Loss Farmers

If loss farming is not considered against the rules, or punishable in any way shape or form. This is an excellent way to earn XP while you need to afk. Perhaps not ideal, but you could just rise above water and drop your anchor and let the other player give you free XP. And if there is any kind of SBMM and you keep getting matched against 'sweats' this might be a good way to lower the skill group.

I never tried it and not sure if I would ever bother unless you can earn XP super quick (more fun than 2h battles for half a level when I am not even level 10 at the time)

@zig-zag-ltu My issue is that the game is all about showing off your cosmetics and something you've worked hard for. Loss farming makes these curses become a participation trophy. And yes like you said the skill-based matchmaking does team you up against the same-level players, but it is frustrating when after a couple of good fights, you come across the same guy 3 times in a row getting one hole and running just to lose because he is trying to get easier wins down the road. I really do think that if people want to level up the allegiance, the losses should give them rep, but I believe that cosmetics you get for just leveling up should also be locked behind commendations like "Sink a ship of opposing (this many times) faction", "Kill the enemy of opposing faction after receiving an Athena blessing/skeleton curse (this many times)"

@cpt-hot-tea Idk. Well the pirate legend curse was a participation reward and now its locked behind 105 levels of PVP. Besides people still need to participate in PVP and if they are not good at it, in a very long and grindy process they will eventually earn something.
I think also genuine and honest players participating only benefit from this. I really would not mind meeting someone just farming the losses to get some free money and xp. That's on them and I would gladly assist.

At the same time, if everyone who does this, just stopped playing the PVP mode, we would have less ships available for match making.

The way I see everyone wins and I doubt anyone doing this will reach level 1000 before majority of people who play it honestly. I think the developers have done a decent job in balancing this.

It could be improved if they would manage to come up with a more advanced formula to separate an XP farmer and someone who lost an intense battle and issue rewards accordingly but this is a whole another topic that hopefully will be addressed in the future.

So I would leave the current cosmetics as it is, but I would love if they introduced new ones like for example the Good boy set from Arena or Triumphant sea dog. So if you saw one you know whats coming.

I have already unlocked the desired skeleton curse, so I'm happy I don't have to touch the hourglass anymore. It was a cool experience initially only to become stressful, boring and repetitive after a while. I was more than happy to encounter loss farmers, so I could finish the grind much faster than expected. I have encountered a lot of salty people between lv 70-100, both trashtalkers and people who wanted to stop me from repairing before being server merged after a loss. So, yes, get those free wins and get out of your grindy bat cave as soon as you can.

@zig-zag-ltu said in Loss Farmers:

The way I see everyone wins and I doubt anyone doing this will reach level 1000 before majority of people who play it honestly.

Well, the people who want actual fights don't win. I imagine sitting in queue for 10+ minutes, only to be matched with someone who doesn't want to participate isn't all that great. In fact it makes the hourglass mode tedious for the people it's aimed at, which probably wasn't the intention. For the average player, faster and easier fights for quick rep may sound like a win/win situation, but that only makes sense to those who care primarily about the rep / cosmetics, rather than the gameplay.

@eldritchbear So what would you suggest? To eliminate xp for farmers, so they forget the mode all together? So just bear in mind that if you wait 10 minutes for a farmer, you will end up waiting 30+ minutes for a match and you might get matched against someone so bad/good that it wont even be fun.
I would recommend to remain patient and if there is any kind of SBMM you will be weeded out from that crowd and matched against other hardcore players once the system gets more data. But just be prepared for longer que times.

Even for games like CSGO:
(1,305,714 all-time peak) (997,149 - 24-hour peak) (887,467 - playing 37 min ago) (1,133,610 - last 30 days peak players.)

People in highest ranks (Global elite) would wait sometimes long periods of time and this game is massively popular.

@zig-zag-ltu said in Loss Farmers:

@eldritchbear So what would you suggest? To eliminate xp for farmers, so they forget the mode all together? So just bear in mind that if you wait 10 minutes for a farmer, you will end up waiting 30+ minutes for a match and you might get matched against someone so bad/good that it wont even be fun.
I would recommend to remain patient and if there is any kind of SBMM you will be weeded out from that crowd and matched against other hardcore players once the system gets more data. But just be prepared for longer que times.

Even for games like CSGO:
(1,305,714 all-time peak) (997,149 - 24-hour peak) (887,467 - playing 37 min ago) (1,133,610 - last 30 days peak players.)

People in highest ranks (Global elite) would wait sometimes long periods of time and this game is massively popular.

There would be much, much longer wait times if only the people interested in fighting were involved, that's true. This really says more about whether coming up with a mode like this was worthwhile in the first place. The current state of mixing groups with vastly different goals isn't working out that well either, though, and to my mind only serves to frustrate a larger percentage of the player base.

As I see it, launching this mode with tiny player pool subdivisions and only the most rudimentary outline of matchmaking rules was a huge mistake, and it's going to take a lot to recover from it. I don't know what the fix is, or if there even is one, but I do think that a proper SBMM effort will go a long way in getting people engaged. While I can't really speak for the people who are good at this and interested in fighting, I suspect they'd be more OK with wait times if there was an actual challenge waiting for them at the end.

@targasbr It does happen and rather often and from different perspectives (At least from my experience 2014 - 2017) It happens where people would smurf and try to get a stomping fest. It would happen where a team would give up after 1st round. Luckily for sea of thieves players there is only 1 round and not 15.

However the more MMR you acquire the less of a problem it becomes as you get matched with more evenly skilled players, obviously human factor can always play a part where some teenager gets a meltdown and starts griefing.

Also if you ever played it, you would not get disheartened by an easy win, because for 1 easy win you would have 100 griefing teammates losses. ( I could not find IRL friends who would stick to it to form a squad of 5) Where people from ruzzia mostly would ruin your experience every single day. And the more games you have under your belt the harder it gets to up-rank.

So this is why I mentioned the Skill based match making, if this thing does exist and let's say (imaginary numbers) you have200 wins, you will not get matched against instant sink ships as they won't be anywhere near your skill group or win count. So If I was you I would be happy with easy progress towards becoming a champion for a faction, XP, win count and win streak.

P.S. When talking about problems against being matched vs certain stereotype of players I would personally like to know where are you playing from. I am yet to meet anyone like that playing from UK, however, I don't think I played 20 matches yet, Probably around 10-15. But if you play from a country where this game is not popular at all, perhaps you get constantly matched with players like that as there is nobody else to match you with and nobody wants to play/play against 300+ ping

@eldritchbear I know what you mean dude. But this is why you have to give it some time (given there is some kind of ELO/Skill based system). The system is too fresh to be able to know these things accurately and it is also done by people who never made any kind of competitive game before. Those other FPS games are done by people who know what they are doing and they still have problems. The lower your rank is or if you lose it due to inactivity you get matched witha/against a 'Zoo'.

Got to say

If you have to complain about other people losing…you got yourself bigger problems.

At least you will earn the curse faster than them with that win
But also, if you defend and have someone invade you. Your more likely to fight than them run away.

@targasbr Personally this makes a lot of sense for me that you have this experience. Over many years of gaming, people have complained about Brazilian gaming community, so would not be surprised if such behavior is more common in your region compared to NA for example. Well I hope you will get more honest matches once the system gets older.

P.S. I hope you don't take my comment to be offensive.

@wolfmanbush said in Loss Farmers:

If matchmaking worked well and if the content was appealing to people outside of pockets of activity they would largely be put together a lot of the time, this isn't on them.

I'd argue that this wouldn't have fixed issues when this is SoT PvP to it's core. It's impossible to fix PvP in the current state it's in, encouraging it is the only way to remind people that this exists in the game and could be good fun. Players with bad attitudes, on both the winning and losing side, are the reasons I believe PvP is mostly disliked by most of the community. If everyone was all GGs and "Well Played" at the end of the battles, maybe PvP wouldn't be in such a bad place like it is now.

Players in this game can lack thick skin, they refuse to move on from encounters and to some degree, make future encounters worse because they can't handle what the game gives them. That's a player mindset issue that can easily be traced back to as early as, I'd imagine, Alpha. It's an issue in some content creators with bad egos, it's an issue with competitive players with bad egos and tight standards, it's an issue with players that are genuinely too soft for the seas, etc. Once you subtract those types of players out of the game, everything else about PvP is in a fine enough state, minus the hit registration.

@magus104 said in Loss Farmers:

Also with this change now you cant troll face spawn camp them out of bounds KNOWING that you are robbing them of any progress and ruining their experience. All the time saying "well they should get good then".

...What wrong with "getting good" exactly? I know it's not an easy task and takes a lot of time but like, that's what a truly dedicated player has the right to say, even if it's rude and uncalled for at most times. You can't just get better by not doing anything, and if you have a goal to work for, it should be earned with a similar amount of struggle as normal PvE players who can't finish a single voyage in under 2 hours. Is this not equal, minus the difficulty?

@cpt-hot-tea I like where your heads at but make it’s 75 sinks. If you wanna loss farm after that sure but make them work for it a little bit.

To address the others I like the idea of PVP on demand and it does suck when I am looking for a fight only to have someone sink or scuttle immediately.

To the others saying the mode was not worth making…. So you’d rather go back to the days of the PVP players server hopping to find you and sink you. I quit taking loot I was just looking for fights. I mean we can go back to that but I feel it would cause people to go back to saying “There needs to be a mode for PVP so they leave us alone” they made it, you wanted the curse so you invaded it and made it what it was not meant to be. Pick a side.

Not gonna lie I haven’t even noticed the supposed increase in loss xp. Idk if I’m at a high enough level in the factions to where the difference is that small but when the rep bar goes up it literally looks exactly the same as before for me.

But yeah the people who were loss farming before are just gonna stick with it now.

There is no way "Loss Farming" Is an efficient way to level up.

Losing a battle, especially at higher levels, only gives you like 5% a level... but let's just pretend it is a solid 10%. That would mean you would need 10 losses per level... so to go from 90-100 you would need 100 Losses.

If matchmaking was instant, you still need to go from the tavern, to your ship, vote on hour glass, vote on the war map, raise anchor, set sail, dive, travel through tunnel, load in, surface, scuttle, wait for loss, wait for sad "Sail Together" music with view of sunken ship, then load in following server merge. Let's just say that entire process takes 3 minutes cuz matchmaking is working perfectly.

That would mean that it would take 30 min to go up 1 levels... so to go up just 10 levels would be 5 hours. (NOTE: since it is much closer to 5% it really is more like 10 hours). So to go from level 1-100 it would require (With zero matchmaking time) a minimum of 50 hours of just playing to farm the losses to get your curse (Really is closer to 100 hours).

Personally, I think the system should be 1 win=1 level, and 10 losses=1 level, with the hourglass purely being bonus levels (.5 for 1, .75 for 2, 1.25 for 3, and 2 for 4) and gold (current system). (Being sunk 1000 times would take a long time).

@cpt-hot-tea said in Loss Farmers:

With the new change to the Hourglass system, I've come across players that lose on purpose. And after looking into it, I've discovered that a lot of people are suggesting it as the most efficient way of earning. While I agree that people should be able to do whatever they want, I also wish that PVE lords that have been crying for years about not participating in PVP, are now farming cosmetics that are supposed to be those for PVP players.
Looking back at Arena, where the reward system was actually great. You have to level up to unlock the ship cosmetics, and by winning fights you would unlock the sword, killing people with a certain weapon would unlock commendations.

I feel like this is what Hourglass factions are missing, people will able to grind losses just to unlock both curses and they may even never win a fight.

Suggestion:
Add the commendations so that in order to unlock either of the curses you have to sink ~50 ships of enemy faction. This way it will encourage PVP in PVP based mode.

This just reminds me of alliance servers in general and the players that use that for their rewards.

The players who lose their way to curses / cosmetics, alliance server gold farming, etc. they tend to be terrible once faced with a competent crew.

They just look nice when they sink over and over again.

I can understand why they lose on purpose, imagine fighting for over 30 min or even an hour only to end up losing, would it not have been easier to just drop anchor, lose and get the same points in a few minutes?
Not saying this should be how it's played but from a logic standpoint it makes sense.
If there was some points awarded for how long you lasted in a fight then that would be different but then you would probably get players that would extend the fight on purpose to get more points so whichever way this is changed there will always be farmers.

@lordqulex Ive seen that to and did not know what they meant, seemed odd they were anchored and didn't fire back but now i know.
Which i am thnkful to those since they have given me easy wins.

Cheesus, some people always find something to complain about.

1. Loss farmers will miss out on other sweet things, like the Athena/Reaper Trinkets.
2. Loss farmers help you gain XP much faster
3. Loss farmers help you grow your streak, therefore give you money.

I cannot understand that mindset..

I dont loss farm, but I am happy for every single one i encounter.
YOu dont like them? - Send them to me instead! I will take the money, the XP, the win streak - i take it all!
I dont care where its from mate