Critical Design Flaw - We NEED to talk

@wolfmanbush

Thanks for sharing your perspective, but I find it hard to fully agree. While I understand that diving might balance risk and reward to some degree, there’s more to it than just gameplay mechanics—it’s also about the experience and the message it sends. The fact is, with diving available, everyone ends up using it at some point. And after a while, this realization leads to boredom; the risk of facing unexpected pirates shrinks significantly.

The thrill of longer game sessions where emotions build up—like the excitement of a crew successfully fighting back for their hard-earned loot—starts to fade. Stories like these just don’t get shared as often because these intense moments happen less frequently.

Yes, there’s a lot of loot and FOTDs have become more common, but diving feels like an easy out that bypasses the heart of the pirate experience. I understand server hopping has been part of the game for a while, and people coordinate through communities to find targets, but it also brings less variety in stacking and scenery you could experience.

I mean...you know you can't dive WITH loot on board your ship, right? You can't "dive from event to event" without losing everything on your deck. You literally HAVE to sail to an Outpost between each dive to sell what you've got. Which means you either dive once at the beginning to get to an event (risking nothing, as there's nothing on board worth losing yet) and you sell at below-maximum emissary value a few times as you go back and forth from event to Outpost to event to Outpost, or you stack until you reach grade V as we've always done by diving to the first event and then sailing to successive ones, risking your ever-increasing treasure haul as we've always done. All diving cuts out is literally the first trip from an Outpost to an event or voyage, with no value at all except whatever supplies you have.

Either way, the trip from the event to the Outpost or from event to event is ALWAYS above the water, NEVER involves diving and still involves the same amount of risk as it always has, barring being sunk for starter supplies and/or a grade I flag.

Not so critical, really.

I think people that criticize diving often forget that diving means resurfacing as well. As a reaper V I often see tasty emissaries V arriving on my server.
I don't really care if a ship dives after selling its loot, especially when I get a new one within minutes.

Nowadays sot is just casual players with a minimal percentage of "veterans" (almost all of them quitted outside of some partner streamers). Casuals don't want to waste 20 minutes of just sailing from zone A to zone B to do an event. They just want to hop in an have a quick session. I understand them, since the game is already horribly grindy and force you to do thebsame things over and over again. This system lets them to speed up the process so they can enjoy new content when it comes up instead of doing "older" things. I am a "veteran", but I prefer this new mechanic instead of boring sailing in dead servers. Since I have a job and a family, it lets me to do thing I like to unlock something I want in a fair amount of time.

@blazebeard2313 I get your point of view; there's nothing wrong with the mechanic itself, and I think it was important for the game, especially before the PS5 launch. However, keeping the emissary is absolutely not necessary and a design flaw imho. All I'm saying is that there should be either a buff for those who go from world event to world event, or a nerf for those who don’t. It would be a esay fix but as i said, i am not a game dev...

@thegrimpreacher You can’t tell me that carrying the loot from one world event to an outpost at a time feels the same as having multiple world events stacked on your boat before selling....

Diving offer also a good tool for reaper V pvp hunters, since they can see all emissary on the servers. Plus, people can't escape with diving if they are being chased (they need to be a bit far from the chaser).

@radl25 I never claimed it did. I simply said the diving mechanic didn't change that at all from how it used to be to how it is now. You either go back to an Outpost to sell between every voyage or world event with whatever little bit of loot you have on board to avoid being a target or you stack and make yourself a bigger target. That's the way it has always been. The diving function hasn't changed this process at all for better OR worse.

Players can now teleport from event to event, sell their loot, and keep their emissary grade, all while facing minimal risk

But they can’t stack loot. Selling minimum loot until they reach grade 5, only to sell minimum loot again. The best results is reaching grade 5 with huge pile of loot then sell. But that is the draw. Players won’t see big profit if they just sell small stuff, jump servers and repeat.

Risk is, once they reach grade 5, they either drop the flag and start over or spend more time collecting.

This really is not a design flaw that ruins risk vs reward. People could already keep selling after each island until they reached grade 5 before. Doing so with or without diving has the same general result, you sell early, and dont get the full payout of stacking it to grade 5, thus reducing your reward for not taking the risk of stacking. It has changed nothing other than you are no longer on a single server doing that play style.

Diving has, in fact, increased the risk that comes with running emissaries.

People are diving to their destination, and coming out relatively nearby other ships that then go after them, which they wouldn't have encountered had they stayed on their original server, especially when going from a server without reapers to a server with them.
Likewise, ships that are already at Reaper 5 are diving to a new server, and spawning an island away from an existing emissary in the middle of a task, sailing over and attacking said emissary, who never had a chance to know a Reaper was coming as the leveling and travel processes were skipped. They checked their map before leaving the ship to do the island's goal, and there weren't any Reapers, only to then get dunked by a Reaper 5 that didn't exist 20 seconds ago.

Diving has basically exponentially increased the risk of facing unexpected pirates.

As for loot, diving is worse. You get a smaller amount of loot as it changes the loot pool to cater to the faction.
If you dive to a skeleton camp, you don't even get the orb.