KrakkenSmacken

I was, and yes, that is what it used to be like to be a pirate. In fact I was always very much on the side that being a pirate should be harder. But it's not harder, its just stupefyingly boring now. You used to be able to find enough traders (AI and Real) that even owning a resource hub was unnecessary, you used to be able to rely on AI outpost production purchases to fill the gaps, and you used to be able to supply your own needs from any countries starting resource construction abilities. That's what I am saying. With every change they have made to make the economy part of the game "more realistic", and "challenging", they have eroded the game being fun. They are also making it more impossible, less action, more sea trucker, and far less appealing. I just watched my third guild completely disintegrate and have no more active players, with long time players/acquaintances handing off resources and ships to me, because they know they are not coming back. I won't bother to do that with the upcoming wipe, even if I could find one of them online. Just this week I had a couple of spare hours, and chose to watch "Fantastic 4" rather than log into this game. Mother of God, how bad must it be that I figured I would get more entertainment from that POS than NA? Let me repeat that in case you missed it. Fantastic 4 has more appeal to me now than playing NA. It's the Job of the developers to make a game fun, and put that fun in the hands of the players, not fight against human nature at every turn to try to create the "experience" they seem to be wanting players to participate in. Whistle past the grave all you like, and keep finger pointing at the players being the problem, but the end result will be the same. No players and no game. Shame really, because the idea has such potential.

Um, I would need to have multiple out of nation free port outposts to use that, assuming they even sold what I was looking for. You ever had to shop out of nation for silver? Try it some time, see what I mean. No player trades, and assume your nation holds no silver mines so you have to smuggle and actually find some for sale in enemy ports. The mechanics as intended are designed to force nations to win, or be completely unable to build new ships. Try that as a new player and see how long you enjoy the experience.

My main has enough mats from the old system to build probably 10-15 Santi with "stuff just lying around", as you put it, but I started over with a new account, in a less popular nation, on a new server, and refused to trade directly with players for profit. (Could have sold my lvl 50 crafter hours or harvested fine woods for boatloads). I was trying to see if the conditions for a new player were fun or not. Even being able to build up to a Santi, I spent as I mentioned over 12 hours just looking for enough silver to build a non upgraded frigate. (Needs furniture). Add to that the several hours I spent gathering the funds and other resources to get to that point, I put in well over 24 hours into a new account, 16 of those simply trading and selling to get enough cash to work up to construction. another 6 looking for any enemy trader I could poach. (Found 2). 22/24 hours of sailing looking for mats is not exciting game play by any stretch, and I actually know what I am doing with the markets etc. A new player would have had an even less exciting time than me. The "realism" and "challenge" has become nothing but a huge and pointless time sink. May as well play progress quest.

Fixed that for you. I have these things called screen savers that are just as beautiful, and have more variety. 12 hour of real time empty sailing just to find one mat, to make one ship, is not exciting. This coming from a player with over 1700 hours of experience on how to get mats and deal with trading. Oh and for the record, this new forum model sucks badly. I used to be able to two click to find all the threads I had comments in and had changed, and after half an hour of trying to figure it out, I still haven't. Good design is like a joke, if you have to explain it, it isn't. Probably done here now.

Problem is, that all the place holder mechanics keep getting replaced by new mechanics that are less fun, more work, and just plain worse than the simplistic placeholders. It's like the devs are deliberately squeezing the fun out of the game one update at a time, in an effort to make things more challenging or realistic. Here is a news flash, "realistic" is not always fun. I really had very high hopes with the RvR refactor, but they never did answer that critical question I asked long ago when it was first brought up, "What do you do with the time between hitting the hostility cap and the 48 hour later port battle? " Turns out the answer was not much of anything actually, just go look around at all the beautiful scenery, and grind trade mats. I personally spent over 12 hours looking for a way to get my hands on silver with a new account. Sailing everywhere in range, smuggling from local ports, setting up smuggler purchase orders in enemy ports that produce, hunting traders in and around those ports in hope of a score. Total silver for all that time, 60. Hard and challenging does not equal time investment and difficult to work around, which is exactly the direction all the "new" and final non place holder mechanics seem to be heading.

Another possible dura model. Ok, I was just checking out another games (Crowfall), handling of item damage/decay, that has a very similar problem to NA regarding ship loss, and the had a different solution that could be used in NA. Adapted to NA, instead of DURA, give ships a lifetime repair limit. What this would mean is that a second value for a ship is kept, that tracks all damage sustained, and when that reaches zero, the ship can no longer be repaired. Loss of a ship in combat would split the total life damage between the two ships, and if below a minimum threshold, would indicate only the captured ship remains, or as with a 1 dura system, every capture is a total ship loss, while being sunk may only remove a full ships worth of total life damage. This could be tuned for more granular control than simple dura, and would insure that no matter how careful one was with their ship, eventually it would simply wear out.

As a developer, if the reason is a DB change that can not support the new format, then everything in the DB will need to be purged. If it's the ships tables, then say goodbye to ALL ships. I would suspect that with the changes to the construction model, the BP records and formulas would also all change, so odds are the BP's will go as well. I would actually hope that would happen if the ships do, so we can test how hard the BP drops are given there will be no way to increase you chances of a BP drop by building a "higher quality" ship.

Pretty much this. Don't confuse "interesting" with "fun" 14:00

I honestly do not understand why this keeps being circled back to. What is the advantage to the PLAYERS, and how is it more fun, to increase the rate at which ships are lost and have to be replaced? Stay away from "realistic" and address the entertainment value of it. This is not a real war, it's supposed to be fun. 1 Dura ships remove every attachment a player has to ships. No personality, no sense of owner ship, just disposable zeros and ones, with willingness to fight/play the game tied to how much sacrifice/time a player has to do to constantly replace lost productivity/time. Tie that in with the current mechanics around labor hours, (which I actually think are pretty good), and you are directly limiting how long a player who isn't that good and keeps losing ships, will be able to play the game. If the goal is to keep everyone from being in the highest rated ships all the time, then I think you have already gone a good way with the crew costs and splinter damage. Please point me to any successful game where after a loss of a single battle you are effectively locked out of playing the game for several hours while you wait for your labor resources to accumulate. Now, because I hate just criticizing without a suggestion. Remove Dura completely from the system. Since we are getting rid of "special", when you are sunk, and all captured ships are "grey", your custom ship has to go in to dock for refit/repair. Each ship has a several cost options in labor hours/materials for refit/repair. I would allow for labor hours to go into the negative for this, with a surcharge added if that's what you did. In this way you can ALWAYS get back into your favorite ship, and more importantly, keep playing, but it costs you more in the long run if you keep losing your ship. Bottom line, less Dura and availability will always hurt the casual player way more than those who have a veritable library of ships accumulated. The former would be blocked from play, and the latter will have enough backup ships to use whatever type they want regardless of attempts at restriction on numbers.

Test run day one. 3 hrs from 0, new Character on PvP1, No interaction with any players economy wise. Earned over 300k including 18k from 3 level 1 missions. I am in a Green Surprise purchased from docs. Only had one round trip with the 500 holds, every other thing was done in a basic cutter. I still believe an asset reset would be pointless.

This is exactly the way the economy will behave in your "3 months" regardless. How it operates now will be how it operates again. It does not matter how much is stockpiled, it matters what the true breaks are on the economy, labor hour production, and what you can do with them. If they have too many assets, (as I have for example), they will continue to sit on them, (as I do). You know, I may just decide now is the time to give that test a run. I'll jump solo onto PvP1, and see just how long it takes me to become a multi millionaire without even dealing with players and their surplus. I bet it won't be more than a few days. Oh and ppfffttt all you like, the impact of asset loss on game population is a reality, well known and well understood for years. If you really care about the game, you would do well to research the matter a bit more before suggesting what I think would cause the game to commit seppuku. Admin has already discussed this earlier in the thread, so he knows the risk. "The nuclear blast would be extreme if we wiped everything. We will only do them if it becomes absolutely necessary."

I think the opposite is true, that you can not test the system when all players start with nothing. I think that because eventually and quickly, as happens in all MMO games, there are going to be those players with more assets than they know what to do with. How the economy operates under those conditions is far more important than how it works from zero, as that condition is going to be the "normal" state of the game moving forward. The only reason to test a wipe, is if that wipe is part of the normal operation of the game, as in if the conquest cycle eventually ends in a victory/wipe. In that case it would be critical to see how the system starting from zero behaves. Otherwise it's a pointless exercise that will only represent at most 2-3 weeks of recovery, then a new normal almost identical to the current state, at the risk of losing a huge number of players who continue now largely because they have invested time as represented by current assets. tldr; If the economy can't work with surplus assets and currency being held by some players, which will happen eventually, it simply does not work.

Your mixing purpose here. The entire purpose of the rookie zone is for rookie training, its in the name, not to crown a "King of 1v1". You should be learning the basics here, in a more controlled environment. 3v1 = Niagara + Rattle snake VS Snow. If the purpose is rookie training, then 3v1 trains them in one thing, that they get seal clubbed badly in the rookie zone and they will get eaten alive in the real world. Talk about a disincentive to play.

Ping is partly governed by the speed of light, which is how fast electrical signals travel. There is no network on the planet that can beat that limitation, so no matter how good your connection is, traveling across the ocean and back will always add the speed of light distance minimum. Until we get quantum entangled networks that is.

As long as that model is consistent for all players, as in the delay is long enough that everyone is affected the same, that is a very reasonable accommodation. Adding in the audio at the button press, sooner rather than later, so that the "fire" command is heard immediately, and then the cannons fire near the end of the shout, will make a HUGE difference it game flavor and not feeling like slow fire is lag. Player expectations from twitch and experience tells us that every time you click, you fire instantly, and any delay is lag. You have that to battle, and audio cues is a great way to do that. "You don't have to change much to change everything"