Passive mode for tall tales

  • M1KE DA 1KE
    Rogue

    So I recently made a post talking about how difficult of a time I was having trying to complete tall tales while playing solo. And while discussing it had an absolutely amazing idea that I think would greatly improve the experience of playing tall tales in Sea Of Thieves for everyone!

    So if you've ever played GTA Online you would be very familiar with the "passive mode" that peaceful players are able to use to avoid being attacked and griefed by toxic players. Well I think a very similar system should be added to Sea Of Thieves to make doing tall tales safer. So when you start a tall tale in SOT I think that you and your crew and your ship should enter a "passive mode" where any emissary status is removed (basically the game forcefully lowers your flag for you) and your ship basically becomes semi transparent to other players (and other players become semi transparent to you) and the same for loot. Basically you and your ship can not interact with any other players or loot and no other players or loot can interact with your ship and any loot already on your ship would phase through it and go into the water underneath your ship. This would make it so that grade 5 reaper ships can't exploit the pirate's life tall tales to session hop and vise versa.

    And once you complete the tall tale your ship and crew would immediately be removed from passive mode (unless inside of another players ship or person in which case once one of you moves the passive mode effect would be removed so that ships can't instantly be destroyed or broken by suddenly becoming stuck inside another ship)

    This wouldn't hurt the playability of the game in any way and would be a great way to prevent players from being griefed or constantly setback while trying to do tall tales

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  • M1KE DA 1KE
    Rogue

    You would also still be able to interact with supplies like supply crates, wood crates, cannonball crates, ammo crates, storage crates of the damned, trident of dark tides, and random barrels found floating in the ocean as well as all of the usual barrels found in the game. These items would remain on your ship when you start a tall tale and enter passive mode.

  • jack lester
    Master
    Insider

    Similar things have been suggested before but Rare are fairly clear that something like this will never happen and I imagine this thread will be locked and redirected to Rare's post shortly.

    The suggestion itself sounds like a lot of development work for such a small aspect of the game. The tall tales don't take very long to complete and for the vast majority of players, one playthrough will be enough. Personally, I have the gold curse and I don't plan on ever doing those TT again, unless to help someone.

  • Musicmee
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Moderator
    Founder
    Deckhand

    @jack-lester How shortly we talking?

  • MaximusArael020
    Master
    Insider

    I don't really think this is necessary. They added checkpoints to the Tall Tales to make them easier to complete, even if you get sunk or have to leave.

    In the grand olden times, if you got janked on the last part of your Tall Tale you had to start from square one! Now you just start at the beginning of the chapter. Consider yourself lucky, young one, as in the dark times getting the gold curse was truly a horrific experience. Now people just trade the final checkpoint 5 times and go about their way.

    No need for a passive mode. Completing them, even solo, is easy enough as is.

  • BurnBacon
    Champion
    Insider

    And while discussing it had an absolutely amazing idea that I think would greatly improve the experience of playing tall tales in Sea Of Thieves for everyone!

    Or just One 1%

    So if you've ever played GTA Online you would be very familiar with the "passive mode"

    Just stop...and No...stop...dont compare other games to others. it isn't healthy. What next, ever played Minecraft and you know how you can enter "creative mode" and have everything unlocked. :/

    Well I think a very similar system should be added to Sea Of Thieves to make doing tall tales safer.

    But most TT aren't safe.
    Look at say...ALL of them that require you to visit an Island, which is visit able to everyone.

    This wouldn't hurt the playability of the game in any way and would be a great way to prevent players from being griefed or constantly setback while trying to do tall tales

    That why they have "Check Points"

  • M1KE DA 1KE
    Rogue

    @burnbacon but you have to be able to reach a checkpoint in order to be able to continue from that point. I was trying to to the 2nd pirate's life tall tale and couldn't even start it because a toxic reaper crew killed me on my way to it and before sinking my ship saw what I was doing and then camped at the location where you start the tall tale and proceeded to kill and sink my ship everytime I came to try and start it while telling me to go kms and calling me many inappropriate names and such that I can't say here.

  • HiradC
    Captain
    Insider

    @m1ke-da-1ke im not bothered about the underlying idea since some tall tales do have separate instances. You sneak in a dig at reaper 'exploit' rare specifically addressed this and confirmed they didn't deem this an exploit, so it makes it seem like potentially you would be voting tall tales up as an 'exploit' to avoid being attacked

  • D3ADST1CK
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    I don't have any problem with adding a separate story mode just for doing Tall Tales. It would need to be run in an instanced environment with everything else disabled; no gold, reputation, commendations (except for the TT ones, obviously). There is no way you can mesh a passive mode into the current servers and not have it be exploitable in some way or potentially make the experience worse for everyone else on that server.

    Creating and running separate matchmaking and instances for something that is pretty limited in replayability sounds like a huge waste of resources though, so it's unlikely to happen.

  • VakrisOne
    Marauder
    Insider

    You would be better off asking for a seperate "Tall Tale mode" where PvP is switched off. Being able to dynamically engage and disengage a "passive mode" within Adventure needs a lot of coding work to make it work right, plus a lot of headaches for all of the exploits it can and will open up.

  • M1KE DA 1KE
    Rogue

    @d3adst1ck a separate mode just for doing tall tales would also be great! After all tall tales don't give you much rewards and I would absolutely love being able to load into a specific "tall tale only" server where all I can do is the tall tales. After all that's all I want to do since the tall tales are supposed to be the story campaign of SoT. I think that would be a great option. Hopefully Rare takes this into consideration (or since they are currently testing out private servers perhaps if those become available to the public they can make it so that the only thing you can do in the private servers is tall tales)

  • Ghostpaw
    Legend

    Tall Tales were not intended to be completed in safety from other crews. They were created in response to some of us asking for more story based adventures to engage in while stealing from each other. Originally they did not even have checkpoints but a lot of players asked for them to limit their losses. There are a couple of tall tales that are sectioned off from the rest of the world, but that was more a result of the type of story and the map they wanted to use. If you notice, the team went through a lot of trouble to keep the Tall Tales in the main game. The game is about risk that others players will arrive to help or hinder your progress. There are plenty of titles out there that allow you to complete adventures and craft stories in safety. I have no interest in seeing this game slowly morph into that as well. To be frank, the Tall Tales are really easy to complete on their own. The challenge is completing them while facing possible opposition from other crews. This is what makes them replayable too. The experience is different each time because the obstacles are different. To make them interesting Rare will have to create much more elaborate puzzles and challenges. Why don’t we let SoT remain good at what it does well instead of trying to run it into the ground by making it into something it was never intended to be?

  • Hijack Hayes
    Commander
    Insider

    No thanks, I think it works as intended in the current format. The check points were added to help take this issue into consideration.

  • Red0Demon0
    Commander
    Insider

    @m1ke-da-1ke said in Passive mode for tall tales:

    @burnbacon but you have to be able to reach a checkpoint in order to be able to continue from that point. I was trying to to the 2nd pirate's life tall tale and couldn't even start it because a toxic reaper crew killed me on my way to it and before sinking my ship saw what I was doing and then camped at the location where you start the tall tale and proceeded to kill and sink my ship everytime I came to try and start it while telling me to go kms and calling me many inappropriate names and such that I can't say here.

    I am sorry to hear that you had a negative experience, these experiences are not common.

    You should have recorded this interaction and reported it to Rare. Next time something like this happens, go to the support tab, and submit a report on the top of the webpage. This behavior is not representative of the Sea of Thieves community nor is it supported.

    If you want to complete that specific tall tale, ur ship isn't required but not recommended that u try to go over to the same place again. What I do recommend is that you just log out and switch servers, in this case, and redo the tale, shouldn't be much of an issue since ur still at the start of the quest line.

  • VaughnSilver
    Master
    Insider

    I strongly believe The Pirates Life tall tales are a very close substitute for passive mode.
    Chapters 1 and 3 are in complete protection.
    Chapters 2, 4 and 5 are relatively safe.

    I don't think the Shores of Gold tall tales are a good idea for newer players; losing important items can be very disheartening when learning even with checkpoints. The best time to grind Shores of Gold is with a decent crew or as a competent solo.

  • Boeing7876500
    Seafarer

    @jack-lester said in Passive mode for tall tales:

    Similar things have been suggested before but Rare are fairly clear that something like this will never happen and I imagine this thread will be locked and redirected to Rare's post shortly.

    The suggestion itself sounds like a lot of development work for such a small aspect of the game. The tall tales don't take very long to complete and for the vast majority of players, one playthrough will be enough. Personally, I have the gold curse and I don't plan on ever doing those TT again, unless to help someone.

    If you look at the achievement percentages, you'll find that most players never even start the Tall Tales. I consider 30 hours worth of gameplay in tall tales a lot. They need to make tall tales more discoverable, instead of sailing to a random location and happening to stumble upon one

  • Boeing7876500
    Seafarer

    Also turning off world events, sea forts, shrines, quests, etc. doesn't seem like it would take too much dev time.

  • SweetSandMan
    Commander
    Insider

    Rather than a passive mode for Tall Tales, they should instead do completely separate servers for Tall Tales.

    Servers where there is no progression at all aside from Tall Tale progression. No gold. No world events. No emergent threats. No roaming PvE. No flotsam loot. No fishing. Nothing.

    They could just have 5 (or 6) ships all together on one server with nothing to do besides Tall Tales.

  • Galactic Geek
    Seafarer
    Founder

    @sweetsandman said in Passive mode for tall tales:

    Rather than a passive mode for Tall Tales, they should instead do completely separate servers for Tall Tales.

    Servers where there is no progression at all aside from Tall Tale progression. No gold. No world events. No emergent threats. No roaming PvE. No flotsam loot. No fishing. Nothing.

    They could just have 5 (or 6) ships all together on one server with nothing to do besides Tall Tales.

    But what if those ships are doing the same TT? For example, having to fight Briggsy at the same time? I've seen it happen before! And it isn't pretty... 😒

  • SweetSandMan
    Commander
    Insider

    @galactic-geek said in Passive mode for tall tales:

    But what if those ships are doing the same TT? For example, having to fight Briggsy at the same time? I've seen it happen before! And it isn't pretty... 😒

    So... something that has happened before...and can definitely happen today...is the reason not to put Tall Tales on their own servers? Or what point are you trying to make?

    Surely there's a way they could fix that TT (and any others) so that they can support simultaneously progress by more than one crew should they offer TT only servers.

  • Orsokuma2668
    Rogue
    Insider

    I have all commendations for all tall tales. Some were done solo, some with friends/a crew.
    Honestly, I feel the current format of checkpoints is as close to a perfect solution as we'll get. The likelihood of encountering a less-than-delightful player in the way you have described it is slim - please don't misunderstood, I've also sailed into some .. unsavoury characters, but there are already ways around them

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