Doubloon Currency - Developer Update

@sonicbob Again this change was not just poorly explained but the execution and literally every decision around it is utter nonsense. I will concede to one fact this deleting did force me to go spend my doubloons on items I had my eyes on but were way to expensive to justify the purchase for being only soso cosmetics. Knowing the doubloons would just be turned into gold if I didn't spend them just meant more of the OTHER useless currency you haven't done anything about. But all the points I made in prior posts which was ignored because you didn't have an answer, and now seeing the reason there was no answer is because this is just a lazy and poorly thought out concept like a lot of what you guys have been doing lately.

Not that it's a good comparison of the actual situation. But I think the idea is similar. For me anyway. As a kid I got into trouble a lot, grounded probably half my childhood. The disciplining never taught me a lesson because my brain works different. My understanding is Neurotypical people would have learned OK let me NOT do this thing so I don't get in trouble again. But me being Neurodivergent, the way my brain works is I won't do something you tell me to do if I don't understand the WHY, punishing me for something I clearly didn't think was wrong doesn't teach me it was bad. I need to know WHY what I did was bad.

Changes like this, deleting our doubloons which we know WHY it's happening in terms of everyones doubloon rich. But we don't know the rationale behind you doing it. You made it seem like Bilge Rat weekender would be the only time you could gain doubloons. Like reaper chests would be the only item left outside the weekends that would give doubloons. But making all doubloon items give gold instead also wouldn't help with the gold issue. But unless it's part of next months update it doesn't appear any items have been stripped of their doubloon values. The problem of how we are able to get doubloons isn't solved.

Another example of you taking action and punishing players that felt awful. Those who did exploit probably felt it was fair. But having not done the exploit and losing levels for doing ONE Burning Blade commendation which apparently gave me too much emissary ledger so YOU put me in the category of exploiters because you drew a line based off not looking at any data... Being punished for playing a game feels bad. At least with the Burning Blade it was publicly known why the reputation and gold was being removed (not that anyone cared about the gold part). You had no way to know who turned in a lvl 100+ blade of souls. The only way you could catch people was looking at emissary value and you guys have never looked at how broken emissary leader boards are at the start of a month. So you had no idea what was normal vs abnormal. What it looks like for a no lifer like myself who will play a 30 hour session after an update to try and knock out as many commendations as possible to be able to go play other games. That was a long session with some friends to do the handing in lvl 8 Burning Blades. To think we could have done the exploit on a galleon with a few more people and gotten it done much faster. Like I got a temporary ban in World of Warcraft one year because a friend figured out an exploit to give us infinite attempts at a rare drop mount. Instead of the intended one chance per day per character. So we knew we were exploiting, while it stunk it was understood and excepted... And similar to some of the things you have done changes were made to WoW to make that mount actually very common and easily obtainable now so in retrospect their reaction was over the top especially due to the effort involved to do the exploit. It would be akin to if you guys banned the world 1st Pirate Legend for being a streamer and just having his chat farming out PvE and letting him server hop for all the selling. Effortless year 1 Pirate Legend when today you could trip over a rock, break your jaw and hit Pirate Legend.

Adding a currency cap isn't a solution in a game that's literally about the pirate life which is counting your giant stack of riches. Looking at the proposed and I imagine still in flux prices and doubloon payouts for the Bilge Rat weekends... This all seems like a nonsensical, trivial, mundane change just to increase everyones play time. I saw but didn't read most of the chatter around exploits of the weekender stuff. Think something about selling stolen doubloon items would reward more doubloons than if you just PvEd yourself? So the concern there was just Ship A farms all the loot then lets Ship B sell all the loot then swap roles. EZ fast tracked doubloons. That's more a flaw with the design concept. From a player point of view it seemed like the reason you were doing the reset was to make these black market cosmetics harder to obtain, it would be a long term goal. Instead the prices are comparable to the year one Bilge Rat costs which was SUPER cheap... Until you straight up made them free, just complete the commendation and we gift you the cosmetic... GEE I wonder how we got into this doubloon situation again? Also the cosmetics you are adding are the they gate keeper ones that the "I was there when it happened, people who joined the game after don't DESERVE my free cosmetic that I got just for playing during the actual season" crowd? Or are all past seasonal cosmetics being pulled from the gold shops? And EVERYTHING becoming available in the black market rotation? Because right now I went to spend my doubloons because it was better than turning them into more useless gold. However the BIG reason I never spent my doubloons in the past was the items are too darn expensive. Most old seasonal cosmetics cost 600 and no offense... Are pretty ugly. I managed to buy MOST of what I wanted but there are a few items around the 1500 mark a few at 600 but that's was just too much for a singular item. I got the big ones. The hull and figurehead at 3000 doubloons previously. It took multiple seasons to farm that much though. Because my focus was doing it casually over time not grinding out doubloons all day every day. And since quitting the PvE discord life my doubloon income has dropped considerably. As much as you want to talk about an economy, PvE discords fast tracking every aspect of the game killed that. I do my own PvE thing now. Solo is much slower but I can play when I want and do what I want for the most part. Just takes many more hours, but is more chill. I just wish I could progress in safer seas for some stuff because as much was I want to grind out a few things it's pointless to put in the effort and lose everything to PvP. Equally pointless do put in the effort for anything and not gain reputation... Even though leveling up to get 1 more ring I will never wear is also pointless... Though if we're going to start debating what is and isn't pointless then what is video games as a hobby anyway? Could be doing something constructive instead of working on checking imaginary boxes in an imaginary game. But we find it fun. Until the developers keep punching us in the face for playing too much.

Just why of everything? With the reveal and FOMO nature of the cosmetics being released with the 50,000 sword especially my youtube feed has blown up with doubloon exploits. Even with the announcement of the sword will be given to everyone who has earned a lifetime 50k doubloons... Well now that just even more negates the intended purpose of that item. You have those newer players out there probably exploiting to hit that mark, while loads of inactive players will now likely also be eligible. Unless you having to manually scrape that data will actually reveal to you just how few people this perceived doubloon problem applies to.

Not to play into the house is burning down but eh.. doggy got his coffee "Its fine" meme... But this doubloon "fix" just seems like your trying to smother a fire with asbestos. So for those youngsters who might not know how bad us putting asbestos in our houses for insulation was, basically putting out a fire with something that would likely give you cancer and kill you.

TLDR not that Drew or anyone would read this?

• What's the point of the reset if you are going to allow us to fairly quickly just re-earn all our doubloons on a Bilge Rat weekend to buy all the cosmetics on offer that rotation? It seemed like from our point of view you were just trying to add a new long grind so you didn't have to put effort into adding new cosmetics.
• What is happening to all the past season cosmetics currently in the gold shops that cost a ridiculous amount of doubloons? Mainly looking at Shackled phantom hull and Ferry of the damned figurehead as they both cost 3000 which would be 3/4 of your lovely new doubloon cap. All the black market items are cheap by comparison they might as well be free... Are you moving everything to the black market? Or are the gold vendor items going to have their prices reduced? Also for organization sake why not have tabs for stuff that cost doubloons vs gold?
• Still up the air? Is the ability to earn doubloons in the world outside the weekender going to be nerfed? Because it was heavily implied this would be the cast. But not confirmed and with this update seemingly still not the case.
• Basically rather than adding something of value to the game for us to do with our doubloons and reworking the whole shop and currency situation you are doing something that feels like a punishment to the players and makes the idea of investing more time feel bad. Why go out there and grind more commendations inflating my gold balance even more if you are going to turn around and do the same thing to gold later?
• Deletion and adding a cap isn't the solution, figure out a proper fix. Especially as reputation gains are all most PvE players care about. So much so we had some year one pirates delete their characters after hitting level cap because it didn't feel good to play any more selling loot and not getting the dopamine hit from seeing the reputation bar go up after every turn in. Those people were the minority but also the reason you finally (and too late) added pirate profiles.
• Lifetime doubloon count. So you are going to use AI for this I assume because investing man hours to do it seems like a waste of payroll? Cause there is no in game tracking of doubloons just gold. So you have to look at past seasonal progression/completion, commendations completed, if you even have data for how many of each doubloon item was sold, ashen chests, keys, tomes, reaper chests, rag crates, ritual skulls, skulls of destiny, not to mention doubloon pouches inside ashen chests which isn't even a proper item you could track? Also maiden voyage doubloons for those who looted those from the treasure hold. Then factor in seasonal cosmetics purchase cost for the seasons that player wasn't active for IE 6000 doubloons alone for the figure head and hull mentioned above. There's a lot of factors at play here and with now much data you guys seem to ignore curious if you would be looking at all data points.