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Bach

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Everything posted by Bach

  1. I think it might be interesting to add a new fishing find. Native canoes - a native canoe is found adrift. The rescued survivor is willing to show you where his village is. The map leads to a coastline fishing fleet of native boats. Once there you can trade with them for several items of value to you that may not be so much to them. They maybe trade simple goods for gold, silver, jewels or who knows. These native fishing fleets should always be in shallows and would give upcoming new low level players more to do.
  2. Thank you William Wade. Turned out I just needed a little clear thinking puzzle solving. The thing that changed since 2017 was that I had dismantled the laptop rig and stored it. When I put i back together to play I plugged the external monitor into the docking station ports. This turned out to be the problem as the system didn't recognize it and was running it on some default rather than the 960M card. I plugged it directly into the laptop port and got the fps back up to 60 even after putting the higher res parameters from last year back in. Still not ideal but very playable.
  3. This is odd. I played the game last October 2017 just fine on high graphics mode. I recently logged back into the game this week to find FPS problems. I'm only getting 8-9 FPS on high mode. Even with everything turned to low I'm only getting 19-22 FPS. Its really ruined the game experience from what it was. I have tried updating the driver on the card but it does not seem to help. Any ideas?
  4. @admin I recently returned to the game this past weekend. i like the tutorial and think it will help a lot. encouraging players to join clans early on is also very good. Real currency system. I can see advantages in this as well as like the idea of national mints and treasure fleets. I think the only issue I see looming is that players in NA tend to play more like tribal clans than they do as nations. Similarly player run treasure fleets would be no added content. These would the engineered by players to always occur off hours or in uncatchable ships in various ways as to be useless as content. what I would suggest is that have the mints run by clans that own and secure the gold or silver ports. When the mint produces X amount of currency the clan puts in a request for an NPC treasure fleet to be created to take the currency from point A to point B. The treasure fleet is scheduled by the computer in a window similar port battles set by the clan. The clan then has the play content to guard their NPC fleet as it makes its route. NPC fleets always take direct routes from point A to B. Something like that so that treasure fleets actually become playable content to the clans making the currency and their time zone enemies.
  5. Yes, that list shows the uncapturable free ports. Buildings and such may not really be that much of an issue on Global. Only the pirates stand to lose anything if they don't move stuff and most of them are still actively playing. Savanah, New Orleans and St. Lucia are all pirate held. Well also possibly any Brits living out of Vera Cruz. But for the most part everything just turns to neutral and you can even teleport to all the neutral and free towns on Monday. Which will make moves a lot easier.
  6. Its a historical styled niche game in a world of instant gratification FPS and a steady stream of MMO releases each month. The idea that it would ever maintain a population large enough to support multiple servers is just as broken.
  7. If you consider the new prime RvR nations (Brit, Spain, France, USA) have so many uncapturable ports you cant stop them from building ships. In fact very few port captures are likely to effect their home port ship building. But you can counter them by attacking main bases they may have built far from home to project power. Sweden, Danes and to some degree the Dutch will still be susceptible to night flipping tactics. But they are hard play mode.
  8. Though players are free to migrate you generally do have to give up any hope of RvR if you switch. So the switch can get you more PvP. If tou like PVE there is no real reason to switch. So the choice is essentially. PVE = opposite your time zone server RvR = you time some server PvP = whichever server has more people. The ONLY reason they don't merge the servers is RvR. No other play style matters as much. In the upcoming patch I suspect we will find the dreaded "night flip" 😮 will become irrelevant. When clans have to pay to own ports it becomes impractical to run around capping everything. So we might finally get a step or two closer to merging servers.
  9. I don't think there is anything that can or possibly should be done about this during beta testing. The bug reporting system marks ship coordinates. I'm guessing whatever this third part program is that it simply checks the F11 cords for ships linked together in a common system, collects the data and then reports it on a positional map. This would be the same as players periodically hitting f11 and telling everyone in their group what their cords are and then plotting everyone's coords on a separate map screen. Of course a program does it all in the blink of an eye. I don't think this works for target ships. However, it no great measure for the spotting ships coords to be just as good as the actual target coords. So target cords are not all that valuable. Ultimately, when the game goes live the F11 system gets disabled and this potential goes away.
  10. The difficulty rating is a very very rough idea of what you can expect if you choose to play that nation. It is reasonable to give new players some idea of the game play experience each nation likely has to offer before they choose a nation. I believe that is all the Devs are trying to do with the difficulty rating. A solo/pvp hunter may not mind about RvR. But he probably will mind about long sails to targets. He will mind knowing which ports have easy targets and which will be very hard to assault solo. Nations with uncapturable ports near the center of the map offer short sails from home ports which require less preplanning. In this aspect they are likely to be easier to play. Target nations that are considered easy, like Spain, has a reinforcement secured set of home ports all the way over in the gulf. This area of Spain is Easy for Spanish PVE/econ but makes it HARD for solo pirate players to assault it due to distance and larger swatch of reinforcement ports. Sweden is hard mode and only get two home ports. A solo pirate hunter would find that Swedish players have less protection and less possible travel routes than Spanish players. This makes Sweden a HARDER nation to play and an easier one to be assaulted by lone pirates. Now Swedish player could turn this whole thing around by capturing all the port around them so the difficulty rating isn't a guarantee. But just x10 ports would cost the Swedes 1mil gold per day and none but the 2 home ports come with reinforcements. Plus anytime Swedish clans hop to another game those captured ports revert back to neutral. Anyway, you get the idea, its about guiding new players expectations of game experience. I would imagine if a mostly PVE oriented player joins Sweden, gets stomped daily by solo pirate hunters that he will quit the game in short order. But if the difficulty rating causes him to choose Spain and he stays in the game because he is ganked less then it will have done its job.
  11. First off, you state you using a third party (essentially GPS) system to track allies/targets and coordinate your ganks like modern fast patrol craft. That not exactly a fair test of the mechanics but we'll go with it. If the guy had his smuggler flag on, was travelling in just two trader brigs and you were next to Mantua then all he had to do was use the invis+speed+invul timer and go into Mantau. Congratulations you caught someone that clearly wasn't thinking ahead. There is nothing wrong with the new set up. It deters gank fleets but doesn't 100% prevent them. It also gives the lone runner a chance. At least a better chance then he had before.
  12. No. On the test bed Kidd's is Nuetral at the map start and will revert back to Nuetral if no clan pays to maintain the three ports. yes, I went to the trouble of sailing there and visiting all three ports on the tested. Pirates are listed as HARD nation to play. Having a 100% secure production and PVE base in the middle of nowhere would clearly move Pirates into EASY nation mode.
  13. Will you be sending out another forged paper set so we can change nations to the difficulty setting we want to play?
  14. Thinking about the new rules I have a couple questions. Will this just require a map reset or will player gold, assets and skills also need to be reset? Will pirates still be treated as a nation? The pirate status in the game is confusing to say the least. They are treated as a handicapped nation as they are not set up to build rate ships and get exclusivity to one of the best combat 5ths in the game. So which is It? Are they conquest minded black flag nationals that have to use Alts to build a fleet of rate ships? Or are the sea hunters and town raiders waging war on the world? What I know is that as long as pirates can sail rate ships players will use whatever means necessary to get them. So if you want piratey pirates you are going to have to put in a hard coded restriction on sailing rate ships. Its a simple change to just restrict them from sailing a ship type. This will likely improve the RvR game as it consolidates more RvR minded players. Will we all get issued another Forge paper set?
  15. The new rules will generate a more realistic conquest game both in PvP and Econ. Ports will be capturable now for a wider variety of reasons. Some of those reasons will even be inside of a nation as to cause intra nation fights. At the same time there will now be costs for owning a port that will deter frivolous land grabbing by nations that do not intend future use of captured ports. What will likely unfold is a rush by merchant minded clans to gain control of national market hubs to control taxation and resource access. Many of these battles will be fought by player clan to player clan. Much like the East India Company getting into it with the Royal Spice Traders over some trade port. There will also be military reasons to hold ports, same as before, to deny national enemies and pirates the ability to teleport in close to your nations PVE and cargo routes. But this time, owning teleport denial ports comes with a price tag. The end result is that areas will be weighted now in strategic importance. Before a nation would just capture the entire gulf coast and just sit on it. This created huge amounts of wasted game space no one could use to rebuild or train up. Now doing so comes with a huge price tag and so I suspect most of the less resource valued gulf ports will remain Nuetral ports.
  16. It's not rocket science. Once everyone was done building up and skill up for the end game it was up to the end game to hold everyone's interest. The current end game is simply not up to the task. People came blame a lot of factors but the truth is that if there still was content to achieve, more skills to grind or new things to build we would all still be playing the game. The sand box was supposed to replace the build ladder. But it didn't succeed. So once the ladder was climbed there wasn't as much to do.
  17. ID like to clear up some misconceptions that I think are really just carry over expectations from last years game build. There only commodities in the game that matter are Labor hours, CMs, gold and coal. Everything else can be gotten from those. Labour hours - these grow over time for all players and increase for every alt you own. Can be stored and sold in contract form. Highly valuable and require no in game tasks to get. Easy to get and happens automatically. Same as it was last year. CMs - Awarded for PVE, PvP, and RvR. A tanked up 5th rare doing fleet mission can harvest 16-20 CMs per mission run. More if the PVE player is highly skilled at it. These are easier to get than most players realize. These were not used last year and many players don't realize how easy they can get these. Coal - this resource has the novelty of being the only resource NOT harvestable from uncapturable home ports. Can only be harvested from ports you own and does not spawn in game. This is both valuable and not valuable. The reason being is that only small quantities are actually needed. It can be over produced and stored or one ship load purchased at a foreign port can last months. Without interaction with foreign traders this CAN be very hard to get for near one ported nations. This building material was not around last year and many players did not realize they should horde it whenever their nation owns a coal port or even that they SHOULD sell it at foreign ports that can't get it. GOLD - Easiest commodity in the game to harvest. Under the new patch it's easy to make millions in any one of several income streams. Ships are actually cheaper now. Not because the gold cost number is lower but because the gold is easier to get. We always had harvesting by PVE, PvP, RvR and trading. But now we have trade goods and it's possible to make a million gold an hour or more if you do it well and understand the system. We also have Nuetral port consumers of repairs and player made building materials. So an easy trade triangle is raw mats, craft then sell to free port, buying trade goods to sell to capital ports. This is an easy revenue stream. Selling materials is the easiest money path for casuals closely followed by trade good runs.
  18. You can get around your CM problem but you need to think outside the box. As one player said above, the CMs are just a new form of RW. They are meant to increase the presence of players at sea as well as slow down elite ship production. Getting ships isn't a problem. Getting maxed out fully kitted PB ships is a problem. If your tactical strategy relies on maxed out fully kitted PB ships then maybe you need to devise new tactics. The two biggest player driven problems in NA at the moment are players thinking only in terms of Trafalgar battles and players not thinking moves ahead. RvR in NA is a chess match. The more you plan ahead the better you can do. I do not see any problems with the current system that ties CMs to crafting. Besides, if a nation just lost maxed out fully kitted PB ships to another nation then perhaps just getting them back into the exact same contest faster isn't likely to be a winning plan.
  19. The thing with the exploitable rewards is because the game was handing out monetary rewards. When the battle reward is a stepping stone to more power then you have to expect exploits. But PvP rewards don't need to be monetary or power advancement related. For example, some games give out prestige related rewards that are often equally sought after as trophies and bragging rights. These could be paint schemes, colored penants, titles and/or special non-cobalt related in game perks. Lets say you participated in 10 defenses of Carlisle. The admiralty awards you the title "Defender of Cornwall". Even simpler 100 PvP battles your ship mast has a green pennant, 200 PvP blue, etc... Maybe if you are British you can gain a knight of the realm title or Order of the Bath ensign on the foremast. Anyway, hard core PvP players might laugh at this but they aren't the ones we are trying to get motivated. Just being able to get a common paint scheme for your clan would be enough to encourage some PvP risk taking.
  20. I agree on your first point. The game needs more PVE content and goals to go along with RvR we have. I don't think your second point is what is really happening. Players are not afraid to lose expensive ships. They are simply unwilling to lose period. That's not something the Devs can fix. We can grab free 5th rates off the OS right now. We can build Connies and Aggies with a lvl2 yard and reasonable materials. Skills are carried from boat to boat and don't require expensive mods. The standard speed mod, Gazelle, is available to everyone that can sink x4 NPCs. One trade goods run can net a million gold. A level 1 character can build the biggest cannons day one. Getting PvP ships is as cheap or cheaper than ever. So why aren't players out there right now blasting cannon balls at each other? They don't want to lose. Why do people gank? Because it's an assured win. The problem has never been economics. It's attitude and risk vs rewards. Currently players are adverse to the shame, disappointment or whatever it is they view negative about losing. Maybe we need PvP participation trophies. Equally as obvious is that the rewards of PvP simply are not enough, for whatever reason, to convince players to risk losing. Is there an expected release date for this patch?
  21. You could always just buy the marks. Many players that for some reason like to do missions will often sell them.
  22. Most of them are all by order now. Players want to choose the wood type mix as well a the ship type. So most will put in a order for a ship to be built to be able to get exactly what they want. As mentioned above, most all of these players will provide the CMs to get exactly what they want. From the economic side, if you are building ship types randomly or by speculation of what pvp players consider the best pvp configuration for that month then its a risk you chose to take. The only ships I have found to be of any value to produce and sell without pre-arrangement are generally the obviously configurations players would use to grind pve ships. You could simply copy the most recent ship a player order requested and see if that sells. But there is risk in potential loss of not only labor hours but real life play hours going that route. The bottom line is that the new system requires sea grinding time by someone to harvest the 50 marks for the permit. If its done by the buyer, the self builder or some masochistic merchant hell bent of creating a ship dealership lot its all the same.
  23. I'm pretty sure I can field this one. Control and ready man power. It's like herding cats to try to gain control of a large nation like GB or USA. Meanwhile the pirate nation is right there with larger sums of man power and a good amount of them are expecting to PvP. We used to have a saying in POTBS pirate nation "if you flip it they will come". Basically, you didn't need to organize the whole pirate nation. Just one or two clans. Once that clan put hostility on a port the others would see the build up and often head there to get PvP. Try the same thing in the British nation POTBS and many of the Brit players would avoid the point of hostility build up. So as a Brit you had to organize all the clans to get the man power. Think of the simple beauty of what BLACK does. They take the port next to a capital and then just stock a 1st/4th rate fleet to hold it in PBs. Meanwhile the other pirate rabble move in to hunt the capital and keep your enemies down for you. Love it or hate it the tactical brilliance is there.
  24. Since you asked, almost my entire game play time of 2600 hours. Here is the thing and it's no Surprise it all pivots around RvR. I joined Jan 2016 and for the first couple months I played on PvP2 French. Then the RvR got stale and the population dropped off. When the USA prime time population matched the pvp1 server I switched (april-ish). If all you can do is PvP anyway then you might as well just be a pirate on the EU server and you get higher pop weekends. So April 2016 on until the wipe I played EU server. Post wipe I went back to PvP Global to get some RvR, I'm one of the rare French there that likes to dabble in it, so I played there until August 2017. This followed the second mass pop die off following the wipe. So now I'm back on PvP EU with the out look that I'm here for the rest of the year again. With these new changes being discussed IF I wanted to try them out and IF PvP EU holds the PB restrictions then I will be forced to go back to Global again to try them out. So it does matter if the servers merge or not because I keep getting forced to develope two characters. It would be awesome if they could figure out a way around that. Unlike you I don't get a choice to pick a PvP server vs a RvR server when population drops. For me it's simply play PvP or stop playing as the low pop RvR just sucks. This isn't always the us vs. them USA vs. EU contest your painting it to be. Some of us are literally just stuck in the middle. Aussies got it worse than me. A true one server solution that works solves a lot of problems.
  25. I'll address the first part. You were/are reading that French situation incorrectly. Sure some of the home bound French players would have used forged papers. But you weren't actually fighting those guys anyway. Purge, Bork, Rover and WO weren't going any where. They had no reason too. They most affected French would have been the ICS, they like RvR and they had already used their forged papers. Second part, I'm not seeing the "ideal concept" that Pvp players don't want sailing and not in those mentioned tasks. I know it sounds like it should be that way but in observations it doesn't actually trend. The true pvp groups I know, BLACK included, will make the long sails as needed to support their goals. These are very goal driven players and often that goal is to go where the PvP is. Now they may whine about the sailing a bit but they are all doing it to live out of free ports, build certain wood type ships and generally doing whatever they need to for a combat edge. The players that actually do stop playing the game due to these factors seem to be non-PvP players that aren't really into striving the extra mile to gain a combat edge. That's just my observation.
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