Patch 9.7 - Land sighted

[Biggus]

Here's my feedback on the 9.7 patch so far:

 

Mostly good...except sinking/leaking is now tuned far too steeply and getting into fleet missions with more than 6 people in the group is bugged.

 

I just managed to lose a Pavel after barely scraping a friendly ship.

Pre-patch, this would have perhaps resulted in a leak which would have been fixed in moments and required perhaps 4, maybe 8 crew placed very temporarily on survival to deal with it.

Now, for a mere graze across the bow, I lost my bowsprit and suffered a leak requiring more than 700 men to go to survival to stop the ship filling with water...with mechanics as they are, even though I disabled gunnery and turned off all guns (new F5 command) the men still wouldn't filter to survival fast enough to stop the ship sinking....at 5 men every few seconds (I think) it would take far too long to ever hope to fix a leak like this before the ship went under.

So, this is a PSA to all captains out there: leaks are much much more dangerous than before and have the potential to send your ship to the bottom before there's ever a chance of saving it, even if you have the potential crew, they'll never get to the task fast enough to stop the ship going down.

So, right now it's tuned far too severely...I'm all in favor of it being more serious, but this is ridiculous.

[Hethwill]

Yeah that's not gonna happen.

 

Has happened times before. With pickles go figure. Even 3rd's with snows. So yeah, it's gonna happen.

[maturin]

 I don't care what range it's at, that completely removes the armor mechanic from the game so now hit points is all that matters.

Well, you should care what range it's at.

 

Any cannon can penetrate any warship near muzzle velocity. Armor should only be relevant at range and shallow impact angles.

[Wilson09]

First impression (had to resurrect from the ship-graveyard to test):

 

- XP grind reduced = Great !

(will give much better reviews and "grind" is always something that won´t keep players for the long run)

 

- duelling ? can be more "handy" for the non-tester

 

- Fleet mission: got to test it !

 

AA-report:

Really, brought the SANTI out and my whole AI mates got sunk, boarded one Ingermanland, but the rest AI fleet

nearly, nearly got me down. Not sure about the "penetration"...not a topic I am expert on.

 

I had a heck of fun ! 2h of sailing, "shittening my pants" loosing the Santi to AI ! Really...had to give it my best shot,

used all new tools of crew management to escape. I got stern-graped and crew-shocked once, they (2 Bellonas, 2 Ingerm.)

took the piss out of me. Both stern/bow down, 10-15% structure on both sides remaining.

 

Finally, 250 (out of 800) Santi-pirates managed to escape. It is, when you believe one mistake, one missed shot

can cost you, NA comes alive. When you need to use your brain and start thinking, "holy crap, how am I going to get

out of this"? (disconnecting = no, pausing = no, not possible, shit, back to the captured Ingermanland and switch ships

= won´t make it...shit)

 

----------

It is perfect for "casuals", if you cannot afford to loose a big ship, knowing, you might get

another one like it in 2-3 weeks only. Finally, loss can happen even to AI and it matters...

 

Loved the thrill !

Many thanks for the patch !

Edited April 13, 2016 by Wilson09

[Hugo van Grojt]

I love the laissez faire attitude taken towards anyone against the BR change.

 

Assuming we all sit in ports and jump on helpless mission runningers.  Clubbing seals.  Talentless hacks.

 

 

Aside from the skill and creativity it takes to come up with any of those tactics i find the generalization to be false.

 

 

Bach is in every thread reasonably arguing that the change does more to stop people from helping those ganked then it does to stop gankers.

 

Slamz is talking about the skill and enjoyment of fighting outnumbered.

 

Several others have commented that they just dont want their group to get split since it ruins the entire evening trying to re-group

 

 

I asked this question in another thread but i only got one response. I ask that anyone or everyone respond and give us an idea of your game experience since the game world is so vast and things may vary.

 

How many times have you been successfully ganked?  What were you doing at the time of the gank?

 

My personal ganking experience is as follows:

 

1. I have been ganked multiple times, fair a square. I was not paying attention to the open world and ran into a squad of Pirates/Roaming Swedes and paid the price. I tried to sell my hide as expensive as possible, was frustrated but had only myself to blame. Life went on.

2. I have been ganked multiple times by pirates that appeared out of nowhere in the OW (jumping out of a battle instance) with no chance to event try to run. Frustrating, un-immersive and a great fun for the 4-6 players exploiting a somewhat broken game mechanic to catch their unaware prey. Hated this every. Single. Time.

3. When organising a counter-ganking group of players trying to expel the gankers from our home waters, the gankers ran away every! single! time! Using logoff mechanics in battle screen, tagging each other (pirates) so part of their group could shoot our sails freely (see Tribunal thread on this) or running away for 1,5 hours. Even if we managed to sink some of the gankers, this has been anything but a fun and aweomse PvP experience.

4. The best ganker fights we had was with Swedish raiding parties (salute to Sveno et al.) or with Swedish defense fleets near Gustavia  that actually stayed to fight with a battle rating difference of roughly 1.5 BR for attackers/defenders occurring naturally.

 

This is my personal account of ganking experience, but I firmly believe that the current patch will NOT discourage PvP. It will make small group PvP more challenging for both sides due to the need for positioning and will make PvP a more enjoyable experience for both sides involved. My personal opinion, your mileage may vary.

 

Cheers,

 

Hugo

[Valetudin Arian]

Is it just me or does the dev team have no idea why PVE players enjoy PVE instead of PVP?
 

Since my post was half deleted, I will re-type it:

 

Content can be viewed like this: If you have 2 sinking ships and decide to remove a bucket from the content of each ship it will only really matter in relation to how big the ship is, how many buckets they still have, and how many men can use the buckets (PVP content vrs PVE content). So you may be removing the same content but when you have less content to begin with then the effects are much greater on the ship with less content to begin with.

I will get even closer to the truth by adding that the larger ship is full of people who were lured onto the ship by dreams of bullying/jealousy/neighbor envy(basic requirements for PVP) so a loss of a bucket may aid them in their pursuits to steal/kill/measure appendages against other peoples while holding a sharp knife as long as they can take everyone else's or cause them to have less than them. While the smaller ship with less content is crewed by men who follow dreams that may still involve being competitive it is a competitiveness not aimed at causing grief to anyone, so any content taken from them that shares its properties with their focus(PVE content of PVE players)  will be more sorely missed as well as felt.

But that is O.K., just delete the PVE server already.

Edited April 13, 2016 by Valetudin Arian

[Bloody 9]

Lets give the patch some time for more accurate information.  Only put vital info that would  require a hot fix.  Time is needed for the developers to see the impact of the patch..

 

Thanks for your work in progress.....

[Jonnydread]

The scale of the land is completly off and by complelty i mean at least a two digit factor. 

The narrow in front of Mitara is around 2 ships length wide, while in reality it is about 7 km (!) wide. 

Maintaining the scale of the OW in the battle instances is breaking the immersion. 

[akd]

Please post a link that shows the results of what 80% of your players want.

 

In an RvR environment any mechanic that limits who can participate in pvp will erode the entire reason for having RvR in the first place. Why would you ever want to shrink who can participate in a PVP fight?

 

However assuming this is your goal this new mechanic certainly isn't the answer.

 

Since now we have to make 100% sure that everyone is moving at the same speed to minimize the ADD effects of keeping cats corralled and sailing in the same clump all this mechanic does is insure that everyone is sailing in the same ships. Now that tackling is over you will no longer see combined arms ships. Privateers and Pickles, Niagra's and 3rds will no longer be able to sail together.

 

Everyone will sail a tackler and a low BR tackler at that.

 

This BR limit just negated all the work you guys have done to create a wide variety of ships. The days of sailing a Live Oak ship to a pvp battle isn't going to happen. If you aren't in a Fir speed Tricom/Niagra/Ren you will end up outside of the circle most of the time and sitting in the open sea's with nothing to do.

This mechanic discourages group PVP and will eventually lead to everyone basically sailing 1 or 2 types of ships in the open sea's.

 

It certainly doesn't address ganking since that is easily overcome. Most people are still going to encounter 3 v 1 fights and complain about ganking.  

 

Now all you have done is instead of allowing a 5 v 1 over a 3 v 1 is you told the 2 people who couldn't get in the battle that they don't get to play the game. They will sail off instead of sitting there for an hour and hopefully find another fight that doesn't split them up. Eventually all you have is a bunch of small groups totally unconnected unless people want to just sit there for an hour doing nothing.   

 

All you have accomplished with the open sea BR mechanic is discourage group play and reduce the usefulness of most of your ships for open sea combat.

 

Are you sure 80% of your players want this?

 

This is nonsense.  People explicitly playing as gank squads were already rolling around in groups of fir renommees and trincomalees, just as they always have.  Why? Because they could catch any lone ship and kill it, but also run away from any balanced or greater force that responded.  Your so-called "combined arms" group fails at pure ganking because as soon as a heavier response shows up, the heavy ships in the group get caught.  The only thing mixed groups allowed for was "tackling" a fast ship to pin it for heavy ships that otherwise would not have been able to catch it.  "Tackling" is a fake mechanic that simply exploits OW time compression to guarantee death of any slower, more balanced opponent, while eliminating the risk involved in bringing a ship to a battle maxed out purely for speed.  By all logic, if one ship tackles another for ships in the distance to join later, those two ships should fight alone for an amount of time in the battle instance proportionate to the compressed time elapsed to join from the OW (e.g. you fight alone for an hour or more).   It is perfectly logical that joining an instance late should come with harsh penalties and restrictions that are somewhat artificial to compensate for the artificial disconnect between instance and OW time and space.  Imagine if battle instances had originally consisted only of ships present in the circle at the time of creation (which would be a perfectly justifiable mechanic given OW scale and speeds), and then the devs decided to allow ships not in the circle to join the battle later, but with restrictions.  Seen from that perspective, the supposed nerf is a huge boon to group play.

 

Now, however, you can use "combined arms" for legitimate reasons, e.g. scouting ahead of the main force, shadowing enemies and relaying positions, pursuing smaller ships, etc.

 

That said, now that it is harder to ensure a target is drawn into an instance and kept there, I fully support making it more difficult to escape an instance (by moving from pure short timer based exit to combination of timer vs. distance exit).

[maturin]

 

 

Now, however, you can use "combined arms" for legitimate reasons, e.g. scouting ahead of the main force, shadowing enemies and relaying positions, pursuing smaller ships, etc.

Or tackling a comparable force!

 

This use of a tackler is still possible. The fact that the complainers ignore this fact just goes to show that they really just want to gank.

[Lennyo]

Well, you should care what range it's at.

Any cannon can penetrate any warship near muzzle velocity. Armor should only be relevant at range and shallow impact angles.

I consider anything within carronade range to be short range. 400ish meters in this case. Historically even 18lb long guns had issues getting through the live oak Constitution's hull. Now you're telling me its ok that 6lb mediums punch through like butter at that range? An occasional penetration, or even half is acceptable as no wooden ship is impervious to damage. But near 100% penetrations is not.

I did further tests and it seems angling is still effective. But trying to angle a Connie against 3 7th rates is not going to happen.

[Dharus]

Or tackling a comparable force!

This use of a tackler is still possible. The fact that the complainers ignore this fact just goes to show that they really just want to gank.

Or to split a comparable force so the rest can "gank" them...

[Babble]

My personal ganking experience is as follows:

 

1. I have been ganked multiple times, fair a square. I was not paying attention to the open world and ran into a squad of Pirates/Roaming Swedes and paid the price. I tried to sell my hide as expensive as possible, was frustrated but had only myself to blame. Life went on.

2. I have been ganked multiple times by pirates that appeared out of nowhere in the OW (jumping out of a battle instance) with no chance to event try to run. Frustrating, un-immersive and a great fun for the 4-6 players exploiting a somewhat broken game mechanic to catch their unaware prey. Hated this every. Single. Time.

3. When organising a counter-ganking group of players trying to expel the gankers from our home waters, the gankers ran away every! single! time! Using logoff mechanics in battle screen, tagging each other (pirates) so part of their group could shoot our sails freely (see Tribunal thread on this) or running away for 1,5 hours. Even if we managed to sink some of the gankers, this has been anything but a fun and aweomse PvP experience.

4. The best ganker fights we had was with Swedish raiding parties (salute to Sveno et al.) or with Swedish defense fleets near Gustavia  that actually stayed to fight with a battle rating difference of roughly 1.5 BR for attackers/defenders occurring naturally.

 

This is my personal account of ganking experience, but I firmly believe that the current patch will NOT discourage PvP. It will make small group PvP more challenging for both sides due to the need for positioning and will make PvP a more enjoyable experience for both sides involved. My personal opinion, your mileage may vary.

 

Cheers,

 

Hugo

Thanks for responding mate.

 

1.) Happens.  Agreed.

2.)Gankers totally exploiting a mechanic.  Mitigated by choosing targets in relation to distance to port.  Cant join a battle during invulnerability timer.  Annoying but I'm not sure the BR change fixes this or is the best way to try and fix this.

3.)Lack of PvP always annoying but still not sure how anything changes here.

4.)Good fight.

 

Again as I have stated before I dont really think the change stops ganking at all.  It might actually be making it easier for the clever gankers.   I just dont really see ganking as that big of a problem.  The only two people to respond are you and Maturin who admits to never being ganked.

 

I think the larger problem is really going to be the positional start.   Tag someone, your buddy sails in from of the swords and joins the battle on the other side of the enemy.  Easy gank.

[noniac]

so, i have done a couple of missions, just saying 12 santisimas on a fleet is madness, i know historically fleets had 40 ships but....come on. thanks for the rank upgrade, but sadly im back to lvl 1 missions due to nearly sinking on my own lvl missions, even the cutter and privateer i faced got my snow to 30-40% hp on the sides of my ship. I cannot play like this, 2hr for a 200 xp on lvl 1 and lvl 2 missions. Its just a no no thanks. Im leaving this game until the next month, i hope 9.8 or 9.75 or which ever is the next patch will solve this. Suddendly making the last 2000 xp to complete 5000 has bumped to 20-25 matches, im not going through the 10.000 step in lvl 1 missions, see you in a month. and i made only 10.000 gold...guys you have to re-think this...soo much, i would say you need to hotfix this in the next couple days. The game now is unplayable for a newly started character. I would say people who are entering the game now will FOR SURE sink a thousand times in their basic cutter. The npcs are deadly accurate plus the damage the do...OMG. 

 

PD: capturing ships disabled is still a bad idea and will forever be a bad idea, those who say its great already have lvl 3 shipyards and are producing large ships as crazy and dont care new players cannot capture ships...they already captured theirs and now they have moved on....REVERT

[Enraged Ewok]

Or to split a comparable force so the rest can "gank" them...

 

If you are able to "split" a comparable force then they weren't sailing together to begin with, and thus were food for the more organized players...

[Dharus]

Naval Action, practice synchronized sailing with your friends!

[Lennyo]

Been ganked many times. Usually sailing from port royal to port morant. Gankers have an alt account that they attack near the coast and then allow escape. The rest hide in battle screen. I sail by and boom, 10+ ships pop out. Being a low pop server and short 2 min battle timers, I never get help from PR in time. Happened to me and others so I'm always Leary of ships who's names I don't recognize with sails up in that area.

Another ploy I've fallen for is a lone surprise sailing south of morant. I enjoy fighting surprises in my Renommee so I got into harbor, grab it and come out. Thinking I'm going to have a good 1v1 fight I don't announce it on nation chat. Once I get in, boom entire gank squad there.

Not allowing ships to join a battle while invulnerable helps, but to make it truly effective the invulnerability timer should be longer than the battle timer.

[Babble]

Not allowing ships to join a battle while invulnerable helps, but to make it truly effective the invulnerability timer should be longer than the battle timer.

Yeah i hear you.  Its just a slippery slope with being able to escape with a 2 min invulnerability timer.

[Enraged Ewok]

Naval Action, practice synchronized sailing with your friends!

 

I'm sure that's why the preferred battle formation in reality was a gaggle and not a battle line. Oh wait...

[Hyperion74]

I played about two hours on the new patch.First off, I like being a Post captain now. Thankee. 

In chat a player was doing a mission and the A.I had rail guns rather than 6 pounders, His armour was gone pretty quickly. Another had an AI ship fire three broadsides in less than a minute.

My long nine cannons shot about as far as my caronades which looked like about 100 feet. Full elevation and on the uproll and the fall of the shot hardly changed. Aim for the top sails and hit the hull, This was with chain btw, Ship was a Reno.

Fleets are way too massive. 9 vics, 6 santis. makes my head hurt.

That's it so far, got pizza waiting.

[Scud]

Please reconsider the 'No NPC Captures" This was a huge part of the game that appealed to me. Being able to sail any ship you could capture was a ton of fun. I like going out on adventures just jumping from ship to ship for the RP appeal, and it was a great way to try out different ships and random builds that you may not have ever otherwise tried. With only 1 durability and total random quality and build specs it never seemed unbalancing. You are always better off having a ship made to order, but it was great for trying new and different things, and made the game very adventurous if you wanted it to be. 

 

Other than that I love the other changes, but this should really be reconsidered. At the VERY LEAST for the PVE server, as it is very crippling in that environment. (I like pve and pvp and played on them both, depending on what sounded fun on a given day)

 

That's my 2 cents for what it's worth 

[Ted Nougat]

I'm sure that's why the preferred battle formation in reality was a gaggle and not a battle line. Oh wait...

 

Captains were called out for ragged station keeping. And when you pulled into a port, having a nice, orderly formation was the sign of a good commodore/admiral.

 

Not sure that the real, actual boats were as leaky and prone to aggressive sinking as the boats in the game now are, but formations were actually a very important thing...

[Quineloe]

Has happened times before. With pickles go figure. Even 3rd's with snows. So yeah, it's gonna happen.

 

I think it's better to focus on the sort of gameplay the majority of the players takes part in. I mean it's fun to pretend the game where that happens all day and everyone does this actually exists, but it's just not the case. People were also more than happy to pretend that traders would enjoy playing the victim all day long so pirates have plenty of player traders to hunt, and the same fallacy applies here. People aren't gonna be happy to lose their ships because some other player wanted the upgrade, so they'll be protective of their ships. It's not going to work out.

 

So if you think taking away AI captures means players will simply target other players for ships now and as a result we'll see more PVP, I think you are mistaken. Players will simply use the next easiest method to obtain a new ship, which simply is either crafting it themselves or paying someone with the easy come money from PVE.

[Paul Hodges]

Great patch, thanks for that. My thoughts on what is NOT good:

 

- Leaks have become too serious. In this period, ships hardly ever sunk. Combined with the massive penetration of lower calibre guns now, this is a terrible issue.

- Missions have become too hard. Maybe I'm not that great a player, but I find it almost impossible to win missions of my own level. Surely these should be soloable?

 

Other than that, excellent work, keep it up!

PS. The BR antiganking that is discussed so much I have not yet experienced, so neutral on that.

[OTMatt]

Naval Action, practice synchronized sailing with your friends!

 

Keeping all your friends in the same hole of fleeing enemies will require the skill of mid air refueling