Ccarpio
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Hello everyone, Just one of a few quick polls, to consolidate the many times this has been asked in one way or another on the forums. Voter choices are set as private. Poll closes on December 1, 2019. Below you have quick instant action as long as you can be bothered to set it up (find like-minded players). How it works 1) You invite the player(s) of choice to your group. 2) Only the group leader can start a duel, typing /duel 3) The other player(s) can accept or decline. If they decline, they leave the group. 4) Each player picks a side: 1 or 2 and the ship he wants to try. 5) The battle starts once each player has set himself as ready (/ready) 6) All players enter with a no port-bonus variant of the ship they selected, without consumables or mods. All ships start with max crew. 7) There is no effect on hostility (e.g. situate your battle as part of capital zone of group leader or whatever is needed). 😎 You gain 0 exp and 0 credits. What it adds 1) Capability for large clans to train newer players in the battle set-up of their choice. 2) Capability for players to set up PvP events/tournaments if they wish to do so, without affecting anything. Most other games have something like this (DCS:World, Wargaming's training rooms, ...). Especially for unpopular niche games, like DCS, streams by Moltar (SATAL) do get a fairly large number of viewers and do seem to draw people to the "airquake gameplay" that is not enforced in any way on any of the "die-hard realism crowd". I am sure some of our community here have a good enough knowledge and voice to give it a go as casters. Guild vs Guild is popular in many games and the community can come up with its own rulesets in these rooms without upsetting the open world. Playing in the sandbox will still remain as significant as before. Those that wish for the purely competitive experience get the chance to start the tournament scene up themselves from the grassroots level. Naval Action Legends may not have seen the light, but it seems that the idea is still fondly remembered by quite a few on these forums. There are plenty of further extensions possible (Twitch partner programs for rare notes, ...) if the manpower is there (and the feature took off in the first place). For those that once played Guild Wars 2, you will be familiar with the difference in mentality between the World-vs-World players and those that resided in the Mists. This proposal caters to the second group, which are not really accounted for (somewhat in the patrol zone). 3) Opportunity to play mini-games with guild/nation/server and make your own content: "Tag the indiaman", "blockade running", with little risk. I am sure creative minds will find something. Open-world • It is not another ganking opportunity • If it drives too many people to instances, make it cost reals to start and accept the duel to somewhat reduce popularity.
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I think the Loki runes are some of the better ideas to come to Naval action, to be honest, although I understand it is yet another thing making it harder for new players and a bitter pill to swallow for those who really did want to take a break from PvP. Why not tweak the system slightly by allowing the user to customize the game as he wants to play it? 1) Add an option in the game settings called "Enable drop-in battles." Leave it tagged "on" per default and do not allow players to change that setting upon entering the instance itself (gray it out upon entering the battle or something). 2) In the upper-right corner of the battle screen in the instance (or somewhere else clearly visible), text will show "Drop-in battles enabled", giving a clear indication to players if they are flagged for potential PvP. If they get a drop-in when they want to chill out, it is their own fault. 3) Everyone can enable drop-in battles, but only DLC owners can play as the NPC ship, generating more revenue. You can play as many drop-in battles as you want if you own the DLC. You may experience a queue however. The player dropping in does not earn anything (for now) Player rewards can be tweaked later on to stimulate popularity of playing as AI. 4) As long as the drop-in battles setting is enabled, players earn 1-5 combat marks (based on mission difficulty) regardless if a player actually dropped in and mission rewards are increased. 5) Mission rewards are further increased per player that dropped in. Combat marks are multiplied per player (+100%, +200%) that joined your battle. 6) The Loki rune remains in game as a single-use token. It is consumed upon use and allows to play one battle as AI. 7) Optional: "Got the drop on someone" leaderboard. List of the deadliest captains that dropped in on those with the mode enabled. Second leaderboard: "Suspicious prey" - Leaderboard showing the best defenders. The top X players on both leaderboards get a single token of one of the DLC/rare ships at the end of the month (e.g. up to rate X based on position: rank one can pick from rate 1-7). The reward ships cannot be captured, but are destroyed like any other DLC ship. Like I posted here: Just give people choices and a lot of the negative feedback disappears. It is a sandbox game, I am not sure why every player needs to be gated to play the way a select few want. EDIT: Just discovered this post, which essentially proposes the same (Credit to ZWAJO):
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Naval Action Classic
Ccarpio replied to Cmdr RideZ's topic in Current Feature Improvement Suggestions
Recently came back after a few years' absence (due to RL reasons) and rejoined the USA faction. I must say it was a massive shock to not be able to play missions of the rates I actually enjoyed playing. Most fun I ever had in naval action was running fleet missions with one or two friends or teaching newer players how to do fleet battles solo. The current mission limitation by port means, my game content pretty much stops at fifth rate, because I have no real time for clan life anymore and I simply happened to pick a weak nation. Given the quote in these forums, I am also not the only one running into this wall. Fourth rate DLC releases, despite looking like fun ships to play, are not really worth the money for players that simply have no access to missions to use those ships. BR and diplomacy I have been reading the forums and the suggestions being made now and the problems pointed out, are things that have been tested in so many variants, that it just doesn't really fix anything, as @admin pointed out. A lot of the developer's work over the years has been for nothing, as the community wanted a thing, it got implemented and then it turned out to be utterly terrible, despite being exactly what they asked for. BR changes (high, low and mixed) have been tried before and changed absolutely nothing in player attendance. It just resulted in other meta builds (full Wasa fleet, etc). Maybe there could be an option to restrict BR by value of a port and then let for example 30% of the max allowed BR to be decided by the port owner just for novelty, but it will not solve anything. It just means additional ships that are required to fully kit out. The diplomacy page in the past did not work either (seems some now think it to be the holy grail). It just resulted in the stronger banding together to maintain the status quo, with the added flavour of some lunatics threatening others in chat to vote for the allies that they wanted to keep. Population imbalance Once the GB faction was dominant, US had some great guilds for a while (e.g. STARS, TDA), then the pirates had their time in the spotlights, followed by the Danish, ... Now it seems the RU faction has pretty much reached map ownership. There will always be a top dog and there will always be a lot of players that jump ship to the easiest option. You cannot punish the players that worked hard to reach that status or expect the DLC to disappear. The original players just played the game according to its mechanics and they did not ask for parasites either. The most common complaint I see from the smaller factions (e.g. FR player posts, ...) is not being able to recover from a defeat at a rate fast enough to give the fights that many claim they want to see. I cannot say how hard it in the current game iteration really is at top tier, as I simply cannot realistically get there currently. I asked in the US nation chat about port battles. I got a response 30 mins later from a player in private chat. This is (paraphrased) what I received: "Do not bother, it takes ages to get it going and you lose it all anyway.". This was about 2 hours after I installed the game again. Player retention A game has only one chance to make a good impression. These days, games hardly ever leave early access and use that as an excuse for flaws. Naval Action did release and it seems to have reached quite a lot of players compared to the number of people at the time I had to quit (in my last few days there were about 180-200 people online during my playing time slot). It seems Naval Action kept most of its loyal player base and lost those that popped back in to test the waters. None of the suggestions I saw on the forum so far (nor mine below) will improve the total player count. Most that really quit do not read patch notes, while a majority of the others simply troll on forums. Only good Steam reviews, community exposure (e.g. streams, events, ...) and probably a more active Reddit can really do something. Instead of typing "the game is dying", it is probably a good idea to first see what needs to change before you feel confident to recommend the game again to friends. Below, are my suggestions to at least make the game more accessible to a wider audience. Hardcore is great, I used to love being competitive myself. But in all honesty, is it really that wrong to open the sandbox to players with a slightly more relaxed approach? I have tried to keep the essence of the game as it is with this list, while providing players with choices. All suggestions below should be realistic to achieve in a released game. I do not know how the code is written, but I think the tools are present or at least have been in the past. Feel free to criticise them as you see fit: 1. Power rankings: Although the current RvR scoreboard is nice, it only shows success in terms of absolute numbers of ports. A score based on ports owned and total broadside weight (in long gun pds) of all ships owned by active players (in the last month) in a nation is most likely more representative. It seems many factions are only still there because they are allowed to exist. A better metric should exist to balance out the game state, as history has proven that the players simply will not do it by themselves. This metric should not be used to impede players' ability to play the game and achieve their goals, yet gives the smaller fish in the pond a better fighting chance as long as they do not give up. 2. Customizable combat missions. Players tend to love being able to make choices. Allow them to make them and scale rewards accordingly. Add 3 dropdowns in the combat mission UI: battle type (e.g. single ship, small group, fleet, epic), rate (1-unrated) and difficulty (very easy - very hard). Then restrict players to having at most three kill missions active at a time to maintain some open-world presence and make missions refresh only every 30 minutes to avoid constant rerolling for a better position on the world map. 3. Players of the non top-3 factions in port count can play PvE missions of any rate in any port their nation owns. For the others the current system remains to force people to spread out. The mission spawn distance for all nations depends on their power rankings. Players of all nations will need to travel further based on their relative power to the strongest nation. The current travel times (about 2-3 minutes) seems generally well-received. They would then be scaled slightly for all factions based on their relative power (e.g. TravelDist=base+scalar*Power_faction/Power_topFaction) to improve presence in the open world (up to e.g. max 8-10 minutes travel time for the top faction). 5. Ship capturing: First and second rates can no longer be captured (automatically sold to admirality). Third rates captured from AI are low-quality by default and can be used as expendables. All other ship boarding outcomes work as in the current system. 6. Increased mission rewards for smaller factions (cargo & combat only, higher bonus for PvP) relative to strongest faction (same methodology as travel distance). I don't think passenger missions really need a boost as nobody is really helped by zergs of trader lynxes or cutters. They are good enough to help new players start out as is. 7. "The home fleet": Players of every faction can click on ports owned by their own nation on the world map to invest money that affects NPC spawns. All money invested will increase NPC spawning based on if NPC level thresholds are exceeded (calm, border conflict, unrest, high alert, total war). Each level will increase the probability of high rate fleet spawns. The thresholds are based on the relative power score. The money pool decays over time, reducing the boost in strength to the point it slowly disappears when reaching 0. 8. "Developmental aid": More NPC traders proportionally and of more diverse nations enter the waters of counties in which conflict has recently occurred (port battle) in order to simulate a relief effort. This will draw in raiders. Most of the so-called open world PvP'ers only attack trade ships and then leg it at the first sight of an armed opponent (exceptions exist, but the majority has always been like this). Drawing them in to a potentially interesting area will increase the chances of conflict. Spawned trader's probability of being of X nation follows the power metric. 9. Return the flag pulling mechanic with restrictions. Only group leaders with at least 10 players in a group can pull one flag and the group leader's name gets broadcasted in nation chat (to prevent trolling and allow reports). 3 flags are allowed per nation simultaneously. Flags can only be pulled against nations that are stronger than a relative power threshold. If a port battle has not started within 2 hours of a flag being pulled, the flag gets reset and the initial fee for pulling it is lost. The flag automatically becomes void if the group size drops below 10 players. Flags cannot be pulled against roughly equal-power or weaker opponents. If the port is successfully captured, the initial fee gets refunded. Cost for pulling a flag depends on tax income of the target port. 10. Casus belli: The nation that lost a port to a flag pull gets a free retaliation against that port and can attempt to retake the port within 12h, after an initial cooldown of 2 hours to allow the attackers to retreat or prepare a defense. If the counterattack fails or does not happen, the port becomes protected as usual. This should mitigate some of the night capping complaints that plagued the early stage of the game. If the counterattack succeeds, the port does not become protected, but triggers proposal 11. 11. Ports that have recently been flipped get a substantial demand of all basic goods (fir, oak, iron, stone blocks, provisions, ...) for a period of time after expiration of the retaliation window in order to simulate it repairing the damage. The port will offer very high prices initially, which will decay over time. Ports do no longer produce goods or spawn trade missions from the port while in repair mode. All buildings in the port are inactive for 24 hours. More passenger missions are available in that port to represent people wanting to leave the damaged town (to give traders something to take back, essentially). This may bring the traders that loved blockade running back and force them to spread around goods if they want to optimize their passenger returns. 12. Port bonuses are now part of ship experience (this will require more extensive coding). Actions that grant ship experience like they currently do, continue to do so. All port upgrades now add a flat amount of experience to every ship constructed in this port. Ships now have multiple levels that unlock at preset thresholds. Each level grants ability points that players can spend as they see fit. These can be used to upgrade hull, guns, speed, etc (current port bonus passives) or to unlock ship upgrade slots. This will make it so all ships of a given rarity become equivalent with enough time spent on them (and if players farm for the same rare ship upgrades). Ships in upgraded ports will start with the current substantial advantage and will require much less time to max out. Player skills will now be the only determinant in PvP and the whining about port bonuses can then stop. Players are also then free to create their build as they see fit. (Optional: Extra economic balancing can be done to maintain high experience for ships/unit, as is the case in Ultimate General (replenishing your unit with rookies or veterans). If you lose too many men in battle, you can lose experience. This can be compensated by hiring veteran sailors, which are substantially more expensive. It is probably best to make sure that the experience loss penalty is not too harsh, so that the average players can actually max out a ship.) 13. Crew training: Ship experience boosts can be bought to increase ship experience earning with ingame currency. If this is price-balanced correctly with the in-game equivalent, this could be act as a pseudo-subscription to complement the DLCs being released, but care should be taken to keep it balanced. Naval Action has been released for quite some time and there is no reason to suggest an immediate influx for players. If done properly (as convenience, instead of "P2W"), it could give naval action a more sustained source of income and perhaps help support the development cycle. 14. The difficulty of starting nation information gets removed. It has no relation to the current in-game situation and can be considered mostly misleading (even though the initial intention was good). 15. More randomization in trade good prices in addition to randomly spawned missions for player-produced goods? I have no immediate ideas what the trading community really wants to see. These are what I believe can help alleviate some issues with the current game, based on comments I have seen in these forums and my personal experience with the game. Many of these ideas are not my own, I gathered them in a framework that might work. The base game has solid foundations and it really has improved a lot of things compared to back in the day. It is clearly a work of love, which shows in the quality of the current combat system (maybe boarding can use some tweaks, but meh).