@dank-jimb0 said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:
My only argument against this is that there is one benefit of safer seas and that is just enjoying the tall tales. You will have to do the tall tales in high seas again if you want to get the captaincy trinkets complete.
Guild ships will be able to progress Captaincy, so you, personally, don't even need to do it (just buy the ship, pledge it to the guild, let those commendations, and thus achievements/trophies roll in). You just need to be in a guild and have someone do it for you. (And my cynical brain says we'll see for-profit guilds, with real world money changing hands. We've seen it in plenty of other games.) Guilds basically undermine the whole 'can't earn captaincy progression in Safer Seas' and simultaneously create a new set of problems for Rare to manage. But on the flip side, Guilds are an important social aspect, and come with a significant number of benefits for regular players (like a captained ship not being lost due to a networking issue and thus killing a session).
The most straightforward solution is to acknowledge that captaincy in Safer Seas doesn't harm anyone else, nor does it being gated entice people to the High Seas. More importantly, without the ability to save cosmetics to a ship, or to use trinkets, Rare isn't selling those to people who aren't otherwise going to play High Seas.
@d3adst1ck said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:
The reason is for business. They don't want large numbers of players playing in Safer Seas, because running one of those instances is more expensive than a regular instance which services 5 additional ships and many more players. Running more instances is more overhead, more expense. They want to make it less appealing for players who already know how to play and an easy way to do that is disable features that are not for the specific group they are targeting (new players trying to figure out how the game works).
I have to ask, what's this assumption based on? The facts we have are:
- They're introducing Safer Seas without charging for server access to it, which makes it very different to the old Custom Servers;
- The Custom Servers weren't profitable enough to be used, and these are somehow just part of the game.
From that, we know Rare must have a vector to make money from it, so they've obviously found a way to ameliorate them. Adding a captained ship into that context isn't going to keep people in it longer, in fact, having a faster selling rate decreases the selling cycle time, so, it feels a bit backwards to say it causes some kind of harm. Those who don't like PvP just won't play, which in turn loops back into the problem.
Until Rare says it costs them a lot more to run Safer Seas, we can't assume that. From a business perspective, they've obviously decided it's needed, which means they've obviously partially solved the problem.
@every-henry said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:
@orloglausa , I see your point but before captaincy , we had to sell to respective company and it used to consume precious time in adventure mode. If I understood SS correctly , the time parked at a port won't be an issue anymore. Imo , Port Merrick is way better than Dagger Tooth.
Yes, and we've all been there (at least pre-Captaincy). But more time in port does mean more time with the server spinning, and people hitting High Seas withoout knowing about it. It also means, once again, less opportunity for Rare to get cosmetic sales through the emporium, which I have to assume is their primary revenue stream.
There's no Athena in Safer Seas (yet?), otherwise Ancient Spire would be a fun headache too.
For me, the bottom line is that Guilds undermine it to the point where it doesn't matter where people earn it. If anything, it's better for Rare, overall, that it's there. I'm a Pirate Legend, and have my ships, so it's not like this means a lot to me from a general gameplay sense. But equally, I don't want to see new players not using the Sovereign, not using captained ships because of the cost (thanks to the Safer Seas income nerf, they're a huge investment), and not seeing a huge part of the gameplay QOL. New players need to see they can earn QOL to keep them invested enough; moving to the High Seas won't tell them about Captaincy, and they won't experience it, so it'll actively hurt transition rates.
I feel the same way about emissary flags being missing (even if they were significantly reduced), and the emissary caps (because who does it actually hurt?), but those are future issues to consider when data rolls in. Captaincy is an issue pre-release, because it needs to be considered, and should exist in a way where you can introduce friends to the QOL they'll earn. It's really a combination of social and general support structures.
