Idea: Burying own treasure
Summary: Bury loot to create own treasure maps. Maps are dropped when ship sinks. Other players can pick up the maps and take the loot, or also just find it by digging randomly.
Motivation:
When levelling up emissary reputation, you often have a lot of loot on board, that you want to only turn in at the end of the session, for maximum profit. This of course has a high risk, which is intended.
In the past, when me and my crew have had LOTS of loot and were scared of losing it, we used to hide it on a random island somewhere and come back later.
This, howerver, is also not entirely risk free. A random crew could stumble upon your loot and take it, the server could merge (and not the loot), or the loot could also just despawn after 1-2 hours.
The Idea:
I wondered how this problem could be solved with an interesting gameplay mechanic. My suggestion is the following: Let the players bury their own treasure. Burying treasure would create a map and mark where the treasure is buried. The map would be added to your map inventory and be denoted with a special symbol.
The loot would be able to be dug up at any time, and it would never despawn, as long as the map for it exists in the world. It would also persist with server merges.
However, when your ship sinks, all your custom treasure maps would drop in the wreckage of the ship. Any player that picks it up gets the map added to their map inventory.
Why?
I think it would add an interesting gameplay element, because if you sink but you were cautious enough to bury all your loot beforehand, you don't immediately lose anything (apart from the ship). If you remember the location of your treasure (or have a screenshot or something), you can still try to get to the island where you buried it, and take it before the other crew comes and digs it up.
This could offer you another chance to win back your loot. In normal gameplay, you would either just give up, or hunt the ship until they or you make a mistake.
Racing to dig up the loot offers another interesting gameplay element, imo.
I think the system would be pretty well balanced, because you need to invest quite a bit of time to secure your loot like this. It is also just one extra layer of protection, so if you're too slow to get to the place where you buried it, you still lose everything.
Restrictions:
There should of course be restrictions to where you can bury the loot. I propose restricting it to all normal islands, so no outposts, trading posts, forts or the shores of gold.
Please let me know what you think.
