Musuko42

Translation: "We shouldn't have to organise ourselves properly; everyone else should have to do all the leg-work instead."

Normally, I find the smack-talk pretty crass. But this time, I had to laugh at HMS Delusional. XD

I'll try to. I'm afraid I don't understand what point you are trying to make with your edit. Can you clarify?

One player, who isn't a diplomat, and who doesn't speak for the faction (nor even officially for his clan), put forward a peace proposal, and you take that to mean the whole British faction is having an attack of the vapours, dropping their monacles into their port, and wetting themselves in fear?

Now that IS a good idea! With tweaking for exact numbers and times, of course. But I like it!

There should be ratings below basic, for captured AI ships: Worn out, Very worn out, So full of rot that it's barely afloat. They should still be a viable option...but one with severe quality drawbacks compared to purchased/crafted ships.

We all KNOW that, and want the timers to be replaced by something better. What I don't like is everyone beating up on the Aussies for having the audacity to live in a different part of the world, and for using the game mechanics as they stand in exactly the same way as everyone else does. US player sets a timer to US primetime: nobody says a word. EU player sets a timer to EU primetime: nobody says a word. Australian player sets a timer to Australian primetime: "OMG! So unfair! Exploit! Unsporting!"

Did you know that the Ausez clan holds about 40 ports? That means an Australian clan holds nearly half of the British ports. If it's unfair for them to set their ports for their prime time, then it's unfair for US/EU clans to set their ports for their prime times.

It won't be intended to keep up with player-driven politics. How players react to the semi-random element of the decrees will be the strategy. You're right; it takes away player control for where and when port battles are staged. I wouldn't say the present status-quo is "fun", though, with timers and shooting towers.

We already have to do that when another faction springs an attack just before we want to make an attack. I'm sure the AI system could be smart enough to stagger port battles intelligently, to avoid having us rush around aimlessly. Perhaps not 24 hour windows. Maybe 6 hour windows.

Crafting. I'm just going to come right out and say it: labour hours stink. I can understand the idea behind the mechanic; to prevent powergamers from grinding 24/7 and dominating the ship-building aspect of the game. The problem is, the game as it stands actively forces you away from it when you're a crafter; it makes you close the game and leave it for days at a time while the hours refresh. There is also little gameplay involved in the process; gameplay is all about making choices, and there aren't many engaging choices involved in crafting. Who has heard of the old adage; "Cheap, fast, good; pick two"? What if this choice were incorporated into the game? Want to build a ship fast and cheaply? Well, it'll be a weak, crappy ship. Want a good ship, fast? Well, it'll cost you! Got time to wait? In that case, you can have a good ship for cheap...eventually. My proposal for crafting is this; scrap labour hours, and replace it instead with something that any player of other economy/resource games will recognise; timers, building-based production, hiring and firing of staff, tools and equipment, and choices, choices, choices! You build a shipyard. You buy tools and machinery for the shipyard; you can buy high-quality, improving the quality or speed of the production, depending on what choices you make later. Or, you can buy cheap and dirty stuff and get what you pay for. You hire shipwrights. Do you choose the cheap, inexperienced men, who'll perform poorly, but will gain experience later? Or pay top-dollar for the grizzled old veteran with skilled fingers and a sharp, honed mind? You pay those shipwrights, and you choose how much to pay them. Maybe you even supply them with rum. The happier they are, the better they work. You feed supplies and money to the shipyard and set them building a ship. You get to set your priority, within the bounds of the quality of tools/machinery/staff: quick, cheap, good. The shipyard then starts a timer, and the ship is completed when the timer runs down. You can do things to change the length of this timer, but you'll still have a minimum length of time to wait, preserving the intention of labour hours, but now involving lots of gameplay choices and tactical decisions. Now, extend that idea further down the supply chain. Build woodworking workshops, blacksmiths, foundries, for making the ship-building materials, all with the same mechanics; buy machinery, buy tools, hire staff, pay them, all affecting the quality, speed, and cost of the materials you produce. Take it further; your mines and forests work the same way, affecting speed and quantity of production. Why would you have different qualities of materials? Well... Abolish crafting notes. Honestly, they're a bit of a clunky mechanism. Instead, why not have the quality of the ship be determined by the quality of the parts that it's made of, and by the result of the cheap/quick/good decisions made in its production? Why not even take it further; divide the ship into different sections and allow each section to differ in quality? Build a ship with super-high-quality canvas and rigging, but shoddy planking and frame parts? Then you'll have a leaky, poorly-armoured tub with brilliantly-fast sail-handling. Build a high-quality ship, but skimp on the carriages? Then you might have a gold-quality ship in all areas, but with a fatal flaw; the cannons tend to break their carriages too often. Potential areas: masts sails rigging armour frame pump carriages rudder Trade ships. Abolish AI traders. At least, as they stand anyway. Replace them with player-driven AI traders. Got one port with a foundry smelting iron, and another port with an iron-ore mine? Want to get the ore from one port to the other? Buy/capture a trader ship, hire a crew, give the ship orders to sail back and forth between the two ports to transport the ore, setting certain criteria for when they sail; fill the hold, or sail when they have a specified amount of ore. Choices, choices! Your traders might be captured by the enemy. They might be sunk. You'll have to be careful where you let them sail. The importance of safe areas of the map will be increased. And, if the goods are captured, they remain in the economy, and we don't have the artificial inflation of AI trader goods coming out of thin air when one is captured. But what if they do get captured or sunk? Well... Insurance. Durability seems so artificial. In the real world, sunken ships aren't magically recovered from Davy Jones' Locker to be reused over and over. In the real world, ships and their cargo are insured...if you want them to be. Allow captains to purchase insurance policies on their ships. Offer a range of policies; more expensive ones pay out a greater percentage of the ship's value. Some will even offer an immediate like-for-like replacement. Some might cover the upgrades too. Some will cover the cargo, some not. Choices, choices, choices! Port Battles. I don't think anyone likes timers. And what about flags? Did they do that in real life? "Sorry chaps, we've sailed for days to capture this port, but Smitty accidentally dropped the flag overboard, and without the flag we can't take the port! Back home we go!" I propose instead of flags, we have "decrees". The King/Queen/Admiralty/whoever decides which port they'd like taken...captains don't. Every day, a number of ports are chosen by the game AI to be vulnerable to attack for 24 hours. "Port X, owned by France, is desired by King Wossname of Britain, and a royal decree has ordered it be taken! (23h remaining)" It will be a shame to remove player choice in where port battles will be held. But, it will allow flipping of ports to be slowed and controlled by the devs, and will add a healthy element of randomness to fighting; we won't be attacking/defending the same key ports over and over, and will have to consider defences over a more varied area. And player choice will remain; we won't get to choose which ports are vulnerable to attack/defend at any given time, but we will get to choose how we react to them. It will also prevent any faction being knocked all the way back to one port; the game will stop issuing decrees for that faction's ports to be taken when it's utterly beaten, and in turn give them more decrees to expand into nearby ports. They'll still need to fight, but they won't be utterly destroyed. Additional minor port battle changes: Split the BR limit between ship classes, so only a certain percentage of the ships can be ships of the line, giving a role to frigates. Combined arms are more interesting. Player-built defences and reinforcement. Remember the building ideas above? Extend that to defences and reinforcement as group-built projects. On the home screen of a port, you'll have an option to provide money/materials/ships to the defence of that port. How strong the forts/defences are for that port will depend on how much has been invested in it, and it'll decay over time. How many ships, and of what type, can be summoned by reinforcement will be determined by what ships have been donated to the reinforcement pool. And when they're sunk, they're not replaced, unless they're insured. This should mean that factions are forced to choose which ports to actively defend, and which to leave vulnerable. Pirates. Should not be a faction. They should be an "exile" faction for lone-wolves. No ports, no buildings, and no teaming-up together. But... Pirates can fly a false flag to pretend to be a friendly player, before springing a surprise attack, or to use one of that faction's ports. Pirates can bury treasure; hide stashes of cargo on otherwise empty stretches of beach. Pirates can support larger AI fleets. In essence, they should offer a very different gameplay style. And pirates can join other factions...and to change factions, you MUST become a pirate first. France isn't going to hire a British captain. But they MAY hire a British captain who fired on his own countrymen, renounced Britain for the pirate life, and subsequently attacked British shipping almost exclusively. Changing faction would require you to first become a pirate, then by your choice of actions encourage the AI leadership of your chosen faction to approach you with an offer of enlistment. It would not be an immediate process. But, maybe, an entertaining one. More to come as I have further ideas. Thoughts? Comments? Rebuttals? Accusations of being an idiot with stupid ideas? All welcome! Thank you for your time and attention!

When a clan captures a port, they set the timers to when their members can be online to defend it. The Ausez clan has many Australian players. When they capture a port, they set it to when's convenient for those players to defend that port, in exactly the same way as every other clan in every other timezone. You're going to have to explain why it's fair for US or EU players to set timers for when Australians are asleep or at work, but it's not fair when Australians do the exact same thing.

I think plenty of players on both sides are happy to see this end, but nothing constructive is going to happen while negotiations are hung up with such nonsense. If you want someone to make a deal with you, don't offer them something they've already got! You can't offer a lack of Spanish attacks as an incentive for peace; Britain already has that, and everything you're asking in exchange would puts them at a disadvantage compared to the present situation. And asking to be given ports in exchange for no-longer trying to take them is like asking someone "give me all your money and I'll stop trying to steal it from you". Nonsense!

So everyone is allowed to set port timers to when is convenient for them to be online to defend them...except Australians, because when they do it, they're unsporting?

There's a very simple way to halt the expansion of a nation when it gets too large: add an exponential modifier to the cost of flags based on the number of existing ports that nation controls. Nation with 1 port, flag cost = base value x 1 = 100,000 gold (as an example). Nation with 20 ports, flag cost = base value x 2 = 200,000 gold. Nation with 100 ports, flag cost = base value x 512 = 51,200,000 gold. Obviously, the exact values will need to be tweaked. But the idea is that a nation's growth will be forced to slow as it gets larger, and smaller nations will be able to recover more easily. Plus, it has the added benefit of making nations more carefully pick and choose the ports they take and defend, instead of steamrollering every port they can grasp. Similarly, a modifier for the number of players in a nation could also be applied.

Apologies if these were mentioned and I missed them. Add to crew recruitment the abity to impress crew off of captured vessels to replenish your own. The requirement to feed and pay your crew, and to set how much you pay, and what quality of rations you provide, affecting morale and performance. Run out of rations on a long journey and you'll have problems. Run low on morale and some crew might jump ship in port, requiring you to hire more to replace them. Having marines, or guards, or certain scary officers on board, would mitigate this. So you can choose; be a nice captain, or a tyrant.

This exploit annoyed at least thirty active players when it happened. You want to allow each exploiter the chance to do this five times before any permanent punishment is considered? As I've said before, it doesn't really matter if there was a specific written rule broken or not. What matters is that the actions of a few made the game less fun for a larger number of players. If you're having a friendly game of football with some friends and one person is being a dick and spoiling the fun for everyone else, you don't scour the rulebook for some technicality; you ask them to leave. Because if you don't, and they carry on being a dick, then everyone else will probably end up leaving, and you won't have anyone left to play with.

How about a "book passage" option? Ports will have a randomised list of available journeys, for a fee, which will take you to another port instantly. It'd cost money, and you can't specify your destination; you can only take the routes that are available, and the range is limited to something reasonable. Effectively, you're hitchhiking on AI ships. But it'd offer a decent chance of being able to hop and skip to where you want to be.

Yeah I know. But I remember what it was like to have a full-time job (I'm a self-employed slacker now, thankfully). You go to work all day, you get a few hours to yourself at the end of the day, you want to enjoy a game...and instead you get dicked around by trololololol hacker sociopaths. Your leisure time is wasted. Your money is wasted. And both of those things are limited resources for you. I love this game. I love what it is, and what it might become. And at the same time I fear for what it may become. GTA5, Rust, DayZ, all had such potential, and I've abandoned all of them because these kinds of people run rampant and unchecked in those games. I don't want to have to abandon this one too.

Well alright. I've clarified now. Better?

Please don't put words in my mouth and then contest those words. I am not saying that people will ragequit just because of this one thing. I'm saying that people will have a less fun if this sort of cheating and exploiting continues unpunished, and people who aren't having fun won't keep playing. Same thing; don't put words into my mouth. Nobody's threatening to leave. Fine, quibble over semantics. Where I've said "paying" customers, imagine I said "paid" customers. Happy? PAID customers who get a crappy experience will stop playing, and will communicate their dissatisfaction in reviews, and the devs will get fewer PAID customers in future. Is that message clear?

You're asking to remove the need for sailing...in a game about sail ships.

It doesn't need to be a consensus. It just needs to be a greater number than the number of culprits. If ten people say "this one person has worsened our gaming experience", then the devs have ten paying customers who have been upset by one paying customer. Do they, as business owners, risk losing ten customers for the sake of one? Spanish players were harmed by this debacle too; I'm sure there were some who were looking forward to the chance to fight and defend the port, and were denied the chance.

As with the real world, the consensus is the measure. Imagine you're having a party with twenty guests and one person is being an idiot and pissing everyone else off. That one person might bleat "but you didn't specifically say I can't do this or that thing". And you might even agree that the thing they are doing isn't all that bad. But you've got nineteen unhappy guests who are threatening to leave if you don't get rid of that one person. It doesn't matter what you as the host think. The only question you're facing is "do I want one person to leave my party, or nineteen?" So what would you do in that situation? That's the situation the devs are facing now. They've got a bunch of unhappy players, and a few individuals who have caused it. The obvious answer is to invite those few players to leave. I'm sure they can be refunded the cost of the game if that's a concern.

It's not about the port. It's about dozens of people having their fun spoiled by a few individuals who care more about winning then they do about playing the game. There may have been other chances to take it, but that doesn't change the fact that a whole bunch of people managed to get online at the same time, some of whom might have limited leisure time to spend, and instead of getting the port battle and all the PVP joy that goes with it, they got their fun stolen by selfish cheaters. I don't play GTA5 online any more because of cheaters and hackers ruining it. I'd hate to see it happen here.