ajffighter86

Sigh. I think the Spanish/French/Dane/Swede side has not realized the full potential of the alliance mechanic. It is not about being someone's lap dog. It is about spreading your power around the entire map so that you can coordinate tremendous offensives in certain areas of the game world, or come to mutual aid if it is needed. here's a tip: If your farthest outpost is less than a 30 minute sail from your capital, you aren't going to have any impact on this war.

You're really gonna make me give away the strategy, but I am to the point of doing anything to lay some myths to rest: Mexico was taken with a grand coalition of about 3 mortar brigs and typically no more than five 4th rates. British bought the flags. A few supporting dutch and US ships supplied the squadrons (hardly fitting to call them fleets, working together we might have been able to fill half a battle). By the time the last ports near Vera Cruz fell, we even had a guy jump in with an Indiamen just for the loot. If that is to be defined as an unstoppable force, then there is honestly no hope for Spain. It was, however, highly organized, and that is something Spain and her allies need to work on. Charleston is not exactly next door to KPR, and just last night I opened a US outpost in Willemstad. —Willemstad! I said. I don't even have the proper footwear. Simply put, your allies are lazy and disorganized. They did not prepare for a world-wide war. My guess is that they simply spent the time during cease fire to build first rates and grind gold, rather than making the long sailing trips that are necessary to be effective allies. A few Danish or French reno's could have stopped the attacks in the west. But it seems Spain is a better ally to them than they are to you. Perhaps you should vote for war and take ports from them as compensation for not helping you in your time of need.

If anyone is to be ashamed, it should be the French and Danes for leaving the Spanish to their fate. The Americans sent half of their navy— that's right, 10 of our 20 players —to the aid of the British in the Mexico-Yucatan campaign, yet I rarely if ever saw one French ship helping to defend Spanish ports. The US may have a small player base, but we will do what we can to help our allies—and we prepared for it, moving outposts well in advance of the campaign. (yes sailing long distances sucks, and yes, it pays off, when you need to be at two sides of the map in the same weekend). I feel as though I would be spilling some grand super secret strategy by saying this, but, perhaps you might try to coordinate more with your allies? And, I might also add, that it is important to know the limitations of what you can achieve with the player base you have. I understand that there is a significance to having traditional Spanish ports in your possession, but there is no possible way that you can defend all those ports alone, with the players you have. For example, look at the Swedes. They have 2, densely packed, blobs of ports, if you will. One of those blobs has been intelligently protected by diplomacy (their home waters sit between Danes and French, with whom they have agreements). This gives the Swedes a comfortable opportunity attack all day long from their ports in northern Haiti. It is easier to fiercely defend 20 ports with 100 players than it is to try to defend 200 ports with 100 players. (if the swedes even have that many). Empires crumble because they over-extend, and even the British are not immune to it. And, I say this as a United States player, but we as a faction are in for a rude awakening when port timers are a thing of the past, because I know that we have more ports than we could possibly defend (so do the pirates, who, I'm told, reduced the USA faction to nothing last spring). It may entirely change the way we have to play the game, but I am up for the challenge, personally.

I am not sure how a pirate becomes a judge, but I suppose there have been cases of pirates-turned-governor, so the real question is, have things gotten so bad in Denmark that they are outsourcing their judicial system to pirates?

The Swedish are merely being schizophrenic, and perhaps the pirates are confused as the Swedish are behaving more like pirates than the pirates.

I haven't seen many comments from French players in this thread. At risk of sticking my hand into the hornet's nest, I dare say that Spain's allies are sleeping on the job. Seems a bit one-sided, yes? I've seen screenshots of Spanish helping the French in their battles, but not so many French helping Spanish. Perhaps if Spain were to remember this in the next round of voting . . . well, you might guess what I'm getting at.

That was a fun fight for sure. The Dutch needed a Rosetta stone, lol. 1/3 speaking German, 1/3 speaking English, and 1/3 not even on TS. But, in a case like that, all you can do is brawl and hope for the best.

PVP 2 is heavily unbalanced, unfortunately. On that server you have 2 factions, pirates and USA, and the other 5 players are merely spectators. In stark contrast, PVP1 is actually very challenging to play on the US faction considering we probably have more teamspeak channels than we do players. We're a highly disorganized band of misfits hell bent on showing the british and dutch that they're blessed to have such dysfunctional allies. I hit my pray button repeatedly in hopes that the day will soon come that Spain and USA are no longer hampered by port timers and can enjoy killing each other in good faith, as God intended.

Raphael Semmes rarely ever saw a Confederate port. He sailed CSS Alabama everywhere, Caribbean, South Africa, the New England coast. It's the only way a smaller naval force could fight, and it wasn't even all that effective. —but, not possible with the social perk. Raiding a larger nation's shipping is a thing of the past.

Yep. If we had 30 minute timers back in February on PVP2, the French would have been wiped out. We were already down to 1 or 2 ports. You could barely find 25 French players online at any given time, even during peak hours. The pirates had maybe 75 online at a minimum at any given time. (most of the player base on PVP 2 was either pirate or USA at the time) What that means is that with long timers, the pirates would have been able to destroy the French in any OW battle that was initiated. That's what people don't seem to understand. Longer timers do not lead to balancing and helping the underdogs. They only favor the team that has the ability to get the most players into a battle (which is usually not the smaller nation, meaning ganking becomes a ten-fold problem). The only way the tiny French nation could succeed in victory against the pirates was 'guerrilla' warfare, attacking at different locations, being unpredictable, disappearing over the horizon and repeating the tactic somewhere else—none of which would have been possible if the pirates could have called their entire nation to every battle we ever tried to fight. If people want a balanced fight, we might as well do away with OW. I do not understand the point of sailing to fight battles if we are simply treating the open world as a server lobby where we will wait for even fights. That can be accomplished from the "missions" tab in any port.

Come on folks, this was the first test of many events, which hopefully will improve over time. Those who participated didn't actually get much anyway, so all the butthurt over "it's on the other side of the map" might as well cease. Unless we all honestly think Jeheil is gonna go around murdering everyone with his purple pellews. In which case, this event was highly overpowered and unfair. And I hear the pink royal Essex paint absorbs cannonballs that hit its hull and turns them into cotton candy. Those are the only two overpowered drops from what I saw.

What if next time the wreck is guarded by a fleet of 1st rates? I hope they will keep it unpredictable.

I personally have not laughed so hard in this game as I did reading global chat during this event. It was apparent who was having fun, and who ate their cheerios from a toilet bowl this morning.

Someone in the other thread described it as "fight what you see" and I think it was very accurate description of the 2 minute timers. People will risk durability on their ship if the enemy ship or fleet they see on the horizon is likely to give them decent or even favorable odds in battle. But now players will become passive (just like before when we had longer timers, and no one wanted to initiate a fight anywhere close to a free town), because you have no way of knowing what is 2 or 3 horizons away, or who is waiting in the port, and those are the ships that are going to pour into battle and screw it up for you. This is what it looked like outside of free ports when we had longer timers. No battles happening, just a bunch of peek-a-boo because no one was brave (more like stupid) enough to initiate a fight:

Exactly. This worked great for the Indiaman. —not so great for someone trying to raid traders in a solo surprise. We tell pirates to act like pirates and then we do stuff like this that absolutely ruins it. Might as well not go outside of a port if you can't find 24 other people to group up with.

I totally respect the desire to remain an underdog nation. Good luck. This needs to be tested, anyway. It'll be interesting to see how the alliances play out across all nations, if just 1 nation decides to make seemingly erratic choices with their voting. I also like that you can somewhat gauge nation's strength by the vote tally. I've been asking for the developers to simply just list the number of active players on a server by nation, but now you can at least make rough estimates looking at the vote results. It's not 100% accurate, probably not even 50% accurate, but better than trying to sail all over the place getting a head count, lol.

The only real interest I have in the Keys is a jumping point to move into deepwater ports farther south. People like to claim the USA has the easiest starting location, but I disagree. For the most part aside from a few Danish and Pirate challengers coming out of Sunbury, it's probably the deadest area of the map. Even the Gulf coast sees more activity. New US players have to sail for 2 hours or so to get to any decent PVP action. Yeah, it's great for grinding up levels but if that doesn't appeal to you, a nation like Britain or the pirates actually have a better starting location if you are looking for action. With the new port battle mechanics, we will hopefully no longer be limited to capturing nearby ports from currently held ports. If US wants to strike French ports, we won't have fight or "trade" ports through Spain, Pirates, British, Danish, Dutch, and Swedes since there will be no conquest flags that expire in 1 hour of sailing. You'll just be able to show up and cause a fuss outside of a port and attack it. I think it will make for some interesting shifts in front-lines.

I might suggest when coming out of a tack in a larger ship you try to gain up your speed a bit before continuing the turn using manual sails. With the latest patch on acceleration, ships, particularly your 3rd-rates & up, barely turn at all at anything less than 2 or 3 knots, with or without manual sails, and that moment of vulnerability coming out of the tack at 2 knots can feel like an eternity. Get that speed back up to about 3.5 or 4 knots as quickly as possible and then continue pushing the bow around with your front sails. And if worse comes to worst, even if do get caught in the wind, if you depower and turn your sails headlong into the wind, at least you have more maneuverability being pushed backwards than you ever will at a complete stop.

I say this purely from a gameplay standpoint and not a diplomatic standpoint, but I have concerns about the coming diplomacy patch. If two of the most powerful nations can form alliances, I think we are in for some serious problems. Do not mistake this as me looking to make an argument, but rather just allow me to voice these concerns. There is little incentive for anyone to ally with Spain at the moment. Between the US, Dutch, and British, they are wholly surrounded. However there is a lot of incentive to want to be allied with the strongest nation on the server, which I assume to be the British at this point. And we have seen from the disappearance of many French and Danish players, that when a nation's morale is too low, the active player count follows the decline. Granted, much of the disappointment and break-taking has been over port battle mechanics and I hope to see many players return when the PB re-work patch releases. Perhaps, there should be some incentive (xp, gold, maybe?) to form alliances with weaker (no offense with the term) nations. Nothing game-breaking, maybe a 10% bonus. This will tempt voters in nations to vote for those less appealing alliances, rather than just make sure they're on the winning team's side. Perhaps some civil strife might ensue, of course. We have seen from the dutch faction that getting an entire nation to agree to terms is not easy, and I sense there are some disgruntled captains in Spain (I always admire a fighting spirit from an underdog, though, regardless of faction). This might place a burden on the developers, I'm sure, as they'd have to code some way to track current power and active players per faction day-to-day, or perhaps at least a weekly basis. But take my suggestion as just scribbling ideas on a napkin. And perhaps this thread is not the best place to discuss this, but it has been my experience since I picked up the game, that heavily unbalanced match-ups are not particularly interesting for either side, boredom follows, and players lose interest. I completely understand the motive for this treaty, to give spain time to get back on it's feet, but with the distance and/or absence of former Danish and French allies, it will still be 3-v-1 when the treaty is broken again. And serious question, but is it any more fun for Spanish players to feel compelled to follow these treaties as it would be for the Brit/Amero/Dutch alliance to park right outside of la Habana every day? Some players WANT to fight, regardless of the odds. I am curious to hear a direct answer from Spanish players: Are you benefiting at all from this truce? Rebuilding? If not, then we should ask if we are doing more harm than good with this treaty, if it has stifled the action for nothing. It was a lot of fun when the dutch, pirates, british, and spanish were brawling in the channel between Cuba and Haiti, but once that scale had been tipped too heavily in one side's favor, one of the server's hottest PVP zones cooled down considerably. As an American player—again, not speaking diplomatically here, but just good ole gameplay (I can hear war drums beating already, lol)—I would actually enjoy the idea of a good-sporting fight against british or dutch from time to time, but I fear that with all these treaties, people have become too ingrained with their habits of assisting one another to manage such a contest, and my concern is that the diplomacy patch will only exacerbate the issue. Have we accidentally created a system where alliances are de-facto permanent and probably detrimental to overall server gameplay? I hope not.

It would also bring a sense of sanity to the game world when half the server population consists of pirates (as a nation)—not to mention a bit more realism. Privateering would have been much more common than piracy, and in the case of truly successful and notorious privateers, were often mistaken (or perhaps, purposefully 'misjudged') for pirates. Sir Francis Drake, hero privateer to the English, dreaded pirate to the Spanish. It just depends on who you asked at the time.

Is it really off-topic though? I ask seriously. It has been apparent since day one of OW there are two different types of players. There are those with busy lives that do not want to spend hours getting into the fine details of the game (i.e. crew management, crafting, even sailing), and there are those of us who want a fully fleshed-out open world experience. And again, I do not see much chance of compromise between the two sides that will make either happy. Asking for feedback on crew management when half of the replies are going to be from people who will hate the system no matter what you do with it, is putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion. We need to first address the different play-styles, and then you can ask those who actually desire the crew management aspect how it can be improved. Then you can get feedback without all the 'my kid poops his diaper every 5 minutes and I don't have time to grind money for crew' replies.

I don't think bottles are meant to be a 'large chunk of the game.' Prior to the fishing/bottle patch, the large part of the game was sailing for hours to get to a battle anyway. At least with the shipwrecks, you have more than one reason to sail across the map. They are supposed to get people out of their capitals and interacting with the rest of the players on the map, and I don't think they were doing that when they spawned shipwrecks 2 grids away. My humble suggestion is to spread out your outposts in free towns. I play as the USA and I made it a determined effort to open an outpost near the Dutch capital, just in case I got one of those weird shipwreck spawns. I didn't do all of that in one sitting, of course. it took time to make such a trip and I fought some battles along the way. The shipwrecks are just supplementary gameplay and really are not a requirement. They should be considered as 'something to do' rather than 'something to strive towards'.

It feels about right, how it is now. I think the bottle drop rate was adjusted in the last patch as well? I've noticed I'm no longer picking up bottles faster than I can open them. Random locations, random reasons to visit random ports near shipwrecks. It gets people moving around the map and that is a very good thing, and should be the purpose of the bottle drops in the first place. The only thing I would suggest is the bottles way out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean should eventually be done away with. Those do nothing to promote PVP and it's unlikely you'd salvage a shipwreck in deep water.

Every time someone complains about money being too hard to get in the game, the developers do something that absolutely breaks the game. Does anyone remember last winter when missions paid so much money, we had massive inflation? They had to cap mission payouts at $5,000 regardless of rank, and it still took ages for the economy to stabilize again. So new players complained about money being hard to get. The "solution" was that money was made stupidly easy to get. The resulting inflation actually meant that the least wealthy players needed to get even MORE money to buy the ships they wanted. It didn't solve their money grinding issues at all. I believe we may need two different types of servers when the game releases. I know the prevailing opinions on 'splitting the community' but I see no other alternative. One server will just be bang-bang shoot'em up combat, but you won't gain experience or need gold. Just pick your ship and go. Maybe you can sail any ship you want, so everyone can go ahead and fight each other in 1st rates all the time (which I think will eventually get boring, but I digress). It will be a purely sandbox server. Nothing transfers over from this server to other servers, since nothing was risked nor lost. The other type of server will be for players like myself who want a little more depth and challenge to the experience of the 18th century, economic hardships included.

I really, really like this idea in regard to the trading aspect, at risk of going off topic. It could probably be implemented loosely with the national goods that already exist in the game, and causing multiple types of them to be needed to make certain things, like upgrades, perhaps. Say, to make light canvas, you need: American cotton, Swedish iron (lol, just an example), and French wine (just, use your imagination). So, yeah, to make certain things, you'd actually need materials from different nations, so that going to war with them actually carries some economic penalty.