Rate the patch 9.97

[Vaan De Vries]

10 hours ago, jodgi said:

That may be true.

If I squint my eyes, forget myself, drink five pints and do a ballerina spin I can agree that there is a little fun in the whole getting mats thing. At the very least I recognize that it gives some atmosphere and immersion to the game. I totally see that some of you love that stuff to bits, so I've been tolerant to the inherent boredom of it, for your sake. You're welcome.

As far as what makes a guy like myself want to fire up Naval Action.exe, eco stuff is not an important motivational factor. It is in fact a tiny negative, but I'll keep that to myself.

I could be wrong, but based on the topics and levels of whinage on the forum over the last year I'm afraid the majority are "shooting at ships" oriented players.

Now, look at your quote at the top. People don't mind spending more time shooting at ships, it is what they came for, it is what is fun. Make crafting and eco stuff "complex" and  "challenging", which simply translates into time consuming for those who mainly came for the shooting, and the bitching and moaning will have no end.

Anectode:

I've done quite a bit of Naval Action promotion on other sites and among friends. It may be that all my friends are similar PVP-airheads like myself but out of the seven players that I know started playing due to my efforts none remain today. They're not mad, they even say they like the game, but the time consumption of all things eco has eroded them away. I made them golden ships for free but that can only ever be a temporary bandaid.

And now, the all-caps provocative one-liner that is my opinion and TLDR;

ECO ORIENTED PLAYERS NEED PVP AIRHEADS MORE THAN PVP AIRHEADS NEED ECO ORIENTED PLAYERS.

(subscript: For your eco sandbox to ever stand a chance you need to accomodate the PVP airhead instead of chasing him away, he is the true content provider and consumer of your eco) 

This seems to be the idea of the developers, will you fight them over it?

 

I am not ECO oriented. 

Most of the time I was hunting for OW PVP near Hat island. And from what I've seen majority of the players ARE NOT PVP airheads - cause they are constantly running even from fair fights. Most of the players in this game will engage you ONLY having decisive advantage. 

I just don't see a point in having OW that you don't use(or use 1 hour per week to get your 2 mils and get back to small battles/pvp events). Let's just go to the sea trials (small battles) again.

Eve has a complex ECO and is successful without catering to casuals and oversimplifying eco.

If you can't fight well enough on Frigates (you lose duras to fast) - fight in brigs. If you can't fight well enough in brigs - fight in basic cutters - you have unlimited amount of them.

 

 

And you are wrong about players leaving because eco is too hard. Yes, after fine woods online dropped from 600 to maybe 400 because of fine wood whiners. But people advocating to that tend to forget that BEFORE FINE WOODs online dropped from 2500 to 600 on PVP1. And most of the people left had all the ships and resources you want. I had around 15 players friended in NA a year ago. They were sea salted, ready for action, fighting PBs, doing suicide squads near enemy capital, etc. They could have mats for 20 Santis. And now I occasionally see only one of them online. 

They left because game was too CAREBEAR and BORING. Because there was no (and still there isn't) big sense in OW PVP. No PVP points outside of stupid (for PVP sandbox) "events zone". No influence on the RVR because while you sank 100 1st rates in OW or PB people will easily replace them with 1000 new ones. Because ROE tend to protect carebears too much with insane amount of AI fleets, forts, OW speed increase, 20 sec tag timer, etc. Because people wanted PVP sandbox set into Age of sail period but instead got a game which tends more and more to casual "no brainee" style of playing. When challenges are better be removed then overcomed. 

For session based PVP there are thousands of games who implement instant gratification better: WOWS, WOT, WOW, etc. They have instant battles, you don't have to think about eco, in games like WOW you can PVP only inside specific locations(no ganks), etc. But session based PVP is boring - after sometime most of the current carebear population will leave anyway for yet another session based game.

the 1900 people, most of them was quite hardcore and left because game isn't a PVP sandbox it was advertised to be - won't come back. 

Edited December 7, 2016 by Vaan De Vries

[Destraex]

Voted good in general but still think travel should be much shorter and sweeter and events closer (manually activated time compression outside when of human player sight would fix this). Bear in mind I have not really done a lot of testing yet with the new patch.

A small step in the right direction. But if the time sink has not disappeared the players will not stay I would say. The open world was supposed to enhance the battles not become the whole game and a massive waste of time. My 2c... on average most people in the entire world do not have hours to play every night. Most I would say have 1 or maybe at maximum 2hrs and this may not be their only game.

[Blackbrook]

Patch is good, but not perfect.

I like:

+ hostility bombs are gone (mostly)

+ towing helps when you want to move many ships around

+ new events (new content) 

I don't like:

- new events (break immersion on OW). This is not a big problem.

- fine woods are gone. The idea was excellent. Removing of fine woods is ok, but I think that reduction of the requirements would have been good enough. It is interesting to see what happens when people have adjusted production. There must be something which limits the number of 1st rates and best 4th rates in the game. Maybe the new port battles change this, but certain ships are preferred in the current system. Someone suggested that ship building should take real time.

Maybe you should bring back the shipyards. You can still build basic ships (classes 3-7) in every outpost, but classes 1 and 2 require a shipyard. How about you need experience to build exceptional ships? E.g. to build an exceptional surprise you need 8 crafting notes. 4 of those must be normal mid notes, but you need also 4 personal crafting notes for surprise. These are kind of crafting xp points for certain ship type (1 surprise xp point per surprise you build). There could be a decay in these so that if you stop build certain types of ships, your build xp for that ship type decay (you keep the ship xp level e.g. 2 weeks and then it starts to decay 1 xp/week). 

[stormridersp]

Overall, this patch was a hotfix for the many untested and failed concepts introduced in the last patch, which is a good thing, although its clearly one step backwards in no specific direction. I was honestly expecting more failed features to be also fixed, like economy but in particular, the politics, which still allows the two biggest nations to form alliances. IMO, devs should have a development plan: what is it that they want to achieve with OW? Persistence? End Game? Strategy? Balance? Fairness? It feels like we´re all running in circle with random attempts to introduce new features without fixing the broken ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

Where's the "meh" option? Picked bad in general because it seemed the closest when the top 3 options are all good or better.

Like : 

- Coward perk is gone. Good riddance.

- Towing works. Oughta be able to replace ship teleporting just fine.

- Hostility point adjustment. No more boost from running stupid low-level missions.

- Brace command.

Dislike :

- PvE events are just about rinse and repeat to manipulate the AI, adds nothing of value to the game experience. Don't expect that to change with future event scenarios, only thing that might end up being fun is group events.

- Fine woods removal. Finally felt like my L'Ocean was precious and capping one was a juicy target, now it's back to having the materials to craft 5+ of them at will when needed.

- Fine woods removal + PvP events only make up for the lack of incentives for OW PvP - capturing ships is still largely useless (especially now), and gone are also the fine wood traders so there's no reason to hunt traders either, and the numerous towers and AI fleets makes OW PvPing just for the sake of fun not so fun at all. This is a dark trend towards more preset and arena-style gameplay to make up for the failures of core gameplay.

- Huge amount of inflation on top of the one we had because of the fine wood payback. Can hardly trade things for money anymore, hardly any ships available in the shops, dont want to sell ships because don't really need the money and so on. The economy is completely bonkers and wont get to balance it until the wipe comes, but people fear an extra wipe more than a broken release version.

Don't know yet :

- PvP Events dont alternate properly, with only shallow water PvP events taking place at euro evenings. Or is this intentional? Because it's hella stupid if it is.

- Will we see PBs again anytime soon? Several regions just became worthless without fine wood production, and there's plenty of regional trim regions to go around. Couple that with being back to PvE racing for hostility and I don't see why people are going to actually bother with PBs. More effort + fewer incentives.

- Still got to see how signalling works out.

[jodgi]

7 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

cause they are constantly running even from fair fights. Most of the players in this game will engage you ONLY having decisive advantage.

This is another matter entirely. I propose that more than half of the running is players reacting to the loss mechanic.

 

7 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

If you can't fight well enough on Frigates (you lose duras to fast) - fight in brigs. If you can't fight well enough in brigs - fight in basic cutters - you have unlimited amount of them.

Any game that tries to be like this is making a very risky bet.

 

7 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

And you are wrong about players leaving because eco is too hard

That's why I wrote "anecdote", I was only referring to those 7 I know personally. Eco is easy-peasy, always was, but the boredom and time consumption has been dialed back a bit.

 

8 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

Because there was no (and still there isn't) big sense in OW PVP

This is a valid point, I understand how that makes the game fun for some. It means little to me, personally, but that is not important - We're just different.

 

8 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

But session based PVP is boring

<Looks at how many battles in WoT I have....>

What's wrong with me?

8 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

the 1900 people, most of them was quite hardcore and left because game isn't a PVP sandbox it was advertised to be - won't come back.

Aw, now you're just making things up!

[sveno]

I selected "Bad in general" for those reasons:

- There was no real work done on the issues with the RvR/PvP the patch two months ago introduced (what made a lot of my guys stop playing).
- There were elements added (PvE/PvP events) that look like a quick fix to retain players at this stage of EA (directly contradicting the sandbox scheme).
- The "Fine Wood" was taken out without trying to make it less of a grind (i do really think that fine woods was one of the better things in that patch back in OCT).

To the posters & readers of this topic in general:

--> Content in sandbox is player driven, we just need the proper tools to make it happen - events fail to live up to that by definition.

I do understand that bringing a complex game alive is a really hard task, rest assured for my respect you trying your best doing this.


 

Edited December 7, 2016 by sveno

[Vaan De Vries]

1 hour ago, jodgi said:

<Looks at how many battles in WoT I have....>

What's wrong with me?

Let me rephrase - there are plenty of games that do arena and session based PVP much better. Myself got 15k battles in WOT in three years - it always get boring in the end.

Also, why bother with OW at all - let's just go back to Sea Trials.

1 hour ago, jodgi said:

 

Aw, now you're just making things up!

This is how most of my friends left. That's why me and the last friend who played the game with me are stopped playing after this patch. The battling itself in NA is not more interesting or skill based than in other games. It's OW and immersion in the age of sail (really interesting to me) which brought me in NA. Without good OW, RVR, ECO - it's just another session based game and not the best one.

1 hour ago, jodgi said:

Any game that tries to be like this is making a very risky bet.

 

It is general rule in EVE and it's not complaining. Besides, it also has real sandbox OW, ganks, steep learning curve, hard eco - and still a lot of players are playing it.

Don't know why this game attracts so many carebears..

P.S. Couple days after the MEGA patch that should have brought all whiners back - online is 399. Before patch at this time it was around 380... 

[jodgi]

2 hours ago, Vaan De Vries said:

The battling itself in NA is not more interesting or skill based than in other games

This offends me.

The hunting and fighting in Naval Action truly is among the best three games Ḯ've seen in my life. It is very interesting because there isn't only one single way of winning a fight. It is more skill based than team based arena games, so there is even a reason for guys like me to keep the OW, imagine that! I'd play arena Naval Action but I'm staying right here.

Sigh, EVE. A GREAT game with a GREAT economy and a GREAT many players... Who mostly do PVE, what is it 80%, 90% or 95% of the server activity? T_T

[Siegfried]

One bad thing in naval action battles are that bots people use.

[EL LOCO]

I voted Negative.  

At first I thought fine woods was terrible but then I saw some overall strategy in both holding key counties and shipbuilding areas.  The 10% random drop rate was horrible and should have been adjusted upwards to 20% without compass wood.  That is how you test a game.  Not just rewrite a game.   Horrible developers.  I worked on POTBS in Seattle as a coder and this reminds me of all the carebears complaining and getting their way and ruining the game in the end.   Flying Labs went belly up.

After Patch.  I closed my Spanish Florida base as there is no point in holding that area of having buildings.  I do not hunt traders anymore as there is no point as I have everything I need.   No point in engaging PVE to raise hostility as Spain is quite content.    Now I can build a 1st rate everyday and it just seems pointless especially when I have now well over 680 million in gold as I was buying FINE TEAK at rio de la hacha for 532.   Managed to transport well over 8000 Fine teak to Capital.    Lost 4000 fine teak along the way.  Keeping my stocks o FINE LIVE OAK as I think they will implement it back and I have well over 2000 of that.   

So..I guess its back to smuggling to PORT ROYAL for fun and buying all their Grade notes!  lol 

[OneEyedSnake]

just wish that deep water pvp was more common

[Blaatand]

On ‎07‎-‎12‎-‎2016 at 1:37 AM, admin said:

future patch notes will always come with a poll

 

Please rate the patch 9.97

patch notes here 

 

 

Gentlemen

May I suggest being a bit more constructive in your approach?

Vote should always be 7 days AFTER patch release to have people TEST and not just REACT

Vote should be on all elements in patch

Vote should have at least these options:

• Good
• Bad
• Neutral
• Needs tuning

As I have mentioned before I do this for a living (R&D) and you guys break all the basic rules.

Also consider this:

Diversity is paramount!!! Make all come to the same server

Do not listen to only one side but focus on balancing PVP, PVE, crafting and trade

i.e.

• player AI fleets for traders only
• ROE changed to outer circle only applies to traders
• Forts at capitols, towers at larger cities and small ports with maybe wooden palisades
• occasional towers on coasts in territorial waters
• AI fleets a few large fleets around capitols
• everywhere else 5th and 6th rate patrol fleets with 3-5 ships 
• AI Trade convoys with 2-5 trade vessels and 1-3 escorts
• OW speed as exact double of ships speed to reflect build

extra speed was a mistake considering you also added towing - as mentioned before DO NOT CHANGE items that are co dependent as you now have no idea which had an effect - you wanted to patch complaints about travel time and made 2 different implementations to accommodate this so which one got best results?????? exactly..... no bloody way of knowing!!!!

player AI fleets for PVE - PVE people could be included with a rule that a warship with fleet makes it impossible to join in PVP (but not sure about effect of this??)

 

[Angus McGregor]

11 hours ago, jodgi said:

This is another matter entirely. I propose that more than half of the running is players reacting to the loss mechanic.

Please elaborate.

[Jean Ribault]

I notice that in this new forum once you vote, you no longer have the option to delete or change your vote, like the old software.  I didn't want to, but was just noticing.  Is that a setup option for this forum software?

[Zoky]

I rate this patch as -20% people during EU prime time compered to 7 days ago and as -50% of people compered to just 1 month ago. I find this to be far more honest rating system then this good, bad, ugly abstract rating that none can really understand or quantify

Edited December 8, 2016 by Zoky

[CptEdwardKenway]

Don't know deinstalled a month ago for obvious reason

[The Spud]

On 8-12-2016 at 1:30 PM, Zoky said:

I rate this patch as -20% people during EU prime time compered to 7 days ago and as -50% of people compered to just 1 month ago. I find this to be far more honest rating system then this good, bad, ugly abstract rating that none can really understand or quantify

The problem is that since september we have basicaly done 2 steps forward and 1step backwards (or rather one step forward, one step backwards and again one steps forward), meaning allot of stuff was done and discussed but in the end we only made a small amount of progress. Non the less I feel the game is enjoyable again as it used to be, it just hasn't brought any real significant changes or content that is big enough for people to make it worth rebooting the game.

I play other EA's too, and if I see the patch notes, and they say mostly stuff like bug fixes, sound improvement, video improvement, map changes, balancing issues, etc... its probably allot of work that got done by the devs, but its not a patch that brings new content or gameplay to the game. If you see patches saying, new maps added, new vehicles added, new weapons addes, new skins added, etc... you're instantly triggered to try them out. So hopefully the new PB's and maybe admiralty store will bring back some people.

[van der Clam]

46 minutes ago, CptEdwardKenway said:

Don't know deinstalled a month ago for obvious reason

Then you might want to delete your account on this forum, as there is certainly no reason for those who delete the game to comment on something they care not to test any more

[Cmdr RideZ]

Where is the average option?  Like something good, and something bad.

...

You had pretty good game, and now with the resent patches you have broke everything.  Now you have a huge job to put it together.

Like one of my friends said..  "I was thinking that the game was getting almost done and it was good already, now I do not know what to think about this".

Edited December 13, 2016 by Cmdr RideZ

[Yar Matey]

A combination of the old flag system and hostility generation will work and bring pvp back to this game.  Its simple, you pull a flag, sail to the port you pulled a flag for, and generate hostility through pvp.  If no one shows up to defend the port, then you get 50% hostility for the region.  2 flag pulls where no one from the enemy team shows up then you got yourself a port battle scheduled for the county. 

It can be any pvp event even just an open sea battle nation and its allies vs nation and its allies. The purpose of the flag is to let everyone know where pvp is happening, and it worked ok before the hostility patch.

I posted my idea here for blockade events, it seems to be somewhat popular: 

 

Edited December 13, 2016 by Yar Matey

[CptEdwardKenway]

10 hours ago, Hodo said:

I think you mean UNinstalled the game.  

And I am not sure about your reason, unoriginality?

Here they go the grammar.... you know it

And no we say deinstall or uninstall

 

And you can read the reasons here in forum. Have fun while reading.

[Ink]

Captains, please update your voting (if needed) based on the patch with the new PB mechanic.

[van der Clam]

Just now, Ink said:

Captains, please update your voting (if needed) based on the patch with the new PB mechanic.

We need a better poll that asks about specific parts of the patch. It would help devs know what parts are great and which need tweaked.

[Jean Ribault]

7 minutes ago, Ink said:

Captains, please update your voting (if needed) based on the patch with the new PB mechanic.

Check the forum options.  As of right now voting can't be changed.  The old forum gave you an option of change your vote, this one only displays results.  If there's an option to do so we need a forum administrator to fix it.

Also, I agree with above, this poll question is weak, please break it down a bit.