Oliver H. Perry

I hope to see you hoist a TDA pennant soon sir. Respectfully,

To Tommy's credit, he has already said that he regrets doing so, and will not do so again. Personally, I think that's a credit to his character. Myself, I think using someone's stream to chase them down is a very shabby thing to do, and would hope that my fellow Captains in the Armada would commit to not doing so in the future. That said, it's impossible to police it, so I would say "caveat streamer" - streamer beware. If you're going to stream, you'd best keep a sharp eye for enemy sails and dry powder in your guns.

Looking great! For the record, I provided systems architecture advice and design assistance, Obiquiet rocked the actual coding. Good job to everyone on the wonderful outcome!

Doesn't the idea of a random mini-game take out the entire idea of using skill and better seamanship to escape an enemy?

Outposts are so incredibly cheap right now, you can earn enough to open another one with one or two battles in a Lynx. I'll add that you don't actually need an Outpost in an area to hunt there, you just can't easily send back prizes - and with the current earning system, it's pretty useless to take prizes for gold anyhow when you get just as much gold, if not more, and far more XP by sinking them outright. The argument that they don't have an outpost somewhere else falls pretty flat. 1. No. If you choose not to flee, but instead engage a force of superior ships, you don't have the right to claim you got ganked any more. You'll get melted, you'll sink, and you can come right back out and do so again. 2. Exactly, especially if you're in a disposable ship. Fine, get in there and get melted. 3. Nobody in TDA especially minds being attacked by a half dozen Lynx, again, they mind those Lynx doing so and then complaining that they're getting ganked or then being rude in chat. I was waylaid by a French player twice in 10 minutes, he in a Trincomalee, myself in a Cerberus. Both times when he sank me, I remained good natured in chat and then decided to shift my hunting grounds to someplace a little less dangerous. It's part of the game that you'll run into superior forces, fight hard and learn from it. If you keep getting sunk outside your outpost, go somewhere else, it's a huge ocean out there.

I heard a number of times of small "fleets" of British Lynx engaging our large ships in recent days. If you're going to attack our forces, we have to respond, our Captain's can't and won't just sit there and get shot up. That said, not every American in those waters is necessarily TDA, just as not every British player in those waters is SLRN. It is a hot spot just now, however, sailing just a tad south gives you waters that are full of smaller French ships to prey upon. Please avoid attacking large American ships when you're not looking for a fight and it's pretty likely you'll be just fine - assuming they're TDA.

Maybe for you, but what of the other Captain, who expected you to act accordingly to your colors? Fine, you may only do it once, but creating such a mechanic will make the incidence of acts of piracy exponentially higher, and greatly reduce the levels of honor and dignity that existed at the time, and that Game Labs has indicated they would like to recreate in the game. People on the internet are, by and large, jerks. Give a jerk a chance to be a jerk, and you needent be surprised at the outcome.

"Sorry, I was drunk." Don't think that flies in any jurisdiction anywhere. A Captain that did that would have been removed from Command, and very likely jailed. If you're unable to control yourself when you drink, you may need an accountability partner to ensure you're sober enough to log in.

Well that's entirely different. I'd like to see people within about 10 miles get added to the Instance. That said, I think they should enter the instance at a distance commensurate with how far out they were. So, for example, if you enter an instance when you're 6 miles away, you should be 6 miles away from the main combatants in the instance. This makes for a bonus for holding a tighter formation, it also creates excitement in trying to ninja board a ship and escape before his friends can close enough to stop you. That said, the limit has to be the limit. Where is the cutoff? If you make it 1 mile and 100 yards, then isn't 1 mile and 101 yards ridiculous? Where do you draw the line? The cutoff distance is the cutoff distance, plain and simple.

I've sailed small cruising craft coastally (recreationally) for near 30 years. Sound does carry across the water, true, but there is a lot of other noise - waves, wind, the noise of your own craft, the incessant prattling of your First Officer. Unless you're in a dead calm, a cannon fired directly at you to leeward isn't going to carry 10-12 nautical miles. Even if it did, you're outside of visual range at that distance (or very near to it). Fire all the cannon you want, but other than "over there somewhere", finding the correct heading to come to your aid will further delay help. The problem with allowing a "pile on" situation in the Open World is that we know ships there are traveling at around 150kts or so (based on early screenshots by Admin). 6 minutes of sailing can take you nearly 15 miles. If you allow people, a la PotBS, to "see" a battle that has formed, and head over to it, you'll have a giant pileup of ships coming from distances that would be ridiculous in real life. I think if you aren't in fairly close proximity to a battle when it forms, you shouldn't be able to join that battle - based on the in-battle speeds (which appear to be far closer to reality), a boat that isn't pretty nearby in the Open World is going to be hours away at battle instance speeds. Way too far to make a difference.

That is something, that Ampaholic has pointed out, that is completely ahistorical. If you want friends to be able to help you, you need to either have them in range to assist you, or hire an escort. Allowing a mass rush from people far and wide to join a battle doesn't really appeal to me. This both benefits the attacker who is carefully working to hit you at the correct time, and it benefits the attacked who doesn't have to worry about a dozen attackers that were over the horizon piling on against him. It would have to be dead calm, and if they were out of visual range, especially at the speed it seems that boats travel in the Open World, they'd be hours away, not minutes. The best you could hope for in the real world was to fire a cannon. And even that wouldn't be heard if they were very far off upwind.

Admin has stated that there will be no whaling, so I'm not sure this ship is even suitable for the game. She's quite beautiful though!

There is a difference of crew required to man it sir, and the amount of supplies it will need to make that journey. If I'm attempting to run a profitable merchant, I'm not going to do so by employing (in the case of Lynx, and I'm using my memory here) 30-60 men to be able to fight the ship (the entire reason I have cannon in the first place). A profitable merchant will ship with 6-12 men, not nearly enough to fight a large number of guns, board in the smoke, or make the rapid sail changes needed to maneuver a fighting ship. That I'm only carrying a small number of men grossly extends my range at a far smaller amount of rations, opening up space for cargo. Remove the need to carry many tons of guns, shot and powder, more room for cargo. There is a HUGE reason that, in real life, serious merchant ships (with the exception of certain Indiamen) did not carry very many guns, and did not carry a lot of crew. A stocked, purposebuilt warship equipped and crewed for war shold not be able to carry bulk cargo profitably.

Indeed, the ships should be in quite close proximity.

I just finished a book that went over numerous letters and other accounts from folks who were actually at Trafalgar, and it seems in some cases entire quarterdecks were nearly swept clean of officers due to precision fire from the tops of enemies which were alongside in the fight. Then you have the case of Redoutable, where the Captain Lucas had spent an inordinate amount of effort in training all of the crew in marksmanship and swordplay with the idea that boarding was going to be his primary method of fighting (luckily for the British, I believe he just missed one or two opportunities to board Victory). His crew, as you mentioned, were responsible for Lord Nelson's death. I agree, your average Jack couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, but for Open World, being able to train your crew in boarding related skills would be a good thing to have (at the expense, of course, of other skills for balance purposes).

Personally, I don't see the fairness in allowing different capabilities for users that want the image to be upside down. Maturin has a good point, if you're going to give an advantage to historical "mode" for spyglasses, they should be locked at a single magnification power. I don't think that's a feature that adds to the fun.

So effectively, you're saying you are completely unable to control yourself to avoid using vulgar language directed at others? I don't know of many professional workplaces that tolerate people being abusive to one another, most people certainly don't walk down the street cursing loudly at other passersby, and you're generally carded and subsequently asked to leave the game in the recreational soccer league I plan in if you're abusive towards the other players. Yet somehow, we think that just because we're online, we can treat other people poorly and disrespectfully? Personally, I find it baffling that people are unable to follow the simple rule of treating other Captains respectfully. Back in the Napoleonic Era, being disrespectful would generally end up with being called out and subjected to a sword or gunfight with the aggrieved party. If you were going to go around being disrespectful (as a gentleman of the higher classes), you had better be amazing with a sword or gun, and even then, you could expect serious injury even if you won. Sometimes, I think maybe we lost a degree of "civility" when this practice was discontinued.