Making the Game more attractive

[Jacques Cassard]

Hi there Dev Team and Comunity,

first i want to say that the Game looks awesome, i played it 3 years ago and i did restart 2 weeks ago. 

But the Buisnessplan of the Game is just not going the right way, sorry to tell that.
Many People here i would say still remember the Game Sid'Meier's Pirates. It was a Gold Mine for Sid as Civilization was.
But the Game was not an online Player Game, it had something Romantic and a lot of new Features Bounded to the Ports and Ships.

Atm Naval Action is doing the same mistake as Eve Online did 5 years ago and lost about 80-90% of its Players..

It has to do with Psychology. First to completley enjoy the game, the Player is forced into a clan, to get the same upgrades for ship crafting and economy such as Teak Log etc.
Secondly, there is no reason why to explore the Carribean, no rare trading resources are popping up in random Ports, no Books in random Ports, nothing actually is in random ports.
There is only one reason to travel, Missions.. No treasure hunt, no Port AI.

So my Suggetion : and please take you time while reading :

1. The Game needs more Free Towns .. i mean a lot of more Free Towns about 50+.. 
This is needed to support new Players and Players that does not want the clan wars, more Free Towns leads to more freedom in choosing a home Port for production.
In those Ports also single Player "Now to the PVE mode" can invest, and the port upgrades are available for the investors. This gives freedom of clan based game play and
attract more freedom liking players.. means more money in the Buisnessplan for the Game devs.

2. The Ports need more attention. A port should always have at least some goods to trade with, and i dont mean only trading goods. lets say 10-20 reps a day, some logs,
some of a lot of the goods, not all but, no one likes empty shelves. And some Ports already producing "Iron, Oak Log, and the Basic Stuff" and traders bringing some Rare 
stuff to random Ports too. This brings more realistic wealth to the game and will attract more new Players.. means more money for the Game devs..

3. The Ports need to be something like an AI. at the moment Ships spawn somewhere and doing routes no one can understand.. The ships should leave a port make a patrol,
or a Trade. Also each free Port or Neutral Port should have a own defend fleet, and within a Area depending on Port size the defend fleet is acting as an anti gank system.
if some one is attacked in this area the defend fleet will help the victim and will join the fight 2-3 min after. Like that clans can upgrade the defense and the zone, Free towns
doing that too with solo Player investments and trading that is done, but not forced by the players, and as the investments go back, the city saves money by reducing the protection.
This will save the new and more freedom liking players from ganking of bigger groups and will players give the feeling to stay and enjoy the game longer and even buy new DLC,
means more money for the Game devs...

4. Admirality or Free Town missions, or even Tavern tresaure hunts. atm you have 6 missions in every port.. always, there is no randomness only in mission destenation.
the game needs more different missions.. with upper named improvements, a mission could be called, weaken the town La Mona by attacking a trader of that town.
that is what flags were made for and still are.. there is a reason why a lot of ships still sail under the flag of Panama or an other city.
a Player also can Choose if he wants to serve for a city and gets a Letter of Marque but then have to sail for a certain time under the flag of that city..

There are so many things the devs could implement to make it more attractive for new players.. and if it is attractive enough i bet a lot of people would pay 5 dollars a month
to finance the servers and the maintance so the game stays intact for a long time period and can improve over time.

5. Balancing the player count on nations. To balance a playercount, the nation with the lowest pop need to have very attractive admirality missions where you can earn a lot of money.
the nation with the biggest pop should have the lowest payout for missions.. and the payout should be that attractive that the pop distribution really happens..
lets say, if a nation only has 5 players, a mission from admirality could pay out 1mio. and a nation with 1000 players get only 10k..
like that nations would attrackt Players and a distribution would start until a decent distribution is reached.. until then the low pop Nations player will have more money to compensate theyr efforts. this would prevent all one nation migration and with that player loss and with that again more money for the devs... thats why a lot players left EVE online.. every one went Minmatar because as bigger a nation was as more payout they gave... so every one was minmatar or had a minmatar alt..

6. No Alts or Twinks... Having alts and twinks is supporting paranoia.. no one will undock of a port anymore without having twinks in other nations to see nation chat or areas to 
not get agressed.. this will show an increase of players first and then a leaving of players because they dont agree with this mechanik.. at the end every one has 2-3 twinks and
a hughe server population is visible and still nothing is happening. 

there are many other things that could improove the game and with that give the devs more income.. and the changes arent that big as you might first think.
but such Skripts of towns and theyr interacting with eachother and also goods balancing are not as hard to write as you might think.

lot written, little said ... but that would increase server pop for sure ^^
 

Edited May 5, 2019 by Jacques Cassard

[mikawa]

This is a very good proposal.

[HachiRoku]

1 hour ago, Jacques Cassard said:

6. No Alts or Twinks... Having alts and twinks is supporting paranoia.. no one will undock of a port anymore without having twinks in other nations to see nation chat or areas to 
not get agressed.. this will show an increase of players first and then a leaving of players because they dont agree with this mechanik.. at the end every one has 2-3 twinks and
a hughe server population is visible and still nothing is happening. 

how would this be possible from a technical standpoint? Would you like somekind of hardware identifier? Stuff like this do more harm than good and most of the time its the person that is not "cheating" that pays the price.

[Cetric de Cornusiac]

Fine ideas, especially No. 5.

[Guest]

there is actually not a single way to clear out Alt accounts, the only way they could work it out is to give less advantage owning several accounts, in which they clearly wont given all the suggestions proposed about it earlier

Edited May 5, 2019 by Guest

[Raekur]

1. The Game needs more Free Towns - No it does not. Freetowns allowed nations who are not even remotely close to an area to invade and set up bases without having work their way to the area. The last thing this game needs is more freetowns. Freetowns aid raiders and no one else. Neither traders or nation defenders need freetowns, so why add 50 more of these enemy FOB's to the map?

5. Balancing the player count on nations - Offering incentives to get people to join one of the lower populated nations will lead to the system being exploited or players just using alts to hop from nation to nation to gather the compensation that is being offered. There is no way to ensure even numbers across the 11 nations that are in play. If you want more balance between the nations, reduce the number of nations starting with removing the Prussian, Russian, and Polish groups.

6. No Alts or Twinks - There is no acceptable way to eliminate alts. To restrict connections to only 1 per IP address would eliminate families that play together (and believe it or not there are a few). With the exception of spying there is little that alts can really that disrupts things. If a player can actually operate 2 accounts at the same time (a rare skill) than i applaud them. I have tried to operate 2 ships in Freelancer at the same time and it is not as easy as some would think and near impossible if either or both get engaged in combat. Devs already stated a long time ago that spying was acceptable. If the players can not follow basic security protocols than they have no excuse when bad things happen because they refused to keep their mouths shut.

[Jacques Cassard]

There is actually a way to detect alts or twinks.

every action you do is creating a protocol and textlines in it for the server. if an account is online for several days without having any actions in protocols or only chat text,
you could send out an twink identivication warning to that account and block that account if the protocols are not changing in activity for several days.. dont ban just block.

So twinks then would be only available for lets say 30-50% of the time unless you do some battles and trades with it.. just be active ^^