Slamz

Why? What does that do other than waste your time trying to figure out where they went and their time because they had to sail back to a port to pick up more repairs? It might be different if this was WOW or Life is Feudal where you want to cause attrition so that the people have to run away so that you can get back to what you really wanted to do -- kill that boss mob and take his loot or complete step 6 of your "kill 20 wolves" quest or beat on trees for 20 minutes to get lumber. These are time consuming actions that you need enemies to leave you alone so you can do. There's not really anything like that in Naval Action. If you leave to go get more repairs, it just means I'm going to be bored trying to find someone else to fight. I'd rather you repair up here so we can have another blowout battle ASAP. The real attrition of NA is ship loss. Everyone flips ports in one go. In fact, if you don't flip it in one go it's worthless to try if there are any defenders who care about it at all. You'll log on the next day and contention will be zero.

There would have been a lot more but we literally could not find you and you avoided any area of the map we went to. Anyway, moot point now since most people have quit playing. Whatever chance BLACK had to prove its mettle was last month.

Running from combat is just part of PvP. Don't sit there and pretend you suicide into every uneven fight you see. It's up to the taggers to surround their target. OW coordination is a PvP skill as much as aiming cannons is. But leaving an entire section of the map and grinding missions in the hopes nobody finds you is "running away" to a whole new level. There's no PvP tactics, OW or otherwise, that can really counter that, short of sailing around for 2 weeks trying to figure out where everyone went. I do believe that invis and speed buff killed BLACK's PvP tactics. From what I saw, your tactics revolved entirely around the revenge fleet. No revenge fleet, no PvP. You should have just adapted. Other people have been getting plenty of kills without needing revenge fleets. Like I said, OW coordination is a PvP skill too -- spreading out (but not too far!) and herding targets into other taggers.

tl;dr: Repairs used in the open world heal 4x as much as repairs used in combat. I like the way repairs work in combat and I'm fine with the fact that it's pretty expensive. This at least creates some risk and a balancing act in how many you want to bring: more is better but it's expensive and heavy. But on the open sea I always feel it's a bit ridiculous when I click repair and go through like 30+ repairs. It's just a logistical hassle, especially if you're looking to flip ports by grinding fleets: you'll need to carry several hundred repairs. But if repairs simply healed 4x as much outside of combat, it would make them cheap to repair your ship with when you're out of danger while keeping in-combat repairs costly.

Ignoring the fact that most of the British power players were working out of Belize while KPR was more the newbie area, doing "solo hunting" is hardly a measure of victory no matter how you look at it, unless the server pop is something like "3". Anyone can go solo hunting anywhere. The question is if a clan can go somewhere and take all comers until the enemy stops trying to counter them, which WO did right outside MT. To this day I cannot fathom why BLACK ran from that area. You had to have lost quite a lot of rep with the other pirate clans for refusing to fight. We were nervous every day about what kind of 1st rate fleet BLACK was going to drop on us today and it never happened. Yeah I've always liked the idea of open battles, if only we can create some better rules for how joiners spawn in. We can't just have them go "poof" in front of us 20 minutes into a fight but it would be interesting if there was some way to allow it that somehow gave the people in the battle plenty of room to maneuver and time to take the new arrivals into account.

This is one of the fundamental problems, again, especially with a low population: OW PvPers spread out to look for action. It rarely stays in the same place for long and it's easy to overwhelm and area if everyone goes to the same place, resulting in no more action there. You can't really have a captain in charge of an area because there's no such stability. This is why you don't see 25 French in one place very often: we run all the targets away and there's nothing to do after 1-2 days of this. So it's better to spread out for PvP and patrol around but this undermines whatever RvR effort there may have been and it takes forever to get back together (where there will, again, be no PvP). Like someone wanted to grind Grand Terre last night and was asking for help. Nope. The other clans are spread all over (looking for PvP) and it's a 3 hour sail to get back there to help you. Not gonna happen. We wanted to remove teleports to help support OW PvP but we still have this antiquated RvR system that requires teleportation to really work smoothly. RvR and PvP are two incompatible systems as implemented today. (And NA Legends will likely take all the RvR players away.)

Not to harp on it (okay that's a lie, I totally want to harp on this) but if RvR was a side effect of OW PvP and we simply got rid of 25v25 port battles, this would be a much better game and we'd all be having fun still, even with low populations. Killing a pirate should get me tokens (based on the total value of his ship) that I can use to turn a Pirate port into a French port. After we've killed enough pirates (regardless of where) then we get to claim a port. We can come up with ways to make this exploit resistant. One way actually comes from Planetside 1: the value of a player is based on the actions of that player. You can't hand the same alt a ship over and over and kill him and farm marks. His value is based on what he accomplished since his last death. Seal clubbing scrubs is not worth much. 25v25 and all the dumb mechanics related to trying to make port battles work is what killed this game. Certainly it's what killed this server.

If we're talking about guilds then my experience is that those run like a democracy do not last long and do not grow well. Ultimately you need someone who says "we're doing this". The only question is whether you run it as a hard dictatorship or a soft one. Hard dictatorship: we're doing this. If you're not doing this then you're out of the guild. Soft dictatorship: we're doing this. You can do your own thing but this is our designated activity for the day. The round-table type setup is just way too cumbersome for a guild that's more than like 6 people. I have never seen it work (or work well, anyway).

I think when it comes down to it, most people playing this game just don't care for 25v25 RvR the way this game presents it. The bar is too high (25 of the most expensive slowboats using rarer woods -- ships that are useless for OW hunting) and, in the opinion of apparently a lot of people, it's not as much fun as OW hunting. Everything the playerbase has done for the last year and a half is to find way to avoid fighting good RvR battles. Multiple battles at the same time. By your own admission using alts in multiple fights just to clean up the map quicker and make people go "oh no there's 50 of them we can't win". Screening fleets to stop people from getting into fights. Night flips. RvR has been "play to crush" and not enough people really enjoy that, so it died. There is nothing fun about it.

How are you defining a "win" in a game with no win condition? The closest thing to winning an OW PvP game that I can think of would be to go to where everyone can easily reach you and slay all comers and keep going back until they admit they can't take you anymore. Surely it was WO who won and BLACK who lost. Defining "win" by taking empty ports and camping the least organized team on the server is pretty funny.

Seen one pirate clan hiding in a corner, seen em all, I reckon.

You outnumbered us almost 2:1 (or more than 2:1 if we count all your fleet ships firing chain shot at us). We still brawled you for it. We could have run away early on as soon as we got that trapped US player out of there but we're generally down to give things a try. So yes, that is standard BLACK: numbers and that's about it. I already linked the last large even numbered fight I recall us having, where we sunk one first rate and stole another one. We'd gladly do another big rumble 10v10 or more, but it's hard to convince the rest of the French to fight you when you are hiding in the furthest reaches of the map, seal clubbing the only team you could find with the most low level players still playing. BLACK reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. "I dare you to step over this line! Okay this one! Okay this one! Okay this one! Okay this one!" One month later we are about out of land we can cross to fight you. If all of France moves to Georgia are you going to end up in Texas? What a joke you guys turned out to be. The perfect RvR/PvE guild but not much real fight in ya.

Having been up to the US coast to investigate the problem, what I found is truly baffling. The entire BLACK guild, composing more people than the entire active US population, is camped out up there seal clubbing the US players. If BLACK wanted a fight, all of France was outside of MT for a couple of weeks and could have given them some great battles. As I recall, we got exactly 1 good fight from BLACK, which they lost, and they ran off to seal club the US instead. We killed all the other pirates over and over and over and BLACK stayed hidden the entire time. If this proves nothing else, it should stack on to the idea that it is worthless to deal with these "pirates". Their agreements are worth nothing. They will change or cancel them on a whim. If you need them to help you in PvP, forget it. They wouldn't even help the Danes, who got their butts kicked with nary a Pirate ally in sight. Dealing with them is worthless. As for what the US should do, well that is a conundrum. BLACK wants easy fights and you are literally it. They have boxed you in so well that even if you move west and take other ports, the Pirates can easily follow you. Even if you tried to take a British port I'd bet that BLACK shows up to stop you just for a chance to sink any PB fleet you come up with so they can laugh at you. They are in full "play to crush" mode, as you may have noticed. Your best bet is probably to do what France did: Just give up on RvR for a while. Seriously. Invest in 100% PvP boats and do nothing but that for a bit. Investing in RvR and grinding up PB ships is literally just giving BLACK more easy targets and you are working towards a goal you cannot achieve unless there is a big new influx of players. You aren't gonna beat BLACK in a PB if for no other reason than they outnumber you. They are hunting for your PB ships daily and sinking them daily and you are doing nothing but frustrating yourselves by building anything that's heavy and slow. And bear in mind that BLACK will have tons of spies in your nation, leading you into traps, because that's how they think games are won. Consequently you cannot rely on "the average man" to join you in battle, which doesn't help matters any. You've gotta roll out fast and cheap and look for what ganks you can find, and you CAN find some if you look. I should roll up the US coast and encounter you guys in 2's and 3's rolling light and fast in things like fir or bermuda Surprises and Cerbs. When they outnumber you, run away. When you outnumber them, gank em just like they do to you. Don't be rolling out live oak Aggies unless you're damn sure you can win because you won't escape a gank in those things. Roll fast, cheap PvP ships and use the low cost to take a chance here and there. And pay attention to who really helps you and who sails off at the first sign of trouble.

Repairs simply make the tactics a lot more interesting. If we want to be perfectly realistic then: There are no in-combat hull repairs other than "survival" which plugs holes. There are no in-combat sail repairs but there is a new type of damage: "rigging". This represents lost efficiency in changing your sails and, like holes, gets repaired automatically at a set pace. Armor, hull, masts and sails cannot be repaired in combat. Only leaks and the new one, "rigging". Question is, Does this make the game more fun? Personally I think the current model of repairs is by far the most fun we've had. It makes group fights especially last a lot longer with a lot more give and take and potential swings in who's winning. We COULD switch to a "realism" model as above but I stress that this is not "1 repair each" which is no less stupid and unrealistic than anything else. It's NO repairs, other than leaks and rigging. And I suspect we'd have to rebalance a lot of things, namely giving ships a lot more health all around, as otherwise fights will be over in 10 minutes. (We should probably remove all accuracy mods too, as laser accurate cannons will make demasting too easy again.)

I think it's a good idea but we need a much more robust PB entry mechanic. Like we can join from any friendly port, but there's a system where we can queue up in a ship and if we see BR is too high, we can switch to a different ship. (Clan battles won't solve this, I think, because realistically most war companies are going to necessarily be PUGs, not strictly coordinated entities.)

I still disagree -- remember when we could join PvP battles from the port, and they were just little arena fights, and in early 2016 you didn't even lose your ship when you died in there? People still ran in those battles. In a way it was worse because who wants to spend 30 minutes chasing some guy down for a ship that won't cost him anything when he finally loses? He was basically trolling you. So I think ship cost is a red herring -- we would have all the same problems even if ships were free. We might actually cause new problems!

Do you think lowering ship cost by even 75% would cause more people to PvP? I don't. It was 80% cheaper in 2016 and servers still died off. I think the problem is still mainly: * Tag mechanics encourage "gaming the game". What we need is "WYSIWYG" tagging: if I can't see you when the tag starts because you are invis or in a port then you can't get in. Problem is people get tagged in a WYSIWYG 5v1 and complain that their friends can't come help them. Devs listen to this and change mechanics and all it does is give gankers even easier ways to abuse the system. * RvR mechanics and the routes to XP do not encourage PvP. People grind and mission outside their capitals (in what should be the "newbie zone") even at max rank, rather than going out and fighting. It's just not a problem of ship affordability and you can't fix it that way. It's mechanics, mainly tag abuse that turns people off of the game and XP routes that let people completely avoid RvR/PvP and face almost no risk. (This is why EVE makes you go out into lowsec or nullsec if you want real XP for higher tier ships. Safe zone really only supports basic, newbie tier gameplay.)

Demasting is mainly only an issue in lopsided fights, e.g., Bellona fighting a Surprise. My experience with same-class fights (lots of experience of this against the Danes and the Pirates) is that they go for demasting, we do mainly hull shot with some chain to take the edge off their speed and we win by a landslide. Demasting ain't what she used to be. But I guess a good way to settle that dispute would be to try it in a tournament!

Yeah but I think we're talking about different problems now. Imaginary problem: people can't afford to PvP. Real problem: people don't want to PvP with messed up mechanics like "hide in battle" and "using alt-spies on the outside so you can warp speed onto targets". This is why people also quit in droves back when we had 5 durability and we all literally had 30+ dura of PvP ship sitting in our docks. People still quit because it's just not fun to get ganked through bad mechanics even if the ships are basically free. People trying to turn this into a crafting/economic discussion are off the mark. It's literally a great PvP ship. It has a good point-of-sail lineup, good maneuverability and if you're in a group some of you can load out with 32-pound carros. I have a screenshot where 2 of us killed a Heavy Rattler and a Santissima using 2 Cerbs. Santi was run by the #1 lineship clan in the server too so this was no noob gank. The Heavy Rattler actually went down after 1 broadside of point blank carros put leaks in him and he sank. Not bad for a cheap ship! We use it in "low risk" groups a lot and have gotten a lot of kills. I think I have 4 slots on it now and I have done nothing with it except PvP. Point being that cheap, quality PvP has always been available. People saying "such-and-such is a terrible PvP ship" is the literal problem -- nothing wrong with the ships, but people have this idea in their head that if they can't sail the #1 top rated PvP ship then they don't wanna go. That's almost the opposite of how actual PvPers look at it -- we want the best "bang for the buck" and that's Surprise/Cerb. We only sail 4th rates or better when we're feeling fancy and cocky (and generally have a good, stable, experienced group).

If all ships were free (or cheap enough to be eternally affordable) then nobody would ever sail a Surprise or a Cerb. If you want the big stuff, you must take a bigger risk. But big ships aren't needed for PvP. I'm sure there are EVE players who really only enjoy Titans but we can't just give everyone Titans for free to make them happy or the rest of the content becomes meaningless.

This is basically asking "why play the game". Because it's fun? And I think the risk of loss is a big part of the fun. Naval Action Arena has almost no appeal to me because meaningless pewpew fights with nothing on the line seems like something that will maybe be fun for about a week. I give that game about 1 month before it loses 90% of its players -- it'll be much faster than NA itself tailed off. (Same reason I only ever played Minecraft on survival mode. The chance of dying and losing a lot of stuff was the only thing that kept that game interesting at all.) It's more like you have developed a theory that chess can be won in 2 moves and therefore it is a waste of time to play chess. Really you have identified an extreme edge case that pretty much nobody ever encounters in normal play. Hardly seems worth worrying about. Do most people normally lose in two moves? Do most people normally find they can't afford a Surprise? Then it's not a very useful problem to bring up.

Is anyone losing ships faster than they can come up with the labor hours to replace them? Or is this a theory-crafted problem which technically could exist but which does not actually exist. In our experience as a clan, the bottle-neck is the physical act of hauling stuff. Labor hours and money have not been a bottleneck for what we do, which is probably about a 30/60/10 split of 5th rate, 4th rate and 3rd rate effort. I'm actually sitting on a pile of labor contracts "for emergencies", which never happen.

Actually we thought the Pirates would show up to help their allies. And as you said, it was not empty. Had we gone down to fight you, we would have lost Dominica. The port you took is literally useless so congrats on spending 5 hours flipping it for no reason. No wonder everyone in your clan is quitting. Your leadership is so concerned with "play to win" with a flawed definition of "win" that they aren't even concerned with the welfare or fun their own members are having.

There are definitely still mechanic fixes we could think about. The current layout of battle timers makes zero sense, for instance. We really need WYSIWYG battle joining. If you're invisible, in a battle or in a port when the tag timer starts, you're not getting in. And "defensive tags" need to go away. Every fight should start from convenient medium cannon range. Certainly a lot of damage has been done to PvP by people exploiting the current mechanics -- maybe not "exploit" as in a bug, but "exploit" as in taking advantage of clear holes in the game design to purposefully ruin the experience of other players. (And personally I find it to be senseless. I have never purposefully engaged in trickery to get a kill -- or at least, nothing more advanced than "hide behind this island" or "spread out and push him into a better tagger". In those cases, we getcha, but you had a chance to see it coming and potentially avoid it.)

Open world PvP is always gank style gameplay. The argument you're trying to have is a copy of arguments from WOW, WAR, AOC, ESO, GW2, EVE and literally every other game that offers any sort of open world PvP where fights can be and frequently are unfair. You might as well complain that fights are sometimes unfair in RUST. It's practically the point of the genre.