Commendations that specify sinking a Rival faction's ship.

  • When the Guardians and Servants factions were first added, they both came with mirroring commendations, many of which require sinking a rival faction's ship, that are necessary for many of the unlockable cosmetics. The problem, however, comes in when they added Honor Battles, the ability to match against ships of the same faction, to reduce matchmaking times. A good addition for those waiting in long queues for sure, but I personally find a lot of my time wasted when my main goal is to complete the commendations that specifically require sinking ships of the opposite faction, but I queue into an Honor Battle instead. I came up with two possible ways to remedy this.

    Option A) We could opt-in to fight rival factions only, similar to how you can vote to fight a larger ship as a champion. A new option is added to the war map to hunt down rival faction ships only, with the obvious caveat of waiting longer in queues.
    Option B) Just make all faction ships count for the commendations, whether they're a rival or not. It's only fair, since the honor battle feature was added after the PvP Factions, but the commendations weren't updated to match this new feature. If the commendations were to be updated from "Sink Guardians Ships" or "Sink Servants Ships" to just making both "Sink Ships representing a Faction," grinding for these specific achievements would be a lot easier without relying on a 50/50 chance to be matched against the Faction you're actually hunting for.

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  • I’ve seen this come up time and again and I have to disagree. I think Rare are leaving it as is to encourage people to play Hourglass more, knowing it’s likely they’ll get an Honourable Battle. Is it a sucky move? Yes. Is it keeping people coming back to it however? Also yes. Whatever keeps Hourglass alive I’m down for. A core reason I’m against increasing the allegiance gained but Rare have stated their position on that too: https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/topic/160900/hourglass-pvp-earning-allegiance/1

  • @tesiccl I see where you're coming from, and I definitely agree with keeping allegiance the same, but the reason why Honor battles were added in the first place was because the player base wasn't split an even 50/50 in matches. If there are 100 active ships in a region and 70 are Guardians, those Guardian ships would be waiting a lot longer without Honor Battles. But what typically happens is once they get their curses or desired cosmetics they switch gears. Say 60 of those guardians ships got their ghost curse and move to Servants, but the 30 servants got their curses too and are trying to get the cosmetics they want before switching to Guardians. Now there are 90 Servants and 10 Guardians. Honor battles are now added to the equation. Sure, everyone can level up without issue but have barely made dents in the commendations they want.

    What I mean to say is, the grind is definitely long, but is that really the price we have to pay so Hourglass stays active? People should play hourglass because it's a fun mode, not because it's a grind that people will drop as soon as they have everything.

    I hope to see more Guardians ships on community weekend. Most likely average players using the multiplier to level up their factions, but Guardian ships nonetheless. On the other hand I've only had the curse less than a week and I've sunk 12 Guardians ship already. Maybe it won't be as slow as I think it will.

  • @ratburgrr it’s also based on the time of day, region, and if you’re on Xbox / pc servers. Community weekend will bring in a nice boost of people so make sure to hammer out your commendations during that time. The servers will be busy, but also get ready for a challenge, cause the sweats(me ;p) will be rearing to go!

  • I want the option to wait longer for opposite faction. I’ve run into countless same faction people who just instantly scuttled to be able to get back in faster, than fight out the battle with the hopes they will keep their supplies. Literally just say stuff like “need Athena” or “trying for comms”

    I’ve stopped playing hourglass because I want the starfish face and make so little progression towards it. I don’t even care about the gold curse, I want the starfish… one night my friend and I had 32 battles and only got 7 progress towards the starfish because the majority were same faction. (btw this was peak hours on an HG event day)

    Then couple that with all the other issues that plague HG. I get that most people are still just trying to get the curse at all, or make it to 200, while others care more about the gold variant. I’m a commendation hunter, so levels don’t matter to me, therefor I could be level 5000 and I wouldn’t care… I just want the stupid starfish 🤣

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