Over the years this game has developed and changed, there has been an incredibly obvious shift in how easy it is to get rewards from... basically anything. Every couple of minutes it feels like I'm just being gifted gold or doubloons for seemingly no reason, whether it be the Plunder Pass filler tiers, the forgotten daily deeds that I end up doing by accident, weekly insider rewards, the occasional twitch drop, etc.
Gone are the days of actually fighting FOR LOOT.
Any year 1 player will remember the good old days of having to fight for a single fortress that rewarded maybe 20k for selling everything. Nowadays I'll be doing good to even see a single solo sloop in the general area as I complete an Ashen Winds or FoF.
Any year 2 player will remember the (what I would call best times of this game) days of having to fight the entire server for a single FOTD, because of the athena reward and extreme profit from one run. Once again, nowadays I rarely see FOTDs at all, and when one is up there's usually maybe 2 ships there, almost always in an alliance. Athena chests are... pretty worthless, they're so easy to get anymore, sprinkled around randomly just to make things appealing, like the FoF.
Personally, I would like to drive things back towards that actual "risk = reward" playstyle, because it's so easy to get anything and cash in without any risk. I've been playing a lot of Hunt Showdown recently and have compared a lot of that game to this (especially cosmetics, they got more pirate-y cosmetics over there despite being a cowboy game...), and one of the biggest things I've noticed is the cash-out reward for successfully extracting; maybe it's not massive or gives you tons and tons of stuff, but it FEELS satisfying knowing you've just survived the entire server, whether it was a mad dash to extract or fighting off everyone on your way out, when you get that reward it feels good. SoT has so many ways to get so many rewards it doesn't even feel that good to finish a session after making like 200k because of how easy it is.
To balance out a couple of things and bring back that feeling of success when defending your goodies until you get a chance to sell, I propose;
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Making world events a lot rarer. Currently it's maybe 10 minutes tops between world events spawning, as soon as you complete one, there's another one ready on the horizon.
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Making Reaper Chests a lot rarer, and raising the reward for them. I simply cannot remember the last time I actually cared about going to get a reaper chest in the past 2 years. Splitting their doubloon/gold value between 2 chests and just making them overall kinda pointless in terms of reward for having to go out of your way for them was just not a good move. Merge their rewards back into one chest again, or buff them considerably.
2 fairly simple changes, right? Just making things rarer. Sure there are still voyages and sea forts people can do if they wish to avoid the risk of combat as much as they can, but with the high value of World Events and increased value of Reaper Chests, hopefully that would encourage some more interaction between crews when one spawns. This doesn't necessarily mean it will make it extreme pvp either, just bringing more crews together on one location as world events were designed to do can lead to both positive and hostile interactions, making the game a whole lot more interesting at the end of the day, because be honest; PvE with nothing different gets boring after a while.
Something else to consider, I would also like to see a "regional loot value" added to the map; increasing the chance of more valuable loot and rewards towards the centre of the map (excluding the Devils Roar, cause that's just unfair). The centre of the map is where people are most visible to everyone else, so why not make it so if you want the better reward, you have to take the chance of being seen more? How it is right now just leaves players scattered around the edge of the map making tens or hundreds of thousands of gold, same as those risking it all right in the heart of the storm.
So what I'm trying to say here with this is basically:
When the servers are this small and can only support a very small number of crews, it is important to bring interaction, risk, and reward, to the play sessions in such servers. Otherwise, the session feels static, unexciting, and in the long run, boring.
