Slamz
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Posts posted by Slamz
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After the Great Pirate War, France made nice with the Swedes and started poking around west, where they ran into the British. The British were on a path to (allegedly) restore the Danes to power (at the expense of the Swedes) and to additionally claim some "traditional" British ports in the Antilles, perhaps not coincidentally putting them within easy striking distance of France.
Long story short, this did not work out for the British. They also liked to set their port defense timers to 12-14, when apparently they had no one on to defend them, so it was a weekend blitz to totally kick them out of everything east of La Mona with really the only resistance coming from a Chinese guild on the Danish team, who couldn't quite totally screen the British ports against us (and later regretted that whole "making deals with the British" plan they had going).
Let the records show we would have preferred to fight the British in manly stand-up port battles, but if they're going to go around setting their port battle windows to the time when the fewest people are online PvP2, we will eventually make them look silly.
France now anticipates letting the Danes and the Swedes work out the details of who-owns-what in that area, with France's only requirement that we maintain some useful reinforcement windows in the area of Puerto Rico.
What's next for France?
Hard to say.
The big fish are still (presumably) the U.S. and the British. The British are literally in our way, though, and we have no access to the U.S. Our obvious lane of advancement is Hispaniola and the British pac-manned all that up a long time ago, presumably securing their east flank but also incidentally guaranteeing that nobody can fight the U.S. without having to go through Britain to do it.
Will the British cede some interesting ports?
Will France just start taking some interesting ports?
Is the U.S. even still a superpower?
Can anyone withstand Britain's apparent nonstop Victory building train?
Stay tuned, for we again find ourselves facing PvP2's most dangerous threat: the time when France has run out of things to do.
(The last two times this happened, we wiped out the entire pirate team, captured everything east of La Mona and stole someone's Victory.)
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So I make this challenge to you all, when a new player logs into the forum and sees personal attacks, do you think it is a game that they will want to play?
The kinds of players we need here? They would probably enjoy seeing the forum sparring because it looks like a healthy game with some real rivalries.
The kind of player who shies away from rivalries probably won't last long in this game. You know the type I'm talking about? The type that come into sandbox PvP games and expect gentleman's fisticuffs. They will quit over any number of "unfair" setups (I once had someone accuse me of cheating because I was chainshotting their sails...they didn't think that was a very fair way to fight). Anyone that would quit over forum words is someone that's destined to quit anyway. Saving them is a waste of time.
I'm not saying we should greenlight everything and turn into 4chan; it would be lovely if Lord Roberts could come across as something other than a very angry teenager on his 5th can of energy drink, but a little personal forum rivalry looks like a healthy PvP game to me.
Show me a PvP game where there is no forum rivalry and I will show you a PvP game that has installed so much padding that their players don't even care who wins. That's a game that's not going to last. It's boring.
Naval Action has a very healthy sense of PvP. The only thing really hurting this game is the "must be this high rank to enter" barrier to new players and the horrifying amount of bot farming required to join the fun stuff.
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Short term, I would personally suggest this is "not punishable" and shrug and say "it's alpha". Worst case, you quit out and lose the ship, but eventually there will be a wipe anyway. He wasn't really keeping you in there or ruining a bunch of people's time. Second worst case, the person who was claiming the ship could have sat in there and had a sandwich and gotten the ship at the end (time wasted = 1:1).
Longer term, there should maybe be some consideration that if no enemies are reasonably close to you, you should be able to leave and take your prize ship with you. Even in PvE this is annoying. Sometimes I have captured the ship I wanted and the last 2 NPCs have been having a running fight with each other and are like 3 km away.
The ideal fix would probably be that you send crew to the prize ship and it auto-flees as if it was a trader NPC. If it makes it out, you'll see it on the exit screen and can tell it where to go.
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What do you think PVP1 pirates? All of us fire over to PVP2 for a night, basic cutter swarm?
Actually not totally 100% sure who you would find to swarm.
PVP2 brief history of time:
* USA squashes pirates.
* Pirates backpedal and squash all of France.
* Vichy France never forms -- it's 100% Charles du Gaulle.
* Pirates fight this for a while and then quit/change servers/switch teams.
* France takes all their stuff back. Pirates are reduced to literally just Mortimer Town.
* New pirates show up (rumor? USA players switch)
* New pirates retake homeland, smattering of pug USA defenders don't manage to stop them.
And there we are today.
Don't think the British are fighting them anymore or even located in the area. USA seems to be more focused on their Yucatan front mainly against Spain and somewhat on the Cuba front against the British(?). British are fighting the USA on one side and keeping the French in check on the other side while allying with the Dutch and ignoring(?) the pirates.
Will be interested to see what the pirates do next but so far as I know they don't have any serious enemies in their area fighting them right now, unless the USA has gotten organized recently.
What the PVP2 pirates probably really need is a boatload of cash to pay for port attacks. Will be interested to see if they open a new front against the British or try to push on to Florida against the USA but I would bet they are getting cash strapped now.
Most of the pirates on PVP2 went French or Swedish
OMG went French.
Other pirates (FC?) went Dutch and allied with the British.
Other pirates (Invictus, or maybe SIN? I don't remember) went British.
So far as I know nobody went Swedish. They are the same people that have always been there afaik.
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I'm struggling to think of what games allow this. I am pretty sure I am still the guild leader of guilds I have not logged into in 5 years because most games don't have any concept of ownership transfer.
It's not like Naval Action guilds are intricate structures with guild banks and guild ranks and complex membership structures.
Just make a new guild. Not that hard. Make like 5 officers to help with invites and you're done.
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Need to think of how to do things like this without the arbitrary cap of 6 players.
What happens when I have 7 people online?
One of the great things about this game (so far) is that there is rarely a case where someone has to get totally left out. (Everyone has their own theory for what killed POTBS, but my theory is that it was largely the 6-man group limit, which meant any guild without exact multiples of 6 online had some people twiddling their thumbs.)
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I suppose it's a question of where you think the balance will fall:
Too many traders for not enough trade goods
Too many trader goods for not enough traders
If the former, then secrecy could help you be that 1 trader who finds a really nice coal stash somewhere out of the way where some lazy coal producer is just dumping on the market. Every other trade is scrounging around but you've got the mother lode!
If the latter, then public information will help the few traders make more efficient use of their time. There's more stuff to buy, deliver and sell than they collectively have time for so it's really a question of just helping them spend their time more wisely.
I'm betting on the latter. The only reason I do my own coal delivery is because I'm pretty sure nobody would know where to buy it if I just threw it onto the market of the local port.
This is going to be even more important once NPC production ramps down to 0 and you have no idea where to look for stuff.
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Some people are going to get very rich.
Once the economy becomes 100% player-based, this will actually be a very critical component.
i.e., I'm a lazy iron producer. I just make iron and throw it on the market where I am. I set the price cheap because I want someone to come buy it and I do not care that I can sell it for 3x as much somewhere else because I am lazy and do not want to bother.
With data like this, some trader can see my iron in the shop and decide to come get it, then resell it for more money somewhere else.
That's actually a great feature. Frankly I think it's data that should be available, real-time, inside the game! ("Where's the cheapest iron within a 1 hour sail?")
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I thought it'd be easier to understand how to solve your problems
I still don't think you understand.
We do not have problems. You have problems.
You think our problem is that we can't defend our ports. This is not really a problem. Truth be told, there are only 3 reasons to own ports right now:
* You want to grind crafting levels and need tons of resources.
* You want reinforcement bubbles.
* You want places to carry flags out of (which, for the most part, results in you obtaining more ports you have no actual use for).
The RvR game is a bit of a joke in its present state. So losing ports really is not a serious problem to have. I would be content PvPing out of free ports and buying just the ships I need from willing sellers, of which there are plenty, using the money I obtained mainly from PvP. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Your problem is you are all geared up for a massive 25v25 port battle game that does not exist at the moment. Maybe the U.S. team can give you that fight, but I'm not even sure about that.
Sweden can't give you that fight.
France can't give you that fight.
I assume the Dutch, Danes and Spanish can't give you that fight.
So your problem is you have a playstyle that you cannot feed. What are you going to do, I wonder?
Offering an increasingly higher XP and gold reward for ships with BR lower than the average BR in a fight would be a great way to encourage a more historical mix of ships on the seas.
Short term, sure.
Long term -- say, 6 months from now assuming we all keep playing -- everyone will be max level. XP will be totally meaningless. I'm rather afraid that gold will become meaningless too, especially for the players who tend to win a lot and therefore get a lot of gold and spend very little.
I don't think improved rewards is really a good answer to this game's problem. We just need more fighting and more war and less PvE grinding that takes people out of the war for long periods of time.
If this game was pvp only there would be less than 250 people playing it.
Which actually makes me wonder, "Would it be so bad if the PvE people quit?"
I mean, they are basically non-entities anyway. The U.S. may have 300 people online but if 250 of them are mission grinding in the hinterlands then they are as good as offline anyway, so far as the rest of the game goes. Whether they log in or not literally does not matter with respect to the health of the game or the server. We almost need the online count broken down more:
"Number of people online: 650"
"Number of people doing anything remotely relevant to the other players: 70"
"Number of people dicking around in PvE being basically worthless and would not be missed if they logged off right now: 580"
The game supports them, but they don't really do anything that supports the game. They would be just as happy (maybe happier) if they were offline playing single player -- or standard Left4Dead style single-group coop.
My argument being that we literally do not have to do anything to support those players or their playstyle. They are already uselessly irrelevant.
At best, they are working hard to become relevant later, but I wonder how many of them will stick with it to that point.
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If the port was important to you, you had to be willing to fight for it and lose ships.
No, we really don't. Once balance gets out of whack enough, we will simply stop showing up and go do something else instead. This is exactly what we did against the pirates. They took every French port and after the first couple attempts to stop them, we just defended the one shallow port they couldn't outweigh us at and let them take the rest in PvT. It was not very exciting for them.
Is that the gameplay you want?
Because it's the gameplay you're going to get.
But I think you are again getting hung up trying to roleplay politics in a discussion about game mechanics.
The real question is:
Do you think that port ownership should be determined by which side brings the most number of heavy ships?
If your answer is yes then I'd love to hear your justification for it and how you envision that creating satisfying long term gameplay that attracts and retains players long term (especially in light of the fact that leveling up efficiently -- which means grinding bots -- is boring as hell).
If your answer is no, then quit roleplaying for a minute and agree that there is a weakness in the game mechanics that could be addressed. Step 1 of any sort of game improvement is likely going to involve attracting developer attention by actually establishing wide agreement that there is a problem.
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Put this in and PvP piracy is deader than it already is. It's hard enough to prevent a trader from scuttling his ship by ramming and turning off survival as is.
When I say "only the owner can do this" I mean the new owner, as in the person who won the boarding action.
So after boarding, you can already hit "X" to transfer to it, or right-click it and select "Release" so that someone else can capture it. I just want another option that says "Sink" and lets you sink it instead of capturing it or giving it away.
If you sink it, it is treated the same as any other sunk ship and generates normal XP and gold rewards.
PS: just give all who would rather abuse the game than play it max exp at the start and be done with it.
This would indeed solve a lot of problems. Right now we are discouraged from "playing the game" because there are too many pressures to level up. And since leveling up is so bloody boring, people will always look for shortcuts.
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Think the slots in port battles need to be split up for example x number for 1-2-3 rates and some slots for smaller ships.
The way it is now lower ranking players are being ask´d not to join port battles and that´s will have a negative effects on game.
That's an imperfect solution, too, as it requires a lot more haggling on the part of the people conducting the port battle. Now instead of bringing 25 people in their heaviest ships, you have to make sure you have the proper mix, which is going to be a big hassle between multiple guilds and potential outsiders "taking up slots".
The current port battle system should really only control something lesser, like if you win the battle you destroy the port's reinforcement window. Flipping the port's control is some totally different mechanic.
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the 18 French ships did NOTHING to protect their towers.
Okay, General Custer, what's your strategy for winning a port battle with 5000 BR vs 10500? You seem to propose that the French stand in blockade and brawl, which I hope you realize would be a very stupid plan. It would result in the same British victory but with far more losses for the French and a lot more gold and XP for the Brits. French did absolutely the right thing by hanging back and trying to pick off a couple ships without losing any -- it was their only chance.
The REAL alternative is to not show up to defend at all, which you're probably going to see a lot of. Instead, the defenders should be out grinding NPC fleets, which is so boring that most people just quit playing the game instead. So, again, the real, actually proven effective counter is to let your ports fall, ignore them entirely and just go PvP.
We need a better port flipping mechanic -- one that doesn't simply hinge on BR.
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Brits actually took one of the last Danish ports. I'm glad this whole thing was finally outed as British propaganda! I think when all is said and done, there will be no Danish ports -- they will all be British (if for no other reason than there are no Danes left to take their ports back).
I assume that was the plan all along.
Not real clear on why that was the plan, though. I don't see what it gets ya.
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it was given before
people were farming this like crazy
you board the ship
exit the battle - now he boards you
exit the battle - now you board him
It would be nice to be able to right-click the ship and say "sink" -- only the owner can do this. It just puts holes in the ship and sinks.
Sometimes I get chances to board an enemy ship, killing him, but the NPC reinforcements are too much to deal with so I end up sailing off and getting no credit.
I didn't really want his ship. It was just a way to kill him. It would be nice to easily sink the derelict and get credit for the kill.
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Complaining on the forums isn't going to help you, you need to start grinding. If you're too lazy for grinding the fleets, then the blame is on you, not other players.
That is a quote of desperation. Now I know you're feeling it -- the same thing the pirates felt before they quit.
Sons of Britain encountered the pirates at Aves, realized they'd been outleveled, and went off to grind. 4 weeks of grinding later, you are finally ready, only now the pirates are gone and the French aren't up to the levels required to play your game. Whoops?
In desperation, you (and especially Roberts) want to taunt us into grinding levels. No doubt you will aim to capture ports rapidly in an effort to spur us on.
But most likely the problem is already set. You want us to grind up to a point where we can fight you? Okay, fine, let's say we do that. What are you going to do for the next 4 weeks while we run off and grind up like you did? Will you do the same thing the pirates did? Quit? Are we going to spend the next 4 weeks grinding up only to find out there's nobody to fight again, just like is happening to you, and just like already happened to the pirates? (Is that what happened to the U.S. as well? Where are they?)
It's bad game design really -- or more charitably it's a side effect of the place-holder port battle system -- but it's also you choosing to play in the manner you do rather than, well, fun stuff, like open sea PvP hunting.
I'm sure you and Roberts would say, "lol! That's why we're the best and you can't stop us!" but the pirates said that exact same thing. And then they got bored and quit.
We will set up outposts in free ports and gank your teammates and have a great time doing it, and we'll mostly do it in ships like Surprises and Snows (and maybe Trincs, because, you know, Trincs) and we will still be having fun while you guys are conducting your 15th PvT empty port battle and wondering why you even bothered to log on.
The reality is you have put yourself into a very boring position where the game simply may not be able to offer you the fun you want and I don't even know where to suggest you go look for it, other than to say "quit and come back in a month or two". You can PvT every port on the map, but learn something from the pirates: it's really not that fun and you will lose members over it and this game will end up with a few more negative Steam reviews, not from us, but from your own terminally bored members.
I don't know why I try really. The pirates didn't listen either. My whole experience with enemies in this game is one big long "I told you so".
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Really all this patch added was a new ship that had already been present in the game before, as well as some text boxes that produce resources on a daily basis.
Yes, as much as I enjoyed this patch, I frown on it being called a "big content patch".
It was a nice combat mechanics patch with a tentative resource revamp (tentative because until NPC resources are shut off, the new resource system can be largely ignored). It was not a "big content patch", which to me implies some substantial new things to do.
And while adding ships to the game is nice, it's really not going to change anything. I doubt that "lack of ships" is anyone's top reason for quitting.
What I'd really like to see, I think, is a massive rework of port battle mechanics. Somehow it has to not be a battle of "he who brings the biggest ships wins".
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France:
Britain: Puerto Rico War / Hostile
Spain: Neutral
Swedish: Friendly
US: Neutral
Pirates: Hostile
Danish: ???Dutch: Friendly
- War with Britain over the Puerto Rico area and their incursion into the Swedes. Hard to say there's a general French/British war considering it's mostly just 2-3 clans causing trouble in a specific area.
- Pirates downgraded to "hostile" because the war with them is over and frankly if I saw a pirate fighting someone I would probably side with the pirate.
- Danish set at "???" because they are British, allied with British or have all quit, depending on who you ask and what time it is. Their ports get swapped around like cheap hookers on nickel night. They have no known actual presence anymore.
- Arguably the U.S. is at war but that was a limited fiasco involving a subset in a specific area and is over now anyway. U.S. and France can't really fight each other even if they want to because Britain is in the way.
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Ultimately, the game needs to cater to all types of players and make each possibly activity interesting and captivating. Missions as they are clearly are placeholders, they will introduce better ones eventually... Same with everything else.
I gotta disagree here, because some of the players want contradictory things. I think we already see that:
"I want lots of levels and for leveling up to have meaning."
"I want RvR and PvP without a lot of grinding."
Those are two very contradictory goals and the game seems to be trying to satisfy both to the fulfillment of neither. Person #1 grinds his way to high levels and then finds out there's nowhere else to go and hardly anyone to fight at his rank. Person #2 finds out he can't participate in port battles because he didn't grind enough.
The game needs to decide who its audience is and cater to them. I guess the audience could be "people who love to grind and then love to PvP only after they are done grinding" but I'm not sure that's a real audience or even a feasible one (the fastest grinders will always end up being bored and then the lemming effect starts up).
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France is still remarkably healthy and I will go out on a limb and say it's because we have been one of the most focused "actual PvP" teams.
Not trying to be political here, just not sure of another way to put it, but what we've seen of the Pirates and the Brits is what's killing the game: grinding their way up to higher ranks and then simply showing up with so many numbers and so much weight that you can't fight them. The irony is that it kills the game for them more than for the people they "fight".
I have to imagine a lot of the pirates really did get bored out of the game. They grinded their way to high level ships (boring!) and then finally went on the attack only to discover that we left our port battles undefended because there was literally no point in trying -- they were too high level and too numerous.
And last night was another perfect example. The Brits attacked Fredericksted with over 10,000 BR -- average BR for them was about 450. French actually showed up with 21 defenders but only about 5000 BR -- sorry, but that's really the best we can do at our rank. So the Brits quickly killed the towers and won. It could have been a great fight, 25 v 21, but the Brits literally leveled their way out of PvP. I have to imagine that was a pretty boring night for them, capping off a pretty boring month. (I don't think anyone sunk on either side. It was over that fast. I was hitting a 3rd rate with no armor and the fight ended faster than his ship could fill with water.)
Meanwhile, we still spend a lot of time hunting on the OS (this, in fact, is why we are lower level) and can generally find people to pick off. So we're losing PvT port battles but getting a lot of open sea PvP. That keeps us entertained while our enemies are literally boring themselves out of the game.
There's a lot of fault we can place on the game design here that we could talk about, but the players share a lot of blame here as well.
Grind -> grind -> grind -> grind -> show up for port battles that nobody else can even fight you in -> quit.
Open world PvP -> awesome fun -> everyone still playing after 30 days but you can't defend ports.
Pick one.
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This idea that PvP requires loss because you don't want to fight the same person 100 times in a row just shows the blatant elitism at work there. You want the other person to actually be forced to quit fighting if you beat them a few times because you're tired of them getting another go at you? Seriously? I mean fuck their enjoyment of the game right?
Yes, seriously, because if they can't enjoy the challenge of losing and the costs involved, then they are not really a PvPer in my book.
My PvP is about the thrill and the suspense of knowing there is risk and knowing that failure has consequences. I feel that every time I carry a load of cargo across the open sea in a Trader Brig. I feel it when fighting in an Exceptional ship with nice permanent upgrades. And I know that the enemy is risking something too and has good incentive to not want to just yolo his way through every fight.
If you want shallow PvP, go play Smite or DOTA or any of the other pointless brawl games out there. Some of us want 1 game with a little depth.
With this said i support the ideas crewlimits. An excellent idéa. Every captain or has to gather crew like laborhours today. And perhaps by huring recruiters.
It might be interesting if rank determined:
Maximum crew you can have. This is the max crew you can have if you hire crew.
Minimum crew you are granted. This is how many crew you get without having to hire any.
Labor hours per day to hire new crew?
Minimum crew might peak at around 300. High ranks can always captain a Frigate, without having to worry about labor hours. Crewing a Victory might be more for special occasions. If you try to PvP in one on a regular basis, the enemy might be able to get you out of it just by using enough grapeshot (implying crew does not refill for free after every fight...maybe it only refills up to that "minimum crew" value. Or maybe you can refill on the open sea for convenience sake, but it costs double normal labor hours. Kinda like repairs, it's cheaper if you do it at a port.)
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I actually think a shipyard should take up all 5 slots. You can produce resources or you can run a shipyard. Not both.
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Wouldn't it be good for the economy to help crafters sell expensive ships to anyone?
That's why I'd like to see the change: so crafters feel more comfortable selling ships on the market.
I know some people have no qualms about selling Trincoms to the enemy but I detect a lot of hesitation when I suggest more people start selling ships on the market. It's especially confusing to newbies who look at the market and simply don't understand why there aren't more quality ships there, and arranging meetings with ship builders for a personal experience usually isn't very convenient for either party.
Reducing market fees for ship sales could well be another topic too.
Ultimately I just want to see more ships out there for sale and would like to remove these various hang-ups that are keeping some builders from doing it.
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Hmmm, once a pirate always a pirate, so you're flag now really does not matter. You guys should gone Spanish.
("Your flag does not matter" + "you should have gone Spanish": pick one. I find your lack of consistency disturbing.)
At any rate, it does seem as if the British Empire has become so powerful that they can fight the Americans with one hand and still spare dozens of people to attack the Swedes (and threaten to reclaim old British ports while conveniently overlooking all the old French ports they are occupying). Looks to me like we had better all rally together against the new overpopulated server juggernaut: the Brits.
PvP2: Tales of France
in National news
Posted
This is like saying "the only reason the British own 90+ ports is because a bunch of people joined them".
Well. Yeah. Okay? What was your point?
The real question isn't who you can get to join you, but who you can manage to keep.