Fargo

It didnt work because once you got a large ship your grind income increased exponentially. Also conquest wasnt working, people had just all time to grind for the largest possible ships. When no ships need to be replaced, you can make ships as expensive as you want without effect. Those ships need upkeep/repair cost that results in similar or even less income than mid lvl captains earn. Balancing in general becomes impossible. You cant make mid lvl ships well accessable for mid level captains and at the same time still valuable for high rank captains like this.

What is the goal?! Good sense of realism, ergo large ships feeling heavy etc.? All ships handling well? Balancing in terms of competetive play/fairness? Something else? If you just ask people like you did you'll only get subjective opinions, people telling you to buff their favourite ships etc. Many went offtopic already discussing about BR, thickness, Mast HP etc. Just saying.

Thats a big problem with marks, they allow you to buy labour. 30 CM = 24h labour generation. 25-30 PvP marks = 48h+ labour generation. What are 30 CM, 30min of first rate mission?! Your production capacity isnt limited anymore. A single player could supply a whole nation with everything. Gold inflation + labour inflation results in resource, material and ship devaluation. Everything craftable is meaningless. Then atleast they should do it right and get rid of gold, labour and resources all together. Economy cannot work as an optional feature/when people are allowed to cheat on supply and demand. Either go 100% economy or remove it. Decide for it and discussions about ships/labour for marks or capturable npc ships become obsolete. Without economy the question once again is how NA is supposed to work as a whole, if we want it to be more than a meaningless PvP arena.

Blöd nur dass große Schiffe absolut nichts besonderes an sich haben wenn jeder diese besitzt. Du fühlst dich nicht geil weil dein Schiff groß ist, sondern weil dein Schiff größer ist als andere. Das scheint die breite Masse nicht zu verstehen, denn die hat NA schon in jeder Hinsicht einfacher gemacht was letztendlich dazu führte, dass es heutzutage nichts besonderes mehr zu erreichen gibt. Du startest NA und stellst fest dass du im besten Fall das erreichen kannst was jeder andere schon erreicht hat. 90% sind Rang 10, jeder Depp ist reich und besitzt Alles. Motivation? Nicht vorhanden. Mal ganz davon abgesehen dass das ganze PvP und RvR Konzept auf einer funktionierenden Wirtschaft beruht, die so nicht funktionieren kann. Marken versuchen hier auf sehr einfache Weise komplexe Probleme zu umgehen, wie vieles was seit dem Wipe implementiert wurde. Selbst wenn Marken nicht so unglaublich schlecht umgesetzt wären, Marken können die Wirtschaft nicht ersetzen und lösen auch sonst keine Probleme. Langzeitmotivation muss gut durchdacht sein, genauso wie ein grundlegendes Konzept. Was die breite Masse will interessiert hier einfach nicht, die denkt nämlich nicht ansatzweise über irgendetwas nach. NA wird ein Paradebeispiel dafür werden wie man ein Spiel nicht zusammen mit einer Community entwickelt.

See the point is you cant without changing the principles of the game, and you should never be allowed to do so. Thats the problem with discussions here, everyone is allowed to change the game in his personal favour after years of development. No moderator or admin is going to say well here is our concept and our goals, please stick to it, removing economy is not an option. Im not going to participate in further duscussions, because arguing neutral and rational is pointless, a pure waste of time. Devs only care about majorities and the majority does not care about complex coherences and how to make the game work, but mostly about their personal needs and believes. As i argued already, its impossible to develop a functional game like this, and a pure waste of time for everyone who seriously tries.

Successful game development has nothing to do with listening to anyone but experts. Thats the advantage of logic: it works. Blindly developing a game trying to please everyone in the end is likely to please noone. It would require everyone to be expert for everything, to be unbiased and to have the same goal in mind. See the principles of NA got defined already in the very beginning. Sandbox, realistic, hardcore, crafting, trade, conquest. But not a single word in steam about PvE. What makes you think that youre allowed to ignore this? I think its ridiculous how players try to abuse the openness of devs. Ofcourse its devs fault, but i highly disrespect such players. You even dare to call this a logical argument?! Youre just cherrypicking whatever you can. That might be your limited view of it, but it proves nothing. And its impossible to prove anything while several changes happend. Following patches for example totally contradicted the direction one dura was pointing and also economy. With marks, speedcap, etc. in addition i dont wonder why people left. I could argue in the same way that more people left the more easier and ceaper stuff became again, while exactly this continuously happened since steam release already. Those "hardcore gamers" simply provided arguments while your "It will kill the game" crowd wasnt able to do so, and devs one time did the right thing and listened to logic. So whats your advise, to mess it up on purpose?! Eve is able to motivate PvP and RvR with economy. Just figure out why EvE has such a bad ratio. I would guess because they decided to focus on PvE content. They are able to do so, and they have much more options to generate such content. Learning from successful economies doesnt mean copying everything else. All im assuming is logic. That gameplay has to be motivated somehow is not an assumption. That people expect something to work when its in the game is not an assumption. We never know why people left, but we can figure out whats likely/major problems of the game. On the other side we can easily figure out if PvP marks increased PvP by keeping track of combat news. I did this work and kept track of daily numbers before i made any statements in regard to losses/cost-income-balancing. Then we dont have to discuss. You cant criticise the most basic concept without having any better idea. Eco has nothing to do with PvE. And how exactly is eco a problem for PvP? A working economy has nothing to to with expensive stuff, "hardcore" or beeing forced to trade. To the contrary it allows you to get everything for gold without effort. That youre forced into PvE as a major money source to fund PvP isnt an issue of economy.

Because other people try to seriously improve the game. You, both sides, are mostly trying to fight youre believes and to defend your personal very specific playstyle. Regarding this topic, what would you think about combat not providing relevant rewards? About especially large ships beeing hard and unprofitable to maintain? You wont like that because you like riskfree 1st rate combat 24/7 gaining you everything. You dont care that the actual game cannot work like this. Discussions should be about improving the game, not "winning" an argument. What do you want to achieve with comments like this: "Sad thing is that, as it happend with server merge, Devs will listen to the vocal minorities once more. But this one-two - this time - will be really fatal for the game." I dont care if you represent a majority or not, it doesnt matter if you cannot justify your position with valid arguments. "The game will die without xy bla" is getting tedious. And thats basically all ive seen from your side so far. Basic PvE content might be necessary so you can fight something at any time. Further content would be nice to have, but its not necessary. And you should realise that serious and challenging PvE content would be lots of work, especially AI delopment. While we cant do scripted bossfights, we very much rely on good AI. It cant even handle big ships, how do you want to make it act smart in complex scenarios... that in the end are just simulating real PvP... while you get real PvP for free.

Guys im not attacking your beloved PvP playstyle. This does not mean that PvP isnt important... But meaningful PvP and a lively OW are the result of meaningful trading and RvR. Both rely on a meaningful economy. This is the concept that has to work. You cant just fix PvP, its basically the result of everything else working. Trying to fix PvP in any other way is messing up the game by definition. As coaster said, pure rewards just lead to an artificial environment and promote dumb tactics like ganking and sealclubbing. Without objectives people also run from everything. And rewards are only going to motivate until people are saturated. All you see is "Oh it increased PvP over night its great" (We havent seen evidence yet btw). What you dont see is that its going to drop after a week again and that the population continues to shrink. Extreme PvPler still enjoying meaningless PvP might be happy with the current game, 80% of potential players are not. That youre still playing this game only proves that your expectations are pretty low. If you dont agree, tell us how NA is supposed to work in your opinion. @jodgi I asked you multiple times already and got no answer. Guys please stop the PvP vs PvE BS in every topic. Thank you...

The goal is to make the game better, not to increase current PvP. We could do that in alot of stupid ways. Tradable and exchangable marks are nonesense in multiple ways.

@Thomas G. Marshall Negotiating?! The purpose of contracts is that you dont have to communicate for each deal. If you want to negotiate you can go to trade channel. If anything makes sense its buy contracts like we have for other stuff already. What if 15 people want to negotiate with you all online at different times?! This deal would take a week probably if you want to make it fair... Shouldnt sell contracts work the same way then?! And this should make deals easier?! Stop assuming a broken economy. You totally dont understand how demand, supply and competition works. Have you even read my whole posts?! Btw. figuring out what ships currently sell for best profit is what makes shipbuilding exiting. If you blindly craft ships youre doing something wrong. And you have to care about your profit/what you can sell your ship for so or so. You cant blindly fill contracts assuming that the buyer cares about youre profit... And the market would always tell you what your ship or similar ships currently sell for.

Either people trade because trading is fun and meaningful, or they dont. Artificial rewards trying to replace a broken economy wont improve anything. Trading is even seperated from economy already with artificial NPC trading resources. Forcing stupid and boring gameplay instead of improving it is the best way to make players not play your game. Its already not working for conquest and PvP, it wont work for trading either.

The point is that its not a good idea to ground new ideas on broken mechanics. Make the basics work, then think about how to improve further. Even if there is no downside, why use time and resources for something that has no upside, that in the best case is just not making anything worse. Your argument is that it should become easier to get the ship you want from the market, but based on a currently broken situation. Before we fix basic problems and the market starts working we cant evaluate how difficult it is. Maybe think about why people fill buy contracts for materials or resources instead of putting a sell contract. A: Youre safely selling large amounts of goods for moderate profit. B: You need the money immediately even selling for low profit. C: very good price. D: You want to get rid of a small amount of goods. E: You dont have enough contracts. F: Good is oversupplied and looses value, youre happy about every piece you sell. Now why should i sell a ship to a contract that usually aims to buy as cheap as possible?! People would still just put their ships on the market instead of filling your contracts. You are forced to buy the slightly more expensive ship, what else can u do. Usually youre neither in a hurry selling a ship nor trying to get rid of it. When a ship is very well supplied already you craft another ship or build. Sure this is theorycrafting and i can be completely wrong, but this seems likely to me.

I think you dont get the point. A: It wont fix serious problems of economy. B: If economy is fixed you wont need it, the market would just be filled with all kind of ships, it would be easy to replace ships. Who defines overpriced?! Do you think people would sell ships cheap because you want them to do so?! Prices are based on demand and supply. See people buy upgrades for 3mio. gold. If ships would be demanded they would pay that for a ship aswell. The problem with inflation is that NPC prices arent effected. Usually it would atleast be very expensive to gather resources, but it isnt. The result: In one mission i earn enough gold to buy resources needed for multiple first rates. Limited by labour, gold inflation directly translates into resource inflation and ship inflation. There is no demand, people dont need ships/more ships than their friends and clans are able to produce. 100 CM translate in 10 labour contracts -> labour is not really limiting anything. Shipbuilders arent needed anymore, a single shipbuilder could in theory supply a whole clan or nation. Just ask a random max rank player how many ships and how much gold he owns, how much resources his clan has stacked and how many marks(=labour). If labour would be a limiting factor, you would be able to sell labour on the market for high value. Just test it by selling labour. As a reference, without hyperinflation 100 gold/ LH was common, it should be much more now if labour is demanded. Economy got always trampled on, but right now really everything in this game contradicts a working market. Im just disappointed that people are not rubbing in devs nose how obviously broken it is, or atleast support those who try. Dont get me wrong, i appreciate very much that youre one of the few dealing with eco problems.

Thats not what im talking about... Seriously what are you trying to prove here. If youre incapable of doing serious discussions just keep out of it. Im trying to figure out coherences based on logic. If my logic is mistaken feel free to point it out, im not genius. But dont tell me im wrong because you are right. If you raise extraordinary claims contradicting all logic you have provide extraordinary evidence. Fir is imbalanced provable with simple math, reality provides evidence how fir is not useful for balanced combat. You said it yourself, the only viable tactic with fir is raking/boarding-> to avoid damage. That it is possible to compensate something with skill or boarding wont make it balanced. But i guess you still wont understand this... Speed alone doesnt win you any battle. Speed is only so important because it exponentially reduces risk caused by several bad mechanics -> it makes you never loose a battle. Raking isnt effective against groups, or what do you think why PB ships arent fir? You cant just ignore a whole bunch of examples. Watch tournaments, Portbattles, or just other vids for more examples. What would you do when a reasonably strong wasa hello kittys up your fir bucket, sterncamp it?! Good luck. Speed is not even that important for sterncamping, you can easily do it with teak. Speed increases your turn radius, while raking is all about staying out of broadside reach. A smart opponent would even try to make you overshoot. Even 1v1 and in a smaller vessel it can be very hard to sterncamp someone who knows what hes doing, but thats not what were talking about. Speedcap increases the importance of speed by defining a magic number of immunity. It messes up ship balancing by default. Removing the option to use a ship with speed advantage cannot lead to more variety. Youre claiming any ship is viable what is obviously wrong. Assuming you ment "more", this is based on the assumptions that ships are still speedcapped, and that people still care about loosing stuff/play efficiently. The cap became less important again with the latest patch, while ships arent worth anything anymore without rare upgrades. Nobody wants to remove ganking as a form of hunting. Hunters always pick weak prey, thats just sensible and realistic. But they should not be allowed to exclusively do this without any risk. Thats when hunting turns into ganking. You can stick with the fastest possible ship, you just are going to sink more often. Thats all we have to achieve and its not that complicated. Let people gank if they want, just allow other players to punish those guys. What nobody needs are pure gank builds giving up all combat capability. Is there maybe a reason that youre emphasizing how honorable and skilled you are suspiciously often, while emotionally fighting everyone trying to nerv gank tactics...?!

Trader vs pirate vs pirate hunter... thats the basic concept how PvP is motivated. And it requires players beeing able to force each other into battle. What do you mean with slow ships? As i said, slow/fast is relative. Try to balance it... Fir ships literally have to sink from one broadside to make them useless for ganking. Until then people would probably just pick weaker prey/use larger groups and run from even more fights. Even if you can make it work, its just a very bad way to handle it, not fixing the cause of the problem, just giving hunters a "magic tool" to control ganking. Gear means basically upgrades, and i totally agree that these are messed up. I would make upgrades craftable consumption goods like ships or cannons every time. Sure selfish people are cherrypicking, but thats not making it legit for everyone. This is not kindergarden. To refuse realism you need good reasoning, period. This is not about "winning" an argument with rethoric or deciteful tactics... unless youre just trying to defend your personal playstyle. It doesnt matter if we like realism or not, NA "likes" realism. I agree btw. that crew damage was tested in a very bad way, while it would not make only sense in terms of realism but also for gameplay. (The reason why you cant balance raking with hull damage is because these are 2 different win conditions.) Balancing is about decisionmaking. Thats why its bad to completely nerv fir. It reduces options people can make decisions about. Giving every piece of gear a very specific purpose doesnt require decisions, its boring. Ships with very specific purposes are restricted to very specific gameplay, boring. Proper balancing would allow you to build a ship good for scouting or boarding, but still capable of doing anything else. On the other side a boarding fitted ship would never make boarding auto win, and your scout would never be able to use speed for 100% immunity. Balancing is all about avoiding extremes, and the only way how you can achieve real versatility. Thats what im trying to explain the whole time.... Lets stick with trader vs pirate vs hunter. How fast do you have to be as the pirate?! So fast that you can compete with hunters. To either get away or to fight them off. These two options have to be balanced. When speed lets you always get away, pirate hunters dont play anymore. This is what happened. The combination of beeing allowed to get away every time + imbalanced fast ships demoting to fight the hunter is causing an annoying gank meta. How fast do you have to be as the hunter? So fast that you can catch and sink the pirate. When the pirate slows down, you can slow down aswell. But when purely speed is defining if the hunter is able to sink the pirate, the pirate is never going to slow down. I dont want to force the pirate in every fight, thats just another extreme leading to weird results. Already changing 0% risk to 10% does alot, because then youre not immune anymore.

The question was not why they shouldnt be allowed to do it... Why should people suddenly demand ships just because they are allowed to place contracts. If ships would be demanded shipbuilders would be able to sell them on the market right now for reasonable profit. So accidentally everyone trying to sell ships is selling the wrong ships?! Im not saying its anything wrong with it, its just not improving anything.... You cant really compare what it ment to build a ship back then compared with NA. Each day more combat is happening then in the whole age of sail. Ships are consumption goods in NA, lost and crafted every day... atleast thats how it should be. Ofcourse you have to order something when production takes more than 10 years. As a shipbuilder in NA you can craft multiple ships each day. With labour contracts currently even unlimited amounts.

Ofcourse it works in terms of achieving its purpose (=to make actual fast ships useless). But removing fast ships wont nerv gank tactics. "Fast" is relative. Make fir completely useless and another wood becomes fast. Say teak would become the fastest wood replacing fir, people would gank in teak ships. The difference would be that teak ships are able to fight slower builds -> are not forced to run from even fights. This doesnt nerv gank tactics, but its atleast not promoting them unnecessarily. Removing fast ships is what speedcap does already, or atleast did when all ships easily went 15kn. Did this fix ganking? To the contrary. Speed is the problem, not fast ships. Speed currently exponentially decreases the risk close to speed cap, or without cap using the fastest boats. To nerv gank tactics you have to nerv speed. Speedcap defining a magic number of safety does the opposite. Why allow ships only built for ganking/to avoid combat. Whats your point. Why remove the option to use a fast combat build on the other hand?! Because this game is not purely about combat? Well i mean we should evaluate what makes sense in terms of gameplay and realism, right? Because this game has many unrealistic things? True, and im criticising all of those that refuse realism without any good reasoning. Dont try to justify nonesense with other nonesense. Im talking about balancing of fast ships. This would make them stronger, not slower. And dont misunderstand "stronger", they would still be weak.. just balanced. Nerv speed and you can still use youre fir ship, it just becomes more efficient to use a slower/stronger ship the more often youre forced to fight/not able to escape easily. More focus on combat slows down the meta, then there is no need to max out speed anymore. Dont misunderstand "slower", OW ships would always be decently fast. Traders are not supposed to be very fast, especially with cargo.

And why should someone craft the ship you ordered?! As a shipbuilder im also placing buy contracts, but for materials. These dont fill already while its way easier to craft materials and also non crafters can craft those. People dont need gold or have better ways to earn this, the market is dead. And why should lots of people suddenly buy ships via contract when these ships are not selling on the market now?! If a noncrafter needs a ship he asks a clan or a shipbuilder he knows. With labour contracts the shipbuilder not even needs the labour. Ships for marks reduce demand in addition. What if the ship requires marks/permits?! You still have to communicate with the buyer unless the price allows you to buy marks if availiable, while contracts are supposed to undertake exactly this.

Buy contracts wont fix economy in any way. People just wont sell ships or materials when they dont need money/can make money so much easier with missions. When economy works you can just buy ships from the market. Sure if there are 50 different builds for each ship you might not always find the exact one, but then many builds wouldnt differ much. Ships and builds that are demanded would always be well supplied. Permits are a problem limiting shipbuilders to supply demanded ships, changing this would achieve much more (after balancing of economy).

Yes but speed wont win you any fight. What do you want to prove here, youre examples arent representative for anything. That you can beat something with an experienced fir squad proves exactly nothing. If you want to show off your alleged skill do it somewhere else. This is not how you do serious discussions and your doing it in basically every topic until people stop discussing with you. Fir is provably imbalanced and reality shows that most people are running in those ships. Whats youre assumption, that all people ganking are noobs, or that ganking isnt real?! Why arent people using fir ships for portbattles?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwvkBnMUeI this is what usually happens if the strong ships somehow know how to fight. A single combat ship can beat whole hunting squads, and fighting multiple ships makes it significantly more difficult for you to avoid damage/win by raking. If you just couldnt escape easily with 0 hull, ganking would become much less viable. I cant count the battles ive been "ganked" by butter ships that had to disengage very quickly. Ive seen a bucket forcing 3 players + 6 fleet ships to escape. Basic 3rd rates that beat up to 3 fir carronade fitted boarding connies. Etc. Your fir ships are neither going to win a sail battle on distance, nor a broadside fight. Unless you can decide the fight by raking youre most likely going to loose.

Thats one of the stupid mechanics im talking about. No, there is no point to allow combat ships not capable of combat in a game that focusses on combat. Its neither realistic, nor good for gameplay in any way -> get rid of it. You cant balance speed as a combat stat and a gank/escape stat at the same time. Making fast ships crap (what they are already) reduces fast ships to pure gank ships. Youre trying to balance ganking with combat, but there is no point to do so because theres no point to have ganking. This is the actual problem. 10 ships running from a 3 man squad is the definition of ganking as problematic gameplay.