Hi Rare. Just a short note to you all. Had an idea and thought to run it past you.
I'm an older player - part of Launch Crew - and I put SoT down a year ago. Then picked it back up and have been having fun with it ever since. Huge amount of stuff has been added, so well done on that part.
My suggestion - after grinding more or less nonstop Merchants until I maxed out at level 75 - is that you are doing cargo runs, but they make no sense. I mean, why am I getting cloth and ferns and booze from Tool Guy at the Outpost? Or some random on an island someplace?
I mean, I get that mixing the cargo makes it more difficult - you have to treat one thing a certain way, while treating something else the exact opposite way at the same time. Plants wet. Cloth dry. Etc.
But why not get booze from Tavern lady? Cloth from Clothing Guy. You could add in tools and such for Tool Guy - I mean, he's selling Spyglasses, Buckets and Watches and such, so they have to get moved around and delivered somehow, right?
Same with Weapons lady. She deals swords and firearms, so they have to be delivered by someone, right?
If you can't implement them into the game - like getting 3 crates of Tools from Tool Guy, 3 crates of Rum from Tavern Lady, a crate of Cloth from Clothing Guy and a crate of swords from Weapons Chick - then maybe you can seed them around the map on random beaches? Like you do with Tea, Spices, Silks, Gems, etc...
But you should only be able to turn them in at the Vendor you buy those things from. A crate of pistols can only be sold to Weapons Chick - not Merchant Lady. A crate of Spyglasses can only be sold to Tool Guy, etc.
You could even put a particularly unusual version of a pistol, spyglass, bucket, etc, in those random crates - accessible if the player has not obtained it yet via other means. If they already have it available, then it would only say "Crate of Whatever" and they could sell it. If they do not have that certain item, then choosing it would cause the box to disappear or break.
Because - frankly - transporting the same ferns around gets old, fast. A bit of diversity would be nice.
The second thing is just a thought or two on the Roar (aka "Florida") - volcanoes spew out large amounts of minerals, metals etc, in real life. Stuff we usually don't get to see very often from deep in the Earth. So it would make sense to find raw gold, gems, etc, laying around on islands with active volcanoes.
And why are there no silver coins or bars?
Just curious, given that the "dollar" of the Classical Age of Piracy was a Spanish Real (royal) - a massive silver coin that everyone was familiar with (it was even accepted as legal currency in the young United States after 1789).
About half the currency in circulation in the Colonies during the Classical Age of Piracy, and afterwards, were silver Spanish Reals.
In fact, "Pieces of Eight" were bits of a Spanish "8 Real" coins that were snipped off from the edges (which is where milled edges on coins comes from - to keep people from doing that).
So yeah, that's all I got. I know it's a bit, but I try to give thorough, thoughtful comments and not just "This is broke - fix it".
Thanks for making a good game, Rare. Be good.
J
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