(Feel free to cook me in the comments if I'm out of touch, or just spell something wrong).
Structure of this post
Part 1: A List of changes I think had a negative impact on the game
Part 2: How these changes affect the game
Part 3: My direct pieces of feedback
Below are a list of changes that in think negatively impacted how emergent the world is from a player perspective:
1: Sunken Kingdoms are added, making high amounts of treasure items attainable relatively quickly.
2: Sea Forts are added, making high amounts of all resources easily accessible in about 15m, getting this amount of resources used to take hours.
3: Loot crates are now able to directly take and store items making looting resources much easier.
4: Crates can now be bought directly at outposts. you no longer have to find them.
5: Captaincy is added and loot can be sold magnitudes faster then before
6: Voyages are overhauled to be more consistent and you can now re-roll them as much as possible.
7: World events got re-balanced reducing incentives to alliance, and generally made the events easier
8: Harpoons instantly put loot on the boat making loot moving even faster
9: Getting a FOTD was made much easier through a PL voyage. Which could sometimes take hours
10: Safer Seas took a lot of players that would be incentivized to alliance and are primary loot generators leave the matchmaking for High Seas
11: Diving is made less location dependent, faster, and is now incentivized with dive only voyages, some of which are the best in the game.
12: Sprinting with one handed loot was added
13: Ziplines/ Harpoon Travel is added further speeding up loot transfer and general traversal
All of these changes on their own sound all well and good, however when you add them up they produce some undesirable aggregate effects. They are listed below:
A. It's much faster to get stocked up for a voyage, raiding an outpost used to be a 15+ minute(Depending on crew and island size) process you had to plan around, it was a part of every story on the high seas. And now you can get dozens of supplies in under 5 minutes, not even including Sea Forts; which just give so much resources, you can just skip what used to be an integral part of the process. Serious crews would cannon over to islands whenever they passed them with empty inventories because stocking up used to be that slow, the incentive to do that isn’t there anymore. Because of this there's a reduced barrier to getting back on a voyage if you're sunk. Increasing the likelihood someone will attack you due to a lower perceived downside in their risk calculation. There's also just more idle time on boats, no need to stop for a flock of barrels in the water.
B. At an outpost you used to roll voyages, and you only had three(per player) for a faction before you had to wait for a reset. You took what you could get, sometimes you didn't have very good luck. And these voyages were long and took you across the map, it was very easy to get side tracked into some wild adventure. Now you can infinite re-roll voyages that have a more predictable length.
C. Loot creep has been crazy ever since Sunken Kingdoms were added, then came level 25 voyages with more loot piles, and more expensive loot. Then the world events needed more loot, because they weren't worth doing, etc. Is it worth doing the basic quests of buried treasure and animal hunting? No. There’s a flock of barrels with loot in the water, who cares? That message in a bottle, why bother checking? Too much loot became too common, and a lot of emergent things in the world that used to make some of the best stories no longer are worth pursuing, or seeing if you can plan into your voyage. We know what is optimal, and pursuing anything else is sub-optimal, so no one does it anymore. Which makes the game more predictable, limited, and boring. Also the game is buggy/laggy enough, we do not need even more loot items straining connections.
D. Transporting loot used to be a huge process, between finishing a normal world event and selling everything could take 30-40 minutes, this is without any outside interference. Talking with your crew while you run back and forth was a part of the struggle, and was also really tense, just because an event was over didn't mean you were even half way done. The relief when finally selling after being able to see and hold your loot was the best. Now however, looting takes much less time, you don't need to choose a really good parking spot because of all the harpoon buffs. You can be closer to your boat more often. Knowing outpost layouts, which loot goes to what vender, the run from the boat all the way to the tavern on some islands was NERVE RACKING. That's all gone, just give it to the sovereigns in under 2 minutes.
E. Getting a FOTD used to be its own story that could take hours, and required interaction with other people on the server. However, now you can skip that process, do it on your own, super quickly, and now FOTD's aren't an event anymore, they're expected. They're also optimal, so lots of people are doing it.
F. PvP was so tense and unique in this game because of the stakes. It isn't just about the battle, it's about what you're fighting over(Loot). Loot is generated from PvE activities, by PvE players. So when these PvP averse players exited the High Seas they took their loot with them. And honestly good for them. However this leaves the rest of us with a population that is on average higher skilled, more willing to engage in PvP and less likely to alliance with other players. This is limiting to the stories on the seas and probably contributes a lot to that feeling of the seas being more cut throat then before. This doesn't even mention diving, which you can't do with loot. Because diving is so incentivized by great dive exclusive quests, and by saving so much sailing time people are more likely to sell at any given time. This makes PvP more likely because people have less to lose, but also more trivial because people have less to lose.
G. Resource scarcity kept PvP fight times down(sometimes). However now, good luck, that ship you've been fighting probably has hundreds of planks. If they don't commit to a full on engagement you can be fighting for multiple hours, and even if you do sink them they can be back, fully stocked for a fight in a few minutes. SoT is ultimately about having fun, but the main currency you chase is gold. PvP in almost every single circumstance is inefficient for gold generation, this goes for both the winners and the losers, it's always been this way. However because fights in SoT have gotten so long and so inefficient they've also gotten more frustrating which just kills the fun for a lot of people.
TL;DR:
All of these changes served to reduce friction and make the game faster. These reduce loot generation, loot hoarding, and stealing opportunities. This leads to an increased number of people willing to engage in PvP, longer PvP overall, and more frustrating encounters with lower stakes. Integral parts of what made SoT so emergent and filled with possibilities for crazy stories can now be skipped over, or are so sub-optimal that they aren't worth doing anymore, additionally people's ability to choose to be optimal has also increased. This lowers activity variety and makes SoT feel more same-y. This IMO is why SoT just doesn't feel the same anymore.
My pieces of feedback are:
- Do a loot rebalance, not one thing at a time. Every quest, world event, on demand activity, message in a bottle, and anything not mentioned here. Preferably tone down the amount of loot items, if not for connection issues then do it for the sake of having one unified vision for loot distribution that is consistent and fair given each activities risk vs reward.
When you do this, factor in the increased power of the harpoon, maybe even rebalance it.
I’d like to be pulled in random directions again, to have emergent loot matter. Currently if you want to make a lot of gold there’s a pretty small list of activities that all give the best loot and not much else is worth even thinking about.
- Remove diving specific quests should be, and your emissary flag should reset each time you dive(Excluding hourglass). Diving to a new server should be more punishing, I know matchmaking changes were made, and they were an improvement. But I think encouraging people to dive less is a better solution.
Some of the best stories happen between crews that encounter each other on the same server over multiple hours, I’d like to have them happen more often. Also hoarding loot makes for the most nerve racking gameplay, I’d like more excuses to feed my hoarding tendencies.
- Remove the Skull of Destiny Quest, I’m ok with it being a rare random loot piece that you can find while doing PL Quests. But the quest itself cuts out what used to be a rather interesting journey a crew could go on or factor into their questing activities in the background.
I also think a general Fate of Flame update would be really cool to ship alongside something like this. 5 new flame colors with their own death sources, that when used with the pink flame at the FOTD (or a new new location) would summon colored ghost ships that need to be taken out. Similar to a Ghost Fleet event. It'd be nice to have more then one type of high value player summonable event. It'd also be a good way to make up for taking away the quest after so long.
- Do a resource rebalance across outposts, islands, sea forts and other things. I preferred things when they were more “scrappy” and it felt like running out of resources was really a concern.
I really liked the changes made to hourglass, shortening up the matches and adding a shrinking arena vastly improved the flow of the game mode. A also noticed improved behaviors(less excessive running), likely because of said time limit and reduced friction to re-queuing a match. I think a way to shorten the length of PvP in adventure mode is sorely needed. I don't know what form that should take, but it should be done.
- Either get rid of the sovereign selling point, give it it’s own reputation track, or have some sort of downside to using it; a” handlers fee” if you will.
I do realize that this is a controversial one. As people are now used to the convenience of selling loot really quickly. And yes I can see why people would disagree with this.
- I'd like world events to be harder(I'd like most PvE activities in this game to be harder). But especially world events.
And I'm not taking just giving things more health(although the basic enemies could use more health) it'd be cool if we got more skeleton variants with their own gimmick. Also more weapons, like a skeleton with mini-blunderbombs, blow dart skeletons, or if Eye of Reach skeletons could spawn everywhere like they used too. Give skeleton captains abilities, imagine if shadow skeleton captains could steal your lamp flame, after a few seconds it would re-appear nearby floating in the air, and you would have to chase after and grab it.
