Hello fellow pirates and plunderers!
I am here to suggest an addition to the game in the form of private servers or private matchmaking. For my friends and I we just want to be able to be in the same lobby but also have our own mini fleet of ships because we think it would be fun. I have done a little reading on the forums here and on reddit and it appears that both the devs and the players alike have some concerns about how private servers might affect the game and some of its achievements
I believe I have a couple of potential solutions. Many folks don’t want private servers because they don’t want other players to be able to grind gold so easily. The reasons for this probably vary, and my opinion is that i would feel unaffected but I do understand and one of my solutions can fix this problem.
The other part that I am far more concerned with than gold(since gold is really only useful for cosmetic upgrades and purchasing voyages) is the reputation on the public servers. I think it would devalue the pirate legend achievement of on a private server with just your friends and no real threats you could just grind to pirate legend in a very short amount of time as you could do plenty of missions uninterrupted.
So how would I fix these issues? Well a private server could theoretically have its own progression system. This would effectively mean that you would start a new character for that particular server, and all the gold and achievements you earn on it only count on that server and would not be carried over whatsoever to the public server.
Alternatively, you could drastically cut the amount of rep and gold you earn playing privately if you wanted to still allow it to somewhat count towards your main progression.
Another way to think about this is if you’ve ever played a game like Call of Duty(I know I know, just bear with me), in that game you can play on Xbox live and join a public server and play online against other people from around the world, and you can do this with a party of friends if you want to, not all that different from how SoT is now.
In addition to that, however, they also allow you to set up a private match with your friends where you can compete against each other, but there is no progression system(not in the latest versions anyway). In older versions of Call of Duty the private matches did have their own separate progression so even if you were max level with all the best weaponry on your Live account, your private match account would start back at level one and you would have to grind private matches to unlock the good stuff.
I think that same concept would alleviate many of the concerns I have read about surrounding this topic.
Feel free to comment and leave feedback. And if you don’t like the idea, you are also welcome to share that opinion - though I would appreciate it if you would articulate why you think it is a bad idea so that we might be able to address those concerns.
Happy sailing!
-Infinitcatmew
