Droprate

[Captain Lust]

One of my mates who gave up on the game before wipe came back the other day. I told him how the game is pve now, but can still have some pvp from time to time after you farmed for cash upgrades but pve being much more rewarding / risk free in terms of gold/items. He was turned off by it quite a bit but still wanted to give it a shot since i told him if he looted a good upgrade he could make some cash or gear up his ship.... since hes low rank i gave him a tanky snow and told him he should do scoundrel missions. He said he counted and did a total of 24 missions and he told me it wasnt easy even tho he was fighting some "rookie" brigs/snows ( always 2 of them )... had to give him 2 more snows in the process. He didn't get a single upgrade... not even a shitty pump or anything... thats 48 bots and 0 upgrade drops. So my question is, do those rookie ships drop less? Or did you nerf the droprate? I did some pve after wipe and remember i got at least a few usable upgrades...

The game is grindy and time consuming enough... do we really need this ultra rare upgrade garbage? If the drop rate is so low for upgrades in general, i wonder how long it takes to get the one you want? And no buying is not an option for casuals because the items are retarded expensive ( obviously ) if anyone is selling them at all but most people keep the good upgrades to their clan anyways... so i thought devs said we would be done with this exclusive upgrade bullshit we had pre wipe, where you have to spam the chat for hours to find a overpriced item you need to stay competitive? I don't see AverageCaptainJoe85 getting his "Art of Ship Handling" book any time before 2019 ( and yeah that shit is OP ).

[The Spud]

I think we don't always need these items for top notch PvP, but the fact we can only get them trough Sealed Bottles, PvE drops and dead mans chests (dunno?) is a bit weird.

Chests and sealed bottles are luck for the most part, you can't force it. But PvE missions are like the lottery, its like gambling, i'll do just one more I'm feeling lucky.
Its just a dead certainty you get gold (much needed), combat marks (for fancy stuff), XP (for ya ship), XP for your rank and the occasional repairs/cannons and upgrades, you don't realy risk anything and the rewards are plentyfull, its also always accesable.

I must have done like 20 missions in my frigate this week, which would be roughly 30-35 ships (mostly 2 x 6th rate, sometimes 1 x 5th rate), and I got one Beltinck pump, one reinforced masts (6-7) and one time the "Distribution of cargo", which was a realy lucky find. Out of maybe the 20-25 ships I actualy looted. So I would say droprate is not too bad. 

Should just get more rewards doing PvP to be honest.

[Captain Lust]

10 minutes ago, The Spud said:

I think we don't always need these items for top notch PvP

I just really hate to have pvp in any game without balance in terms of gear. It's just worse than pay2win, where you can at least buy the competitive gear without having to suck off RNGesus for a lucky drop every blue moon. If i have the same gear as my opponent, i can be sure it was skill that decided the outcome of the fight and not some magic upgrade that some filthy lubber looted with luck after hours of pve...

[Thonys]

well the overall thing you see is that the "captains are very very...... very poor "

no gold, no silver, just nothing .just captains who will become pirates soon (mutiny) because of the starvation of the nations 

be glad if you get a rig repair out of it 

i personally don't even look in the ships anymore useless ch..  everytime

so yeah it is a common thing that you get disappointed , but going to battle for some upgrades is just a utopian  quest  for something you dont need 

[Kanay]

Silly question that needs to be asked just in case :  does your friend approach the sunk ship close enough and use "x" to explore his cargo ?

Small ships, even cutters in OW drop stuff regularly for what i could see, rarely good stuff but they do. As for the rookie missions the balance is completely off and probably extremely difficult and frustrating for new players given the ability of AI to do things no ships player controlled can do...

As for the upgrades RNG stuff i hate it, they removed RNG from crafting process.... just to add more RNG into the game with all those drops able to transform completely a ship or turn them into motorboats, the books, the upgrades, the special notes you need to get + books to make more special books... All stuff should be possible to be crafted or grinded by all players after a few, RNG is bad, always was, always will be, don't know why some games still use this silly artificial mechanic nowadays ...

Players " We don't want RNG stuff in game" ... Dev's "Ok guys, but let's add some more RNG ..." , i simply just don't get it.

Getting 4 or 5 exemplars of a crappy upgrade that is worth nothing in terms of value or efficiency on a ship, just good to occupy one more slot to store it as they still can't be stacked to keep them for later use ... meanwhile some will get "lucky" and drop important stuff making a decisive difference on them ships, one of the most detestable things in this game or any other game having similar mechanics.

 All this does not reward the player for what he does in game or the time he spend he game, it just push to silly grind crossing fingers to be lucky one day and gives the illusion of some game content when it ain't... It's like playing lottery games for 20 years in hope to one day get a decent price that will probably not cover all money ( and here in game playing time ) wasted into this lottery.

I made an optimized ballast waisting 100 pvp marks into this, just to get art of cargo distribution the next day offered by RNGesus ... both books doing the same thing with a tiny difference for roll rate being -8% for cargo and -5% for the optimized ballast... this is pure frustration, waste slowly collected marks into something that have no more use after RNG strikes back ...

One question while I'm at it : are we limited for the number of books we can learn or is the UI dynamic, seems like for some things there is less room for books in the UI than there is books possible to be learned, wondering about this and if our captains have a "limited knowledge capacities " ...


 

Edited June 30, 2017 by Kanay

[Captain Lust]

18 minutes ago, Kanay said:

Silly question that needs to be asked just in case :  does your friend approach the sunk ship close enough and use "x" to explore his cargo ?

Yes, but i wish he didn't to be honest... he asked me why i still bother with the game and all i could say was that i really like the combat.... 

[The Spud]

9 minutes ago, Captain Lust said:

I just really hate to have pvp in any game without balance in terms of gear. It's just worse than pay2win, where you can at least buy the competitive gear without having to suck off RNGesus for a lucky drop every blue moon. If i have the same gear as my opponent, i can be sure it was skill that decided the outcome of the fight and not some magic upgrade that some filthy lubber looted with luck after hours of pve...

Well its a bit like we saw with gold upgrades pre wipe, I had some good ones but most of them were craftables but didn't stop me from doing PvP.

Like with the upgrades, you have some players that are dead set on getting all those top notch upgrades, and they'll either grind PvE or they'll buy them for top dollar. Either way, they did the effort for it, so I grant them that. I haven't been doing tons of grinding, but I still got a couple nice upgrades anyways, and at some point I'll probably have the majority of them, and so will everybody probably.

On the other hand, upgrades don't matter if you don't know what you are doing, as in the oponent can have all the upgrades he wants but if he shows his stern he'll lose cannons and crew non the less.

But I get your point.

[Kanay]

I don't know then, he probably offended RNGesus ... The lottery is bad and your friend is an example demonstrating how bad it can be, like back in the days when we had to craft 20-30 ships at pure loss just to get a BP for another ship, or make 10 same ships before getting the speed outcome we wanted and so on, not it's even worse with so many upgrades and books out there that only a few chosen ones can grab... Just frustrating like any other lottery "game", if this term can even be used, a game is supposed to be entertaining and fun to some degree, there is none of this in lottery.

Does your friend get some repair kits or rum at least from the ships he sink ? or even medium cannons that can be sold for breadcrumbs only ? Only hope for him that he gets something nice quickly to not be too much more frustrated by all this than he already is.

 

Quote

On the other hand, upgrades don't matter if you don't know what you are doing, as in the oponent can have all the upgrades he wants but if he shows his stern he'll lose cannons and crew non the less.

 

Nor ships used will matter much in such cases, however the real question is with 2 players equally skilled using 2 same ships, one full of nice rare upgrades and books, other using crappy ones or none... the advantages given to one will make all the difference, and not a small one.

Edited June 30, 2017 by Kanay

[Captain Lust]

14 minutes ago, Kanay said:

Nor ships used will matter much in such cases, however the real question is with 2 players equally skilled using 2 same ships, one full of nice rare upgrades and books, other using crappy ones or none... the advantages given to one will make all the difference, and not a small one.

This is the real problem.

[Kanay]

Yesterday during PVE missions grinding xp for slots on my ship i had numerous times a single ship dropping 2 upgrades or books, never had more than one book or upgrade from a single ship before, when lucky enough to get one, not sure if really lucky or if something changed in the drop tables yesterday, best i got yesterday was 2 upgrades + 1 book from a mercury and a Niagara, both sunk and looted in a same mission...

Edited July 1, 2017 by Kanay