Battle Rating for Ports still TOO high

[The Geth]

So what I'm hearing is that hard-coded, official in-game diplomacy is a solution to the issue of RvR's relative unpopularity. And personally I'd agree, but this raises the question: does @admin plan on (re)implementing such a thing? It's not in the roadmap, at least.

[Raekur]

Not sure if alliances are really going to solve what may be the bigger issues with RvR. First is the massive cost of the ships which leads to the highly skilled clans being able to steamroll over anyone else with ease due to attrition. Second is the spawn issue of the first which is the elitism it creates due to fear of losing ships that are difficult to replace. Both of these things are the result of it costing such a large amount to produce ships that can meet the aggressor on equal footing. When ships cost near nothing there were battles all over the place on a daily basis (with some groups complaining that there were not enough daily PB slots available) and the combat logs were constantly moving and very few complaints in regards to how long it would take to replace a ship. 

[TheDread]

5 hours ago, Raekur said:

This is part of the issue with people wanting to get involved. How is someone supposed to gain skill in a ship if they are constantly denied the chance. If a group is capable of working together and the battle commander is able to run the battle than the number of slots open on a ship is not the critical component of the battle. A high skilled player I feel can do just as good of winning a battle using a ship with only 2 slots open than a novice skilled player could do with all 5 open. 

I don't disagree with your sentiment that the captain is more important than a couple percent more reload or turn rate...  but my counter argument is that you're NOT a highly skilled player if you haven't taken the time to open more than 2 slots on a ship you plan to take into port battles.  The opposite isn't necessarily true - it's totally possible to open 5 slots WITHOUT becoming a highly skilled player, but it's NOT possible to become a port battle ready player without spending time in the ship you plan to sail.  It's my opinion that you should BOTH - open at least 4 slots in the ship AND not be a total idiot before you're allowed into a port battle.  Both requirements, not an either or. 

[Raekur]

1 hour ago, TheDread said:

I don't disagree with your sentiment that the captain is more important than a couple percent more reload or turn rate...  but my counter argument is that you're NOT a highly skilled player if you haven't taken the time to open more than 2 slots on a ship you plan to take into port battles.  The opposite isn't necessarily true - it's totally possible to open 5 slots WITHOUT becoming a highly skilled player, but it's NOT possible to become a port battle ready player without spending time in the ship you plan to sail.  It's my opinion that you should BOTH - open at least 4 slots in the ship AND not be a total idiot before you're allowed into a port battle.  Both requirements, not an either or. 

And in the case where your L'Ocean was destroyed due to gank, glitch, disconnect and the Santi you have not had a chance to train beyond 2 boxes should disqualify you from participating in the port battle? While yes, every dedicated captain will train in a ship exclusively for participating in a port battle, there is always the backup ship that is on standby after the primary is done. The problem that maybe a small percentage of captains encounter is that any good plan only survives right up until introduction to reality. 

The main thing that will help determine the outcome in a battle is the about of familiarity a battle commander has to the captains who are under his command. How many are better suited for the side to side brawl and how many work better as skirmishers who rely on maneuvering and deflecting shots so they can harass and weaken the enemy ships. Not all captains are usually skilled in both areas or have a ship that is capable of doing both. Does the captains best skill set match the ship he is in command of, was it his ship or one that was handed to him in order to fill a slot? The biggest mistake any commander can make is to just rush into a battle without discussing who is skilled in which area and how to then deploy those skill sets. A mix of both is usually the best as it allows the commander to react and adapt to changes in the flow of battle. Having all of one or the other introduces certain vulnerabilities that can be exploited if the other side realizes what you have done.

[BoatyMcBoatFace]

Let's say you bash AI and random players (that you deem are safe to take) to unlock skill slots. Done and done. 

 

How does any of that translate to you understanding the dynamics of the actual battle? Especially coming from GB which are known to have their very awesome lines where they yell at anyone who is not matching speed or direction perfectly. A highly skilled player will do his thing and generally scoff at your methods, as he is skilled and has his own ways to do things. Thats why if you want to train people to act as a unit, you need to start them fresh. If you encourage somebody to do things their way for so long, they will entrench their own habits that you will never be able to change. After you clash, that person will just stop showing to your battles, which is endemic in the game for just about any nation. Less so in the big ones because they just have more people in general. 

[Never]

As long as we have this ever growing power creep for ships, RvR will always be the few and never for the many. An Oak/Oak no port bonus Wasa has zero chance vs a seasoned 5/5 full port bonus Wasa and this should not be the case. All stats added by port or by wood type should carry a positive and a negative. All ships should be 5/5 or simply all ships should allow for 1 upgrade of each type. Plus all upgrades should be craftable with common or semi common materials. 

I think NA is trying to mimic other MMOS too much, by following the typical power creep gear upgrade type of approach. But in those types of games, once you have something, you keep it. With the mechanics allowing for ships to be lost from 1 minute to the next even from the smallest error, loses are far too harsh. 

Even the often quoted as inspiration for the hardcore aspects of NA 'Dark Souls' 'one of the most hardcore games ever made' gave endless chances to players. Yes, you would die maybe 1000 times during a play through, but never lost gear or levels already gained and you always had a chance to recover what was lost when you died. 

The game needs to be geared toward the average players, not the top 5-10%. 

[erelkivtuadrater]

23 minutes ago, Never said:

As long as we have this ever growing power creep for ships, RvR will always be the few and never for the many. An Oak/Oak no port bonus Wasa has zero chance vs a seasoned 5/5 full port bonus Wasa and this should not be the case. All stats added by port or by wood type should carry a positive and a negative. All ships should be 5/5 or simply all ships should allow for 1 upgrade of each type. Plus all upgrades should be craftable with common or semi common materials. 

I think NA is trying to mimic other MMOS too much, by following the typical power creep gear upgrade type of approach. But in those types of games, once you have something, you keep it. With the mechanics allowing for ships to be lost from 1 minute to the next even from the smallest error, loses are far too harsh. 

Even the often quoted as inspiration for the hardcore aspects of NA 'Dark Souls' 'one of the most hardcore games ever made' gave endless chances to players. Yes, you would die maybe 1000 times during a play through, but never lost gear or levels already gained and you always had a chance to recover what was lost when you died. 

The game needs to be geared toward the average players, not the top 5-10%. 

an idea of the top of my head could be that if you surrendered your ship, you could keep it without the upgrades and cannons, and the enemy would only be able to sink the ship once inside the inventory and as its today get doubloons and one random upgrade from the ship.

Surrendering the ship would be more relevant, but there would be a problem with doubloons generation, but im sure we could figure out a way. Maybe pay a price to the admirality in doubloons to use the ship again. Say 1st rates would cost 10k doubloons to put into service, while a frigate would cost 4k doubloons as examples?

 

Thinking about it this could fix alot of things. If people chose to gank or a player is getting chased for 5 hours, the targeted player could just surrender the ship if he felt like it, he would have to pay doubloons which he most likely have to use the ship again, while the attacking player gets rewarded for having the player to surrender his ship.

Edited January 8, 2020 by erelkivtuadrater

[Farrago]

Deleted. Posted to a more appropriate thread. 

Edited January 8, 2020 by Farrago

[Potemkin]

I vote we raise all BR limits on all ports to 25k simply because greg made this thread.

[Sir Loorkon]

The port BR is fine. It might be interesting to have a ship rate limit with some ports to have more smaller ships (and more players) involved.

The background amuses me. First you provoked my clan with your shallow-mania attack in the Bahamas, than you removed us from the friends list (for a while) after you took Maracaibo when Cabal dropped it (well knowing that it was MONX main crafting port) and than your interesting negotiations with the Brits makes MONX lose Jeremie. Than you repeated this very seldom way of diplomacy with Lions and now you wonder why lots of PvP players might have gone and you might not be able to fill a 10.000 BR PB? I read your impressive Williamstad Gazette (awesome work btw) but the most interesting articles are those that are not printed there. 

[Despe]

i guess that the BR limit is ok now, with small, medium and large fleet PBs.

[Yoha]

1. PB BR limits are pretty diverse now. I like it the way it is currently.

2. Seasoned woods are fine, they are not game breaking. The slight S-wood advantage is almost never the deciding factor in battles.

3. If you are bad at fighting, a S-wood ship isn't going to change that. It will just make your mistakes more costly.

4. If you take an Oak/Oak ship to anything, you are doing something wrong.

5. If you never get picked for a PB then either get better ships, become a better fighter, or find a new clan/nation.

6. If you can't afford to lose it, don't sail it. Ships are cheap and easy to replace if you are in a semi-organized clan and willing to chip in to help others.

7. If you wan't to play a game like darksouls, then go play darksouls. NA should not try to be like darksouls.

8. Reals are easy to make, dubs are easy to earn, resources are easily found. Naval Action has never been easier for casual players like me to thrive. I don't even have to do trade goods runs to be able to afford all the ships and upgrades I could want.

[admin]

1 hour ago, Syler said:

 

4. If you take an Oak/Oak ship to anything, you are doing something wrong.

That will change soon. All woods will receive repair bonuses and penalties depending on their RL qualities. Oak will be one of the easiest to repair. 

 

[Malcolm3]

14 minutes ago, admin said:

That will change soon. All woods will receive repair bonuses and penalties depending on their RL qualities. Oak will be one of the easiest to repair. 

So, for example, for Oak/Oak ship you could repair more HP and do it faster than for LiveOak/White Oak one?

If that is so, then it sounds good

[Never]

42 minutes ago, admin said:

That will change soon. All woods will receive repair bonuses and penalties depending on their RL qualities. Oak will be one of the easiest to repair. 

 

That sounds great

[Yoha]

50 minutes ago, admin said:

That will change soon. All woods will receive repair bonuses and penalties depending on their RL qualities. Oak will be one of the easiest to repair. 

 

That would be a good change, however, it won't change the attributes of oak that make it worse than other wood combos.

[Teutonic]

1 hour ago, admin said:

That will change soon. All woods will receive repair bonuses and penalties depending on their RL qualities. Oak will be one of the easiest to repair. 

 

a change we can happily accept as a good "wood meta" change. I am optimistic to hear how it will actually work.

[Sir Texas Sir]

On 1/6/2020 at 9:44 AM, z4ys said:

Tbh most people dont care about RvR its a necessary evil to compete in ship crafting.

Thats a reason why people join the winning side. You just have to care less and others will do the job for you. Xmas truce was great. Just go out pvp and dont care.

It was once said/written that only around 10% of the playerbase ever joined a portbattle.

And when you look at the great battle result screens that are always the same usual suspects.

lets face it not everyone enjoys RvR but all the shiny stuff is linked to rvr. Winning matters.

A stronk RvR team in your nation means less headache for yourself.

There is also the problem we don't know what ports can be attacked or not unless we use alts to check ports.  Maybe @admin devs can add a line in port info that tells you which ports they can be attacked from.  Than the clan will know if they need to put a timer on or not.  Most of the ports we have had attacked in Dutch lately have been cause no timer was on them when a port close got flipped and the clan didn't know if they needed a timer or not. 

The other thing a lot of smaller clans couldn't do port battles in the past cause of the Capital Frontline system.  Now that they can attack smaller BR ports they are doing that.

On 1/6/2020 at 9:33 AM, Intrepido said:

Coalitions or alliances are the way to solve this as @admin wasnt brave enough to cut down the number of nations.

I still think a coalition system ran by the devs would be a good thing for the game as we have way to many nations.  This way they can actually add more nations/flags by just adding those nations to a coalition group.

[Gregory Rainsborough]

3 hours ago, Syler said:

1. PB BR limits are pretty diverse now. I like it the way it is currently.

2. Seasoned woods are fine, they are not game breaking. The slight S-wood advantage is almost never the deciding factor in battles.

3. If you are bad at fighting, a S-wood ship isn't going to change that. It will just make your mistakes more costly.

4. If you take an Oak/Oak ship to anything, you are doing something wrong.

5. If you never get picked for a PB then either get better ships, become a better fighter, or find a new clan/nation.

6. If you can't afford to lose it, don't sail it. Ships are cheap and easy to replace if you are in a semi-organized clan and willing to chip in to help others.

7. If you wan't to play a game like darksouls, then go play darksouls. NA should not try to be like darksouls.

8. Reals are easy to make, dubs are easy to earn, resources are easily found. Naval Action has never been easier for casual players like me to thrive. I don't even have to do trade goods runs to be able to afford all the ships and upgrades I could want.

"diverse" There's 3? There used to be dozens in the past.

[admin]

On 1/6/2020 at 8:44 AM, z4ys said:

Tbh most people dont care about RvR its a necessary evil to compete in ship crafting.

Thats a reason why people join the winning side. You just have to care less and others will do the job for you. Xmas truce was great. Just go out pvp and dont care.

It was once said/written that only around 10% of the playerbase ever joined a portbattle.

And when you look at the great battle result screens that are always the same usual suspects.

lets face it not everyone enjoys RvR but all the shiny stuff is linked to rvr. Winning matters.

A stronk RvR team in your nation means less headache for yourself.

we more and more believe that these days. RvR price of loss is too high compared to just pvp. And people just hate losing stuff. 

[Never]

Loses in RvR are only bad because the gains from it are not directly perceivable, but the loss of a expensive ship is. That could be changed by making the game completely separate OW PvP and RvR PvP. The rewards for taking part in RvR PvP could be unique to it and players could be rewarded even just for participation, similar to PZ. 

Screening battles could also be recognized by the game as RvR rewarded content. Simply by putting a PZ-like area of screening around the PB port in question. All battles within it involving the nations in the PB could be considered RvR battles. 

I would compare RvR in NA to other MMOs having World Bosses. Anyone can show up during the spawn time of a world Boss and most games give rewards to anyone that even just participates in killing the boss. Give players easily tangible reasons to show up to RvR and they most likely will do so. 

Edited January 25, 2020 by Never

[Sir Texas Sir]

5 hours ago, admin said:

we more and more believe that these days. RvR price of loss is too high compared to just pvp. And people just hate losing stuff. 

Another game Developer said a while back why they are making there game something like 20/80 or 30/70 (heard both) player vs AI and you can't tell if it's a player or AI just by name.   He said that folks like to win and when your not winning all the time you aren't having fun, when your not having fun you stop playing.  So we want to re move that from having really good players always picking on less skilled players as they won't know who is a player or an AI.  

I'll take this into this game.  Folks don't like to loose all the time, when you have the same folks winning or zerging cause every one joined there nation the game stops becoming fun.  So folks either join the winning team or they stop playing.   It's part of your jobs as Devs to balance the factions.   You have not done that and that tends to have a very one sided map.  It's just repeating it's self.  Like Pirates controlled most of the Map on PvP2 cause all the best players played in one faction even though the US/GB/Dutch way out number them.   It just wasn't fun for both sides.   We have asked you to bring coalitions to help balance the games, the post you even made about such was great.  Other games balance by restricting certain factions or offering rewards to join lower factions.

Back when I was very active in MWO on we ran a Merc clan that only joined the weakest houses.  As you can see that was the one with a 7% population with gave us 30% profit on loot and XP for joining.  If we joined the biggest houses we which held 12% of the players, we actually took a -20% hit to XP and loot.

If your not going to do map resets than there is no win in game, and the game gets stale if the Devs don't change anything.  Sooner or later other nations will fall and stop playing and numbers might dip down low again.  The majority of the players honestly don't care about PvP, they like just doing there own thing and fighting in the OW (PvP or PvE or both).  So once they loose the good crafting port they leave and join the bigger nations.   This isn't healthy for the game.   There needs to be some incentive to not do this.  Also incentive to join the weaker nations or have a coalition so the weaker nations can help each other.  Impossible nations should never be part of any coalition nor pirates.   

[erelkivtuadrater]

3 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

Another game Developer said a while back why they are making there game something like 20/80 or 30/70 (heard both) player vs AI and you can't tell if it's a player or AI just by name.   He said that folks like to win and when your not winning all the time you aren't having fun, when your not having fun you stop playing.  So we want to re move that from having really good players always picking on less skilled players as they won't know who is a player or an AI.  

I'll take this into this game.  Folks don't like to loose all the time, when you have the same folks winning or zerging cause every one joined there nation the game stops becoming fun.  So folks either join the winning team or they stop playing.   It's part of your jobs as Devs to balance the factions.   You have not done that and that tends to have a very one sided map.  It's just repeating it's self.  Like Pirates controlled most of the Map on PvP2 cause all the best players played in one faction even though the US/GB/Dutch way out number them.   It just wasn't fun for both sides.   We have asked you to bring coalitions to help balance the games, the post you even made about such was great.  Other games balance by restricting certain factions or offering rewards to join lower factions.

Back when I was very active in MWO on we ran a Merc clan that only joined the weakest houses.  As you can see that was the one with a 7% population with gave us 30% profit on loot and XP for joining.  If we joined the biggest houses we which held 12% of the players, we actually took a -20% hit to XP and loot.

If your not going to do map resets than there is no win in game, and the game gets stale if the Devs don't change anything.  Sooner or later other nations will fall and stop playing and numbers might dip down low again.  The majority of the players honestly don't care about PvP, they like just doing there own thing and fighting in the OW (PvP or PvE or both).  So once they loose the good crafting port they leave and join the bigger nations.   This isn't healthy for the game.   There needs to be some incentive to not do this.  Also incentive to join the weaker nations or have a coalition so the weaker nations can help each other.  Impossible nations should never be part of any coalition nor pirates.   

so true. @admin said that the alliance system was bad for the OW pvp.. well as i wrote but didnt get an answer you should use the pirate faction to be a free for all pvp faction, where if you dont want hard alliances you can join those and ally up with the ones you want to and fight the rest. I also red Redii's suggestion that was a great one. TLDR; Impossible nations are placed in pirate faction which are FFA, the Flag the clan chooses to sail are the ones you ally with, so if 3 clans are pirates, clan 1 & 2  fly the russian flag are hard alliance the 3rd fly pirate flag and has none. This would make total sense and help alot with the balancing

Edited January 25, 2020 by erelkivtuadrater

[Vizzini]

Players unwilling to risk all are on the wrong server. There will be no reason to play if you have nothing to lose for a great many on the PVP server

A war of attrition grinds players down until they get low on morale or resources. Imagine a scenario where a player can hit the reset button , get his ships and ports back that he lost last night. He will never be bothered about the risk of losing it and in the same way there will be no incentive for the player attacking

 

games playing ok right now , don't let the whiners spoil it

[Never]

1 hour ago, Vizzini said:

Players unwilling to risk all are on the wrong server. There will be no reason to play if you have nothing to lose for a great many on the PVP server

A war of attrition grinds players down until they get low on morale or resources. Imagine a scenario where a player can hit the reset button , get his ships and ports back that he lost last night. He will never be bothered about the risk of losing it and in the same way there will be no incentive for the player attacking

 

games playing ok right now , don't let the whiners spoil it

Telling players they are on the wrong server is just a bad attitude to take. We all want more players to get involved in RvR not less. Even without any attrition, a lot haven't even touched RvR.