StaleMemes
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I'm saddened to see it has gotten to this, I miss the times when the most controversial thing happening was Mr.Doran's chatban for spamming trinco duel requests.
I do have a question though, will the developers still read/see suggestions made on the forums?
I've been wanting to write up a huge suggestion for a while now about how to make pirates a realistic and unique class for solo players, I hope my delaying won't make it impossible to get that suggestion through.
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A dedicated fishing boat would be cool, it would be nice to see AI fishermen sailing around ports. Even better if pirates could attack them to reduce prosperity of hostile ports.
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43 minutes ago, Norfolk nChance said:
This PvP won’t ever happen on a PvE server unfortunately.
A few years back we had a smugglers flag function which allowed you into enemy ports. PvP had risks with its use. However, on the PvE server it became a stupid license to print money.
La Tortue to Mortimer Town and back again became the highest yielding trade run with a round trip of forty minutes. I campaigned hard at the Dev’s to change the setting.
If I used the flag, I was happy to be attacked by another player or AI patrol...
@Ink was adamant, PvE is PvE and that’s it. NO duels, No flag systems, no competitions, its Player versus Environment. The only addition to this was Co-Op missions for EPICs. Even doing group missions there was NO friendly fire. You can’t hit each other.
The reason is player manipulation forcing another player into a PvP situation.
Full stop, it won’t ever happen.
Norfolk
You have no idea how sad that makes me :C
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9 minutes ago, Zlatkowar said:
Is that a crime? Just asking because you seem to want pvp on your terms and your terms only as well.
I think people are so invested in the gank wars mindset they've forgotten that people fighting because they both want a fight is actually possible (and for me at least, a lot more fun).
The PVP server isn't what PVP can and should be to me. Its not realistic either. The PVP server isn't like the golden age of sail, its like warhammer 40k in wooden vessels.
What @Slim McSauce said basically. The PVE server, with consensual or limited PVP opportunities only for people who want them, could be far closer to what many including myself hoped NA would be than the PVP server currently is.
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plsnoban, I'm here for the memes not the politics behind them!
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7 hours ago, Angus MacDuff said:
This would be in effect a mini PB in itself. That's actually a very good thing with regards to content.
This and the Blockade suggestion are great but what about timing? I can see an evil clan doing this when they know that the owners aren't present. There would have to be timers, I think.
The Eco warfare could happen at any time, though. Really good thought put into this.
I think timers could work for this just like normal PBs, at least until a different system is devised. Eco warfare at night might not be very fair to a clan, so I think allowing clans to limit the general spawn times for their port's AI would be fair.
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On 3/10/2019 at 9:49 AM, Baptiste Gallouédec said:
Hope this comes with an hostility rework as i refuse to take part of it as it is.
23 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:When the game is wipe and you start over your going to need that XP for leveling up and fastest way to do that is killing AI. So folks need to get it out of there head that the game is PvP only. Your going have to kill AI once in a while. Even better if you get PvP while doing it cause that gives you even more points. Which is why I think it's silly that some of the folks bitching so much about lack of PvP won't go flip ports of the main clans that will come out and fight....to me they just want fights on their terms only....you want PvP go flip a major econ port and I bet you will get PvP. RvR is actually PvP.
Might I draw your attention (and that of all those discussing hostility) to my proposal for reworking the way PBs are set/Hostility?
I made the thread to hopefully change the boring nature of grinding hostility and replace or enhance it with a bit more spicy pvp and pve.
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Most people don’t really like hostility missions, and I have found them incredibly repetitive on the few times I did do them. With the recent changes to ports and the addition of port management, customization, and a real reason to own them (awesome changes btw!) it opens the door for much more interesting port battle setting mechanics.
I propose getting rid of the hostility mission system and replacing it with any one or combination of the following ways to set a port battle.
Blockades. The premise simple, the details more complex, a large group of players sail to the port they want to blockade and when a sufficiently large battle group is near the port, they can trigger a “blockade” event. To successfully blockade a port and either set a PB or complete one step in setting a PB, the attacking team would have to prevent the defending team from bringing more than a certain amount of “relief supplies” –food supplies and gunpowder for instance— into the port. Lineships and frigates would not be able to carry relief supplies, only merchant ships and smaller vessels; the defenders must protect a big merchant (Indiaman) or create a distraction allowing several light ships to sneak through. The blockade would have to be kept up for a standard amount of time, probably somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, but if the defenders do not show up and get at least one ship within a certain range of the port within 30 minutes, the blockade is counted a success so that people don’t have to sit in the blockade for hours waiting for nobody to show up.
“But aero you noob, it’s impossible to blockade a port in NA because you will just get screened out and people can sneak by once ur in an instance, also tagging mechanics make blockades so hard!”
Here is the big trick: the blockade is an instance of its own. If you trigger a blockade, a battle instance is created in and around the port. The open world continues somewhat normally, with players who aren’t involved coming and going like normal. The catch is that if you want your supplies to count towards breaking the blockade, you must drop them off into the port from the combat instance, having sailed into the port through or around the blockade while they can chase or block you. When the blockade is triggered, all ships in the attacking clan/attacking alliance of clans are pulled into the instance based on their relative position to the port in the open world. When the defenders join the instance, they join also based on their relative position but at least 10 minutes sail (in the battle instance mind you) away from the supply drop off point, which would be right in the center of the port. The wind in these blockade instances will always be set to a neutral position so that nobody spawns in down wind with 0 chance to make it to the port.*a small caveat is that the blockading ships might need unlimited chain or sail repair mechanics may need to be nerfed in these particular instances, to stop spamming and sail repping as a cheesy break-through tactic.
In this type of engagement, port defensive batteries and towers will actually be extremely important because the closer you can bring your blockade to the port, the easier it is to cover all the gaps and stop a small ship sneaking through. Enormous and expensive shore batteries can destroy warships at long range, creating a “safe zone” for blockade runners that will be very difficult to prevent them from reaching, as opposed to a port with no defenses where the blockaders can keep shooting the supply ships even as they are slowly unloading their supplies into the port.
If team composition and size is unrestricted, it will be extremely easy to break a blockade because the defenders have the advantage of being able to use any one of multiple strategies ranging from a powerful fleet to smash the blockade, to a swarm of blockade running lighter ships to shotgun the defense and hopefully make it through. Because of this teams would have BR limits, with the blockaders getting more BR so they can bring a combination of powerful warships and interceptors. Also remember that depending on the layout of the port and any spits of land with defenses, the attackers may be required to bring a mortar brig to neutralize particularly problematic shore batteries. Ideally, the BR limits are shaped for each port so that a fully exposed port with no defenses is easy to blockade, and a heavily protected port that the clan has invested in is very difficult to blockade without some way of destroying the defenses first... This would require fine tuning on the BR limits for each side.
Raids and Assaults. Been suggested a million times before, and other people have put a lot more thought into it so take what I write here as a general idea. The premise is simple, but here the details are pretty simple too. You show up with a bunch of ships and you start blowing shit up right way, mainly those defensive fortifications. Defenders trying to break up the raid spawn in at any time from the moment it starts and with any ships they want. They would spawn rather close to the attackers. Towers destroyed in these attacks would not be available in blockades and PBs for the next week or so. So yeah. Show up and start blowing shit up, guaranteed action, high chance of PVP. You don’t even have to do it because you want to launch a port battle, you can just do it because you want a fight, or just because you don’t like the clan that owns the port and you want to give them a head ache.Economic Warfare. As the developers alluded to in their post about port mechanics upgrades, economic sabotage in more indirect ways could play an important role in RVR and with port battles. The possibilities are endless, so I’ll only list a few ideas I’ve had.
Sinking shipping to weaken port defenses
Sinking shipping to increase PB/RVR timer window. (Sink AI merchants near an enemy port to create a window for a raid or blockade or to increase the length of the existing one.)
Sinking shipping to decrease the prosperity of a port and reduce its output of materials.
Hiring “privateer” players to go attack merchant shipping around an enemy port or to suppress piracy around your port waters. (pls I just wanna be a pirate come on).
Rewards for escorting AI merchants and for intercepting them (if on a contract to do so by a clan.)
Etc, etc. Lots of possibilities that give people meaningful reasons to go out and look for trouble, and giving them central focus points around which to focus their activity, increasing the likelihood of encounters that turn into fighting. Escort and intercept rewards would also give rewards to players even if they can’t find PVP, leading to less of those frustrating instances where you spend an hour searching the OW but find little of interest and log off with nothing.Those are my three big ideas for how to change mechanics around port battles and ports to improve the conquest aspect of RVR and introduce a more “sustained” aspect, with spontaneous raids and constant economic warfare being important to weaken an enemy clan before the decisive confrontations.
Couple this with the “front lines” that admin confirmed:
https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/28606-manage-ports-and-save-time-coming-soon/?do=findComment&comment=627960
and you will (hopefully) end up with more RVR action, and a lot more different types of RVR action. My favorite part of this idea is the privateering and merchant raiding, because it’s a way to get solo players involved in RVR, and it offers a smooth transition from PVE to PVP.I don’t think that requiring a clan to tick all the RVR boxes to have a PB is necessary either, as these mechanics could flow together. Raids and eco warfare make it easier to blockade, blockades trigger PBs. If the impact of coastal defenses on blockades are well balanced, then players will have to perform raids and destroy them before trying to perform the blockade and set the PB. Some sort of screening nerf may be needed, however, because I think if players must sustain economic warfare, conduct raids, and blockade ports to set a PB with no guarantee that they won’t be stopped by an impossibly big screening fleet or just really cheesy delaying tactics, then people may not go through the trouble of trying to set PBs.
Alternatively, blockades, raids, and merchant sinking could all work together to build hostility, so after either several blockades, several raids, or a combination of the above, a port battle could be set.I might not have the specifics down pat, or there might be a glaringly obvious weakness in this idea that I was blind to in my excitement, but please look at this as a suggestion for a type of mechanic change, not a hypothetical set of patch notes. I fleshed this out quite a bit because its an exciting prospect to me and because I wanted to propose solutions to a lot of the problems pre emptively, not to try to tell the developers how to do their job.
Thanks for reading this and kudos to you if you actually did read most or all of it, I hope it wasn't a waste of your time. I'll check to see how people have responded in the morning. o7.
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Port management opens up the possibility for better port battle triggering mechanics. Hostility missions aren't very fun, but what about using a combination blockades, economic warfare, and/or raids/assaults to create PB opportunities?
I have several ideas about this, are people even remotely interested in changing PB creation mechanics? If so I can write up a suggestion about it.
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Now that clans can build defenses for their ports, its time for port raids so we can blow them all up!
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Confederate soldiers routing towards the enemy.
Its a bold strategy cotton lets see if it pays off for them.
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I'm all for wiping the shit out of everything, the game becomes boring when people just amass billions of resources because of exploitable economics and keep them after changes make them harder to get. Then nobody has to do anything or make the "player driven economy" work because they have 1,000,000,000+ gold or reals or whatever and don't do anything. I have 20k+ Iron for instance, now its much harder to get but I don't have to do anything to work for Iron ever again basically because I stockpiled while it was easy to get (planning to be a cannon salesman) And as for ranks, I think without an xp wipe, the release will be a disaster with half the players at rear admiral slaughtering the other half, who are all on brigs.
Obviously, doubling back on previous promises is really bad, but I think that if you didn't see this one coming you might want to visit the optometrist.
I am fully aware however that as someone who doesn't really enjoy sailing anything over a corvette, this wipe is going to take a lot more skin off of other's peoples backs than mine.
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Ok this is beautiful :''') Makes me want to come back it really does.
gloire aux grenouilles!!
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I agree that there are too many nations. There should be 1 nation, where newbies learn how to sail in a small safe zone. Everything else should be clans based.
Thats how I see it.
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I'll say it again, people will be perfectly willing to purchase DLC even if it offers no game play avantage.
In Team Fortress 2 people pay real money to be able to turn themselves into pigeons and cover their rocket launchers in christmas lights. I'm sure they will pay for bow figures, sail patterns, and paint jobs.
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49 minutes ago, Capn Rocko said:
We just need a reason to fight for ports. Add more meaning to the ports and there will be more RvR. Resetting the map doesn't change anything it's just a temp fix for a bigger problem.
Say it again for the people in the back, clan based RVR not nation based!
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"Please, please give us more lineships so we can completely ignore them in favor of the bellona and ocean"
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24 minutes ago, Slim McSauce said:
Boarding isn't on the same level as cannon combat, literally a completely different game. Cannon combat is sim-like, current boarding is a copy&paste from age of sail mobile games, seriously. How you can be content with that is beyond me
Its like switching from watching "Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" to "Pirates of the Caribbean 3".
...in about 5 seconds.
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3 hours ago, Tiedemann said:
So I'm now registering that we all fear a rating system. And this is because we strongly believe that this games player base has more bad apples in it than the world normally has.
Go read through the "great battle results" thread and tell me otherwise.
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This just shows that the game does a great job of modelling McClellan's tactics.
*Shots fired*
Well, actually, no shots were fired because I thought the enemy is too strong for me to attack.
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36 minutes ago, Capn Rocko said:
another suggestion could be outlaw battles + RvR + total clan control of ports. Many want clan vs clan instead of nation vs nation. Outlaw pirates could be be that.
I made a thread about exactly that a while ago ironically, it got derailed really fast though but i'll repost the section on pirates. May not be 100% cohesive because I got bogged down trying to edit it, but the gist of it is clear. The permadeath for pirates is extreme and would not be necessary for much of the rest of the system to work.
Original Thread:
Just open all the spoilers and read, I never learned how to do spoilers in spoilers properly.
On 3/30/2018 at 10:15 AM, Capt Aerobane said:Totally rework pirates and add privateers.
What I, a largely solo player, would be most excited about!
Pirates as is are just another nation… one of 11? 10? A lot. Anyway, they are nothing unique. This at the same time as there are two problems: Lack of gameplay niches for solo players and complete lack of representation of actual pirates: outlaws and privateers which were important at that time. So important that controlling them was a key reason for the construction of the US navy’s six original frigates including the famous USS constitution. In fact, the charter to build these frigates included a clause immedidately scrapping the ships’ construction should the threat of piracy be eliminated through a peace treaty with the barbary states. (If Wikipedia is to be believed)
Here is how pirates could work.
Pirates would be total outlaws, while privateers would be nationally affiliated outlaws.
First pirates. Pirates would be an extremely challenging gameplay style, and not just because of pvp. Pirate gameplay would, as is accurate, be more about survival for most players than about having an impact on the OW. As a result, pirate mechanics would be very different. Pirates would have no ports, and no alliances being able to attack each other at will if they wanted. However, some clans may decide allow pirates into their port and there is nothing stopping a group of pirates working together, which would be their best chance of taking down a large merchant. While this would decrease the prosperity for obvious reasons, the clan would earn income from repairing pirate ships and selling them goods, and most importantly by facilitating pirate hiring of crew. Pirates would have hideouts and staches. A hideout would allow pirates to repair their ship and the only continuity for a pirate after dying would be what they had laid a way in staches. After a pirate dies they start from scratch with a basic ship, crew, and cannons + some repair equipment. Any pirate can make a hideout, and they can make it anywhere. (but they would want to put it somewhere well hidden. Hideouts would be hidden from everyone but their owner pirate in the OW, and staches would be completely hidden from everyone in the OW. To enter a hideout or interact with a stache a pirate would sail close to it in the OW and right click on where they knew it was, there would be a 2 min cooldown, if they clicked on the right spot they would be able to interact with it (with their ship still in the OW) and repair, refit/add guns, replenish or upgrade crew, or whatever. If a pirate forgot where they put their stache? Tough luck man. If someone else finds it? Should have been better hidden. Same for hideouts. While the pirate is in the instance interacting with the hideout, a they would still be in the open world so anyone sailing by could see them, see the name of the pirate inside, and attack him then destroy the hideout or looting the stache, or if they are clever they could memorize its location and come back later to snatch it up. Remember, pirates are for hard mode, survival-oriented players.
Pirate levelling
Pirate levelling would be based on infamy, but there wouldn’t be much levelling. Pirate power would be very fluid. Pirates would have the option of refitting merchant vessels they capture to add more guns. This would mean turning LGVs into LGV refits, (not likely to happen often because deep water vessels would be tough to hide) traders brigs into brigs, etc. Also letting them add tons and tons of small caliber guns would be good, but probably difficult coding wise? Letting a pirate bold enough to do so cram an obscene amount of 2, 4, and 6 pound cannons onto a captured Indiaman and go full Blackbeard for a few glorious days before being hunted down would be awesome. Pirate crew would have bonuses and penalties fitting their historic counterparts and giving them advantages against merchant shipping, for instance letting them cram more crew onto ships without morale penalties, or penalties manning 12lb or larger cannons. The real “levelling” of pirates would be trying to sink/capture enough merchant shipping to get to the top of the infamy leaderboards and start getting clans to put bounties on their head.
Pirate repairs
Pirate repairs could work as following: Pirates can either repair in ports that allow pirates, in hideouts, or in the OW/battle. To get OW repairs, pirates would have to cannibalize ships they captured for materials, destroying them. (pirates could either sink, swap ship, or scrap ships they capture, giving infamy, a new ship, or repairs respectively.) Pirates could also recover any lost crew after a battle to complete their complement by forcing sailors who surrendered from their victim to join their crew.
False flags and smuggling.
Pirates could use false flags. A pirate would select a nation, clan, origin, destination, and ship (destination/origin explained above) (obv would want to be realistic there, a pirate on a snow claiming to be an Indiaman wouldn’t fool anyone with a spyglass) they would then, when hailed in the OW, show up as this. They could use this to hide from hunters and surprise merchants, or sneak into ports and even buy off the market place. However, if they show up to a port and request entry claiming to be a clan, nation, or player that isn’t whitelisted to enter the port, the port owners would be immediately notified of an attempted smuggler, forcing the pirate to flee. Ports adamant about preventing smuggling and protecting their monopolies could set up stringent entry requirements: Only entry by PMing the entry officer and getting a temporary whitelist. While a pirate could claim to be someone in the OW, they can’t fake a private message. It would also make alts basically useless unless they were able to completely infiltrate a clan, and even then logs and basic clan accounting would catch them. Instead of no-skill boring alts, we would have pirate smugglers that can be countered and require skill/risk.
Secondly, if a ship came very close to them and hailed them again they would have to show their true colors. AI sail in straight lines too, so pretending to be something other than a pirate would be tough: but awesome if pulled off. An interesting strat to counter the fact that OW AI are slower than players would be to carry a large amount of one heavy item in the hold, slowing the pirate down to AI speeds and destroying this weight when they want to show their true colors and attack giving them normal speed.
Privateers.
There would be two paths to becoming a privateer: Either start your character as a national and don’t pick a clan, instead choosing to become a privateer and receive a letter of marque from your nation, OR, as a pirate secure a letter of marque from a nation. For a pirate to do this, they would have to garner significant infamy and not have sank any vessels of the nation they want a letter of marque from in the past X amount of days. Upon doing so they would lose their perma death status and take on many aspects of a national. The pirate route would have several advantages: A pirate could secure marques from multiple nations, and change nations by dropping/taking letters. They could also revert to piracy if they wanted to but doing so and returning to perma death would be very risky.
Privateers could help clans by working as mercenaries. They could protect shipping, attack enemy shipping, hunt pirates, and even help with port battles and large PVP battles. In exchange, they would be able to buy/repair ships from the national capital or clans who whitelist them. They would have to form relationships with at one clan or port to get access to repairs and ships near the combat areas, but clans would benefit from allowing privateers and they could still safely prevent them from abusing the market by only granting them ship, repair, and resupply amenities.
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Naval Action Meme collection
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Topic is H. Darby - let's do H. Darby. - Naval Action Memes