Æthlstan

Solo, chasing down a lone enemy Renommee with torn sails in my Surprise, after sinking his companion. Suddenly, to the southwest, I sight a squadron of 4 enemies in various frigates. The lone renommee turns to reengage me and I think it is time to make good my escape. A short time later, to my northeast, a squadron of 5-6 various frigates and brigs appears, friendly this time, and moves to join me. An epic fight ensues, in an instance that had become a boring chase. more of that. Less of the current BS.

These guys are pushing a great basic development model. It would be nice to apply a few of their ideas to Naval Action Edit:(thanks pancake) It looks like its going to be a good game but lets not turn this into an advertisement for the game, please PM me if you have specific questions about it Lets keep this more about the development model they are using and ideas they have put out that we could apply to Naval Action. If you would like to talk about CoE, here is a link to a CoE discussion thread This thread should stay relevant to suggesting ways we can use some of this stuff in Naval Action

I dont really think it has to be a separate experience. Perhaps for specific missions the player can be made untouchable by all, but after the player has the basics, they could be attacked while still in tutorial. In fact, I'd encourage it. Have the tutorial comment on it, actually, wish the player luck. Then if they get sunk, the tutorial can help them through getting out on the water again I envision the tutorial helping the midshipman to rank 2 or 3. Just enough to get them into a square rig and explain manual sails. There were smaller 2 mast square rigged ships, so perhaps we could have a sloop with 60 men that can be used at level 2...say 6-8 larger cannons per side over the cutter. Tutorial wouldnt be easy mode. It would just allow the player to learn without delaying their progress. I think we have advanced enough since 2001 to have an adaptive AI "assistant"

Not sure if I get what you are saying entirely. Let me elaborate more and you can then tell me what you think should be different I'llpoint to a specific RTS. Stronghold. In that game, you dont really get a tutorial. You get a cautious old man helping the young princeling on his first few missions. He is very prominent in the first few campaign missions and you cant turn him off. But as you progress, he fades away and you run more and more of your kingdom without prompting. Its the least obtrusive method of tutorial, and maybe our version of it would end after the guy has reached rank 3 or 4 and has finished learning how to sail a square rigged ship

We dont really need to start in a brig at all. A good tutorial is all that is needed. I have spent a lot of my 1500 hours teaching new players how to play, and running missions with them to keep them in the game. I didnt mind doing it the first 15 times, but there comes a point where it all blends together and you start forgetting what youve covered and what you havent, and then it becomes a chore. A basic tutorial a la "the scribe" in old school RTS games would be nice. You could call him First Mate or whatever, or give the appropriate title for the nation.

Requisite I'm done for good post. The recent developer announcements are just more of the same drivel that continues to drive players away. To the few non toxic players out there, I'll miss you.

I really am about done with this game. I dont feel the need to play it and I dont feel excited about it. Nothing about the game is fun anymore, everything is a chore, and I haven't had good PvP in months. I really hope you get it right with the PvP system, and I really hope you get the right balance with ship building, to where basic ships are still useable and exceptionals are more rare. If the combat system sucks, this game will die If shipbuilding sucks, people wont be able to use even the best combat system effectively and this game will die.

I know that I have not had fun testing this game in several months. Its been more of a chore every day. My efforts to bring in new players and help my nation be able to fight at all hours have been sabotaged by huge player bleed off. People leave the game. They don't really leave my clan. I'd be OK with them just leaving my clan, but no. They leave the game. Most of my old PvP 2 clan no longer plays because we stopped being active when we were told there was a server merge coming. We went to PvP1 to get a lay of the land and prepare, but the merge kept on being delayed or reconsidered. They were left hanging, so they didnt come back. We also lost a significant part of the playerbase solely over the 2 minute timer change. We complained and offered alternatives, but we were ignored and the system remained in place for 6 months. I tried taking new players under my wing, even if they didnt join the clan, just to make sure they had someone to ask questions to and help them out if needed. Most those players dropped off the face of the earth after complaining about the 2 minute timer or various other problems they saw, coming on here, seeing people had addressed the issue multiple times in multiple threads for months, and deciding that the game wasn't worth wasting their time on. I've stuck around because I really enjoyed playing this game, and I would like to enjoy playing it again. But I've gotten more and more disheartened with every passing day and each month of steamcharts reports showing a continued downwards spiral. If this game was moving in the right direction, we would see an upwards spiral, not a downwards spiral. There is no way you can justify the downward trend after February without deluding yourselves.

When I first started, I played largely with basic. My captured NPC (or player) fine, common, and mastercraft were awesome (at the time) and I loved them. I felt no need to use exceptionals. and the guys I was playing with felt no need to use exceptionals (my entire nation actually). Hell, we felt no real need to use upgrades either. It wasn't until we started attempting to defeat our massive opponent did we start crafting exceptional ships to use in port battles, and even then we still had guys entering with common, fine, and mastercraft. If this game ever gets back to PvP centric gameplay, like it was in February, that, combined with the amount of resources it takes to build exceptionals, will put common, fine, and mastercraft back on the map as good PvP ships. Overall PvP skill on this server has gone way down over the past several months because good fights have become so uncommon. Back in the old days, we fought opponents who had exceptional ships in our basic-mastercraft ships, and we won, because we were more skilled than our enemies. If my enemies are terrible at PvP, I wont risk being ganged up on while in an exceptional. I'd take a fine or common out to go solo PvP. Id keep my exceptionals for RvR screening, hostility missions, and port battles.

This is stupid Uh, my description is entirely valid and not vulgar. It *IS* an insanely stupid idea. That is my opinion and I am free to express it, unless Gamelabs wants to be thought police. Do not change the quality system Do an asset wipe. With the changes you've made to crafting, people will be sailing in basic ships for a while and it is much harder to keep up a fleet of exceptionals. This is yet another example of you admins over reacting and making a massive unnecessary change rather than making small adjustments. Back before Exceptionals became commonplace, I sailed basics, and common, fine, or mastercraft was a big deal. We can still go back to that. Edit rescinded

Admin whats your thoughts on this?

If theyre changing the economy its pointless to do it now. Other alphas have survived after asset losses, its no big deal. And i beg to differ. The people who make 10s of millions are not ones to sit on their stocks. When I was an active trader when I was farming blueprints, stocks ran through my warehouse like water when the price was right. If i wasnt making 0 profit off of crafting, or if I wasnt crafting at all, I would have been able to put my hands in almosy every market within a month after starting from nothing when I first switched to PvP1. If I continued playing that way (only did it to finance blueprints acquisition) I would be one of those players with 10s or 100s of millions. But thats not the point. The new economy is not just a different econ update, the admins say it will be a complete rework. We cant test it adequately with current assets and without seeing it I think its hasty to suggest you could make everything back so quickly Pvp2 has a very crappy player driven economy and most people make money by AI trading. Try AI trading on here when theres hundreds of other people competing for the same AI trade deals. I found the most lucrative way to make money was to compete with the power players by severely undercutting them but that wass only possible because I played while everyone was sleeping. I used to live in Oceana. So all my cargo runs happened while everyone was asleep and I could move 8k at a time. Even then I was dealing with power players, there were markets I couldnt possibly compete in, and I was limited to just a few. In fact, the ones I did compete in had power players too, but I made friends with them and they let my contracts sell before undercutting me. Or I wouldnt have been able to compete at all. This was back in the age of very plentiful AI resources and i dunno if I could pull it off today. With the new economic system promising to be even more dependant on players making their own resources, its even more important that those massive stocks of resources be eliminated so we can see if players can create enough resources to drive the economy In fact, I'd say starting from 0 is very important when we test the new economy. Whether or not everyone gets back to where they were quickly or not is pointless, because the whole point of an asset wipe is to test how the economy functions. Is resource production to high? Too low? Is crafting feasible? Is making money reasonable? How fast can people make money? How fast will the economy grow? Are some markets underperforming? Do we see a shortage? An unusual surplus? Does resource production cost too much? Etc. Perhaps you could not wipe until a week after all final changes to the game are made. That should give you enough time to see how the high end economy works, if you feel its that important. But I think within 3 months its reasonable to expect that players will have reached a level high enough to have adequately tested that anyways. If we dont start from zero, and stocked assets are making up for market deficiencies, what happens when those stocks run out? Can people produce enough to compete with these guys? Will the economy falter a year after release because these guys stopped playing?

Dude. Expense means nothing when you have 100 mil to toss around. With that amount of assets, you treat the economy more like a stock market than anything else. Identify cheap resources. Buy them all up. Wait until prices skyrocket. Sell at high price until it doesnt sell any more. Rince and repeat. Double your assets every week. any new economic system that gets released will never be able to be tested properly unless we start fresh. The entire point you're missing is, if the new system is broken, it may be impossible for new players to make it rich. This could be due to either the system itself, or the current tycoons out there with monopolies on every profitable industry. Which would also be something broken. So you cant test a new economy's upper limit with old economy money, materials, and resources. Some of these mega millionaires have a ridiculous amount of almost every resource and material. You cant test scarcity with that kind of backlog. These mega millionaires would just trickle out their supply in ridiculously priced labor contracts making a killing, using product that they got on the cheap before it became expensive. Thats what we call artificial market manipulation. If people cant become megamillionaires after 3 months of "Beta" post wipe, then maybe there is something wrong with the economy...or maybe it is working correctly. But with 3 months for final game design testing, I think people will have more than enough time to climb to the top with their millions. If you think there is no incentive for them to do that, since there is no long game in 3 months of play, then why is anyone still playing when release is potentially less than 6 months away? an asset wipe is coming then, for sure. One thing you could do to ensure motivation during those 3 months is to have goals and benchmarks set for the players, with a reward for reaching each benchmark post release. ppfffft No. we didnt get where we are using the final version of the economy. Our assets come from a wide variety of economic situations. We have been playing since open world, in a lot of cases. Our assets will not recover to the same state in 2-3 weeks, if the dev's final economy looks the way I'm guessing it will. Maybe in 3 months, but even then, it will definitely not be the same. The hundreds of thousands of tons of stockpiled goods the power players have accumulated will not be there. I think its impossible for anyone to get that much production in that short a time span. We will have millionaires, but will we have megamillionaires? Will we still have ships selling for 15 million? I doubt it. An asset wipe has always been held over our heads by the devs. Anyone who has willingly invested time in this game should know that. Are they going to quit at release then? Hmm? Are they going to not play for the 3 months of final testing that has been proposed? I find that more likely. However, perhaps thats where the rewards I suggest come into play. I really like the yacht, and wish that I played early enough to get it. How many people would play to reach a goal (say, earn 5 million gold by beta's end) to receive a similar redeemable?

Thats a stupid argument when talking about testing the economy (which I have serious doubts over), you simply cannot do that by creating a new character. The economic system can only be adequately tested if all players start out with nothing. The current situation where there are folks with tens of millions, or as they claim, hundreds of millions, acquired through broken game mechanics half the time, does not provide a conducive testing environment if we wanna seriously test final game design elements.

An asset wipe needs to happen taranis. One is coming at release anyways. Once the devs are satisfied with everything and they plan on making no additional changes, they should do a complete asset wipe, announce a beta, andvertise the beta, and bring in a whole new influx of players that are starting in relatively the same place as the alpha testers. Beta should be at least 3 months before release with another asset wipe afterwards. After release, special redeemables can be given as a reward to alpha players if the devs so choose, but I feel that it shouldnt be anything that gives a significant advantage. The worst thing for a new MMO is to have a significant part of the population not only max level, but to already have accumulated massive stocks of ships, money, resources, and materials. Im right there with you. You and I dump some serious cash into new players. I rarely have more than a million gold because Im always spending it on the clan or new players or transfers in some way or another. But you and I do that to mitigate the grind new guys have to go through, so they can enjoy this game more fully. Now imagine if we all started from scratch again and we went on a massive recruiting spree. Those new players would be in the same boat everyone else is, and we wouldnt have to bear the brunt of financing them with gold and ships because it will be a while before anyone has massive stored stocks again. We are alpha testers. We test this game and provide our feedback to ensure the game is successful at release. We've known wipes are possible. If its whats best for the game, we shouldnt complain. Id rather this game thrive at release, rather than die and leave me with heaps of worthless virtual assets.