This is actually pretty big. I never liked me and my friends getting raided by people who played for 2000 hours and memorized PvP mechanics, I might give this game another shot.
Since there’s no functional upgrades from collecting gold, this kind of works out. A lot of time, I collected tons of gold and just never spent it.
I also wonder if matchmaking will go better. Solo queueing seems to find a lot of people instantly leaving parties, and I suspect they’re trying to find a particular “sea” with their friends to perform group invasions.
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Open-world PvP in Sea of Thieves is pretty bad.
The various worlds mostly seem completely empty. You can see 10x as many ghost and skeleton ships as you see human-controlled ships, and even those are somewhat rare. In most MMOs you’re constantly seeing other players. In Sea of Thieves you can do a whole hour-long quest and never see another player.
Human-controlled ships aren’t marked on the map unless they’re flying the reaper flag. But, people who fly the reaper flag are extremely into PvP, so most people who aren’t also into PvP avoid them. And, they’re easy to avoid because they’re visible on the map. The Reapers only see others on the map if those others are flying level 5 “emissary” flags, showing they’ve been doing quests for a certain faction for a at least an hour of in-game time.
A single quest in Sea of Thieves can easily take half an hour. A quest chain can take a couple of hours. You mostly only get quest rewards at the end of a quest by turning treasure in. If your ship is sunk you lose all the treasure, cannon balls, food and wood you had on board. For a short time the stuff is floating in the ocean where anybody can pick it up. But, there’s no cost to replace / repair your entire ship including anything bolted to it like cannons.
That means that a pirate out hunting for other players has nothing to lose if they’re sunk – maybe 5k gold in supplies (cannonballs and food) if they bought them instead of just searching barrels and everything to gain – potentially the entire haul of whoever they sink. Meanwhile, a pirate at the end of a quest chain has everything to lose, all the treasure from the quests they just completed could be 300k gold, and nothing to gain by winning a PvP battle. If they sink a PvP pirate after them they maybe get some cannonballs, that’s it. That doesn’t encourage epic naval battles, it encourages the one with treasure on board to sprint for the nearest outpost and try to unload and sell quickly.
The sprints to the outpost are also not all that interesting. Since the cannons are only on the sides of the ships, neither the pursuer or the pursued can shoot at each-other. NPC ghost ships can drop mines that players chasing them have to avoid. But, human ships don’t have that option. So, it becomes a sailing race, but a sailing race in a sailing game with very dumbed-down sailing mechanics. (You can sail directly into the path of the wind, for example).
IMO, the game needs a re-think of PvP overall. But, what I want might be too radical a shift from what they have designed.
I think there should be some overall factions that were like the major nations in the actual age of piracy: the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and so-on. The players could be privateer-type pirates working under the protection of one of these major factions. That would mean you could see more people when you’re out in the game, but that you wouldn’t have to worry about FFA PVP if you were in an area of the map where your faction had control. But, of course, any lucrative mission would mean leaving the safe area and venturing out either into the open sea, or into another faction’s area. That would make the game world seem less empty. As a privateer you might have to turn over some / most of the value of your treasure haul to your faction. In exchange for their protection (especially things like cannons around their harbors) you’d take a smaller cut of anything you brought in.
Of course, there would also be Free For All PVP pirate players who didn’t belong to any faction and who used secret pirate bases, but being FFA PVP pirates, they could turn on each-other at any time. A true pirate base might shoot at an incoming ship belonging to a major faction, but wouldn’t protect one FFA PVP pirate from another FFA PVP pirate. But, the benefit would be that any treasure they found would be all theirs, with no cut to their faction. The risk would be no “insurance” on their ships. Any ship they lost would cost them dearly.
In terms of combat, the ships in Sea of Thieves should have chaser guns – guns in the bow and stern of ships. Just like real pirate ships, these should be much smaller and less powerful than the main guns, but would give something to do while chasing / being chased. Dropping mines should also be an option for the ship being chased, but also dropping treasure should be easier, so that you could try to bribe whoever was chasing you. (They’d have to make it so that to pick up this treasure the chasing boat would have to cut off the chase for a minute or two – right now you could harpoon that treasure without slowing down).
Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s dumbed down but sailing into the wind is possible IRL. By keeping your sail at an angle the wind pushes you sideways, but your keel is kept in place by the water, so your ship moves forward.
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
You can sail close to upwind, but not completely. If you try to sail too much upwind, your boat is “in irons” and you stop getting any push from the sails. Because the sails aren’t pushing, you can’t steer either. Because of that, when sailors are sailing upwind and tacking across the direction of the wind, they have to make sure they have enough momentum to cross the path of the wind without stalling.
Meanwhile, in Sea of Thieves, if you get your sails set perpendicular to the wind you get bonus speed. If you get your sails 100% wrong (i.e. they should be pushing the boat backwards) you still creep forwards.
Honestly, I’d love a pirate / 18th century ship combat simulator that actually got the sailing mechanics more or less right. The mechanics of sailing are really interesting, and then you add artillery into the mix, what’s not to love?
Piecemakers3Dprints@lemmy.world 9 months ago
All in all, your logic is sound, but the diatribe is missing some essential facts. For instance, a common tactic for human-crewed ships (non-solo) is to drop off the back of the lead ship while holding a gunpowder barrel/keg and attempt any number of damaging goals from detonating it under the ship as it passes to doing so in various places onboard (my favorite is the crows nest as the game doesn’t seem to count the elevation as distance for the fire spreading, and hardly anyone looks up, so the attacking crew tends to take a long-ass time figuring out why their ship keeps catching on fire). To sum up, this more than dying game has had years to correct the long list of bullshit, and PvE is not its salvation. To wit, they’ve not even begun to deal with bots/hacks and their response now is to incentivize PvE? Pfft. They’re just stringing out their cash grab even further, trying to bleed y’all that much longer.
tl;dr: Find a better game to play, people. You deserve better than Roblox Pirate-flavored.
ouch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Alright, hire this one.
clanginator@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah I tried Sea of Thieves a while back and unless you already got some friends who are pretty into it, or you’re a streamer trying to do crazy antics messing with people, the game just doesn’t have a lot of appeal.