Archaos

I don't think its a case of wanting to be one ported, its a case of calling the Pirates out on what they said in the OP making out they were doing the server a favor by stopping their attacks, giving some ports back and distributing other ports to other nations. The simple fact is that the Pirates although they could possibly one port (region) another nation if they wanted, they would leave themselves exposed to counter attack and they are unable to defend too many ports. They have kept strategic ports and are making out that their offensive has stopped due to not wanting to kill off a nation. They just want to dictate to the server how things should be.

Much as I suspected, its not about the good fight or letting nations rebuild, its all about staying top of the leaderboard. At least you are starting to admit it. You want to be top dog on the server and make sure everyone else falls into line for you to whip at your leisure.

I thought the restrictions on PvP EU were only the times that port battles could happen. Does this mean now that you want the time hostility can be generated also restricted? Maybe the EU server should only be open for a few hours per day.

Don't you think it would be abused a bit by people trolling and taking everything from the wreck and leaving a single unit of the cheapest item?

While Koltes and Black clan may believe that opening up the gulf to other nations to allow them build and in the long run make a more competitive server, what will actually happen is that the other nations that enter the gulf and the Brits and USA will end up scrapping against each other giving the Pirates more opportunity to rule to roost and dictate things on their terms. The Pirates are not interested in the Gulf because they realize that they cannot hold all those ports and the current mechanics mean that they would lose points towards VM's, so they instead consolidate what they have and are able to defend and attack ports as necessary to ensure they stay top of the leaderboard. These are good tactics and what any nation should do to ensure they remain in control, but do not for one minute believe that they are doing it for the benefit of other nations.

So in other words if the Pirates act as a nation the nation should become like pirates.

I thought the Pirates in their terms were offering ports in the gulf to other nations, or was that only on the proviso that you did not attack them from those ports?

The only problem I see with it is that they did not give any indication that they felt it was an issue. Just the simple response that the battles were open so you can join and do something about it. I agree that the BG idea can bring some interesting tactics into play and hopefully more people will test it to find if there are any flaws in the system.

Its strange that you still blame the inactivity on the Brits when at the moment the Pirates are the ones with the power. If you believe the OP the Brits got their butts kicked and are now being given a chance to rebuild. The Pirates are the ones now sitting back consolidating their gains, surely the inactivity is now due to them.

I remember the days when I basically leveled up my crafting to level 50 almost solely using goods captured from AI traders.

I guess this is to do with the Devs response to the tribunal post today regarding Pirate vs Pirate battles to hide in to get into port battles. I have to agree that the response was very poor and does not take into account the reality of the situation. Although outlaw battles remain open and anyone can join, the issue is that if they are being used for this purpose then the Pirates involved will not remain anywhere near the spawn point and thus there is very little chance in catching them unless you join the battle immediately. We used to do this in mission battles a while ago when the battles remained open for 20 or 30 minutes (I cant remember the exact time). You join a mission and kited the AI till you were well clear of the spawn entry point and that way you could not be ganked in your mission as you were well away from any intruder. I am not saying people should have received punishment for this, but they should have realized that this is an issue and done something to stop it happening. As it stands this is giving their blessing for people to use this mechanic and it will only cause more bad feeling.

Though your proposal may have merits, I would have to say in light of the thread you posted the other day regarding declared victory and terms, I think it is a bad idea. This would allow you post something controversial and others would not be able to comment on it. This is a forum where there should be open discussion. I agree that can also lead to trolling and derailing of threads, but censorship is not the solution. As the mods have pointed out majority of the slang and abuse matches happen between leaders of the bigger clans anyway. I know personally I try to keep personal abuse and trolling out of my responses to threads, but that does not mean that people like my responses and that can still get people worked up.

I think you have an idealized opinion of how this would work out. You think that if there is a disagreement then the sides have a fight and the one who wins gets his way and the others just accept it and carry on. Well I do not think that would happen, the losing side would still hold a grudge and would frustrate the winners at every occasion and if they could not do that then they would be forced out of the nation and probably the game. It would just be a case of bullying dissenters into submission. Such a mechanic would quickly turn the game into a clan vs clan game (there may be merits in such a game). Majority of the toxicity on the forums relates back to some battle or other where someone won and someone lost and they each accuse the other of playing loosely with the game mechanics to gain unfair advantage. These grudges last for a long time even after the game mechanic in question has been changed.

I'm sure they would enjoy the PvP, but it would be at the expense of their global domination fantasies. Would they be as happy when they started losing ports because they were tied up in a civil war? I know some of their players just love the PvP, but they still need access to ship building materials.

Are you saying that if you found 25 active PvP'ers and transferred to Pirates you could not cause serious issues for Black clan or any other large pirate clan. Imagine turning up at their PB with a 25 man fleet and entering the PB and once the timer runs down a bit so no one else can enter then leave the battle, or attacking their PB fleet outside. The thing with the pirates on Global is that the biggest clan is from the old PvP2 days, while the Brits and US appear to have a lot of clans that at least some of have come over from PvP1. The ones from PvP1 have tried to retain their former clan make up and end up competing for new members, while new players joining the Pirates or ones jumping from Nationals to the Pirates tend to look to join an established Pirate clan which in turn strengthens the stronger pirate clan. At least that is how it appears to me, but I may be wrong.

Are you a member of a clan? There are a lot of people who do not wish to be in a clan and that is fine, but if they then expect protection from clans they should ask themselves why should the clans help them. I personally try and help players if I can but I have been caught out a few times. I once saw a player in a 5th or 4th rate obviously afk not far from KPR green zone a pirate tagged him and I jumped into the fight to assist. The other player then came back and happily sailed off without firing a shot leaving me 1v1 against the pirate and I was in a lesser ship. Maybe he was just bait and I fell for the trap, but it made me very wary about helping random players. I have heard similar problems from others who try to help players out. Britain may have the largest population, but that also means that they attract the largest number of inexperienced players who will not listen to advice. My advice to you would be to find a clan that do help their members and join them.

Although I can see the merit in such a mechanic, dont you think it could too easily be abused. Imagine a whole clan transferring into your nation just to cause trouble, raid your traders, attack your PB fleet. It would just be chaos, to tell the truth I am surprised that no one has done it to the pirates yet, I realize they have some large well organised PvP clans, but if a dedicated clan of nationals became Pirates it could seriously disrupt them and lead to internal civil war. Edit: If they did implement something like this you may as well make it a clan vs clan game, because that's what it would evolve into.

What you say here just proves what a big help Pirate vs Pirate battles help in bringing a nation into line. Fair enough you do not use it to bully smaller clans, but I am sure if that smaller clan was interfering with your plans to flip a region at a certain time, you would first warn them off and if they did not listen you would take them out in a Pirate vs Pirate battle. That option is not available as a national, as you say the only option we have is to talk to them. If you have people you suspect of being alts trying to enter your port battle you can take them out before the get in to cause problems. Nationals cannot do that. You say there is fighting among Pirate clans and accept that is going to happen when you have more than one group, this is the same in all nations but Nationals dont have the ability to fight and actually bring them in line to make the nation stronger. Nationals can only use words and just look at the forums to see how words bring people in line, or do they only make the gap grow wider with abuse and counter abuse. With the ability to actually fight you can make it so that a wayward clan loses members as they are not allowed to operate. Just the fact that you can use force to back up your words is sometimes enough to make the difference. As the Pirates now are more of a nation rather than Pirates maybe the Pirate vs Pirate battles should be removed until they get round to developing proper pirate mechanics for the game and Pirates are no longer just another Nation under the black flag.

You carried out a campaign and achieved your goals, good for you. But you then come on the forums with some form of speech as to how you have won the server and dictating terms making out you are going to save the server by distributing worthless regions to other nations in the so called effort to allow nations rebuild so you can do it all over again while all the time you maintain top spot on the leaderboard to get VM's. You currently have the power to do this and congrats to you for achieving that, but please dont make out that you are doing anyone any favors by what you are doing. No need for some grand announcement. If you had just stopped taking ports and consolidated people would have rebuilt in their own time. All you have achieved is a mud slinging war that is weakening the Brits even more by exposing cracks between the clans (maybe this too was the plan). People dont need to know your plans, people dont need to be grateful that you are giving ports back, people dont care that you are not taking more ports than you can handle while setting yourselves up to raid them constantly. And to top it all the OP comes on and then tells his clan not to engage in any more discussion and asks the Mods to lock the thread, well maybe he should of thought of that before he started such a thread. If he really regrets posting this then he should ask for the whole thread to be deleted not just locked after he has had the last say or everyone may as well start creating controversial threads and having them instantly locked so no one can comment.

Yes it could be abused, but that is why I say the bounty is not exorbitant and builds up slowly and it resets once the person is killed or captured. What would be the point of abusing it anyway, you have to do the PvP to build up the bounty on you and then you let yourself get killed or captured by your alt to claim the bounty, it still gets people out PvP'ing so who cares that they make a little extra money from it.

Do you guys really believe what you are spouting here or is it just some BS propaganda line to make out you guys are keeping the server alive? You are trying to dictate what other nations should do and force them down that path while at the same time leaving yourselves with a target rich environment that you can easily defend. You know you cannot take all the ports so you try and make out you are leaving them for the benefit of others. All I can say is take your terms and shove them where the sun dont shine, and I hope the rest of the Brits and other nations tell you the same. If you dont want to over extend then dont take anymore ports, but please dont give lame excuses that you are giving others time to rebuild. Read your own statements they contradict each other.

To all British nation players I would say tell the Pirates to do their worst, tell them to go swivel. They cannot afford to take all the regions as they cannot defend them. All they are trying to do is dictate the map on their terms leaving other nations scrabbling round for crumbs off their table. They want you to rebuild only so they can beat you down again once you start getting strong again. And in the end if you did turn the tables they would say, well we could have one regioned you but........ How many PB's can they contest at the same time? If they take more ports they leave themselves exposed. The offer of SLM to improve morale is pitiful, they know most of the nation have moved out of that area anyway, thats why they want to keep Portobello, so they can harass you at their leisure, same way as they are doing to the USA by holding Georgia. Most of them prefer to do solo raiding anyway, so leaving the Brits with quite a few ports gives them plenty of targets and they can still claim that Britain is the largest nation and they need everyone to not do deals with them. If they reduce the Brits to one region then it will become obvious where the power on the server is and they lose all their excuses and leave themselves open to being ganged up on. The only terms acceptable to a Pirate is the noose and gibbet, let them swing at the entrance of Port Royale.

I know what the mechanics are, I was just wondering how it worked in practice and was there ways it could be worked to give you an advantage. For example in the situation I gave if the attackers only have a PB fleet and a few ships as screeners, and the defenders have 2 full screening BG's, is it possible that the few attacking screeners are unable to pull the defending screeners into battle because of BR difference, or even if they could they would need all of their screeners to do it thus leaving the PB fleet at the mercy of the second screening BG. There are other scenarios that I raised in the patch thread but they were never answered. But anyway this is off topic for this thread so I wont dwell on it.

I was thinking more of the situation where there is more than 1 BG on each side, or it is unbalanced and the smaller nation only has their PB fleet in a BG with a few other vessels to help screen and the larger nation is able to field 2 full screening BG's as well as a defending PB fleet (probably not possible on the Global server).

Do you think maybe they gave up because of the tactics you used previously? You may have changed tactics to use the new mechanics but how were they to know? Personally I would be eager to know how the new mechanics for Battle Groups works out. I have concerns about it, but I do think it may help alleviate some of the problems that you mention about screeners avoiding fights and just trolling to stop you entering the port battle.