The Hourglass Circle

@oneeard-mac

They will blow up if they go far enough out of the circle, but yea, there’s a significant space to work within before blowing up.

I don’t think I’m entirely against the idea of a battle royale style circle, but one unattended consequence could be an increase in driving opponents out of the circle. I’m not saying that tactic is invalid or anything, but it seems like a decreasing circle might encourage people to rely on that tactic even more, which I don’t think would be popular. I could be wrong.

Here’s an idea that might not be feasible: how about slowing ships down once they reach a certain distance from their opponent? This already exist to an extent with the sirens song quest, could it be added to hourglass?

Personally, I like HG how it is. I think that the best way to speed up your matches is to become more lethal. I had a lot of matches earlier in my HG life that consisted of two very incompetent players, me, and my opponent. Some of those fights went very long because neither of us could follow through. Nowadays I’m pretty consistent with cannons and my opponents tend to be as well, and if they aren’t, well… That’s not to say that I don’t have long matches sometimes, but they’re much less frequent

I've played games with a shrinking area to prevent stalemates and I really liked it.

Besides cheats, DUH, to me this is the single best fix that could be made to hourglass.

Shrinking the circle would render naval combat secondary and base everything around boarding and hand-to-hand.

Then again, this is already the case and it kinda shows a lack of variety in Sea of Thieves fights. Being able to sink ships from the distance by firepower alone should be more of an option to reduce technical stalemates like these. But I'm not sure that's even possible without limiting people's ability to go around with nearly infinite resources. When you know every ship you're up against likely carries 500 wood planks, 700 cannonballs, etc, what choice do you have but board them and hope you incapacitate the crew.

@liberance Naval combat is already secondary because repairs (aka Healing) are over powered.

But they can't really fix repairs without readjusting the whole game.

I'd love to see them allow the boarding ladders to be pulled up and at the same time add grappling hooks which is how boarding was really done on sailing ships.

@foambreaker said in The Hourglass Circle:

I'd love to see them allow the boarding ladders to be pulled up and at the same time add grappling hooks which is how boarding was really done on sailing ships.

This is something that crossed my mind many times as well.

The consequence of making traditional boarding harder though, I imagine, would be people getting better at aiming cannons and often shooting themselves at other ships to board them, leading to the same result we have now. Which is why I was thinking more along the lines of a resource cap.