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Slamz

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Posts posted by Slamz

  1. 7 hours ago, Rigs said:

    1) Gankers and Sealclubbers

    A lot of people seem to wonder how we can prevent ganking and seal clubbing, as in physically stopping it via BR limits or other draconian measures.

    The better question is why people behave that way to begin with and I think the answer is that for the most part it's just that those are the fights that are the easiest to find and most consistently rewarding.

    I'm a veteran in a veteran group and we spot your group of veterans. In a perfect game, we should want to fight because [INSERT DISTINCT STRATEGIC REASON TO FIGHT HERE]. Our fight somehow influences who controls the local resources. We fight to secure the shipping lanes. We fight for all those tonnes of white oak logs. There is a distinct strategic reason for us to engage in this very costly and time consuming high stakes battle between veterans.

    For the most part that does not exist and never has. In reality we all lose a lot of ships and gain absolutely nothing. In fact, since PvP ships are not the same ships as port battle ships, we didn't even impair each other's ability to fight over that port battle tomorrow. We pretty much just duked it out for funsies, which only gets you so much gameplay.

    So since 95% of battles are strategically worthless, this naturally pushes players into whatever is easiest and most immediately rewarding: seal clubbing! It's not worth a lot but it's always worth a little!

     

    I think the solution is that somehow each battle must be strategically meaningful. It should end up being almost impossible to NOT impact the game on a strategic level. If my Surprise sinks your Surprise in the middle of nowhere, that should still, somehow, have some sort of meaningful strategic impact beyond the loss of a relatively trivial amount of materials.

    We simply have not tied the OW PvP game into the strategic map elements strongly enough.

    • Like 6
  2. On 8/31/2017 at 12:28 PM, admin said:

    We have problems converting new players to veteran players. 

    I know a long time ago I proposed switching to a model where we earned XP per ship rather than ranking up. This would allow a new player to jump right into a Surprise (assuming he could afford one or, more likely, a clanmate gave him one) and be competitive immediately.

    Well..... you did add ship XP but you added it overtop of existing rank XP which meant veterans had to spend time grinding XP again and new players basically have two grinds: one to rank up and potentially a second one to get the ships they want unlocked to the point they desire.

    Really I'm not convinced we need XP at all. This is not a PvE game. There is not enough PvE content to call it a "PvE game" regardless of the fact that some people try to play it that way. This is a survival game, more like RUST than it is like WOW. Go out and kill or be killed. In a game like that (this), you need disparity between players to be somewhat restricted and easy to bridge.

    In WOW it's okay for a level 80 to crush a level 40 because for the most part the game prevents that from ever coming up as an option.

    It's not okay in a game like this. It's a big reason I think it's hard to convert newbies to veterans: apart from the learning curve that means a newbie Surprise will lose to a veteran Surprise anyway, we additionally cripple the newbie by forcing him into a ship that has no chance in even if he was an amazing sailor.

     

    • Like 1
  3. I've always liked this idea but previously it was a non-starter due to the way port battles were "first come, first served" by the entire team. With no way to control who can enter, BR limits wouldn't work.

    With the clan-based takeover idea, it can work and I think it's worth a try.

    Someone should work up some 3rd party tools that help commanders plan their fleet within a BR limit, if such a tool has not already been made.

  4. The BEST clan is the one whose leaders came here on a regular basis to post solid updates to the developer explaining all of the latest bugs, exploits, loopholes and toxic mechanics they had discovered which they realized would ultimately be bad for the game overall.


    It would not be, for example, any clan who had their members banned and warned for douchebag gameplay, or who tried to take it out on the developer via negative Steam reviews.

     

    Maybe an even better gauge would be which clan would the community most like to encounter again in another game, somewhere else. New EA game is out, you join that game and there you see _______, who you remember from Naval Action. You're happy to see them because they are good gamers who really add to the community. They might crush you but you know it's good gameplay and if anything, their suggestions will make it even better.

    If you fail the community test, you fail as "best".

    • Like 4
  5. You have to really define "best".

    Like no way is BLACK the best. They literally hid from the French open world PvPers and refused to engage them after what I believe was literally 1 fight (which was, itself, less than half actual BLACK members). I don't see how you can claim "best" if you dominate in RvR but were not a serious PvP presence and vanish when the open sea fighters appear. I would even go further and suggest that BLACK's rather stupid "play to crush" attitude that they used on the USA team makes them the worst guild on the server, as the server would literally have been better without them.

    Similarly, of course, I can't point to any of the French clans as "best" because we were the other end of the spectrum. We dominated the open world PvP scene in the areas we went to (including Mortimer Town) but we almost didn't do port battles at all, as we didn't care for that style of fighting or econ ("slowboating"). Our crushing of the British 4th rate port battle fleet using 3rd rates probably didn't help server health either.

     

    To be perfectly honest, I don't think PvP-Global post-wipe has any clan that can come close to claiming they are the "best".

    We didn't really have any singular stand-out clans that excelled across the board and were notable.

    It's like you walked into a crowded theater for a viewing of Wonder Woman and asked which member of the audience was the best among them. Yes, which of you overweight neckbeards and raging feminists among you is the best.

    The contest of "best" is only a close race in the sense that most of them are tying for last place.

    • Like 3
  6. The game gives us too few objectives to really fight over on a consistent basis.

    The one objective we do have -- port battles -- are actually TOO organized. The nature of them encourages 25 of the most expensive ships, ideally manned by only the largest and most experienced clans, to duke it out but only every few days, tops. This is content that most players found themselves cut off from.

    So most people never do get to have a real fight in NA where it matters who wins, apart from their own personal risk.

    This is why you see a lot of PvP games have distinct, minute-by-minute goals. Capture this tower. Capture this other tower. Okay now capture this fort. Now go mine this rock and fix the fort. These are like "mini-goals" that players can fight over and it matters if you win the fights or not.

    PvP roaming -- just kind of vaguely patrolling the world looking for someone to gank where it really doesn't play any role at all in any sort of larger scope and is not working towards any objective -- gets old pretty quick for most people.

    • Like 3
  7. On 8/25/2017 at 9:15 AM, admin said:

    Tonnage wars will not work due to non attendance counter. 
     

    Tons = tokens.

    Tokens = port ownership.

    Doesn't matter where you got the token. You can use it on any enemy port. Go hunt the enemy where they are then apply the tokens where you want.

    Tokens can account for up to 25% contention per day. This is the only way to generate contention.

    Can be countered by an equal number of tokens, up to 25% per day.

    "Port battles" replaced by "token wars". Might seem less exciting but going out hunting beats sitting in empty port battles.


    Token payout is on an exponential scale: sinking a single Victory is worth way more than its equivalent weight in 7th rates. This is to discourage "farming" of cheap ships. The real wins will come from sinking high rated ships. (Players could try to counter this by only going out in weak ships but "good luck with that". Sinking weak ships for low tokens is still worth more than not sinking anyone because your ship sucks and theirs doesn't.)

     

    It's actually kind of odd that "PvP tokens" have never been a part of RvR.

    You let us craft war supplies in the east end of nowhere and then capture a port with them but we can't do the same with PvP?

  8. 55 minutes ago, Intrepido said:

    the painful grinding to unlock slots on some ships. A fight could be won because one guy had the time to unlock all 5 despite the other one have more skill.

    In my opinion this is greatly exaggerated. Skill slots are very minor bonuses and feel more like flavor to me. About 95% of my PvP has been done in ships with 0-3 slots.

    The problem I see are gamers who think they need top tier everything before they are ready to PvP. Even if it's just another 1% bonus to some niche ability, they feel like they can't fight at all if they don't have that. Maybe we have to bow to the flawed psychology of the average gamer but it really is fine the way it is. Being an expert at a ship gives you a few bonuses that are very unlikely to swing any given battle.

    It's like people in other games spending 20 hours getting 1 last point of Vitality even though it's diminishing returns and that last point is hardly a perceptible improvement. But nope, they gotta have it. Not ready to PvP without that last point!

    • Like 2
  9. Random thought of the day:

    All current "free ports" become permanent pirate ports. They cannot be captured. Pirates get free outposts in all of them and can teleport between them (captain only -- no ships, as usual).

    Pirates cannot capture ports.


    This turns Pirates into, well, pirates. Points of threat all over the map, free outposts, but OW PvP-only.

    Any current pirates who want RvR would simply join a nation. (Conversely, anyone who does not care about RvR would probably join pirates.)

    56 minutes ago, Skully said:

    The counter to having ports revert to neutral automatically is not show up. You can just observe, from your shielded capital, the enemy coming in conquering your port and you wait, because it'll flip back automatically.

    Hmm, looks pretty much how we have it right now on Global.

    Yeah, that's exactly how I think it should work, though.

    Most port captures in this game are literally meant to be "dick moves". They don't really want or care about the port. They aren't going to base out of it or do anything there. It hurts newbies and people who don't want to buy a second account but that's all it does.

    The way it SHOULD work is we see, for example, Brits operating out of Belize and KPR and we say "Georgetown would be a great base to take over to raid those two places from. This is worth our time and money to take that port and live there."

    We take the port because we care about it and want it for a specific purpose.

    We do not go take every port in the entire Gulf coast. Those are useless to us. They stay neutral. If we get tired of raiding, then we'll let Georgetown expire too but the Brits might decide to hasten us out of there with a port battle.

     

    I think we still need counties though.

    If the Brits want to secure Belize, they will still want to own every port within at least a 15 minute sail of there and that's a lot of damn ports. They care about them because they want them to be British-owned and not enemy-occupied but they can't afford to maintain dozens of ports. Keeping counties will make it feasible to claim reasonable swathes of land.

    Most territory will still be neutral but there will be concentrated pockets of "we care about this stuff".

    • Like 2
  10. The difference I see is that "1 repair only" is fine for 1v1 but is a pain for group fights and will damage group tactics.

    1v1 mostly it would be used at a point where you are deciding if you are going to stick it out or run away. The point you pop your repair is where you would have to make that call.

    In groups it's more complicated.

    "As many repairs as you have time for but each one takes 10 minutes" will allow current group tactics to continue to exist. Pulling out to repair, if you can, will always be a valuable thing. Ideally you'd want to pull back while your teammates cover for you, throw your crew into repair and just live with what plinking you can do for those 10 minutes with what you have left in gunnery.

    Since group fights easily run for 30-60 minutes, it means there's a huge difference between "3 slow repairs" and "only 1 repair".

    So I think "slow repairs, as many as you have time for" is an idea that would work well for both 1v1 and group fights. It will also end up helping gank victims, assuming they aren't slow. Long slow repairs are the bane of gankers that rely on front chasers to slow a victim down.

  11. 4 hours ago, Skully said:

    It makes conquest meaningless.

    If nobody is using a port that means nobody cares about its current condition. If you want it to be neutral, go for it, there should be nobody around. :ph34r:

    That's been the problem all along, though: probably 80% or more of Conquests are useless. Ports nobody cares about being captured by teams that will never use them. Really it's just the old "this map is too big" problem.

    Now it will mean that really you only take a port if you want to be pissy about the ownership of it. Those Brits have been going in and out of there and they're snobby and you don't like them so you claim the port.

    If only your clan is using a port or you don't care about the Brits who are also using it then you just leave it as neutral.

    There will be a lot less RvR but really I think it means that the only port battles we'll see are those someone somewhere cares about. Empty port battles should largely go away, which to date is what most RvR has been [a boring waste of time].

    • Like 2
  12. 38 minutes ago, koltes said:

    Agree, though still think that in battle repairs need to either go back to 1 repair per type and no timers or go to 30 minutes independend (not linked) timers. In lots of cases fights turned into who has more repairs wins

    I think the solution there may be to keep it as-is but slow down repairs significantly.

    Like the goal should be that if you meet the crew requirements for repairing with 100% of what it's asking for ("200/200") then it takes 10 minutes to do that repair.

    This makes repairs be a slow burn, meaning it takes away a huge portion of your crew for a long time and can be outdamaged. In 1v1 combat, not wanting to shut down gunnery in order to fill out repairs, that 1 repair might drag on for 20 minutes. It will still be important in group fights but in 1v1s, repairing in active combat will be tricky.

  13. 16 hours ago, Quineloe said:

    500k is an absurd figure, similar to 500 gold per crew member used to be.

    Admin was also saying that sinking a single NPC Victory would yield 400k.

    If that's the case then a lot of small clans will find 500k per day to be very affordable. All you need is one dude with a 1st rate who does 2 missions per day and the cost is more than covered.

    But you're right that most of the map will go neutral.

    I'm not sure that's a bad thing, though. It's realistic given our population. If nobody is using a port, it SHOULD be neutral.

    • Like 5
  14. 31 minutes ago, Jean de la Rochelle said:

     Nevertheless the conception of players being dumb sheep that just need to be herded around by increasingly limiting their compound in certain ways shows a certain kind of philosophy towards game making.

    Yeah -- one that works.

    Almost every game herds players around in ways meant to highlight the main aspects of the game. Football has boundaries. You cannot take the ball with you to the bar and still claim to be playing the game. The game herds you onto the field where all of the other players must also be.

    "Sandbox gaming" has always been a very tricky beast precisely because it does not herd the players and therefore gives them a lot of rope to hang themselves with. They claim the game is not fun and they quit (see Steam reviews for NA) because the game didn't herd them into fun activities.

    In conclusion, I assume players are dumb sheep because in all my years of gaming I have come to the belief that this is what most of them are. Let them hide in a corner until they hate the game, declare it's boring and quit and that is what a lot of them will do.

    But I also think that if you have a fun game and herd your players correctly then you can establish a base of people who enjoy that style of herding and more will come. This has worked well in game design since the first caveman kicked the first rock across the first line.

     

  15. On 8/22/2017 at 7:17 AM, Peter Goldman said:

    they are scared even more and won't risk.

    The central problem here is that they have a choice -- they "won't risk" PvP because there are more rewarding paths that are also less risk.

    People grind missions in safe spots because missions are the #1 most reliable source of XP and cash and they are also safer.

    Ultimately this is why we must take away the player's choice in the matter. They must risk PvP if they want to advance.

    I still have yet to talk to a veteran captain who admits they quit because they ran out of ships. Cost and durability has never been a real issue. The fear of loss is somewhat a matter of ego (which is perfectly legitimate in a small community) but mainly it's a matter of avoiding risk because the game rewards us for hiding.
     

    In my opinion, the only type of missions should be these new "hostility missions" that put you outside enemy ports.

    • Like 3
  16. 15 hours ago, koltes said:

    For this he doesn't simple win a battle. He destroy the enemy. He removes the very will to fight.

    So.... you're saying.... you wanted to remove people's will to fight so that BLACK could resume what they really wanted to begin with, which is a life of PvE.

    You know there's a whole separate server for that where Ender has already "won".

    15 hours ago, koltes said:

    We had to do RVR to ensure our survival.

    I think this summarizes the flaw in BLACK's approach to this entire game. You really didn't. What you needed to fight was the perception that you needed to RvR to survive.

    BLACK has tons of alts, at least several in several different nations that I know of. You literally do not need to own any ports once you have that. You can certainly argue it hurts anyone who is not in a clan that uses alts but for guilds like yours and mine, it does not present a problem.

    PURGE has 3 people with alts in other nations and that has been all we ever needed to operate anywhere we want without any regard for which nation owns which ports.

    You always seemed to think we were meta-gaming the forums by saying ports don't matter ("they're saying ports don't matter because they don't want us to attack them! We should take their ports!"). We were literally informing you of the facts of the state of the game, which is that ports don't matter.


    You should have learned to live out of free ports back when the USA was a superpower. You'd have turned into actual pirates.

    Ultimately, the only problem I had with the game was the lack of people on the OW to fight. Too few hot spots, too widely dispersed.

  17. 1 minute ago, Barbancourt (rownd) said:

    would increase the bickering in Nation Chats exponentially

    So much of the bickering is actually the result of 8 teams though.

    "Attack the Danes!"
    "Don't attack the Danes!"
    "I single-handedly made a deal with the Danes where they get all our ports and keep them forever!"
    "Ally with the British!"
    "WHO SUNK MY BRITISH ALT!"

    If there were 3 teams I think a lot of the actual reasons that people bicker would go away.

    There'd be a lot less reason to need alts, too, as it would be a lot harder to end up with so many teams that need them.

  18. 11 minutes ago, Skully said:

    I think we can all agree which Nation has lost the Conquest Competition and should be removed from play.

    I have advocated for reducing the game down to 3 teams myself. I would get rid of Sweden, Denmark, USA, Dutch and I would rework the pirates into being actual "pirates" instead of "British emos who wear a lot of eyeliner and like black clothing".

    Or keep the nations -- in fact, add more  if you want -- but group them into 3 overarching teams.

    I feel like this game needs to either be a 3-team game or a complete clan-based FFA.

    The current setup does not work.

     

    Maybe you're on to an interesting idea where a team loses enough ports and gets absorbed by the conquering nation but that's sort of what people have been using their forged papers to do anyway.

    • Like 1
  19. 1 hour ago, chailang said:

    You go on living in your world, and look at your poor port

    Why do you think ports matter? I've been playing in Haiti and off the US coast for over a month without a French port anywhere near.

    I would be happy to answer your questions about how we do it but I am surprised that CCCP does not have this knowledge. We cannot have a serious discussion about game mechanics if you don't know how the game works.

    • Like 4
  20. 8 hours ago, chailang said:

    But what I see is that many unsuccessful people are complaining 

    Not unsuccessful, just bored.

    CCCP surrendered when we put Road Town into contention. You were bored with fighting NPCs and sitting in empty port battles.

    Everyone feels the same way.

     

  21. In the end, 25v25 RvR in rare-wood slowboats of the most expensive kind is simply too broken for anyone to put up with, and, in what I think is the really sad part, not enough people enjoy open world PvP.

    BLACK does not like OW PvP.

    Everyone else learned to dislike RvR.

    No PvP + no RvR = dead game.

    France probably did a lot to help herald the doom of the server by ambushing the British 4th rate fleet outside of our port battle against them which, in turn, prevented them from making it to the Pirate attack on Georgetown. We used a number of 3rd rates to do it which really highlighted why France itself does not do more port battles: because the flaws in the game design are so obvious that it was just a matter of time before someone did the same thing to us. 4th rate battles that you must sail expensive, slow 4th rates into is a really stupid idea when the obvious way to prevent them is by attacking said 4th rates using higher rated ships outside.

    Nobody in their right mind will schedule a 4th rate battle with that kind of threat looming over them. Fir/fir 1st rates will absolutely run down and destroy LO/WO Aggies.

    We could do lineship battles but then you need 25 1st rates and that was just more tedious than we cared to put up with. We came here for OW PvP, not hauling lumber (and definitely not grinding missions for ship XP because PvP is no way to get ship XP).

    And, of course, we had to "fight" Denmark in pointless night-attack flip-flops for weeks, which killed most of France's desire to grind RvR in general.


    So, yeah.

    If everyone had come out to OW PvP I think we could'a had fun. Some people were starting too but it was too thin in population by then.

    BLACK's plan of "RvR only" does not work in a game where RvR is broken in so many ways.

    • Like 3
  22. USA coast has been a seal clubbing party for Pirates for the last month.

    Joba, you can hardly cry about the USA sinking you when Pirates have been attacking them outside their capital literally every day.

    Also, news flash, port ownership does not matter in this game. Smuggler flags and alts, bro.

    If you really want to be mad about where the bad people touched you, go hunt them down and sink their ships.

     


    I can't believe you're actually trying to peace-out with the only team that still has more than 10 active players.

    I seriously had to double-check the first post to make sure this wasn't a thread from 3 months ago that some troll bumped up.

     

    • Like 3
  23. 17 hours ago, Skully said:

    Ah but there is. We have had ships pull away from fleet to retreat for repairs. Granted, frustrating to the fleet commander and captain, but definitely a tactical issue, not a mechanic one.

    Usually when this happens to us, we ALL go back.

    We don't want the one guy in his Connie having to sail back by himself to get repairs and in a group of, say, 5 people, having a Connie drop out may be worth waiting for.

    So the theory is that it results in attrition but in practice I find it results in the entire group taking a 30 minute time out (possibly much longer, depending on how close the nearest port is). I mostly feel it just slows down the pace of an already slow game.

    It's also why there should be a way to trade at sea.

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