Aetrion

I really like the idea of having crew be a limited resource that needs to be preserved more than ships, but at the same time, I feel like if the game has a crew system that gives such a significant drawback to using a ship of the line then the fact that they have arbitrarily reduced durability just kind of turns into a double tax on them. It also seems to me like losing crew only when durability hits 0 just further encourages scrapping 1 durability ships instead of taking them back out to sea to avoid the losses. Personally I think having the game based more on your ability to recruit and retain crew than on making captains buy their own ship makes a lot of sense. It opens all sorts of avenues for interesting gameplay that is more in line with how battles were really conducted back then, because a huge amount of it comes down to a human element, where morale and honor and loyalty were just as essential as gold and cannonballs.

I think there is an argument to be made that crew should be a limited resource and capturing ships should "cost" some crew.

To be fair, the mast for a larger ship at the time wasn't just one piece of wood, it was a core of wood surrounded by multiple trunks that were cut into sections that would fit around the core and then held together by iron bands that were fitted while hot so they would contract and keep the entire thing tightly compressed. Destroying one of those masts was extremely difficult, since they were basically a bundle of telephone poles held together with iron bands. In the movie the mast collapses after just two hits.

I generally agree the game would be a lot more fun if it had some systems for allowing you to specialize and find your own niche and play style, but I think these suggestions are way too specific to simply agree with. A lot of the profession ships are from an entirely wrong time period and would be woefully outclassed by anything in the game already.

No, PvE should not be tedious and boring in the first place, and people should be free to play the game with however much of either one they enjoy. This idea that PvP requires loss because you don't want to fight the same person 100 times in a row just shows the blatant elitism at work there. You want the other person to actually be forced to quit fighting if you beat them a few times because you're tired of them getting another go at you? Seriously? I mean fuck their enjoyment of the game right? Being on top shouldn't be easy. Being ahead shouldn't just get you further and further ahead. That's exactly why the open world combat has already self destructed into just a few nations owning everything and people mass migrating to Pirates.

Ships of the line don't come with 5 durability, and even if they did, all that does is somewhat reduce the amount of upkeep grinding you have to do, not make it into a game where you fight over rewards rather than punishments. Sure, but I can only say once again, the clans that actually want economic PvP could just as well have it if all those big costs were incurred with things like harbor defenses and troop ships, rather than forcing that aspect of the game into absolutely every possible mode of play by going straight to the one thing you need to play the game at all with, which is ships. The whole fear of "everyone is in a 1st rate" is a symptom of the fact that there is no good reason to use anything else, and that's what needs to be addressed rather than simply saying "Well obviously everyone would want to use this one thing, so we just need to make sure not everyone can have it".

The problem with PvP losses in this game is simply that it's your ability to participate that's under threat when your ship is under threat. You're not losing your chance to accomplish a certain goal, you're losing your chance to even get back into the fight, and that's entirely different. Dark Souls is a game that does this right. In Dark Souls you don't slide backwards. You don't lose gear you already have, you don't lose levels you've already gained. All you lose when you die is your progress toward the next milestone and you get to try again immediately. That's why Dark Souls is fun despite the fact that you die a lot. That's entirely different from how this game operates. You lose progress you've already made when you get sunk here and you don't really lose progress toward a new goal, you instead have to regain your capabilities before making another attempt. People try to identify things like 3rd rates as the problem for zergy tactics, but the issue isn't that people have too many ships to use, the issue is that they didn't actually have to work hard blockading ports and stuff to enable a harbor battle and don't lose the progress they've made toward that goal when they get rebuffed.

Yea, this is really the core of the issue. Even people who just prefer smaller clans get squeezed out by the current system.

Effort and skill, fine. Demanding people sacrifice their time to be allowed to have the best stuff in the game is just stupid though. That's not a measure of anything positive.

The problem isn't with the idea that you need to spend time to earn rewards, the problem is with the idea that you need to spend time proportionately to using those rewards to keep them. That simply isn't the same thing. People aren't saying "Play for X# hours to get your first rate", people are saying "Play for X# hours to earn the ability to play with a first rate until you lose a fight". That's completely different, because it doesn't make it about how much time you've spent in the game overall, it makes it about always using a portion of your time in the game on upkeep rather than actually doing the thing you play the game for. At that point someone who plays 8 hours a day might be able to get a few good fights out of every playsession, but someone who plays 2 hours a day three days of the week can go two weeks without doing anything other than upkeep, and at that point there is no reason to play the game for that person anymore.

If that was the case then the whole debate about them being disposable would be pointless either way. I don't want everyone to just have a 1st rate factory in their backyard, what I do want is a system that gives good reasons to use other ships other than just not having so much time for grinding that you can afford using them.

This should be a skill based game, not a grind based game. This whole "I earned this because I spent more time than you" defense is simply bollocks. Spending more time in the game doing boring upkeep tasks just to be allowed to participate in the competitive content has nothing to do with working hard or playing well. If you have any kind of job that values quantity over quality of work you're basically just waiting to get replaced by a robot, so no, the game shouldn't strive to simulate that experience.

All ships should have the same durability when crafted. Making a ship that's already 20 times more expensive than smaller ships have less durability so that it costs even more to maintain is just a stupid kneejerk fix to "I don't want everyone to have 1st rates, only the cheesiest grinders in the game should have the best stuff!".

Incentivising people through punishment rather than reward doesn't make for a fun game system, especially when one side HAS to lose for the other to win, because it means you can get punished despite having done nothing wrong at all. Also, I just don't agree that the cheesy ganky tactics you get when people try use "tactics and strategy" to avoid ever losing a fight actually make a game more fun. It sucks all the skill out of the fights if everyone just tries to maneuver for a gank.

I don't see how losing something and then grinding to get it back adds depth to a game. You're still just doing the same thing over and over, there is still no actual meaningful reason to do it, and specifically in the case of this game the activities you need to do to get new ships are a thousand times more brainless than the actual fights. Depth comes from being able to play the game in many different complimentary ways and having to make hard decisions, not in cluttering up a singular endgame idea with a lot of repetitive extra steps. The whole "Everyone will just hang out in a first rate" to me is the real indication of lack of depth, because it means that there is no real reason to use anything else other than simply not being able to afford it. That doesn't indicate to me that people have a lot of choices or decisions to make in the game, more than simply getting hit over the head with a bunch of boring grind with a very obvious and one sided goal they need to shoot for to be at the top of their game.

Nope, that problem only crops up when you make progress only about getting stronger rather than about specializing to suit your play style and continuous adaptation as your style and the game evolve. Also the idea that forcing people to constantly grind just to stay where they are is somehow a valid replacement for a progress system is just false. It assumes that building infinite needs into a game is infinitely entertaining, but if that was the case then all previous games with that philosophy would still be running full force, which obviously isn't the case. Games need to change and grow to maintain a playerbase for many years. There is no way to get around that, and it isn't a bad thing either. There are no systems that remain entertaining forever

No, this game needs more parts that allow people to make progress and not just constantly struggle against upkeep, not fewer. It's already ruined by people insisting that everything must be limited by grind.

I agree that right now the game is basically wasting it's potential by randomly making all the really fun stuff obnoxiously difficult to get into. The combat system in this game is IMO better than what you get in World of Warships, yet here you can't get into good fights and earn good ships unless you jump through a bunch of hoops first and play with a clan. The open world element is nice and all, but unless it's developed to a degree where open world means more than just a giant gank-arena it simply isn't more fun this way than having a decent matchmaker. The RvR stuff needs to be more developed and have more going on than just trading ports back and forth, that's for sure. Generally the game just lacks meaningful content for a variety of playstyles. All it has right now is grind for ships and then burn them up in port battles.

I agree, but the problem will never be solved by restricting ships by money and crafting. They need to be restricted by a system that works the same for everyone, regardless of how much they play and how huge of a clan they have. Otherwise the people who can outgrind the curve will always cheese the system and the people who can't will always have no reason to keep playing, resulting in a shift toward the exact same problem you had before, just with fewer overall players. For example, having crew be more like work-hours so that if you lose a huge ship it can take a long time till you have enough people again to crew another one would make spamming third rates and treating them carelessly impossible even if everyone had an infinite number of them.

If clans poured their expertise and dedication into building coastal defenses, harbor monitors, trans Atlantic shipments and other things like that that form the basis of global strategic gameplay rather than insisting that they should simply be the only ones who get good ships nobody would be complaining. The problem is that you don't want all the crafting to specifically restrict the elements of the game that are there for you and require that element of attrition, you want the crafting to restrict the element of the game that forms the basis of every possible form of gameplay this game can have, and by that create a game that is exclusive to only your style of play. Usually in MMOs that do clan wars you have your clanwar system built in somewhere at the high end and the dedication needed to participate is for doing stuff like building fortresses. It doesn't mess up the more casual play, nor does it restrict other people from making characters that are equally powerful so that the fights stay skill based. In this game the clanwar stuff kicks in right on the ground level of how powerful you are allowed to be in a fight and by that squashes every other form of gameplay and kills the skill element.

This game is more and more turning into a massive display of hypocrisy from elitists who demand special rules like ships having reduced durability or being uncapturable when it serves to preserve the advantage of grinders and huge clans, but will instantly invoke "no, it's a sandbox, no special rules" when anything is suggested to make the game more palatable for a wider audience. I mean the devs keep saying they don't want to be a game that drives away scores of people by giving an insurmountable advantage to organized clans full of people who play all day long, but let alone the fact that people who want that sort of thing are concentrating in this forum proves that that is exactly what they have, and the game's community has already begun to shrink down to a single type of player. Also I can only reiterate once again that the game cannot ever achieve cost factor balance of different ship types as long as the costs are built into a system that you can circumvent by grinding and stockpiling. It simply is not possible. This isn't an RTS where all the ships a faction has are bought from the same pool of money, every unit has it's own pool of money, and you guys ignorantly believe that if you just make that pool hard enough to fill you'll get people to enjoy playing as zerglings.

Agreed, fire should force crew to fight it.

That would mean all first rates would be built of teak, since being able to afford twice as many and being able to put top end mods on them on every second run with no fear of losing them would more than make up for the loss in durability.

It could have a system where the last 100 people of your crew are never lost, so you always have access to a 7th rate at least.

Generally I agree, but if there isn't any kind of speed limit to boarding the game currently has no defense against it, which makes no sense. In reality if someone threw grappling hooks on your ship you could just chop the lines with a boarding axe, and generally actually getting onto the deck of another ship was very difficult. One of the most important uses of grape shot was clearing the decks so that a boarding attempt could even be started, since it was nearly impossible to actually start moving a significant number of men onto the enemy ship if they were prepared to repel the attempt. Just driving close to an enemy ship would earn you a hail of fire from muskets and deck guns. So, as long as there is still some method to actually deny someone the opportunity to board, sure, realistically matching speeds should make boarding possible. But there just needs to be some way of stopping people from actually attempting it, which right now is keeping your speed up.