BluewaterMP

I vote - Arranged PVP: Leaderboards, tournaments, pvp events, duels and ow duel flags, balancer improvements (19 votes [8.44%] I see the War and Peace mechanics option is dominating early. I would warn that I feel this poll overly represents the vocal minority - the subset of players involved enough to post regularly on forums are likely similar to those heavily involved in RvR and other end game type activities. My feeling is for the broader, silent majority of the players the real need is for easier access to PvP. I'm a semi casual, about to hit Post Captain, and I have never once been involved in any RvR (Great Britain on PvP 2). Not for lack of wanting to, just no idea how to get involved. Focusing on end game content is not optimal at this point IMO. The player bleed is occurring in the low / middle ranks, the folks dedicated enough to make it to end game RvR stuff are already likely to stick around. Let's do things to make the game funner in the beginning / middle stages so that we can eventually have enough players for more ambitious end game content

OP - This was an excellent and well thought out post. This is the kind of constructive contributions that help drive the game forward. Haters gonna hate of course, because internet. In general, most of your suggestions are around ways to make the game more varied, interesting, and fun. The Realism Police that run these forums aren't going to be receptive to alot of them, and will likely just point to a bunch of broken mechanics that in theory should do the things that your suggestions hope to do. But I I generally support them My two cents on some of the concepts you brought up and the initial responses: Crew Hiring / Crew depletion while at sea - The problem with this is that the undercrewed penalties are so steep in this game, if you don't auto regen crew you basically have to go back to port after every battle. That is no fun. My vote is that this is one area we keep the unrealistic assumption in support of keeping the game fun. Mission Types Variety - This is a critical, necessary upgrade. I grind missions for XP like a lot of people. And as much as I love the actual combat in this game, man it gets old doing the same damn search and destroy mission hundreds of times in a row. Want to stop the hemorrhaging of the player base? Mission Variety is one of the first 3 or 4 changes that need to be implemented ASAP Hidden and Secret Zones - I feel like the Realism Police aren't going to go for this one, but to some extent it is a good idea. Right now I have almost zero incentive to explore the map. There is this massive, gorgeous Carribean overworld to play in, but as a rational player it makes the most sense to just grind missions around the same port I do all my crafting. There needs to be more incentive, then is currently in place, to explore the map. The economy / trading is not enough at all right now to make it worth me driving a few hours to other ports. I think there should be "Floating Treasure", "Hidden zones" or other random boons spawning across the OW that would give me some kind of reason to go out and explore. I want to sail around this map so bad, but there just is no reason now. Captains Log Book - YEAH. This game needs consolidated stat keeping. I should be able to go to a Captain summary page and see a detailed list of all my kills / assists, shooting %, and all kinds of other interesting metrics. This is so easy from a programming perspective, all these variables already exist, they are just not being stored / reported out explicitly. And they really should be. Talent Tree - Why not?? People above me seem to be freaking out about this taking away from the "Skill" component. That does not have to be the case at all. You just make the benefits of specialization / talent trees a little less powerful. They aren't more heavily weighted then Skill in combat, but does give tiny little advantages in the areas that you specify. The trick is just don't make the Tier benefits overly powerful, and boom, you have a fun system

I am ok with the delayed patch timeline, these things happen, but devs do owe us a fairly detailed, consolidated patch note listing as soon as they can. So that players at least know how to allocate their time in the next days Reason being, they have alluded to some significant systems changes - and right now I don't feel like playing until I understand what is changing (and what activities I currently do that are less productive in the context of the upcoming patch). Example - crafting system changes and BP drops. There have been some vague explanations that it is changing, but no details. So should I just not be crafting high level ships while I wait for an overdue patch? This would be less of a problem if patch was on time, but the more it is delayed, the more we need some kind of heads up of what we should be expecting

I think this is an excellent insight. If there were 3-5 (or more) viable ship options at each rank, instead of basically one 'best' choice and sometimes one alternative, I think that would get rid of a lot of the "grinding" oriented complaints. Right now people are forced to think very linearly about rank progression so that they can get any kind of variety in ships. Understand its E.A., and there is alot of work associated with each incremental ship added, but my two cents is that this is a great place to focus energies to get the most "bang for your buck" from development hours

Most of the changes sound pretty good. Not necessarily a ton of content, but valuable and natural tuning which is probably more critical at this stage of game. Big fan of a little more ship crew usage variability, and the store interface UI improvements are critical. I do think there are a couple of valid concerns over identities of major traders, but that can be worked out. Question on ship additions: 1) Will Niagara BP be droppable then? 2) Probably a dumb question, but Niagara buffs will only be applied to future crafted Niagara's - not existing boats, correct?