5KnuckleChuckle

If the game is to have a players driven economy then there will need to be player owned companies....Personally I wouldn't mind manufacturing a few things but my true plans would be to own a chain of "Kneel and Bob" whore houses in every port.

If I remember correctly CCP did quite a bit of market research to come up with the best model for Dust514 and they found that they would make more money offering free access to the game and just charging for premium content rather than selling the game and charging a subscription fee. Even when they did this model with Eve I beleive it was $15 for the game and roughly $10-$15/month for the subscription. I'm fine with paying for the game and paying for premium content as long as there isn't a subscription fee and I realize that unlike CCP, Game-Labs hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, had a successful online game for the last 10 years which would more readily allow them to give free access to the result of X years of development time.

Cheers Popaye! I'll probably be waiting to buy the game when it is available on steam...Supposedly 1-2 months if I can wait that long. In the meantime I have been getting up to speed on how the game works watching Ramjb's vids on YouTube.

I would think logging off would be much like how I would like to see increased time scale work. That being if you're travelling in an increased time scale when a player or NPC vessel is within a set distance the time would return to normal and be unable to increase until everything was out of that distance again. Same with logging off, if you try to log off and a ship is within the set distance then you can't log off unless you are in a port. When you log back in you are exactly where you logged off. This would be more realistic. If you are disconnected or log off with something within that set distance your ship stays in game for a set amount of time then dissappears. I figure this is one of the only ways to stop people from combat logging.

In my opinion, this is a pretty underhanded model. I have played games where, and agree with, vanity items ONLY are purchased with real world money but if you are paying a premium price for a game then you shouldn't have to use real world money to buy "important" items in the game. As it is $40 for an alpha is pretty steep and I saw in another thread where an admin claimed they have the final game valued as high as $100...pfft...what game is $100? On top of that you are, in all liklihood, looking at a subscription fee as well. If you have to pay for ships and other useful in game items on top of that...well...you know where they can shove it.

Probably not going to be a popular opinion but I figure there shouldn't be "instant" repairs...obviously this is completely unrealistic. I would suggest a repair system something along the lines of some submarine games I have played...damaged items are fixed at an increased rate in comparisson to reality but are far from instant. Maybe the repair time could be adjusted based on the skill level of the crew etc. but you shouldn't be able to do large hull and sail repairs in a battle.

Only mildly on topic but development priorities as I see them are: keep the game as realistic as possible keep the game as historically accurate as possible don't sacrifice either of the above to appease whiny players who complain that something is hard, takes too long, etc

I would agree with Brigand. Pay for vanity items such as customized appearance in the form of custom sails, ship colours, flags, etc but not pay to win or for convenience. That being said, I have seen discussions regarding a player based economy which would lead me to believe that players will be able to produce and sell any commodities in the game...eventually. I would also think that transferring money and items between players isn't unrealistic. However I would rather see ships have an astronomical value which would be realistic for the time rather than having a ship sunk and just toddling down to the local merchant to buy a new man of war....There needs to be consequence to death rather than, so I have been told, the WOW model where you don't lose much from dying. In Eve if you have all the stuff you had collected over the last 2 years of playing jammed into a ship and said ship was destroyed all your stuff was gone as well. .

In relation to the expansion of the game map, from a development stand point I would imagine this will rely on the size of the player community (No sense in expanding the game map outside of the Caribbean if there are only a small number of people playing). Don't think that will be a problem with this game but it is a consideration. The other is server performance. If this is going to be one big open world the more chunks of the map you add the more strain on the servers. In regards to fast travel and say the map was broken down as you have it, I would think fast travel would only exist for trans-Atlantic voyage. Maybe you would have to travel to the edge of, for example, the Caribbean area then have the option to fast travel to the edge of either the European or African edge....Initial thought.

Hello Gentlemen, Canadian and old...lol. Don't have the game yet but will be picking it up and have no idea in regards to true sailing technique and how such applies to this game. Just a bit reserved in buying an alpha game as I have been burned by them in the past though this is the best damn alpha I have ever seen. Would be interested in crewing with you guys once i get up and running...what is your view on pirating, smuggling and such?