A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages.

Merchant Alliance is horrible.

The quests (that you can't 'chip away at' alongside other quests) are boring (so far).
The crate/coup system is horrible. If a pirate can hide A Shovel, Watch, Compass, Scope, 10 cannonballs, four trees worth of planks and a whole banana plantation, then they can 'hide' (carry without CARRYING) 1-2 coups. (Or perhaps Ships could be modded with cages to hold any livestock. We certainly don't need a Brig on the Sloop (so it could go there) and there's enough space below the galleon. We wouldn't even need crates at all. Just pick up flapping chicken, and the shove him in the pen. Do the reverse when you need to sell.

The lack of direction is annoying--people can try 2-3 islands before finding even the wrong colour chicken.

The whole idea seems poorly thought through. The experience is disjointed and awkward. If they had a note on each order saying: Chickens have been seen nearby on Islands X and Y, then fine. OR, let players activate one quest from each of the three factions at once.

The coup stuff is the worst bit, though.

@captainsloopdog a dit dans A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages. :

The merchant coups/cages should be purchased rather than handed out or just part of the ship.

And if you lose one, you can just cancel the voyage, making these quests even more tedious.

There should be no limit to how many coups/cages you can get, charge a small ammount of gold for it, I don't care, but we should be able to get any kind of cage whenever we want.

Some kind of journal with a page being added for every island you set foot on would really be nice, that way you could take note of which kind of animal you can find on which island without having to cheat and go look lists on the internet.

@ssg-felony Here, let me get my world's smallest violin. If you don't like the quest style, then don't do them, simple as that.

I have a list of the islands we've visited on my desk along with the animals on them ive written out.

Straight up they should be delivery missions not go find the product then deliver it. Paid based on cargo type and distance traveled.

@epicdejavudoo said in A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages.:

@ssg-felony Mermaids Retreat has all the colored chickens and pigs you need

Ya but where do you find the coups and pig cages?

I mean is it possible to stock up on a bunch of cages?

@rdizz said in A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages.:

Straight up they should be delivery missions not go find the product then deliver it. Paid based on cargo type and distance traveled.

I like this; or alternatively have the MA merchant/quest giver able to sell you the cargo for the MA quest you have active (unless they are the merchant for the island the quest delivers to, because that would be silly) so you can hunt down your own stuff for maximum profit, or buy the stuff and deliver it receiving less profit and potentially risking your own money on the venture.

The cage system is really overly clunky currently.

@santach said in A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages.:

@rdizz said in A complaint about the Merchant alliance Voyages.:

Straight up they should be delivery missions not go find the product then deliver it. Paid based on cargo type and distance traveled.

I like this; or alternatively have the MA merchant/quest giver able to sell you the cargo for the MA quest you have active (unless they are the merchant for the island the quest delivers to, because that would be silly) so you can hunt down your own stuff for maximum profit, or buy the stuff and deliver it receiving less profit and potentially risking your own money on the venture.

The cage system is really overly clunky currently.

Actually instead of "buying the cargo" you should have to pay a deposit. A sort of insurance incase it never makes it to its final destination.

If another player or crew steals it, it should also be considered stolen and only sellable to a shady dealer somewhere. And this is where we introduce the "pvp" faction of sorts.

@rdizz the hard part will be making it worthwhile to deliver it rather than just sell it to any other MA merchant, if you buy it for less then "list" price you'd just sell it back immediately and print money, but if you buy it for list and sell it for list, the only thing you get from the contract is reputation. The cargo would need to be worth more to that particular MA merchant, or the contract itself would have to pay out a bonus amount on completion.

@captainsloopdog Have the wind direction flag on top of the mast show the symbol of whatever kind of voyage the ship is currently on? Make it seem less like the ship is always trying to surrender? :P

@captainsloopdog Or a "voyage" type you don't need to buy from anyone, it's always in your inventory you can put on the table to vote for, the jolly roger, hunting other ships, when it's your active voyage, you fly the jolly roger and when you're close enough to another ship your crew can see a little spyglass style coloured glint on ships that have treasure on them. (Because pirates can see when your ship is running low in the water and filled with booty) would also give pirating crews less reason to m****t players who don't have any treasure on board yet.

Can't take credit for this idea, but I can pass it along.

What we've been doing is while we're first stocking our ship, we also propose a Merchant voyage, get the cages, cancel the quest, propose another, get the cages, and so forth until we have at least six cages. As we do our other voyages for the other two alliances, we grab every critter we come across. Once we turn in our chests and skulls, then we get more Merchant quests and see what our cages hold to fulfill them, canceling them, if we don't have what we need. At the end of our session, we just sell the remaining livestock. I'll have to test it to see if there's a difference in the gold and reputation we get for non-ordered sales, but we were getting over 100 gold for our random chickens and a decent amount of reputation, too.