admin Trade fix

[Raekur]

5 minutes ago, Hethwill said:

I wonder where those 860 extra hands fit a 340 crew ship... 🤔

( fine with covering losses as long as there's no prizes to crew, once you crew a prize you would've taken from the 340 and not the "pool to cover losses". that's balance, makes you make decision on how to use your resources, and not give everything without cause )

But what would remove the account flag preventing replacing crew? Entering a port or the NPC ship reaching its destination? The port aspect could be easily exploited by just hunting near a freeport that is not one of your outposts. For the option of the NPC reaching its destination, keeping track of the potential massive number of NPC ships that could be added within just an hour is staggering ( a good hunter can wipe out a fleet of 4 trader brigs and send them sailing in under an hour with little effort)

[Hethwill, the Red Duke]

The prize getting to destination would reset the "lock". You'd have no prize anymore.

Regarding the "exit to port" as we had many iterations ago, is a no go IMO due to extreme usability to bypass normal gameplay ( insta teleport of ships of the line for example ).

 

[GrubbyZebra]

45 minutes ago, Raekur said:

Maybe in your haste to be a grammer nazi you missed my point.

I wasn't trying to be a grammar nazi, but your opening sentence was almost unreadable. It was 86 words without a single piece of punctuation.

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I said nothing about the hunter sending the ship off as an NPC (which was already stated by an admin that it was not going to happen). I was referring to the tow to port option.

I know full well that you weren't talking about ships being sent off as an NPC, which is why my response to you had no mention of it. 
 

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So lets examine your position of using crew to send the captured ship to port (which again, will never happen due to the strain it would put on the systems and the database). Admiral grants 1200 crew, an Endymion (about the largest hunter ship in use) uses only 340 crew. That leaves 860 crew to cover losses and "prize crew". More than enough to FULLY crew 2 Indiaman and still have 100 left for crew losses before even touching any rum that was brought along as extra.

I, like many others, do not think crew not already on the ship should be able to added to the ship while away from port. This is a conversation that is fleshed out in greater detail in other posts and need not be revisited here. Such a restriction was implied in my response on lowering available crew, and should have been easily inferred.
 

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As to trying to code something that limits the crew you can replace, what tag on a ship would designate who can and can not replenish crew? The coding for that would only be possible provided both the hunter and NPC remain online and afloat until the NPC reaches port. Otherwise it would be too easy to exploit by the hunter simply logging off to remove the flag on the account. The other aspect that I dislike with the NPC fleet is that it creates more targets and forces the nation that lost the trader to chose who to go after. If a trader cant send a fleet off under the NPC crew idea, why should a hunter have the option?

It's easy, ship not in port, no replacing crew not on the ship when it left port. This has nothing to do with whether prizes are or are not converted to NPC ships, which, again, was not part of my response to you.

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The only way I would see there to be any balance in this is that similar to the smuggler flag there is a Hunter or Privateer flag with the following rules set.

1. Can only be switched on or off at a Nation port.

The smuggler flag should have taught all of us that people will just leave it on, thereby making it meaningless.

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2. The hunter can teleport the trader to his nearest outpost from OW after 3 min, this means that response fleets only have about 2 min to engage the hunter before the trader is lost. The hunter must have enough dock space to accept the trader otherwise the transport fails and the trader remains in fleet and will need at least minimal crew otherwise the fleets speed is reduced to 0.

deduct the min crew from the hunter regardless, but otherwise, sounds fine (there needs to be some penalty for send prize crews off that would prevent hunters from staying on station indefinitely).

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3. The hunter is unable to engage NPC ships while the flag is enabled (this would be the reverse of the current code preventing a basic cutter from attacking a player).

Why? It doesn't matter if the hunter engages an NPC ship or a HPC ship, the prize mechanic should function the same.

[Obi-Heed Kenobi]

8 hours ago, admin said:

not going to happen. Player created NPC transporters are technologically impossible

What everyone is missing is this. 
1000 players online is not really 1000 players, its 1000 players right now (this second). In reality it is up to 10,000 players per day. 
If each of them creates and NPC trader on OW - this will create 10000 ships (which will sail when player logged off too) which is impossible on the technology side.

Remember that the whole british *****ing royal navy had only 500 combat worthy ships at its glory time (it had more but most were in ordinary and in repairs). NA has more than 1500 NPCs and up to 2500 players.

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

[Sea Fox]

Thank you admin for your response. So sailing the prize AI isn't possible. I have no problem sailing it to the nearest port (this is what I do now)

I see then only three possible ways to increase eating traders for breakfast

1) instant teleport of capped trader to port (like the old days)

2) bring back smuggler flag so we can hunt traders in something besides the tsnow and indiaman so we can cap and sell goods and ship in nearest enemy port

3) make trader ships better. The tsnow is currently the best hunting trader ship but it takes a while to whittle down crew and usually the indiaman gives up and you take your prize that way. The LGV.....well the LGV sucks in every possible capacity, tbrig not much better. The indiaman allows you to take any amount of cargo seized and is just ok for hunting. Can we not get a refitted indiaman? Any of these traders haven't got a snowballs chance in hell against ANY war ship

[Knuddel]

11 hours ago, admin said:

not going to happen. Player created NPC transporters are technologically impossible

What everyone is missing is this. 
1000 players online is not really 1000 players, its 1000 players right now (this second). In reality it is up to 10,000 players per day. 
If each of them creates and NPC trader on OW - this will create 10000 ships (which will sail when player logged off too) which is impossible on the technology side.

Remember that the whole british *****ing royal navy had only 500 combat worthy ships at its glory time (it had more but most were in ordinary and in repairs). NA has more than 1500 NPCs and up to 2500 players.

why not reduce ai numbers? limit that number or if to many guys us ai transport do that over night when playernumbers are 300 around?

[Raekur]

Well my feelings on it is this, if a trader needs an escort to avoid hunters attacking him while sailing a trader, then a hunter should get an escort for the captured trader.

Why should someone who goes after weak targets get an option to bypass normal game mechanics when no one else does?

[Coaster]

On 1/21/2020 at 4:24 PM, Sea Fox said:

incentivise the wolves of the game!

 Funny. Why not offer social benefits scheme, trader stamps, welfare security, too? less 'wolf', more 'jackal'

The incentive is already there - player traders laden with cargo are sailing the seas. They are taking a risk. Whats your risk? coming away empty handed? and now you argue for compensation?

[Liq]

Buyprices of tradegoods should be remarkably higher. While the Sellingprice increases by the same amount.

Eg:

Before:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 2'000, sellprice = 6'000

After:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 8'000, sellprice = 12'000

That way the profit stays the same - with much greater risk involved. At the moment you don't really care much about losing an indiaman or two with trade goods because it's easily replaced. With that change the thinking of players might adapt.

Plus, if you capture an indiaman, you don't have to sail it across the map to get some money out of it. You can sell it where the ressources were bought aswell for some good $.

[Raekur]

28 minutes ago, Coaster said:

 Funny. Why not offer social benefits scheme, trader stamps, welfare security, too? less 'wolf', more 'jackal'

The incentive is already there - player traders laden with cargo are sailing the seas. They are taking a risk. Whats your risk? coming away empty handed? and now you argue for compensation?

Thats because beating the crap out of a 6th rate ship that has no way to beat their tricked out 5th rates is not enough for the "Long Hours" spent looking for a target. Granted the reward they get now is from the 6th rate pvp missions which going after traders is very easy to fulfill. Maybe they are annoyed that the mission increased from 10 kills to 25.

Now they want to be able to go out, capture a ship that has a full load of goods onboard that they can sell at any port and make a large amount of reals. All the while the players who are trading are taking a much higher risk then the hunters are and losing large amounts of cash on each failed venture. Wonder how long that will last before the traders go bankrupt and are unable to replace their ships. No traders on OW and then the hunters will have to actually hunt after things that can actually kill their lazy asses.

[Earl of Grey]

10 hours ago, Liq said:

Buyprices of tradegoods should be remarkably higher. While the Sellingprice increases by the same amount.

Eg:

Before:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 2'000, sellprice = 6'000

After:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 8'000, sellprice = 12'000

That way the profit stays the same - with much greater risk involved. At the moment you don't really care much about losing an indiaman or two with trade goods because it's easily replaced. With that change the thinking of players might adapt.

Plus, if you capture an indiaman, you don't have to sail it across the map to get some money out of it. You can sell it where the ressources were bought aswell for some good $.

This, but let the small profit goods like they are, only the players who want max. profit should have a higher risk ... 

[Coaster]

19 hours ago, Liq said:

Buyprices of tradegoods should be remarkably higher. While the Sellingprice increases by the same amount.

Eg:

Before:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 2'000, sellprice = 6'000

After:
Trade good XY: Buyprice = 8'000, sellprice = 12'000

That way the profit stays the same - with much greater risk involved. At the moment you don't really care much about losing an indiaman or two with trade goods because it's easily replaced. With that change the thinking of players might adapt.

Plus, if you capture an indiaman, you don't have to sail it across the map to get some money out of it. You can sell it where the ressources were bought aswell for some good $.

Decreasing incentive from traders does not equate to increased incentive for hunters.
Increasing incentive for hunters comes 1 of 2 ways-

1: Reward hunters above and beyond the reward they gain from capturing the trader. This will lead to traders taking up hunting as it will pay better until such time as the balance tips catastrophically to there being all hunters and no traders. Until the rewards are changed again, there is no coming back. If the goods do not interest you, then you are simply out to get easy kills, and as such no amount of incentive will satisfy you.

2: Remove other sources of income to hunters. Trading and 'piracy' become the best, if not only, sources of income. Failed hunters will become traders, increasing the number of targets available for the successful hunters. Increased quantity of traders means more competition over goods to be traded, and increased chance of a trading success. Then profit and 'throwing overboard' can be tweaked to prevent ludicrous earnings or denial of rewards respectively.

Wolves don't come in flocks. Sheep do. So either the sheep are the traders, or they are the hunters.

[Cetric de Cornusiac]

On 1/21/2020 at 5:24 PM, Sea Fox said:

Did you know that when I started hunting traders in south America 100% of all indiaman my little tsnow came across was unarmed! Both the main and the fleet!! Now almost all of them are because they got tired of me taking their shit! Also I'm seeing more folks sail a war ship as main with indiaman in fleet. 

Hahaha, about time they learn to arm their traders!

By the way, I do this all the time - armed traders and escort as main ship. But... on PvE server. LOL. (where I simulate that what you do as profession, with NPC)