Taralin Snow

This is an excellent point. I am on PVP2 playing on the French team, and at one point we were down to just a couple of ports. You couldn't do any kind of crafting without risk due to the pirates that were taking all our ports (unless you were willing to sail 6 hours from the SE corner of the map up to Texas and Louisiana where there were still some French ports). It was scary running cargo through areas where pirates were fleeting, doing missions, and hunting French, but if you wanted to craft you had no choice. But you know what? It was also exhilarating, and if you think that moving cargo is rewarding, you haven't (1) successfully moved cargo right under the noses of your enemies or (2) successfully seized resources you need from those same enemies, to use to make ships to fight them with. I do not know how to teach those other traders how much of the game they're missing. This may just be another case of "the threat is worse than the execution". Losing cargo stings but is quickly forgotten. But for those who have never lost a cargo, the fear of loss can be crippling, much more so than any actual loss would ever be.

If it helps you understand my motivation at all, I will tell you that I am a crafter and producer mostly. I don't like being so far away from the front line; I would prefer to play with my friends but I often find myself unable to join them because my teleport is on cooldown after using it for some crafting-related task. You might think that the solution to this problem is easy -- just reduce the teleport cooldown so that I can use it more often. But I think that while this is personally convenient for me, it is damaging to the game as a whole, and especially damaging to the smaller teams. A small team has a good chance against a larger team if they wait for an opportunity when the larger team is elsewhere. But with teleports the large team is never truly someplace else because they can easily teleport back to you. For the sake of the small teams I really think teleports need to be eliminated. Even if this makes things less convenient for me personally. As for traders risking ganks? I think it's important for the game that rewards come with risks. I do not see any reason why trading should be both profitable and risk free both at the same time. Low-risk trade should give minimal profits. High-risk trade should give lots of profit. Staggering amounts of profit to the trader if he can successfully move his cargo, and staggering amounts of profit to the raider who can manage to steal it. The safest places to do trading should be the places where you have the most teammates, so they can help you avoid ganks. The "quiet" parts of the map should have NPC pirates to keep things interesting.

Before the player production patch, there was no reason you couldn't craft or trade on the front line. Need a ship made? All you have to do is find a port where both you and your crafter of choice have an outpost and meet there. Hand over a cargo ship full of parts (which you could make anywhere, using resources you could get nearly anywhere), he clicks out a ship and hands it back to you. Done. Need to move your main warehouse to a new port? Just load up a Traders Snow (or several if you have lots of stuff) and sail it over. No problem (aside from the risk of ganks, but that just makes it more fun by giving you choices -- you decide if you want more trips in smaller faster ships, or fewer trips in slower ships, or maybe you will just wait for friends to escort you). Really the high cost of shipyards is the only reason you can't continue to do this now. Because shipbuilders are tied down to ports where they have made expensive investments, they can't easily move. And since shipbuilders are typically the players with high craft levels (because shipbuilding is the only thing that earns a lot of crafting xp) you need to go to them for upgrades as well. If we could find a way to move buildings (mostly shipyards since the other buildings are *almost* cheap enough to just tear down and rebuild) then we really could live on the front lines, or just a few ports back from it. And if we could do that, we would hardly need teleports at all. I think that the desire for more/faster teleports is a symptom of a deeper problem, that players find themselves forced to be in too many parts of the map. You should be able to pick a place on the map to play, and play the whole game there (producing, crafting, trading (with the locals), open sea battles and port battles, all of it). Moving should be a gradual thing, not done by warping from one end of the map to the other. If you need to teleport somewhere to participate in a port battle, the real question should be why aren't there players there already who can take care of it? Why do you need to be there? If there are already defenders there let them handle it. If there are no defenders there then why does your team need that port at all? If you are on the attacking side then why do you even want to participate in something so far removed from the part of the map you're in now? If the reason you need to teleport is because your team won't have enough players there otherwise, then what you are really doing is using the teleport mechanic as a Force Multiplier (letting a smaller group of players exert more force than they could without assistance) and in that case you need to remember that the higher-population team can do this as well (even more so) which means that teleports end up helping the strong team get stronger. This doesn't seem to me to be the right direction to go.

Naval Action runs well on a Dell Precision M6700 (Intel Core i7 3740QM, 16GB RAM, nVidia Quadro K3000M 2GB, 1920x1080, Windows 7 Pro).

I seem to recall reading that Camp Du Roy would go back to being a Free Town with the next content patch (then at the next port reset it will go back to being neutral again). So that change is coming too?

Merging when you have assets on both servers is tough. There are two easy options (neither terribly good): 1. Allow multiple characters per server, and force a rename if needed during merge so that your characters have unique names. 2. Delete any existing character on the target server being merged to. This is prone to problems if players don't plan/prepare properly. The good options are of course not easy.

That would work if you read the entire JSON into an in-memory string before you start parsing any of it, but my parser reads directly from the incoming http stream to avoid needless use of memory. By the time I read the last few bytes of the http response, the bulk of the JSON has already been parsed. I suppose it's possible to apply regex scanning to a stream rather than an in-memory string but I wouldn't call it easy. Of course this idea of using a regex may still be a useful tactic for others, even if it does not help me. I don't want to give the wrong impression that I think this is a bad idea, it just happens that it doesn't help in my particular situation. Incidentally, I have already solved the problem for myself although I didn't go into details on how because I didn't think anyone would be interested. What I did was amend the expression parser to also recognize a limited class of statements (specifically "var identifier = json-value-expression" but I can add others such as callback function definitions).

This would be more useful if you make 1 Bazaar thread per server.

It's a problem if you are using a language other than JavaScript. My JSON parser is written in C# and while it was able to parse JSON value expressions it was not able to parse JavaScript statements that assign JSON value expressions to variables.

I like the new system but I think notes need to be craftable about 5 levels earlier than they currently are. Also, there needs to be a way to efficiently level up crafting without having to make ships. We already have too many shipbuilders and not enough people making craft notes and ship parts, and it does not help that in order to level up crafting to make mid grade notes you need to consume valuable labor hours making things that nobody needs or wants (trader lynxes), while the things that people actually do want (planks, fittings, carriages, etc.) give paltry amounts of xp.

I'm not sure I see the value of having multiple windows on one port. If you have 3 players in 3 time zones, it seems like the easiest solution is to capture 3 ports, then have each person set their own window on one port. so everyone will have a specific port they can defend which is attackable during their own play time. if there is a particular time period that has a lot more players than the others then I'd expect to see more ports for that time. I do like the idea of a window decaying after a few days and needing to be reset. Ideally the reset takes the form of "make this port attackable during the current window" which means if you want a window of 12-14 server time, then you must log on to the game during 12-14 server time and go to that port and set the window. It would be nice if this mechanic encouraged the setting of timers that say "this port is reserved so that players in the X-Y time zone have something to attack/defend" where X-Y is a time period where players are actually on, and discouraged the setting of timers during periods when nobody is on ("we are effectively removing this port from the conquest game by setting it to a time where nobody is on."). Really what we need is a way to ensure that the distribution of port timers roughly matches the distribution of player activity. If 90% of the players play during 02-04, then around 90% of the ports should have 02-04 windows. if zero players play during 14-16 then it shouldn't be possible to set a 14-16 window. this is harder than it sounds because we don't care so much about players who are crafting or pve grinding but uninterested in port defense -- ideally we want the windows set during times that "port battle players" are on.

It's possible to have a multi-server game without any zone 'loading' screens. The original Asheron's Call did this (I suppose technically Asheron's Call 2 did as well since it used a similar engine) and I am mystified why the technique isn't used in other games as well. I suspect this is a feature that 'large world' MMO engines would have but 'small map' FPS engines would lack, and since the FPS engines generally have better graphics those are the engines that end up getting used. So for the sake of pretty FPS-style graphics, we end up with annoying FPS-style loading screens. As for the economy, I doubt it will ever be 100% player based. Just "mostly" player based. As things are now the devs have said that NPC production won't go away entirely, it will just be reduced to make player production more important. As long as we keep in mind that resource buildings are intended to be used to address resource shortages I think we will be all right regardless of population. If NPC production can keep the shops supplied with enough Lignum Vitae logs, then players don't need to make any. But if there are resources that are constantly sold out due to excessive demand, then those are exactly the things that players should be using resource buildings to make. These buildings basically put the tools needed to remove supply shortages into player hands.

On the surface this sounds like a good idea, but what if you have a main character on PVP1 and a character on PVP2 that you only occasionally play, and you decide you want to switch your PVP2 character to another nation (e.g. you aren't really "playing" on PVP2 so much as using it to research which ports have which resources so that your map tooltips don't all say "Not visited yet")? Then you would lose a rank on PVP1 as well when you haven't changed anything on PVP1 at all.

I don't get the impression that the developers are so in need of business that they want to make this a PvE game, or more to the point that they want PvE grinding to be the best way to level up: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/12026-dare-to-dream-whats-your-ideal-port-conquest-system/?view=findpost&p=215785 http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/11749-game-is-bleeding-players/?view=findpost&p=211193

There is a terminology difference at work here. For the French (and many others), "PvP" means player versus player combat, at the level of individual captains sailing individual ships. "RvR" (a term stolen from GW2 I think) is nation versus nation combat, at the level of groups of players (typically clans) working towards common goals. It is absolutely a valid RvR tactic to win a port battle by showing up with double the defenders' BR, but this RvR tactic involves no actual PvP aside from the need for individual captains to avoid making stupid mistakes that cost BR before the last tower is down. Nobody is claiming that this is somehow unfair, what we are saying is that this is bad for the game because it puts RvR behind a PvE "pay wall". Effectively it says that "in order to compete in RvR, you must pay your dues in PvE first. Lots and lots of PvE". Gating access to RvR behind PvE is what's bad for the game. In a PvE game, gating access to content behind some kind of PvE grind is common and expected. But this isn't a PvE game, it's a PvP game (this has been confirmed by admin in the past). And putting that kind of PvE grind into a PvP game isn't good for the game in terms of attracting and keeping players. It's bad for the players who can't (or won't) PvE as much, and it punishes players who didn't "get in on the ground floor" by forcing them to play to "catch up" rather than playing to "have fun". What we need is for people to be viable and competitive in RvR just by doing PvP. This can mean either making PvP rewards higher so that you can level that way just as fast as by doing PvE, or it can mean removing the gating requirements completely (e.g. removing rank requirements to crew ships in port battles). The latter is probably better because arguably the barrier to entry in RvR should be very low so that people can have fun sooner rather than later. It is not fun being told you must sit out a port battle because your rank is too low.

I think all the nationals can agree that it is important for the pirate team to be healthy and active in our enemies' waters.

A better model to consider then is Asheron's Call. In that game the map was made up of square landblocks, and each landblock resided on a particular server. There were many more landblocks than servers, which meant that typically a single server would be hosting multiple landblocks. The game client received updates for the landblock you were in, as well as updates from the 8 surrounding landblocks (the size of a landblock roughly corresponded to your 'visibility' range, so you never needed updates from landblocks further away). Landblocks could technically be moved from server to server while the game was running but this was generally avoided because it caused a visible lag spike for players. It was possible to walk from one corner of the continent to the other, transitioning across many servers, all seamlessly (no loading screens). But all that requires a fair amount of infrastructure on the back end, and your network protocols (both client-server and server-server) have to be written to support it. Asheron's Call used its own engine that took care of this (eventually they named it the 'Turbine Engine') but I have never heard of another game that did this. I think Naval Action is already too far into its development for something like this to be a reasonable possibility but I did want to point out that it is technically doable if you have it in mind from the start.

Maybe next time the Brits can draw the US defenders while the Pirates PvT an undefended port. Mix things up!

Reputation counts for very little when you can give all your stuff to a friend, delete your character, then recreate with a new name.

I noticed this too. I figured OP must have just been talking to himself because he didn't know that blue text = your team only, and white text = everyone in battle (both sides). I imagine he was getting increasingly frustrated that the "answers" he was getting were not in any way related to the statements he was making. I wonder how long OP has been doing this, talking to himself during fights? It's a good thing we friendly and helpful French are here to help educate players on how to play the game properly.

if you're trying to figure out who on the US side is involved with all these port captures, just look up who the Lord-protector of each port is: Vermiou - Senator Freeman Atchafalaya - Senator Griefer Terrebonne - Senator Griefer Nouvelle-Orleans - VictusB Biloxi - Senator Griefer Mobile - Senator Griefer Santa Rosa - Senator Griefer San Jose - Senator Griefer

if the US wants to "give" those ports back it's going to cost 2.1 million gold to make it happen. 150000 Santa Rosa 450000 Mobile 450000 Biloxi 450000 Nouvelle-Orleans 150000 Terrebonne 150000 Atchafalaya 300000 Vermiou

Has this been fixed? Because we've been taking cargoes from pirate player traders and getting more than 1 unit of whatever. If this bug only affects pirate players but not nationals then it's a really horrible and unfair bug that absolutely needs to be fixed.

I do try to remember to keep 1 unit of coal in the hold of each of my combat ships, but I had no idea other players were doing this kind of thing with actual traders ships. Sailing around with no guns and a nearly empty hold strikes me as a waste of time that could be more profitably spent doing something else. Just about *anything* else, really. edit: oh, a game bug. that makes more sense.

I'm going to agree with Obliterati on this: the pirates would have won at Puerto de Espana if they could have kept their BR advantage for just 30 more minutes. MVP for the French may very well be that third rate pirate captain who got himself sunk needlessly. As MVP for the Pirates I'd nominate Artemis Pain, who successfully targeted and sunk damaged French, costing us a lot of BR.