Genma Saotome

THere are those who just want to fight... and those that just want to sail and trade. DEV's can never make both happy in one game. WRT grinding it out in the OW... my idea is to make it harder. Give us reef/furl control over individual sails, make the wind real (no more steady counterclockwise movement, always the same wind speed), make storms rougher, and move the longitude for the sun from Bodo Norway (check sunrise/sunset in late June it for yourself) to somewhere much further south. The idea is not to drive away PvP players (tho many with reflexively bit-ch and moan about it) but to make OW sailing a real challenge instead of an opportunity to go vacuum the carpets or clean the cat box, you know, ~25 minutes of real activity so you can come back and fiddle at the PC for 3 seconds before leaving for another chore).

No, I am unaware of what they do.

When doing screenshots in portrait mode as a very large portion of the screen is taken up by the ocean... too much IMO (study attached image). I don't know whether adding a vertical axis movement of the camera would fix that or alternatively you need to look into lowering the horizon level so the ocean only covers about 25% of the screen instead of the 50-55% it covers now. Either way allowing the player a bit more control the ratio of sky and ocean should allow for closeup screenshots that show more of the ship -- very much so for screenshots taken in portrait orientation.

I wanted to make some portrait, full size screenshots and ran into several problems. Appears to require window mode Shard screen doesn't work at all. All port displays do not adapt to window mode resulting in half or more of the screen to disappear. All port displays have text all over the place. None of the items in ship's hold are selectable. An example: FWIW you can get some very fine screenshots in portrait mode (cropped):

IMO all occurrences of the word dismiss should be replaced with the phrase "Delete from Game". It would be decent to have a confirmation as well --- we see a confirmation to convert 1 Needlefish to fishmeat and none to remove a ship from the game??? I had the exact experience as the poster above -- First use of fleet, first separation of ships. Trading Brig gone for the exact same reason: dismiss != delete!

Adding SLI capability will greatly increase fps for open world sailing. Dunno about big battles tho... lots of draw calls i expect, but if that's not an issue then SLI will help there too. As for game play, I preferred some exp and gold for causing damage, killing sailors. None at all for doing your best w/o a win is rather coldhearted.

Was disconnected several times from PvE about 5 hours before this post, both in OW and in port. First attempt at login failed. I happened to notice how many people were logged in. I waited a minute before a second attempt to log in (it worked). Roughly 25% of the people showing up as logged at the first attempt in had been kicked out per the numbers on the second try.

I'm curious Dev's... are you logging what's going on in the game? Doing any analysis? If not I sincerely suggest you consider it. How far are people sailing, on average, between ports? How much money is being made (or lost) with each port call? How much money do people have? What goods are being purchased and what's not being purchased? How much shot is being fired by a ship in battles? Which ports are busy, which are ignored? What are the mix of ip locations (roughly speaking) by hour of the day by country they're sailing for? Have you got a reasonably even balance at any given time? And so on. This post isn't meant as a criticism but speaking as one who was trained in Total Quality Control (TQC) you cannot improve (or fix) what you are not measuring. You should be logging and analyzing a LOT OF STUFF. You can take all of the crabbing you get from players and check the reality in the numbers. Crabbing about things where the corresponding numbers are obviously showing there is a problem tends to highlight what's important to change.

Are we supposed to give feedback or not? You can't chop up a half pound of Bluefish to Fish Meat w/o being asked "do you really want to convert your Bluefish?" but if you hit the dismiss button on the fleet tab your ship, it's cargo, its guns, are all instantly destroyed. The problem is "Dismiss Ship" doesn't convey what is about to happen. It needs to be followed by "from game". If they want to replace Dismiss with Delete it still needs "from game" appended.

It was already at the dock -- I had just moved things from the hold to the warehouse. I did not want to switch ships but simply reduce the fleet from two to one and continue on with the one I had been sailing. That left Dismiss. You know... as in you dismiss staff from the meeting. Everything goes back to the normal state. Consider: If "dismiss ship" clearly means delete ship from game, then shouldn't "leave battle" also mean delete ship from game? Both phrases mean sending the ship away. Can you imagine the fuss there would have been if "Leave battle" did delete ships? Well, that's how angry I am about having my ship deleted in port. WORDS matter. These guys have been paid to do the job right. "Dismiss ship" as it presently works isn't doing the job right, it's doing a sloppy job when all the difference in the world could be achieved by adding "from game". The objective for good online instructions from software professionals is not to be understood. The objective is to be not misunderstood.

The problem is no so much the one word as it is the entire phrase "{ Dismiss | Delete | Remove } ship from game" is completely comprehensible to everyone. "{ Dismiss | Delete | Remove } ship" from fleet" is also completely comprehensible to everyone. "{ Dismiss | Delete | Remove } ship" on the fleet tab does not explain what is about to happen happen. Period. And yes, I am really angry about this. WORDS matter.

This is WRT the use of the word dismiss on the fleet page. CHANGE the G**D*** word. Dismiss != Delete. Dismiss means to release or send away from present duties. It does not mean delete, kill, terminate. Given you have provided NO documentation, if you are going to delete our ships from the game -- and doing so w/o asking for a confirmation!!! -- use the phrase Delete from game so nobody misunderstands what is about to happen.

I noticed this about 12 hours ago: about once a minute the ship would freeze, the waves would rise and wash over the deck <panic as the ship was slightly overloaded>, the fps number would rise by 50% and then suddenly the ship would race forward at 2-3X normal speed for a couple of seconds and then all was well for the next 45-50 seconds.

FWIW, in your port/commodity table you have 489 references to commodities that you have previously deleted. They're probably not a problem... but if somebody makes a typo somewhere else it could match up to one of the old key values in this file and cause problems. The attached file (UTF-16LE) is not .json but it does contain all the information you'd need to track down the depreciated keys in your own files. Port Production List.txt

Q: When you pick one is it permanently assigned to that specific ship or is it knowledge you have that can move from ship to ship when you do? Q: Can it be traded in so you can pick something else? Q: Is it ever lost and if yes, how? Thanks in advance.

If you change it to "You sell" and "You buy" nobody will be confused. Even "U sell" and "U buy" would work if space is a concern.

Ok, that explains a lot, thanks.

Why are so many sell prices at 1? Is there something specific that needs to happen to get those to "normal" or are the permanent?

NOOB QUESTION Right now I have only one character (PvE). I am inclined to remain PvE but there is always a chance I try PvP. Given that possibility, does it make any sense for me to create characters on the other two servers before the wipe?

THANK YOU p.s. I still recommend to you tagging ships and game assets so you can run multiple "virtual worlds" on one server, each invisible to the others. Aside from lowering the server count when needed it opens the door to a variety of new instances of virtual worlds on one server, whether it's a world for noobs only, experts only, or starting over with original port ownership, just to name a couple of possibilities. My point is this: a data driven process will offer everyone much more variety in what kind of experience they can choose from and that has to be good for you in the long run.

Assuming server = 1 computer, yes, they want to reduce the number of servers. But they do not have to go with 1 server = 1 virtual world. They can overlay PvE and PvP on one machine keeping each wholly invisible to the other. Tag each ship with a label for PvE or PvP and make some changes to the .json files so the data lines are grouped by the same tag and bingo, you can have n virtual worlds on 1 machine and nobody would know beans about anything that wasn't tagged the same way as they were presently playing. All of the virtual worlds running on one machine would be full world environments. There are no exploits -- ships, stores, warehouses, everything, would be limited to the virtual world they have been tagged for. What that does mean for PvP people is they've have to do the occasional trade mission to get raw materials for ship building -- all of the other goods could be dropped.

My proposal in the base note was about what is displayed in port. Let people use whatever names they want... they're the only one's who will see it after all. I very deliberately did not make a suggestion about showing ship names out in the open sea, mostly because there will be far too many idiots that will chose the most offensive name they can type.

Seeing as you are restructuring the ship database please consider adding a field for a name for each ship. If doesn't need to be displayed in the game window but where it could be helpful is on the home and equipment screens when you are in port. Right now all I see is Trader's Brig and another Trader's Brig. Yeah, they are Trader's Brigs all right, but they are not crafted to the same standard and being able to tell one from the other at all times would be rather helpful, especially when I decide to break up the lower quality ship. Being able to give each a name and to see it in port would ensure I don't goof up.

The more I consider the proposal the worse it looks to me. Consider this hypothetical: A square map; 4 ports, one per corner. Dull right? Ok, spice it up a bit, change it to a circle. Add more ports. Vastly better, huh? Nope. Utterly dull. What makes the full map so much more interesting is all sorts of stuff is in the way. Down in the gulf of Mexico all you have to do is point the ship, set it off and walk away, come back after it's grounded itself on the far shore, get it off the mud and sail a few minutes to your destination on the right or left. Rinse and repeat. BORING. It doesn't need to be that way: Tag the game assets to what kind of purpose a virtual world has (Any PvP, PvE, noob fighter PvP, master fighter PvP, whatever) and simply display only identically tagged game assets to each player per his own tag. They could run n virtual worlds on any one machine, each sharing the same and each having their own private-to-that-tag game assets.

The data files are pretty simple. For shops there is a bit of data that is, essentially, a time stamp, and then what follows are row after row of data that describes each shop and what the have (qty onhand, high price, low price, etc). It kinda looks like this (please excuse syntax errors): var Shops = [Timestamp,"Regularitems"[lots of data]] What I'm speaking of is a bit like this: var Shops = ["Logicalworldid":01234"[Timestamp,"Regularitems"[lots of data]"Logicalworldid":56789[timestamp,"Regularitems"[lots of data]] etc. ] Now in that example I've made a second set of "Regularitems" with all of its data. What distinguishes one set from another is that each set is individually part of one (and only one) block of data called "Logicalworldid". That keeps them separate. A different way of accomplishing the same result -- and it may be easier -- is to simply set up multiple directory trees, each with their own server program. There may well be other gotchas that make that impractical but the concept of multiple virtual worlds on one machine is what I'm pushing as it makes so much more sense than this safe zone idea. Unless, of course, the purpose of the DEV's proposal has nothing at to do w/ servers and everything with pushing everybody into one place simply because they need/want more people in one place than they have right now. IMO it that's the case, well, ok, but they should have been upfront about that being the reason.