Nathaniel

Why shouldn't protecting your ships or trying to disable the enemy's trade not by themselve lead to exciting and unpredictable open world encounters? In a world where all this works eventually i would be quite glad to see "sheduled, formal" Fort battles with clear rules as a contrast.

That clearly stems from the development plans of the game. Clearly forts are meant to be strategic ressources intricately connected to crafting and trading in the midrange future. But as far as i understand the announcment the portbattles itself will come to testing a lot sooner, so for a considerable time they will be exactly that, badge of honour and bases for NPC/player hunts in far away regions. As a swedish/dutch/denmark player i would already now consider a few bases on cuba or in the maracaibo region as a strategic advantage.

This approach creates more problems than it solves. In a nutshell: 1. The most durable side will win, not the most organized or skilled. 2. It encourages overlong playsessions which wear you out extremely. Look at Guild Wars 2. There was a similar system favouring 24h presense. At the start of the game i was part of a super-hardcore organized force which played against similar minded enemies and tried to mantain a nearly 24h hour presence to beat the foe and clinge to one of the top spots in the world rankings. I don't need to point out that after two months every side that took part in this "who stays longer on" arms race was completely exhausted and uninterested in the system. 3. For the players that see such playsessions as madness but still want to see the fruits of their success the proposed system will also fail. Because they will never see this fruits. Again, this happened in Guild Wars 2 on a lot of the mid-rating servers. Guilds came online, did some conquering, only to see it completly destroyed in the beginnings by a small group of night cappers. Do you really want that large war efforts will be decided by the side who can bring as many Siberian/Austrialian/Korean players as possible on, that can destroy the enemy's day's effort without any resistance? 4. You make blockades the centre piece of this strategy. Which is historical, i grant you (though not in this smaller caribbean ports). But read any diary/letters of captains serving in blockades. What is "blocakde" a synonym of? Complete boredom. Why do we want it in a game?

That's why they asked us for suggestions that could help carve out a common ground

While i generally like your ideas, they seem to involve a lot of additional content creation, including mechanics that need to be build from ground up, some representation of land combat, not to speak about models e.t.c. While they serve more realism, i wonder if they are really so necessary considering the developers production limitations and if we shouldn't better concentrate of what is relatively cheap to build: more abstract port battles centred on naval battles, not logistic operations. That's what this game makes best, after all. Yea, but that's why we have dozens of ports in the game. A dedicated guild/group that put enourmous efforts in capturing a port should capture it, without relying on some random players having to finish the fight deep in the night. That doesn't mean that that wins the war. An organized effort from other players/guild/groups in other timeslots or in battles happening simultaneously. If the others fail one captured base in the enemy heartlands will not mean much in the overall efforts. And what will we do if 40 ships gather in the dedicated area but the battle can only harbour 25? I really think we should focus more on the querstion admin asked, because it seems crucial. While PotBS had very fun battle, it couldn't deal convincingly with the invite mechanics. And i really can't imagine at the moment how this can be solved without making invites absolutely random on the one side and without preventing casual players from ever participating in a battle on the other side. To the devs: i really think you should stick to the option you discussed earlier this year. Giving the leader of the clan/fleet/society that organizes the attack the ability to decide who get's in. While having casual players in a battle might really make it more unpredictable and fun, having your dedicated players, who spent a lot of time and effort for organizing the attack/building an impressive fleet/getting into voicechat on time locked out of the battle will just lead to a guild becoming desinterested in the fight and leaving the casual players to fight for themselves and get sunk and frustrated. I've seen plenty of this in PotBS. Which surely doesn't help anyone. Experience tells me that when a society has got 10 or 15 of it's members in, a clan leader will be glad to ask for help from anyone that wants to participate. The problem of course would be if we see societies with online numbers beyond 30+ players. Which at the current state of the game is unlikely but will become probable with a growing playerbase. I think the answer to this could be to create port capturing mechanics where a lot of battles happen on the same time. For example we have 90 ports dedicated to three different timezones, where the 30 ports in a timezone have to offer a port battle in a tight timewindow of three hours. That would on the one side give dedicated groups the choice where to strike, on the other, there would be plenty of options for casual players to participate in the other port battles, which would probably become even more fun if the defenders are forced to deploy their main forces against the organized attackers in other, more strategic ports. More than that, the organized guys on boths sides will be dependant on the casual players in helping them out in this less strategic battles, maybe even sending some guides/officers for helping them out. A system like that is not without it's downsides, but i really can't see another way without making the RvR effort ultimately meaningless and uninteresting for organized groups because of the unpredictability of an invite system. You could of course split the slots, like giving 15 slots to the admiral of the attacking clan/fleet and distribute the 10 others in a lottery to everyone who has signed up. That however could give an unfair advantage to factions with a lower population overall and those nearly no random/casual players (like Spain for example). But maybe that isn't so unfair at all and can be seen as an underdog buff?

Agree with most of the posts: 1. I really like it 2. I think you could even double it again. 3. Ricochets when not 100% parallel happen too often at melee range.

Вопрос чисто геймплейный-эгоистичный, но такое ощущение, что многие оживленные пути следования NPC практически вымерли в этом патче. Есть предложения где хорошие зоны для фарма найти?

Если тесты открытого мира все-таки пока откладываются, я бы посоветовал таки подумать про возможность ставиться в очередь группами или про режим команда вс. команда. Для тех, кто любит бодаться в игре часами (для меня уж точно), это бы все поменяло в плане мотивации

But again, lower the effectivety of long range firing by, say, two times, and voilà, problem solved, a lot of new Nelsons raised.

The fact that, as you correctly state, fights eventually often end up in melee due to lack of patience/skill doesn't mean, that damage on long distances is not both historically and gameplaywise OP. You shouldn't be able to get a ship sunk on 1km+ (focus fire or not), which you can now do easily. As i said, i have nothing against line fights, they are great, but they should carry the risks (and rewards) of maneuvring at medium distances, holding the line up with great difficulty and skill, and not just two fleet bantering at each other at minimum speed and unrealistic distances with no real chance of mistake except just failing to aim "properly".

I don't know how soon Damage Model 4.0 is coming but i still want to bump the topic,because long range behaviour now is a lot worse, than Admin's reply implies. Right now long range damage is way to high, the penetration debuff isn't really as large as it should be. At least from a player perspective (i know, on the developers side it can look very differntly) it looks like something relatively easy to implement. Even less penetration on long ranges than now and a lot more wide shot dispersion would do the trick instantly and alow for more realistic, close quartered battles. Lines are OK of course, but they should happen at half the distance they happen now and require a lot more maneuvring and commanding skill. I am sure, that will also add to the testing, data-gathering value, since you'll be able to gather more realistic data, than from two lines on max distance, just dumbly ping-ponging eachother to death.

Все заработало, спасибо за ударную ночную смену по восстановлению.

It's up! Thanks to the devs and let's go hunting

У всех, у всех http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/3992-stuck-in-the-loading-screen

The interesting thing is that our Admin keeps popping on and off the forum right now, while only sticking to the old "Battle availibility" thread. Now, ofc that could be some strange kind of automatic smartphone monitoring app and the lad meanwhile getting some well deserved sleep, but if not, it would be great to get at least a small clarification if the issue can't be resolved by a simple reset and we'll just have to patiently wait till the morning.

Hope they have at least the software bit and are working on fixing the servers, rather than sleeping

Probably because you just didn't click any battle buttons?

does any of the mods maybe have a "Panick, Admins" button? Ah, dreams, dreams...

Yea: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/3992-stuck-in-the-loading-screen/

Same here Server crashed, we all landed in lobby, i clicked the PvP button immediately and ended with the loading screen instead of the match preparation screen.

Проведя пару абордажей еще раз хочу поднять предложенный расклад. Сейчас однозначно защита не помогает против атаки, как должна. Подозреваю, что там работает какая-то хитрая формула, которая работать отказывается. Почему бы хотя бы в виде теста не сделать схему как у Broad_sky с банальным сотношением 1к0, чтобы действительно походило на камень-ножницы-бумагу. Абордаж должен резко повеселеть.

Just got my key, hope you get yours soon, too, mate, see you in game.

Potbs name: Nathaniel Hagthorpe Potbs nation: Britain Was pretty active in PvP throughout beta, less so on release, but i suppose it was Antigua and then Roberts. Maybe someone will remember me and help me to remember