Barbancourt

Won't clans just flip ports to take them away from enemies, then not pay for them and let them revert to neutral?

Only if you're willing to give up all your progress and go back to grinding up from Basic Cutter. Very few players will do that.

We needed a region capturing process that takes a week or two, instead of the quick flip and single port battle process that we got. Accomodate not only global time zones, but also weekend-only players and other people with normal real-life obligations, lol.

Because it became one of the fundamental problems with the game. There was once a dream of having a global NA community on one server letting everyone play 24/7, but the global community didn't materialize and the dream died. Tthe population has crashed so badly that nations can't even defend off-hours port battles against two guys who aren't particularly good. Now it's "the server that's always asleep"....or just dead.

This stuff...

If you can just sail the seas and get some people together for small mixed frigate battles the game is superb. The low population, alts, RvR imbalance, wonky economy, capital region gankers, etc are getting in the way. I'm not a genius - I don't have all the answers - but there is a lot of potential here that should not be thrown out.

An advantage of getting in now is that you'll be able to learn a lot of the important things before future wipes and releases, so you don't have to be a complete noob when that time comes. It's hard to really participate as a noob, which is frustrating when important things are happening rapidly after they make big changes to the game. Research the national situations before chosing a nation, keeping in that mind things are really wonky right now for just about everybody, and start thinking carefully about joining a clan though you don't need to do that right away.

176? Dang, I thought hitting 56 knots was pretty epic. Same thing happened to me earlier in the week for 3 days straight. I wasn't gonna say nuthin on the forum about my secret turbocharger!

It take some dedicated practice and pointers, and it was a couple months before I even tried. It's like playing Finger Twister on the keyboard, and half the time I do the wrong combo and kill my momentum, or misalign my fingers and hit the "r" or "v" keys by accident or forget to go full sail when turning through the wind until it's too late. :/

We lost some clan members to this Albion thing too, long before the population or RvR crisis. We need to wage war against these new player-stealing games!

(triggered) Absolutely NO! Players just want to be able to make some tangible progress after many hours of time investment, without having to resort to a tedious PVE grind. The PVE grind is almost always a foregone conclusion so don't dress it up as an "achievement", and I actually got most of the XP to reach my most recent level-up from merely sailing traders between ports which isn't an "achievement" either. In comparison, sticking your neck out to have a decent battle would seem to merit better XP than easy grinding, even in a loss. Most players (considering myself as an example) are just easy Prey in the PvP=Predator-vs-Prey equation for a very long time, in large part because we're curbstomped by players that already have bigger ships and fleets (via prior XP). In other games I get some token XP as a loser, and sometimes even decent XP as a loser. That doesn't detract from the much larger piles of XP and loot you get as a winner, and it keeps you moving along to the next interesting part of the game.

The problem with PvP is that it's usually so lopsided. I'd sail a frigate out and do PvP regularly if it wasn't for the fact that instead of a decent battle I expect to run into overwhelming numbers and/or larger ships and be deleted very quickly for someone else's cheap LOLs and juvenile heckling. So instead I keep my ships safe in port, saved up for the one time every other week when I can manage to play when there's a group activity going on.

What's this nonsense about Global being a "bad idea"? Global just didn't have enough players to operate successfully. What we were given was a NON-CHOICE: Europe-centric time windows, or not Europe-centric time windows. That doesn't offer a "choice" for most of the world.

...intriguing! I've got Mortar Handbook, but I'm assuming that isn't one of the "right" ones.

You don't really need them, and even if you want them you don't really have to have them in this month or next.

Mebbe need a new east asia-oceania style server...

It isn't a "handout" to try to get all the players together to save the game for everyone. I'm not sure why you have this judgemental tone about which server I've been playing on. I'm GMT-10 so you can't claim I had a "choice" to start out on the EU server, and the fact that the server populations have crashed certainly isn't my fault either.

Ping may or may not keep Aus/NZ/SEA/oceanic players off the EU server, but the population crash on Global would appear to doom them anyway. Going to the EU server cold turkey means going back to Basic Cutter and doing three months of XP and asset grinding all over again. (by the time you've done that there may be another Wipe anyway)

Just have the person who you're building the ship for provide the permit and blueprints. Presumably they have the marks if they have a use for such a ship. Some of the permits come in packs of three so you can even ask for two permits to build one ship and have another for yourself.

That would be really disappointing. I would want to use the lobby game to learn about the ships and combat, and even as a different avenue to get XP than waiting for AI ships to respawn.

It would be nice if there were Admiralty orders that break up stale alliances and keep fresh goals ahead of people, but at the same time it would fall apart if the Admiralty gave orders that were too hard to achieve, hurt your own position, or ran very contrary to your personal goals in game. Presumably there would be a penalty for failure, or players would just ignore them. The Admiralty would probably also have to provide benefits and resources up front to execute the orders, in carrot-and-stick fashion.

That's a misrepresentation of what happened. The regions weren't given away, but instead trying to keep them was not workable. Nobody wants to center their game time in Naval Action around grinding PVE fleets to keep flipping those regions back and forth weekly. And as far as I can tell from your previous post you aren't interested in doing that either.

I did not play the game with any seriousness until post-Wipe, and I was not in France pre-Wipe, so I am speaking of what we built as France post-Wipe which is what is relevant to the situation right now. I wasn't saying you volunteered - I was asking IF you were volunteering, because anybody who wants to CAN make a new Team France right now to grind the PVE and win back those ports, at least on a temporary basis. (sounds like you wouldn't be interested in that) There are still a small handful of troopers in BORK sailing out of Fort-Royal pretty much every day, though at odd hours. Hats off to the guys who are sticking with it in the current situation.

I suspect most people would be pretty happy if they could just get a couple fairly even-strength small number frigate battles with their clannies per day. It really shouldn't be so hard to get that kind of content?

It takes days in an empty region like Orinoco, Leewards or Windwards, though it can be done in a few hours in particularly concentrated places like Basse-Terre. (without opposition, of course) They're all different.