Hi all, I've been playing the game about a month now and was just wondering about a couple of things which I seriously wonder how are still an issue in a game this old?
Firstly, mermaids. Obviously the mermaid feature is great, but I've had numerous infuriating experiences with it recently, especially in PvP. There have been a number of occasions where my crewmates have been knocked off my ship, which is now sailing away from me, where no mermaid spawns for at least 1 minute. By the time I am able to mermaid back, I have been sunk. Often times these are fights which I was actually winning until being knocked off the ship. It's like the game doesn't recognise that my ship is 100m+ away and sailing off, and just goes "This is fine, you're good here, you can make that swim". It's completely insane how often this happens in fights with player ships. Meanwhile when I am stood ashore 30ft from my ship doing a vault, I am bombarded with mermaids. How isn't there a better system for recognising you're off your ship with no hope of getting back to it? Is there an intentional timer in PvP where the mermaid actually takes longer to spawn to reward knocking players off? Sometimes she pops up immediately, other times it is like I said, I am sunk by the time she's up.
Kind of building on from this, is what the heck is going on with load times and screens sometimes? Once again, especially in combat, it can feel like it takes an additional 30 seconds on top of the wait on the ferry to get back to your ship, and oftentimes I am killed by a ship camper during this load screen, so load in dead. Why is my character appearing on the ship before I am actually able to control him? I can even hear the game sounds while in the load screen, including me being killed by the ship camper. Seems like a terrible system designed to encourage ship camping. (Before someone says my PC must be garbage, my load times are exponentially shorter than this in any other game, so I have no idea what's up with SoT.)
I assume I will be met with lots of responses saying "Get good, that's what the game is all about", but I am not complaining about the gameplay here, it's the glitchy / incredibly clunky / very strangely or confused configuration of the AI / spawning / loading system which seems to result in you often being caught in huge limbos where you cannot do anything to help your crew or your ship. Is it literally just me that experiences this, or are these "quirks" just part and parcel of playing SoT? I assume it can't be because when I've played open crews and on community discords, others get very annoyed by the same stuff, especially mermaid problems.
