ajffighter86

Yep. Terribly uneven fights are not fun, in my opinion, whether you are winning or losing. I just hope the developers give us something really dynamic for the port battle re-work. I imagine that people are gonna be fighting all over the place. We will hopefully no longer be limited by 'front lines'. Sure, it'll probably be harder to keep the ports you've got, but maybe it'll be easier to fight your way out of bad situations.

maybe, although if that were the case then the USA would have the most players in PVP1, and I do not see that being the case. Probably we are in competition with Sweden for the smallest faction on the server.

Well I think the british benefited the most from the summer steam sale. They likely needed the help when it was 4 on 1 before that (everyone forgets that in early June, Spain, Pirates, Danish, and French completely pushed the British out of Haiti, boo hoo bullies and all). It took the dutch forever to get a foothold in a deep water port near Haiti to even get in on the action, and furthermore it took a few weeks later before more than 1 or 2 dutch clans showed up to help. The US was largely cut off from nations friendly to it and had to fight through the Bahamas to even be a player in the world war. Astonishingly the Swedes have one of the smallest, if not the smallest faction on the server, and they could spit and hit Mortimer town right now. People often talk about the ebb and flow of NA open world. I do believe they may be right, because things do change. Everyone learns humility at some point, how else would you ever know how it felt to be the other guy?

Aren't you the one who is trying to open a business making health kits? Notorious pirate/doctor? I can't take it any more. I'm out of this thread. Real pirates: o7, see you in game. The rest of you can walk the plank. The major problem with every nation in the game is that eventually, tides turn. At some point, weak nations become stronger, and things get boring again for those seeking a real challenge. All I ask, is that we have one faction, just one faction, that never gets easy. And SORRY, but many of us feel that it should be the pirate faction. You'd even be surprised to find that there are national players such as myself who would eagerly join the pirates if it simply felt more challenging, and I hope the developers can continue to make so crushingly hard to play as a pirate, that only the fewest and the proudest (and perhaps the craziest) have earned the right to sail under the skull and crossbones.

You could try piracy. EDIT: A question like this deserves a little bit more in-depth of a response than the snarky comment I offered. I apologize. Let me tell you the story of PVP2, my first days of really giving open world a try, during early access steam release last winter, and my first and last attempt with the pirate faction. I went to create my account. I read the descriptions. Interesting, pirates is something like "This is gonna be brutally hard. Good luck". A bit of background: I'm the kind of guy who gets a new game and immediately sets the difficulty to the hardest setting possible, because I absolutely LOVE the challenge. I load up into Mortimer town, set out into the bay in my basic cutter, and lo and behold!, there's hundreds of pirates sailing around all named things like 'jack sparrow' etc etc. In other words, it turns out pirates wasn't different or challenging at all, it was simply the 'cool' faction to be. In fact there were sooooo many players in the pirate faction, it was anything but 'difficult' as the description suggested. I was surrounded by a bunch of 'wanna-be's' and pretenders who numbered more than the mighty British navy. Not long into my early days as a pirate, I found myself surrounded by strange pirates who wanted to do nothing but fight robots to grind up to 1st rates, and capture deep water ports, and 'pick sides' in the loosely player-made alliances we had on PVP2. In other words, I was sailing with national-players, falsely claiming the title of 'pirates'. I was considering putting the game down, until I noticed the French on that server were getting pummeled to death by my zerg nation of pirates, who decided that instead of staying in the Bahamas to fight the USA (the other zerg faction on the server), they were gonna just sail to the southeast corner of the map and continue grinding up to first rates, true pirates that they were, and all. But I noticed something about the French. There was one port, a shallow water port in the southeast corner of the map, that they refused to give up. (Pedernales?) Day in, and day out, every day of the week, the pirates launched attack after attack, but could not break the defenses of the French on PVP2 at that defiant little port. No one thought they would have held out for as long as they did. French ports were burning all around them, but Pedernales never fell. It was glorious, and earned them the respect of even their enemies. See, the "pirates", so eager to fight predictable robots to rank up and be able to sail the big ships, had mostly never learned the basics of sailing, and all of their battles until that point were won solely because they brought more, bigger ships to the fight. They simply had no skills. The "pirates" of PVP 2 were in every regard, pretenders. FAKES. FRAUDS. However, the French had been PVP'ing for most of the Antilles campaign, because their existence depended upon it. They had no safe places to run missions. They did not have the time to go off to some far corner of the map and grind up. And day by day, they were being pushed into a corner, as the pirates had the numbers to hit 2 or 3 ports per day and the French had no hope of fending off the attacks. Yet, when the pirates had to face them with equal rated ships, in equal numbers, in that shallow water port, the pirates were massacred, each and every time. The French were simply better sailors, and unquestionably deserved every victory they achieved. Right along that time, a pirate clan called OMG, many of whom were thoroughly disappointed as I was to find that the pirate nation was not challenging at all, decided one day that they were gonna re-roll to the French side, and I didn't hesitate to join them (no easy task considering there is no amnesty in the game, and it took forever for us to trade off our gold and materials so we could delete and recreate a new French character). But you know what? I found my piracy play-style among the French. We had no hope of winning. We thought we'd all be wiped out within a few days. The other "pirates" we left behind had insulted OMG and called us traitors (and sometimes they called us traders (sic)). They called us the red-wedding pirates, lol. We were labeled KOS. But pirates we were, and as pirates we played. We popped out of every free port in the lesser Antilles and smacked the unsuspecting pirates where they least expected us to strike. We moved around. We were unpredictable. I felt more like a pirate than ever before. Within a week, the pirates started disappearing. Not all of them, but certainly the ones who simply wanted an "Easy" life as a pirate eventually just quit playing. Good riddance. We even trolled the French a bit. (I mean, a pirate's gotta have a little fun with the nationals, right?) We, a single clan of pirates, working with a determined, small French faction, broke the will of an entire, massive Nation of "pirates." And that is what pirates should be striving to achieve as a pirate in this game, instead of worrying about what will happen to your resource farms. Just gonna drop this here, because, damn, those were the good 'ole days. Sadly, my clan evaporated along the time that TC's The Division came out, and stopped playing NA. I had to build a new life on PVP1. Some of our French friends came over to the server from PVP2 as well, but they've all scattered to the winds. Legend has it, they are still out there, sailing, trolling superior nations, from whatever faction they play as. True pirates. http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/11324-pvp-2-french-negotiations/?hl=french+diplomacy#entry200810

Stop tempting me with the prospect that piracy might actually become challenging. It is time to separate the pretenders from the bloodthirsty savages that would make even Blackbeard himself tremble.

Does anyone else see the irony of a pirate asking how he is going to make money and gather materials? I swear the current mechanics have corrupted any concept of what it means to be a real pirate.

Indeed. From the sound of how it will work, the smaller nation could go halfway across the map and start raising hostility at another port and attack from the rear. So there's no way that a smaller nation will be completely boxed in and beat up on with the new system, as I understand it. The game will always have a disadvantage if you are a smaller nation, I don't think there's any way to equalize the odds without introducing extremely 'gamey' mechanics (which I think limiting fleet size in OW battles falls into). You'll never have and hold as many ports, you'll never have as many players (personally I enjoy the challenge of such a situation). With the new hostility system, it just makes it even easier to flank large nations. Right now fronts are pretty much established because there's only so far you can sail when you only have an hour to get to an enemy port and plant a flag. But the game also has ways of letting you know just how many ports you can comfortably defend as a nation, regardless of size. Even when larger nations get over-extended, they become vulnerable. And, we'll have to see how diplomacy works. If we can enter each other's battles I don't see why 2 smaller nations working together would not be able to fill fleets to 25 players for OW battles.

You get the true pirate seal of approval.

I regret that pirates were implemented as they currently exist. IMO, there should never have been a pirate 'faction' but instead privateers, which could change sides at will, perhaps with a cool down. Too many problems with spying I suppose, but I wonder if there is some way to make it work. Of course, you could go completely pirate if you really wanted to, but you'd have to operate out of free towns and would truly be on your own, essentially. True pirate, hated by all, few reliable friends, etc.

Then the game's faction description will accurately reflect the challenge of playing as a pirate? Hmm. Perhaps I would raise a black flag then.

I think weight and momentum weigh more heavily on your ship's ability to slow down. So it seems like you are sailing faster against the wind than before the patch, but in reality, it's just that your ship is slowing down over a longer period than before. I think the patch affected deceleration as well as acceleration. It makes ships feel like they have some weight to them. That is what I think is happening, anyways, and I like it, if you want to be able to stop quickly now, you actually have to use manual sails. I still laugh when someone completely drops sails in front of my ship and tries to board, and now it will be even worse if they will keep on sailing for a bit. I'm happy that the developers are still trying to tweak sailing to make it even more realistic.

LOL. So when the USA was full of fresh players, you did little more than insult, and continue, to insult the US for not being able to field a full fleet for battle. And you insist that having more, bigger ships somehow equates to being more skilled. And now you expect the same consideration in return? I will do your new players a favor and offer this free advice: Leave the SORRY clan. Go fight with some respectable pirate clan leader.

I saw it, 'twas a trader lynx, with a piñata hanging from the yard arms.

What if you are the 7th player? You just get caught outside the battle and . . . good luck. It's bad enough when you try to sail in massive screening fleets and you can't join a battle because it's already full with 25 players on your team. I don't think further limiting the size of battles is going to make that problem any easier. Having played since sea trials, I can say that the more ships you can cram into a battle, the more awesome it is. And that was when we played in a shrinking circle that kept squeezing us to death.

Basically summarizes the current NA community in general: Winning the game "wow this game is awesome." Losing the game, "man this game is boring."

Guys guys, This is all an elaborate role play by the Dutch to represent the struggle between the Oranjists and the Republicans.

PVP1 but yeah I'm sure the guy who made them was like, "These will never sell " and then "Contract Fulfilled"

I agree with constructing med kits. Even if you don't get the best prices on materials you can usually build them for cheaper than you can hire new crew. I bought 20 large med kits in KPR because they were priced at 50K (which is not even the cheapest people will sell them for), but it was a third less than the cost of hiring all that crew. Granted, it was very risky to haul them back to cayman brac to store them in my warehouse. Fortunately no one could catch my trader lynx. If they did they would have gotten 1 million gold worth of loot.

Yes, and it is a flaw in the game design, not malicious intent to avoid combat. Do you guys think it was easy to be home at 12-2PM to take those ports in the first place? Did USA players whine and complain that the Europeans were setting port timers during the US-workday to avoid combat? No. They just set them to timers that are most convenient for their daily schedules. It's a broken system, but the accusations that people are using port timers to cheat are being thrown around rather flippantly and are unwarranted, in my opinion.

Now that's actually a good idea. If they don't change port battles soon, I would like to see this implemented as a temporary fix feature in the mean time. ahem, DEVELOPERS ^^^

If I recall correctly, the Dutch set one port timer to an EST prime time at Jacmel so that their US-based clan members could have a place to fight, and the whole damn server had a meltdown over timers.

At this point, a Spanish v. US fight might actually be a close match. Right now, many Spanish and French players are taking a break from the game. I don't think anyone is opposed to a fair fight if Spain and US went nuts clobbering each other. I'd be curious to know the numbers of currently active players for our factions. I'd guess they would be about equal on PVP1. But what we might consider is the health of the server and when you reduce factions to a few ports, it further complicates their efforts to recruit new players. New players have nothing much to lose if they start on a weak faction and want to delete/start over on a winning side. Nothing wrong with trying to keep fights relatively equal so in that regard I can support treaties like this without throwing around names like 'carebears' and such. When I fight and win against someone, I tend to seek the satisfaction of knowing it was because I was a better player, and not because there were 10 players on my team and only 1 opponent.

I'm happy that people take into consideration the overall health of the server. Beating one nation too badly discourages new players for that nation, because, there are a lot of players who simply like playing for the 'winning side'. I personally prefer the challenge of playing on a smaller faction, but not everyone seeks the same challenges and people can tend to get carried away. Having said that, hurry up with your summer vacations. LOL at the 'nation of free town'. How do we convince them to pick a side?