First, my friends and I have really been enjoying the game. You all have done a great job with the world, the ships, and the experiences this game provides.
The Problem: There needs to be a way to turn PvP off. While I understand the PvP of this game adds some interesting interactions and experiences, not everyone wants to constantly be looking over their shoulder or avoiding certain parts of the game for fear of other players ruining their play time.
A lot of us bought this game to sail around the beautiful game-world, find treasure, and battle skeletons together without wanting to constantly harass or be harassed by other players. Literally no one I know bought this game to only do PvP. Before purchasing, we all knew there would be some PvP, but we didn’t expect it to be such a punishing experience overall.
Additionally, most, if not all, other games that offer some type of PvE experience have a way to opt-in and out of PvP or PvP zones (e.g. The Division, WoW, Ghost Recon Wildlands, or even as far back as Star Wars Galaxies, just to name a few).
Example: My friends and I just spent the last hour clearing out a skeleton fort, only to have 2 sloops roll up right as we finished, engage us immediately, and take everything. Even after we tried a couple times to sail back to try and fight for our stuff, a galleon sailed in and killed everyone. We disconnected in frustration, having wasted an hour of our lives, and have zero incentive to ever do skeleton forts again. Not to mention, this experience left such a bad taste in the mouths of my friends, that they will be taking a break from the game for a while.
Furthermore, and I’ve even seen this brought up in a Q and A at E3, there needs to be more of a punishment for dying, when engaging in PvP. While I understand the perspective of providing a play experience where players don’t mind taking risks, it is a punishing experience for the players who are attacked and harassed. Why create an environment where my crew and I have to disconnect and find another server to get away from a ship, or multiple ships, doing nothing but playing the game to kill other players? That just doesn’t make sense and it’s frankly a bad way to handle “risk vs reward” play experiences. Honestly, it’s just promoting PvP, which is confusing seeing as Joe Neate even said the dev team liked The Hungering Deep because it gave players an incentive to stop attacking each other at first sight.
Suggestions:
*Flags: Actually utilize the flags. Maybe spawn everyone into a server with PvE only enabled. If players want to flag themselves for PvP (pun intended), they could raise the Jolly Roger and only be able to attack other people who have the Jolly Roger raised. Obviously, all other flags would just be for PvE and only the Jolly Roger would opt you in for PvP. Additionally, put a small buffer time (3-5 minutes) on both electing to be flagged for PvP and for lowering the Jolly Roger to go back to PvE only. This would keep players from sailing up really close to someone with a white flag raised, and then instantly switching over to the Jolly Roger.
*PvE or PvP Server Selection: Maybe let people select at the beginning, when they are deciding which ship they want, whether or not they want to play on a PvE or PvP server. I don’t know how complicated this is, but it seems to work pretty well for other games and I know for a fact my friends and I would almost always join a PvE server.
Anyway, like I said, you all have made a great game here and I fully understand that there are some growing pains going on. Also, it is a really cool experience to be able to be a part of this game developing over time, changing almost every week, and having the dev team actually listen to the community. Well done and keep up the good work.
Twitch
