Taralin Snow

the label is handy because it allows like-minded players to more easily find one another. but yes, having a pirate "nation" with nation-like port ownership mechanics makes little sense. blocking pirate access to neutral ports makes even less sense in that context.

actually it is. that, plus something else.

pirate strategy & diplomacy. the thread title is a ruse to make this thread appear uninteresting to spies.

There's a saying in chess, "the threat is stronger than the execution". Anyone who has played a lot of chess will be familiar with this. When all this began to unfold, the threat of Pirates taking French ports was real, and we began making contingency plans. "What will we do if we lose this port or that one?" And then we realized the answer was "We will do exactly what we've been doing". So, now the Pirates own ports they neither want nor need. The French wanted them before, but thanks to the Pirates forcing us to really look hard at our situation, we have discovered that we don't actually need them. If all the Pirates packed up and sailed away tomorrow, we probably wouldn't even bother to retake them all. We might take back a couple just to make life easier for our crafters, but without a specific reason to need them to be blue on the map we'd probably just leave them as they are. So in the end what you have accomplished is to take something from us we didn't really need, and give us instead something else we did need: clarity of purpose and a common goal. So, thanks I guess.

The very first thing I did when I started this game as a brand new level 1, is leave Fort Royal and sail south, because I heard that's where the good PvP was. so, I really don't know much about these "newbro ports". what are they good for, and why would I want them?

I had no idea it was possible to like your own posts. This Changes Everything.

I am in favor of allowing pirates to capture and sail anything they can get their hands on. And I'm in favor of allowing them to use those ships to foul things up for the nationals, for example by raiding their ports and flipping them to neutral. As a Frenchman, why would I have any objection to pirates turning the ports of our hated enemies neutral? And if you dare accuse me of paying the pirates to do so, I will have you know that was a ransom payment to secure the safe return of my kidnapped cousin, nothing more. Also, regarding the idea of murdering your way into the pirate biz, how about this: you start as a national, then kill some number x of your own teammates (and I like the idea of having to kill players rather than NPCs). anyway, once you do that you appear as a "pirate" to players of that nation, but you appear as "neutral" to all other nations. in order to appear as a pirate to other nations, you need to kill some of their people too. maybe if there's some kind of diplomacy mechanic you might appear as "fugitive" or "pirate" to allies of nations you've betrayed. So if indiscriminate mayhem is your thing, murder everybody and be flagged as a pirate to every national player. But if you choose more carefully you can be declared by the British as a pirate, and still find yourself flagged as neutral by the Dutch and the French. and if neutral players were allowed to enter ports, I could see a pirate making a nice side income as a smuggler, using their 'neutral' status to get into ports a national player can't. But for this to work there would need to be a lot of national navy NPCs sailing around looking for pirates. Otherwise everybody who aspires to be a smuggler (aka "free trader") would just pick some faraway underpopulated faction to betray, and what would be the risk there? If there aren't any Swedish players hunting pirates in the Yucatan, there should at least be Swedish Navy NPCs there, tasked to bring Swedish murderers to justice, by noose, sword or cannonball.

2/24 Pedernales Participation Players by Rank Rank French Pirate 3 2 3 4 3 6 5 5 4 6 13 8 7 2 4 Players by Clan [PURGE] 12 [LMN] 6 [18E] 3 [EA] 1 [J4LP] 1 no tag 2 [bSO] 9 [sIN] 7 [TSP] 4 [AUSNZ] 2 [FC] 2 [CF] 1

You say that as if you thought sailing an hour round trip (with favorable wind) was a good thing, equally as good (or better than) sailing 5 minutes for it. Saint Joseph is about the same distance as Kingstown, and time spent sailing there is time we could be PvPing instead. Do you seriously have players in your clan that like hauling cargo long distances? Is that why you thought we'd like it too? The fact that you don't understand why this was such a terrible deal for us does not bode well for your future as the official diplomat for CF. You're offering polished turds and claiming they're gold nuggets. I am beginning to suspect that the Dunning-Kruger effect is at work here.

Yeah, I think we have a couple of RP'ers that are all up in arms about retaking the ports near our capital. Nobody takes them seriously.

Oh, and how could I forget? Read the US PVP2 - Bounty on PURGE SLAMZ thread on Reddit.

If you want to know where a big part of that notoriety is coming from, look at Slamz's post history. If that's too much trouble just read the PVP2 Vive La France thread. Really just the first page of that thread will tell you all you need to know.

That's exactly what happened. Not even being sarcastic. What you don't seem to realize is, that neutral port was where a lot of us had outposts, because it was the only accessible port in the area with iron and hemp. Your "deal" was for us to give up our only iron/hemp port and try to scratch up resources elsewhere. Maybe one of the British ports you so graciously offered to let us attack might have had iron/hemp, or maybe not. We didn't know. What we did know is that the one local port where we knew we could get iron & hemp, you wanted us to let you lock us out of it. Obviously the answer was going to be no, and obviously we took immediate steps to defend it.

Ok, this I can believe. Why can't the pirates defend their shallow ports the same way the French have been defending Pedernales? Because they have too many knuckleheads bringing Basic Cutters to port battles.

2/23 Pedernales Participation Players by Rank Rank French Pirate 3 1 2 4 4 6 5 6 5 6 9 6 7 1 4 Players by Clan [PURGE] 11 [LMN] 5 [18E] 2 no tag 3 [sIN] 9 [bSO] 8 [FC] 4 no tag 2

The Pirates should certainly be able to defend their key shallow water ports in the Bahamas, but they can't defend all of them. They're outnumbered up there the same way we're outnumbered down south, which means they can't defend as many ports as the enemy can attack. They have to pick certain ones to defend and let the others go, like we've done in the south. I think the key difference in the situations is that they had an area on the map they could retreat to, so there was less of a need for them to hold out where they were. We don't have any particularly good places to go so we have much more incentive to stay. You could say we're backed into a corner at Pedernales. The lesson to be learned here is: it is much easier to push an enemy out of an area when they have someplace to retreat to.

Pirates should get to use neutral ports also, and they should have the ability to raid a national port and turn it into a neutral one.

This is what crying looks like: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/10855-ships-joining-friendly-battle-and-griefing/

As a clan, [PURGE] is not in favor of having safe PvE zones. Not for us, and not for anybody else. Newbie areas may be the only exception, where some of us will concede that too much PvP too soon can cause new players to become frustrated with the game, rather than excited about it. But really our preference is to fight other players, preferably for something more important than the pink slips for their shiny new boats, but we'll play for that if the larger objectives (like ports) are out of our reach. And if there are gentlemen's agreements in place that say "no chain shot" or "no ganking mission runners" or "no capturing ports in this area" just keep in mind we're not gentlemen. It really would be better to think of [PURGE] as French boucaniers (buccaneers in modern parlance). We haven't forgotten why people choose to be pirates, but there's more to being a pirate than choosing to play on the Pirate team. From where we're sitting it looks like too many "pirates" have forgotten this.

I kind of thought they might be some kind of leveling clan for newbies, but then I saw that they have higher level players than we do (and bigger ships) so I thought maybe not. But this does explain a lot.

Apparently [bSO] really is a 'beginners' clan. Since they had higher level players than we do I thought they weren't, but apparently they are. So now we know. Confirmation here: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/9846-pvp2-us-political-situation-info-needed/page-11#entry195687

dawn is way too early to be awake.

stupid port battle timers. how about setting the window when people are on? nobody wants to be up at that hour.

I think the French down south have their hands full right now with [bSO]. And [sIN] and [FC] if we can figure out where they're hiding. I think we're outnumbered by those clans alone, never mind the rest of the pirates. I doubt [OMG] or [CF] will have to worry very much about what the southern French are doing as long as we're busy fighting the southern pirates. Of course that does mean we'll be too busy fighting [bSO] etc to be able to offer you any assistance against the US. Assuming we had any interest in sailing 5 hours to reach them, which seems unlikely as long as we have people to shoot at where we are now. I really hope an upcoming patch changes the nation mechanics so that pirates can actually be pirates. I think the game would be a lot more interesting if they were a 'wild card' faction instead of being just another nation, especially if they had the unique ability to convert national ports to neutral ones (and of course the ability to access neutral ports). Really a big reason the Pirates and French are fighting so bitterly in the south is because we can't share access to neutral ports. Once a neutral port gets captured, every other nation gets locked out, which leads to teams taking ports they don't really want to own just to ensure they themselves don't get locked out by someone else. Not the only reason of course, the reinforcement bubble is handy too, but a big one.

It's important to keep in mind that, just like every nation, the Pirate nation is essentially just a collection of clans, and they're not always on the same page. Sometimes they're not even reading the same book. Down in the southeast corner of the map, I haven't noticed any [CF] pirates bothering us lately. Last few days it's been mostly [bSO], and maybe 1 or 2 and [sIN]. At last night's port battle in Pedernales there were 17 [bSO], 1 [sIN] and 1 [FC]. I don't know which pirate clans showed up at Cano Araguabisi and La Trinite. Since those last 2 are deep water ports, maybe the higher level pirates all went there? Is [bSO] a leveling guild for lowbie pirates? edit: I got curious so I looked at a screenshot from Pedernales last night to see what the levels were. Pirates: 1 [bSO] 1 [bSO] 0 6 [bSO], 1 [sIN], 1 [FC] 1 [bSO] 5 [bSO] 2 [bSO] French: 0 0 1 [PURGE], 1 (no tag) 3 [PURGE], 1 [18E], 3 (no tag) 3 [PURGE], 2 [18E], 1 (no tag) 4 [PURGE], 1 [18E], 1 (no tag) so I have to say [bSO] doesn't look much like a leveling guild, with 2 rank 7's. but they are clearly an active/growing guild because they at least brought a couple rank 1/2 players while the French brought none.