I have been playing for awhile and have noticed a few issues that concern me as far as pirate progression. One issue that I feel damages the game design is the ability to server hop until you find a server with a skull on the horizon.
- This causes players that are only interested in doing skull forts (and NOT voyages) to bog down the Sea of Thieves game hardware that is responsible for loading players into servers by repeatedly joining a server, checking for a skull on the horizon, and leaving the game if a skull isn't present.
- This may result in increased delays when loading into a crew and also loading into a crew that immediately quits after loading in because there are no skulls on the horizon (potentially leaving a player alone on a ship until a new crew joins them).
- Because this gameplay choice is arguably the fastest way to accumulate pirate reputation and gold, this affects players that also want to do voyages (or at least not server hop) because of players that refuse to do anything else.
It's fine for players to prioritize skull forts over voyages due to the lucrative plunder available in skull forts, but I very much dislike that people would just server hop until finding a server with a skull on the horizon and refuse to participate in voyages. I hope that some change will be implemented (such as server locking players for a certain period of time) so that players will have no reason to hop from server to server doing nothing but checking for skull forts.
I wouldn't want a change that would prevent players from changing servers for other reasons, though. I feel this server hopping issue needs to be addressed because it affects players that want to engage in other activities besides skull forts. I don't feel that you should have to solo simply to avoid getting stuck with skull fort server hoppers popping in and out of your crew slowing down your ability to engage in voyages. I feel that voyages are an important part of the game and exploiting server hopping to only farm skull forts is damaging the overall gameplay experience for those that would like to do voyages while they wait for skulls to appear.
I have a few people that I play with that practiced this method and I found the experience of server hopping to be tedious and boring. I don't fully understand the mechanic or timer that causes skull forts to activate, but many have discovered that skull fort farming is a much faster way to farm gold and experience than doing voyages. I am not complaining about skull fort farming being a faster way to farm gold and experience. In fact, it needs to be this way or skull forts would be ignored and voyages would be the only thing to do. I just don't want server hopping to be the method of farming skull forts.
In order for both to be important, a design change needs to be implemented that makes the server hopping method obsolete. One way to accomplish this could be through server locks that would prevent players from hopping servers more than once (or a specific number times) in a certain period of time (maybe 15 or 30 minute locks would be sufficient). This way, crews could elect to participate in voyages until a skull fort activates instead of server hopping until they load into a server that already has a skull on the horizon.
The crew menu should additionally include an option to change servers that appropriately indicates the remaining time to change servers (if a server lock timer was implemented). This way, players don't have to leave the game (server) and bog down the loading queues when the entire crew just wants to change servers. Crews may choose to change servers because of griefing or just after completing a skull fort in order to find another one sooner than if they waited until their server spawned another skull. This would allow some degree of server hopping, but would limit it to a reasonable 15 to 30 minute server lock that would discourage players from continuously server hopping.
One problem with server locks is that it might dramatically restrict players from joining and leaving games until they can find a competent or communicative crew. This is my #1 frustration when playing with random players. I can't stand when a crew doesn't respond when you talk to them. You can't be sure if they will participate or grief you if they can't respond to basic questions. It also takes the fun out of group play if you don't have favorable interaction.
This potential downside to having server locks also made me think of an idea where servers don't need to have locks that prevent them from changing servers, but instead add progress meters to the servers that show world event activity. This would include elements such as skull forts (and possibly additional future content) in the form of a visual display as part of the UI that illustrates active and progress to next skull fort (or other event, etc.) which could be either (or both) related to time and even voyages that crews on the server complete.
This way, players could hop from server to server until they found one that was close to activation instead of one already active. This would reduce server hopping because waiting 15 minutes to skull fort activation would be fine, but you could server hop, not see a skull, and then leave to keep server hopping, but you may have hopped to 5 different servers that were 15 to 30 minutes to activation that would have encouraged you to stay and wait and do voyages instead of server hopping again.
The participation in voyages should also be significantly involved in accelerating the progress to the next world event so that if everyone simply server hopped and didn't do voyages, that it would involve significantly longer delays between events such as skull forts. This could be something like 1% progress per 2 minutes and 5% per voyage completed on the server. In 20 voyages, that would be 100% progress and activate the skull fort (or other event, etc.) or say 10% from 20 minutes. At most, the events would activate every 3 hours and 20 minutes if nobody on the server was doing voyages. At the least, you could probably see an event triggered every 1 hour (or less) if 4 to 5 crews were doing voyages at the rate of 1 voyage per 20 minutes.
Additionally, I have noticed that the Merchant Alliance is the least fun and most frustrating faction to level up due to the general design. When doing voyages, you have to return to the merchant to pick up the cages (I often forget to grab the cages and have to sail back for them) and then sail to random islands to search for animals that may or may not be there. It is easier to do two or three voyages for Gold Hoarders or Order of Souls than one Merchant Alliance voyage.
Also, the rewards based on the time spent aren't relative to the other two factions. If merchant voyages take so much longer than the other two factions, then they should give substantially greater rewards per voyage to balance out the gold and experience to time ratio. It's also slower to look around on islands while carrying cages. I feel that the cages should be automatically loaded into your resource inventory similar to the way that bananas, wooden planks, and cannon balls are.
The person that initiated the voyage should have the cages loaded into their inventory in the same radio menu that maps are located for Gold Hoarders and Order of Souls voyages. This way, you couldn't forget to pick up the cages. They shouldn't be counted as plunder and you should be able to carry empty cages while sprinting, just like you can sprint carrying a cannon ball or a wooden plank, etc. If the cage contained an animal, then it would have the same properties as a chest or other piece of loot and restrict sprinting and would have to be set down to pick up other things.
This way, you could choose to drop the cages on the ship for your crew to access as needed, or even allow the system to provide all crew members with shared access to the cages until they were consumed by catching an animal. This could be further developed to prevent voyage crew members from catching animals that the voyage didn't require (i.e., griefing your own crew) so that shared cages couldn't be used to grab other animals not required by the voyage.
I also feel that there should be some way to tell which islands the animals you need to catch reside on. Gold Hoarders and Order of Souls voyages give you maps so you know exactly where to go. The basic problem is that Merchant Alliance voyages have no indication of where to go, but include a specific port to deliver to, and a time limit (while generally reasonable, provides additional difficulty) to take into consideration. I don't see how Merchant Alliance voyages could even be considered as close to being balanced in terms of time, risk, and reward.
If you play solo, it's much easier to do a Gold Hoarders or Order of Souls voyage and both give you the flexibility to turn in at any outpost. This is vital when soloing, because engaging other crews is much more dangerous when you're alone. However, due to how boring a Merchant Alliance voyage may seem to a crew, it's typically something you may choose to only do solo.
I often choose to do a few voyages for Gold Hoarders or Order of Souls until I travel past some islands where I see animals. I try to make mental notes of which islands have animals I might need for a potential Merchant Alliance voyage, but I typically can't remember which had which when I get to the point I would want to do a merchant voyage and end up not doing the Merchant Alliance voyages at all.
This conclusion identifies the disparity between Gold Hoarders/Order of Souls and the Merchant Alliance as a game design flaw. I can't see it any other way because it wouldn't make sense to me for the game to intentionally design one faction to be so much more time consuming, random, and difficult than the other two and not give a proportional reward for the extra time and frustration it involves.
