Ship Milestones are just creating tension and discontent within the playgroup

I agree, I don't find a point in sailing on someone else's ship when I'm not getting getting credit to my own ship. Nobody actually wants to spend hours of time for nothing.

Rare seems to have failed to consider the people that have friends and play with them regularly. To me this new My Ship update is similar to World of Warcraft's creation of garrisons, which actually isolated the people more rather than bringing them together. If they don't allow the Ship Milestones to be shared between captains on a crew, this whole season is a fat L in my opinion

Super difficult for people to hold down a crew in this environment, people have different schedules, the game is very time consuming and people have different interests/goals that can tug and pull at the threads of the group

the last thing we need in regard to crews is adding more potential for splitting people up

I'm mostly a solo (open crew outside of that) but I have long posted that the biggest obstacle in retention is finding and keeping a crew.

as a solo player who this doesn't negatively effect me it baffles me how anyone can not see the obvious flaw in the system. it feels like the new update is a good idea thats been badly implemented. a few tweaks and it would be good, including having anything you get on someone elses ship apply to your own

If you play with the same lads often like me, just take turns being captain. No biggie.

The bigger problem is when people show up 20 min too late, and your 2 man sloop is supplied and neck deep in an adventure. Do you swap to brig to accomodate that 3rd friend? Will a 4th show up 20 min later again? The game has no system in place for situations like this.

@callmebackdraft Yeah when you have friends it's generally worth playing with them, and any unwanted tension comes from poor planning on Rare's part.

But is my ship getting titles as well while sailing on someone else's ship? No one can predict what events will take place once you set sail; how can we grind certain milestones and TITLES for the BOAT on a consistent basis? The hours me and my friends have spent on one of our ships have all gone toward his ship only and he's reaped the rewards title-wise. Personally, I don't care how fine some think it is, it should be changed to accommodate every captain aboard the crew. I'm not trying to be the one receiving the rewards, I want all of my friends to get credit for everything.

The point of the ship milestones is basically like a 3rd commendation system and to create endless grinds. its really idiotic implementation as you mentioned we need to unlock 15 ships for an achievement but in order to do so you need to be the captain all the time. but not just that... reaching legendary status with 1 ship only allows us to buy 1 more ship of that type so we have to basically lvl 12 sloops to legend to buy own 13 sloops then our galleon and brig finish out the achievement. The achievement should just be buy all 3 ship types. Basically its an achievement I am just like NOPE guess i will never 100% the game then. I have no desire to have more than 1 ship of a type just to save different load outs.. Ok maybe like 2 sloops but not fraken 13

while for roleplaying purposes the ship can only have 1 captain i think any ship owner should be able to gain progress regardless of whos ship they are on. the issue is how over complicated the milestones are. if the progress carried over to your ship and you were working on say order of souls but you had been grinding gold hoarders on another captains boat now your ships going to have to mile stone titles fighting each other? this whole system is moronic. insult to injury is a combination of insider failings. 1 they never had the patch up for testing. 2. they had the majority of the trophies unlocked for testing since we cant copy over our real pirates no one would have accomplished anything to have stuff unlocked to test. But some foolish testers thought the unlocked stuff on insiders was Rare being respectful of our time investment by not making us farm the stuff all over again.... jokes on them.

but yea they took a social game and turned it into an anti social solo player experience. Sorry bud im not playing with anyone else i need to level my ship. im not wasting my time leveling someone elses ship. and playing alone is boring so ok i guess i should just uninstall altogether then?

the fact the personal and ship milestones is just a copy pasted BS. honestly im thinking the only solution is just delete ship milestones altogether. and if a captain leaves the game one of the other captains on the crew can switch that ship out to the one they own. Just goto the ship wright to vote in a new captain then restore ship BOOM done.

While I like the new customization options and features added into the captaincy update, the ship naming, saving customization, supply purchase, etc... The milestones are the only thing that really grinds my gears.

Probably a lot of you are going to say "Just play as captain on EU servers then 4Head" but here is my scenario.

I play with 2 friends, one of them is from the Philippines. I have come to appreciate the SEA region servers a lot more than EU region servers. Every time I have played on EU servers so far in 100 hours, I have not had a single session where my ship wasn't attacked. While I normally wouldn't have a problem with that, almost all of those occurrences were my parked ship rammed or shot up by a galleon or brig ganker team and in some cases even received insult to injury in terms of slurs or trash-talking. Most of the time I didn't have loot on my ship because I would sell loot as soon as I get it as I don't like to risk it or are doing a tall tale alone. The reason for that is, currently none of my friends want to play on EU servers and I completely understand that! Trying to reason with people on EU servers and maybe reach a "negotiation" even have, a majority of the time, resulted in nothing.

As soon as I started joining my friend on SEA region servers, I have noticed the immense amount of respect people have for each other in the game and I had a LOT more kind interactions with other pirates, even after PvP encounters they were always respectful at the end when we sunk them/got sunk by them.

Overall I would mostly play with my Filipino friend, with him captaining the ship, because for some reason my connection is more stable if I join him directly, instead of trying to use a VPN.

At the end of the day, I don't think I will get far, probably won't even meet any noteworthy ship milestones in the game in a very long time and am starting to think that it's not worth playing the game as it is right now for the captaincy update, but instead for some other content that was released, which is some neat little tid-bits of QoL improvements and of course getting the plunder pass maxed out.

I just hope that after taking all the feedback from the forums and influencers, Rare and Microsoft will change around some of the milestones to be more reasonable and maybe give fresh captains SOME customization options to start out with and tell other pirates "Yarr, I'm a captain, I am here to embark on epic voyages and adventures to become a legendary pirate captain! AHOY!". Because currently everything is locked behind the milestones and a lot of them require you to be captaining a ship for a very long time. Or even make some of them unlockable with gold, like other skins and ship sets originally. You have to work for gold equally as much as for commendations.

@callmebackdraft I would avoid using real-life scenarios as comparison to earn trinkets and customisation for your ship. With that analogy, you can't buy cool racing tires for your car unless you drove your own car for 300,000 miles, but yet here we are. You can buy whatever your heart desires for your own car without it being locked behind milestones you have to achieve in life.

I'm pretty sure a lot of friend groups playing this game has accepted the fact at this point that changing around captaincy to get everything 2/3/4 times back to back on each individual ship is an impossible feat to ask of the players, so some will just resort to naming one person captain and if that captain is kind, will let the crew choose the trinkets and other stuff for themselves from the captain's stash.

But hey, I guess I can go on Etsy and get an actual Serpent's Flame sculpture 3D printed, for 100 bucks, still way less effort for something inherently more valuable than wasting 100 hours being on fire in a game. Mhm-mhm

@nitroxien
Let's create an example of this situation. There is an imaginary pirate named, say, Joe. Joe has a consistent group of himself and three others that like to play on a galleon. They rarely use smaller ships or open crew, or might do so when the rest of the members are not online.
Joe is the only one who can afford a galleon come the new update, they vote on it's name, and it will be called "February". When Joe and February get progress toward milestones, trinkets are unlocked for February, the groups ship. Thus, all progress benefits the group, because February is the crew's ship.
There is no reason for another crew member to want to sail on their own ships, because it is not the crew's ship- they might use it for other things, such as open crew or with a different friend group. It doesn't matter that February technically belongs to Joe- it is the only ship that the whole crew plays on, and thus it is the ship of the crew and the crew of the ship. The fact that Joe is technically the captain provides no benefit to him in anything other than roleplay and is in fact detrimental to his gold pouch as he is responsible for purchasing trinkets and the like, which are then added to the crew's ship.
What if we sail in open crew? Well, if you're sailing your ship as captain of an open crew then you're captain, if you opt to join someone else then another crew member might be captain. There's nothing to argue about because arguing gains nothing- in either case, you chose to be of the crew or to be the captain.

Conclusion: From a neutral perspective, the ship for the crew rather than the ship for the captain benefits the whole crew and should not cause debates among sensible people. Please tell me if I missed anything.