An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback)

@d3adst1ck said:

It's a time drag, no matter how good you are at dealing with it.

I don't avoid doing merchant animal voyages because they are difficult, I avoid doing them because I'd rather watch paint dry.

I've suggested good ways to incorporate parts of Arena's design into HG in other threads, so I won't beat that dead horse here. But HG can be made much less boring.

People could still play how they want to, they just wouldn't be able to waste an indefinite amount of time.

@worst-tdmer said in An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback):

@sweetsandman Ah yes, the much better format of spawncamping the swabbie open crew and digging up chests, while the good crews ignore the game mode and TDM on the fort.

Arena, while imperfect, had a more engaging format that allowed for its own "box of chocolates" experience. Matches where all ships were competing over the chest, the sinks, the steals at the turn-in...chefs kiss. Nothing in Hourglass can compare. Not even close.

And please don't act like hourglass doesn't have swabbies being spawn camped 🤣

Hourglass is literally what you make of it. It's monotonous and repetitive if you play monotonously and repetitively. Escape the meta and improve at different scenarios. Run matches where you turtle, run matches where you only tdm, run matches where you go for cross boat snipes only. There's a guy who used to specifically defend against invasions at smuggler's bay and drop kegs from the top after kiting his enemies.

The catch is you can only do these things if you let go of the incessant ego-driven need to win/speed run your curse/levels.

I tried the "create your own challenge" method when I would encounter an obviously less skilled player. No repairing was typically my go-to. It just...wasn't fun, though. Hourglass, to me, isn't satisfying whether it's a win or a loss. It's just a chore...so I stopped.

@worst-tdmer I play brig or gally whenever my friends ask because I don't have patience for this game anymore, idk how solos do it lol.

Those matches end much sooner than 10 min, though I have had outlier cringe matches of decent crews who didn't want to commit to a broad & kept resetting. But those were outliers.

I make the suggestions I make, not to make my experience better, but to make the experience better for the casual player. I'm sure you and other skilled solos do just fine. And you'd do just fine with a 15 min limit and an appropriate score system too.

@worst-tdmer said:

@theblackbellamy The competitive 1v1 game mode should not cater to the casual player base. Adventure does plenty of that already.

Eh, it's "competitive" only because it is a 1v1. Traditional games and sports matches are really only competitive after you add constraints to ensure it. Time limits. Tie breakers. Even playing field. Arena's score system could have been better, but at least it had one lol.

HG has none of that. It was shoehorned into Adventure to give players some form of on-demand PvP in lieu of Arena. But it was in no way meant to be "competitive" to the extent that it excludes or drives casual interest away. Which is unfortunately what it has seemed to to.

Is LBH or LoT still around? After NAL shut down, those two groups did their best to host actual competitive matches.

You've never had a good match in brig/gally against streamers/comp players that lasted over 30 minutes?

I have but I hadn't timed them lol. Not sure how long they lasted. I was only pointing out that most of my fights on the bigger boats are fairly quick, so the time limit isn't something that would make or break my experience. I am suggesting it because it makes more sense to have these limits for a match (again, see: Sports).

I also fought against streamers (who had the coconuts) and comp players (while they were pub stomping :P ) in intense 5 boat naval in Arena, and those only lasted 15 min. Much more fun than a 30 min 1v1 of constant resetting, curse balls, bone callers and other goofy adventure things.

@worst-tdmer said in An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback):

@sweetsandman It was a casual game mode, with the purpose of being fun. Hourglass is a competitive gamemode with the purpose of being an outlet for PvP players. Hourglass doesn't have players spawncamp you for points while repairing your ship, it has players spawncamp you while sailing you out, giving you more than enough opportunities to turn the tables. Anything outside of that is reportable.

Sounds like a silly challenge that doesn't really do anything but speed up your match, i guess it puts pressure on you to end the fight fast. Turtling makes you better at turtling, tdming makes you better at tdming, snipes gets you better at snipes, and keg drop is just silly and fun.

Again, if you play in a boring repetitive style, your matches will be boring and repetitive. Maybe PvP just isn't for you?

LOL. PvP is by far and away my favorite part of SOT. I have thousands upon thousands of hours of mostly solo PvP and duo PvP. Solo-queueing Arena (iykyk) was my jam.

I won way more often than I lost in hourglass before abandoning it. It's not that I don't like PvP, I just that think Hourglass is lame. Simple as that. If you like it, good for you. Maybe it's just solo Hourglass is unfun...I definitely have more fun when I'm duo-ing with my buddy.

To that extent...Arena needed work. Badly. But the format was a better foundation than hourglass, IMO.

Hourglass could be great...but I feel like it's in the same boat that Arena was in. Desperately needing enhancement that Rare will (probably) never give it 😥

@sweetsandman said:

Solo-queueing Arena (iykyk)

Just mash that A+B brother

To be a fair competition HG needs a scoring system that takes into account the combined reputation on each ship ( a ranking if you will) and points scored for ship damage and player damage to determine winner. If one side is stacked (ie. Galleon - 4 pirates reputation lvl 140 , 290, 225, 110 = 765 ranking vs. a galleon with 40, 105, 35, 114=294 ranking) subtract the ranking and get a deficit of 471 that the higher ranking galleon must make up to get the full reputation reward.

That would be competitive and fair. If the lower ranking gets the sink, then the reputation multiplier based on the ranking deficit would be rewarded. ( Ie. 30% of a reputation level. If the lower ranking ship loses (sinks) but had made up the deficit damage, they would get 30% reputation level.)

Current matchmaking can put a lvl 15 against a god and that's where the fun ends for both sides. Matchmaking by rank would need a more populated HG. There is the problem. It's unrewarding to be wiped and get next to nothing therefore a painful boring repetitive mode ( the loading in, supplies, emissary, etc. ) that remains unpopular. If it's ever going to be a FUN true competitive mode worth populating, a better scoring system with real rewards for each fight and the effort to just participate is overdue.

Honestly I may be way off here but it's a start and a path to improving HG and it's population. Make it fun. It's already worth it.

@worst-tdmer said:

It has skill based matchmaking, it has boundaries, there are no ties so there is no need for tie breakers. It has an even playing field in that you choose what supplies you go in with, and only match with the same ship size. It requires 100 increasingly difficult levels to reach the "end" of the grind, it was definitely never designed with casuals in mind.

CoD actually released their white paper on why they introduced their "SBMM" (in reality, it is EOMM), and the effects it had on retaining a wide, casual audience. XDefiant popped up as an alternative for people who were rightfully disgruntled with EOMM (not SBMM), although XD's major selling point was "no SBMM." And within months of its release, you can see exactly what has happened to its player pool (it shrunk lol).

SBMM ensures that casual players fight casual players. And let's not forget that SoT's MM is W/L based, not fully SB. But in any case, it's not the same as having a ranked mode or a competitive league. That's why I asked about LoT or LBH. It's difficult coordinating all the supply-gathering and setting-up, so I can see why the activity isn't there. But these groups ensured that the teams were going in with equal supplies. They minimized the impact "luck" or "chance" would have on a match, and that's part of what made it truly competitive.

The freedom to select what supplies you go in with isn't competitive lol. Arena had a fixed and equal amount of starting supplies between groups. And there wasn't an overabundance of specials either. "Special dumping" back then was nothing compared to special dumping now 😂.

The score system could have been better, yes. The modes could have been divided between clearer objectives, yes. I was in here advocating for a TDM mode just so that we wouldn't bother others, since we were apparently so bothersome. But all in all, it was much more (by definition) "competitive" than HG is.

The skill ceiling during arena was much lower than it is now. Yes, mechanically it was higher with cancels, but the game knowledge has never been higher/as openly shared as it is now. I love 30 minutes of both gally's on fire, constantly pumping lowers while boarders are sent/defended on each side, the momentum pushing and pulling, constant communication between your team to stay afloat, hail mary plays like trying to steal the other ships main crate. Those fights have the peak sea of thieves mixture of chaos/skill/teamwork.

End of the day it's still a 1v1. I helm and helming in 1v1 gallies is meh lol. For the players who actually enjoyed naval and didn't just farm noobs, Arena was way more fun to helm in. Involved much more strategic decision making. Now it's just "turn left, everyone do their usual thing" with some variance in boarding PvP. Everyone's de-masted and on fire by the end of it.

No one takes parallels anymore. They should make it so that the mast falls to a side randomly lol. No one wants to engage till we're in an orbital.

I miss Arena.

@worst-tdmer said in An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback):

@sweetsandman Hourglass is just pure pvp between you and the other ship ¯\ (ツ)_/¯

Yeah no kidding...emerge, crank right, raise sails slightly, crank left, drop sails, blah blah blah blah done it hundreds and hundreds of times.

Don't speed run it or treat it like an Ego match, you say? That's literally the format that hourglass is. There's effectively no other commendations within the realm of a single hourglass match that doesn't involve beating your opponent.

At least Arena had all sorts of stuff to progress outside of just winning/losing.

@worst-tdmer I wish I could give you a definitive reason why I found Arena to be more fun than Hourglass...but I'm not alone in that feeling. I'd bet that if you took a poll of players that spent significant time in both, you'd get an overwhelming majority that preferred Arena. Not everyone, obviously, but I'm sure it'd be a landslide in favor of Arena.

@worst-tdmer said:

Equal supplies does not make a gamemode competitive... Arena is as casual as it gets, sorry... Helming will always be "turn left/right, and everyone do their usual thing" regardless of how many ships are in the battle.

There was much more to it than that in Arena lol. It's true that it lacked a MM, but good crews did hop for sweaty lobbies, and good fights were never stale. I have more HG fights that look identical than I had in Arena, that's for sure.

Look, it's good that you enjoy the mode as it is. If we can't fundamentally agree that equal starting supplies makes a game more competitive, then I don't know where else to go from here lol.

In any case that's not what I'm advocating for. Time limits and a score system, however, would make the mode more appealing to casual players for the same reason SBMM appeals to casual players.

Arena may have been casual, but without Arena, we wouldn't have had NAL. And that was the game's unofficial ranked mode, imho. If players want a truly competitive space, then they need to quit "taking breaks" and organize a competitive space. As for HG, Rare needs to appeal to more players, not fewer.

Anyway... we can agree to disagree. Last word is yours.

@worst-tdmer

Time limits and score systems are literally part of almost every competitive sport out there.... are you going to argue that sports matches aren't competitive?

As for standardised supplies, yes, that is more competitive than introducing the RNG of whatever supplies you can grab at an outpost. When you standardise the supplies, it comes down to pure skill, not who has the best or most supplies.

The only reason Hourglass is popular is because of the curse grind and Rare locking commendations (and areas of the map) behind having those curses. Without those incentives, it would be dead.

@worst-tdmer said in An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback):

@realstyli Because most sports aren't fights to the death l mao. Yes fights to the death are more competitive than modern sports.

It's a videogame where you're sat on your rear pushing buttons.... not a fight to the death. It's not even comparable to sports played by top athletes.

If you want to compare the suggested changes to anything, it's boxing - where you can hit a knockout punch to end the fight early on, or it comes down to the most hits at the time limit.

Supplies very rarely decide fights.

Okay, so we agree that standardising them isn't going to be an issue, good.

Look at the top hourglass streamers, and tell me how much supplies they typically start with.

I mean, I've seen quite a few of them use exploits to get more.

Most hourglass sweats start with captaincy supplies, pockets, and crates, and snowball off their dead enemies barrels. Go out and collect all the supplies/curse balls/bonecallers you want, I guarantee you'll lose it to the first good crew you run into with starter supps.

I guess its a good thing that Rare did that then :) .

A well-timed bonecaller or curse can absolutely change the fight, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

I actually enjoy hourglass and I mainly play solo. They should definitely add a closing circle after awhile or something to deter runners, as well as fix the place at dragontooth where you can put your ship between the rocks.

@worst-tdmer said in An Honest Opinion Of Hourglass (Feedback):

@sweetsandman I think its because you weren't forced to sink one good crew that knew what they were doing, and had a slew of other options/opponents to win/make progress/cause chaos.

Arena was a fun mode no doubt, but casual/not competitive.

Maybe? I remember the ultra competitive Arena matches most fondly.

Though, to be fair, SOT isn't exactly a platform for true comp...like at all. It's so wildly unstable and broken that RNG is often the determining factor in the most competitive matches. It's less of a chess match, and more of a tug of war match where occasionally a sheet of oil appears beneath the feet of one team or the other, or the rope sprouts spikes randomly.

Anyone that takes SOT that seriously - especially in its current state - is setting themselves up for disappointment and frustration. I'd lean more towards THAT being the reason I don't like Hourglass. It's a mode with true comp in mind with its design...but the game isn't stable enough to support it. In a 1v1 win or lose only scenario, you want the game to just, ya know, WORK, and let your skills be the deciding factor...but it often doesn't. Cannons going anywhere but where you're aiming, backsplashing, every sort of input registration issue you can think of, parts of your ship literally not being there...the list goes on...and it's only gotten worse since S8.