[MCC] Die Antwoord

You are missing the point here. A game is a business. If a business has little to no clients, it dies. The carebears or whatever you want to call them are supporting the game by making it viable monetarily, by providing money for the dev studio to actually improve all aspects of the game. This game might be PVP, but despite what the devs say, it does not have PVP at it's core. The huge map, the small player base, the HUGE grind to become meaningless, etc. are all things that go against this game being core PVP. What do hardcore PVP games have in common? Little to no investment/grind and instant action... I don't see how this game could ever evolve towards that without radically changing. All that said, there are many ways to promote and incite PVP. An achievement and mission system that involves killing players for instance... 1 kill = Murderer 500xp, 10k gold 100 kills = Conquerer 20k xp 150k gold 1000 kills = God 50k xp, 500k gold Participate in a 25 on 25 battle = xp+gold Participate in 1, 5, 10 small battles Participate in 1, 5, 10 large battles Participate in 1, 5, 10 defended port battles Die 1, 5, 10, 100x to enemy players Mission: Kill 3 Frigates+ ships (condition: the 3 players must be of different nationalities) Mission: Sink 10 french players Mission: Cap a British player Pavel Mission: Get in the protection bubble of all nation capitals Mission: Kill 10 players after they have called in reinforcements etc. All this would promote PVP if the rewards are good enough and are complex enough to be hard to farm/exploit. Kicking out or shunning the PVE guys is not how you do it... Drawning them to PVP via necessity or monetary/progression gain is a damned good way. I'll think on it and create a suggestion thread in the appropriate section... I think it would be nice

The pirate on pirate exploit accusation is a serious one, I hope you have proof to back it up. I can't say I never had doubts myself, but despite having several people close to these guys I could never get confirmation about any of them using any kind of exploit. Without giving out names two guys in my clan were fishy in that reguard and again, I have never caught them in the act nor have I ever had any other player give me proof or even substantial gossip to back it up. So please, if you do have proof, put it forward or at the very least provide it to the devs. I would be the first to kick anyone doing this out of our clan, cheating and exploiting is bad for the game and I have strong convictions and principles against it. I also know for a fact most accusations that come without proof are baseless. All that said, to get back on topic, the issue is not the server but the game. Our pop cut in half... So did all other servers... The game is bleeding, not the server.

Don't mistake my point of view as an anti-pvp one. I'm with you on both of these, leveling exclusively through pvp should definitely be viable, at the very least equal in time spent vs doing pve. I'd also argue trading and crafting should both be rewarded in some way. Ultimately I would like a game where every player can chose his activities based on his preference and still be relevant, and be able to do all, some or only one of them and not gimp himself in the process. In a month from now if nothing changes port battles will be 25 Santismas vs 25 Santismas... That ain't good. Maybe port battles should be like nation battles with a set and equal number of ships and BR. People that join would be assigned to ships, higher ranked players having first picks and any attackers vs defenders diff would be filled by NPC captains.. This way all port battles would be equal BR and skill would determine who wins.

If this game was pvp only there would be less than 250 people playing it. This is a simple fact, a vast majority of gamers have little to no interest in pvp. The fact they are playing a pvp game on a pvp seever does not chanve that fact unfortunately for the hardcore pvp players. The world is too big, the pop is too low and the alternative gameplay elements, as bland as they may seem are simply removing the focus on pvp. Now wheter this is a good or bad thing thats extremely subjective. I think the key could be a revamp of the small/large battle system. It needs to be deeper, more personal, nationalized, clan-based even, etc. France and US on both end of the world want to measure epeens? No need tp travel for 4 hours... Just create a large battle where only france and us can join and duke it out...

Remove teleports, increase open sea speeds by 3-4x and all the problems are solved all while making the game a lot more fun and increasing pvp encounters. Or perhaps leave a teleport but call it charter instead. You pay X gold to move from a port to another but it takes 1 hour real time during which you cannot play. No ship or goods are moving with you, you are essentially boarding a trader ship as a passenger, without any interaction. This would be best used wheb you are stopping your game session, in prevision of what you'll want to do during your next. This prevents instant teleports, cargo exploits, ship moving and using teleports to defend ports. I said 1h but it could be 4, its rather irrelevant at that point, so long as its long enough to not be able to teleport and defend.

Uh guys, you realize you can do small battles, large battles, cap trade ships, hit NPC small ships, hit player small/trade ships, all solo, at any level, in a Cutter, right? If it takes you more than 2-3 hours to buy an AI Constitution and work your way from there, you are a terrible, terrible player. This whole thread is a non-issue. I'm not against having a way to delete your char and start over, but the mission/money issue is not even remotely a valid argument.

The new crew system already works like that as far as I know... If you only use the same side all the time, that side has full crew reloading it. If you use both side, you'll notice that both sides reload slower as your crew is split, you even have entire decks stop reloading sometimes... Overall with a full crew, the default crew assignment to gunnery is too high for just one side, but too low to do both sides. When you look at the numbers on the button you see how much crew you have and how many are required to reload ALL guns simultaneously. On my 3rd rate for example, that number is something like 714 from memory and I only have 484 guys assigned to guns by default? This means that if I fire a full broadside, about 350 guys are reloading that side... but when I fire ALL guns, I'll only have 240ish guys on each side, slowing my reload by that much. So basically. nobody is picking their nose, unless there is just no place for them to be... Lets say it takes 8 guys to reload a gun... Putting 20 on it won't help, they'll just be in the way.

Agreed. In that regard, I would really like the devs to consider making the difficulty level for nations when new players chose one to be dynamic and based on different factors, like how many ports were won/lost in the last week, how many ports are owned vs other nations, how many PVP sinks were done, average rank in nation, average crafting level in nation, relative number of active players, etc. I don't know how Sweden is listed in terms of difficulty right now, but I would put them pretty high on the list based on that info. I think a lot of nations on PVP evolved from their announced difficulty level. Then again, this would probably make USA the "super easy" nation, just as it is now, and draw in lots of new players trying the game. When I first started playing this game, I went US because it said very easy and I was a total noob to the game, I wanted to learn before I went "hard mode", that's just a natural thing to do for lots of players. Lets just say M. Wedges didn't chose the easiest way to enjoy the game. Not saying he can't, lots of players went French when the odds were stacked against them and really enjoyed that, but it might not be the kind of game play everyone is looking for. Pirates a week ago for example with only Mortimer left would be a terrible choice as a brand new player with fleets of US and Brit players camping their capital day and night...

The API files are updated once a day on maintenance so the values are not live, but max 24h old.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would like to remind the Britisb that the amount of pirates that switched to France is very small compared to the pirate player base. OMG is the only clan that went french as far as I know and they said they had 20 members but I only ever saw the same 6-7 guys so I'm guessing they had max 10-12 active players when they made the switch. To put things in perspective, CF and Invictus combined had 40-50 active players online every night for a good while (not so much by the time OMG jumped ship). So stop saying the pirates went french... A handfull of them did... CF went dutch (approx 30 of us from the original crew).. Invictus went Brit (not sure on numbers but they were bigger than us when they switched so I'm guessing similar numbers at the very least).

Been in several 25 vs 25 on my comp which is definitely not a slouch and I was lagging pretty bad... Playable, but barely. Anything bigger than this I don't think anyone could handle but the top 1% players who always have the latest hardware. Locking a game to super high tier computer is not a good strategy.. especially for a niche game like this one. I do like the BR idea though, but I would keep the limit at 25 vs 25, it's already pretty demanding.

I would like the rudder to be like sails, with infinite adjustment either way and a key to bring it back to center. Very often going straight or going full turn is not the best option, ie: when turning and trying to keep an enemy ship in your sights. Would be nice to set it half way so I don't have to constantly readjust my heading to keep my broadside aligned.

You keep hitting that nail Slamz and while I agree with it, you have to understand that it is totally biased towards your personal interests. PVP is one aspect of the game and I would say that a majority of players even on PVP servers do not have this activity as their main priority. I'm a good example of this, I like to experiment all a game has to offer, so I do a bit of everything. I do PVP, I do missions, I do crafting, I do trading, I do social, I do politics, implicate myself in clan leadership, etc. While I enjoy PVP, I could do without for a week and not be bothered by it. I know many other people who live for PVP, if it ain't PVP it's sh**, and they log on and if there is no PVP action within 5 minutes, they log out and go play Rust, COD, CS or whatever other instant action game because that is what they crave. Ultimately, the game needs to cater to all types of players and make each possibly activity interesting and captivating. Missions as they are clearly are placeholders, they will introduce better ones eventually... Same with everything else. As for the grind, it's real whatever your interests are. I would argue that your PVP-centric interests make it much worse, you guys are behind the curve in terms of XP/rank because of it and I would argue that it should NOT be the case... Spending all your time trading, crafting, missioning, PVPing, etc. should all give more or less the same gross XP progression, maybe with perks... PVP a lot? Get a small boost to PVP XP and even maybe some special upgrades (PVP planking for instance that protects a bit more and doesn't reduce speed as much?), trade a lot? Get better prices at ports, more gold rewards from missions, cheaper repairs, etc... Mission a lot? Get a damage/XP bonus vs AI ships... etc... This way everybody can do what they want and get stuff related to their main interests...

2 weeks ago yes. While the subject has been beaten to death, long story short we were the original clan that moved to Aves on day 1 of tbe steam release. We had an alliance with Invictus and OMG to comquer and hold the Camp du Roy area. OMG left because they were in a hurry to get pvp, Invictus left for god knows what reason and it left only us, on the decline activity-wiwe to defend 15ish ports on our own.. We were down to approx 10 active members in that area. There was another similar alliance holding the south but they were much less experienced and unable to stand on their own. We had no interest in holding the south, they had no interest in holding the CDR area... So long story short, the pirates were dead at that point and we needed a break from the drama and lack of cooperation. We held a clan meeting to see if we were going to help down south, move back to Mortimer or perhaps try to operate from free ports to harrass nations, etc. A million ideas were thrown around but ultimately lots of us had eyes on the Dutch as well as some connections there. We voted and 95% members were for the Dutch switch so that's that. We do not regret a single bit and we will be staying Dutch, this is not a temparary situation.

Not saying it should give as much as making a ship does but 1xp per note is bs. Making parts and botes should give at least some xp but not be a good way to level fast. Half xp / hour vs ship would be a good balance imho..

Need moar dutchies! Come talk to us and see how you fit in!

From my experience, the gist of the players we lost was because of waning interest in the game as opposed to people leaving for other servers or factions, etc. As an example. CF back at it's height as pirates had 58 total members, over half of that number online every single night. On the weekend we voted for the Dutch switch, we still had 58 members, but at the highest of the night we had 8 online. These are not players that left for other nations or servers, these are players that deserted the game itself. Our peak server activity went down about 40% in the last 2 weeks and the same numbers can be seen on PVP1. I can only conclude that approx 40% of the GAME's population got disinterested in the game. While this is somewhat normal for any new game after this amount of time, I'm a bit concerned at the lack of new players to replace them. We do see new faces, but we're definitely losing more players than we gain over the course of a week, so the game IS dwindling down. Ultimately it comes down to what I said in another post... Content is a bit slow to come (I applaud the big patch we just had, but more frequent/smaller patches would definitely do good for the game pop), the price tag for the game is too steep for many potential new buyers, the XP curve is one hell of a grind for the average player, etc... It's not the server which is dying, it's the game IMHO... slowly but surely.

I think you are pretty much spot on on all you said. The only thing I'd add though is the whole British as a zerg nation image results from US lies, they lots A LOT of active players in recent weeks and the level of unity between the multiple now small to tiny clan is extremely low, with a lot of opposing views and none of them helping the others for the most part. The US on the other hand can still in relatively short time pull numbers that are huge compared to any nation right now, even with their multiple high action fronts. I wouldn't be surprised if the US had at least twice as many active players as the Brits and they appear to have higher unity as well, even though they are not working as one, they do come together to defend their turf (that cannot be said of the Brits). One thing is sure, the whole server pop went down by approx 40% in the last 2 weeks. If the trend maintains this server will be dead a couple weeks fro now.

Yep, not sure what happened, heard runors of USS xfers and peeps coming from pvp1 to help? Either way ggz

I don't know of anyone besides CF that went Dutch... Could be wrong though. Not even single guys or anything, just us AFAIK.

This is unrealistic and pointless. I've been trading ships in and out of nation using free ports and alts ever since I started playing and I feel it promotes international trade and balances out the markets. Most ships on the market are way over priced anyway... So such trades are usually done player to player to begin with. I've imported several Trincos to pirates back when they were priced close to a million gold by our "fellow" pirates... Other nations were selling them for 250-400k all over the place. Capitalism at its best.

The prices being charged for Exceptional ships were already ridiculous... This is going to more than double them. I'm on PVP2, perhaps on PVP1 ships are much cheaper, I don't know... but getting the money to buy an Exceptional 3rd rate or Pavel on PVP2 was an undertaking before the patch and now it's not even worth it... High end notes were already going for 100k+ last night...

In fact it appears there is a new bug introduced by the patch causing exactly this. One of my clan mates lost all his stuff in the capital last night. He was in a Tombado trying to teleport back home to Willemsted and when he hit teleport, his Willemsted outpost was removed, no warning or confirmation and his teleport went on cooldown without moving him there. We challenged him, figuring he messed up and pressed abandon instead of teleport but reading this thread now, it looks like it might actually be a bug. Fortunately, my clan mate didn't have all that much stuff in that outpost, but he did loose an Exceptional Trincomalee and several capped ships he had there and possibly some mats/upgrades and other random items.

I agree the cost offset was too small, but I think they really went overboard. Went from 100% of the pop making notes to 2% able to and not wanting to....

Also, my clan is actually considering organizing port-cap exhanges with neighbors just to get notes. I think the fact we're even thinking about this is a symptom of how bad the situation is.