[Mega Thread] Balancing Exploration and Player Combat - Part 2

  • @evilalienhybrid I have an equally good idea to removing skull forts, let’s remove PvE entirely so there is no incentive to sink each other and we can all sail around drinking and singing? Without loot why PvP either? Then we can all have an awesome sailing journey on the Sea of Solo Sloops.

  • All of you talking about toxic players are a bunch of fairy pirates. The game is called Sea of Thieves not sea of gentlemen, for your insolent comments I’ll make sure my crew “ganks” you, sinks you and takes your booty by force. These waters are not safe for landlubbers and ninnies. I’ll be meeting you at every skull fort and camping any outpost with gunpowder barrels just for you f*****s to quit for good. Your voice chat when I sink you is more toxic than anything I could do in game with my character.

  • Serverside hit detection & low tick servers blatantly do not work, that's why barely any successful games have ever done it, it's downright unresponsive and rage-inducing. All of the biggest shooter games right now (PUBG, Fortnite, R6:Siege, Overwatch, Call of Duty to name a few) use clientside hit detection with serverside checks for a reason. "But lagswitching!" you may say, and with that you indicate that you don't know what you're talking about because not only did the 5 games mentioned before fix that problem, but a chimpanzee trained to type on a keyboard could come up with a solution for it.

    You may notice someone isn't taking damage over half the times you hit them, you may notice it's nearly impossible to land hits when you're grouped with someone who lives halfway across the world and is hosting, you may have even lost a fight & your ship because of it. That's exclusively because someone made the nonsensical contrarian decision to have server-side hit detection WITH LOW TICK SERVERS for literally no reason, there is no upside, one of the only games to pull off server-side hit detection is CS:GO. Would you like to guess why? It's because they actually spent money for good servers, it's because they actually put in the time to have a good netcode, this game very blatantly does neither of those things.

    Don't tell me "But I land my shots when I hit!", I am a pirate legend and have over 100 hours in-game, I run with crews so good that we have never sunk in a real fight (so no, I'm not salty that I lost, I don't lose), we go out of way to PvP. Anyone with enough experience has noticed that this is an issue, and it's a ridiculous one with an extremely easy fix that should have been implemented from the very start.

    And as if that wasn't enough, you get straight-up insulted by the hitmarker. The hitmarker, if you didn't know, is calculated clientside- unlike the actual hit detection. That means the game is literally telling you "Hey, we know you actually landed that shot and everything but I don't care, screw off, you don't deserve to deal damage." I simply can't imagine a good reason for this, the whole situation makes no sense whatsoever and how it made it past testing (assuming there was any) is just as baffling.

    If you want to keep up the masquerade of SoT being a AAA game: maybe, just maybe clientside hit-detection with serverside checks (like almost every other AAA game) is the way to go. It's either that, get better servers/netcode (lol), or ignore the issue and let the dedicated players get more and more frustrated over it. I think you could guess what option my money's on, and it definitely isn't going to be on the gamepass after this month.

  • @mysticdragon297 There are bounty/misc books around the islands along with message in a bottle appearing in shipwrecks and on the beaches of skull forts as well. There are ways to obtain missions without doing voyages and I regularly duo with my girlfriend without voyages just island hopping. This game has stuff to do if you think outside the box. My newest goal is turning my flag black above the crows nest every time I spawn into a server. Once you get a high gold per hour average and all your cosmetics you start to look for other ways to enjoy SoT

  • @mysticdragon297 It's a good start, but I'm not sure voyages even need to be a thing at all. I like the idea of content being presented to the players in a more organic way, rather than just finding voyages, why not just have certain event types happen randomly. Maybe you'll find a bottle with a map or riddle, maybe you'll find treasure or trade goods hidden away in a cave or shipwreck, maybe rare animals will be there, maybe a skeleton crew will attack you. It just seems like you don't need the rigid voyage structure at that point if you're randomizing where people find them. It would feel more natural to simply come across a skeleton crew and fight them to take on their captain than to find a bottle telling you about a captain on a specific island. I can understand random map drops and spawns at landmarks on islands or in bottles, but the other voyage types don't really feel like the kind of thing you'd just find randomly on a beach stuffed in a bottle.

    Then rather than having separate voyage types, just ditch the voyages altogether. NPCs wouldn't sell them and players wouldn't need to find or vote on them. Use the voting system for maps or riddles if you want to keep it, but ditch the voyages. I don't want to get roped into doing "quests" with a bunch of homogeneous micro-missions when I could just be sailing around and finding things as I travel from island to island. Each one offering a different experience from the last.

  • @greaseman85 What is the DEFINITION of a toxic player you and me seem to have a problem DEFINEING things in our arguments don’t you think? You can’t just go around and slap the ‘toxic label around on people until you know the definition.

  • @purpleurkl I am now following you beautiful speech

  • I think special cannonballs such as booze bombs and explosive cannonballs could be both fun and give the game a more interesting combat flow. However massive changes like this begs the addition of tutorials after the addition of game-changing features.

  • Not sure if this is the place to put my ideas but i have a few thoughts mainly about the merchant alliance vendor.

    Allow players to purchase animal crates individually rather than cycling missions out for them.

    The cannonball crate, banana crate, and wood crates could also be available for purchase. I find that when i get one of these requests for ship supplies, I take the crate and ditch the mission because they make resupplying less tedious and more fun, especially in a group.

    (You could even go so far as to allow players to directly buy these supplies individually and stock up but IMO i prefer the idea of just buying the crates and scavenging the supplies.)

    Include the trade goods in merchant alliance voyages. based on your reputation level you could have players taking tea/sugar/spices from one place to another, along with the rest of the trade request. currently we only see this loot locked away in a stronghold or in a sunken ship, and it would be nice to have the variety of trade goods.

    Keep doing your best
    I believe in you Rare
    I believe in Sea of Thieves

  • The sniper still needs a buff even after the most recent patch. Today I have been toying around with the sniper to see how good it really is and it is still the least rewarding weapon. I hit a guy sailing away two times back to back and he did not die, he just sat there on the wheel and kept going, didn't even eat a banana. The damage drop off vs distance should be removed from the sniper as the whole reason to use one is for long distance!

  • Thank you all for your comments and feedback in this thread. To keep the discussion fresh and allow us to read through all your comments, we are now locking Mega Threads after seven days.

    The new feedback thread on this topic can be found here!

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