Server Health is a Game Design Issue

[Magnum]

1 hour ago, Hodo said:

Technically, Eve is instanced per region.   So once you enter a region you are in that instance for the whole region.  IF you really wanted you could cross the region at the speed of sublight which would take hours if not a day or two if you did in game.  

But there are FTL options in Eve which cuts the size of the region down greatly.   If my scales are correct I think one region in EVE is about the size of Cuba and the Bahamas in game.

Yes for the most part in EVE each solar system is a separate "instance" that runs in real time - it's the FTL tricks that allow a speeded up game experience as needed.

NA "COULD" be similar if for example each county was a separate instance and as you sailed to the edge of a county you "jumped" into the next county - but within each county you could shoot at and crash into each ship you could see.

It would require a serious server upgrade - but would be EPIC!

 

[Skully]

1 minute ago, Magnum said:

Yes for the most part in EVE each solar system is a separate "instance" that runs in real time - it's the FTL tricks that allow a speeded up game experience as needed.

NA "COULD" be similar if for example each county was a separate instance and as you sailed to the edge of a county you "jumped" into the next county - but within each county you could shoot at and crash into each ship you could see.

It would require a serious server upgrade - but would be EPIC!

Not just a server upgrade. Technically an EVE instance works very different than a NA Battle instance. EVE is very much similar to a turn based game, while NA is more similar to a FPS.

EVE queues player actions (which do not really include movement and physics) and slows down time if the queue becomes too large. NA models physics and movement real time.

EVE can therefore support an "infinite" amount of players, while NA (especially client side) can only handle a limited amount (50 being a good limit for 95% of the computers).

I do agree, it would be utterly EPIC if we ever get to such a real time system.

[Magnum]

9 minutes ago, Skully said:

Not just a server upgrade. Technically an EVE instance works very different than a NA Battle instance. EVE is very much similar to a turn based game, while NA is more similar to a FPS.

EVE queues player actions (which do not really include movement and physics) and slows down time if the queue becomes too large. NA models physics and movement real time.

EVE can therefore support an "infinite" amount of players, while NA (especially client side) can only handle a limited amount (50 being a good limit for 95% of the computers).

I do agree, it would be utterly EPIC if we ever get to such a real time system.

Also EVE supposedly started as a submarine game is why the ships tip as they turn in space, and lose speed if you turn off power - totally unrealistic. An example of people suspending disbelief to "just play the damn game".

An idea I had is to have each "Capitol" be a lobby where you could sit and wait for other players to Que up and then fire off a battle instance as in sea trials.

NA just needs SOMETHING other than ganking players who wander by from the hidey hole of a hidden battle instance as a way to start battles.

 

-----

If 1/2 of the players in a battle are there against their will - it is a failure to "fun" for 1/2 the players - see.....

Edited August 16, 2017 by Magnum

[Magnum]

In fact I'm playing EVE right now - I can warp to a station (or Citadel) where I'm safe at almost any time - so I can alt tab to this forum and type in peace.

If I were playing OW NA I would either be "stuck" in port or always have to worry I would sail by a hidden "instance" and be spotted by enemy players and jumped.

The "log-out in OW" is too slow to just alt tab away from - as is the OW sailing, it has become a drag to me.

[Preechur Blackheart]

I am a sheep. Unapologetically. I am not an aggressive PvPer though I will seek battles if I have the time to do them. The problem is real life doesn't allow that very often. 

Yet I enjoy this game!!! Let me tell you why I have not abandoned it, instead spending hundreds of hours overall, and an hour or two a night.

* I enjoy trading. I enjoy running various trade routes with the thrill of maybe getting engaged and sunk. You do not get that thrill from PvE servers.

* I enjoy my clan, the discussions online, Teamspeak and these forums, which I read faithfully, even if I do not post much,

* I enjoy getting into OW battles when I know I can complete them without family aggro forcing me to surrender early (yes, that happens, and more often then most of us casual players would admit).

*I enjoy the goal of getting good enough to maybe get into PBs again

*I enjoy crafting, and remember better days when I was able to contribute to clan building programs that had integrity

Here is my wish list  - remember, from a semi-casual player like the game needs to attract to survive:

*I wish TP would be modified to cut down the time sink of OW travel. I thought TP to one's capital was a great compromise, though current capital blockade realities make that problematic.

*I wish ships either had more durabilities, or were easier to produce. One reason I do not PvP as much as I would like is the expense and difficulty of ship replacement. More duras = more willingness to risk ship loss. When we had a diminishing dura scale (5 duras for little ships down to 1 dura for first rates) I enjoyed the game much more.

*I wish ship upgrading was much easier. I had more fun pre-wipe. Yet I like the larger number of possible upgrades too - I just wish I could get them so I could get the ship build I want to suit the playstyle I want. (I play another MMO- LOTRO-where a character build has nearly infinite possibilities).

*I wish the path to a first rate were different. I understand the need for the current state. Everyone had multiple first-rates pre-wipe - they were too easy to get. But a semi-casual player like myself has to be in a generous clan to ever get the better ships now. And if you are a solo player who is not in a clan? 

I will write a positive review for STEAM shortly...and I look forward to LEGENDS and think many of us will play both games - Legends for easy battles NA for the immersive experience. Thank you Devs, and thank you community.

Preechur Blackheart

 

[The Wren]

38 minutes ago, Preechur Blackheart said:

*I wish TP would be modified to cut down the time sink of OW travel. I thought TP to one's capital was a great compromise, though current capital blockade realities make that problematic. +1 A TP to any owned port with a 24 hour cool down could go a long long way to relieving much aggravation.

*I wish ships either had more durabilities, or were easier to produce. One reason I do not PvP as much as I would like is the expense and difficulty of ship replacement. More duras = more willingness to risk ship loss. When we had a diminishing dura scale (5 duras for little ships down to 1 dura for first rates) I enjoyed the game much more. This would help tremendously with PvP and with trading in general. When we went from 5 Dura to 1 Dura we were promised that ship costs would go down. Well the Devs were either mistaken or they outright lied to us. Ship costs right now are very high then you need to spend more than you did on the ship to get cannons on it. I am half expecting at the next wipe after buying a ship to have to then buy each nail and peg and assemble it myself. Before the wipe I had plenty of ships that I had crafted to my liking. I was able to generate a fairly steady income which financed my PvP. In the event I sunk a favorite ship several times I would start gathering mats to be able to build another one once it was finally lost. They way things are now why would I risk a Trinc with nice upgrades and cannon that cost me almost 1 million gold to a gank squad outside of Charleston? It is beyond stupid. If I had at least 3 dura on it I would gladly go out there looking for the fight just to see how she performs.

*I wish ship upgrading was much easier. I had more fun pre-wipe. Yet I like the larger number of possible upgrades too - I just wish I could get them so I could get the ship build I want to suit the playstyle I want. (I play another MMO- LOTRO-where a character build has nearly infinite possibilities). I personally think that upgrades and knowledge slots are BS and should be removed from the game. I've been flying IL2 for decades and there has never been any special unobtainable upgrades for any planes which affected performance. You fly and look for enemy. If he is better or luckier you go down in flames or vice versa. I've made some great online friends from killing each other.

 

[Rebrall]

19 hours ago, koltes said:

I think that 7th rates needs to be dirt cheap to buy or craft.

6th rate are easily affordable to craft hence player price will keep low.

5th rates are bread and butter of open waters should be a bit easier to craft as it is now thus reducing the price for them costing at most 100k for the ship with best woods setups. 

4th rates should be where they are. Those are big ships and needs certain investment. 500-750k in a shop is a fair price.

SOLs needs to be given purpose. PBs that no one showing up to is not enough. Lineship PBs needs to have SOLs slots so 3rd and 2nd rates are used too. 3rd rates 1-1,5mil is a fair price. 2nd rate is 1,5-2mil. 1st rate should be around 2-4 mil mark total including canons and upgrades

Upgrades needs to have a fair cost, but not hard to replace. We arw no longer caring about ship loss, but mainly rare upgradez loss. All upgrades needs to be easily availabe to craft. Resources for their production plentiful. Permanent upgrades needs to be just costly in comparison to the ship (maybe double the price of the ship when installed), but something that you dont have to use to sail the ship well and be competitive.

Cannons should require less Iron and Coal or both of these resources reduced in price to gather, thus making cannons production significantly cheaper.

Thats it. Dura is not a problem. Its how it goes along with the rest mechanics

 

16 hours ago, Duncan McFail said:

@admin and seriously get a cash shop going. No one's paying a sub for this game, but many people want to throw money at you. No pay to win. No ships, gold ,bps, labor contracts, resources, mods, marks, or books. Things like paints, name changes, server transfers, nation transfers, custom flags, sail schemes, cannon schemes, bow figure schemes, and xp boosts. 

For the steam reviews we can take care of it. There's plenty of people who haven't written a review and play this game. There's also a lot of people that play the game and have a negative review up. This I don't understand. That's basically saying the game is bad and I'm just basically tolerating it as I continue to play, but people interested in this game should steer clear. Shame on those responses. Either put up a good review and state your issues with the game or just stop playing if you have a bad review up. 

 I hate agreeing with you two FYI but ultimately you are both right,

@admin out of interest of change, instead of suggesting new mechanic's maybe send anonymous feedback/suggestion forms to every one in the forum and get everyone's ideas for the future of the game,

I bet throughout them you would see a very similar ideas begin to emerge and then put out a discussion post like the war company post up with what emerges as the stand out ideas,

 

it has a good chance gaining players back and improving the moral of the players still playing, not that this will please every player but the bigger portion as you can't please everyone cause there is to many playstyles with in the game.

 

i would suggest also people/players need to start learning to do a bit of give and take instead of being selfish to there play style cause as far I can tell some of the ideas that have been implemented have been players ideas and the majority of the player base got grumpy about it.(obviously not all the ideas were from the players)

[Duncan McFail]

9 hours ago, Rebrall said:

i would suggest also people/players need to start learning to do a bit of give and take instead of being selfish to there play style cause as far I can tell some of the ideas that have been implemented have been players ideas and the majority of the player base got grumpy about it.(obviously not all the ideas were from the players)

Most of the initial changes on the last major patch were not from players. People have been asking for 1 dura ships, but having the ships cost less from a labor/gold standpoint. That didn't happen. I'm pretty sure no one asked for less dock space, unlocking slots on each ship, no teleports between free towns, no deliveries between free towns, no teleports to capitol, no more ship deliveries, and no more sending ships to ports. For most of the changes it was to get people on the OW which I agree with, but additions like less dock space and having to unlock slots on each ship is just an annoying time sink piled on top of a ton of other time sinks.

[Hethwill]

Statistics surely shown the absurd amount of ships every player had that were barely used. Technical side it is database space being used that can be used for other things ? No idea. But we cannot lie - we all had tons of ships we never used.

The most purist been asking for no teleports and instant move of goods. It is the age of sail. More ships in the OW.

It is a time sink ? Hell yeah it is. More so when players want to do everything on their own, and still find time to manage several accounts to ensure they can do everything on their own without having to resort to multiplayer, because "god forbid us" to play with others anything other than combat

This is not a counter point but exposing the same that said a while ago.

We do write a lot here. Developers make their own plan and might grab pieces from what we write. Obviously we are not the designers but we all have some kickass ideas.

Yes we did suggest all of that you wrote.

Solution to time sink is not related to teleports.

[Nelsons Barrel]

18 minutes ago, The Red Duke said:

Statistics surely shown the absurd amount of ships every player had that were barely used. Technical side it is database space being used that can be used for other things ? No idea. But we cannot lie - we all had tons of ships we never used.

Statistics surely shown the absurd time we spend to get these ships! If you spend over 1000 hours in a game, what is wrong being rich in it? You reached endgame, you deserve it.

[Hethwill]

5 minutes ago, Eleven said:

Statistics surely shown the absurd time we spend to get these ships! If you spend over 1000 hours in a game, what is wrong being rich in it? You reached endgame, you deserve it.

Nothing wrong of course. Was just pointing several factors than might have contributed to some of the changes. No idea about absurd times but if a convoy of materials is raided, surely it gets set back for a couple days.

Even with the recent changes we all already have more ships in the docks than we already use... again

Regarding the being rich, many of the testers did vouch for a career kind of game, kind of being a proper trading company mogul, a navy captain, a freebooter, etc. How many ships a navy captain would have ? Exactly Zero. You would get one assigned by the Admiralty. Alas the proposition never saw light unless the players really set themselves to play like that, kind of rp of their own making.

 

[jodgi]

32 minutes ago, The Red Duke said:

Statistics surely shown the absurd amount of ships every player had that were barely used.

Three frikkin' words: "Fear of loss". It does more than logic and reason would dictate.

[Skully]

1 hour ago, The Red Duke said:

Statistics surely shown the absurd amount of ships every player had that were barely used. Technical side it is database space being used that can be used for other things ? No idea. But we cannot lie - we all had tons of ships we never used.

It has increased our opportunity cost for getting into any action.

Instead of having the right ship for the right action in the right place, I'm at the wrong place with a wrong ship and seeing no action.

Yes, ships should not be magically teleported, but this should never have resulted in an increased (cost /) effort to get into the action.

So I fully agree, we had tons of ships that we never used. They were there for the eventuality to see action. (And yes that might all be considered perception, but perception is a critical part in decisions.)

Again the current mechanic can scale up perfectly, because action would be everywhere. But it doesn't scale down as action becomes a rare commodity.

[Hethwill]

Ah, correct. Wrong place, wrong ship. Hence we only go into Action when we are correctly setup... right.... and not when Admiralty tells you to

I see opportunities, not problems.

[Duncan McFail]

4 hours ago, The Red Duke said:

Yes we did suggest all of that you wrote.

If you have any links I'd love to see where a player suggested we had too much dock space. Who said we should have to unlock each slot on a ship? Or even better that we should unlock slots on multiple ships in order to unlock slots on the ship we want. Who was the proponent for 1 dura ships along with a higher cost to them? I've seen plenty of talks about no tps, no gps, and no deliveries but never talks on the above mechanics till they were implemented. 

On another note. It would be cool if the clan leader's/officers reading this thread could put out an email to there crew asking them to put a steam review up if they haven't already. 

[Hethwill]

What part of "designers vision along with parts of players suggestions" did I miss ?

I pointed out to a very true statistic that might ( or might have not ) participated into some design decision making. Too many ships not used. Hoarding for... nothing, in general.

Sorry, english is not my first language so I might miss some grammar that leads to misinterpretations.

[Wang]

On 16/08/2017 at 6:20 PM, admin said:

Your post is there and is not moderated.

There is a difference between 

• First statement: Developers are scamming liars and dumb idiots favoring russians/british/danish/swedish by opening adding pay2win transactions to naval action and providing special content for fascist/nazi moderators.
  • and
• Second statement: Developers are lazy as they don't add content and don't listen to me. 

The person making first statement will get ignored and eventually banned
The person making second statement is still here and posts occasionally without any censorship

We don't understand the reasons for your statement - maybe you were in a certain echo chamber or fake news affect people more and spread faster.. 
 

A dev quoting meme's nice one.

 

Yes im un moderated, but doesnt mean that every post i see you respond to, you take a stance of defensivess.  Read my posts i never said first or second statment you made.  This is all in your head after creating your own echo chamber. When you itneract with the comminuty its not positive.  You blame the community for how they are and you take no responsibility for it?  

Edited August 17, 2017 by Wang

[Duncan McFail]

16 minutes ago, The Red Duke said:

What part of "designers vision along with parts of players suggestions" did I miss ?

I pointed out to a very true statistic that might ( or might have not ) participated into some design decision making. Too many ships not used. Hoarding for... nothing, in general.

Sorry, english is not my first language so I might miss some grammar that leads to misinterpretations.

I was differentiating between player suggested mechanics and non player suggested. Like fine woods and alliances were player suggestions with a ton of feedback before they were put in game. They seemed good on paper until they were implemented and then there was a ton of problems. I'm just saying never in my time on these forums have I seen a player say we have way too much space in our docks meaning the change wasn't player suggested. I probably misread your post. I think your grammar is better than mine.

[admin]

22 hours ago, Hodo said:

Both have their pros and cons.  I like NAs system if it was more WYSIWYG in battle instances.  

 

Ideal system would be with no instances - but its impossible with complex combat models. We would have to move to EVE (or other traditional MMO) skills on cool downs system. where you don't aim at all and just lock the target and click the skills.

Or we had to go the rust model with max 100 players per server. 

[The Spud]

5 minutes ago, admin said:

Or we had to go the rust model with max 100 players per server. 

So...if we would have a 100 player servers we could have no battle instances, but the OW would be one giant battle instance?

That just sounds so epic to me, it would fix so many problems.

[jodgi]

36 minutes ago, admin said:

We would have to move to EVE (or other traditional MMO) skills on cool downs system. where you don't aim at all and just lock the target and click the skills.

Ew... just, ew...

[Nelsons Barrel]

55 minutes ago, admin said:

Or we had to go the rust model with max 100 players per server. 

Or like Life is Feudal MMO: Seemless Server transition

[Tenet]

Ship use statistics are an awful way to decide on anything because of the way the rest of the game is set up. 

You have highly specialized ships and highly specialized locations and a requirement to keep different types of ships for different tasks.

Obviously if I have 12 slots only 1 of them is going to be used depending on what I can do that time. Obviously if some activities are no longer rewarded in the game, the ships can sit idle for weeks - I can't remove them because if the activity suddenly resumes in the area and type of battle, I need the ship, and can't just magically transport them where needed. 

Out of my 12 slots, 4 are RvR ships in tactical locations, 2 are PvP brawlers, 4 are chasers in various hotspots on the map, and 1 is a trader. 

Since both RvR and OW PvP are heavily discouraged by current game-state, they don't see much use. 

Raiding is discouraged by the lack of "Sails on Horizon" warning and slow relocation speeds. 

The only thing I'm encouraged to do is PvE combat missions to keep unlocking slots and skill books, and that leads to boredom and desire to stop logging in. 

The only exception is the location where the rest of the clan hunts - I can go there for group PvP which can keep 1-2 ships actively used while the rest are idle. 

99% of the income to unlock all these slots and purchase ships came from remote trading lanes where interaction with other players was minimal. 

The first thing I was complaining about right after the wipe is how horrible the income (risk/reward) is for Fighter ship captains compared to Traders, and that hasn't changed. 

P.S. The Red Duke - 

You sail in Surprise / Reno / Cerb most of the time I've seen you, and very rarely in a captured rated ship. You simply don't understand what it means to require 50 combat marks for a Trincomalee or 75 Combat Marks for each Constitution. It's not just the cost in resources and rare woods, or the maintenance of supply lines. Combat marks are the new critical resource and PvP is setup specifically as a mark-sink. Not 50% and not even 60% win rate break even in CM costs vs gains. This cost alone pushes people out of OW and into Combat Missions. 

Edited August 17, 2017 by Tenet

[Hodo]

4 hours ago, admin said:

Ideal system would be with no instances - but its impossible with complex combat models. We would have to move to EVE (or other traditional MMO) skills on cool downs system. where you don't aim at all and just lock the target and click the skills.

Or we had to go the rust model with max 100 players per server. 

Not sure how that applies to my suggestion or comment.  

What You See Is What You Get- WYSIWYG.

If I were to tag a Constitution, with no one else on the horizon, it should be ME and that Connie in a fight.  Not me and the Connie, and everyone who just happens to sail by at a 75X compression speed rate.   

 

[Christendom]

Another satisfied customer - 

Hard to keep new players if the game looks and feels dead.

#servermerge

Edited August 17, 2017 by Christendom