SueMyChin

It's been long discussed and I think there would be huge desire from the player base for the above too. At some point, when we get a better inventory management it should work that way.

I don't know what you're replying to but it has nothing at all to do with what I said. I'm fully aware a gun needs powder to fire, please, tell me where I stated it didn't... But the idea that all a ship's captain needed to do was hire more lackeys to carry the powder from the magazine and they would instantly improve reload times is again, ridiculous. The bottleneck was manning the guns themselves, swabbing, loading, aiming and firing the guns. Not the supply of powder. I'm surprised having such a knowledge of sailing you've underestimated how resourceful, organised and inelegant sailors can be. The thought that hundreds of thousands of them overlooked that it was simply poor training/lack of powder monkeys holding back reload times is hugely misguided. Again, I'm obviously not saying powder isn't need, I'm saying that a captain is no more likely to go to sea without enough of them, to the point where it holds up reload times, than he is to leave port without a mast. The 'powder monkey module' is the gunnery equivalent of a 'sail module' "sail module: Add some sails to your ship to make it go 100% faster"... Surely we're working on the assumption that in game a captain has the foresight to take sails with him, just as he would take more than enough lackeys so that there was no danger of them holding up reload times... Baffled that I even had to explain that but I hope it clears the matter up.

Yup, like both the shed and the whale modules, totally impractical.. The idea that the bottleneck on reload times was powder being brought up from the hold is ridiculous anyway. You could have 400 people tasked with carrying powder to the gundecks and it wouldn't help them fire the guns any faster. Can anyone actually think of an upgrade that would naturally come under a 'modules' tab on a ship? Perhaps an extra pump at a push but everything else would be either improvements (copper sheathing, arguable the extra pump), upkeep (careening), crew training (improved powder monkeys!) or something that wouldn't come under ship alterations at all, like improved gun sights.

Yeh, or hire grown men to do it, increase the fire rate 20%! Then they could have built a shed on the deck to store the powder and shot in too, increase the fire rate 30% ! They could have tied ropes around whales and had them tow the ship, increase speed 50% ! There are certain improvements that are sensible and there are some that aren't..

Obviously, but you don't walk into a ropery and ask for an improved rigging module... Copper sheathing is not a 'module' either. It's an upgrade, an improvement, a modification and of course this wouldn't last forever as an in game modules do too. Call them upgrades or improvements and remove items like 'more powder monkeys' that improve reload speed. This should be encompassed within crew skill, which would improve with time and action. To qualify I'm not calling an upgrade system 'stupid' but handling it within a 'module' mechanic like exists now is.

None of that is unique to modules, you could apply the same reasoning to advocate whatever mechanic they chose to handle ship 'upgrades'.

Modules are a stupid idea to begin with in my opinion, they belong in arena games like WoT and WT etc. No idea why they are even in the game. If you're going to have some kind of upgrade feature then there are better ways to do it and rather than improving the modules they should put time into finding a better way of handling upgrades full stop.

This would effectively happen every time war broke out in the real world. If you could get to a country with the information that war had broken out first, you could buy or sell stock that would become more or less valuable once the information became known to the markets there. In game you could have what would almost be a 'side quest' where once war was declared between two factions you could offer to take the information to a distant port for a entrepreneur, if you're there before anyone else he rewards you handsomely for the trouble. This would effectively become a race against other players who would simultaneously take up the mission.

Your points are great and I think many would welcome lots of the suggestions. The arbitrary ranking system based on XP is overdone and turns a game into one long grind just to pad the whole experience out. Obviously, within navies and societies there would be ranks based on merit but outside of these, cant we just play the game for profit, possession and fun? The harshness of the game, the loss and reward has long been debated on these forums too. As you mention the recent success in prema-death games like DayZ should be showing developers that players want to feel that risk of knowing one mistake and you're back to square one. I've already seen players advocating the loss of a durability to teleport somewhere as "they have been sailing days and never lost one durability yet so I still have 5" (to paraphrase) this is hardly the feeling of loss that get hearts pumping in battle. The economy has to be the driving factor within the game, finance must motivate every action as it promotes a fairer game and the degradation features referenced in your point 'case two' would heighten that motivation. I see no reason why ship/module degradation with use should not be implemented, but it doesn't sound like it will be. I think overall this comes down to a developers philosophy. GL seem to have a penchant for over simplifying aspects of the game (IMO). People may disagree but maritime warfare in the Age of Sail was harshand very technical, I don't think it should be any different in game. Adding arbitrary ranks to pirates, 1-10 rating systems on cannon, ship durabilities and the like remove that technicality and 'harshness' from the game, to it's detriment for me. Some of the most technical games in their genre are also some of the most popular. Look at games like counter strike that currently have around 100x the player base of call of duty and battlefield.. EVE can/will have more players online at any one time than all but the top 5 games on steam... there is a demand, especially on PC for technical games and those that want and understand them are the ones with the money in their pockets, not the kids who can't work them out.

I think the AI escorts will serve a purpose. Obviously player escorts would be better but if they aren't available, going into a battle vs a stronger ship with them would be preferable to going into one on your own.

This might just be me but I would limit NPCs to protecting a home port and being available for hire as escort duty for a cost. Obviously in testing that would leave the oceans sparsely populated but is there any real need in them once it goes live? Consequences of this would be no pointless battles whereby NPCs attack players with no hope of the player losing. Farming NPC ships for loot and XP would be far more difficult as they would only exist around enemy controlled areas or would be part of a convoy with at least one player involved. If missions were added there could be AI controlled enemy involved in those too but NPC fleets sailing around aimlessly when the population is larger would add little to the experience for me anyway... I appreciate they're a fact of life in testing though, if only for population and AI performance testing.

In the game if there we an alliance between two sides let's say France and Spain, who were both at war with, say the British. Word gets out of a large British fleet heading for the French coast and the Spanish and French set course to intercept them. Their commanders Fred Gravina and Charley Villeneuve spot the fleet and close in for battle. At present Charley would have to sit in open water waiting for his ally Fred and the British to finish having a battle before they could get stuck in. Why is this desirable? Surely they should all be in the instance fighting at the same time?

Because who in the right mind would willingly fight a battle on 2 fronts when they could join a side and then fight it out between each other once one foe is taken care of.. You're effectively choosing to fight two even foes over a fight well in you favour then an even fight with your ally, it makes no sense. What I gather the OP is asking for if the ability to chose allies in a fight and there are countless examples of this happening at sea.

A perfect compromise... Leave the instances as they are in open world but, make it so that with every passing second the ships joining the instance are further away from the centre of the instance. As in, each second after the instance was started is multiplied by X (this number being decided upon in testing) and X is how far from the centre of the instance new ship joining would spawn. So lets say an instance is started and a ship is 1 minute away by 'open world travel times' then they would be able to sail for one minute and join the instance but would be 10 minutes 'in instance sailing time' away from the centre of the instance. This would give us the best possible likeness to what actually would happen. With good testing a fair middle ground could be reached between 'gankiing' and supporting your allies.

Thought this would be an easy concept to grasp but obviously not.... At present, as there is no morale system you have to kill all of the crew for the ship to effectively surrender. If crew morale was implemented then only a fraction of the crew would need to be killed (just like in real life) before surrender would be considered, at which point grape shot would be too effective and could then be made to be less prolific at killing crew. You wouldn't then have to expend all of you crew capturing one ship, just like in real life... and then the problem posed in the OP wouldn't exist.

If they inferred that crew 'lost' in battle were either killed or wounded you could have some of those crew returned to duty once the battle instance is closed. The problem of losing so many crew in battles at the minute is a result of exaggerated grape shot effectiveness due to the lack of crew morale. Add crew morale and reduce the crew loss by at least half and this isn't an issue any more.

There is a reason that despite all the discrepancies other age of sail games tend to have time/distance compression is constant. The game simply wouldn't work without it. There's certainly an irony to asking that sail time be increased while at the same time asking that features be implemented so that you wouldn't have to suffer them... Here's a work around I think we can all agree on, at some point battle instances should take place on the same map as the open world and your positions in the instance should be relative to your positions on the open world map too, both when joining and leaving the instance. If and when that is implemented, you can get yourself into a battle instance with Kaboki and side by side sail the open world real time together.

Sounds boring as hell and what about those players who don't want to pvp constantly? They have to sit for 4 days and do nothing...? I'm glad it's never going to happen.

They've already said it to be permanent and if the devs are to be believed, it will be to your detriment. It would work, it's already tried and tested. Developers like SuperCell have used this method of selling many small micro-transactions and amassed billions in the process.

Clearly not what I'm saying is it. Given the finality of the decision and the array of consequences, it will be a more thought out than simply turning pirate on a whim. Nobody is going to do it just because they feel the need to sink a premium ship. It would be better if a little more complicated. I would have them come with limited durabilities but the same characteristics as all the other ships in the game. I would charge nominal fee's for them, $1 or $2 each but with a cool down so that you could only buy them once every 24 hours. Players could skip the grind but only once a day, ideal for those that only play an hour or so per night. That way it would only serve negligible benefit to players who can afford to put more time in. It wouldn't stop the less well off from trying the premium ships either and I think long term, given that this is something of a niche game it will generate repeat custom, even when the niche market is fully saturated and the regular type premium sales would have petered out.

Heh, 240 hours.. That's a good year of game play for some players, just to sail the length of the map once. That's not even necessarily a whole trade run.

I've seen that tank team killed in videos but we aren't talking about a gold ship here we're talking about premium ships that are going to be common place, which if they were to come with regular durabilities wouldn't cost anywhere near the same amount as a regular premium tank in WoT and nobody goes around team killing them.. On top of that you team kill a ship in NA and you're a pirate, and fair game to anyone for the duration of that account's life. Nobody is going to do that. If they're an enemy ship, they're no more likely to attack a premium ship than they are a regular one. It's a nothing point.

It's already been stated that they won't be but this is simply wrong. Even if they're weaker they're at an advantage because they'll be back in the fight before the non Premium ships. Why is this so hard to understand...? If the cost is kept down they definitely would. Remember the main reason cited for buying them is to reduce the grind for busy players. This is a moot point if gankers are of a mind to troll paying players specifically they'll do it anyway, whether it costs the player a couple of dollars to replace or a couple of hours grinding.

Can you please elaborate on this?

Why would you impose dead calms with wind variation? I don't think anyone is asking for that. When we have ships turning without being under way (the artificial kedging/warping) I don't see there being much resistance to a minimum wind. I used to play/mod Age of Pirates 2 and with a moderate understanding of the code you were able to adjust the wind settings however you liked them. The ideal settings for me were having the lowest possible wind strength at about 30%. No dead calms but enough variation that it was never repetitive. Wind variation has to be attempted at the least and I would love it to include really short gusts that can catch you out from time to time also. Really turn the sailing into something you have to think about.