Hi all,
So first off, I've played this game for a decent bit but I won't say that I'm some legend or related.
I'm making this post after reading another post concerning the progression of gameplay changes, the comments on "sweats" (tryhard PvP players) in the community, and the issue around the FOV.
The main issue I've seen popup is multi-ship raiding crews which have become much more prevalent as of late.
For those who don't know, the idea is to have 6-8 people (brigand and/or galleon) queue up simultaneously and attempt to get two people into the same session in different ships. The others then join those two and form an allegiance and then go around raiding other ships.
The issue here is that unlike PvE multi-crew (ie. Merchant Alliance or PvP quests), fighting two voice-comm co-ordinated ships is unavoidable. By the nature of PvE quests and the limited map area, you can never really escape because they will either follow you on the inner side of the circle of the map (shorter distance) and/or follow you to the outpost/island you have to visit.
You must either sink them or quit.
Honestly, there needs to be a change in mechanics to allow smaller solo ships an avoidance strategy that overcomes being followed. For those who say to sail against the wind, this will only work until you reach the limits of the map.
For those who say, fighting is part of the game, that is true but fighting multiple coordinated ships as a sloop or brigand is not fair in the slightest. If this was a rare occurrence, then it'd probably be okay, but it's becoming a much more common occurrence on desktops because of low-delay voice communication (ie. Discord).
To be honest, I would like to see a game system design that allows for multi-ship crews. I think there is an opportunity here for small fleet battles
(2v2, 3v3, etc) as this game's mechanics actually suit this extremely well.
Second of all, there needs to be a mechanic to allow smaller ships to explicitly avoid a PvP encounter. For example, if a player sails to the edge of the map, the current mechanic means that the chaser can just hover at the edge of the limit and attrition the ship they are chasing.
Obviously, there is the issue of limiting the escape opportunity window. Otherwise, people would just run away indefinitely and PvP players would lose out. It is part of the game to allow PvP ships to raid PvE-centric ships, that's the whole concept of Piracy! At no point should pure PvE be an option.
Also, on that front, there are significant differences in the playability for desktop clients versus console clients. Some of this is unavoidable but a lot of the playability issues in this game are coming from having a centralized "experience" for all platform types.
For example, there is the issue of FOV and nausea versus performance limitations for consoles requiring it to be clamped and the related animation and first-person camera space issues.
Another one is the in-game menu navigation not having certain functions that you expect from other games with similar interfaces (like the inventory UI).
Sensitivity limits for desktop controls are another. This one does not make sense because high DPI mice will overcome this issue, meaning that people with "gaming" hardware will have a much larger advantage over people without it.
There are other issues, many of which I may not be aware of or agree with necessarily and many of you may disagree with my assessment.
The fundamental summary of the issues can be described as portability issues. They have arisen from the game's support for desktop clients. Many game design decisions and systems are showing these issues because they were never really designed to operate outside of a console environment.
The reason to compel me to make this thread is that Rare has been awfully quiet in addressing the portability issues between desktop and console clients. Either just taking a hard stance against mods or other changes to address portability issues (like the FOV changes for wide-aspect ratios and nausea symptoms) or just ignoring it outright.
I will not condone people attempting to cheat and many client-side mods for desktops are just for that, they are not to fix portability issues, they are there because players want an unfair advantage.
But the truth of the matter is that many mods exist because of these portability issues and both of these mod categories are getting conflated and grouped together as "cheating" (in a malicious connotation) and are dismissed outright.
And I've seen people saying that extended FOV has no place whatsoever. I'm sorry but just because you don't have an issue doesn't mean others' issues are suddenly invalid. Nausea is not a "small issue", end of discussion.
It is fine to take the stance against client-side mods for the sake of fairness, I can understand and agree with that position. However, in that circumstance, Rare has an obligation to address significant issues with their game.
And for anyone who says otherwise on specifically portability issues, tell me what avenues Rare has for offering a refund. Because if there isn't one, then it's effectively selling a defective product to customers with no warranty.
Obviously, I'm still playing the game. I enjoy it and have no intention of refunding at this point in time. But if Rare wants this title to continue to grow on the desktop market, then these issues have to at least be addressed. Many games out there with cross-platform play have different UI and control schemas for different platforms because they understand that each platform has different advantages and user experience requirements and that applies here too.
I would like to hear your feedback on this and hopefully Rare's if they are reading this. Thank you for your time.
Regards,
