Slamz

Most of France's pure crafter-traders were in ICS and they went to Denmark before the fight started. But also, France has always been the hunter and so we have had very little in the way of ship loss. We choose the fights so we pretty well judge our own risks. Our need for crafter-traders has been relatively slim. (Add to this that we don't really like 1st rates and I think most of our clans just don't have any dedicated crafters. There's not enough demand for that. We are all PvPers who do a little crafting on the side.) It's part of why you find me being baffled in other threads, in other forum sections, over what the hell it is other people do in this game, if they aren't PvP-hunting. I just can't imagine having been a crafter-trader for the last month because what do you DO? There's not enough demand! Some people have got to just be sitting on 30 million gold and 50,000 iron ingots and haven't the foggiest idea what to do with it all. Nobody is losing 1000 labor hours per day of stuff in this game. ....well, maybe the Pirates are.

Well.... Solo PvP is very real. Solo duels might be a myth. Using a Surprise to gank traders is certainly real. Works great; happens all the time. But if you mean 1v1 warship duels then I agree. My experience is that even when things look perfectly even -- we are both in the same ship model -- one of two things happen: a. They run away. b. They charge at me, which about 99% of the time means everyone they know is hidden in a battle nearby, and is even now jumping out and coming at me. ...this is why it's always important to rig for speed. How so? Being a new captain today looks easier than when I did it and XP requirements were so much higher. And now new captains can capture ships again. I do think AI tweaks may have made it too difficult for new captains to level up solo, though -- something I'm not sure has been addressed still. It's hard for a veteran to "start over" and really measure how difficult newbie missions are to solo. On the other hand, the new players could learn to beat these things. I guess the question is how far do you want us to dumb down the game to make room for lazy gamers. If you balance the game so that even the worst gamers can have fun, then you've made it boring for the skilled gamers. Which is why it's important to determine who the intended audience is. I don't like WOW. There's too much leveling up and not enough focus on quality open world PvP. Does this mean WOW is a bad game and needs to change? Or does it just mean I am not WOW's intended audience? So what's the intended audience for Naval Action? Those are the people who should be listened to. Others will be unhappy. Welcome to game design 101: you can't make every audience type happy with one game. (And it has never been entirely clear to me what the audience for this game is really supposed to be. There has been a heavy goal of making open world PvPers happy lately but there are still some pretty questionable game elements if that's the case, like how missions and port battles work.)

That's another reason I hope we can be in a clan and a war company at the same time (devs seem to keep specifically dodging that question, unless I missed the answer somewhere in this). These small, independent minded clans are not going to disband and put themselves under the leadership of some war company leader. At the same time, I seriously doubt a clan like CCCP will allow other Danes to join them if that's what a war company means. They will stay independent. If you can only join one or the other, I think only BLACK and CCCP will have functional war companies. Creating a war company of less than 25 active port battle players will be useless.

People can do that now. Granted I guess what war companies really do is act as a method of excluding people -- an unfortunate necessity due to alt abuse, though.

If history is any lesson, people will use their forged papers to all go to the team that's conveying the largest benefits. You might think they'd go to another team and form up a competitive war clan but please state for the record an example of that ever happening. USA gets beat down by Pirates and Brits, half go Pirate, others go Brit. Dutch gets beat down by France, most go Dane, which had a peace treaty with France. Brit Aussies join the Chinese in the Danes rather than fight them. Brits get a beating by the Pirates and a lot join the Pirates. I have yet to see an example of, say, a bunch of Pirates going "we really need to compete with BLACK. Let's join the Spanish!" People never use their forged papers to create better PvP. It would be hilarious to see the Chinese go "f this, stop joining us" so they all go Swede and kill the new Danes. Not gonna happen though.

My prediction for how this will play out on PvP Global: total flop. Pirates will form a War Clan. France will not. Dutch will not. Spain will not. Swedes will not. Brits might but it won't work -- not enough people or coordination. USA -- see Brits. Danes will but they won't fight the Pirates. French will simply avoid the RvR and use all the lovely French ports scattered around the map. Pirate war clan will take them and tax them but French do so little econ that it won't matter. From our perspective it's still a French port and we can teleport to it for PvP and that's awesome for us. Pirates will be mad that nobody cares they're "taking" all the ports. Since the rest of us are not in a War Clan, we literally do not even notice or care about this activity. Some French might want to start a War Clan but the first thing that happens when they make one is they lose access to every port on the map, because they are all Pirate and Dane owned and they have disallowed other nations access. No thanks. Nobody is going to join the French War Clan and lose PvP teleport access immediately. British will want to play but current evidence suggests they simply can't get it together. 25 1st rates is just too high a bar for the remaining Brits to meet. I think USA might want to play but again, they aren't going to meet the bar for 25 PB ships that I can see. I just don't see this idea playing out the way the devs imagine. Maybe back in March 2016 there would have been enough players and competition to make it work but not on PvP-Global today. ...What if a War Clan can only own 5 ports? This lets them compete over some hot commodities but they can't "take over the map". This might allow small war clans to work, now that I think about it. Pirates and Danes coordinate and grab the 10 hottest ports on the map. USA has a small war clan and they grab, say, the Tampa area. Not exactly a hot commodity. Pirates want to go git 'em but in order to take the USA port they must drop ownership on one of their hot commodity ports. If some real competition pops up, they will want to take those hot commodity ports and fight it out but minor clans can take the less desirable areas and still maybe get a little something out of the system instead of basically being encouraged to avoid it entirely.

Yeah, this is a game design issue but also a lot of player fault is here. I remember how people gamed the flag system just to avoid having to fight anyone. You could only attack a port within a certain window of time, so no night flips, but you could do false-flag attacks and pull multiple flags so defenders couldn't know where to be, etc. And people would intentionally set their timers to 4am in the hopes that nobody would be online to attack them, effectively making the port invulnerable. Once people got the hang of the mechanics, it has been nerdcore gaming-the-game ever since. Now it's night flipping so bad that they made an EU server just so SOME of the people could avoid it. And I'm sure EU still has issues with people trying to flip as early as possible or as late as possible and multi-flipping to avoid PvP again. Ultimately this must be fixed through game design, but I can hate the player AND the game. Port battles -- the entire system and concept of them -- is broken. This has probably caused more grief than anything else over the last year and half. Devs are trying to address the problems with port battles but Old Yeller has gone rabid and needs to be put down for the good of the game.

What became unfun to you? I think a big part of it was how 25v25 port battles tended to get ruined via splits, alts and exploits -- some of which has been addressed and which the upcoming "clan wars" feature will address further. 25-ship fleets can no longer be split (if they stick together, due to battle groups + circle-on-the-defender) and once clan wars are in you'll never have alts taking spots up in a PB again. It might just be a problem of "too late" but they have been getting addressed. But I also think a lot of people joined PvP servers who did not really enjoy PvP. As a PvPer, I think the game has been great and other than the low population, its never been better than it is now. The only thing I would change is the way people use missions to hide in the nether-regions of the world. People should be sailing on the open sea, not grinding missions outside their capitals. We might still need to twiddle with invis, "warp speed" and timers (things regularly abused by the douchebags of the game, because they're too terribad to hunt like a real PvPer) but generally things are good now. I also think there's a perception of "this is too much work/risk" but again I think this is a perception problem. You can PvP all day long in a Snow or a Cerberus. Cerb is a great PvP ship and I'm not joking -- get 2-3 together and they can do a lot. We sunk a Santissima using 2 Cerbs recently (and no he was not AFK and yes he was a member of a major clan and knew how to use it, but he got busted with too little escort on the OW and couldn't outturn Cerbs.) If anything, this game just needs to be re-marketed. Target audience: people who love hard core PvP. They're out there and I think they'd love this game. They probably just look at it and think it's PvE and they hear complaints about "the grind" but the irony is PvPers are the people who need to grind the least.

The best negotiation tool is OW PvP.

I used to worry it might become the meta that people would run fleet ships and all PvP would degrade into big PvE fights. But yeah, they mostly just get in the way and the fact that they won't do repairs makes them very fodderous. Even though we can capture good ones for free now, I'm not sure it's worth it. Spend 10-20 minutes looking for, tagging and capturing a Surprise only to have it ram its bow sprit off (or yours) 5 minutes into a PvP battle and fire chain shot into people's hulls because sometimes that's just what they enjoy doing...

OW PvP is simply more accessible: You can do it with any number of people. You can do it in a variety of ships. You can sometimes make really spectacular catches (like traders full of loot, or a lone 1st rate). PBs by contrast are very rigid: Need 25 people. That's a big commitment. Need very specific ships. The only thing you'll be fighting are other very specific ships. PB mechanics tend to result in most people going "poof" in mid fight because the "scoring" portion is over. I think this game shines when fights are in the area of 2-10 people per side, in a mix of ship types. Bigger OW PvP fights can be exciting too but I have never seen the allure in 25 fat, slow ships bumbling around. Of course, other people are welcome to it. If France had 25 captains who wanted to do it I'd be all for having them take some ports. I like teleports. Go take northern Haiti! We just don't have 25 interested captains. In truth, getting 25 French together is almost the entire active team so it's not that easy to pull off, especially when we're mostly spread out and it's a 2 hour sail for a lot of people. PBs are basically just broken right now, but OW PvP is always open for business.

I like to roam. Last night we were around Cayman Brac. Bagged a Pirate Aggie, Connie, Trinc, Hvy Rattler and 1 actual Santisima (it exploded). We were supposed to hit Kidd Island area but with the port battle I wanted to check that area out instead and it paid off pretty well. Previous night we were around La Tortue and killed all those Pirate screeners heading to the port battle. Also popped back to FR last night because we heard a Swede L'Ocean was wandering around by its lonesome but never did find it. Found a handful of Pirates and a Swede (probably the same) in an Endymion but they barely got closer than the edge of visual range. Tonight? Who knows! La Navasse is still useful sometimes but that was more of a British hunting base. Now that we aren't hunting Brits, southern Haiti is rarely interesting. I hear there's action around La Mona sometimes though. Teutonic bagged some Danish trader today. France aims to be like the old American Express commercial: "we're everywhere you want to be."

That is what a travel advisory is, really. Civilians are warned to clear out and lay low. This is now a military matter. Pirates still believe that ports matter and they're going to "really show the French" by taking ports, even though we have no use for them. Meanwhile, we continue to top the PvP scoreboard, almost exclusively on the backs of the Pirates. Maybe they came to FR to fight us ship to ship but that's a bit chin-scratch worthy. We were trying to get them to do that around MT and the "elite" Pirates vanished. We mainly beat up the other pirate clans while their leadership found some excuse to be 1000 miles away in a different direction every day. Have they come to FR to fight us near our base of supply? That certainly makes things better for us, if so!

Be advised of increased pirate activity in the general area of the Lesser Antilles until further notice. The French Royal Navy, having run the Pirates out of Mortimer Town, have chased the survivors to the four winds and even now our quarry scurries to scatter and hide. Known Pirate vassal state, Denmark, is known to be sheltering and aiding the Pirates and all captains are advised to be on the lookout for solo 1st rates wandering around near Christiansted. Their holds must be inspected for pirates and collaborators. Any 1st rates resisting inspection must be burned. The French Royal Navy will continue to destroy the pirate threat on the open sea but advises all trade ships within the Lesser Antilles to arm themselves and to strongly consider an armed escort. Citizens of the rest of the Caribbean may enjoy reduced levels of pirate activity but are warned to not let their guard down as it cannot be predicted where the Pirates will flee to next.

I don't know if I'd call POTBS a "working design". It did fail as a game and its OW mechanics were a big part of the problem. I also think the "port battle" concept is fundamentally flawed: having to get so many players together in such specific ships for such a high-stakes one-off fight is a game flaw. EVE is more tantalizing but EVE had a lot of very good support for clans which you would have to build here if you really want clans to work like they work in EVE.

Someone hasn't been watching the PvP combat ticker. Or the nightly scoreboard. Or reading pirate nation chat. Or probably logging in at all lately.

Yes: That pirates are meta-gamers more than players. If they spent half the time fighting in OW PvP as they spent trying to lawyer up their agreements and figure out more efficient ways to manage their spy network, they'd actually be halfway decent players, I bet. In related news, Dharus and I killed a BLACK Santissima using 2 Cerbs: Santi on fire: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/866233379704939132/8B50B3F88C265145B5DF342DFDD9F0A8EEB77085/ The End: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/866233379704938662/DE5A16BE955912EE1655608DD593190FD9EBEE5C/ Also turns out 32 pound carros make REALLY BIG leaks in a Heavy Rattlesnake.

In thinking about this, 30 minutes is still not long enough. A single battle in this game can easily be 45 minutes or even more. And then even a "nearby" flag is likely 30 minutes sail away. A 30 minute flag timer still pretty much requires people to be out of combat and close to the scene in order to have time to react. (Extra true because the flag grabbers will have had hours to get together and organized. There could be 50 of them. It'll take us longer than 30 minutes to bring in the kind of support we'll need to engage them.)

Yep. Dead horse, kicking of, but it should be a matter of record that a lot of people did go out on a lot of limbs trying to get ICS back into the swing of things, as equals, and they seemed to go out of their way to snub all such attempts. To my eye, it looked like they wanted to be in charge and if they couldn't be the top dog, they didn't want to play with the rest of us at all. Took their ball and went home, only to find out we didn't need their ball. One of their main beefs was Solas and his bounty on them, but Solas was a pirate-alt who eventually got booted out of BORK (and tried to sabotage them on the way out), which just goes to show, you can't let one jerk ruin your relations with the entire team. That was all very poorly handled by ICS leadership but "too late now". I think they will ultimately find CCCP to be even more of a problem for them than we ever were. We tried to bring ICS back as equals but they'll always be a dog in the eyes of CCCP. Go fetch.

If I lend you 5 cents and you promise to pay it back and then refuse to pay it back, the problem is not the 5 cents. The problem is I can't trust you anymore and will never loan you another 5 cents.

I was also thinking about this and that all alts will be Spanish. Unless we can make outposts in any port, in which case I guess alts are no longer needed (except for the usual extra labor hours or "hauling alts", etc).

I think there's merit to this idea: either war company dictates terms of the battle or else maybe the port dictates it but there are many different types of ports. Not just lineship/4th rate/shallow but lots of types. 10v10 lineship. "3000 BR max". 20v20 shallow. Whatever. Take the port that fits your style. More generally I have been thinking that the problem with port battles is that "the juice is not worth the squeeze". Currently we have to go far out of our way to generate a port battle and then it's a big hassle to get 25 Aggies or 25 first-rates together to do the battle, when the winner barely matters. By contrast, Planetside battles for base control are so fundamental to the game and so integrated into normal gameplay that you almost can't avoid them. Just log in and play and you will find yourself fighting for base control on a regular basis. Base ownership doesn't matter that much but it's okay because it's more like a side-effect of regular combat anyway. NA needs to be more like that, I think. Fights for port control should feel more like common gameplay and less like a special hassle event where the stars have to align and a lot of "work" has to be done to make it happen. Allowing for a variety of conditions might help that. 25 lineships is a hassle. 10 might not be. Maybe let the players decide.

Yep. I think the devs intend for the weekly victory to be more like an "atta-boy". You get a nice additional pat on the back if you play in such a way that you also, incidentally, win the week, but trying hard to win the week at the expense of normal daily activity is totally not worth it. BLACK is smart enough to realize this but some how they are stuck in old thinking. 1 weekly victory = 150 combat marks right now. I think some people look at our posts and scratch their chin and think "what are they up to now". How can what we be saying be twisted into a serious-business meta-gaming scheme, because that's what they'd do. If we want port mechanics changed or are arguing that VMs are not worth being tryhards over then it must be because we're up to something sneaky. I think we're about as straight forward as we can get without blogging our minute by minute lives. I just want a good game. A lot of times I talk plainly about French/Purge plans (almost certainly to the dismay of some other French) because I think it will make for a better game overall if more people understand the thinking behind some of the things we do. e.g., It is not a trick or ego-saving device to say we don't care if the Danes take our ports. I'm saying it because it's possibly a problem with the game. We really do not care. We have no reason to care. Pirates presumably want us to spend the next 2 weeks grinding PvE in another night-flip contest with the Danes and we're just warning you that we're not going to do it, because it is dumb. It was done last time because frankly we had some outdated thinking still and had not played in over a year. I am tempted to flip Road Town again but only because I know it will make CCCP angry. That is literally the only reason I would do it. Now that we have fully tasted the free port life style, we prefer it to the PvE grind port-flipping lifestyle. We will keep doing what we are doing. I hope the Danes do not bore their new players out of the game with a contest we do not care about, is all. Believe it or not, I hope AUSEZ and the rest do not quit the game, but they are going to need to consider what fun they are going to have over the next month and how they are going to find it. I don't think avoiding OW combat and PvE flipping empty ports is going to keep them interested in the game but I'm not their momma.

It's an organizational issue, mainly. PURGE has not merged with BORK because we are different clans with different styles and histories. We work together a lot but we are different entities. If the game makes us merge into a single War Company in order to do RvR then it creates organizational confusion. Internally we are going to continue to be different clans, but I guess we will no longer be labeled as such?? "The Purge" has a long history spanning many games with our own leadership and rank structure and forums and Teamspeak rental server and so forth. We are not going to fully merge with another clan because of a test in Naval Action, so it's almost like NA is dropping support for clans. Effectively. So the War Company will have like 50 French in it and I'll have little idea of who is who or where they came from because really it will be about 6 different clans in there, unlabeled and unclanned now. Also, it would screw up our economy which is running smoothly based on the clan warehouse. We will definitely not use a "War Company" warehouse that can be raided, btw. We'll go back to the bad old days of internal trading between members.

It's like this: We're not lawyers. We come up with pretty reasonable "treaties" that take about 5 minutes to write. The treaty said nothing about the safety of pirates or pirate ports or what happens if allies get attacked. It said the treaty could be honorably ended with a 72 hour warning, and that was it. If you want to sit here and play word games and go on about how such and such event triggered such and such hidden clause then what I'm really hearing is that next time we make a deal involving pirates or CCCP, we need to hire a lawyer and really make a rock solid treaty with no loopholes at all and spend a couple hours on it. We are not going to do that. You have made it clear that you are going to make us put more effort into dealing with you than we are prepared to put up with in a video game. In order to keep our lives simple, we will simply not deal with you at all any more. Pirate and CCCP trade ships will be sent to the bottom of the ocean until such time as we independently decide to stop, good day sir.