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Why did players leave?


Simon Cadete

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Here is my reason for leaving.

A complete lack of direction by the developers.  They have been flip flopping ideas every 3 months, each time it is drastically different than the previous version with no chance at all at tweaking or adjusting the version they just released.   We have gone from flags, to no flags, to 46 hours to 22 hours, fine woods, no fine woods, complete wipes, and then reversals on features that are rolled out.  

The addition of fantasy ships and then the lack of actual national mechanics for nations to set them apart from each other.   No real pirate functions, pirates are just another nation that can fight its own.   The continuing effort of the developer to ignore most of the population that plays the game more than 2 hours a week, and actually have input on how the game feels.   Then there is the bugs, exploits and loopholes that go unchecked for weeks, and when they are finally fixed, instead of balancing the problem or removing the things that were caused by it they ignore it.   

 

Now we have the development of Legends starting, and they keep throwing that in our face like that is going to make anything better.   Look if I wanted World of Sailing ships I would have bought this game in sea trials.  But I didnt.   I wanted an OW sandbox PVP game set in the age of sail.   

So with the game spiraling down the toilet, I decided it is best to distance myself from it till it either dies, or changes and becomes something I wanted.   And if it doesnt, there are a dozen other games I can play and put money towards that do fit my wants.  There is a reason why EVE has been around almost 20 years.

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7 minutes ago, admin said:

Based on veteran hours we have no problem retaining veteran players if they start pvp and rvr.
We have problems converting new players to veteran players. 

 

28 minutes ago, admin said:

Captains were rewarded for bravery indeed even if they lost. And we did reward for bravery but unfortunately this feature was overexploited

NA is currently the best realistic age of sail experience. 
If you are unsatisfied with the experience - it does not make the experience bad or incorrect.
We will remove some bad things we added in may patch, but we have no plans to adjust and downgrade the realistic age of sail experience to the tablet game levels. 

For battle only experience we are making a separate product who will take away people who are not interested in authentic age of sail experience of the open world.

 

@admin I think you may be drawing the wrong conclusions, at least from comments like mine. I don't begrudge the age of sail concept or travel times or realism. But there is a point when you get rapidly diminishing returns.

 

For example, the changes that made it harder to maintain a presence in more than one area such as towing ships, sending ships to port, and so on. Yes, it is more realistic this way, but it is a major inconvenience to most players who want the ability to do some crafting and some PVP but find it's generally not advisable (or even possible, based on resource locations) to do so in the same area.


Consider the notes, permits, etc. As has been mentioned numerous times in countless locations, port battles cater to the well connected and large clans. My clan is about a dozen (at most) active players. We stuck together because we like each other, we're all pretty good, and we don't like being associated with some of the more, to be blunt, asshole attracting big clans. However, due to this, we are essentially excluded from the higher tier ships. To get a ship of the line, you need Victory Marks. To get Victory Marks, you need a ship of the line...see the problem? Even if you actually allowed converting all marks to each other (the last I checked even though an exchange rate of combat marks to victory marks was given, you could not make the exchange). That would still be a difficult task - the conversion rates are like USD to Venezuelan bolivars, but at least it would be doable. Even better would be to give back damage rewards from battles. Right now if you lose a ship in even a valiant defeat you get nothing. If my Surprise decimates a 1st rate but is ultimately sunk, I'm out a Surprise. For a truly accurate admiralty reward system, you would take account for things like that. You said that there were exploits; I don't think that's a good enough reason to abandon an otherwise good system. I'm reminded of a Thomas Jefferson quote: "Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished". I'm sure you get my point.

For a while you did the daily PVP events with the circle near Shroud Cay or the other free port (which name escapes me at the moment). These certainly weren't perfect, and were a hotspot of various poor sportsmanship behavior, but it was on the right track. It was fun, and there were rewards for going out there and getting involved and you were almost guaranteed some PVP without having to hunt across half the map. But you decided to abandon it. This is the sort of thing that keeps people around, for better or worse. You need to have MORE things like that, not fewer.

 

The biggest problem in my view is that you have a creative vision, and that's your right to do. But in applying it, by design or chance you end up catering to a smaller and smaller group of people, or you get folks to buy into the premise but they give up on it for other reasons. I don't think your lack of a decent UI is solely to blame by any stretch of the imagination. It certainly doesn't help, but I think the UI was more to blame 18 months ago than it is now. Now, you have players who have contributed to the community and made guides and videos, etc which help new players.

 

I have never been one to bash you or the other developers even when I thought you made some very short sighted or questionable decisions. But as developers I think you have a certain responsibility to see the forest for the trees in a way that many of your hardcore players do not always, and that means recognizing that what is good for the goose is NOT always good for the gander and that features, mechanics, and other systems should be designed to be of benefit to the largest group. As I once told another member on the forum regarding the "good old boys" network for port battles, I paid the same for this game as everyone else and we all have an equal right to enjoy it.

 

I think all of us keep coming around because we enjoy it and we want to see your game succeed because it is the ONLY game of its type and it truly is quite an accomplishment that everyone on the development team should be proud of. But that doesn't mean you should not be willing to admit to making a mistake when one happens, or seek out honest feedback from the players, or accept that sometimes the original creative vision might need to be changed to something else. That doesn't mean anyone failed, but it's a fact of life. The fact that so many of us here - including myself - are taking the time to talk about this issue shows we care about the game and want to keep playing it. Like I said before, I want to keep playing too, but lately it's just been made so hard to do.

 

Thank you.

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29 minutes ago, admin said:

Based on veteran hours we have no problem retaining veteran players if they start pvp and rvr.
We have problems converting new players to veteran players. 

Veteran here. Sry for being repetitive, but since it seems to me that the forthcoming changes you announced are overall good for the game, have you any idea about when we could expect to have them implemented?

Edited by victor
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54 minutes ago, admin said:

100%
OMG danish player is farming xp on calling pve reinforcements - plz fix NOW and ban denmark
OMG pirate players are shooting each other plz BAN now and ban pirates make them sail gunboats only
OMG players come to port battles in captured 3rd rates (full pb) omg ban them remove capture we want empty PBs

thats one more reason players are leaving. stop whining. enjoy the ships and vast open sea.. like nelson did

You mean we should turn our blind eye on exploits and gamebreaking mechanics like nelson did in copenhagen just to life happy ??

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1 hour ago, admin said:

90% of battles in EVE pvp ends up with kill mail only. no xp no money.
yet of course one can say that you can level up pvp skills in eve by just sitting in station in 1.0

This is not EVE. Why do you always think you have the same players as EVE, the same mechanics, the same solutions to different problems?

You said you want to do a realistic sailing game.

90% of sail battles ended in a draw. The captains got their reward anyway.

 

Also:  a lot of players have pointed out that they do not like having to grind PVE or trade in order to finance PVP. This could be easily fixed.

 

Give assist rewards also when ships are not sunk or when they are boarded. Give assist rewards to mast and crew damage as well. It is a magical solution to most of the whines here, trust me, please.

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1 hour ago, admin said:

You have to look at that from the perspective of the new player. Who spends several days just learning manual sail. 

Yes and we have to encourage them to continue playing.

Losing (both in PVP and PVE) a very tight and hard-fought fight with 0 rewards is very frustrating and will lead new players to leave. Seriously, stop that crap.

If a new player loses its Snow, Cerberus etc. and put up a decent fight, they should have enough money to buy a one-tier lower ship from the rewards to get back in the game. They should not be forced to PVE grind or trade them back into the game. That way you distract them from fun things into less-fun things and they leave.

It is really simple. Just try it.

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1 hour ago, Peter Goldman said:

People whine that they need to wake up early in the morning, that's the human nature. They always have to complain about something.

Capturing ships actually allows easy farming combat marks as captured ships are free. I would suggest lowering the costs of crafting ships and removing NPC capturing. Make it so most players can afford small ships with little effort instead of chasing NPCs and getting crappy ships that do not work in PvP.

Farming gold and exp via damage was very little problem as time effort needed is not worth it. Giving gold and exp for players for damage done actually won't be as frustrating as "No Rewards" message telling you "screw you and screw your 1h effort in PvP battle"

We can still capture NPC ships, but have to pay marks if we want to sail them ourselves. Otherwhise they can be used as fleet or sold. That is the most elegant solution.

No rewards is acutally a killer for newcomers. Totally agree.

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36 minutes ago, admin said:

100%
OMG danish player is farming xp on calling pve reinforcements - plz fix NOW and ban denmark
OMG pirate players are shooting each other plz BAN now and ban pirates make them sail gunboats only
OMG players come to port battles in captured 3rd rates (full pb) omg ban them remove capture we want empty PBs

thats one more reason players are leaving. stop whining. enjoy the ships and vast open sea.. like nelson did

Most Naval engagements were fairly small mostly one on one, rarely did reinforcements affect a battle, a notable exception was during the war of 1812 during the battle between Bonne Homme Richard and HMS Seraphis, it is likely the battle itself would have finished like many others, as a stalemate, until U.S. reinforcements arrived forcing Seraphis to strike her colours. In game it does appear that situation is very much the same, no one could guarantee that reinforcement would be nearby but if they were then that is merely the fortunes of war, the attacker(s) have the choice to break off the action or risk being sunk.

Pirates fought anyone and everyone, and generally in small ships, that said, elsewhere Koltes has come up with what may be a workable solution, it may well prove to be worth considering.

I rather suspect, in part, perhaps you are employing sarcasm here, sadly sarcasm does not translate well into the written word. No-one want's to sail for a couple of hours to sit in an empty PB,  I would submit perhaps 25 v25 cloned ships is not the way to conduct PB's they would be more interesting with diverse ships of many rates and types with a mix of veterans and less experienced players, it offers a fairer chance and more reason for more Captains to put in the effort involved with PB's. This is not a problem the Devs can do anything about, it is something only the players can work on.

Nelson had a huge incentive to do what he did, he was a Naval Officer in a long and bloody war, his country was under threat from outside agencies just as France and Spain were. while he may have enjoyed the ships and vast open sea there were aspects that he hated, one was the very region we fight in, the Caribbean, and he was also unfortunately chronically seasick throughout his naval career.

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1 hour ago, Hodo said:

Here is my reason for leaving.

A complete lack of direction by the developers.  They have been flip flopping ideas every 3 months, each time it is drastically different than the previous version with no chance at all at tweaking or adjusting the version they just released.   We have gone from flags, to no flags, to 46 hours to 22 hours, fine woods, no fine woods, complete wipes, and then reversals on features that are rolled out.  

Here is a guide to early access games. http://store.steampowered.com/earlyaccessfaq/

You also probably read this warning from Valve itself
Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

And you have probably read this

Why Early Access?“Sea Trials is a long age of sail tradition. Captains of that time had a chance to test their vessel and provide feedback to the Admiralty on what needs to be changed to make the ship perform better. Extensive sea trials are required by the Admiralty to fully test if the ships in the game are seaworthy and ready for fighting.”

You volunteered for this and were warned in advance.
We promised experimentation as we need to search for the best nuclear materials in the complete unknown to find the right mixture. To do so we must have a lot of drastic changes and experiments. Such approach works best for the game and for our future games in this setting. Such approach might not work for you though and we understand that. But you should not have bought an early access version then. You knew what you were getting into.

There are people who would never understand captains who sometimes sailed into a complete unknown without even knowing where they going. There people who won't understand scientists who tried crazy combinations without knowing what they will get to find most of the current chemicals and substances. They would prefer a safe trip on white star line and will decline a dangerous trip on Santa Maria. Early access is not for them. They should stand aside and wait for release. 

 

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Lack of content. RVR  is the worse offender, when it should be 1/3rd of the game (RVR, PVP, and everything else) Its barely 5% no one wants to touch.

Fix RVR and there's content to keep people engaged between patches, without it PVP dies, and the game goes into hibernation until update.

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9 minutes ago, admin said:

Here is a guide to early access games. http://store.steampowered.com/earlyaccessfaq/

You also probably read this warning from Valve itself
Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

And you have probably read this

Why Early Access?“Sea Trials is a long age of sail tradition. Captains of that time had a chance to test their vessel and provide feedback to the Admiralty on what needs to be changed to make the ship perform better. Extensive sea trials are required by the Admiralty to fully test if the ships in the game are seaworthy and ready for fighting.”

You volunteered for this and were warned in advance.
We promised experimentation as we need to search for the best nuclear materials in the complete unknown to find the right mixture. To do so we must have a lot of drastic changes and experiments. Such approach works best for the game and for our future games in this setting. Such approach might not work for you though and we understand that. But you should not have bought an early access version then. You knew what you were getting into.

There are people who probably would never understand captains who sometimes sailed into a complete unknown without even knowing where they going. There people who won't understand scientists who tried crazy combinations without knowing what they will get to find most of the current chemicals and substances. They would prefer a safe trip on white star line to a trip on Santa Maria. Early access is not for them. They should stand aside and wait for release. 

 

You are plain right very, very rude right now. Many of us have used considerably amount of time to come with feedback, solutions troubleshooting etc. If you do not cater more about your customers than this, you can take your lousy product and wipe you a...

I'm so done with Game Labs.

 

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1 hour ago, admin said:

Based on veteran hours we have no problem retaining veteran players if they start pvp and rvr.
We have problems converting new players to veteran players. 

Game needs safe zones. Like real safe zones that will sustain a new guy until rank right below captain, but to make captain they have to go out into the "real world" of PVP and RVR.

Missions in safe zone should be scenario style missions (see Age of Empires)

* Mission : accompany trade ship to Port. (Objective : trade ship must not sink or be captured) player spawns into mission with trader and attackers

* Mission : support for battle in progress. (Objective : sink all enemy ships)

* Mission : retrieve ship captured by pirates (Objective : bring ship back with minimal hull damage and bring pirate crew to justice. Demast ship!!)

* Mission : retrieve ship captured by pirates at all cost. (Objective : capture ship by boarding)

* Mission : escape! (Objective out run your attackers and escape!) Player spawns into mission mid battle with damage to his sails and minimum repair kits.

All these and more could be set up as teaching missions to prepare players for the unforgiving pvp world and help graduate players to higher experiences

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5 hours ago, JG14_Cuzn said:

Unfortunately you cannot have a game in alpha for 3 years and expect the excitement to continue.

I don't even think its so much about the excitement but replayability.... The game is great but lacking in content and the only thing making up for it and having high replayability factor is pvp. So what happens if you add no new content and make everything slower / grindier instead and make the game about pve to progress entirely? Go figure. I don't want the game to be easy mode and ships free like before wipe but there isn't only black and white.

Edited by Captain Lust
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54 minutes ago, shaeberle84 said:

 

90% of sail battles ended in a draw. The captains got their reward anyway.

 

What reward did they get? Admiral Byng was court martialled and shot for an inconclusive battle. Since then most british captains fought to victory or loss of the ship and never rank. 

We understand that you want us to give our participation trophies. But we have not decided our position on the participation trophies because they promote bad behavior annulling our reward systems for actually winning. + Even World of warcraft does not give rewards if you don't kill an NPC or a player. There are no partial kills even in WOW.

PS. Legends will have partial rewards for damage (effort) because legends will be impossible to exploit. Here we don't know how to close exploits in pvp as battles can be arranged. 

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18 minutes ago, fox2run said:

You are plain right very, very rude right now. Many of us have used considerably amount of time to come with feedback, solutions troubleshooting etc. If you do not cater more about your customers than this, you can take your lousy product and wipe you a...

I'm so done with Game Labs.

 

you are one of those people who only reserve the right for direct criticism for themselves. Such people are not welcome here as we don't tolerate double standards and demand forum members to treat everyone equally. You won't be missed.

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3 minutes ago, Batman said:

Wow you really have to stop comparing this game to other games, which are actually successfull.

majority of games don't give participation trophies. eve/wow/many others. in fact i can't name a single mmo that give xp or money if you did not kill an enemy. We had this effort rewards but they were exploited. Thus we chose a proven way because everyone else (every other mmo designer) have already figured it out.

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2 minutes ago, Batman said:

So do you want your game to be like the majority of games? Or do you want your game to be unique and interesting?

Do you want your car to use all experience all other carmakers accumulated? Or you want your car to ignore all safety standards learned by 100s of years of driver deaths? 

We tried a unique effort xp system and it did not work because exploits supposedly ruined it for those who believed they were getting an advantage. Now the most complaints about no rewards don't come from new players. New pve players quickly figure out that you just sink the ship and get all rewards you want.

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2 minutes ago, Peter Goldman said:

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/

 

Chronicles of Elyria is the game that abandoned all of the most typical and annoying parts and mechanics of MMO games. New interesting solutions and methods and mechanics. They didn't want to follow all other typical MMO games. They wanted to fix all of these games common issues and bottlenecks.

 

yes and we have many innovative mechanics in gameplay too (for the age of sail games). But xp for kills is a safety measure and i am sure most MMOs learnt that the hard way. Just like inability to talk to enemies. Both these features create a flood of support tickets to work and investigate and we do sort and work on all of them. No xp for partial damage = no farming = no tickets = more time for development. 

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12 minutes ago, admin said:

majority of games don't give participation trophies. eve/wow/many others. in fact i can't name a single mmo that give xp or money if you did not kill an enemy. We had this effort rewards but they were exploited. Thus we chose a proven way because everyone else (every other mmo designer) have already figured it out.

Okay, insurance it is then https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/212726885-Insurance

In essence it boils down to the same thing.

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You have a large problem converting new to veteran players partly if not mainly due to the fact Veteran PVP at all cost players are hammering them day after day.

Have a group of pirate players on the USA coast every day from a free port north of Capital hammering new guys trying to trade to afford a ship same 4 guys daily.

Every time they are hitting the new players and constant 4-1 hammering them. Try to deal with them they run wasting many game hours chase chase chase.

You have certain clans from 2 nations hitting new players day after day the outcome is they don't return and get fed up with it.

Main problem has been for awhile the max rank PVP gods in these clans don't have a brain in their heads doing this. 

One other main problem letting ppl build ports in free ports by capitals they occupy them with PVP veterans and hammer the new guys when they know the main nation pop is not online.

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32 minutes ago, admin said:

Here is a guide to early access games. http://store.steampowered.com/earlyaccessfaq/

You also probably read this warning from Valve itself
Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

And you have probably read this

Why Early Access?“Sea Trials is a long age of sail tradition. Captains of that time had a chance to test their vessel and provide feedback to the Admiralty on what needs to be changed to make the ship perform better. Extensive sea trials are required by the Admiralty to fully test if the ships in the game are seaworthy and ready for fighting.”

 

I cut the bravado to get to the point of your post. 

We all know this is "Early Access" but that doesnt change the fact that almost a year and half ago you had a very defined guideline for the way things were going to go, how they were being developed and when we could roughly expect them.   And you were good at sticking to that guide.  But you deviated from that about 12 months ago.  It has since been down hill.   

Your changes have no reasoning behind them and even less actual testing.  You push out things and then retract them or just flat out throw them out without adjusting or even giving a chance to test things.   This is not how Early Access testing is done.   If you want us to test things, actually let us test things, dont just throw things out there, and then yank them without even listening to the community that says they are ok, but need adjusted.

The idea of the marks was good, it just needed adjustment but instead you yanked conquest marks and threw them out, then through in this horrid victory mark system.... which isnt any better.   You launched 10.0 with the idea that 1st rates would be more rare... yet they are more common now after your recent changes then they were previously.   

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