Archaos

Are your quest slots full? I have managed to do a clan resources quest in a port my clan was friendly with and had no problems. It takes a mission slot and 24 hours to get the items.

Although I agree with making the economy more involved, I think there is already enough opposition to the scarcity of repairs which have to be crafted let alone having to look for crafted ammunition.

Many other PZ's have a free port close by, but are not as popular. But I agree it is a mixture of small things that make the difference.

Which raises the question as to why is Deadmans Cay PZ so empty as it is basically the same as Nassau, just a bit further South? Edit: To tell the truth, I believe the Nassau PZ is so popular because the Brits own Nassau, and so one of the largest populated nations have easy access to the zone. I know personally I never had an outpost in that region till the Brits captured Nassau and I think it is the same for many others. I only started doing Nassau Patrol when I opened an outpost in Nassau.

Combat medals are the new PvP marks, and you can get them from the 1v1's. So currently the easiest way to farm them is to get a friend in another nation, both buy cheap ships from NPC or capture them, head to do a 1v1, have a proper fight so you cannot be reported, keep rinsing and repeating and share out the combat medals between you.

The thing is with the new pax and letter delivery missions you can easily accumulate 50k doubloons in a couple of days of average play of 3 hours. Maybe if you are a PvP'er you may find this too boring, but PvP'ers will get combat medals and I am sure economy people will be willing to trade doubloons for combat medals. In reality things have almost gone back to the way it was before doubloons. Reals = old gold, Doubloons = old combat marks and Combat medals = old PvP marks.

I found out how to see where they are when you visit a port you check the top left port info tab and it shows the resources under clan resources. So you need to get traders out there checking enemy ports

Can you please let us know how we are supposed to find out that an enemy port has one of there rare woods forest available via exploration, as I have explored many ports during my trading and I have only ever seen these forests as missions in friendly ports. There appears to be no other indication that these forests exist, so I fail to see how it is supposed to drive RvR?

The thing is that Doubloons are easier to obtain now so the price should drop for them. With virtually risk free pax and letter missions anyone can make 10's of thousands of Doubloons in a few hours of sailing. I currently have a trader lynx with 20 delivery missions with an average reward per mission somewhere in the region of 900 Doubloons, it will take me around 3 hours to do the deliveries and it should net me around 18k Doubloons. If you add in the couple of hours I spent picking up these missions and some of the smaller missions I did while going to various ports to pick up the 20 missions, I reckon I will have around 20k Doubloons for 5 hours work, and that is on a single alt sailing mostly afk while I play on my main. The ease of getting Doubloons coupled with the change in the price of Admiralty Ship Notes to combat medals will mean that there will be surplus Doubloons on the market. There is now little point in doing PZ mission to get Doubloons as there is far less risk and work getting them from economy missions.

Can I please ask you to review the wiping of ship slots or if not at least change the way ship slots are unlocked. One of the biggest gripes with the game is the amount of PvE you have to do in a game that is supposed to be hardcore PvP, yet there is a requirement to unlock ship slots, which for most people means they head out to do PvE. I understand that the slots can be opened by doing PvP but the simple fact is that most people feel noncompetitive if they do not have majority of the slots open on a ship and thus are reluctant to engage in PvP with such ship. People are always complaining that max rank players can be seen PvE'ing in the reinforcement zones, but they never consider that these players may be grinding slots on their ships. I was one of those people who spent a lot of time in the reinforcement zone or some relatively safe corner of the map fighting OW AI fleets to get rare books and unlock slots, but since getting the rare books and unlocking the slots on most of my ships I have turned more to PvP. I'm not a good PvP'er by any means and I could not say for sure that having the slots unlocked makes much difference to the battle results, but if given a choice to engage in PvP with a ship with slots unlocked or without I know which one I would choose. In short, PLEASE change the way ship slots are unlocked as it is the most tedious part of the game that turns people off and I would say majority of the negative reaction to the wipe announcement is down to this. People may be able to get back to max rank in 2 to 3 weeks, but to unlock all the ship slots takes a lot longer.

They are doing an economy wipe to test the new economy from scratch and following a question from players about how much Reals they would be left with in the clan warehouse to pay for port costs, the Admin answered 100k. So if people with multiple alts formed multiple 1 man clans they can effectively hide away a lot of money from the wipe thus negating most of the effect of the wipe as there will still be a lot of money in circulation and the new economy will not be tested properly. Its not a conspiracy its a fact, I personally have 2 alts and have sufficient funds that need to be used or wiped that I can afford to create 1 man clans to lessen the effect of the Real's wipe and give myself a bit of an edge in the new economy. There are many players with a lot more alts than that and if you do not believe that they will do the same you are mistaken. It may not be as relevant for the release wipe, but for the economy wipe next week it is important. If the worry is about clans losing ports because of lack of funds, they would be better removing port maintenance costs for a while and properly wiping majority of Reals from the economy to properly test it.

Although I am disappointed that XP will be wiped, I can agree with the reasoning behind it. But what I am more disappointed about is the wipe of ship slots as they took a lot of time to grind up. With levelling XP it is not too bad as it gives you a chance to work up again through the ships and maybe revisit some you have not sailed in a while, but grinding slots is just painful especially now with the new AI spawn mechanics. I think what we are going to find is how difficult it actually is now to grind up the ship slots and how difficult it will be for new players to unlock these slots. I did a lot of grinding on OW AI fleets during my hunt for the rare books and in doing this I worked through all the 1st to 3rd rate ships unlocking slots as well as some lower rates, but since getting all the books I needed I have been unable to face serious grinding of OW AI fleets and have tried to move more into PvP. When the Christian came out I was going to try and unlock slots on it but I just could not face the grind and any time I thought about where to go to find the OW AI fleets to grind on I just gave up and went to do something else. I am afraid that I will feel the same way for most ships after the wipe. I do also think as a couple of others have pointed out that the game is not ready for release as there is not enough content to keep people occupied (Grinding again does not keep people occupied, just bored). From what I saw of the economy patch on the test server, I do not think it is in depth enough to keep the eco fans interested. Battles have always been the games greatest strength, but there are still too many issues with RoE. PvE that used to be readily available in many areas of the map is no longer available and instead we have friendly AI fleets sailing around just adding load on the servers and not much else (who has not been caught by a hunter with a large friendly fleet close by but just outside of the tag circle because the tag circle is so small now). Personally I think that unless there are some major additions to the game before release that we will be down to 500 players or less in a couple of months after launch. Will I still play? Yes, because I love the genre and this is still the best looking Age of Sail game out there, but I guess we will see how many people will be lost because of these changes.

So this means people with multiple alts will just create multiple clans to hide their Reals from the wipe, thus negating the full effect of the economy wipe.

The issue I see is that when they do implement the new trading as it is currently on the test server there will be no point actually trading in trade goods as the missions will give better reward for less risk. They have not finalized the rewards for the trade missions yet and there have been calls for the current doubloons rewards to be changed to Reals, but the issue will be that to take a mission costs nothing so there is no initial outlay like there is with normal trading, so if you get intercepted all you lose is your ship and the mission item which was free, so why bother buying trade goods to sell in another port.

People would just create alts in the nation that has the bonuses they want so they can get access to those bonuses. It would just give people who run multiple alts a greater edge in the game.

He is correct the ship mods that drop from mission chests auto stack so if you already have a mod you do not see if you have received another one without checking through your warehouse and noting if you have an increased number of a certain item. It is not about keeping useless items, some of the items are very good but you are not ready to use them. Items such as musket mods that you may want to install on a particular build of ship so you store them in your warehouse till you need them. It does not matter how tidy your warehouse is if you open a chest with the same musket mod that you already have they will auto stack and you get no notification of what you received.

But is this not a wrong way to motivate people to do RvR, the more successful a nation is in taking ports the more their newer players struggle to find AI fleets to attack? GB is currently the strong RvR nation but this has not always been the case and other nations have held this position. Why should a nation have to drop ports just so they can get AI on their doorstep to attack. Personally I think the changes that were made to AI distribution were a negative step for the game, most AI fleets no serve no purpose and are just a waste of server processing power as they spawn in areas where they will not be attacked and they are not much good for defensive purposes either as the tag circles are small and you literally have to be ontop of an AI fleet to have them in battle with you if you get attacked. Yes, it may reflect more of the reality of how it would have been, but at the end of the day how many other things have been overlooked in terms of reality because they did not fit in with this being a game. I agree that people sitting on the dock just farming AI fleets in the green zones is not what we need in game, but some form of easier access to AI fleets is required for newer players leveling up and farming books.

But as many people have already pointed out that once the ports become capturable then they will be prime targets. So if you have your clan and personal warehouses and lots of ships in these ports you are going to have to look at moving a lots of stuff to somewhere safer. As usual with many such posts from the Devs, they pull the pin and toss the grenade in there and let the confusion begin rather than clarify some of the questions raised. i.e. questions like which ports are actually counted as GB secondary zone? Does the removal of safezones also mean that the ports now become capturable etc. Such simple things for them to answer but they keep quiet and let people speculate and then wonder why people get upset. Edit: Sorry I reread the original post again and they do say these areas become capturable, but there is no clarification on what actually counts as the secondary zone, and nothing to aid people moving their stuff out of these zones.

I just had a look again at Sweden on the test server and they are rated as one of the harder nations to start in, yet although they only start with 2 ports there are also 2 capturable ports within their reinforcement zone and another 3 just outside their zone. This means that they can have a higher chance of crafting higher quality ships within their reinforcement zone. Whereas the Brits need to go to La Navasse or the Caymans before they get a capturable port for crafting and both these areas will be early targets for other nations. Imagine if Carlisle was a capturable port but still within the KPR green zone, you can guarantee most Brits would set up their ship building there instead of shipping stuff half way across the map. I have only really compared Sweden to GB as these are ones I have experience with, I am sure there may be other nations that the same will apply to.

That may be true, but the fact that these nations had a secondary "safe" area gave them more options and more ports to trade and get resources, so in some ways it did make it a bit easier. But with the change in AI spawns you now almost never see any enemy AI fleets around KPR or Belize. Admittedly the reason for none around Belize is due to GB owning most of the ports around, but for KPR even at start game after a wipe there are very few enemy AI fleets around. We all know that after the wipe the first nations to get their economy up and running will be able to build the ships to capture the important ports, and being able to go out and quickly kill AI fleets will quickly generate the income needed to build a PB fleet. For all the new players that we hope to get too on launch, the ability to kill AI on your doorstep will make a big difference rather than having to go further afield and risk being ganked by more experienced players.

The question is, should the battle marker be readily visible? Shouldn't you have to keep a good look out for them rather than have a big beacon letting everyone know there is a battle. I actually like the fact that you can sail right past a battle at close range in poor visibility and you have to scan the horizon closely to find a battle even when you know one is close by. I think making the swords too easy to see would be a bad change.

I'm not so sure it is. When you compare it to Spain, their secondary zone contains multiple ports while for GB it would only be Belize, that is why I think the Cays are part of GB secondary zone. I am referring to game start after a map wipe as it is on the test server, almost every other nation is closer to neutral ports than GB, so GB will get less spawns of OW AI enemy fleets.

I hope with this change that they will also change the description of GB and Spain for new players as difficult nations, because that's what this change will make these nations for new players. GB especially is quite isolated for new players being good distance from neutral ports at the start of a game. With the current rules on AI fleet spawn it means that GB does not get many enemy AI fleets on its doorstep. With this change at game start the closest neutral port to KPR will be Pedro Cay so it will only produce AI small ship fleets, but if Pedro Cay is captured by another nation it will be a prime port for enemy Le Requins to operate out of to attack new players. This already happens now, so imagine when they are located at Pedro Cay. Looking at Spain I expect the same thing is almost true from looking at the map, though I have never played as Spain. On the test server I have tested out a couple of different nations, Sweden and Dutch and Sweden especially had plenty of enemy AI fleets sailing into its reinforcement zone and Capital area and it reinforcement zone almost overlaps neutral ports, so it is a lot easier for new players to get going especially after the wipe. Looking at the map I think Danes will be the same. Can anyone who started out in GB or Spain on the test server tell us how easy it was to find OW AI fleets to attack close to the nation Capital? These changes will make GB and Spain some of the more difficult nations to start in.

Can you give people in these ports the option of a free teleport for all their ships and goods from their outposts in these ports as many people have main clan warehouses and crafting points in these ports.

I like this suggestion. We already have a sort of bounty system in that you receive a reward for killing or assisting in a PvP kill, if this reward was increased based on the number of kills they had against your nation then it would give more incentive for people to go after them. But such a system would need some way of making them identifiable in OW so you would know it would be a high value target. At the moment you get the same reward for sinking someone like Ram or Banished as you would for sinking some new inexperienced player. With such a system you would need the reputation to increase as they killed members of your nation and reduce each time they are killed. In such a system even though it could be exploited to a certain extent by letting a friend in that nation kill you, it would be limited as the reputation would drop the more times they were killed, and knowing what some of these players are like they would not like their reputation to drop especially if there was a nation leader board showing the most notorious players for killing that nations players. I am sure some players would even try to appear on every other nations notorious list.