I already made a post recently, but I really want to put this here, where it's more likely to be seen and engaged with.
From my post in Custom Server Update Discussion:
Here's the thing about the notion of private servers that has everyone up in arms, alright?
This game is easy.
It's easy. Very easy. SO easy. The easiest. The most difficult events in the game are things you have to go out of your way to run into on the map - i.e., Ashen Lords and Flameheart. Solo sloops are the only exception; if you've got at least one more person on your crew, you can deal pretty quickly with the random Megalodon, Kraken, or skelly ship that spawns on you.
So instead of balancing their own game, Rare let the players do it for them.
They wanted a game where you're a pirate sailing through dangerous waters in search of well-guarded loot, but the one thing that's guarding the loot is intervention by other players. Death is meaningless unless whatever killed you has a solid chance of actually sinking your ship.
If we want private servers with progression, we can't just get private servers; we would need more mechanics that pose a danger to the player, more dangerous krakens, megalodons, and skelly ships that aren't just piñatas full of loot.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people engaged in PvP because they just plain got bored of doing quests normally and wanted the excitement of ship battles against a competent opponent, just not in the Sea Dogs arena.
I don't know how a lot of PvEers feel about that, overall, but it's a fact they have to face - if you want private servers, the game has to get harder to compensate, if Rare really wants to keep that 'danger around every corner' feeling to the game.
That's about as far as that goes.
I feel like this is a pretty easy agreement to come to; the game really is just super easy. Second only to players in difficulty is the amount of time you're willing to sink into the game.
There's a bar minimum amount of change that would need to be implemented to make the game equally as difficult as it is just by letting other players see and shoot at your ship, some of which are:
- Death consequences. There's no consequences for death; you're put in time out for a hot minute, then you pop back in. An easy way to add consequence is by deducting gold from the player upon death.
- Enemy AI. As far as it goes right now, it's not great. Even Flameheart's difficulty stems from the fact that there are so many enemy ships, not from the how difficult it is to fight each ship individually. This would have to tie in with a combat revamp of some kind.
- More aggressive kraken/megalodons. They both just kinda hang out while you shoot at them; while this could easily tip over into 'way too difficult to fight', it stands to reason that in a private server, at least, it warrants a difficulty boost.
Already, I get the feeling that this is way more effort than Rare is willing to put forward into this game.
Based on what I've seen from them so far, combat and difficulty progression just isn't their bag; they're tertiary at best. But these are both topics that fundamentally weaken the game because they just haven't been worked out enough; combat mainly comes to cannonfire and ship steering, and difficulty progression is more reliant on how often you bash heads with another player.
It's a fun game, but it definitely feels like it's fun in spite of itself, at times. It can be better, and even if this kind of overhaul doesn't come with private servers, it would still serve the game well to add depth to the game's difficulty and combat.
