Partying, Crew and ship Management

  • Ghost 0f Dawn
    Master
    Insider
    Founder

    After dealing with a small amount of trouble and a few problems with the grouping in the betas, I felt it'd be a good idea to go ahead and discuss some of the ways we manage crews on our ships and joining in general. I know there may have already been words on differences to the way the full game handles it, but it doesn't hurt to still throw discussion into the water.

    As it were, you effectively had to have a crew ready before setting sail, and one of a few things would happen. 1: You set sail alone when no friends were around, and now you must abort to lobby and lose what you had going, or your friends wait until you finish up your voyages. 2: You set sail with randoms and they're taking up the space you wanted reserved for your friend. 3: You started a small crew but are now ready to open up that 4th slot, and this refers back to point #1.

    There's currently no privatizing crews, and there should be. The brig may be a tried effort to deal with random trolls that join, but so is just locking a crew to friends or invitations, and it's far more effective.

    Drop-in, drop-out crew lobbying system. Plain and simple, We needn't jump ourselves from the game-world and immersion every time we want to swap out crew-mates. The ability to leave a crew and then order your ship from the shipwright afterwords without leaving a game would be most appreciated, as well as inviting others to your crew exempt of any lobby types.

    We quite simply need these additional crew freedoms. Locking crews privately. Ship Selection from the shipwright, dropping from a crew and joining crews on-the-fly without leaving game. If necessary, just lock a Sloop crew to 2 players prompting they must switch to a Galleon from the shipwright before adding a 3rd or 4th player, but no need to leave to the game lobby.

    If there are server-side technical difficulties for this, or fears one could leave a crew to get there own ship and turncoat them. I'm sure it can be remedied. Honestly the latter there sounds like a decent idea. None-the-less, Games like Destiny have a working player pooling system for running into other players in the game. Sea of Thieves would benefit from this as well so that it isn't the same 3 ships around the world for 4 hours.

    But, well, that's a wrap. Let me know what you think, because I definitely would like to party up with my friends without getting stuck with a random before I was able to invite them!

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  • Onwuh

    please RARE make this happen.

  • CopeNhoggin

    Agreed. It needs some love from the devs in a big way. It is NOT a turn-off to me because the game, as far as I have experienced it, is in beta. But yeah... who has only 3 gamer friends in this generation? I'm a full-blown hermit and I've managed to fill up a digital friends list.

  • Ghost 0f Dawn
    Master
    Insider
    Founder

    @copenhoggin It's really not a discussion on total crew size really, but how the game handles its partying and crew joining. I get that people may have lots of friends and want a massive crew, but for the balance of the Galleon, game, and technical as well as social side of things, bigger isn't always better. Having had lots of experience with large groupings of players all trying to communicate, it often becomes convoluted and the ability to socialize is lost.

  • Nightmare247365
    Master
    Insider
    Founder

    I am all for locking crews, but if this change happens leaving a crew needs to force the leader to another server or go back to the lobby. I see too much abuse potential for a 4 person crew separating into two sloops. You say you want to prevent ship partnering but this allows it even more. So just make it a 4 person crew has 1 ship of choice and anyone leaving must go to a different server to get another boat.

  • RayFromJersey
    Ship Mate

    How do you even join random crews in game?

    The only way I was able to get a crew was make/join a LFG post. I see people complaining about randoms joining their groups but I never saw the option to do that lol.

  • CopeNhoggin

    Well, to further your point then... Where I live we have 1 ISP to choose from and it sucks, at times when weather is bad I get booted from the game. When I return to the game some rando has filled my spot and my team will have to leave and regroup to get me back. Awkward.

  • Ghost 0f Dawn
    Master
    Insider
    Founder

    @nightmare247365 I see that as a legitimate concern, and never said I wanted to prevent ship partnering, but I didn't directly support it either. This really goes under the server-side technicalities for sure. So long as you are able to leave a crew, and join up another crew before ordering your ship, which would then spawn you off elsewhere in the game-world and phase your crew out into a different session, that would work.

  • rockintye

    I think some rendition of this needs to happen. Personally I'd like to see the ability to have larger crews like 3 man sloop and up to 6-8 on the galleon. It would be nice to join into the same lobby as friends especially when your friends already have a full crew. It would be nice to battle or team up with friends.

  • Ghost 0f Dawn
    Master
    Insider
    Founder

    @rockintye I see this a lot on larger Galleon crews and I just do not agree. I understand some people just want "more friends at once" and some think the ship is "difficult to manage with just 4." The fact however is that it's fairly well balanced in it's current state especially against a sloop. A Galleon vs Galleon with 2 skilled crews I've seen become easy stale-mates. 6-8 people would just make it impossible to sink each other as you'd have enough people always output more repair than the enemy could damage.

    That's part of the reason you can feel under-crewed. The intention is that a crew-mate being killed, shot overboard or trying to board the enemy ship opens up a weakness, you have less firepower and repair output therefore. A sloop would never stand a chance against that many people on one ship.

    As for "teaming" with friends as in using multiple ships working together, you may manage to do that, but directly teaming with friends ships is a bad idea. There would be nothing stopping you from filling up a server with ONLY friends and doing all activities risk free. Additionally, you could fill most of the server and then just go ham on a single other crew seriously unfairly. So being able to team up with randoms you cross is fine as it maintains the dynamic of not really knowing them, and having the caution they may turn on you at some point.

    Teaming with friendly ships and just having larger crew sizes also hurts the overall population of a server. if a Galleon could have 8 people, that's half the server. so you'd likely only see one other galleon, or a couple sloops at best at any given time. During the beta I've had 3 Galleons and a sloop all in a fight together.

  • rockintye

    @Ghost-0f-Dawn that is where playing it smart comes into play. Managing your resources appropriately. Our two man crew took down a galleon with a three man crew due to the fact they ran out of supplies and we had plenty.

    Granted our battle lasted a while but we still managed. I think having the ability to have a three man crew on a sloop might give you the advantage needed.

    Also teaming up with randoms seemed almost impossible being that communications are limited in the game and everyone seemed to be out for themselves. I do see your point on filling the servers with friendlies as a problem, as there would be no one to challenge them, and they could progress in the game endlessly.

    Maybe they should add those legendary skeleton captains to their own ghost ships and have them challenge players.

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