You aren't taking into account that most commendations how no reward and that milestones are just a copy pasted commendation system WITH rewards.
As you can't progress milestones in safer seas.... AND because PL voyages are available there... There's way too many progression paths added since year1 that are turned off in Safer Seas for it to be of any use to 99% of the player base. Even those who want a chill experience. Also the tall tale checkpoint system is pretty useless. If you are looking for short sessions to slowly work on tall tales having to spend 10-15 minutes to get to the first stop because no other ships means you will get every PvE spawn so krakens, megs, skeleton ships... All that is happening to you since there's no one else for them to target. And all for loot thats worth anywhere from 20-300 gold and no convenient way to sell without sovereigns.
I have slowly been working on the last few achievements I have. I need a few more gold hoarder voyages complete. Also vaults opened for a commendation. Also working on devils roar milestones and gold hoarder emissary ledger. I try to be more efficient with my play time so If I have all the ledger rewards and my renown is maxed I stop playing for the season. Which is why I haven't completed it yet. But in this case I am working on an achievement, a commendation, ledger rewards AND milestones all at once. On safer seas? Would only be getting 2 of those done. Not to mention it would be progressing multiple milestones not just devils roar voyage complete.
Then I need about 50 LoTV voyages complete. I have been max rep forever now so that's irrelevant. I don't need gold for anything so that's irrelevant. I need a handful of the LoTV treasures for commendations and more importantly the voyage complete for the achievement. There have been too many side things happening each season which handle my athena ledger before I can even touch LoTV like this FoF updated.
And not being able to use the ship decked out in the cosmetics I have put so much effort into in Safer Seas combined with not being able to make milestone progress for tall tales (i sure as heck am not going to do them on adventure because they are unrewarding and you just get attacked while doing them.
People seem overly concerned over an insanely silly design choice that has been poorly implemented out of the gate. Rare hasn't understood player mindset since the game was release. While they have made some changes due to feedback this Safer Seas option would have been insanely popular in year 1 and brought them tons of emporium sales if that were in the game at launch. However adding it this late when there's so many progression paths now locked out of the mode and most of the PvE oriented people who wanted Safer Seas permanently quit 5 years ago...
The big question is when they see Safer Seas is only getting 1% player engagement will they improve upon it? Or delete it like they did arena. Everything they seem to add, Arena, Hourglass all goes neglected to the point where it just dies. So I expect the same from Safer Seas.
As many issues as arena had it still would have been a popular mode if they kept adding cosmetics. Similar to how hourglass hasn't had any updates. There's still no reward outside of commendation and milestone grinding from 200-1000. Like with arena you get no reward in the short term it's all locked behind ridiculously long grinds. Why wasn't there 5 color sets for arena? Reward a new tier every commendation rank instead NOPE 1 reward at rank 5 only. Then wait till arena gets its one and only big updated. Added 1 new color set locked behind another long grind. Then the mode is ignored till it dies. I hated arena. But deleting it was a massive mistake. Doing the lazy Blizzard "Lets recolor cosmetics and make people farm for them" instead of having a dye system is something they could have a low level intern do. Not sure why they act like doing a recolor of a cosmetic is such hard work vs making actually new designs.
They seem to have a major lack of direction and foresight. And have from the start. While they were a bit more reactive to feedback in the past like getting skeleton ships in the game and other stuff to make the game feel more alive they have it has now been too little too late for years now.
Season10 is a huge example. They underestimated how big of an undertaking guilds was going to be. In reality from our point of view it is an insanely small update essentially a smaller version of captaincy but with the same gameplay feature set.. Replay the whole game all over again. When they realized guilds was going to be harder to accomplish they could have broken off a small portion of the team to focus on something more easily accomplished for the next season instead of making an 8 month content drought to then put out a shallow update with lots of potential future applications. Also calling it guilds might have been a mistake. Though I imagine any other name might have felt just as weird. But to me coming from MMOs guilds are a large group of players who come together as a whole in a single place to accomplish things. Not small groups of people segregated on different servers playing as normal.
I have always 100% supported PvE servers. I had played on a PvE discord on and off for 2 years but honestly hated having to wait in Que also how lazy my crew mates on there seemed to be. Sitting in a long que to then essentially have to solo a brig or galleon I could just go play alone on a sloop and have an easier time. So basically I was hoping for PvE servers with lower gold and rep gains but I could still accomplish my goals without needing a long que on a discord to have a relaxed place to play. I was willing to take that income hit for the sake of time efficient gameplay. Which is the MAJOR issue people have with the game. Sinking and loosing their loot makes it feel like they just spent the whole session getting nothing done which feels bad. The poor design of athena voyages locking the one and only rep item behind a long quest created the need for PvE servers. People didn't want to put in all this effort just to get the one thing that gave them progression stolen.
Now there's tons of different athena loot and many different ways to get it. In the very least captaincy should be available on safer seas. Because without it the mode is truly useless. Unless you have a 5 year old who wants to play the game and not have to worry about them running into toxic gamers. But they will just panic at the first meg, kraken or skele ship anyway.
Anyone who is panicked over safer seas obviously didn't look at the details or are really bad at math. 30% value of all loot, 10x time to sell due to no captaincy bonus. This mode will have 0 impact on the game. Even if it was out back at the launch of SoT all it would have done is kept people around who just permanently quit instead. Those are players you never would have been able to steal from in either case as them playing PvE or them perma quitting the game is basically the same thing from a PvPers perspective. From Rares perspective keeping these players around longer would have meant more emporium sales. But this mode is too little too late at this point. If anything it might bring a few thousand people back to the game. Maybe if they don't understand all the new progression paths they are missing out on they might not care at first. But this mode only solves part of the tall tail issue. It took them far too long to add checkpoints but even now the monkey island checkpoints are poorly done and not frequent enough especially for the open nature of them.
The biggest commendation farms people want to do is athena and reapers and those aren't available. And arena is gone. Hourglass is the only tier of commendations that exists that has any kind of clout to it anymore and that has been ruined by ignoring the rampant cheater problem for so long.
Even you stated theres 409 commendations people could work on in safer seas and 99 cosmetics tied to them.... Titles.. Does anyone actually care about titles? maybe 1% of the player base? I haven't even looked at my title in like 4 years. I was Pirate legend when it meant something then when they made it go from weeks if not months to earn PL to being 7ish hours? I think thats what they reported on their "average time to reach PL" graphic. it stopped meaning anything.
Since you wanted to do all this number crunching for doom and gloom sake also go look at how many of those 409 commendations count toward milestones and how many milestone cosmetics you are missing out on unlocking by playing on safer seas. most commendation cosmetics are sails and 99% of commendation rewards and titles aren't used by anyone. So the point is kind of invalid. You are looking at it from the perspective of "I EARNED all my stuff!!! Now you're giving it away for free!!!" Who cares? You want the game to die? The point of PvE servers is more cash shop customers since the whales are dying off.
Though honestly if they want more emporium sales HIRE A UI PERSON!!!!!!!!!!!! Every element of SoT has always been a hot mess when it comes to user experience in navigating the stuff. The shop has become super bloated and trying to find what you want is a nightmare. There's no subsections for stuff. Want emotes? look under pirate, want weapons? look under pirate etc. Its just a giant mess of junk all mashed up together.
Also make ancient skeletons more common. The whole point of them is to be a tease to the emporium. As it is they are so rare most new players wont even realize when one is spawning. They will hear the music and be like "what the heck is that" but the trivial amount of ancient coins they give creates a sense of "hmm how do I spend these??" which then gets people to look at the emporium and see oh I can buy some of this with cash... But then navigating the emporium is so overwhelming they just walk away.
TLDR Safer Seas would have been an amazing year 1 addition that would have kept potentially hundreds of thousands of people playing. At this late stage of the game it is a sad attempt to bring in more emporium customers that is too little too later and will is already dead in the water before it even released because its too restrictive. Perhaps I am in the small % of people who sees it as useless. You seem to think you earned your progression and don't want Safer Seas to have invalidated your play time. But its irrelevant. I have almost 100%ed achievements and commendations. Hourglass has made that impossible now though since I refuse to farm those. You could give everyone 100% completion for stuff I spent thousands of hours on tomorrow as a login bonus and I would be happy for them. I wouldn't feel cheated. I would be a bit jealous sure but that's relativity. Your sense of accomplishment shouldn't be tied to how others were able to do the same thing. Stop worrying about other people and focus on yourself and what makes you feel good.
