Irish Rover

Saying "I vote for merging the servers" is a bit like saying "I vote for my 1978 Pinto to do 0-60 in four seconds." It's nice that some of you would like the Dev's to pull off an insanely complicated and difficult programming task, namely, making a real-time MMO server scale to whatever load all the players who want to play at any given time can put on it, but it's not that simple. One of the many goals the Dev's have is to grow the player base. You know, those people who pay the money that let the Dev's do fun things like eat and pay rent. Right now, people look at the size of the player base and say, "PvP2 and PvP3 don't have many people.... we're bored... stick everyone together on one server." Does anyone remember that for a short time, PvP1 was at capacity and you couldn't log in until someone logged out to make room for you? Do you think that can't happen again? If you vote for merging the servers together, what is your plan when the player base does grow and one server can't handle everyone? Do you really want to wait to play? Do you want them to just start up another server -- like we already have?!? And please don't tell me, "This is not a hard problem. Look at Eve. They do it, so NA can do it." Yeah, Eve does it with a huge team of software developers and ops engineers and a quarter million or more players paying a monthly subscription fee -- and believe me, what they've done is not easy. Building single-shard MMO's is non-trivial, and sucks up huge amounts of resources. Bottom line: if you're one of the players who voted to merge servers, go merge them yourself. Get up off of PvP2 or PvP3 and move to PvP1 until it's maxed out again. You don't need the Devs to do that. They've got plenty else to worry about.

I'm sure someone must have suggested this, but I searched and couldn't find it, so.... Please make the Private Message chat tabs blink when someone has typed something that we haven't read just like the Nation tab does. So many times I don't know if I've gotten a response to a PM because I've switched to Nation, or I completely miss the fact that someone PM'd me to begin with. Could they just blink like the other chat tabs do?

As long as players can't change nations quickly enough to use the feature as an easy means to spy, I'm all for it. (Obviously, some hardcore players will have a second or third account in a different nation to facilitate spying and syphoning off resources, and we can't do anything about that.) Telling players, "You have to stick with your nation even when your nation is losing and you are no longer having fun" is idiotic. Their response will simply be "Well, screw you, I'll go play something fun where I have a chance to win!" and we'll have lost a player. The concept of "nations" already has enough problems with it: 1) Ports are owned by nations, but have to be fought over by players who have to pay to attack them (in ships and flags) and then do not control the benefits from their capture. Google "free rider problem". NA has a HUGE free rider problem, and under the present rules, it will never go away. We already see players reluctant to buy flags. They just wait for others to do it. How many port battles over the same port will players tolerate when the "winner" of the port is some trader who didn't even fight? 2) Anyone in a given nation can travel anywhere and buy anything within that nation without any fear of loss from "friendly" ships. Hardcore players will almost have to have alt accounts so that they can pool together huge sums of money, transfer that money to their alt in the "enemy" nation, and then go buy all the iron ore, oak and fir they can get their hands on. Denying the enemy their resources is just pathetically simple, and the richest nation should be able to drain the resources from all others. The nation problems I just listed are inherent to NA's game design. Allowing people to switch nations mitigates these problems at least a bit, and anything that can be done to help that should be done.

An AFK timer is just a Band-Aid. In a month or so, it won't help anything. The underlying problem has to be addressed if we're going to have a long-term solution. As I type this, 2110 players are online and I am in Position 436 in the queue for PvP One! My guess is that I've got over a hour wait to get on -- and I don't have the luxury of waiting an hour just to start playing. I'm lucky to get an hour in total to play on any given day! Players must be allowed to migrate their entire characters -- name, rank, crafting experience, gold, ships, outposts, warehouse inventories, etc. etc. etc. -- away from a server at capacity to another server with lower load. (Most likely, this should be a one-way trip to make exploits harder.) PvP One is useless to me with just 2100 or so players. What is going to happen after another month of EA sales? Add a few more thousand players and it won't be AFK players that stop you from joining PvP One -- it will be active players that stop you -- and you can't kick them! The only solutions are a bigger server for PvP One (unreasonable) or move people to PvP Two (or Three or Four or Five as the game grows.) You can't "AFK-timer" your way out of this problem. Soon, PvP One will just be overloaded with legitimate, playing users.

@thomas aagaard, I find that the "small battles" aren't nearly as balanced as the missions, which the devs have thoughtfully allowed you to tailor to the difficulty you like. Sometimes, the fight is a cakewalk. Sometimes, it's impossible to win. And depending on when you arrive in port, you might wait long enough for the next battle that you could just travel to a mission. I understand that some players like the immersive part of sailing to a mission, but the mission is marked by giant, floating crossed swords that you can see for miles. That's not very immersive for me. For a mission to be immersive, I think they'd need to create a new type -- something where you had to search for a specific type of ship from a specific nationality -- maybe you'd have to follow it and report back to the Admiralty where it went -- or maybe you'd have to attack it. In either case, I can't imagine an immersive mission involving a crossed swords marker hovering over the water. It would have to be more subtle than that -- and it's totally doable in NA -- they just have to decide if enough people would enjoy that kind of mission to make it worth coding it.

I don't think the missions are too hard to find -- a little practice and you get good at finding them -- but I do think they take much too long to reach. I sometimes spend as much time going to and from my mission as I do in the mission! Why? Why would a game developer think that I enjoy traveling over open water again and again and again to get to a mission? Is the point just to slow down the grind to the next level even more? If so, then just give me less experience per encounter and let me get into the fights faster. It's an open world. If I want to sail around and enjoy the scenery, I don't need a mission to do it. If I want a mission, what is the point of making me sail halfway around Jamaica to get one? (And yes, I'm visiting multiple ports and dropping missions that are too far because I can't stand the wasted time traveling to them -- but it still means going back and forth between lots of ports for no in-game reason. I really wish designers would ask themselves, "Do players think this idea I have is fun?" before they go and implement it.)