Speeding the game up to save it.

[nuke76]

I disagree...

If i must play a stupid MASSIVE game with 2'000'000 of people but dump as League of Legend player i prefer to play a fantastic game with a serious community.

 

Less people, but better...

 

At the start the mechanics can be complicated but after this game appear fantastic... people wanna grinding for? Take santissima?

 

Use a mercury/snow and fight in shallow water....

 

In a port battle also a cutter is good...

[mouse of war]

I wouldn't be grinding past frigate level if it wasn't for the fact that my clan is one of the major bastions against the Danish/Pirate/Russian Zerg. 

They grind so we have to. We grind so they have to. Eventually we'll all have Santisimas.

 

If the grind was faster the Santisma event horizon would arrive even sooner

[Musuko42]

How about a "book passage" option?

 

Ports will have a randomised list of available journeys, for a fee, which will take you to another port instantly.

 

It'd cost money, and you can't specify your destination; you can only take the routes that are available, and the range is limited to something reasonable. Effectively, you're hitchhiking on AI ships. But it'd offer a decent chance of being able to hop and skip to where you want to be.

[nuke76]

Oh.. one more thing regarding grinding.

 

I work and i dont have much time to spend into the game, i play less, i level slower.

 

If we make a fight yuo can win easily, maybe as a santissima vs a cutter and you can also conquesta ports... one two...

maybe another one...

but after?

the war is long, expensive, you need money, a solid economics, good allies...

You are belittling a fantastic game... This game is not only "i have the biggest ships i won"

You must reflect on this...

Pirate actually are a larger community, the biggest one and "actually" have a easy life.... but what do enemy? start to attack in the night, when the ppirate are less... what i think about that?

They are great... this game is in our hands, dont waste it.

Cya

 

P.S. 

Sorry for my poor english

[ShavedAlpaca]

I would rather see an "autopilot" for your trade ship (or whatever) that would sail it along a preset course of your choosing to your capital, essentially as an NPC, rather than having *any* teleports.

 

This would allow you to take out a different ship to do PVP, craft, whatever you wanted to do besides the apparently boring task of sailing one's goods from port to capitol.

 

I understand that this would expose those goods to capture, and that's entirely the point of the suggestion.

 

The reason is that this game needs something more to do on an RvR level than the current "Power Level so you can Port Battle in a SOL" meta which is currently too dominant in the game, to the detriment of other play styles.

 

For pirating and privateering to matter in a RvR sense, there needs to be an economic warfare angle possible, and currently due to the abused teleport mechanic, there really isn't.

 

I get that people want action and that's fine - if traders were required to sail in the OW, there would be TONS of action available, for even Midshipmen to take part in, and it would matter - a lot! - in a RvR sense.

 

Currently newbies are forced to PVE powerlevel up to at least a Frigate before they feel like they're really taking part in the game, and that's silly. They should be primarily hunting player traders - or protecting them! - while doing this, it would give actual meaning to their activities for the entire server, and more fun for everyone as a consequence.

 

Ive posted this in the pirate topics before: I would like the ability for a player to hire NPC Traders and the ability to hire a cutter or lynx at any rank if you are sailing a trader ship yourself.

Now there are four options: 

-Sail the trader ship yourself, hire a consort, or dont, your choice.

-Hire a Trader NPC and let it loose on the world, set its destination port and it will go off by itself. It would appear on the OW just like any other NPC ship  (you can sail next to it in OW if you want) , maybe add the information by who it was hired. And when it gets sunk you can receive a late (20+ min) notification: Your trader ship has not reached its destination, rumors are it was captured by: Pirate - Pagan Pete.   Or something like that, lets say it simulates knowledge of local fishermen who saw it being chased or something. Now you can go and hunt the scurvy dog.

-Hire a Trader NPC with one or two cutters or lynxes as escorts, Same as above, except it has a bit of protection. (All this costs money by the way, so you need to think if its worth protecting that trader with a cutter worth 12k or something)

-Hire a Trader NPC and add it to your fleet, like you can cutters and lynxes now, so on the OW your ship shows up, just like it does now, with the addition Fleet:Traders Snow.

I think this is a good way to make it feel like a mission if you are protecting it and to give the players who do not have the time to make 5 trading runs an option to transfer their goods, at a cost and with certain risk.

This would also make the economy flow easier to maintain when it changes to 100% player dependant.

How about a "book passage" option?

 

Ports will have a randomised list of available journeys, for a fee, which will take you to another port instantly.

 

It'd cost money, and you can't specify your destination; you can only take the routes that are available, and the range is limited to something reasonable. Effectively, you're hitchhiking on AI ships. But it'd offer a decent chance of being able to hop and skip to where you want to be.

The current teleport to outposts is that, your captain hires an invisible ship that takes zero time to reach the desired outpost. You are in effect a passenger. Id support the addition of a fee for this service. Im not sure about making it available to all ports, Id say lets keep it to outposts.

Definitely need to be able to get back to port, at least your home port, after a battle. There's nothing to dampen the feeling of a good fight more than a half hour grind 'sailing' back to any port. And forgeet if there's a storm. The game is unplayable. Ports and missions need to be visible with at least a marker. Considering how long these 'storms' last, I log out for a while.

The "real" storms arent that long. (Still waiting for the devs to reintroduce the real storm battle instances, I like that so much) Fog and shitty weather are quite frequent and long lasting sadly. And sailing back to port after a battle, low on repair kits, evading enemy ships and keeping out of sight of land, performing difficult blue water navigation with the limited tools in the game is a thrill of its own, not a grind

Edit: Made quotes spoilers to save screen space

Edited March 11, 2016 by ShavedAlpaca

[[MCC] Die Antwoord]

Teleports are bad and open uo so many exploits its bad. IMHO they should be removed altogether.

That said I do have an alternative solution. Open sea speed is already way higher than real time, IMHO it should be increased about 4x. This would make it much less painful to get around and move stuff, explore and look for action.

It would also clog all the teleporting with a hold containing 1 million gold worth of stuff without any risk whatsoever, magically moving ships and whole fleets across the map, waiting for cooldown mechanics... Etc.

[Tennessee88]

My mates and I were talking last night about the long term health of Naval Action.  We love the game but it seems that there needs to be some changes in how it flows.  Most players can attest to the grinding required to climb in rank, build, trade, etc.  Right now, we are seeing people leaving the game that have had enough of the work required to get that next coveted ship.  The reality is that people wan PvP action and don't have the time or patience for the huge downtime between actions.  While I don't want the game to be easy by any stretch, the long dead time can be a real passion killer for a lot of players.  Traveling for what seems like eons to get a mission done or trading is one thing you really can't avoid; not unless you have a smaller map that becomes a superhighway.  However, I think there can be changes made that would help take out some of the onerous tasks we find in the game.  

 

One change I think needs to be done is to do away with the 4 hour delay for teleporting from outpost to outpost.  You should be able to teleport immediately to transfer ships or to complete actions at each of those ports.  Let's say you need to sell a frigate at Concepcion to help pay for a Tric at Port Royal. Well, you transfer to Concepcion, sell the frigate and call it day.  Not fun.  The time has already been invested in sailing for hours to get to ports to establish outposts.  It becomes a source of frustration not being able to move between them a timely manner in order to move about quicker.

 

Oh, and please add a search function on the world map so we can find where the hell some of these places are!  

 

-Ski

 

 

Absolutely against constant instant teleports between outposts. Way too easy to abuse for more strategic pvp action. Would have entire clans teleporting into free ports for quick raids and then be able to escape via the same magical device in very short order. Would really tick me off to hear of an American raid on Haiti, for me to sail with all haste on an intercept course to cut off their retreat, and find they had already teleported back to key west. On the flip side. I would  like just keep an outpost at PaP where I currently grind and simply teleport to La Tortue the second someone signals enemy in sight. 

 

The grind isn't fun because there is almost no variety at this point (fleeting or missions, PVP gives good xp and is fun, but it is starting to get annoying having higher class enemy vessels show up in mass). Fully understandable, just needs time to develop. Overall, if you think of it, the grind really isn't that bad. The fact that we have so many players in line of battle ships is almost more concerning to me than the grind. 

 

I am hoping they find ways to encourage and direct PVP via missions. 

[Ampen]

Well, people do drop out from the game. If it's because of something like this or something else might be up for debate, I do however belive that tedious stuff will make people drop out to a higher degree than challenging stuff. And in fairness, grinding once you reach a certain level and OS travel can be considered tedious.

[Balsafer]

Kids these days never had to play Everquest where if you die you lose everything unless you get back to your corpse also if you die you lose experience and have to earn it back to start gaining experience to the next level.  They never had to wait a half hour for a boat to arrive in the Ocean of Tears. And then there is the grind in that game and every half way decent mmo out there that doesnt hold your hand as you play.  If everything was fast and you reached the end game content or goal in a month people will get bored and leave way faster than they do now.

[Ice Forge]

First off, from my fairly early view on it so far increasing OW speeds would be complete and utter foolish, its hard as it is to tag smaller ships at points, saw someone suggest a 4x increase, well good luck trying to click a cutter flying past in 80 knots...

 

As for teleports i strongly dislike any and all forms of them in any game that presents a persistent map and in a complete contested area due to the evident borderline exploitive manoeuvre they allow.

Besides they completely break immersion and also piss on some of the more dedicated players like traders hauling materials left and right to build the ships for the combatants.

 

As for "Grind vs Enjoying" topic is an interesting one to say the least, and unfortunatly one in later years and become more and more of an critical issue in a lot of recently released games with progressions and i wont mention names but they all have the same core issue and thats the player; what you make of the game is what you get in return, if you view the progression as a must to get to the "fun/end" part of the game well there isnt anything in the world thats gonna keep you from thinking that way.

If you on the other hand would sit back actually enjoy the game every step of the way then the "grind" isnt really grinding its steadily advancing while having a lot of fun playing the game.

 

And on a side note if your complaining about you dont have enough time free to spend to be on par with the highest guys in the game then you probably need to take a step back and figure out if you should be thinking in those lines or just take a breath and enjoy the game for what it is.

 

P.S. Now that all said and done remember and i cannot emphesize this clearly enough as this is another one of those blurred things thats happened lately, its a "early access" game which means it is still under developement and if your bored or cant find anything to do at "late/end game" its because its not developed or completed yet and you need to keep that in mind as well.

 

P.P.S I'm writing this while having a cold and fairly tired so i do apologize if i come off too harsh

[Ampen]

Kids these days never had to play Everquest where if you die you lose everything unless you get back to your corpse also if you die you lose experience and have to earn it back to start gaining experience to the next level.  They never had to wait a half hour for a boat to arrive in the Ocean of Tears. And then there is the grind in that game and every half way decent mmo out there that doesnt hold your hand as you play.  If everything was fast and you reached the end game content or goal in a month people will get bored and leave way faster than they do now.

 

This is very true, and I agree that alot of games "spoonfeed" their players these days. 

Now, this game has another issue, and that is that it's gigantic. If it's going to be dynamic there need to be more players or travel need to be compressed in some way, otherwise the result will be a pretty empty open sea most of the time. While that might have its charm, I do belive one thing this game need to survive is an active OS.

That said, considering the huge map, I would figure some kind of more leanient approach would be needed to increase the amount of players that stick around.

 

It's not an easy subject, that's for sure. But bottom line is this is a niche game, and as such it will attract less players to begin with, tedious tasks on top of that will make it more difficult. Of course the hardcore games have that charm with them that it's the hardcore players that will stick around, but how many will that be? Enough for this map?

 

edit: typos

Edited March 13, 2016 by Ampen

[ShavedAlpaca]

Oh as for the number of players part, that was also extensively discussed just prior to Steam EA. Things like EVE and Elite Dangerous have an advantage here as they have areas of their maps, every system, every planetary body is its own little server in essence. Here, all of the carribean sea is one zone and so it is server intensive to have 12k people on it. I think the current server limit is 3k and droped to 2.5k to prevent crashes. Either you need a MASSIVE SUPER BEAST ULTRA MASTER RACE server that can handle huge player numbers or find a way to split the map up. Which is difficult, since space games have hyperspace jumps and all that but here you would want it as smooth as possible.
Now border exploits come into play, how do you prevent players camping a popular crossing?
That is the problem when you want more players. Currently the multiple servers are in to accomodate all the new captains that came with the steam EA. I have no doubt the devs would like more players on the map.
We just need to help them figure out how.