Skully

Sigh, already implemented on some goods and it failed. An alter can control 8 ports with just one character, 16 with two. For some reason nobody could obtain Historical Artifacts in Grindstone. Just as you fight a ship with cannonballs, you fight on the market with money. To fight a money accumulator you need to be able to outbid him and turn away his profit, so he needs to seek a new market. A fair trader knows his market and simply offers a fair price. He does not need to resort to penny trading the floor.

Hence a PvP battle should be zero-sum balanced with a relative large proportion going to the players who sink (mostly casuals).

Will this include players who showed up for the fight but actually lost their ship?

AUS & KIN for withstanding the onslaught of AUSFC. SORRY for providing the most devious bastard imaginably starring in the top story so far.

Please keep in mind the level of faucet it becomes.

MMO, definitely. player owned servers, like 2-4 coop, or 4 ffa?

A threesome, but not doubled. 350ms + 10ms instead of 2 * 350ms. So effectively we are banging faster than you initially figured.

Only Legends seek a fair fight. (See what I did there... hur hur)

If we had a larger player base, there would be more people tied up in battles themselves. Having a crack at OW PvP or tossing yourself alone into enemy waters are two opposites. The first is relatively easy, go patrolling friendly waters or escorting PB fleets. Build your way up to engaging enemy ships as part of a fleet. And then go alone dodging enemy patrols in their waters. Why should going alone in enemy waters not be risky? Why does everyone pick the hardest career out of the box and expects to survive?

No invisibility, no speed boost. Just me, my ship and the wind in my sails.

Koltes shouldn't need invisibility to get away, but needs something else for a good getaway.

That is already the case. We are not talking about GPS tracking other ships, we are continuously on the lookout for such hacks. You can test this for yourself with a teammate. Let him sail on an angle slight away from you. As he hits the horizon his ship will stop moving. The server is at that moment no longer sending you updates. After a short time your client registers it as a timeout and removes the ship. (The client never does any form of position prediction, server is the authority.) Target tracking of visible ships can be done on the GPS, but requires a bit more coding which I believe hasn't been done yet. (Although I don't trust foggy weather.) To fix this the F11 coordinates need to be removed. And any coordinates need to be send through a personalized reference point.

It makes perfect sense. Nobody will come out to save a casual and we need @Sir Texas Sir to keep the ducklings busy. Just as it is now or was in the past. With or without invisibility.

My own county or your own county? This game is so confusing sometimes. ( https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/851596176125359945/8E42D675D31149BF2D066357BCA61EB3E8340063/ )

Not entirely. NA is build on a classical notion in which the server is always in control as opposed to for example Planetside 2. In P2 each client owns its world and the server acts as a referee. This becomes apparent when you die behind a corner. It can even be triggered (if they haven't "fixed" it already) by you jumping off a bridge into a teammate vehicle. Your client may decide you did not make it, while his client may decide you did. "Shoot, shoot, why are you not shooting!?" "I'm dead." "No, you are not!" In NA you only have to worry about the RTT to the server, but a players reaction to you is dictated by adding both pings. So us poking holes happens at a relative straight cadence... (hmm... where did this discussion go wrong? )

Picture a battle of 3 Pirates vs 1 Brit, with 3 more Pirates sitting outside eyeballing you. Would you jump in to help? Fair or not isn't the question. The mechanic is there/possible, so it needs to be tested as such. And yes, OW is very much a modern fast patrol craft game. Whether we like it or not. Objection, speculation. Jury needs to disregard this statement. I can show a deeper analysis of the circumstances and other outside influences, but I'm willing to bet ChuCoMan will agree that he had no chance of making it to Mantau. His only option was Corrientes, which was blocked. Thank you and from what it appears I will catch many more. As long as you keep thinking in terms of a lone hunter (casual) vs a ganker fleet (casual), then yes the balance is likely equal. As soon as you introduce imbalance it simply falls apart, for example the lone hunter calls in a revenge fleet to augment his already substantial power of invisibility + speed boost. As for a CONCORD fleet, maybe ask @Sir Texas Sir what he thinks of the difficulty to circumvent 6 1st rates. A legend can only come down, when it meets another legend; http://forum.game-labs.net/topic/21551-the-skully-gazette-july-6/ through trickery; http://forum.game-labs.net/topic/22532-the-smoke-cast-by-man/ or when other legends organize it; http://forum.game-labs.net/topic/16395-pvp1-september-10th-1716-the-demise-of-fuzzyhead-the-bearded/

Which in turn can also be abused. Picture the moment of decision: Continue playing Log-off What information does a player really need to make that decision? Nothing from the game, everything from RL. Giving him the composition of enemy assets on the OW for free directly influences this decision. So the player will not show true intent. Rather a simple log-off at battle screen. (Maybe not with captured ships, but that is a sliding scale.) Anybody willing to waste time sitting at a point hoping for action, can do just that. That's their decision to make. "My mom always said NA life was like a sandbox of ships. You never know what you're gonna get." (OW is nothing more than an elaborate queuing mechanism, ships can come from anywhere including battle instances. ...Okay, a bit more then...)

I fully agree in this part. No it didn't. As I showed I can still easily execute a revenge fleet tactic. And now at the same easily execute a getaway (in enemy waters). Furthermore I can use it to execute the invisibility gank. So we took zero steps forward and two steps back.

Where did I complain about gankers and forming a ganking heaven? If you think this is the worst I have done to prove broken mechanics, then you may want to think again. Hence now a rookie can't set sail in any big ship as protection for himself. Something definitely needs fixing here, but it must be done right or not at all. Again, invisibility + speed boost change nothing with regards to revenge fleets, it is a boon for gankers. Hence it needs to go where it belongs, in the trashcan. (The best part is that the more I try to convince folks, the more they vote for having invisibility + speed boost. )

It gives folks a false sense of security and then they set sail.

Let me tell a story and then you guys can think of how many "wrongs" there are in there. There might even be some "rights", who knows. It is the story of ChuCoMan and how he lost 2 Traders Brigs filled to the brim with goodies. For the sake of argument totaling 1.5M. ChuCoMan was quietly sailing along south-west past Mantua on his way to Barcos to sell his stock of Iron Fittings. When all of a sudden, out of the blue, a British Surprise pulled up beside him. His initial reaction was to drop all sails and try to call it a night. Were it not that the night belongs to the AUSEZ. T -5:00 "Battle comms, US double Traders Brigs fleet, scramble at Mantua." Realizing his mistake he put up his sails again, but the Surprise was ready for his every move. The Surprise tagged him in battle and a chase began. T -4:45 "We need a couple more minutes before we can bring 3 fast interceptors." T -4:40 "Roger, I'll keep him in battle until our fleet is ready." To his surprise the enemy captain made some bad mistakes and slowly he saw his way clear. T -2:30 "3 fast interceptors undocking at Mantua, position?" (And that is how ours comms center looks like, with multiple TS channels to keep ourselves appraised of every movement.) T -2:20 "Just west of Mantua, position 1 on my spot, 1 south-south-west end, 1 at the tip." T -1:00 "Fleet in position." Unbeknownst to him a "revenge" fleet had been put into place. T -0:30 "Preparing for final volley, he thinks he is clear." T -0:03 "Firing..." "I made it out", ChuCoMan must have been thinking as he left battle. Spotting the first Trincomalee on top of his spot, he probably panicked and immediately put up full sails. T 0:10 "Leaving battle, entering pursuit." ChuCoMan must have seen the second ship as he steered left to the tip. T 0:30 "I have a visual at the tip. I have him." T 0:35 "Tag, I'm coming up straight behind him." The rest, as they say, is history. (The Discord transcripts are my best effort to translate Aussie into English, so there may be errors in them. )

Exactly and my position on these so called revenge fleets hasn't changed a bit. I fully agree and you can easily chain @admin in this as well. To which @admin has finally said: Back to the topic, if you want an anti-revenge mechanic, it must not be a ganker boon. Invisibility + speed boost do not pass the mark.

Let me toss up something else, which I completely forgot to bring forth again: TL;DR Should I resurrect that one?

Did someone say "alt"? Ah no, the custom mantra on global/nation chat is "spy!". I would say we need log-off, anything else abusable. I gave it a similar twirl in the past as well: Any form of BR rule gives me a headache. (Abuse and counter-abuse until I get blamed, no matter what. )