Some Merchant Alliance Thoughts

I posted in other post that the MA voyages could just be trade missions. Instead of finding the loot the merchants give you the loot right away and your job is to take it to the destination safely.

@IrrigoDawn
agree. Transporting dangerous stuff for the MA seems like a good idea to me.

The game flow for the MA definetly needs a little work.

@thevipe268 But right now the animals are very boring. Pigs are the only one with a requirement and it is very weak. Things that can flood your hull like the Chest of Sorrows, mess with your sailing, things that change how you have to deal with sailing, that's what I"m talking about. Also that other post was mostly whinging without offering constructive solutions.

@irrigodawn said in Merchant Alliance Suggestion:

@thevipe268 But right now the animals are very boring. Pigs are the only one with a requirement and it is very weak. Things that can flood your hull like the Chest of Sorrows, mess with your sailing, things that change how you have to deal with sailing, that's what I"m talking about. Also that other post was mostly whinging without offering constructive solutions.

Yea, you are right about that, but it isn't the only problem. The flow of the MA voyages feels very limiting, not challenging.
And I didn't say the other post was any good.

@thevipe268 Sorry, interpreted it as trying to direct me to the other post, which I didn't consider a fruitful bed of conversation. My solutions above attempt to address this. The fetch quests would no longer interfere as much with actual voyaging and a more engaging main voyage would feel a lot better with regard to having it be the main thing you're focusing on. Its flow would be less of a problem if it felt more active and challenging.

My suggestions from a thread I posted that got buried:

What I'd like to see is actually having a destination to pick up the items, particularly the animals. Explosive barrels are fine because they're plentiful in forts but animals just feel random to find and frustrating. I've looked on islands with reported animals, particularly chickens supposedly being on Thieves Haven, but I have never seen a chicken there once. Some consistency would go a long way in improving its feeling.

Second, please make it a passive voyage, similar to a message in a bottle, rather than active and therefore, taking up the slot of an active voyage (such as through the Gold Hoarders). That simple change would go a long way in just happening upon the right items while out voyaging for something else. I had a message in a bottle with a Merchant Alliance mission last night and it felt less tedious to find the items as I went along rather than be forced to go island to island not finding what I needed running around like a hapless chicken.

Third, please just give us an item on the ship to store resources such as coops. There's no two ways around it: getting coops from the shopkeep is just plain bad. Hoping to find a coop on an island isn't much better either. There are plenty of unused barrels on both ships, so having a universal coop would be fine. There's no reason they should be segregated by chicken/pig/snake anyway.

Lastly, remove the specific outpost to turn in the items for the current voyage. How annoying would it be if Gold Hoarders and the Order of Souls required you to turn in the chest to a specific outpost? For some reason, that stipulation is exclusive to the Merchant Alliance.

A potential idea to make the voyages more engaging instead of how it works now is to get the items ahead of time from the Merchant Alliance, instead of having the ability of selling the animals/explosive barrels, and deliver it to somewhere else. In other words, you get the items from the shopkeeper instead of the coops, load them up on the ship, and deliver it to a different outpost. Just an idea on that.

If ALL else fails, please greatly increase the payout for just selling items without a voyage. It is painful at present; I don't even think one receives credit for selling animals by themselves. This renders picking up animals out in the wild for sale entirely pointless. I would like to be able to have some incentive to actually acquire money for them instead of lost hopes and dreams and feeling like I just wasted all that time.

I love this game but man, right now, the Merchant Alliance is such a drain. Right now, I just despise it and hope that it either gets an improvement or a non-requirement from acquiring Pirate Legend in the full game.

MY PIG DIED :( please dont report this to p**a, ill do better next, maybe, well come to think of it i was tired of eating bananas lol. But on a serious note ya there pretty dry missions. Not sure what can be done unless there a secondary mission that you can do while looking for chest. Or you get the animal from the merchant and a timer starts and you gotta boogy and bring that bacon and wings to such and such island. Would be funny for that mission if you can bring them to some skeleton fort lol they must be tired of bananas as well.

@lizardheart I think you and I are on very similar pages. I like that you point out that the coops are needlessly distinguished from one another. It's a level of complexity with no purpose. It does not contribute to the game. And since this is a main faction, it really does make sense for us to treat coops like other resources and have a supply of them. I think the reason we don't have a free supply of them is that Rare doesn't want us just collecting every animal we see and hoping to get lucky with what animals we need for the voyage.

I think that having to go to a specific outpost works for the kind of mission like the one I talked about or Delivery missions, but agree that just finding a specific set of animals doens't need to be sent somewhere specific.

@too-much-space That's cool. Would you mind reading the thread before just making the same complaints that fill up every other thread and responding/contributing to the ideas?

I think that's a good idea, i also think that it would be cool if you could hunt animals as a part of mission. I'm pretty sure that there is going to be a harpoon in the gam, and they could probably use that for some of the missions.

@irrigodawn i made 2 suggestions that what the thread name is.

@irrigodawn well the real thread name is Merchant Alliance Suggestions

@too-much-space Well, other people had already brought up much more in-depth versions of everything you posted, except for your off-topic anecdote. So please read the thread anyway and think of new things to contribute, or add depth to old ideas by discussing their variations, virtues, and flaws.

@irrigodawn That sounds like some REALLY exciting voyages! I don't know about bombs, it doesn't really feel like it fits into the theme. But some dangerous/annoying animal, sure!

I really hope more types of voyages are added to the game!

Hugs 'n' kisses
Cpt. Lancia

@blackmage117 That could be nice. I'd worry that people would simply completely disregard it over in favor of expediency, but it might make a nice bonus occasionally? Though if it ends up amounting to a bonus, I'm not sure there's a point in having a destination at all. Maybe the bonus can be equivalent to the extra gold an MA voyage seems to be worth right now.

@sir-lancia said in Some Merchant Alliance Thoughts:

@irrigodawn That sounds like some REALLY exciting voyages! I don't know about bombs, it doesn't really feel like it fits into the theme. But some dangerous/annoying animal, sure!

I really hope more types of voyages are added to the game!

Hugs 'n' kisses
Cpt. Lancia

They already want bombs in the form of explosive barrels.

@irrigodawn I think you should be able to chase three voyages at once, one from the merchants, one from the golden hoarders and another for the order of souls

@irrigodawn ill post as i please

@sir-lancia Well, I dont' mean having a bomb on the ship(though a glass of some explosive chemical could be cool, need to keep it safe and protected from roaming animals that might bump it, or weather or cannonballs). I was referring to the bomb that one disarms in the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

@franzborg That's another pretty good solution. I think this isn't in place because voyages are chosen as a party endeavor.

@irrigodawn Ahaaa! Oh yea, I get it. That makes sense :D

@sir-lancia Yeah, a bomb in that game has pieces you have to disable to win the game, but in later levels it has what I call busywork. Modules that constantly tick down and you have to keep an eye on them and stop everything you're doing to manage them and bring them back up to safe levels every now and then. They never stop, they're just timers that make your job harder to manage. The Chest of Sorrows already does this.

@pist0lpete510 While I agree there are workarounds, this thread isn't really about those and I'm not here just complaining like the other threads. So please don't just copy paste some advice. I made this thread away from the others brainstorming how to make the Merchant Alliance better without all the mindless whinging.

The Merchant Alliance, despite functioning on the same voyage mechanic as the others, places a nonsensically different set of parameters on how you get to interact with their voyages(only start at outposts unless you want to screw yourself, only turn in at a specific outpost, etc). The game flow and purpose is pretty disjointed, even if you can still enjoy it with the right mindset. But it isn't irreparably so and I think it can be made to be great in its own right.

So I've seen alot of talk about the merchant alliance, and a lot of good suggestions!

I like the idea of having a pile of crates or something on the ship. Perhaps it would act the same way the merchant acts to where you can only grab crates one time for missions, but you don't have to go to an outpost for them.
Alternatively, I like the idea of turning merchant quests into passive quests. This could be managed by still keeping them in your voyage list so they would be limited to three quests, and this way we wouldn't need to have a container on the ship for crates because you could just grab three voyages worth of containers.

Plenty of people have suggested transport missions, and I like that! Shorter time period to travel a greater distance trying to protect precious cargo! Sounds dope, and extra variety of quests which is always good!

Speaking of quest variety, and this is just me spit-balling a concept that I think is neat, but I always imagine the merchant alliance as the "good guys" sort. So maybe to bring some combat to the Merchant Alliance... I suggest... Pirate Bounties! Obviously, I'm aware there probably isn't a mechanic to track this , but some sort way to tell if someone on the sea is being especially pirate-y. The loyal Admirals of the Merchant Alliance could go and slay the infamous player pirate.

@squawk-bird Bounties really can't exist because players transition seamlessly between servers. You'd have no way to guarantee finding them.

@irrigodawn Fair point!

@coffeeart687098 Exactly. This is part of what makes messages in a bottle so valuable and useful. The fact you can overlap and work on multiple things at once.