My sisters have been playing SoT since its beta days. I picked it up only very recently, and until this evening had been enjoying so many aspects of the game immensely, putting in some hundred hours of play over the past few weeks.
This evening my sister and I decided to take on an Ashen Lord -- my first. We geared up, spending an hour and a half gathering supply and ammo crates, and filling them with blunderbombs and food. We waited for one to spawn, and made our way over to it. We spent thirty-five minutes battling it, which was great fun.
Just as we struck the death blow, we heard cannon fire, and found that a Reaper galleon had just sunk our (unmanned, undefended) sloop. I told them I was new to this, this was my first Ashen Lord, and we'd just done all the work to kill it. They told me "Get good at the game and maybe this won't happen next time," and then shot me in the face and killed my sister's character as well, forcing us to respawn literally on the other side of the map.
So let me explain what I personally have learned from this experience:
- there is NO POINT in attempting to tackle any major world events in the game, as opportunist losers like these will come along and take away everything YOU'VE worked for, almost certainly more times than not;
- 'being good' at the game evidently has NOTHING to do with actually engaging with the game's content in meaninful ways, or putting in the effort to participate in its more complex challenges, but everything to do with stealing other people's hard-earned spoils with as little effort on your own part as possible;
- the PvP in this game is just as dumb, pointlessly cruel, and fun-destroying as the PvP in every other game I've ever played, and the players that 'enjoy' this aspect of the game are just as elitist, small-minded, and pointlessly cruel as those that enjoy it in any of those others.
Now, I will be the first to admit I do NOT like the PvP aspect of ANY game I have ever played. But I have continued playing so many of those games because their developers sensibly saw fit to provide PvE-only servers for that segment of their player base for whom PvP isn't simply no fun, but actively off-putting.
Yet by all accounts Rare do not see a compelling reason to give the players of their pirate game a PvE-only option. I am here to say that the most compelling reason I can think of is this: because if you don't, you will lose players.
I'm pretty sure you've lost this one. My time is too valuable to me to continue playing a game in which it is evidently encouraged not simply to ruin other players' good times, but to spit in their eyes whilst doing it.
I would offer one other suggestion here that might be taken into consideration, in lieu of or in addition to offering a PvE-only server option (and indeed, so I can't be accused of just coming here to whine and not offering any kind of constructive feedback to address the problems that are compelling me to leave):
- INSTANCED world events -- other games solve this sort of problem, or implement this proposed solution, with widely varying degrees of elegance or ineptitude. But the point remains the same: it should not be possible simply for someone to camp out and steal your hard work, or interfere with it in an actively fun-destroying fashion.
So here in SoT, for instance, using my own experience as an example: perhaps when one crew has landed at a world event, a timer kicks in -- say 5 minutes -- within which other crews can arrive into your same instance and actively join/disrupt you. Beyond this time, your instance is 'closed' to other crews and essentially exists in its own dimension. When you finish the event, you essentially have the island's 'view' range in which your instance hides you, but outside of that view range you become visible to other players again. This would allow you at least a fighting chance of escape, if you then discover a reaper vessel lurking just outside the event perimeter: not only do they not know precisely where you might exit the island instance, but you're also in a position both to defend yourself or indeed to beat a retreat.
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