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Mega Patch 10 Constructive Feedback


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@admin I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well as all the other players as I have had a number of players agree on these changes. These are mainly Economic "Start-up" changes that I think would greatly enhance new player game play without the daunting task of feeling like they can't do anything and can't progress.

So right now I am hearing the difficulty for some players to make money, and I am also hearing (myself included) of some players making a plan and then able to use trading goods to make fast, quick profits. The bigger problem is that some goods are gone, some have already overwhelmed the capital consumption markets, but that is a different thread.

This thread is about the difficulty of starting up AND feedback to make some ships easier to make, while still keeping the spirit of the Admin's wishes to make 4th rates and lineships difficult and expensive to produce.

1. I think generally across the board all buildings "extraction" costs should go down. What I mean is the gold cost to extract the resources should be lowered. While I understand the admins don't want us printing money via resources, it currently prohibits pretty much everyone in starting well...anything. If I had to pick a number to lower everything, I would say all building resource extraction costs should be lowered by 15-25%. I should make it CLEAR that IF @admin you feel these are good changes, this needs to happen first before anything else.

2. I believe 6th rates should be cheaper to produce. I know they are already cheap but I feel 7th AND 6th rates should be the "dirt cheap" and easy to replace. Cannons I think are fine on them and don't cost too much. losing a 6th rate is lost money BUT it shouldn't hurt the bank, it should have the player need to take just a little amount of time to replace. the player shouldn't feel like he's back to square one losing any of these ships.

3. I believe the lighter 5th rates should be slightly less expensive to produce, mainly the cerberus, surprise, and reno. I think they are in a good position, I just feel a slight material reduction is needed. I believe the 1st point of cheaper resources extracting from buildings should help with this though.

4. mid to high end 5th rates are in a good position, no change is needed.

5. 4th rates are in a good position I think, maybe slightly more expensive but ONLY if you make resource extraction cheaper.

6. the Admin wants lineships to cost in the millions, I think that's fine. If resource extraction becomes cheaper, then more mats should be required in lineships to compensate.

 

I envision a Cost CURVE instead of a linear increase. Numbers can be discussed as I certainly don't have the right number but I think it's absolutely needed that this "Start-up" econ gets addressed.

Please add your feedback. again I want this to be only about start-up econ, whether we should start with some gold or not, and general resource and crafting issues.

Edited by Teutonic
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I have to agree, the startup is agonizing. 

While the large clans are doing okay, getting things spun up, you NEED a massive clan working together to really make any progression. This new grind has sent my entire clan packing, as it's less of a game and more of a job. I'm all for keeping line-ships rare and expensive, but right now, EVERYTHING is prohibitively expensive. Even when we CAN afford the guns on a Surprise, it spends most of its time in port, because losing it DOES start you off in square one.

Can we consider bringing back the capture of NPC ships? As it stands, 1 durability ships, the cost of repair production and the cost of cannons already keep the ships incredibly expensive. Returning another decent source of income wouldn't be the same level of inflation it once was. 


I agree, make resource extraction cheaper, and make the lower tier ships a bit easier to produce. I know admin is looking at EvE as a goal, but honestly, they lack the side-lures that EvE has, as well as the activity for lower level players. At present, the casual players are locked out.

Edited by TXSailor
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The prices are absolutely ridiculous for startup unless you are in a large clan. How can you expect people to keep playing unless they are in a large clan? I spent several hours getting guns for my surprise only to get ganked by a large enemy fleet. Now you are telling me I'm back into a basic cutter again for another couple hours? This game has gone from one extreme to the other. This does not promote PvP it does the opposite.

 

And I Thought fine woods were bad. :blink:

Edited by Neptune
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2 hours ago, Neptune said:

The prices are absolutely ridiculous for startup unless you are in a large clan. How can you expect people to keep playing unless they are in a large clan? I spent several hours getting guns for my surprise only to get ganked by a large enemy fleet. Now you are telling me I'm back into a basic cutter again for another couple hours? This game has gone from one extreme to the other. This does not promote PvP it does the opposite.

I agree, which is why I am bringing this up. I really think we need a way for players to be able to prop themselves back up into 6th rates very easily so that the grind back to the lighter 5th rates is not soul crushing in basic cutters. 

EDIT: Personally I think the 5th rate Cerb should be super cheap as well so that you can still enjoy 5th rate sailing "on a budget."

Edited by Teutonic
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The majority of us are vets and know how to make money.  Your average new player will be utterly swamped and overwhelmed.  The most common question in nation and global is why can't I equip my cannons.  Its not self explanatory.  Requiring all cannons or none is stupid.  It's absurd how complicated it is.  It seriously gets asked every 15 mins

Prior to this patch the new player retention was abysmal.  Seems like @admin doubled down and made it even worse.  

Edited by Christendom
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8 minutes ago, Christendom said:

The majority of us are vets and know how to make money.  Your average new player will be utterly swamped and overwhelmed.  The most common question in nation and global is why can't I equip my cannons.  Its not self explanatory.  Requiring all cannons or none is stupid.  It's absurd how complicated it is.  It seriously gets asked every 15 mins

Prior to this patch the new player retention was abysmal.  Seems like @admin doubled down and made it even worse.  

 Seconded, as well as killing off old players. 

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40 minutes ago, Christendom said:

The majority of us are vets and know how to make money.  Your average new player will be utterly swamped and overwhelmed.  The most common question in nation and global is why can't I equip my cannons.  Its not self explanatory.  Requiring all cannons or none is stupid.  It's absurd how complicated it is.  It seriously gets asked every 15 mins

Prior to this patch the new player retention was abysmal.  Seems like @admin doubled down and made it even worse.  

Pretty accurate statement there. :) 

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The plain reality is that the cannon market is broken. Cannons on the market are so expensive that I cannot imagine any player would want to grind dozens of battles and numerous trade runs simply to arm their ship. The idea that the market for cannon will be supplied by a player-supplied economy is simply not realistic. Foundries are wicked expensive to build and honestly, producing the cannon to fully man a Surprise is rather difficult by itself. Even so, I think the only ports that would sell the quantities of cannon required would be the capital. 

How about this? The role of foundries should be to produce long cannon/carronade, not the backbone of the entire cannon economy. Reduce the price of cannons by at least by two-thirds so that players can try out more ships and not be completely devastated by the loss of their ship. 

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It's like I just don't understand how you can reduce durability from 5 to 1 and then make cannon prices 500X what they were and expect people to keep playing. I Mean wtf? I Was personally fine with 1 dura because it's more realistic but this is like retarded.

Why is it always one extreme to the other with this game and no middle ground? Like come on..

At least try one thing at a time, first thing being 1 durability and then try raising the price of cannons gradually until you find a good balance, don't do it all at once. We don't even know how 1 Durability is going to do and with this piled on top well sh**.. :o

Edited by Neptune
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@admin On the Global Server the Port Battle Window (12.00 to 0700 server time) is good for North American players but this expansion from 3 to 5 hour closed period is a big problem for those of us in Oceania, ie Aus EST 22.00-17.00 and NZ 0.00-19.00. This means we can only get PB's very late at night in our timezone!

Please can you go back to a 3hr closed window on the Global Server and make the PB Window 10.00 to 07.00 server time.

This would be a great help for PB content for Oceania players and not hurt North American players.

Thank you.

Edited by PaladinFX
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3 minutes ago, PaladinFX said:

@admin On the Global Server the Port Battle Window (12.00 to 0700 server time) is good for North American players but this expansion from 3 to 5 hour closed period is a big problem for those of us in Oceania, ie Aus EST 22.00-17.00 and NZ 0.00-19.00. This means we can only get PB's very late at night in our timezone!

Please can you go back to a 3hr closed window on the Global Server and make the PB Window 10.00 to 07.00 server time.

This would be a great help for PB content for Oceania players and not hurt North American players.

Thank you.

I agree that would help you guys, although I'm concerned about economic stability and progression for this thread. I believe the PB window previously on global was 10:00 to 04:00 which was a 6 hour lock out, I would also agree that I would like the admin to make it as close as possible to get the smallest downtime, but if it's a problem of server constraints then I understand.

Going to topic - Cannons

I think if all resources were cheaper (as i said on my first point) it would effectively fixed the cannon expense too...and if not it would help to a degree and maybe we would need to continue to tweak it.

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11 minutes ago, PaladinFX said:

@admin On the Global Server the Port Battle Window (12.00 to 0700 server time) is good for North American players but this expansion from 3 to 5 hour closed period is a big problem for those of us in Oceania, ie Aus EST 22.00-17.00 and NZ 0.00-19.00. This means we can only get PB's very late at night in our timezone!

Please can you go back to a 3hr closed window on the Global Server and make the PB Window 10.00 to 07.00 server time.

This would be a great help for PB content for Oceania players and not hurt North American players.

Thank you.

I hadn't even noticed until you said anything.  So not only did the global server launch get completely botched (no merge, no true wipe, lazy rename), it isn't even fully unrestricted.  Unbelievably sloppy.  

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16 minutes ago, PaladinFX said:

@admin On the Global Server the Port Battle Window (12.00 to 0700 server time) is good for North American players but this expansion from 3 to 5 hour closed period is a big problem for those of us in Oceania, ie Aus EST 22.00-17.00 and NZ 0.00-19.00. This means we can only get PB's very late at night in our timezone!

Please can you go back to a 3hr closed window on the Global Server and make the PB Window 10.00 to 07.00 server time.

This would be a great help for PB content for Oceania players and not hurt North American players.

Thank you.

This for me ALOT, I would be on Euro if I could RvR but 2AM to 8AM is impossible, not being able to RvR on Global till 10pm is a kick in the nuts.

Hostility is my priority FIX as these 6 fleets you talk about, we have two groups sailing around and rarely hit anything more than a rattler a traders underpants with the odd 700BR fleet. Its so draining especially early game where Repair kits are so hard to come by

Here is 2 hours worth of timings along a stretch of 5 Enemy Ports

3 small <100BR NON-RIGHT NATION fleets

1 720BR RIGHT NATION FLEET

1 520BR RIGHT NATION FLEET mixed fleet in the same ships as us...that outran us ALOT ???

1 900BR RIGHT NATION FLEET that we could tag as it was amphibious

3 < 130BR RIGHT NATION FLEET

At this rate it would take about 70 hours to raise hostilty. If at the VERY LEAST you could get rid of decay until you have a solution in place !!!

 

Edited by Jeheil
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I agree with OP, in general - if you want to help starting economy running up before a lot of players get bored and quit - you can either lower cost of harvesting OR increase income gold yeld from available solo missions (and/or allow solo missions up to post captain rank).

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22 minutes ago, victor said:

I agree with OP, in general - if you want to help starting economy running up before a lot of players get bored and quit - you can either lower cost of harvesting OR increase income gold yeld from available solo missions (and/or allow solo missions up to post captain rank).

I actually think doing both a lower cost for harvesting and increase payout for missions would not hurt at all.

At this point i still make 5 times more of the amount of gold trading than someone burning through a mission and in roughly less time. Only difference is i'm not getting marks.

My main argument is that if you lower cost of harvesting, literally everything else in the econ/crafting portion of the game becomes so much easier (and i am reminded that they increased the cost of harvesting recently). Something needs to budge to allow all players to not feel so trapped for the first few hours of their play time in my opinion.

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Oak and Fir is insanely to expensive for what they produce. I can only produce half my stock at a time and I'm not even maxxing out. That is like 50-80K a pop I been spending for 500 logs which doesn't really make much when your trying to do cannons for your self and clan mates.  None of us really got to ship production mats yet to help with that.  Even though we got one guy with the LVG BP now after pooling our PvE marks.   Though really with the block out of trade goods that run out to fast (the problem wasn't how much some one could buy and take it was the amount there in the first place).

We are now giving our extra redeemable ships to folks that have lost there trader brigs or other ships to PvP fights.   We have yet to produce a ship just been using our redeemables cause all our money is going into replacing cannons lost and trying to get repair kits to do the grind to get the money to get products out of our buildings.   And this is a bunch of guys that are putting in 5-10 hours if not more a day since patch dropped.  That is not a casual player and we are struggling all the while dealing with PvP cause being in the center of the map and easy target for folks that don't have other nations close to them so they could build up there econ.  Not to mention all the money they been making off the tradres they been capping trying to get starting money.  Which they can't do any more cause they lost there one trade ship, since there is no replacement in OW cap or the shops.

Edited by Sir Texas Sir
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2 hours ago, Jeheil said:

This for me ALOT, I would be on Euro if I could RvR but 2AM to 8AM is impossible, not being able to RvR on Global till 10pm is a kick in the nuts.

Hostility is my priority FIX as these 6 fleets you talk about, we have two groups sailing around and rarely hit anything more than a rattler a traders underpants with the odd 700BR fleet. Its so draining especially early game where Repair kits are so hard to come by

Here is 2 hours worth of timings along a stretch of 5 Enemy Ports

3 small <100BR NON-RIGHT NATION fleets

1 720BR RIGHT NATION FLEET

1 520BR RIGHT NATION FLEET mixed fleet in the same ships as us...that outran us ALOT ???

1 900BR RIGHT NATION FLEET that we could tag as it was amphibious

3 < 130BR RIGHT NATION FLEET

At this rate it would take about 70 hours to raise hostilty. If at the VERY LEAST you could get rid of decay until you have a solution in place !!!

 

We will tweak that. 

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3 hours ago, PaladinFX said:

@admin On the Global Server the Port Battle Window (12.00 to 0700 server time) is good for North American players but this expansion from 3 to 5 hour closed period is a big problem for those of us in Oceania, ie Aus EST 22.00-17.00 and NZ 0.00-19.00. This means we can only get PB's very late at night in our timezone!

Please can you go back to a 3hr closed window on the Global Server and make the PB Window 10.00 to 07.00 server time.

This would be a great help for PB content for Oceania players and not hurt North American players.

Thank you.

we will move maintenance 1 hour earlier i think (but can respond on that on monday only) and indeed there is no point to have 5 hour lockdown on pb

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36 minutes ago, admin said:

we will move maintenance 1 hour earlier i think (but can respond on that on monday only) and indeed there is no point to have 5 hour lockdown on pb

@admin Awesome thank you, will look forward to hearing more on Monday. And yep since this is the Global server, the smaller the PB lockdown the better. :)

Edited by PaladinFX
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Let me start positive. I AM LOVIN THE NEW SOUNDS. sry that had to be in caps.

What really puts a dampener on the early ship grind for me though is that AI ships are now merely a dmg farm with very little loot. Not being able to capture them and their little loot combined with less space in cargo due to cannon and repairs weight means mixed gameplay between PvP and PvE is not feelign rewarding at all. I udnerstand that we aren't supposed to be able to jsut cap together 4th rate fleets but I'd propose letting all 7th and 6th rates be cappable (they're supposed to be cheap anyway) and all higher rates are auto sold to the admirality (we already had that with SOLs). That makes the PvE which we have to play to grind and need to fill the time gaps (considering the next capital is at least 30mins away) interesting again. It also provides some small resources (breaking up)or additional money/not having to pay for a trader snow thereby easying the early game experience without making the later stages too easy. Let's face it no being able to cap AI ships does not bolster PvP if it is at least 30mins away. On the other hand attractive PvE gets people out of the ports and provides possible targets for the PvP crowd.

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The gold and prices are completely fine. Few rides with traders brig + a little bit of studying of trader tool and you are ok.

Of course if you want just to redeem you surp and arm it with cannons the first day and then to lose it - well, yeah - then you have a problem.

If you are starting with 7 and 6th tier - you are fine. I am playing together with 1 friend and we are completely ok.

 

The main thing that is bothering me is skill tree requirement. I can make money fast but why do I need money to equip my Surprise or Indie if I will be completely bored out of my mind getting skill slots on Pickle or Cerberus. This is insane: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PHxx0WQIGShFK8z6dfGe0CsjoKg32YtpeS8GuvTFaDs/edit#gid=0

I am not against requiring some prior experience or skills on lower level ships to allow sailing on higher level ones, but c'omon - make it a tier tied requirements, not ships tied. 

For now the line ship requirements forcing to sail on Pickle-Brig-Snow-Cerb chain just to be able to get 3rd (not 4th or 5th) skill slot on Frigate and upper is ridiculous.

Second tree (Privatier-Mercury-Renomee-Surp-etc) has better and  interesting ships (you can at least effectively PVP in them) but still it's tiresome. Please tune down skill slots requirements.

 

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Trading is the way early on, even if you do small trades on the way to and from a mission, once you get a reasonable amount it snowballs, then you can build a building, find something you can farm and sell for more only a few ports away to limit time and risk, then you have a daily income. There is risk I already lost a ship to pirate sumbags (I mean well done sir).

Obviously if you have the taste for it, go hunting other players and take their #@$@ but that has a much higher risk.

I try to keep a reserve of "a new ship" and cannons on hand as my "insurance" against calamity.

Oh and this more a MULTIPLAYER GAME THAN EVER. BUDDY UP or better CLAN UP.

It can be quite scary. But thats the fun isnt it.

Edited by Jeheil
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Cannons are very expensive only if you buy them from NPCs. 24lb carronade is I believe 500 at cost which makes 50 guns cost 25000 - which can be covered easily. 

medium guns will soon be supplied by players too and prices will go down. As medium guns drop as loot from NPCs.

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