Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak

At this point I would take literally any improvement to the IPG because its such a massive pain to deal with. I even saw a Rare developer j0toro say on discord (the tavern channel) that it took them 16 hours to find their pirate which is a ridiculous amount of time just to get a nice character. It took me about 6 hours to find my current one which is sadly stuck with permanent face stubble.

I will vote up every one of
these posts that comes up. Thank you for making your suggestion.

@metal-ravage You are correct. It's not a major issue, and there are more pressing concerns as far as gameplay goes. But not every developer at Rare is working 100% on balancing swords vs guns, and I'd hardly say that spitballing ideas about quality of life changes is the same as me demanding that this be the first thing that comes out next update. It's my personal, honest feedback on the game I love playing because I want it to be even better than it is now.

@galactic-geek I can assure you, it does not already do this. I have favorited 7 'Disney Princess' pirates and re-rolled the remaining one pirate slot to get everything from Gaston to human Ursula. There is no elimination, it's just decreasing the number of infinitely generated pirates you see at one time - which makes the entire process take longer. And yes, you could force the 'similar pirate' function to give you things close to what you want. That's kinda the idea that I'm proposing. To make it simpler and more direct to find something specific without removing the ease of access to a wide representation of pirates. A very unobtrusive middle ground between how it currently works and the filters that a good number of people want.

• Don't have a random generator system to choosing a pirate, have a slider / pick and choose system instead. The game limits your pirate customization to the body type of your pirate, UNLESS you pay $1.49 to change your pirates appearance RANDOMLY. (Horrible decision making on the devs part)

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

1st, it might actually already do this

I would almost certainly bet it doesn't based on what I've witnessed. Unless you have proof that it does, it's not fair to speculate that this otherwise simple suggestion already exists.

Just keep going until they're all favorited, then start that process on the features you like the most, until you find 1 you're willing to try.

I'd agree with that if it wasn't a paid feature to change should you not like what you tried. Like it or not, Rare made the decision to have it cost real life money to change your pirate's appearance. The least they could do would be to allow for a little preference setting with the pirate generator. As it stands, it seems like a money grab...your options are:

1). Settle for something so you can actually get to the part where you play the game...and pay real life money to change it later.

2). Spend an uncapped amount of time dealing with RNG.

I was fortunate enough to wind up with exactly what I was looking for really quickly and have no interest in changing it....but others are not so lucky.

The only justification I can come up with is that they offer enough ancient coins each season to buy an appearance potion

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

@alienmagi said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

At this point I would take literally any improvement to the IPG because its such a massive pain to deal with. I even saw a Rare developer j0toro say on discord (the tavern channel) that it took them 16 hours to find their pirate which is a ridiculous amount of time just to get a nice character. It took me about 6 hours to find my current one which is sadly stuck with permanent face stubble.

I will vote up every one of
these posts that comes up. Thank you for making your suggestion.

Took me 1 hour - but that's typical for me when it comes to customization in most games.

I understand that not everyone feels like their ingame appearance matters very much, but this is one of the more important factors for me and I guess many others. I see my in game character as a representation of myself and I want to make them look good and simillar to how I would present myself in person. Not just for other people to see, but for me to admire as well.

Just as I enjoy nice graphics, and nice cosmetics in the game I also like to enjoy my pirate's face and body type (I use emotes a lot) . What bothers me most of all is that I already found a great looking pirate but I am stuck with the facial stubble which not all pirates have. Now if i want to use a pirate appearance potion and try out a new character I will lose my current one forever and might not be happy with the new one after checking them out more closely. That would force me to buy a new potion and sit in the IPG for hours again (because I couldnt accept the fact that I paid money to downgrade my character).

The IPG is a huge miss in my opinion.

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

Well, if you add in factors like gender and skin color as choosable options,then some might cry sexist or racist because you might start seeing less of the minorities. Not against it, just food for thought.

Yes, thank you for the strawman argument to consider, I already have taken that into account due to the fact I've read you say the same thing several times in other threads on this topic.

To reiterate, my suggestion is to not add sliders, filters, pickers, or any other menu/static customization to the IPG, because I assume that the reason they didn't add in a proper character creator in the first place is because they wanted a way to quickly introduce a wide variety of pirates to players with minimal input on the players' part. Adding in a button to fill the selection with pirates that are varying degrees of random adjacent to one you've already favorited would neither add more menus/tabs to navigate nor remove the heart of the IPG from the character selection process. Because I have scrolled through many pirates where I've said to myself "I would be content with this being my in-game representation if this pirate didn't have this one glaring feature".

When I first chose my pirate, I presumed that's what the favourite option did. If I favourited a female pirate, I thought the next set of generated, would be more towards female choices. I wouldn't be against this particular method, as it still generates random pirates.

For example, I wouldn't mind something like this:

1st favourite - Determines Sex.
2nd favourite - Determines Chonkiness.
3rd favourite - Determines Age.

Then the remaining five are generated based on those criteria. There'd still be a lot of random choices to pick from, height/eyes/mouth/nose/ears/skin colour/scars/stubble etc.

I would not want full sliders and customisation though. There would be far too many Captain Jack Sparrows running around.

I suggested something very similar years ago.

I said:

When you favourite a pirate, it should give you another option to reroll based on favourites and generate similar-looking pirates. This would be an an additional option to the random reroll - i.e. another button.

So upvoted because I still think it's a good idea.

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

The problem with this method is that currently, there is no way to deduce which features you prefer. For example, you say you chose a female pirate, but how does the IPG know that? It might assume you chose her because of her height, weight, hair color, eye color, skin complexion, etc. - there are simply too many factors to consider. Your pirate, no matter what, will always have some sort of flaw - the only question you have to ask yourself is if you can live with said flaws (just like IRL) or if you're going to do something about it.

So, you agree that limiting the randomness in the IPG wouldn't take away from its core identity of giving the player a wide variety of options? Because what you're describing is exactly what I'm suggesting. You pick a favorite, and then it creates pirates that are similar to that pirate, but all vary a variety of the 'sliders'. So you still have a very low chance of getting exactly what you want, but it takes much less time investment to get pirates adjacent to what you're aiming for.

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

First, no I don't agree - and don't make assumptions like that to try and manipulate an argument to your favor. Second, what I was describing was an example of why everything needs to be factored - and it already is.

Sorry, I'm just really struggling to figure out what it is you're trying to argue. All of your nit-picking appears to boil down to "but this would make the IPG less random", "I didn't suffer so it doesn't need to be changed", "if you let people be who they want then the game will be racist/sexist", or "I disagree with this thing you aren't suggesting".

Out of all of your arguments, only the first in that list is worth addressing because it's the only one that's relevant to my feedback/suggestion. And that's exactly the intent. I am suggesting a way to make it less random, while still keeping a moderate amount of randomness. The degree of randomness and the aspects that would remain static would ultimately be up to Rare to decide.

If you can't do anything other than bull-headedly shout down any and all changes to the IPG, then I suggest you spend your time finding something more productive to debate. You don't help anyone or anything with your nirvana fallacies.

The IPG generator is nice but could be optimized.

Who haven't roll for couple hours to find the correct Pirate.

1 st : By adding just 1 filter : Female / Male it could save us a lot of time (I guess it's not a hudge development).
2nd : Add a vanity box with maybe some presets clothes that we could use before selecting the Pirate. cause some Clothes didn't match or not as we think.
3rd (but not sure , i need to test it) : I don't know if we can't talk during the IGP creation ... Teeth or not is so important for some people ... (For one of my character I ve rolled 8 hour to find a GrandPa look without Teeth).

What do you think about this small add ?

@alienmagi I didn't even know a developer also had issue with their hilariously low production pirate generator.

@meroviel While I understand that it's a choice, I still feel like that choice could be whittled down some without interfering with the randomness that is the pirate generator. There should atheist be an option for male and female. Also I don't honestly see a lot of randomness, I see a lot of repetitive characters both in game and in the creator.

@meroviel said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

Oh I hear you and I will feedback - just as I have when this has come up in the past. I just didn't want to feed into a narrative of me complaining about it when it's actually the opposite and I genuinely love it. One of my crewmates and I sat in VC for hours chatting while we rolled new pirates as we both love it. I tend to settle back, pop a film on or jump in VC with a cup of tea, and just chill and roll.

While we understand the idea is to streamline it, it's not as simple as 'male or female presenting', there would be other factors to consider, such as non-binary, and even then some may have more typical 'male' or 'female' traits depending on preference and representation, so who are we to decide this when as it is now it is left in the player's hands? And as someone stated earlier, picking one race/bodytype/presentation would mean you wouldn't see others and your perfect pirate might be there.

At the end of the day it's up to us as players to decide how much we want a specific look and I know MANY pirates who have come across their perfect pirate and it wasn't like anything they were initially looking for - that's the joy of the IPG.

Not all pirates on the seas are perfect. We see many shapes and sizes, just as we would in real life, and we come to love our pirate's flaws, just as we do with ourselves in real life. A Sea full of supermodel pirates would not be nearly as fun.

I find it is unfair to say there should not be masculine/feminine body filters because of non binary people, when at the same time the IPG is restricted in a way that doesnt even allow feminine faces to mix/match with masculine bodies and vice versa.

Every single male character that comes up in the generator has at least one very robust masculine feature, either a huge or crooked nose, a massive chin, a permanent facial stubble or an unnaturally elongated face that is usually accompanied by 2 tiny almost invisible eyes. Dont even get me started on how a big chunk of male pirates have a very elongated troll-looking torso. Not very friendly to anyone who doesnt consider themselves binary or anyone who doesnt conform to annoying gender norms. I've even seen people choosing a feminine body so their "male" pirate would look better, even though they had to hide their chest under large coats.

I should at least be able to shave off facial stubble. There is no reason to have that permanently stuck on my otherwise almost perfect pirate that should have the ability to shave like everyone else.

Admitting the IPG is problematic would be the first step to finding a real solution. Ignoring it will only result in more people constantly asking for improvements and repeating this entire conversation.

I should add that when I first found out about SoT I nearly gave this game a pass when I realized how terrible the IPG is, but I was luckily impressed with gameplay enough to not immediately refund the game on steam. Im glad I gave the game a try, but I wonder how many people who care about their characters never even bothered trying the game because of this.

Not all pirates on the seas are perfect. We see many shapes and sizes, just as we would in real life, and we come to love our pirate's flaws, just as we do with ourselves in real life.

I promise you that we dont love our pirate's flaws just like we don't love the flaws we have in real life. This one of the biggest reasons why people play games, to escape the struggles of real life. To have this psychological "struggle" imported into our gaming experience it just becomes another annoying thing to have to be constantly reminded of.

Please for the love of the almighty pirate lord just give us the options and keep a randomize button for people who prefer to randomize. What ever happened to "tools, not rules"?

@meroviel why are we still using realism as an excuse in a game with walking skeletons and floating heads?,

and ive said this before, but saying Male and Female is just a term everyone can understand, it could also be masculine or feminine, body A or body B, F or M.

and for the love of god. WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT IT SUCKS. we are SAYING it could be improved, it feels like a foundation that was built, but was left unfinished. and there is not uniqnes to it. im about to get a group together and start playing pirate appearance bingo, make sure to be early cuz the game aint gonna last long. put more STUFF into it. put filters in it, put birth marks in the mix, lost fingers or toes, the pirates that come out are not that unique.

@meroviel
My guess is that the game itself does not generate these models, rather reach one has been designed by hand? To get the filter going someone would have to go through all these models and make these assignments. So how many models are there? My guess is new content , hit reg etc. are viewed as more important. & I get your other points.

However, if the filters where there no one would be forced to use them. AND you could do it via a scoring system Muscled Male = 1, Dainty Female =10 and score all between. If I was going for a 3 look on this scale, each generation I would get mostly 3's but a couple of 2's & 4' and the odd 1 & 5. This would expose players like you want to new loots, while speeding up the selection process. It is unlikily someone who has their mind set on a 10 will go for a 1. Also if you could store your last choice, that would make more people keen on risking a re-roll.

Really all we need is three: Sex, Size & Age

@galactic-geek said in Infinite Pirate Generator Tweak:

@miserenz said:

Really all we need is three: Sex, Size & Age

Race not important too?

Are you trying to get the thread anchored on purpose? You kinda missed the point he was making.