Slamz
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Posts posted by Slamz
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And be honest, do you really enjoy killing someone who doesn't even fight back at you
Yes. It's not my goal. I'd rather have a good fight and I do enjoy fighting Killers, too. But yes, I absolutely enjoy killing people who don't fight back, or fight back incompetently. We refer to it as "welcome to PvP" and consider it to be a community service. If they can't harden up a little bit, get a little spunk to them, then I don't mind driving them out of the game.
Interestingly, I think, not all members of my guild are "Killers" as you might expect. But all of them -- the socializers, the explorers and the achievers -- know how to man up during a fight and take their lumps when they sign into a PvP game. I expect nothing less of the rest of the game population.
I don't want to drive non-Killers away. I want them to feel like this game has room for them. A game full of Killers can frankly get boring and routine. But I don't want to coddle anyone either.
I just foresee doom for Achievers if there is only one thing to Achieve, and some people are already done with it. And adding more ranks isn't the answer because the rest of us hate that.
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This post is an example why in game alliances could have problems.
I was thinking alliances could be "opt in" -- they do not automatically apply to the whole team.
Example (using made up numbers)
Swedes prime time is typically 100 players.
French prime time is typically 200 players.
The main guilds want to create an alliance.
A treaty is created. It appears in both capitals. "The undersigned agree to a peace treaty between Sweden and France."
In order to come into effect, the treaty requires 50% of the prime time population to sign it, so Sweden needs 50 signatures and France needs 100 signatures and then the treaty goes into effect only for the people who signed it.
Late-comers can sign the treaty at any time. People on the treaty can remove their name from it. They can only do this at the capitals.
If you are not signed, it does not apply to you. Unsigned French see all Swedes as enemies and vice versa.
If you are signed, it does apply to you. Signed French see all signed Swedes as friendlies and vice versa.
Signed French still see unsigned Swedes as enemies -- the treaty only applies when both people are on it.
If there is a Sweden vs France battles, unsigned people can only join their team. Signed people can join either team. This gives a way for treaties to be enforced by their own team -- basically players can police themselves. If we don't want your guild fighting the Swedes, we can follow you around and reinforce Sweden when you attack them. We can also join their side in port battles against you.
Once a treaty falls below half the number of signatures required to originally make it, the treaty is canceled.
If War & Peace is not "opt in", I think it needs to be "NPC driven".
If it's forced and player-driven, I think there will be a lot of issues.
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I personally set some of the timers in the Panama area and if i am allowed to set them to anytime within the conqest screen i will set them to whatever time strategically helps us.
Map Strategy vs Player "Fun" Strategy.
Player "Fun" Strategy means planning how to play in such a way that you keep your team entertained, so they don't get bored and quit, even if it's not necessarily the "winningest" way to play. Sometimes you fight not because it's smart but because it's going to be fun.
Map Strategy means planning how to play the game as if it was played by robots. It's the best way to "win" without any consideration for whether or not anyone is enjoying it and may cause droves of players to quit.
Choose wisely.
Second in terms of why those particular ports are in our timezone, did you happen to realise that all those ports or most of those ports were captured by wait for it AUSTRALIANS and KIWI's?
The person who has been setting some of these timers just admitted he did it to avoid PvP ("strategically help us") not to be nice to Oceanic players.
Yes, we all appreciate that Oceanic timezone players play this game but no, that is not why Euro and US players (mostly Brit team players) are setting dozens of ports to your time zone. I'm not sure you're grasping the point or why this is a problem or that you are being used as leverage for trolls.
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Here are you timers: http://mdb-dev.es/NavalPorts/
Ha. Kinda funny looking at that.
PVP1:
US ports are mostly set to US prime time -- 02-04 (Eastern/Central) and 04-06 (west coast).
French ports are mostly set to 20-22 which I guess is Euro prime time.
British and Pirate ports are mostly set to 10-14, which I guess is prime time for Siberia and Australia?
PVP2:
US ports are mostly US prime time, though there is a fair selection set to Australian time.
French ports are 100% American prime time
British ports are mostly 12-16, so Australia again
Pirate ports are almost entirely US time (east coast, 00-02 which is 8pm-10pm).
Analysis:
There is a large and mysterious Australian presence on the British team on both PVP1 and PVP2. I recommend an immediate investigation into who these mysterious Australians are and how so many of them log on during American and Euro prime time just to capture ports and flip them to their own time zone. Are they jobless? Do they need help? Should we raise a collection for them? I worry that they can spend so much time playing this game, during all hours.
Clearly we need an Australian server to service these huge numbers of Australian players (who mostly play on the British team).
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This would not be such of a problem if more non-European players joined the smaller nations aswell. Then it could be fighting round the clock so to speak.
Except that's not how it works. If the front line ports are set by Europeans to European times then the US players will not get to fight there. There's no "round the clock fighting" when all ports are just set to Euro times. You'd have to either try and partition out the map ("US French players attack over here and Euro French players will attack over there and hopefully our respective counterparts will fight us!") or else do some kind of timer hopscotch where 6 ports in a row are set like Euro/US/Euro/US/Euro/US, and then do that everywhere "so everyone has a chance to play".
It's not realistic. We can't even get these moronic players to set PVP2 port timers to times when US players can play there, even when they are captured by US players. They intentionally undermine their own port battles and then neither team gets to fight (and then they complain "there's no fighting here!" and they move to PVP1, thinking that will somehow fix the problem).
Separate servers was the better plan, if we could just stop people from doing blatantly stupid things.
Long term we will have to code the ability to play stupid out of the system. Short term, I dunno. Disable port timers? Set the windows to 12 hours wide? I dunno. I predict PVP1 isn't gonna last 2 months in the current state of things.
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Speaking of Bartle types, I do worry about this game's appeal to Achievers.
I'm not an Achiever. Not surprisingly, I'm more of a Killer, but as the man says, Killers like killing Achievers so I'd rather not see them all quit. Which they are going to do once they hit max rank (many probably already have) and have the best ship (many probably already have).
I would bet there's a fair population of Achievers out there that are literally done with this game. They may come back out of curiosity to see what future patches add but they've already made max level and max ship and are done. Admin might suggest that's perfectly fine but I think it's way too early and stands to throw off the player balance.
Somehow, we will have to find things for achievers to achieve. Maybe that's where a port owner system would come in. Or something. Or better (public?) tracking of stats, like EVE's killboards -- who killed who, how many times.... not a "leaderboard" per se, but just a stat tracking system that might be open to interpretation on how "achievement" may be measured ("I got the most kills!" "Well I killed you the most!" "Well I'm the most accurate!" "Well I do more damage per battle!").
Part of why I don't like this game's XP/rank grind is because it's a turnoff to explorers and killers (and not of much interest to socializers) and achievers will blow through it in about 2 months (if that). It gets in the way and doesn't really provide a solution.
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People on US are leaving other PvP server because some already did that and thus the PvP 1 got bigger population. AND IT CREATE EVEN MORE PROBLEM.
This is one reason I have held back from moving to PVP1:
It's going to be a Euro server so even when you don't have players being intentional trolls when setting port timers, actual legitimate port timers will be too early in the day for US players to fight in and vice versa. I would attack a port and set the time to 02-04 which is going to be way too late for most Europeans to want to attack but is a good time for me. (04-06 is legit prime time for U.S. west coast.)
Moving to PVP1 really does not solve anything and seems likely to make people quit the game even faster overall.
The real fix is going to be "a better system for port flipping" but that's going to take time.
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Not everyone was happy with the production buildings.
Just for the record, I feel like production buildings are a step in the right direction, but need refinement with a view towards "the war".
I have brought it up several times and never gotten a response:
If my nation has 1 iron mine, why do we care about any others?
Why even go outside of a few local ports for everything I want?
France took over Puerto Rico and literally had zero reason to care. We took it, it cost a lot of money, we really showed the British who wears the pants around here but in the end there was nothing to do there and no reason to care or even hang around.
I think player resource production is a strong idea, but just needs more refinement. It COULD be a vital component of "War & Peace".
instead of having 8 flags in various places they bring 8 large fleets to 1 port.
That has definitely been a problem. Port battle mechanics somehow have to encourage people to spread out.
All too often the "PvPers" clump up like this and then wonder why nobody fights them.
Maybe the solution is somehow more goals that can be accomplished solo and by small groups. Like a way a port can be flipped, not through combat, but by something that 1 person can technically do solo over a few days if nobody stops them. (More people will help, but with diminishing returns.)
The current port battle system encourages "roll 100% as heavy as possible" and I think eliminates more battles than it creates.
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And here comes the bickering and arguing. So few people can simply say 'good game', 'we'll have you next time' etc.
Yes, it is interesting how the "good game, old chaps!" usually comes primarily from the winning side.
Is it true that port timers are being adjusted to times that are outside of when the war actually occurred? Doesn't sound like PVP1 is a very fun place to be.
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It has nothing to do with leadership. It has EVERYTHING to do with a North American primetime population 400 players online.
Except this has been true since the start of the server, even when it was over 1000 players online. (Most of those Hispaniola off-hour times have been that way for over a month.)
The point is not that the Brits have created a new problem, but that they have still not learned anything, even after losing 80% of their players -- half to moving servers or changing teams and half to just plain quitting the game.
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We are going to discuss it this week with the team and maybe propose other options for captains moving to pvp 1
One time copy of all assets from PVP2 to PVP1, including blueprints and all outposts/ships/assets "as is". In other words, if you have an outpost in an enemy port, it will copy over, but you won't be able to access it (because it's enemy controlled).
Although, in all seriousness, I think you should consider going the other way: merge PVP1 into PVP2.
Oceanic/Asian players have very high pings to the Euro servers. Everyone can play on PVP2 but not everyone can play on PVP1.
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I look forward to the day when the current batch of PVP2 British go to join you. Which, if history proves, will be in about 2 weeks. Maybe less. They're still learning that "haha we set our port timers to 12-14 so the French can't fight us lololol" actually just hurts their own team, by boring them to death.
France spent the whole weekend in open sea PvP, so it's not really our problem. The Brits will all quit and we'll fight Pirates and U.S. It's just a shame to see more British players quit the server due to their own leadership's stupidity, when they could be joining in on the fun right here, right now.
I tried to warn the Antilles pirates and the Puerto Rico Brits about playing like this too. They didn't listen either.
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After taking Puerto Rico and moving up Hispaniola, France went off to find some action. We have identified the following fun places, so far:
La Tortue -- often there are British and Pirate ships running around, solo or in groups. Good fights can often be had. Only problem is it's more of a port flipping hub so some days there's no activity and some days it's just clumps of 20 ships. *Usually* there's good wolfpack action to be found but not consistently.
Jamaica -- basing out of either Cayman Brac or Ile-de-vache, a tour of Jamaica can always locate British shipping. Sometimes we roll shallow ships, which are good for catching traders and running from the local militia, and sometimes we roll heavier ships, to fight the militia. So far it's been consistent good action and the British mission runners usually come out to play (usually right after we show up and gank a couple of them).
Meanwhile, the British main guilds continue to attack empty ports a hundred miles away from anyone and setting timers to 14-16, when neither us nor them are online -- a clear signal that they do not actually want to fight anyone and have probably soiled themselves. This is probably why half their team quit and moved to PVP1 but apparently the remaining Brits have learned nothing. What we really wanted to do was move a flag up to Haiti and start a 3 or 4 way war (Pirate/British/French/US?) but apparently the Brits still think map strategy is more important than not boring your own team to death.
Personally, I don't care about flags except to the extent they help cause PvP fights, and now that we can simply sail around Jamaica and have good wolfpack style fights whenever we want, I don't care so much about the flags. It's a shame there won't be any good British vs French port fights but honestly neither of us is going to camp out around La Mona hoping for an attack (the time for that was last week, when we were actually there) so if you don't want to fight port battles in Haiti then I guess we'll just stick to wolfpack PvP and stealing all your iron haulers instead.
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I'm not sure how the game can get the more even and exciting fights going more often
I think it's there right now, just for some reason a lot of people don't try it. I can only speculate as to why.
But speed fit Trincom = you can go out and pick your fights and almost always avoid all ganks (especially if you utilize "defensive tagging"). I think most people try to fudge the "speed" part and get disenchanted with the idea. Like they try to use a Frigate (too slow) or a Live Oak Trincom (too slow) or even a Fir/Stiffness Trincom with no speed mods (still a little too slow).
Arguably you could just go out in 5th rates and #yolo into the ganks. I know that hurts the pride a bit but for the labor and materials that go into a single 5th rate, that's a lot of #yoloing, and not all the fights will be terrible.
Whereas getting busted in a Victory is a ton of labor hours and resources and hauling. It makes them play too defensive and just about guarantees they can't find fun.
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Shallow port battles: 6th rates.
Deep water port battles: 1st - 3rd rates.
Open sea PvP: 5th rates
That's the reality right now.
I think the problem is people either don't understand or just don't want to try 5th rate combat. They try it a few times in the wrong ships (live oak, extra planking, etc), get ganked a few times and that's it. Or they try it rolling so heavy and dense that they can't catch anyone and nobody wants to fight them.
Open sea PvP has always been plentiful. Still is. But you have to take the right ship with at least roughly the right fittings and then you get good fights and avoid ganks (and on the rare occasion you get ganked anyway it's not a big deal to lose 1 durability on a 5th rate ship).
Moving to PVP1 might be a good move for you but you still need to switch mental gears. Rolling around as a pack of 20 heavy ships is just not how you find PvP in this game.
Packs of 5th rates is where the action can be found.
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Not totally sure this is necessary, really.
If anything I'd be tempted to suggest perhaps some particular days or times when we encourage people into Small Battles. They're available from anywhere, they're balanced, you still risk ship durability but after-battle repairs are free. The rewards are half normal but the ability to find fair fights back to back to back would make up for that.
I'm not going to pick a time/day because it doesn't interest me that much, but it seems like an obvious direction to take for someone wanting to organize some big and relatively fair battles. As far as I know there are no ship restrictions and you could bring 1st-3rd rates if you wanted (pretty sure "small" just means number of players required to start while "large" has a certain minimum count to start the fight).
But also, was noticing plenty of action around La Tortue last night. Dunno if that was a fluke or normal (I just got there) but that seems like the current "place to be".
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It's a very fragile way to play the game. Really if what you want is open sea PvP action, I see good reason to stop at the Trincomalee (and perhaps some Rens) and sail that forever.
What happened at Aves (and later, Fredericksted) really just spotlighted how fragile it is to play your way. At Aves, Brits rolled heavy but got outweighed by so much that they just left the whole area. At Fredericksted the Brits rolled heavy and outweighed the French so much that again the Brits just left the whole area -- they still couldn't get a fight, but now it was for the opposite reason.
This style of heavy combat requires a very narrow range of opponent weights to work and I don't know how you can get that without actually arranging it ahead of time with your enemies. "Okay we're bringing 20 ship and 12,000 BR. What are you bringing? Hmm, okay, we'll have 2 people swap down to Frigates and that'll make it more fair. Everyone ready??"
My prediction is that PVP1 will be no different for you than PVP2 was. You'll end up outgunned by 2x half the time and outgunning them by 2x the other half and that'll be that.
I think the real fun to be had in this game is sailing around in fast Trincoms, ideally where both sides are pretty capable of fleeing, in which case the fights that happen are the fights you both want.
Otherwise it's going to be a case of one side's 6000 BR slow boat fleet getting crushed by someone else's 12000 BR slow boat fleet and that will probably be the end of PVP1. Same people. Same problem. Same result.
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At the same time, that fleet of 25 slow moving SOLs sound pretty vulnerable in the open world to a screening fleet , so I think this is the balance.
Vulnerable how? To what? As long as they travel as a tight group, you won't even be able to tackle them without a significant force of probably at least your own 3rd rates.
They're really only vulnerable if they travel solo or too spread out.
But the real issue is still the way new players are excluded. Hopefully we can find other things for them to do, though. In POTBS new players could still help a lot with generating points for the port flip, even if they couldn't participate in the battle itself. Naval Action will eventually need something like that. In a world where most everyone is in a 1st rate, the newer player in a Surprise can't help with port flips.
Even operating as a "screen" is useless if the people you're trying to interfere with are organized.
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It should be noted, too, that France's best weeks of PvP involved less than, I'd say, 50 total people on most days. The server may have had an additional 900 people online but they were irrelevant to our fights at the time.
50 people is more than enough for a lot of good fights if they are actually playing in the same area and looking for fights.
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you lost the ship dura anyway due to surrendering from D/Cing. So rather than it going to waste someone captured it, now yes i agree that it prob would have been best to hand it back to you
I think that sums it up.
* Yes it would be nice of him to give it back to you.
* No it's not in the rules that he should do so nor is there any real obligation on his part.
* It will be bad PR for him and possibly his guild if he keeps the ship.
* Not really a tribunal matter imo as no particular rules were broken.
I could see a little bit of an argument if you D/C'd and a clanmate was on the way to grab the ship for you and then some scrub grabbed it and ran off but even there it's pretty questionable. It's literally a free ship to whoever gets there first.
Personally I think I would angle for more of a "name and shame" angle in the National forums. Roleplay it up a little. People will know not to trust him and that may ultimately do more damage to him than a quiet tribunal.
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but again. is this game a job or is it just a game?
We have to climb ranks -- it's a job.
We have to produce and haul resources -- it's a job.
Everyone can be max rank -- it's a game.
Everyone will eventually be excluded from port battles if they don't bring 1st rates -- it's a job that turns into a game later.
The real question is to what extent we want this to be a "for funsies, log in, lolz PvP" game and to what extent we want it to be a Serious Business game where things matter and people feel invested.
Both types of games are valid and attract different audiences.
I feel like Naval Action has not entirely decided which it should be. If we don't want 1st rates to become the mandatory level of participation (with all new players relegated to grinding PvE bots until they can get there) then we'll have to figure out how to make that happen through game mechanics.
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Once you get to U.S or Brit size you realize how big the map is, and the time it takes to get anywhere and do anything. French are about to discover this. I don't know why anyone is surprised about empty ports easily an hour sail for the majority of players, how many ports were defended that the Brits took? I'll give you a hint, not many.
And yet you never once tried to move into Plymouth, which I guarantee would have started up some action for you. French were grinding around Basse-Terre with no opposition this whole time. You have to be willing to move in this game. Free ports are an excellent way to get into the action of some other area without much hassle.
Last night we saw quite a lot of action around the La Tortue area. Pirate vs Brit. Might start being Pirate vs Brit vs French soon. We were diddling around with Cayman Brac for a while too, occasionally teleporting over there and jumping unwary Brits right outside their capital.
How to find fights is a basic skill you need to think about and experiment with. Moving to PVP1 might delay your need to learn, but eventually you'll have the same problems you had here.
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You do realize that the "map painting", as you call it, is all about gaining the resources you talk about... right? You can economically strangle a nation by taking away their ports, especially ones with critical resources like hemp and coal. That being said, I think that port conquering should be much, much harder. Hopefully the introduction of various forts and national improvements will solve that.
I wish that was true, but it's really not unless you're talking about something like Dane vs Swede -- two teams with < 8 ports each. In that case, one team taking a hemp port might be important to them and harmful to their enemy.
But typical U.S. vs Britain, where each team owns over 90 ports, the "map painting" is mostly just worthless. Neither team needs those ports. Nobody goes there. They are useless except perhaps as future flag-grab locations (for obtaining even more useless ports).
Not real sure how to fix that but right now there's little reason to care about any ports beyond the first dozen or so, and this will become more true as NPC resource production gets replaced by player resource production.
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When the map resets, all ports will be without timers.
Suggestion:
Implement a way to buy flags against your own nation's ports. This only applies to ports that have never been captured (have no Lord-Protector). All you do is buy the flag and "Use" it while in that port and it makes you Lord-Protector and therefore lets you set timers.
This makes it possible to move into a new area and actually have port timers set without simply having to lose the ports first.
(Ideally some new system will make this irrelevant, but if we're going to have timers, we need a way to set them on fresh ports.)
Open letter to Game Labs regarding RNoN and DRUNK.
in National news
Posted
I wonder if it would be interesting to let players form their own nations. This would make the game more like EVE but might actually be better.
I could simply start "Empire of Slamz". It's my nation. I can let you join it and I can kick you out. The alliances and wars are set by me. Don't like it? Start or join a different nation. Maybe we'll ally up but you have control over your nation and I have control over mine.
I just wonder if this game would work better as "clan based" (more like EVE) rather than "fixed team based" (more like DAOC or ESO). It would certainly solve problems like this. Maybe the "official teams" can still exist but it would give total freedom to any group that really wants to go off and do their own thing. Roleplayers could still form offshoot groups like "West India Squadron" that is a clan-nation that happens to be allied with Britain but the rules of their nation and therefore their ports are totally in their control.
Forcing people into fixed teams -- and then having a bunch of teams on an imbalanced map -- is going to invite a lot of trouble.