilated in about 8 minutes. Ship lost, but damage successfuly registered... Okay, so this is working. Good.

I am still a bit surprised to see so many 4th rates in there... Out of curiosity I check out one of the battles in progress and here's what I see:

Maximum allowed class : Rank 4. This information should be much more visible... Either in the patrol info screen at port, or on the map, more explicitly. I've seen lots of players confused about this. Just imagine how this would feel to someone who moved from further than a port just 60k away from the zone... 

This does not look like something too hard to fix since it's mostly plain text info to be modified here and there (I may be wrong). It would certainly help lots of players to get the info right from the begining. Less time wasted > more naval action > less frustration > better player retention [Insert fireworks here].

Thanks for reading,
Zlat

[admin]

Patrols need to be slightly repositioned to provide for the NPC distribution. Agree.
Solo patrol is very hard to do on PVE as many NPCs are sailing with fleets. 

[Tiedemann]

We struggled with this yesterday because of the 5. rate limitation in the solo patrol that you can read on the map. But we knew from experience that 4. rates was the limit, and that was correct.

The rating limit should be visible on the map, in port and on the battle instance it self imo. And I do not get why the rating in the center  circle (solo patrol) is different from the rating in the outer circle. Just makes it more confusing.. 

[Guest]

@admin thought about having 1 shallow pvp zone and 1 deep water pvp zone each day? yes playerbase etc.. but for players that only like small/big ships i think it would be great, sailed yesterday without nothing to do because i dont really like small ships it got quite boring after sailing for 2 hours without a target

[Zlatkowar]

Yep, same observation in today's patrol near Deadman's Cay. No SOL's in here this time, but the ships population was so sparse that you would spend several minutes before finding a target.

If the hostile NPC thing is still in the pipe, may I suggest first releasing those hostile NPC's exclusively in this area?

[Baptiste Gallouédec]

I also i hate the fact that solo patrols are in the middle of the gank patrol zone, and only poorly indicated by the small icon over the compass,  last time i managed to sail out of the 1vs1 zone by inadvertence  and have been attacked nearly immediatly (soon to be ganked ofc)