Black Powder achievement

It would be nice to have that voyage available by other means than luck. Maybe add that to emissary voyage when you hit grade 5 if not as normal quest table voyage?

@korpp1s sagte in Black Powder achievement:

It would be nice to have that voyage available by other means than luck. Maybe add that to emissary voyage when you hit grade 5 if not as normal quest table voyage?

No they should just add it back to animal voyages.
Before season 11 you could get up to 8 per animal voyage.

I agree, it became near impossible to get the achievement, Rare should address the issue and at least increase the probability to get kegs and other crate related voyages from bottles.

@armble I started working towards this and the fruit crate commendations for the achievements and I have to agree. It should come back as a regular voyage rather than it coming down to luck of not just finding bottles and mysterious journals but actually get given the voyages you want. It's a pointless change and imo rare needs to make it easier to get the voyages again.

remove the achievement from Steam.

Yes. Remove it from steam but keep it on consoles. :)

The commendation for doing the delivery bottle voyages (the ones with kegs, fruit, wood, and cannonball crates. Not cargo runs or animal deliveries) has become nearly impossible to complete.

What’s the problem?
You barely find any bottles during a normal play session. And when you finally do, it’s almost always a bounty voyage or a cargo run. Those aren’t even special, because you can just grab them from the quest table any time. So why are they in bottles at all?

The crate delivery voyages are the only ones that are bottle-only, and they’re also the rarest. So if you're going for the commendation, it ends up being a frustrating RNG grind instead of something you can actually work toward in a meaningful way.

A few suggestions:

• Adjust the bottle voyage pool
  Remove the bounty and cargo runs from bottles, or at least reduce how often they show up so there’s a better chance of getting crate delivery voyages.

• Add crate deliveries to the quest table
  This would make the commendation easier to complete, though I get that it might take away some of the challenge or rarity.

One last thing

or remove the achievement from Steam

Please don’t remove the achievement.
They did that with the Arena achievements and it still bugs me. I was about halfway through those and now they’re stuck forever. That kind of thing is super discouraging for people who like to 100% the game.

It’d be great to see this rebalanced so that the delivery commendation is actually possible again, without relying completely on luck.

@burnbacon sagte in Black Powder achievement:

remove the achievement from Steam.

Yes. Remove it from steam but keep it on consoles. :)

No either remoove it everywhere or nowhere.

@capn-walken said in Black Powder achievement:

You barely find any bottles during a normal play session. And when you finally do, it’s almost always a bounty voyage or a cargo run. Those aren’t even special, because you can just grab them from the quest table any time. So why are they in bottles at all?

The cargo runs are kind of special as they have you deliver 3-4 times the normal amount of cargo; even the Emissary ones have you deliver 2 and 4 cargo; the bottle ones give you 7 or 8 to deliver in one voyage - much more efficient.

As we can now have multiple quests per bottle; having more crate or keg deliveries should not be much of a problem to adjust.

They could also add it so there is a chance for those voyages to be part of an Emissary quest (e.g. 50% you have 2 cargo runs, 50% you have one or more crate or keg deliveries instead or on top of). Would probably go with having them in addition to the cargo, as it otherwise would decrease the value of the Emissary Voyage.

They should not be added to the quest table as the completion of the achievements were tied to do something other than just getting another quest.

@lem0n-curry sagte in Black Powder achievement:

They should not be added to the quest table as the completion of the achievements were tied to do something other than just getting another quest.

The kegs were tied to the Animal voyages before season 11.
You could get up to 8 per quest.
My friend did it that way, within one day and for me it will take months.
This was one of the easyest achievments ever created and now its one of the hardest.
Thats simply not fair.

They should put it back into animal voyages, just like it was, with up to 8 kegs per voyage.

@lem0n-curry You're absolutely right, the bottle cargo runs are more efficient in terms of volume. But that doesn’t justify how often they show up compared to the actual crate/keg/fruit/wood deliveries. The current balance just feels off, especially when those specific deliveries are the only ones that count toward the commendation.

And just to be clear, I don’t actually want the crate delivery voyages added to the quest table. I mentioned it as a possible solution, but I agree that it would completely undermine the point of the commendation. These voyages should stay special and not become something you can just spam from the table.

Your suggestion about including them as part of the multi-voyage bottles is a great idea. That feels like the best of both worlds: they stay exclusive to bottles, but at least they’re not so rare that completing the commendation feels impossible.

@dermasterbob said in Black Powder achievement:

@lem0n-curry sagte in Black Powder achievement:

They should not be added to the quest table as the completion of the achievements were tied to do something other than just getting another quest.

The kegs were tied to the Animal voyages before season 11.
You could get up to 8 per quest.
My friend did it that way, within one day and for me it will take months.
This was one of the easyest achievments ever created and now its one of the hardest.
Thats simply not fair.

They should put it back into animal voyages, just like it was, with up to 8 kegs per voyage.

The kegs were, yes but very random, not one that you could choose. I don't think Rare should reintroduce a way for players to spam a quest and only do the ones with one or more kegs for a commendation.

Not disagreeing they should appear more frequently in bottle quests or as part of an Emissary Quest.
Even a chance to get such quests (crate, kegs) in a Shipwreck Voyage would be fine IMHO.

@lem0n-curry
There is no nor has there ever been a reason to make this commendation so much harder.
They should restore mearchant to its original state before season 11 instead of making newer players suffer.
Why make it harder when older players had it so easy?
I would call that bullying.
Noone looses anything if the original state is restored, so there is no reason to make it harder just because.

@dermasterbob said in Black Powder achievement:

@lem0n-curry
There is no nor has there ever been a reason to make this commendation so much harder.
They should restore mearchant to its original state before season 11 instead of making newer players suffer.
Why make it harder when older players had it so easy?
I would call that bullying.
Noone looses anything if the original state is restored, so there is no reason to make it harder just because.

I doubt many people did spam animal quests to get an acceptable number of kegs for a couple of sessions; they probably did them when they were doing animal quests or from random quests. And even if they did, it's not a solution that I'd prefer (especially now the animal crates appear on an island), as stated before and alse in other topics:

• higher chance of keg & crate deliveries in bottles;
• chance of these in Emissaries and perhaps Shipment voyages;
• return of random voyages in (outpost) barrels.

That should make it easy enough for players to get these commendations without any cheese that may destabilise servers.

@dermasterbob said in Black Powder achievement:

@lem0n-curry
There is no nor has there ever been a reason to make this commendation so much harder.
They should restore mearchant to its original state before season 11 instead of making newer players suffer.
Why make it harder when older players had it so easy?
I would call that bullying.
Noone looses anything if the original state is restored, so there is no reason to make it harder just because.

You are remembering wrong - these were not "always" available as a voyage, in fact it was a brief amount of time that they were even available that way. In the beginning, both the gunpowder and fruit (then banana) crates were ALWAYS a random bottle mission...or was found in a barrel. They even cut down the requirements significantly from the initial achievement conditions, was initially 250 or 500 of each (cannot remember the exact number).

But the changes around Season 11 did reduce the frequency as they no longer appeared in barrels, and decreased the frequency in bottles. However they did add them to appear in journals on islands now and that appears to be the best way to hunt for those voyages now. A lot of people do not realize this is now the way to track these down.

@lem0n-curry
I dont know a single person that finished kegs that didn't do it that way.

@dlchief58
I realize that that is the way to do them now, but its agonizing.
Me and my friend have found about 40+ messages in a bottle/journals in this season and not one of them was a delivery quest.

While before season 11 you just hopped servers, looked at the outpostbarrels until you found a voyage.
One of my completionist friends did this and went from 0% to 100% for the crates in 3 weeks of occasional hopping and 1 singular session of animalquests to finish kegs.

Noone can tell me that the current way to get either of these is 100% balanced and noone can tell me that restoring the old pre S11 ways is a no go.
If it was this easy once then why not do it like that again, instead of punishing new players for beeing new.

We already have enough unbalanced commendations, because of new changes.
The gifts have the same problem.
Once completable within one day, now takes multiple seasons, just because one quest was removed.
Or the rag and bones, before season 9 you got multiple in each FoF and now you only get one through regular skullforts.

All of these things should be restored to the best state, instead of making them a little less agonizing.

Our crew jokes that we find the shrouded ghost to be more likely to happen at this point than finishing these bottle quests.

It is not like this is anything special than hey pick something up and deliver it.

Just add it to the merchant quests lol

@armble They (the journals) appear on the large items near points of interest, such as campfires, other island barrel locations, and other interesting spots on the islands. No set list as it is still random on whether they will appear or if they will contain the voyage you need. Yes it will likely take more time than before, but let's not kid ourselves like many are doing here - it was never easy (except the one season where they added the voyage for a limited time). But knowing where to look (which I only discovered recently as it was never officially announced, stumbled upon the fact over at the Rare Thief website) does make it more manageable than just looking for them randomly. I've actually come across a few since learning where to look for them. But the frequency could use a little buff to at least match the chances of finding one as it was in the beginning (when they were found in barrels or bottles, not purchasable voyages).

@dank-jimb0 Funny, I did encounter the Shrouded Ghost a short while ago before completing the gunpowder/fruit crate quests. A big no from me on making it a simple merchant quest (especially given they are free now), they just need to adjust the frequency back to having the same odds of finding them as it was in Season 1. Making them a permanent voyage cheapens the achievement as then it is definitely not "anything special" anymore, much like the Shrouded Ghost would lose its prestige by making it easy.

@dlchief58 I have finished gunpowder, fruit crate and cannonball crate commendations before it become harder to find them from bottles. I think, for the bottles, the ratio of gunpowder/crates should be higher than other types of voyages since there is little ways to them compare to the other types of voyages that can be found from bottles.