Fleet Servers! The perfect solution to having more than 4 friends.

  • UrihamRayne
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    It's a popular request from some players to be able to play with a preset alliance, so I pondered a way we could create a system that would use that concept to add a new interesting way to experience Adventure mode.

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    FLEET SERVERS

    Servers that are exclusive to allied ships, the matchmaking is separated from regular single ship crew servers, these servers have 2 up to 3 fleets ongoing at all times, merging servers when there is only 1 fleet in the server. In the main menu, after selecting Adventure, there will be an option to choose between single ship crews or fleet crew matchmaking, selecting single ship crews takes the player to the familiar open crew/closed crew galleon, brigantine and sloop options, however selecting the fleet crew matchmaking you will have the option to pick between open fleet where you are placed in fleets with random players or closed fleet where you invite the players to the lobby.

    The goal of these servers is not only to allow more friends to play together but also to allow for larger scale conflicts between ships.

    Fleet Parameters: Every fleet is always composed of three ships: a Galleon, a Brigantine and a Sloop, in total a fleet server may have 9 ships and 27 players maximum. In order to start a fleet there must be at least 3 players, 1 in each ship, and the fleet only disbands after the very last player of the fleet leaves, even if there are no players in the other ships of the fleet.

    There may be the option of creating a smaller fleet with a different combination of ships, but I prefer to keep a standard fleet size.

    Unmanned ships of a fleet that had players leave, but still have enough players in the session, stay in the server waiting to be assigned a player, but are still treated as regular ships, being completely interactible.

    Ships in a fleet are allied as a default and CANNOT change their aliance in any way. They CANNOT ally themselves with other fleets in the server. They may still talk with other fleets and communicate in any way they could in regular adventure mode.

    Fleet Crewmember Parameters: Players in a ship crew have their name in the usual green, while players outside of the ship crew in the fleet alliance have their names in blue. Every player has a symbol beside their name identifying from which ship they're from.

    There is no friendly fire among fleet allies, just like there is no friendly fire between crewmates. Curses, gunpowder and other general hazards that affect anyone regardless of being a crewmate or not still work as expected.

    Fleet Voyages: Unlike in adventure, voyages and quests are shared with all players of the allied fleet. Whenever a voyage is proposed, it appears in every table of every ship for voting and can be canceled from any ship as well.

    Example 1: a player proposes a Standard Athena voyage. All players can see the proposed voyage on their ship's voyage table and may cast a vote on it until the majority is met. Once the voyage begins all players in the fleet recieve the same maps. In the end there will be only 1 athena's chest and 1 athena voyage completed, despite there being 3 ships in the fleet.

    Example 2: a player votes for the Shroudbreaker tall tale. Other fleet members must cast their vote on the shroudbreaker tall tale as well for it to begin. Once it begins all players in the fleet are given the tall tale book, the instructions, puzzles and locations are identical to all players of the fleet. In the end there will only be 1 shroudbreaker returned and 1 tall tale completed, despite there being 3 ships.

    Full Share Rewards: Every item reward sold by any player in the fleet returns 100% gold and 100% reputation for all players of the fleet.

    Difficulty Tweaks for PVE: Several threats of the Sea of Thieves will have their difficult tweaked for the Fleet Servers. Things such as Stronghold Raids, Skeleton Fleets, Kraken Ambushes, Megalodon Attacks, Emergent Island Skeletons, etc... will have slight differences in difficulty in order to encourage the fleet to play closer together in some situations.

    Several spawns like Ancient Skeleton and Shrouded Ghost will have their likelyhood of appearing decreased.

    Commendations involving stealing a certain item from another crew can only be met if the item stolen is from an enemy fleet. They won't trigget for different crews within the same allied fleet.

    Fleet Communication: Any player of the fleet may use voice chat to talk to all members of the fleet. Text chat is also seen by all players of the fleet. To maintain clarity, the UI will show who's talking in voice chat, and will make color distictions and show the ship type that person is on, as mentioned previously in the player parameters.

    Fleet Management: In the crew management options menu, there will be a Fleet Management tab, allowing for the "host" of the fleet to make changes and swap around players in the ships. The host may change the position of any number of players from each of the ships they're on to another ship within the fleet (respecting the limits of each ship crew size). After the changes are confirmed, another management may only happen after 30 minutes of playtime.

    Hopefully you guys find the idea interesting enough to consider it a possibility.

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  • UrihamRayne
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    To clarify, this is not a request for a private server where you put your fleet of friends and worry about nothing. It's intent is for the matchmaking to maintain multiple fleets interacting with one another, aggresively or friendly, doesn't matter, so long it's not just a single fleet.

  • Darth Baum
    Commander
    Insider

    I think could be a lot of fun and to even take it a stop further a new Arena mode where you have teams of 2 or 3 ships instead of individual Galleons. It could be it's own playlist.

  • Glannigan
    Sailor

    We just need content that requires us teaming up.

    I’ve done nothing but sail around and KoS every thing and everyone I see since launch. The only time I took a break was when the Meg was released and that was fun.

  • ScottStixx
    Master
    Insider

    The problem, as Rare has explained it, is that just six player ships on the server, is extremely taxing. Doubling or possibly tripling that probably means that, you have ships, but no islands or threats. So everyone will just be sailing around in open waters with nothing to do. It's more of system limitation as they've described it

  • D Jaguar
    Captain
    Insider

    I like the creativity but it is unfair.
    Solo sloop against a well communicated fleet doesnt seem balanced. Technically they have it through party chat and discord, but why give them more support with text chat. Sorry solo sloopers. We put up a good fight, but a solo sloop vs more than one ship has a small chance of survival.

    100% rewards? No, I think it should remain the same. If they don't turn it in and do the work they should get limited.
    Overall the gold and rep are pointless, but I rather not incentivize the fleet play more than a single ship.

    And an alliance should always be able to be broken. If we can convince a ship to switch or to go against their own fleet, it makes it more exciting.

  • ShareYourHead
    Rogue
    Insider

    @urihamrayne This is very well thought out. Well done dude!

  • UrihamRayne
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    @d-jaguar I know I made it explicitly clear that the server was separated and EXCLUSIVE to fleets. No solo players or single crews will match up in these servers, only the fleet in its entirety.

    You could bypass this limitation by jumping a few hoops, but it would be a player CONCIOUS DECISION to go SOLO in a FLEET SERVER. Not the intended design.

    The 100% reward is due to the fact that the fleet does not buy individual voyages to partake independently, every ship of the fleet has the same voyage as I clearly described in the Shared Voyage paragraph. It makes no sense to decrease the number of objectives, up the difficulty but still nerf the rewards, since it's the same voyage for everyone in the fleet.

    I don't think you understood the concept of the suggestion in the fundamental level, please consider re-reading the whole thing. Like what's the point of breaking alliances if the alliance is PERMANENTELY fixed and CAN'T add any new players to it?

  • D Jaguar
    Captain
    Insider

    @urihamrayne said in Fleet Servers! The perfect solution to having more than 4 friends.:

    @d-jaguar
    I don't think you understood the concept of the suggestion in the fundamental level, please consider re-reading the whole thing. Like what's the point of breaking alliances if the alliance is PERMANENTELY fixed and CAN'T add any new players to it?

    Because people want to pirate and backstab others. Why else would we break an alliance?
    I think I did misinterpret your post. As I would like the world to stay relatively the same. Any ship can betray another just because. Without the constant threat the game is rather dull. PvE has been set to easy which leaves only the other players. Get three fleets of those only looking for pve, and it has become a pve farm.

    I love the idea of servers with fleets. I want ship battles. I want the ability to play however we like, but your suggestion seems more locked. Ships in a fleet can never back stab one another. Can only fight other fleets, and a fleet voyage that can be done in no time as each ship can set up on a different region complete without having to sail at all. We should be able to hurt our own fleet if we choose to break off.
    The first tall tale would be done in less than a half hour without a need to sail the map.
    I really like your idea but not the 100% gain as it promotes making pve farming servers.

  • Red0Demon0
    Commander
    Insider

    I don't know this feels more like an arena mode than an adventure thing. I had made a similar request a while back but in this case theirs a lot of delicacies. For starters, ther would be a great imbalance with fleet vs fleet. If 1 fleet has less people than the other, then chances are they will defeated over and over again. Not so much battle as a massacre. How would you stop this from happening?

    U mentioned that ships that have no players in them can not be destroyed, in my own opinion, I dislike this, it doesn't make sense and the idea that u have an indestructible unmanned ship out in the ocean doesn't sit well with me

    For voyages u say that the whole fleet gets the voyage, this can be taken advantage of, an example of a situation where thus might happen is in my previous statement, if opposing fleet has less players they will be dissuaded from attacking, leaving the other fleet with less problems to deal with while doing said voyage. In contrast to regular voyages where all ships might be a potential hazard and one must continue to scan the horizon for potential threats, how would fleet voyages keep the same level of potential hazard while completing them?

    Furthermore what do you mean by increased difficulty for voyage AI enemies? Like do fort skellies take 50 sword swings to kill? Are their more of them, with like 10 skelly bosses running around at a time? Would Kraken take like 20 cannonballs per tentacle? Or will the devs need the manpower and time to completely revamp how these things all work to be able to implement them all? How does large beast like kraken and meg pose a threat to the fleet? How would the fleet fail these instances and how do you balance that failure rate with the current build in adventure mode?

    Current alliance system rewards 100% for the crew that turns in and 50% for a crew that is in alliance with the crew that turned in. 100% across the board to everyone in a fleet seems unfair when brought up to the regular adventure mode and seems to take away incentive to playing regular voyages. How would you balance the rewards so that these voyages don't inflate the prices out in the sea of thieves?

    U mention a host? seems its just another word for a captain or a pirate king. How will this host be chosen? Will he also partake in the game? How does the crew limit the powers given to the "Host"?

    Finally, just a tip: arena already take a lot of time to populate and many instances begin with some ships manned by 1 player or by no one. This, as others have said, might be too taxing or challenging to currently do.

  • Shadow20642
    Marauder
    Insider

    Few issues i can see.
    Perhaps these could be addressed...

    If everyone is together then grinding gold would be ridiculously easy. Doing skull forts etc, people would likely neglect the original game mode as they make more fleeting up.

    No friendly fire..
    Perhaps this is good for characters however no ship friendly fire?
    What if im in a sloop circling around a ship using their ally is cover, thats a legit strategy and this mechanic ruins this.

    Perhaps ship damage should remain and crews can just brig trolls as usual.

    Would there be more than 1 fleet?
    Multiple fleets would be good so there is actual competition but a unified server eould get boring.

  • UrihamRayne
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    @Red0Demon0 @D-Jaguar @DaringClarky

    U mentioned that ships that have no players in them can not be destroyed

    no ship friendly fire?

    I did not suggest either of those things. Unmmaned ships are 100% interactible, meaning other players can destroy them, use them, sail them or watever. I also never said that you couldn't damage ships, I said that damage from things you expect not to damage your own crew (like swords, guns and bodyblocks) will apply for all fleet members, which should imply you can damage other ships in the fleet since you can damage your own ship. Besides it's impossible to implement no ship friendly fire, so I didn't even bother to mention it.

    If everyone is together then grinding gold would be ridiculously easy.

    A fleet voyage that can be done in no time as each ship can set up on a different region complete without having to sail at all.

    100% gain promotes making pve farming servers.

    That's the catch. Do you try to play as efficiently as possible trying to set up these elaborate spreads to complete voyages quickly while risking being isolated from the fleet and attacked by another rival fleet? The goal of the 100% and the single voyage for all fleet ships is to encourage environments that invite conflict by challenging the player's instinct of trying to make everything super efficient and grindy. If you try to split your fleet you'll probably end up losing a ship to another rival fleet or even the PvE, you'd have to be confident in what you're doing to make such splits.

    If 1 fleet has less people than the other, then chances are they will defeated over and over again.

    Considering each fleet has the maximum of 9 players (4 players on the Galleon, 3 players on the Brigantine and 2 on the Sloop) small variances in the number of players can be ignored, like 3 players in the galleon insead of 4 and so forth, because the strenght of the fleet is playing together and the strategy of fighting in a group.

    There will be instances where there will be less ships or even a different combination of ships in a fleet if that ever could be possible (1 Brigantine and 2 Sloops for example), and for those cases players will need to try different strategies instead of brute force. Once again, playing together in a fleet instead of spreading out to be super efficient may prove to be the downfall of most of these player fleets, but it's in allowing for players to be in advantages and disadvantages that you can stabilish an environment where the game is allowed to show it's best gameplay strenghts.

    what do you mean by increased difficulty for voyage AI enemies?

    I don't know. I considered increasing the number of emergent skeletons and their HP, maybe have two megalodons attack at once instead of one, two skeleton ships ambush instead of one, etc... Honestly it just needs minor tweaks, not much like I suggested. I don't think difficulty is all that important.

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