kang

Yeah I get that teleporting is cheesy i'm just a little pvp starved at the moment.

So, if teleporting is the entry mechanism, i say the first people to declare/join the battle lobby get in. If you have to sail there, then the first people to get there. Eventually, you could add a bit more complexity in various ways but we don't really have anything to support that sort of thing, at the moment.

Yeah scepo, I freely admit that I lean toward the 'how do we maximize the fun pvp' aspect of the game. Almost completely at the cost of realism. I'm just struggling to see how you can do both.

Ok that makes sense especially if you require travel. But say the US has 300 and the swedes have 100. How do the swedes defend themselves? Or any underpopulated nation? Reroll?

What would stop the "300" from steam rolling the entire map then? Or is that an acceptable outcome?

I'm also cool with a more manual entry process if that's the way it ends up going. I just think that given the current pops a teleport would be a great way to get some big pvp going and if they are putting it out there as an option, I'm throwing in my two cents.

There's no doubt that a teleport dumbs down some of the player organizational factors involved in these large engagements. And getting everyone together in an organized and timely fashion and making the journey on the high seas seems like a romantic and noble idea. But, in my experience, the larger the raid, the longer it takes to organize and the longer that the people who get there on time spend sailing around in circles waiting for the stragglers (who usually had some RL thing going on so it's not like you could get mad at them but nonetheless you just wasted half an hour waiting on them). Organizing all that usually boils down to one or two people who quickly become unenamored to the task and followers such as myself are then left sailing around in circles. My dead simple, needs lots of improvement approach would be to have a way to "declare" your intent to participate. Then at battle time, the matchmaker, goes down the list in order of declaration and whoever is online gets put into the battle up to whatever population criteria the devs are using. The defenders likely will be the determinant so most of them probably get in. On the attacker side, whoever declares the intent to attack would have their fleet members declare hopefully lower in the list so would be more likely to get in unless there are plenty of defenders and then everyone gets in. Most assuredly needs improvement but shouldn't be too hard to whip up on the code side... edit: also probably have some matchmaker esque logic working in there as well based on the ship your in or the one you declare but prioritized by order of declaration.

Few more thoughts on teleporting... I'd be willing to sacrifice a little realism to get some epic trafalgar-like battles. Similarly, ports are of significant enough importance that i think it's worth at least trying out teleporting for the sake of fairness. Plus, "forming up" a fleet (generic, as in defense/attack) takes FOREVER. And even the best organized fleets will have lots of stragglers. If part of the balancing strategy is to fill up the instances, teleporting benefits you in that way as well. Yeah, it's not terribly realistic but why penalize someone who declared to be in the battle just because they got caught in traffic/wife aggro and couldn't be there an hour ahead of time.

Yeah, it looks and feels like port camping. For the most part, we really weren't camping but I get that might not have been apparent especially to the newer players. Capitol bot fleet farming is the FOTM at the moment though so probably best for all the lower level players to move away from the capitols as soon as they can. That said, I suppose a brand new player is kind of tied there given it's their only outpost. So it is a bit of a conundrum...

I'm usually not much of a seal clubber. Sorry if I cost anyone a dura...

Alarm clock raids are the bane of persistent worlds. In DAOC, you'd have 100's of North American players battling it out in primetime only to have a single Hong Kong guild get on in the middle of the night NA time and undo everything you managed to accomplish in prime time. keke la...

As I understand it, "navy captains" in this game are more or less privateers. We provide our own ships, pay for their repairs and more or less go wherever we want . I suppose a civilian vs navy option might change that to an extent but then you start getting kind of close to a "class" system which I'm not sure fits into this type of game. Could be interesting though. The letters of marquee for pirates to help struggling nations is something I suggested quite some time ago. Great idea. I would probably go further and open it up to everyone not just pirates (assuming a navy "class" isn't in the works). The devs could work up an algorithm to limit the number of letters a particular nation could give out based on its relative strength. Throw an xp and gold bonus in there also based on relative strength and you've got a modest self balancing population system. Obviously, peace/war status complicates the issue quite a bit for non-pirate players maybe even enough to kill the idea. But, my original thought was that there wouldn't be enough pirates to significantly shift the balance. Even so, a few are better than none...

You still need a way to remove ships from the game so that crafting has a point but I would definitely prefer a gold sink (ala insurance) as opposed to having to go shopping every time you burn through your durabilities which is both a gold sink and a time sink.

I would suggest that you need to "declare" your participation in the port battle in some way. Then, based on the order of declaration, you go down the list and whoever is actually on at the time of battle gets teleported into the battle based on whatever population limits are imposed. I know teleports break realism but I think the advantages inherent in teleporting outweigh the realism issue. Here are a few: 1) instantly balanced battles 2) people aren't stuck outside the instance with either nothing to do or free reign to reek whatever havoc they can while all the defenders are stuck in the instance 3) quicker grouping, less solo sailing 4) and, for me, they increase the fun to tedium ratio. I think while pops are low and disparity between nations is fairly high, we could really use some hard balancing especially since ports are going to be pretty important to defend.

The may be realistic but wow looks like someone hung out the laundry or something...