Muster Board

  • LordQulex
    Captain

    I'm beginning to think I'm going mad because the solution seems so simple to me...

    I was trying to play last night between 7:00pm and 9:00pm NA CST. I consider those prime-time hours and Thursdays, while not as good as Friday or Saturday night, should be pretty active. I log in to the official SoT Discord LFC channel and I see virtually nothing. Same in the new swabbie lfc. I mean, it was a Ghoul and Glory night! Here's my problem: why is finding a crew so hard??

    And before you all start chiming in about open crew, it's an abysmal dumpster fire and you know it. Setting aside the fact that every third player at least is a griefer, there's also the "what do you want to do" problem where if someone logs on and you aren't doing what they want to do, they leave. Or they say nothing and leave. Or you just sit there by yourself for 30 minutes and give up. Again, the solution is so obvious to me: we need a muster board!

    You click on open crew and you see a grid of ships. Each row is a ship and the columns have ship details like size, ship name, captain, emissary, activity, and free text. I want to be able to filter on brigs because I like them, and filter out hourglass to see a list of ships that need crew. I want to click set sail and be off on my way to join a crew knowing what they want to do and what I'm signing up for (GH voyages, reaper WE, AHG, etc...). Will it reduce the number of griefers? No. But by increasing the likelihood of good-faith sailors joining your crew the effect will be a better open crew experience.

    I believe anyway. Am I way off and going insane? I don't remember who said it before in a previous post but yea, why can't Rare learn from other games? You know what game I've never had a problem finding a mission to play? Deep Rock Galactic. You know what the above functionality is plagiarized from? Deep Rock Galactic.

    Please please please Rare, we need a better way to find pirates to play with. Open Crew just doesn't work.

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  • heslashthem
    Legend
    Insider

    @lordqulex Xbox group finder. Forums LFC page.

  • D3ADST1CK
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    I was trying to play last night between 7:00pm and 9:00pm NA CST. I consider those prime-time hours and Thursdays, while not as good as Friday or Saturday night, should be pretty active. I log in to the official SoT Discord LFC channel and I see virtually nothing. Same in the new swabbie lfc. I mean, it was a Ghoul and Glory night! Here's my problem: why is finding a crew so hard??

    It's probably dead because players want to grind the guild stuff now and not waste time sailing outside of them.

  • LordQulex
    Captain

    @d3adst1ck said in Muster Board:

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    I was trying to play last night between 7:00pm and 9:00pm NA CST. I consider those prime-time hours and Thursdays, while not as good as Friday or Saturday night, should be pretty active. I log in to the official SoT Discord LFC channel and I see virtually nothing. Same in the new swabbie lfc. I mean, it was a Ghoul and Glory night! Here's my problem: why is finding a crew so hard??

    It's probably dead because players want to grind the guild stuff now and not waste time sailing outside of them.

    Yea, the rumors I hear about single player guilds are concerning. I didn't think the rewards were that great to grind it out solo. Heck, I'd help someone grind out their guild if I get to play. I got two more open slots.

  • D3ADST1CK
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    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    Yea, the rumors I hear about single player guilds are concerning. I didn't think the rewards were that great to grind it out solo. Heck, I'd help someone grind out their guild if I get to play. I got two more open slots.

    When a social feature has killed a social aspect of the game, I think it's safe to say it failed its objective.

  • LordQulex
    Captain

    @d3adst1ck said in Muster Board:

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    Yea, the rumors I hear about single player guilds are concerning. I didn't think the rewards were that great to grind it out solo. Heck, I'd help someone grind out their guild if I get to play. I got two more open slots.

    When a social feature has killed a social aspect of the game, I think it's safe to say it failed its objective.

    I dunno, you can't let a single bad apple spoil the bunch. Maybe it's just observer's bias but I want to believe that people are good-faith guild participants and solo-guilds are an outlier. Only rare has the stats.

    But I digress, the fact that if I want to find a session the answer is "Have you tried this third party app? What about this hardware app? What about posting in this forum?" and not "use the in-client crew finder," it just seems broken to me. And I'm a software developer, I understand the concept of not reinventing the wheel. Discord is good but it should be an add-on, not be a gatekeeper to playing the game. Nor should XBox group finder or a message forum.

    The fact that the in-client game finder is a hot trash is just embarrassing. A player should have no trouble finding a session, and if a player can't play your game because you've made starting it an obstacle, that's a design flaw in my professional opinion.

  • D3ADST1CK
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    @d3adst1ck said in Muster Board:

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    Yea, the rumors I hear about single player guilds are concerning. I didn't think the rewards were that great to grind it out solo. Heck, I'd help someone grind out their guild if I get to play. I got two more open slots.

    When a social feature has killed a social aspect of the game, I think it's safe to say it failed its objective.

    I dunno, you can't let a single bad apple spoil the bunch. Maybe it's just observer's bias but I want to believe that people are good-faith guild participants and solo-guilds are an outlier. Only rare has the stats.

    I don't think solo guilds are a problem. The problem is that there is progression and rewards tied to guilds, which tends to keep players isolated to within those groups in order to advance. If there was no incentive to doing guild-only activity, you could be a part of a guild and still play with "outsiders" and the LFG groups would still work fine.

    If they want to keep the progression system, why can't guilds advance just by players in the guild playing regardless of which ship they are on? This would increase socialization outside of your own guild and also fix the problem with slow progress on multi-member ships progressing at the same rate as a solo ship since progress would be tied to pirates in the guild and not ships in the guild.

    But I digress, the fact that if I want to find a session the answer is "Have you tried this third party app? What about this hardware app? What about posting in this forum?" and not "use the in-client crew finder," it just seems broken to me. And I'm a software developer, I understand the concept of not reinventing the wheel. Discord is good but it should be an add-on, not be a gatekeeper to playing the game. Nor should XBox group finder or a message forum.

    The fact that the in-client game finder is a hot trash is just embarrassing. A player should have no trouble finding a session, and if a player can't play your game because you've made starting it an obstacle, that's a design flaw in my professional opinion.

    They could dump a ton of time into adding an elaborate group finder / matching system but I think it would be a waste and not be used as much as the amount of effort that was put in. They would be better off adding more integration for Discord or XBox LFG into the game directly. Let those established systems do the heavy lifting instead IMO.

  • LordQulex
    Captain

    @d3adst1ck said in Muster Board:

    They would be better off adding more integration for Discord or XBox LFG into the game directly.

    That's possible? I've never looked into Discord integration API. Didn't know it even existed outside of bots. Do you have an example of a game that does this? I'd love to research it...

  • D3ADST1CK
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    @lordqulex said in Muster Board:

    @d3adst1ck said in Muster Board:

    They would be better off adding more integration for Discord or XBox LFG into the game directly.

    That's possible? I've never looked into Discord integration API. Didn't know it even existed outside of bots. Do you have an example of a game that does this? I'd love to research it...

    Haven't read too much into it, but it looks like it allows you to do invites / parties and other things through the GameSDK which can be used from the app or in an overlay.

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