Archaos

I would agree that they need to give some indication from outside the battle as to whether it is PvP or PvE, especially if they are going to keep the open always battles in the green zones. It must be frustrating for someone to jump into a battle thinking they are going to help out a player being ganked, only to find out that the person is fighting AI and that they do not require any help.

Bad idea. All that would happen is that once servers were merged then there would start a constant campaign to reduce the dedicated safe zone till all the protections were gone.

I still never understand why people keep thinking that safe zones allow people to make lots of money trading. All the big money trade routes require a lot of time spent out in the OW not in safe zones. The traders who do these runs take time to plan their runs and choose their routes so they are least likely to be intercepted. The only issue I see that people can complain about is the ability to get over half way to your destination and then use the tow to port function to get to your destination or to a port in the safe zone (maybe they could change this so that tow to port takes you back to the last port you departed from as it is needed in case people get stuck). People can seek these traders if they work out where their routes are, but most are too lazy and just want to sit outside the destination ports and wait for them to arrive. I have yet to find any profitable trade route with trade goods that can be done completely in the safe zone, there may be some zones where profit can be made from crafting woods but even then the profit is not from selling to NPC. Fighting AI makes more money than trading for the time spent and if it is just gold you are after then you may as well just do missions that instantly close rather than attack OW AI fleets. The only advantage of attacking OW AI fleets is the increased chance of loot and this is why so many people farm them. If you removed safe zones but made missions close instantly you would still have the issue of people getting ganked on their way to/from missions, so you would not have solved the issue for PvE'ers playing on PvP server. If you really wanted to shake things up then make it so that fighting whether it is PvE or PvP is a money sink and that money can only be made from trading. That way trading becomes very important and it becomes worthwhile protecting traders and keeping their cargoes, while PvE'ers can make their money from selling combat marks and loot and PvP'ers can make their money from selling PvP marks.

I do not think that this is really correct, a lot of the changes they implemented were because people complained. Track back most of the major changes and you will find most of them were to try and solve some issue raised by players. Usually it is a small vocal group of players that persist till the Devs eventually listen and make changes, problem is sometimes the Devs solutions are not what the players wanted.

They probably thought the new reinforcement rules had been introduced already and were wanting to see what sort of AI reinforcements you get. Expect a lot more attacks like this once the new reinforcement rules are introduced.

This does not work. Defensive patrol missions are a waste of time unless you are guaranteed action, people do not want to take missions that entail them sailing round hoping for opposition to turn up. You may say that there is always plenty of opposition around places like KPR, once you get an organised defence fleet the opposition runs, they only stay and fight if they have a good chance of winning. Keeping green zone battles open for coast guards was what I thought they were implementing when they recently changed the RoE for green zones, but what they actually implemented was that battles stay open for all, so you get somebody getting jumped by 2 or 3 players so a small coast guard force joins, but then they suddenly find more attackers join and it was a trap. It again comes down to an organised attacking force facing a random pick up group of defenders. Just look at British nation chat every day recently and the arguments that go on about how to handle the attacks around KPR, some people are happy to just go out and have a laugh in throw away ships, which just feeds the attackers PvP marks, others try to get organised and get the defence force onto TS and into correct ships only to be told by others to stop ordering them round and that they do not have to be in TS and they will fight in any ships they want then they blame the more experienced PvP'ers for not defending home waters. I agree they need more PvE content outside green zones and other ways to get people to leave the zones, but their current strategy of making the green zones unsafe will only serve to drive players out of the game. In an ideal world you could have players defend their own capital waters, but for that you would need a proper naval command structure where people had to follow orders and you would have to allow people be able to drop what they were doing anywhere else on the map at a moments notice so they could mobilise to defend home waters. In practice this is just not possible.

You miss the point, my comments are made because the so called hard core PvP'ers keep trying to get the game mechanics changed so they can get access to the players that are PvE'ing in the 5% of the map that was setup for that. You can see many nations players queuing up outside the KPR safe zone all looking to get some PvE player that happens to attack an AI within the green zone. These so called hard core PvP'ers seldom seem to attack each other even though they are operating in the same area and claim they are looking for PvP. Since the green zones were introduced there has been a constant push from a group of players to get the rules of the green zones changed or to have them removed altogether and by the looks of it they have succeeded in changing the Devs minds regarding these zones and now these zones will become the hotspots for PvP. I agree that most players do both, but there are a small group that only want to PvP, which is not a problem, but they expect every other player to be the same as them

How do you know it will be fair when it has not been implemented yet? I pointed out that it had a possibility to be no change if the AI is super buffed or swing too much in favor of the raider if the AI are too easy to outwit, the truth is we do not yet know how this will pan out but my point still stands that initially it will lead to more incursions into the so called safe zone and this is why the Devs have to clarify what this zone is now. Is it supposed to be an safe area so nations cannot be reduced to a point where they cannot rebuild and where new players can learn the ropes in relative safety or are these zones now the new PvP zones where all converge to find PvP, because it seems more like the latter to me at the moment.

Can you explain how the so called PvP server has been severely damaged by players doing PvE? If those players were not on the server then the population would be a lot lower and the so called hardcore PvP'ers would have to fight each other. If that is the case why dont they just fight each other now and get their PvP fix, why do they have to keep looking for ways to fight against people who are not interested in fighting them? I think if you actually look at it more closely the PvE players probably do a lot to keep the server going as they are the ones that generate the gold, move the building materials round so ships can be built and farm the upgrades and books from AI fleets. Remove all PvE from the game and you would only be able to build ships from notes, there would not be enough gold in the game for the PvP'ers make money by selling PvP marks, the amount of upgrades and skill books would be even more limited than they are now. So when you look closely at it the pure PvP crowd need the PvE to take place while the pure PvE'er does not need the PvP player. Edit: BTW I have no problem with big sea battles and the old Trafalgar fights, but what you are getting now with the new green zone mechanics is large organised fleets facing disorganized PUG's and that can only carry on for so long before people get bored of it. You may say that the PUG's should get organised, but it is difficult when you cannot stop random players joining the battle in unsuitable ships and creating confusion among the defenders.

I know this is off topic, but in actual fact although your figures for the visual horizon may be correct, if you are spotting another ship with tall masts you would be able to start to see the tops of their masts at a longer range than the visual horizon.

It has the possibility of being a much bigger change than it initially appears, as I said in my first post in this thread a lot will depend on how buffed the AI's are and how they improve the AI actions. If the AI are so buffed that a 5th rate is equivalent to the current 1st rates that spawn as reinforcements then it means there is no change, but then why even bother making the change? If the buffed AI are only slightly stronger than normal AI but still as stupid in their actions then they will be easily outwitted by the hunters and thus be practically useless against any hunter with a bit of experience. The biggest effect will be that now hunters will start tagging players in the green zones to test what they can get away with and if they find that dealing with the AI is easy then there is no point in even having a green zone and we may as well go back to the seal clubbing that used to go on outside the capitals and the stand offs that occurred with a bunch of hunters sitting outside the capital taunting people to come out and fight. This goes back to what the Devs said when they first introduced the OP reinforcements, I have been unable to locate the actual comments they made but it was something along the lines that the reinforcements were like Concord in Eve HiSec where if you carried out an aggressive act you knew you were going to lose your ship as the response was so overpowered. Now they appear to have back tracked on this and given into the seal clubbers to give them the possibility to overcome the reinforcements. True it has not been implemented yet and we shall have to wait and see how it plays out, but personally I think it will mean an end to the safe zones and a return to the constant camping of Capitals the said they were originally trying to avoid. I just wish they would be honest with us and at least tell us what they are trying to achieve with these random changes rather than just throwing it out there as if it is some form of solution to a undefined problem.

My responses in red.

I just went to log into the game and at no stage does it say it is a PvP only server, the PvE server says PvE only. The server most people play on is called Caribbean with no indication that it is PvP only. The server caters to PvP and PvE and there is an emphasis on PvP because 95% of the OW is available for PvP. But people like you tend to think the only way to get PvP is by attacking the people in the 5% of the server that at the time are not looking for PvP. So please get your facts straight.

It has been explained many times that for various reasons many players cannot or do not want to PvP every time they log on, and they should not have to. It does not make them pure PvE'ers if they occasionally are unable or unwilling to PvP. You just keep choosing to ignore the fact that there are many players that enjoy both PvP and PvE aspects of the game. The moans you mention are because they are nullifying the 5% of the map where people could make the choice whether they PvP or PvE. I am sure you too would complain if they extended the safe zones to cover 95% of the map and PvP was only possible in the patrol areas.

In the end it comes down to a simple fact, if there are so many players looking for pure PvP then why are they struggling to find it? Why do they need players that are not interested in PvP to be their prey? Just imagine if you got your wish and all such players moved to the PvE server, would it increase the amount of PvP you would get? No it would not you would have the same amount of players looking for PvP as you do now, its just that the server population would be lower. So maybe just pretend that all those players PvE'ing in the safe zones do not exist and you will still have as many opponents as you would if they were on the PvE server.

The problem is that the people who come on here moaning about lack of PvP only seem to want to attack these sort of players rather than looking for more challenging players with the same experience and gear as they have. As they keep saying they are looking for PREY. They are not looking for good PvP they are looking for easy targets, inexperienced players and newbs and once they farm these players to extinction they will find some other reason to moan as to why they cannot find PvP.

When I started it was the same, but the point you forget is that it all changed long before the introduction of safe zones. In the days you mention you still had the option to call reinforcements to even up the fight as long as you were within a certain range of one of your nations ports anywhere on the map. Even after the call reinforcements was removed there was still a lot of battles for Jamaica Patrol, but eventually the raiders started using the speed meta where they could be selective in which battles they engaged in and the Jamaica Patrol became an endless chase until they could single out a chaser that had strayed too far ahead of the pack or they waited till the patrol started to disperse as they got bored of chasing and then they would turn and attack the remnants. I too played in those days and for a time was quite active patrolling home waters, but because of the way players developed strategies (not the game rules changes) it became boring and not worthwhile as sometimes you could spend an entire evening just chasing without getting involved in a single battle.

I do not understand why you keep raising this point. Pure PvE players play on the PvE server, but there are many other players who for whatever reason are not always in the mood or do not have sufficient time to go out and PvP and just want to attack some PvE targets. Why should such players be forced to change servers and level up on both servers depending of whether they are in the mood for PvE or PvP.

The thing is that this is not a compromise, this is giving in to the gank squads that seal club around capitals. They changed the safe zone RoE on the sly when they initially indicated that defenders could join the battle at any time when what they implemented was that battles against AI would remain open for all. Now this appears to have created some large PvP battles in and around the green zones (usually a gank by the attacking side against a PUG), so now they appear to be trying to shake it up a bit more by reducing the strength of reinforcements thus giving more chance for the attackers to initiate the attacks in the green zone. I think they are hoping this will generate more PvP around these zones. Problem is that although this may give an initial increase in PvP it will soon die out as the green zones become deserted and it will be back to the seal clubbing of new players in these zones. I may be wrong in my assumptions but thats how it appears to me and unless they clarify their thoughts on the matter and define what they actually want the safe zone to be then I have no option but to believe I am correct.

This may be your understanding of the reinforcements, but is it actually what the Devs intended? I asked the question earlier but there was no response from the Devs. Many people have different assumptions of why things are in the game and unless the Devs clarify what their intent was we will always get these different interpretations. As far as I understood it the safe zones were supposed to be safe and that was why the reinforcements were so overpowered, so there was no point in even trying to challenge them. I do not see how with the new changes you will get a decent 1v2 fight as the encounter will be within the green zone and thus stay open so anyone can join.

Can you explain what the reasoning is behind having a safe zone? What is it for? What is it supposed to achieve? Who is it supposed to protect? The reason I ask is that the recent change of RoE in these zones and the current proposal seem to be at odds with things that were expressed when the green zones were first introduced. So maybe clarifying what the green zones are may help us understand where you are coming from.

I am afraid I have to disagree with you on this, just because they are 25 in number it does not mean they were not ganked by 7 people. The 7 knew what they were doing and went to the zone knowing they could possibly face 25 and thus they are prepared for it with the correct ships, all players on TS following orders, kitted out with the right upgrades for the fight, while the 25 team starts off with some poor player who was just out to capture a AI trader in the safe zone, he gets jumped by possibly a couple of the 7 team and calls for help, a few more of the 25 team join thinking they are only facing 2, then the rest of the 7 join. By now there are frantic calls in nation for help and more random people join, they are disorganised, have no leadership, no comms and are in whatever ships they had on hand. By the time half of them join the battle some of the original members are already sunk or so badly damaged that they will escape at the first chance they get. Some of the people joining are even joining in basic cutters even though people trying to organise a defense are telling people in nation not to join in useless ships. The end result can be called nothing other than a gank. Every now and again you will get a proper defense organised that can take the attackers on, but you will find that the attackers have come prepared for this and if things start going that way they very quickly run as they have come prepared for that too.

Yes I remember being jumped a few times when I used to operate solo around English harbour and quite often they said they would let me escape as long as I called reinforcements for them to farm.

Camping outside a capital or a safe zone is not hunting. Hunting is going looking for your prey by working out where they are likely to be travelling. Some hunters do it properly and they are the ones you do not find moaning on the forums, its the campers that complain.

It looks like enemy green zones will be the place to safely carry out AI fleet farming safely now as long as you can get together a fleet of 25. Gather together your fleet of 25 and gank some poor trader in the green zone, he calls reinforcements and hey presto you have your AI fleet to battle and due to the numbers the battle is not open to any other interference.