Co-Op alternatives

I too would like them to make things more difficult rather than force you to cooperate via summoning mechanics. The problem here is that doing something like that would require a lot of ingenuity and development time. If the difficulty were added artificially, via increased health and damage, myself and a many others would probably be less happy than we are now. Additionally, I don't think rare wants to limit things in this game by any type of skill requirements. They want the fights to be as easy as possible while forcing the largest amount of social interactions. This is not something that I personally appreciate but it's the direction that most games are going.

I'm sure the shark sunk some people but they weren't trying to save the ship. No matter what the shark does, it only puts holes in the ship which water pours through which can be bailed infinitely. We tanked it in a sloop and ran out of planks 5 minutes before it died and I bailed all the way back to merrick. It seems to target the one who shoots cannons at it as long as the other ships only shoot bullets.

@omnipotence13 said in Co-Op alternatives:

I keep hearing complaints regarding the game forcing crews to team up. I personally like it, but clearly many don’t. It doesn’t help that Rare is commenting in videos that everyone is having a positive experience, as this isn’t the case. Again, I like what they are doing here, but the community is clearly divided here.

Why not just crank the difficulty? Make it next to impossible for a single galleon to fight a boss like Meg. Hey, even give an extra bonus for doing it with a single crew! But make it so hard that the majority if not all of the server chooses to team up and make it manageable.

This would also provide replay value as more experienced players who have already completed the event try to tackle it with a single crew.

I am still on the fence about teaming up. I like the idea, however while some have an easy time of finding a willing crew quickly, or in a reasonable amount of time, others don't. It can take a big chunk of fun out of the game if you can't find a willing crew, or can't even find any crew on your server, especially if you hop and this keeps occurring.

I do agree that it is concerning that RARE keeps saying that they are seeing nothing but positive feedback regarding teaming up, and everyone loves it (paraphrasing here). Yes, a lot do, but there are also a good amount that don't for good reasons.

I like your idea of cranking up the difficulty. Make it doable by a single crew, which alleviates the issue of teaming up. However, at the same time, adds incentive to teaming up to make it easier. I do also like what they did with this thrones event, making some solo-able, and others requiring another crew. It seems like a decent compromise.

A last pondering thought, I wonder what the feasibility of an in game/server lfg tool would be? Not suggesting allowing to ships to join together and have no friendly fire, etc, but something making it easier to find other crews to potentially work with on your server. I know one of their videos mentioned looking into a way to make 'uneasy' alliances. Perhaps that will be something like this.

@omnipotence13 said in Co-Op alternatives:

One of the issues was that Meg was way to easy for the fight itself.

Beating it repeatedly including twice on a single Galleon and never losing, despite crews of varying abilities isn’t ideal.

Did Meg sink anyone?

Aye, she sank plenty I think. This is another case of differing experiences. When I did it with my partner, there was a good portion of the middle fight where it was just the two of us on our sloop fending her off. She had sunk the galleon and other sloop that had come with us. The galleon came back in time before she sank our sloop as we ran out of planks, so we joined them and had a much easier time finishing the Hungering One off. Probably should've done that from the start, but lessons learned =)

Edit- putting a second quote/reply

@lobofh I believe the difficulty referred to is for events only, and not regular missions.

Loot/replay-ability for the events is a good idea. Like for the thrones, there could have been a skeleton boss at each throne which dropped something. Then, even if u already had the throne sitting goodies, you could repeat the kill and get something for your efforts. One issue, however, is that the loot may then create trouble if people fought over it. Although, maybe that would add to the excitement! Alternatively, maybe what you get for killing the skeleton is individually awarded and not dropped.