The game has become too easy.

@tek-lt I was planning to return after EAC was introduced, but after reading through a few forum posts I decided to wait until the next follow-up patch lol.

Anyway, when I do return (hopefully soon), I plan to have HG up passively while working through the new PvE levels. Whether solo or with my usual crew/friends. We've been away for some time, and have a lot of new stuff to work on. I don't even know what "distinction" means as a SoT concept.

Yeah, everything has been nerfed. Yeah, PvE can get repetitive. Yeah, sometimes you do things uncontested because other ships on the server want to hide in their own corners of the map.

Passive HG might solve some of that for a lot of jaded, experienced players. Knowing you'll definitely get attacked, with the uncertainty of when you'll get attacked, might make the session a little more exciting.

I do get why they made parts of the PvE easier. I've always found bullet sponge difficulties to just be poor gameplay so I'm quite happy with the Fort boss nerfs. The skelly fleet though, I miss the old one. I wonder whether they should have used the season 11 dive mechanics to have various difficulties with the world events. So for example Athena raids were the hardest.

I'm quite happy with the lower value voyages being easier but there should also be something out there that is difficult for the veterans like how it used to be which to me; Athena, Reaper and HG should be falling under as end game.

I like the idea that if a skelly ship or meg gets you it's longer before they show up again.

@FedTed998
Pepperidge Farm remembers. I do too.

The game has enough easy options.

@tek-lt I hate it too, you can thank the insta gratification generation for that. Since they can’t keep interest without the reward section of their brain firing off at all times.

Difficulty hasn't really been scaled down, imho. Sure some things have been made more streamlined (handing in treasure, as a prime example), which I'm all for, but there is nothing inherently difficult about manually picking up each and every piece of loot (even though that's still how it's collected) - it's just time consuming.

I also think that if one has played the game for a long period of time, as I have, things will naturally be easier - we've learned how to effectively kill skellies faster, where treasures commonly pop up, how to quickly sink skeleton ships, put an end to megalodons, and scupper krakens - that knowledge just comes from playing the game. A new player has no idea how any of this works, and will naturally be harder.

@fedted998 QoL is fine, nerfing the PvE to the point there’s zero risk is another. When you can complete a skeleton fort before another crew even has time to make it halfway there it becomes too easy.

@wolfmanbush Precisely, the over correct, any time they make any changes it’s not a simple balancing, it’s a drastic change, it’s like they want to learn how to swim but they jump straight into deep water.

IMO incremental changes would be better to find the best balance.

@valor-omega It definitely has scaled back and it’s even in the patch notes, it’s no secret that they’ve gone the extra mile to make the game easier to appeal to new players.

Bought and loved the game because it wasn’t hand holding. You either figured it out or someone who found out told you.

It was a breeze of fresh air for a game not to be so watered down like most games

Now you don’t even have to really leave the outpost to earn gold or just visit one island and farm it.

Being sunk or doing the fort/world event was actually something to be fearful of doing. If someone sinks you, oh well. Dive and do it again.

I’ve actually had to make the game harder for myself. Find rowboat and row around, doing shrines and fortresses. Makes it exciting

@tek-lt I don't disagree. I however think there's definitely something to be said towards more seasoned players - content difficulty past a certain point was never going to be really difficult, and I think that's okay. I don't know that making content harder is realistically going to add anything of value to the game, either.

Me for example - the hardest thing for me was just getting better at PvP combat, and learning the ins and outs, and truthfully I feel like that's all that really needs to be inherently "difficult." I think a lot of folks tend to forget that SoT was never meant to be a massively difficult, or competitive game - there may be aspects that were harder beforehand that are less so now, but as you said, things were scaled back to be more approachable for new players - something I think is perfectly fine.

As someone who's been playing since the beginning, seeing the difficulty curve gradually lessen doesn't super bother me, because again, I feel like once a player gets past the initial hurtles of SoT, the largest difficulty is the other players, less so the PvE. I don't want/need SoT to be like any other game in comparison, personally .

I remember you used to fear the kraken especially when you had a loaded ship.
Not to mention the frequency of it's appearances which were at least once per session.
Now i think i fear a regular shark more as it has a greater chance of sending you to the ship of the damned and is a given if spending more than a minute or so in the water.

The sad truth is its a better business model to appeal to more casual playerbase.

Hopefully rare draws a line somewhere to keep some of the unique feeling of sot. Dive to voyages really worried me, and the seas do generally feel strange knowing people can dip in and out of servers at will.

I'm fine with quality of life changes things like sovereigns I'd never want to play without. But removing multiple colours from Fort of the damned, making the skelly fleet so easy (aside from current bug where skellies don't actually rep holes).

Don't forget we're about to have the biggest influx of new players from PlayStation and where this is all they've known we'll be getting the usual feedback of megs,Kraken, skelly ship op etc game too hard

@valor-omega they removed the skeleton Lords from the fof all 3 of them! You used to fight 1 on wave 16 2 on wave 17 then the ashen lord on wave 18 I don't think its even 15 waves now! I sunk a skelly galleon today while anchored in less than 10 cannonballs and under 60 seconds the fleet of fortune was done in 7 minutes the fotdnow takes 7 minutes solo! They've made it so easy it's boring!

@cmdr-pain4345 that has since changed you get 2 extra skellys per player on a fort that's it!

@hiradc

Couple things here:

1. Not sure why dive to voyages worried you, what with people jumping in and out. That’s nothing new. Some people (myself included) if they have a lot of supplies and don’t want to engage in PvP for whatever reason at the time can just open a portal with a tall tale checkpoint and migrate.

If your concern was for people leaving/joining a given server for PvP purposes, I hate to tell you that if a PvE player really doesn’t want to fight, they will try to find a way out.

2. I agree some things in this game do seem easier than they were, and I have two thoughts for that now. The first being distinctions. With the addition of distinctions you can essentially grind most companies 500 levels. To make that realistically achievable in the game’s lifespan, they have to increase ways to get loot/levels.

So many commendations require an exhaustive grind, and this can ease that a little bit and allow a player to move on to another commendation to work on. Could the difficulty be increased a bit? Sure. Does it have to be outrageously tough, even for a solo sloop player? Absolutely not. As one person mentioned above, if it’s not hard enough, find ways to make it harder for you.

These are just my thoughts though.

So I just had a session for the first time in a long time, and I'd like to update my thoughts on this:

Part of the OP was the lack of contest that the World Events have. And I maintain that, with the direction the game is going, and the fact that servers never really guaranteed PvP, passive/treasury-defense HG is still the best option to have a full PvPvE experience.

That said... the PvE is definitely a little too easy.

This may be partly due to the fact that megs are weirdly passive. They'll come up and nudge your boat a little, then swim away. Adorable. But probably not what they were designed for. Some of the blame can also be put on the skelly ships not repairing themselves. Which I hope is just a bug lol.

With the repair bug, "FloFs" (I guess I'll have to call them that too), were ridiculously easy. We hopped "raid" fleets, and those were ridiculously easy. Ashen lords took maybe 50 cannon balls plus my buddy sword-lunging however-many-times to get through all 3 waves. Another crewmate soloed a skull fort while we were sailing around, stocking up haha.

The only excitement we had during our session was when we were dived on by opposing HG crews. And that was pretty fun. Thankfully, save for a some hazelnutbeards (some during critical moments), we didn't have any game-breaking bugs. Got my sister to level 100 in Guardians. Doing another sesh in a few hours to get another buddy to 100.

It's been fun. But I can see how, had we only PvEd, it would've gotten boring a little too quickly.

Keeping the casual playerbase in mind, I think we can afford to make PvE more interesting, without just cranking the difficulty up from 0 to 100. Or turning them into bullet sponges again.

Some diversity would help. If Skeleton Lords weren't so copy/pasted; had different move sets, and required different strategies to beat - that might shake things up. If skeleton ships used chain shots, blunder and firebombs (without spamming them like Ashen Fleets did) - that might shake things up.

Of course, fix the repair bug for skelly ships and the Gandhi-like nature of the megs. That'll probably be the first appropriate step before adding new mechanics.

Tl;dr:

PvE could be tweaked to be a bit more exciting on its own. If you want guaranteed contest while PvEing, vote up HG.

@cyberguardian77 my point wasn't just about pvp accessibility, it was also having a fast travel mechanic in a game that is about immersion and unique adventures. This is around catering to people to less time which I do understand but again where do they draw the line. You have people on safer seas which is near zero danger stating it is too difficult..

@hiradc

That’s fair, I just wanted to make sure expectations were realistic is all regarding PvP accessibility.

As far as Safer Seas being “too difficult” I find that a bit hard to believe, but then again, I have never sailed in Safer Seas because of the restrictions on being able to level/complete commendations. Plus, the thrill of having to watch your back as you never know what could happen is amazing and I’m not sure I want to ever lose that feeling in this game, especially when I’m soloing. I may not be the biggest fan of PvP, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it sometimes.