Suggestion to Track Navy Career - Beginning to End

[Jean Ribault]

I have suggested this before but never in-depth.  One great thing in Naval Action that I feel is missing is the immersion and attachment one can feel if we were offered an actual "career" as a naval officer in NA.  I want to start off any one character by entering him into the navy and then track his career from beginning to end.  Give him a life of his own, and tie it to everything he does in the game: crafting, battles, trading, sailing, earning gold, etc etc.

If I had such a character I would feel much closer to him as an actual alter-ego, not just log into the game to play it, semi-detached from the character itself.

This character should begin at a young age as a captain, grow old as you play, and then be forced by the Admiralty to retire at a certain age.  In my suggestion here I have offered as a starting point 20 years old, and a 40-year naval career, retiring at age 60.

If our characters were to have such a limited lifespan, it would:

- keep players from becoming dominant and then staying there; they'd have to eventually create a new character

- immerse you into a real career with an end game stimulating you to personal achievement and personal record-setting

- perhaps eliminate the need for things such as map resets and constant Alt hopping

 

Here is what I suggest.  It's just a numbers game, and to me at least seems easy to implement.  I have attached a file with a complete summary of my proposed calculations and charts to show the 40-year career of a typical captain.  The captain's career rating will rise and fall with his age and achievements, and be composed of his accumulated ratings for all his activities in NA over the 40 years, but all of it offset by his physical aging (simulated by a health factor: this factor starts at 1.0 and declines to a 0.25).

In my example the captain's career starts off at 0, increases rapidly then the increase slows until at some point he peaks in his career, after which his age begins to dictate his decline.  It shows up as a hump in the curve of 40 years.  I had no idea how the chart would turn out until I plotted it, but it turned out exactly as I had hoped it would.  In my attached example the player's career peaks around age 44.

Please see the attachment with the calculations, the explanation of all variables, and the final charts of a typical captain - NA Player Worth.pdf .

In the attached example I call the rating "Worth" for lack of a better term.

Please let me know what you think.  This could be a base template for such a captain's rating, and tuned to meet the community's expectations.  I would love to see something like this implemented, because it would excite me to continue playing this game over and over with new characters to continue my own achievements.

Edited February 1, 2017 by Jean Ribault

[Sir Texas Sir]

I also liked the concept if Captain perks where locked to your ships not your char.  So that as you rank up your actually a fleet commander and you get more and more and bigger ships under your command and are not the actual captain of each ship.  The perks you earn for the ship shows how well the officers and crew of that ship grow and get experience.  A fresh ship pretty much has a green officer and crew.  If you sale or trade the ship the perks reset themselves for the new owner.

You can than make the crafting perks and some econ stuff based on your player account as he's the one doing all the willing and dealings back in port of his fleet.  Maybe have each player pick a home port and while that port gets the perks for the crafting stuff that you have earned as you rank up in your nation.

I think it needs to be keep more simple than your system cause of the type of game and well size of the Dev team working on it.  You got a great concept, but I think it's just to much detail for this game to implement at this time or anytime soon.

[Jean Ribault]

I also forgot to mention that at some point the aging process would have to be tied to in-game play hours.  My first best guess at applying it to my 40-yr lifespan above would be to equate 40 hours of in-game play time to 1 year in the captain's life.  In that case you would expend the captain's career and be forced to retire him after 1600 hours of gameplay.

Some people have played twice that, so they would've played the entire life of 2 characters.  I have about 800 hours in-game as Jean so my character would be about 40 years old in the game.

[Jean Ribault]

20 minutes ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

I also liked the concept if Captain perks where locked to your ships not your char.  So that as you rank up your actually a fleet commander and you get more and more and bigger ships under your command and are not the actual captain of each ship.  The perks you earn for the ship shows how well the officers and crew of that ship grow and get experience.  A fresh ship pretty much has a green officer and crew.  If you sale or trade the ship the perks reset themselves for the new owner.

You can than make the crafting perks and some econ stuff based on your player account as he's the one doing all the willing and dealings back in port of his fleet.  Maybe have each player pick a home port and while that port gets the perks for the crafting stuff that you have earned as you rank up in your nation.

I think it needs to be keep more simple than your system cause of the type of game and well size of the Dev team working on it.  You got a great concept, but I think it's just to much detail for this game to implement at this time or anytime soon.

I would also like to see my career-advancing captain becoming commander of ships as well. 

Regarding your final comment STS, I would envision this type of calculation happening client-side, not server side.  Kind of like your achievement files are saved by Steam, NA would write your game stats to file and your Worth calc would be done on the fly when called up, using your stats file.  No burden on the server-side gameplay.  I don't think it would take them long to set this up, I did this in a few hours just using Excel and some ideas.  They could implement it fancier in the UI once they ever get that updated.  The only thing that might go server-side was if they implemented a factor to your in-game ability based upon your latest worth calc, for example, if you're age 58 your character don't perform as well anymore (but I don't think players would like it used in that fashion, just guessing).

Edited February 1, 2017 by Jean Ribault

[Sir Texas Sir]

21 minutes ago, Jean Ribault said:

I also forgot to mention that at some point the aging process would have to be tied to in-game play hours.  My first best guess at applying it to my 40-yr lifespan above would be to equate 40 hours of in-game play time to 1 year in the captain's life.  In that case you would expend the captain's career and be forced to retire him after 1600 hours of gameplay.

Some people have played twice that, so they would've played the entire life of 2 characters.  I have about 800 hours in-game as Jean so my character would be about 40 years old in the game.

I have over 3.5K hours in game with one char and 1.8K with another.  I would have been rited many times over with that system lol.  
If the game had a time base to it than the concept would make since to maybe have, but sine there is no time in game than it's hard to implement.  We are more like a concept of a learder not the actual char in the game.   Fleet commanders can come and go but we are in charge of that fleet.   

 

Many of us would love a ship log that is tied into game though.  So you know how many battles that ship has been in, who has owned it or sailed it and such.  

[Jean Ribault]

3500 hours is too long for one character in my own opinion, at least in the context of this suggestion.  I started with the idea of between 2000 and 2500.

[Pad Seayew]

How many years of a captain's life to sail from Charleston to Port Royal?  

Otherwise I like your idea very much. 

[Thonys]

aging by experience and knowledge is good

aging from a sailor, to an admiral, and then to a regular sailor again, is not very commendable

people can make a very bad decision for the game when that happens.

what i rather like to see is when you age in the game you have the ability to have a real fleet in your command, and not only 2 ships in fleet,

more officiers,

tax reduction

more influence in voting 

better sailors

better ships (lower ranks did not sail a victory )

every rank has his own designated vessel and can not sail at/with under crew

Edited February 9, 2017 by Thonys

[AlteSocken]

I'm one of these casual players, and since I have only a few hours once or twice a week to spent on this game, any character played by me would perform very bad in his available live-time if ow time would be the measure.

Not sure if counting only online-ow-time to the lifetime available would cause any other problems.

[Jean Ribault]

On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 6:29 PM, Pad Seayew said:

How many years of a captain's life to sail from Charleston to Port Royal?  

Otherwise I like your idea very much. 

 

4 hours ago, AlteSocken said:

I'm one of these casual players, and since I have only a few hours once or twice a week to spent on this game, any character played by me would perform very bad in his available live-time if ow time would be the measure.

Not sure if counting only online-ow-time to the lifetime available would cause any other problems.

 

So to address this, it may be possible that the idea could adjust for this taking into account OW time using a compression adjustment, like the game uses now.  Expanding/compressing time adjusting for OW activity (or non-activity, really).

[Hethwill]

at the very least this

 

[Jean Ribault]

In the Admin Q&A recently devs said that it hasn't been implemented successfully in MMO's, from which I infer that they are saying it wouldn't work in NA either.  I don't understand why not, as it is a numbers game to me, but I will take them at their word.  They offered the alternative of a complete player reset, presumably optional per player preference.  This is not the same experience I had in mind in this suggestion.

Edited February 9, 2017 by Jean Ribault

[Hethwill]

Maybe a "RP clan" can become active on this and make up their own playstyle.

[Jean Ribault]

28 minutes ago, Hethwill said:

Maybe a "RP clan" can become active on this and make up their own playstyle.

Not a half-bad suggestion.

[Hethwill]

Not a half-bad reason for me to kickstart on pvp2  just give the shout and i'll be a happy fisherman.

[Jean Ribault]

There would have to be a means of collecting and storing the data required for that clan, through an automated process, with output to a spreadsheet for creating the output I suggested above.  I don't see a way of collecting that data at the moment.  There is the log file for the latest battle, but it might take more than that.  However, a more simplistic model might be able to be created that participating players could self-regulate.  Not sure, seems like a lot of work.

[van der Clam]

Once you have data in a .txt or .info file (or really any file type you can convert clearly to .txt), you should be able to create a simple batch file to extract only the info wanted and then paste it into a spreadsheet. Would be badass to have it implemented into a web forum for player profiles (hint, hint @Marrius :))

[Jean Ribault]

Agree completely.  I was thinking that too, just how in the world to get the kind of data I suggested above without API info or something?  Too much to track manually I think?  But it would be cool to have a clan as Heathwill suggests that uses it for self competition.