Bach

To Admin- sounds good. Definetly an improvement over the last event. Organizational skills and team play should reap a better percentage chance of rewards and I think that's is a great direction to take grand scale team events. To the drama queens- Nothing in these chests is of dire need to any player. The new ship bps, color schemes and materials are nice to have and show off. Can they swing RvR? Sure but only if used in bulk against an opponent that has none and even that advantage will be short lived over time. In the grand scheme it's just an event to choose to participate in or not. It's not critical to game performance. Solo players- I'm sure there will be sme form of solo events when the devs get around to it for you. But you can't really fault them for working on the team stuff first. Smash and grab players- last event we were not prepared for you and many of us let you sail off after having potentially looted a wreck. Since that event we have learned that PvP has a better chance of gaining some form of loot over an empty click on a wreck. Even if it's just your ship. Expect more hunters this event. No matter what, it's got to be better than the previous events. Though I still think spreading the wrecks out in a line would generate better sea contests than a circle does.

It's just one week of testing. The social perk gave us nearly unlimited participation battles and a lot of players complained. Now we're getting the other side of the coin with limited participation battles. Though an anti-social perk might have been enough. No matter what, I think both the devs and the constantly complaining player base need to see exactly where game enforced OW 1v1's will go. Either it turns out to be the magical formula PvP games have been waiting for or we can finally stop hearing about it in the forums as THE answer to ganking.

Perhaps but it will also end the social aspects of PVP for the week. Teams of both gankers and defenders will be forced apart. Number of battles may hold as there will technically be more battles generated but I suspect overall PvP participation by different players will drop. Combine that with a soon reset on ports and there really is no point in conquest play for the week either. This is an interesting thing to test. I think you will learn it fails. In over 20 years of PvP I have rarely seen Pvp players develope solo from pure dueling. They usually start out as learning members of teams and then spin off into their own styles of PvP. I suppose you feel you need to test it so it's not going to hurt to try it for a week. I'll probably play a bit but I find the lack of variables in duels very boring to play over and over. Some friends have been trying to get me to try out the new Hearts of Iron IV game. I guess this will be the week.

Even as oared gun barges they are mostly useless outside of port battles with stationary objectives.

Might be an interesting experiment but I'm not sure of the real use of galley, galleses in game with 18th century tech would be. Not since the battle of Lapanto have they been used in bulk as main warships. A Bermuda sloop in any kind of reasonable wind would rip apart the standard galley. 18th century bronze cannons with grape shot alone would be devastating. Not to mention how much speed a galley would need to build up to penetrate a rate ship broad side hull. Still it could be interesting in the shallows or if port battles with land evolve into tactics of anchored gun platform heavy ships in choke points that galleys could get up on.

I've been playing pirate for three months now. I don't feel they are broken. Port Conquest If a strong leader organizes the pirates into a team they can take ports. This is very hard and will rarely happen. When it does it is short lived. These events are more like mini rebellions than true lasting conquests. In the current system they do work and with the alliance system it is very easy for any two allied nations to team up and put down a pirate rebellion. Which they seem to have no problem doing now. Hunting merchant ships and harassing shipping. This is working fine now. Sometimes we act as privateers for a nation in player to player deals. It all works now. Pirate bases In real life pirates did have havens. You can't stay at sea forever. Obviously the majority of these were semi-lawless frontier towns like Nassau or black beards haven in South Carolina. The Free town work fine for this. I have almost no need for Mortimer Town other than selling or trading goods with other pirates. I find it funny how many pirates build ships, do Econ and missions at MT only to become prey for Nationals that hunt pirates there 24/7. All this they could be doing a havens in Freetowns instead of giving the Nationals one place to always hunt pirates. MT currently helps the Nationals more than the pirates. But I guess you have to start somewhere for new player pirates. May as well be MT. Pirates building frigates and larger ships While it is true that real pirates seldom sailed ships as big as frigates or teamed up into squadrons. In NA we have to balance the fact that the Nationals aren't realistic nationals either. Most every national captain is a Rear Admiral with over a thousand men at his disposal, rate ships and endless supplies. If we held pirates to 6th and 7th rates they would become ineffective if national players also were not also held to realistic ship standards. Since we're not about to take all that back from national players we have to allow pirates the same level playing field for them to compete. The real world ratio of merchant to warships is mostly merchants. In NA it's mostly warships. The average real life pirate hunter, like Lt. Maynard, wasn't a rear admiral with a thousand men and rate ships at his disposal. In NA the average pirate hunter is. So we have to allow for some realism shifts to balance the playability of the game. I think it would add a lot of flare to the game if pirates could create a hidden base. I think it would be fun if nationals could occasionally find and destroy those bases. I think it would be better if pirates could raid non-capital towns and unguarded frontier ports than conquest. I think offering pirates letters of Marc or pardons to work for a nation is good ONLY if it's done as part of a longer term condition the pirate had to be loyal too. If loyalty to the deal isn't a requirement then we have that condition right now outside the game and don't need it repeated inside. Putting something hard coded inside is only worth it if there is some rule to be enforced.

Some goals could be chosen by the system randomly from a list. I.e. - conquest goals for a region of the map would be a list the computer monarch chooses. Econ goals for mass produced goods could also be chosen from a list by computer. Cargo hauling "Colonization goals" where the goal is to move x amount of goods from the capital to y frontier town could be computer chosen. Might make it interesting as the other nations may find you the cargo path to hunt. Others may be semi-player controlled. Say a pirate captain applies for a pardon from France. He spends a cycle trying to sink 100 player frigate level enemy of France and zero French ships. If he succeeds at the end of the cycle he can become a French player. A military goal of sinking enemy ships would always be player controlled as they pick the enemy nations from the alliance system.

Voting 1 week long IF you want individual members participation high as some log in only a few days/wk Voting 3 days long IF you want voting by land lords as they all play regularly Short Alliances will devalue the worth of an alliance. Since it's only a short time no one will care so much. Long Alliance will increase the value of the choice and mean more to the team mates over time. Low number of alliances (like 2) will really only effect resource sharing and port battles. Player made alliances drifting to a 2 sides war will likely supersede the in game ones anyway. So high number of alliances (like 3) will allow the game to represent more of what players may really want but may over share resources and port battle participation. I suggest letting players have up to 3 alliances but factor the alliances hostility point gains accordingly. So a nation standing alone get full hostility gains. A two nation alliance gets half hostility gains and a 3 nation alliance a third. This way larger alliance will have to work proportionally harder to go offensive. While solo or smaller alliances have an easier time going on offense.

As others have pointed out the player base could use more reasons to fight and conquest for their nation. The actual history of the Carribean is full of potential for loyal national captains and officers. GB, Spain, Denmark, Sweden are all controlled by Monarchy. USA and France at this time are democratic republics. The pirates are, well, pirates. The leadership of the nations would have, at the time, set the goals for its military and peoples. Achieving such goals would result in reward or favor. No reason NA can't do the same. Some examples: September Goals by nation- Spain has found itself on the verge of rebellion they believe has been inspired by the French Republic factions and wants to bolster the national treasury. The King sets the following goals. Conquest - conquer and control the Panama region Military - sink 400 French Frigates or rate ships Economic - sell 100,000 silver and gold and gold coins to La Habana At the end of the cycle if the conquest goal is reached participants receive a battle front medal. Redeemable at La Habana for gold. If the military goal is reached the player receives the title Hero of Spain. If the economic goal is reached by an Econ player he receives a blue print of choice. Anyway, you get the idea. It could be any variant of this. Use the nations to set cyclic goals that don't require map resets and offer a little something for end game player to achieve.

Currently the pirates still vote for a "primary war". Last vote it was against Great Britain. The primary war targets generate the few conquest points the pirate nation will need to use in the upcoming system. You can not vote for an ally. It may let you try but since the other nation can't vote in pirates it won't ever become one.

The concept mentioned above deserves more discussion. Whether voting is based on land ownership or simple membership vote I don't think is a huge issue. However, at some point we are going to need to address the "Why we fight as a nation" question. The current "because we can" answer will only hold up so far. There needs to be something more. Be it Glory, Prestiege, rights to a trophy or for the prizes who knows. But for the game to go live there needs to be more. In EVE they just kept introducing bigger and bigger things you could build and rare ore producing regions to covet. That's not going to work here.

Now you see the drawback side of the social perk some of us were talking about in another thread. It's only dangerous when willing reinforcements are in the area. When they are not it helps your enemies more if they have willing reinforcements. So you can be both boon or bane to your own team mates if you elect to spend the three points to get the perk. Further, once the perks stabilize, you will become known for having the perk. Lists will be created and enemies will learn to target that player specifically when they want the 30min timer and target others when they don't. Essentially borrowing the perk from you. I suspect when the perk can no longer be swapped without three levels lost to the officer few players will sail with the social perk on. They will likely put it on tagging Alts that they only bring out for controlled occasions.

I don't mind the fleets in PvP. The create variables and add a little chaos to the PvP. Now that said, it's a mixed bag. Some players know how to chose fleets ships and control them. Some don't. There is nothing wrong with tweaking the system a bit to make it better. One thing that would make it better is if players could ONLY choose fleet ships that were equal or smaller in class than the flagship. Example : Two weeks ago I saw a trader Lynx with x2 Santisima escorts. Not very likely or effective. This week I encountered an LGV with xConnie escorts. The captain crewed the Connies and only left 78 crew on the LGV. I sailed past the Connies before they loaded and graped/boarded the LGV to end the fight in minutes. The Connies just stop fighting at this point. He would have been more effective if he fully crewed the LGV and had x2 partial crew Bell Poules or even Niagaras for escort. That would have possibly run me off. Picking the biggest ship you can for an escort and fully manning them is not effective. First, the AI doesn't sail well enough for that. It's easy to get them turned into the wind and they take forever to get out. The tend to run into team mates in close quarters. They are generally slower than players and just fall behind. They do gun well enough though and this is the key to their use. Choose them for gun potential. Essex is a very effective escort ship. Niagra as well. A rattle snake sounds good but they don't fire front guns often enough and only have x9 broadside guns. A snow is probably just as good. Anyway, just some thoughts from someone who spends a lot of time dealing with player fleets.

Because it is cross teaming and many of us saw first hand what cross teaming did to destroy POTBS playability as a game. By your logic there is nothing wrong with you jumping into a port battle simply with the purpose of taking up slots to leverage the Swedes over pirates. If you can justify it on the open sea it's the same justification in a PB. How do I know how far your cross teaming will go? By virtue of just doing it you are already outside game controls. As long as you can use a pirate alt to leverage a national position it is still cross teaming. This stuff destroyed POTBS.

You neglected to mention the follow through where the battle was completely surrounded by the Swedes on exit. Even a max range tag still allows this. Your not doing it because it isn't an advantage. No matter how you want to spin it it is NOT in the spirit of the game. when we first saw you tag us we thought you accidentally tagged us instead of the swede. So we continued to sail forward. Either way you accomplish the goal of setting us up for the Swedish fleet teleporting into the free port. It's low class play using a mechanic to trap us. Had you actually been sailing a Swedish ship that would have been an entirely different encounter. You are specific using a pirate alt to generate those mechanic results. Probably the best thing in the end is to just remove the pirate v pirate mechanic. It's just not worth the hassle on various issues.

This has occured more than once involving what I think is a swedish alt pirate named Salzi. Basically he gets into the pirate group close in and makes a tag on another pirate. Then the rest of the swedish can jump in on his side at close range. Or he pins the pirate into the battle so the swedes can surrouund the pirate outside the battle. This opens up for huge exploit potential and all any nation need to do is assign a pirate alt charate to key ports and they gain the ability to control the battles with pirates. Pirates can not do much about it as if we attck the alt swedish pirate only one ship can fight. So you have to let him sail along side you till he tags. I challenge Salzi is a swede who discovered this potential and is using it to advantage the swedish team, his real team, over pirates. This whole thing could be neutralized, somewhat, if a pirate making a pirate on pirate tag was not allowed any assistance on his side. But I can see a future where more hard core players will create pirate alts to take advantage of this mechanic as Salzi has discovered.

It's players that joined up while we were in pvp1. Which has been a few months. So they are not new to the game. They just have nothing on pvp2 and we'd have to get them up and going again. Not sure how things will pan out following War & Peace. Going back to pvp2 isn't impossible. For myself, I would prefer both servers stay. I play pirate on pvp1. But to fully test out W&P I like having the option to play NAT on pvp2.

I certainly wouldn't be opposed to bring some form of teleport timers back. Though the new conquest system with required military build up prior to an attack may make instant 25ship Zerg ports pointless. Still I wouldn't mind teleport restrictions that promoted the use of smaller boats. Let's say you timer is reset at teleport based on the size of ship you teleported. Example: a 6th rate might be one hour, a 4th rate 3hours and a 1st rate being 6 hours.

If you hadn't destroyed France, or at least the Danes hadn't , we might consider it. Of course, then we still got the problem of getting the new guys stuff from pvp1 to pvp2. LOL

Basically some version of this. A good number of players went to other games to await changes to alliance and conquest end game. It was suggested months ago that at that time there would only be one server. So now half of us that stayed are end game established on pvp1 and others are established on pvp2. So playing together again becomes problematic without the originally suggested merge or at least asset relocations.

Yes it's been beaten to death. But you still have all our blue prints and high level rate ship production stuff locked up in your low pop paradise. So when War and Peace comes out and the old player base wants to come back and try it out the whole Server Merge issue needs to come back up again. Players that want to come back but play on pvp1 need the originally suggested merge or simply just a way to migrate their stuff.

A few things on this. Even if a player teleports too and hunts at a free town you still get to see him anchored in front of the port at range. You don't have to sail into it. You can call for help to teleport in and escort you or run him off. There is nothing a player does in the situation that he can't do at non-free ports in many cases. The logic isn't there. These aren't free towns because they are so powerful no nation dares touch them. They don't have ships patrolling the zone around them. They are free because they don't ever take sides in national conflicts. Everyone can dock and trade there regardless of what dastardly deeds they may have done or do on the seas. I don't understand what you are trying to fix? It seems to be some sort of hunting tactic you wish to remove. I can not support that at all. Hunting style pvp players need to be able to play the game and hunting commerce ports is pretty much how they have to do it.

I don't think the Devs would remove pirate ability to sail rates. It's simply not practical in a game where the average national player can and will sail a 3rd or 2nd rate to accomplish menial everyday tasks. For example: nationals aren't sailing the coast of Jamaica in lone cargo ships. They are using LGVs with x2 Connie escorts. when they sail from Kingsport to Port Morant doing patrol missions they are not sailing frigates as much as Bellonas. When nationals come to Mortimer Town to hunt pirates they aren't using the Corvettes and Sloops Lt. Maynard used to chase Blackbeard. They are using fast frigates backed up by rate ships. The only way to keep the playing field relatively level for pirates, without restricting rate ships from national captains, is to let the pirates sail them as well. If the standard NAT ship was a frigate then you could restrict pirates to frigates. But in our game every National sea captain is a rear admiral with a rate ship. So there simply wouldn't be a pirate game if you didn't raise the pirates to the same average standard.

I appears that this issue will eventually resolve itself. Those without busy lives will eventually be selling medi-kits at below NPC costs. So then those with busy lives can simply buy those player made kits. Four ways to replace crew. Players will just need to choose the method that works best for them: Buy from NPC - just takes lots of money and no time Buy from players - takes some money and no time Player made via factories - takes some money and some time Player made from fishing - takes less money but a lot of time.

Perhaps something was lost in translation. I WAS giving the French credit for NOT joining the new alliance. Just like you stated above. OW PvP was at its best when France owned ports in West Haiti alongside Denmark and Sweden. This brought closer fights for GB, Dutch, Spain and Pirates. Possibly USA as well. Since the GB-Dutch became dominant in western Haiti some PvP has died off and we do need to sail more to find similar concentrations of enemies in the same waters.