Slamz
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Posts posted by Slamz
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3 hours ago, Diodo said:
Having it in the OW simply breaks roleplay and immersion to me.
As a pirate, I kind of like it, though.
What I hope happens:
During PvP events, 80% of the PvPers go there and fight each other. Certainly all the duelists and group vs group bros will go.
Knowing that most of the PvPers are over there, lots of cargo ship captains pick this time to move cargo.
As a pirate, this is my time to hit the major cargo routes to try and gank some unprotected cargo ships. All the people who would normally be hunting me are out having sweaty man battles in the designated area.
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On 11/12/2016 at 3:51 AM, admin said:
Online will drop even further closer to release. The closer wipe is the lower online will be. We need to test things that cannot be tested once game is released.
Agreed. If you wipe ships I will probably come back and test for a bit, if for no other reason than to check out what it takes to build the new stuff.
But in general I think a lot of people who have quit are simply waiting for the final big wipe and don't see a lot of point to investing a ton of time into something that's going away sooner or later.
At some point we have to test what still needs testing and get that big looming "final reset and launch" party going.
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My only real concern is wondering if new players will find this game acceptable, in regards to the time it takes them to become a worthy contender in the PvP/RvR game. I wonder if we shouldn't start new players out at 5th rate rank, at least (or arrange it so that they tend to get there in 4 hours of gameplay, which is plenty for an intro). After all this time I'm still not convinced that "vertical leveling" does more good than harm.
Basically I know that if I invite any new people to this game, I'm going to spend the first 40 hours of their game play reassuring them that "it gets a lot more fun later".
But as a max rank captain I'm pretty happy with it. Honestly the only thing holding me back from returning to the game for full time play again is I'm waiting for you to finish sorting out the economy and reset whatever you're going to reset. Basically I feel done and satisfied with the beta and am waiting on release. (And I hope some modest marketing might bring a lot of new players in. Would sure be nice to see 2000-3000 players on a server again.)
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Here's how you fix wasting time travelling. Go back to how things were before travelling and complicated crafting were implemented.
Or, KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid.
That doesn't work either.
Evidence: every game ever.
Players cannot be left with a sandbox on the assumption they will use it to go have fun in. Players are mostly idiots. If you want them to have fun you must devise systems that drive them into each other. These systems need a reasonable level of complexity, I think, but should be intuitive.
For example, back to Planetside 1 again, the actual system is this:
* Bases are linked along lines
* You can only attack an enemy base along a line from a base you own
* The XP reward for flipping a base is based on the number of unique kills obtained over the course of the flip
It's not really a simple system. The nuances of that last bit go a little deeper than that one sentence. But from a player perspective it's pretty simple: "head to the nearest enemy base and pewpew".
It works. Complex system to implement via game mechanics but simple for the player to see and follow.
(World War 2 Online's system is tremendously more complex than this in terms of mechanics but the average player can ignore almost all of it and just follow what the map says. Ideally the player has fun without really feeling like they are forced into something.)
When I hear "KISS" for gaming it makes me think of GW2 or ESO or Warhammer Online or all these other games that had very simple sandbox mechanics and were basically garbage that everyone quit playing after 2 months because -- in my opinion of the bottom line problem -- the games lacked complexity.
I think you need lots of complexity to make a good, interesting, long term game. Too much freedom has always proved to be a mistake.
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Why not? Isn't this the Action you are asking for? It should take 2 days to flip the port anyway. Your nation can have some fun fighting the spotted fleet around your ports. Unless you want to keep doing boring sailing.
My experience in other games is "never underestimate the population's ability to pursue game goals at the expense of fun, even to the point they all decide they hate the game and quit".
In original Planetside, armies would avoid each other and capture empty bases for XP and then complain that the game was boring. All they had to do was stop avoiding each other but since the game effectively rewarded them for avoiding each other they kept doing it. World War 2 Online had the exact same problem. In both cases the solution was to change the mechanics of the game so that players were forced into fighting each other in order to progress.
So that's what worries me with this idea.
What you imagine:
People will teleport into PvP hotspots to fight each other.
What I'm afraid will happen because this is what players always do:
People will teleport away from PvP and sack NPCs to flip ports and if anyone shows up to fight them they will teleport somewhere else and do the same thing. In their mind, flipping ports has become more important than PvP. Further evidence: part of why port battle mechanics had to get changed already is because people kept sneak-attacking them and launching distractions and literally doing everything they could to flip the port while avoiding PvP.
And then they complain that the game sucks and there's not enough PvP. Right after their 2 hour Teamspeak meeting where they plotted how to win without giving the enemy a chance to fight them.
Really they are just idiots digging their own graves and complaining that the hole is too deep but this is the mentality we have to deal with.
We DO want action, but I think we have to devise systems that bring players together along predictable (and unavoidable) frontline clashes. Teleportation seems like it should work, but my money says that the players will not use it in the way you intend.
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Don't you think that locking people in one area is the end of this game?
I actually think that will help greatly with the success of the game -- or it would, if we weren't at such low pop levels.
Ideally I think what you should want to do in this game is secure an area and then move forward. You don't want warships simply teleporting behind your lines (possible exception: pirates). If you want to attack behind my lines, I want you to have to sail for 5 hours to do it! Attack my front, where sailing is convenient for both of us!
If anything, I might think about ways to make "and then move forward" a little easier.
I wonder if the current outpost system is outdated, for example. Like I should feel constrained by the size of the map rather than by my lack of outpost slots. If I want to sail for 30 minutes and set up a new spot, that should be easy and I shouldn't have to agonize over which old slot I need to free up and all the work it might take to empty it out.
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Maybe what we should really do is legitimize it.
You can no longer "send to outpost". You must take it into your fleet or sink it.
However, you can now use the delivery system to send ships (just like you can with goods -- same rules).
This eliminates the ability to use "send to outpost" as an escape method but still lets you move ships across the map with some degree of ease.
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Just a minor quibble, but I think it should be more obvious when cannons are lost.
Ideally we might simply display cannon count somewhere and then do something like:
128The ship had 12 cannons on that side of that deck and now it has 8.
Currently you can glean lost cannons by seeing how many reload but when you're firing them as fast as they come online it's not obvious you've lost some.
Just thinking that players might react better if they better understood the damage they were taking.
Might add this to the ship paperdoll in the upper left.
(I assume replacing "cannons" with "wrecked cannons" in the ship model would be too much to ask.)
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Regarding "removed from game" --
How hard would it be to break all ships down into components and mail them to people, similar to the server transfers? Could even bottle up the labor hours used to make them.
That should eliminate quite of lot of the general tears and seems fairly straightforward to do. People could largely turn around and remake the ships using the new system, +/- whatever the new recipes require.
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I gather your 1 dura comment means that you will do away with the durability concept and every ship sunk is lost.
I took 1 dura to be an optional build type. Instead of 5 durability for X cost, you could choose to make 1 durability for X/5 cost.
This would be seen as worth it if you just need, say, a storage cargo ship or to test out a design idea. Especially with all these new factors in how ships are built, you might want a 1 durability "test ship" to try the concept out before building the real thing. Might be a number of tweaks you want to do before building your "real" ship.
That's my take, anyway.
Dozens of people are explaining how to implement it correctly, by raising the price of high quality levels geometrically rather than linearly, but for whatever reason we're ripping them out.
I don't see how that will help.
I don't think you can dangle an option in front of players that is flat-out better and then tell them the only thing stopping them from having it is grinding money and resources. They will grind until they burn out on grinding and then they'll quit.
I think the tradeoff idea is better, where "spend more" doesn't get you a universally superior ship. Then it's like Surprise vs Victory. The Victory costs a lot more but isn't a flat out superior ship. If you're hunting traders, for example, you're not going to do it in a Victory -- you'd never catch anyone! You'd do well in a Surprise, though.
We do need ship cost to have meaning (or else there is no economy and thus no game) but I don't think making superior gold ships exponentially more expensive is a good idea. You'd still be left with a game where nobody wants to settle for a blue.
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I like all of this including those things "under consideration".
The idea of "too many sails" seems the most questionable to me. On the surface I like the idea (and I like that you can end up building a ship that tips over and sinks if you don't manage your turns and sails smartly) but on the other hand I could see it becoming the new mandatory thing to do -- speed is so important both in chasing and escaping that it could become mandatory to overload all ships with sails.
Allowing the construction of 1 durability ships might be a way for shipbuilders to test designs cheaply. They're just not sure if this many guns and this much weight is too much or not so they build a cheap 1-dura sample ship and try it out.
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I dunno, I think I prefer where (I believe) admin is going: make gold ships rare. Make grey ships be what most people sail in most of the time.
That would also encourage people to PvP more, I think. Right now people seem to not want to PvP unless they can do it in a gold ship. It's the expected baseline. Gold ship, full load of gold upgrades. That's what most people PvP in so if you don't have that then you're at a disadvantage almost all the time.
If gold ships with 3/5 upgrades were rare then going out to pewpew in a gray ship would just be the usual thing everyone does. No big deal if you sink. If you build up enough money you'll take out your gold ship with all the gold fixings but maybe the downside of gold ships is they only have 1 durability so you risk everything every time you go out there.
So I'm seeing something more like a choice players get:
Gray ships with 1/1 slots that have 5 durability and maybe even can be refilled as per your proposed system. But this is the "cheap man's road to casual PvP".
Gold ships with 3/5 slots are all built with 1 durability. Cannot be refilled. All upgrades go down with the ship. It's a better ship but exorbitantly more expensive. This is a risky road. People will use these ships for safe-mode PvE and for important battles but mostly not for casual PvP due to the risk.
I think this does solve the bottom line problem, which is people think baseline PvP requires expensive gold ships. We would flip that around and normal PvP would be done in gray ships. (green - purple would not exist)
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What a dirtbag.
Guessing he was one of the trolls who got banned and after 700+ hours invested, he's pretty mad about that. So creating a fake "review" was his revenge.
Wonder what he did to get so many upvotes. Guessing he played a sympathy card on a social media site somewhere and got a bunch of social justice warriors to "like" his fake review.
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but being against all makes them the easiest class to play. because they can attack each other.
By "easiest class to play" do you mean "easiest class to level up"?
Seems to me we could still discuss fundamental changes to the concept of "leveling up". The noise around this has died down since most of us are max level now anyway but I still think the current leveling system is terrible, a nuisance to new players and harms some really cool ideas (like outlaws) without bringing anything good to the table.
I see no real value in a traditional leveling scheme for a game like this. The game is the most fun when you don't have to worry about levels anymore (especially now that the new world strategy system is coming into play).
The goal is to make exceptional ships rarer.To be honest, you might need to drop the fine wood rate even lower if this is the goal. I guess we'll have to wait and see but my feeling is that I can produce more fine wood than I can consume unless I lose multiple durability per day, every day.
The current rate would probably be okay if ships were only 1 durability.
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One non-bug possibility:
He really was on your team and attacked you. He got the "this will make you a pirate!" warning and accepted it. Then he loaded into battle as a pirate.
Never tried this myself but I don't think anything prevents someone from simply deleting their character, rerolling as a team (retaining all XP in the process), using that to sneak up on someone and attack them, turn pirate, and then repeat as necessary. With a second account or a friend to transfer stuff between (keeping your "pirate" account as minimal as possible, possibly just owning that 1 ship), it seems like it would be easy to do.
Although I'm not sure he'd have the clan tag in that case. Though I suppose he could be on standby to accept the clan invite the second he gets into the battle. Do you recall if he had a clan tag on the outside?
Just trying to think of a non-bug way to accomplish this. (The "bug" possibility being that he just showed up as the wrong thing on the open sea. Like that old bug where sometimes people don't show as any team at all.)
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1.you will prolly get a few new production buildings
The way it's implemented, though, just increases the ship construction cost in a way that's treated the same as planks and carriages and ballast.
It's kind of like if admin said, "Good news, everyone! To make construction costs more realistic, I have added nails to the construction. You must turn iron into nails and use a new building to produce the nails."
It adds a new step to the ship construction phase but I'm not sure what adding this level of detail has really accomplished. If a ship is supposed to cost 100,000 gold worth of "stuff" to build, I'm not sure it matters if you break that into 10 discrete items that must be assembled into the final product or 12 discrete items. At one end of the spectrum we could just have 1 production building that literally makes "SHIP PARTS x1". At the other end you can break it down into every conceivable part, including nails and barrels and metal hoops for the barrels and dried apples and paper and ink and quills and lanterns and individual lantern parts....
Food supplies seems to add a couple new break-out parts to the recipe but I'm not actually sure what it has done for the game or what the point was.
I could see the point if it became an operating cost, though admin may have a point that operating cost doesn't matter in a game where most ships don't live for 30 days. I suppose it really just adds a bit of realism to "what makes it so expensive to build a ship" -- that initial supply loadout being a big part of it -- but gameplay-wise it seems like a bit of a non-feature. Could just sell "SUPPLIES" in NPC stores and we have to buy 120 of them to build a 3rd rate or whatever and call it a day.
We could also just assume that this is really what we're paying for when we use "notes". (One might also argue that if I was building a ship I literally did not expect to last a week on the sea, I would not load it with 6 months of supplies.)
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I feel like food supplies and repair kits could both go the same direction:
Less like a "1 big chunk" and more like a bar that starts off full and may need to be refilled, perhaps automatically, acting as an operating expense.
e.g., you have enough food for 120 days of sailing. 6 days of sailing is quite a lot distance in game but after that 6 days you might pull into port and pay a "docking fee" that automatically refills your food for that lost 6 days.
Similarly, maybe every time you pop out of a battle your ship automatically consumes repairs to put the ship back to 100%. Like food, this is just a bar that empties during use and gets refilled for a fee when you dock.
You don't "buy food" or "buy repair kits", exactly -- it's just a fee you pay automatically on docking which refills the bars.
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Maybe collisions should be less about leaks and more about "swamping".
A small ship isn't going to swamp a big ship but when you're in a Trincomalee, pushing a Snow in front of you, you're probably swamping it -- pushing it sideways and filling it with water that's being pushed in from the sides.
Ships being pushed sideways -- especially by a bigger ship that's going to heel it over -- should take on water, but not necessarily as "leaks" (if they stop getting pushed, they would stop taking water).
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For me, and many other ppl, the fun is to seeing our nation prospering, by wars (sometimes) and military strategy but by diplomacy and politics agreements too..
I think it's time for a little discussion I usually have around roleplaying games. I call it, "the difference between roleplaying and making s**t up."
Roleplaying is reacting to a fantasy environment as it is presented to you, staying within the confines of that fantasy.
You are a ship captain, here is a ship, it has cannons and crew and so forth and there are other ships to fight and you can take over ports. You can roleplay as a ship captain reacting to these events and that's all very good and well. You can roleplay being upset over the loss of your ship because you do actually lose it -- the game supports your roleplaying on this issue.
"Making s**t up" is reacting to elements that actually don't exist, even within the confines of the fantasy world. You can't claim that your Surprise is really the Starship Enterprise and that you are really Captain Kirk. That's not roleplaying. That's making s**t up. You can't cry over the death of your 1st mate because the game right now does not have 1st mates, and all your crew shows back up after the fight anyway so it's really "making s**t up" to cry about the loss of a crew member right now.
The relevance to this discussion is that claiming that strategy and diplomacy really matters and is good for your nation is "making s**t up". You might say, "Ah ha! We pirates have taken over the entire Florida coast! We shall become rich off of these bounties!" That's exactly as bad as saying "I am Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise! This is my starship in disguise!" That's not roleplaying. The in-game reality of most port takeovers is that what you did doesn't matter and doesn't help your team even within the context of the fantasy game. If this game was reality and there was really a Pirate admiral somewhere, he would agree that no, taking all those ports literally did nothing for the pirate nation and none of them are going to especially profit from it. If anything, it made the situation worse because the only entertainment that exists -- sinking enemy ships -- has become harder to find.
So I want to agree with you.
I want port takeovers to matter.
I want there to be a real, interesting, deep strategy game here that really matters.
But that doesn't exist right now and I'm not going to log into a boring game and take empty ports just so people like you can make s**t up about it mattering when it very obviously does not.
If we can find a way to log in and have fun and pewpew and ignore the broken strategy game for now then maybe that would be for the best.
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The downside is that we were mostly flipping unguarded ports.
Yep. That's the problem. Same mistake the pirates just made, too.
Our mistake all along has probably been trying to play this alpha as a real strategy game, including doing really boring, stupid stuff. We probably should have all just agreed to meet in Haiti, assign 1 port to each team that none of us will try to take over and then just duke it out over the other ports.
It would be strategically moronic but would be 100x more fun than this dot-flipping strategy game we've all been trying to play instead.
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Everyone here is banging on the Pirates because they are overwhelming USA and Brits but i didn't see the same morale when the same 2 nations, which were quite large at the time, allied against Spain to reduce it to 1 port.
Some things aren't really problems if they happen once. They are a problem when it becomes a pattern.
The pattern has been that powerful teams ally up rather than fighting each other, and most wars are as absolutely lopsided as the aggressors can figure out how to make them. When it should have maybe been USA + Spain vs Britain (a good fight, probably), it was USA + Britain vs Spain (a stupid fight). When it should have been Pirates vs Danes (a good fight, probably), Pirates allied with the Danes. When it should be Spain + Britain vs Pirates (maybe a good fight), it's Spain + Pirates vs Britain, which I doubt will be good at this point.
Half of the reason people quit this game is because the player leadership are mostly idiots, more interested in "winning" (empty port battle after empty port battle) than actually doing anything fun or having a good war. The pirates are my new whipping boys on this issue but I can point fingers at almost every team over this. (I would say the reason most USA players quit is because the "Council" never lead them to any sort of fun wars. I watched for weeks while USA did almost exactly nothing on the map.)
I hear SORRY's own numbers are dropping too. It's the same thing I tried to tell the pirates on PVP2, as well: if you don't give yourselves a good war, your players will quit. The PVP2 pirates should have been fighting the British, but instead they attacked the French, who were about 1/4th their size and the end result is the pirates mostly got bored, then had one frustrating weekend and they all quit.
I'm pretty worried about what will happen to this game when actual Diplomacy gets implemented. I suspect the big teams will peace themselves right out of the game (like now, but formally, and quicker). Human nature seems to be to make friends with powerful teams when they would really be the most fun enemies.
Who would have guessed that the death of Naval Action as a game might come about because the player-leadership doesn't really want to fight or take chances?
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If this ends up killing off all the pvp potential Spain has to offer, USA/Britain both dead and Spain allied to pirates, we would most likely just join another nation.
Or another game. That is basically why I found it easy to quit and play Stellaris for a time. And now Total War Warhammer is out.
I keep watching the forums waiting to see a great war break out that tempts me back into playing but all I see are tales of empty port battles and a lot of hand-shaking diplomacy resulting in even less fighting.
I guess I might be grossly underestimating the British but from what I saw, they weren't that much bigger than the Spanish. Certainly not enough bigger that Spain + Pirates vs British is going to be anything like a good fight.
Just going to be 2 more weeks of empty port battles. That's my prediction. Let's see if Britain surprises everyone, I guess.
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The most baffling thing about Naval Action so far is the effort with which pirate leaders try and make friends with everyone.
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Ugh. McFatts should just roll pirate. Last thing this game needs is one more self-declared president declaring peace. I heard the Pirates allied with the Spanish, even, because apparently pirates vs British was too scary for poor widdle Vicious.
I can't decide which team in this game is the biggest group of pansies. It's like an 8 way tie for first place.
At least the non-McFatts Americans told the pirates to sod off and refused to surrender. This game needs a lot more of that attitude.
And don't give me none of that "it's hard to play with no ports!" Been there. Done that. Still fought. Pull yourself together, McFatts. You're disgracing yourself.
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Events explained in detail
in News Announcements & Important discussions
Posted
I just hope that events do not become like the "Dailies" of other games -- things you must do every day to stay competitive because that's where the bulk of the rewards come from.
POTBS had this problem too. The intent was to help casual players by giving them quick access to cash rewards through the daily missions but what it really ended up meaning was that you fell behind the inflation curve if you DIDN'T do the dailies, every single day.
Hopefully they are fun events that people find interesting but hopefully they are not too rewards-driven to the point that anyone not doing them might as well not even log in at all.