jodgi

Maybe I understand your point perfectly but disagree strongly at any rate?

This is where you and me part ways. Anyone fairly good at #2 can deny you good rakes, and that makes the "one trick pony" a complete donkey. I'm not theorycrafting, I'm talking from my own experience fighting the best. Outlier statistics. Winning 1vs2 is a leap year and full moon thing. To do that you have to get really lucky meeting two very incompetent opponents.

Red herring. Noone who knows about the wind gauge is going to let someone walk over him with mast sniping. The actual shooting at masts is a mechanical skill you can practise against bots. The good tag, maneuvering, timing and use of wind to force the initiative and advantage is a deep skill I still feel I'm learning. I truly can't fit "low skill cap" into my experience with duels and attempted dismasting.

lel You remember how well I was able to protect my reno masts that time down in Mexico? Sheesh... Still have nightmares

?! I do not hit a mast with every ball, far from it. I'm working on becoming as good at it as possible, though. Wind is very, very important. The last duels I did we both worked on disabling masts, but the fights ended in crew disparity and boarding before any mast actually came down. Look at Liq's OP vid: 7-8 32pdr balls to break a mast is not easy against someone who's "protecting" his masts.

Sure, but I know some people who are better at it than others. "Simplifies" is not the word I'd use but I agree with your general drift. I disagree about lowered skill cap, tho. Poke me if that ever becomes a problem and I'll help you get it back to balance. I don't understand. How can hull bashing (including crew and cannon loss) be more interesting and challenging than keeping an eye on hull AND sails AND crew AND masts?

Anyone can bash hull. Hull, masts, crew- and cannon raking needs to be balanced, but if you balance everything towards hull meta the game becomes dull.

The layout is perfect for long trips and that is the primary use of maps: It gets a tiny bit awkward with short to medium voyages: If scaling is a fairly easy thing to do it might be worth it? Also... The speed in your tool is set to instance readout. Since all navigation is done in OW it makes more sense to use the OW speed readout(?). If you set speed and then change waypoints the speed setting changes (bug?):

I'll do my bit. But I have to warn you; The people in the channels I frequent are a lot like me, so...

Good stuff! @UnicornBuster Laptop touchpads need some love too. Maybe have the mousewheel click as an optional control and make normal left-click the panning button?

Then it was worth it! :-D . . . <inner voice> "He means laugh AT you, dolt!" T_T

I'm worried that the OW might not be a place for me too, but for wildly different reasons than you. The arena thing will be perfect for me, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in what happens to OW. Congratulations on being confident about your perspective. Especially since crew mechanics and non-capturable AI isn't tied to PVP exclusively, one of those things isn't even implemented on live yet and insta close timers were reverted back to (IMO) too long timers. That's exactly how it is now on testbed. A PVE player has access to the majority of gameplay activities, items and rewards. PVE rewards are something, just not everything anymore. Good, get it out... I'm sorry if what I said sounded like a challenge or an insult, it was not my intent. We can continue discussing the issue, if you like?

Noone is taking that away, you can bully bots 24/7 if you so choose. Maybe these guys are told to stay away from connies, agas or line ships until they can compete? Since you ask me the most fun thing is to meet someone who is willing and able to fight, PVE grinders can't sustain my motivation over longer periods of time. I will stress that this is my personal opinion. We're talking about changes that are not on my account, mind you. If everything was hunky dory why, then, was it changed?

Yes, isn't it wonderful!

I'm fully open to the possibility. My premise is that we had everything available to PVE grinders, we lived it and it's concequences are hard statistics. Now the devs have changed that into things being locked behind PVP marks you cannot directly aquire by PVE activities. It is however conceivable that PVP marks could be traded. Why did the devs lock content behind PVP marks do you think? I don't think they did it to spite PVE players, but I think they deemed it necessary to lay down some serious PVP motivators. It seems to me the devs are trying to make OW more PVP than EVE ever was. It seems fair to state that Game-Labs aren't content with the EVE PVP/PVE ratio which leans heavily towards PVE. Game-Labs have formulated a target audience or audiences and they are tweaking this game with that in mind. They have said that they want OW to mainly be a PVP environment. They have the PVE server for those who enjoy that and are making the arena version for those who enjoy PVP-on-demand. It seems to me Game-Labs are moving away from enabling pure PVE players on the OW PVP servers. You and me can like or dislike that. Please continue to fight for what you like, you might contribute to making the game more to your taste. I will never shed a tear for the PVE woes so someone else has to carry that particular cross.

Players were happy with deliveries and more teleports too. Do we want to pretend promoting PvP or can we stomach actually doing it?

Do we want to promote PvP, or do we want to uphold these PvP deterrents? You're right, but is it good PvP design? Warships in a player's fleet is a fantastic "experience" and role-playing idea, it's appeal is strong and obvious. It's detrimental effect on OW PvP is equally strong and obvious.

Admin already said this is coming. Why should PVE grinders get everything? If you want the nice things you have to pay the iron price I think I saw admin state they're done with giving away participation trophies. These PVP marks really work as motivation to go PVP, I think we need as much motivation as possible.

Right now 2 fleet spots are (perk point) cheap enough for players to pick it without seriously gimping themselves. You can drag along one bot with one slot free for a prize no sweat. It becomes an arms race, we've seen it before. However much some players like it; Warships in fleets is cancer to an enjoyable pvp experience. It is known... Your question should be solved without blanket bombing OW pvp. I've already suggested elsewhere that perk point cost for two slots should be upped to at least 6 points. That way bot lovers are forced to sacrifice something for their ways, but pvp'ers can have one slot at the ready for prizes. This is just one way to go about it. We could also make it possible to cap and keep a prize while stopping people from going from port with a warship in fleet. That's just from the top of my head, I'm sure there are more, and even better ways, to solve this.

Isn't it weird that "hardcore pvp players" are worried about the ramifications of the new eco stuff which is PVE at it's core? You feel PVE is sidelined by PVP, we are scared we have to partake in PVE to keep a positive bank balance. I wonder about the lacking PVE you speak of; You have bots, buildings, production, hauling, trade, crafting and what not, yet because you can't sit afk at an island and find a new source of materials you say admin only cares about PVP?! What do you mean by "hardcore pvp players who are not in large quantities these days"?

If mirroring instance and OW speeds perfectly was simple it would already be so and they wouldn't ask us to look for discrepancies, keep that in mind.

Yes, that would work. Ships and setups that we already suspect are off could be double checked this way. It does take some time and an available friend. We could still miss many speed bugs compared to the more systematical comparison of absolute hull speeds. --- To remind everyone why absolute OW speeds is hard-mode: (Recorded at 30 fps) You can work out min, max, average, median and type number (?). Even if I go full autism on that I suspect the error margin would ruin it. It's also prohibitively time consuming.

I've wanted to do this for the longest time. Doing instance tests in a "scientific" manner is a cakewalk. The OW speed readout is not dampened and the numbers change too quickly over small timespans, that makes recording numbers almost pointless for use in comparison graphs. If there is some magic you can do to the readout to make it more human readable (in lack of a better term) I could serial produce graphs to snuff out these imbalances. Alternatively: The process of finding suitable ships, with similar woods, similar or no upgrades/perks/mods/guns and so on is an extremely tedious thing. Then you have to grab a buddy, sail alongside and observe speed diff. We're still in anecdotal country and errors in observation, wood, mods, perks, guns... can sneak up on us easily. Maybe some bright minds can think of an adequate and effective way of getting this done? It's been at the back of my mind all this time but I've found no way of doing it properly.

Shouldn't the little ones have something going for them? I'm sure it's historical for big ships to be deathstars to smaller ones, but does the game get better if big ships can kill the crew of little ships that work hard at staying out of the gun arcs? Derp guns could provide quite a bit of entertainment and frustration and we could fill our meme thread with our own versions of these:

You know nothing... <hides>