"No one owes you a fight..."

this quite true, and I think your one of the first people to get this aspect right, and most of the time it's a bit odd how the most toxic ones are the PVErs lol.

@n0soup4u said in "No one owes you a fight...":

@captain-coel I do play, not very often, and one of the reasons is because of the blaring issues in PvP. Also, you clearly didnt read what I said, because the point of the example of the exploit was that people actively try to break the game or at the very least there are mechanics people don't know about and therefore cannot compete (or compete at a disadvantage). If rare had chosen to leave that obscure exploit in the game, how would anyone know it exists other than searching up youtube videos?

The reason I make this comparison is because the sword dash on top of water, as far as I know, was not intended but was left in the game. It's an exploit of the games physics engine, I think its a fair exploit but it's an exploit none the less that is allowed to stay in the game.

It's no longer an exploit and hasn't been for years. The developers embraced it as a feature.

Rare has done things to balance pvp. They have made changes to make it more fair for people. But they have done this in such a way that it doesn't break the pvevp. If players refuse to learn, they will always get stomped, and this isn't a problem.

PvP is here to stay. People can choose how to spend their time.

@scheneighnay said in "No one owes you a fight...":

That your goal is explicitly to harass other players speaks alot of your character.

Keep in mind this is in reference to the fact that anyone can sink you for any reason, regardless of how much loot is on your boat.

So me stealing a Chest of Legends from another crew doing their voyage is considered harassment? Speaks a lot about your character and is a highlight of a playstyle that continues to get mocked by several players that understand and embrace the nature of the game, for better or for worse.

@ It seems this person considers everything that relates to pvp harassment and toxic ,despite playing a PvPvE game. Also they have shown a lot of hostility and toxicity towards others in this conversation without having a single valid argument. The fact that mods delete half their messages says something...

After reading this drivel, and being insulted, just for playing the game the way its meant to be played, I think you do actually owe me a fight. See you on the seas...

@super87ghost said in "No one owes you a fight...":

Someone (i don't know if this was in this topic on another) in the search of a risk for the PvP'er said that their risk was that they didn't get the loot. But that is not even a risk, because they didn't had that to start with. A risk is something that you lose, not something that you didn't gain. That is just not earning the reward.

I'm going to point out to you that loot on your boat is reward you haven't earned yet. You don't earn your reward until you sell the loot.

Take FoTD.

• I can roll up on you when you just start it, kill you, finish the fort myself and claim the loot. You aren't out the loot, just the potential reward.
• I can roll up on you when you finish it and open the vault, kill you, and claim the loot. You aren't out the loot, just the potential reward.
• I can roll up on you while you are loading the loot from the vault, kill you, and claim the loot. You aren't out the loot, just the potential reward.
• I can roll up on you while you are sailing to sell the loot from the vault, kill you, and claim the loot. You aren't out the loot, just the potential reward.

I'm not saying this to be snarky, the obvious difference between all of those scenarios is the amount of effort you put in at each point, but the end result is the same, and in all cases, my actions are the same, it's just the point where our interactions happen that really differ. Nothing in this game is yours except for the coin you get during and after an adventure. Those coins buy you cosmetics. Coins and cosmetics CANNOT BE STOLEN.

I rarely opt for PVP in this game, it's not my style. I am a live and let live person. But, I do end up in PVP because crews I'm on want to, and I have no issue with it.

I think the most important thing to remember with this game is that all rewards are purely cosmetic. (With the exception of captaincy, but that is a small hurdle to cross). This means that a loss of even millions in loot if you had managed to foolishly stack it, is not a real setback. You haven't lost power, haven't lost prized gear, haven't lost reputation. You merely haven't gained the reward for time spent this session.

I won't lie. Putting in alot of effort to achieve a pile of loot and losing it, especially at the last minute SUUUUUUUUCKS. I've had it happen to me more times than I can count. It's disheartening, often enough to make me walk away for the day, or at least until later in the day. But the game is fun, and is more about the journey than the destination, which is what keeps bringing me back. Hopping on with a crew, BSing as we sail, working together, that's what makes the game fun. Solo slooping is boring (to me). The secret sauce of this game is the cooperation, the interaction, and the ever-present tension. And while I might get bummed after a bad ending to a fun session, I still come back for more.

@n0soup4u If you actually said anything relevant I would have.

@super87ghost said in "No one owes you a fight...":

@tybald said in "No one owes you a fight...":

I'm going to point out to you that loot on your boat is reward you haven't earned yet. You don't earn your reward until you sell the loot.

You have it in your posession, but can still lose it. So that is a risk.
If the other has it, it is a reward if you sucessfully fight the other crew.

It is realy not that hard to understand.

And then you start with story like everybody is an idiot that doesn't understand that yet, while in reality everybody already knows that.
This whole post of you is just to distract from the fact that in a fight between a PvE'er and a PvP'er, the risk-reward system is completely unbalanced and tilted to one side. For the health of the game there should be a risk and a reward for both sides.

It's not obvious that "Both sides" get it.

But, for the sake of argument, let's go ahead and pretend that you are right. What now?

You claim the risk/reward is off. How do you fix it? Put your money where your mouth is, and share your solution here. Otherwise you are just moaning that you don't like the fact that people in a pirate game can pirate.

@super87ghost
I did read your post. You are complaining about the risk/reward being off.

Then offer up your solution, otherwise your spitting into the wind.

I roll up on you, no loot, you have a boat full of loot. How do you balance the risk/reward equation?

@platinumace8318 said in "No one owes you a fight...":

I'm a new player of SOT that play's solo (no friends :^) and I'm really enjoying the gameplay loop outside of the pvp. that is not because i dont like competitive pvp games, I've played competitive shooters at a decent (amateur) level and have enjoyed that massively yet with SOT I find myself despising those competitive/pvp aspects, I completely suck at pvp and have no interest in becoming better. that however does not mean anyone who does enjoy pvp is wrong in how they play, I agree with you that name calling is only taking away from the problem people are facing. everyone has their own way of playing no matter how similar or different they are, yet the pvp side has more opportunity to play they want to play than the pve side. If you want to only do pvp content you can do that but if you only want to do pve content you are out of luck if another ship shows up that is not friendly. I think that is where the issue lies, yes there has been way more pve content added than pvp because simply you have everything you need to have a fun and enjoyable pvp experience, you are generally on level footing against other players outside of what skill they might poses. the only other thing they could add to that is a pvp only experience which has been tried and the players that enjoyed that had all the right to do so. on the other side while there has been allot more pve content added which is half if not the main driving force for the game in attracting new and old players into SOT there is no choice to only play that content. if you are like me and don't enjoy the pvp of the pvpve game play loop you're out of luck and get told you're wrong, get better or don't play the game at all which is unfair in my opinion. like i said i enjoy it and would prefer to keep playing but if i can't focus on things i enjoy whats the point in continuing playing the GAME. What it all comes down to is RARE seems more inclined to cater to the pvp only audience than the pve only audience which there is no need for in my opinion. so my question to any of you and RARE is what is the harm in pve only server's? so many other mmo/adventure/sandbox type games give you the chance to choose so why not here?

Of course you can't cater to everyone and I don't expect them to but a step towards a more pve centered/only way to play in whatever way that is implemented would be appreciated. I don't think any changes need to be made gameplay wise simply a server option where damaging another player and ship is not possible. (griefers and trolls will always exist no mater where you go or what you do)

Welcome to the game! I am glad you are enjoying it. I highly recommend joining the discord: https://discord.gg/seaofthieves

I know you say you play mostly solo, but I would suggest hopping on and finding a brig or galleon to run on. The social aspect of a crew is an area that I find helps the game out alot. There's a new-swabbie-LFC channel for new players to find a group. You can feel free to look me up as well: Torrent#4791 (In server I'm Tybald).

Welcome aboard!

@super87ghost
I have played tall tales,hg sessions only, and a lot of pvepvp sessions where i just raise reaper and do world events stacking my loot and hunting other ships. I have around 600 hours,max all reputations and i recently acquired the athenas blessing. I consider myself a pretty average player (although i can put up quite a fight) but i have a pretty good understanding of how the game works and the mechanincs involved. Pvpers do not get less risk than pvers quite the opposite. First of all most people who pvp raise the reaper flag, are marked on the map and do world events so many times they have loot on board as well, hence they face the same risk of losing that precious loot. But for the sake of the argument i am gonna use an example of a pvper who just stacked supplies has no flag raised and no loot on board. For that person to be profitable they have to find someone on the map, sink them take the loot and sell it. This is quite a slow and risky process for the following reasons:

1. They have to rely that they won't be seen by the other crew
2. The other crew can outsail them and sell the loot.
3. The other crew can sink them and they get nothing and lose their supplies.
4. They might be searching for hours and not find a ship with loot, therefore no reward at all.
5. The other crew might have so little treasure that the amount of gold and time it took to gather all of their supplies was completely wasted.

The only time a pvper has an advantage over a pver is when they are within range of cannonshots or they have boarded them, at which point the pver has done several major mistakes. Looking the horizon and map is not a pvp skill, and is not hard. Managing your sails is a core mechanic of the game and is also not that hard. Furthermore selling loot has become very fast making it so you can essentialy sell before the other person catches you.

Pvpers only have the upper hand in combat because they spend more time fighting and that how it should be. Investing time and effort in a game to increase your skill is not a problem and the person that doesn't do that shouldn't have an advantage over them in that aspect. Combat has nothing to do with the risk reward of the game. If i wanted to become a pver for the rest of my life, given how the game works, my chances of sinking every session and not sell my loot would be below 10%.

Don't take this the wrong way but all the comments similiar to yours just show a lack of understanding the core mechanics of the game. Your argument comes basically down to trying to equalize the skill gap in combat between someone who pvps and someone who doesn't and that is far from fair. Not to mention that doing pve is far more easy and requires less time investment than actually improving pvp skills, finding a ship with loot, and sinking it.

@super87ghost said in "No one owes you a fight...":

@captain-coel said in "No one owes you a fight...":

Rare has done things to balance pvp. They have made changes to make it more fair for people. But they have done this in such a way that it doesn't break the pvevp. If players refuse to learn, they will always get stomped, and this isn't a problem.

Here i disagree. Rare did some balancing, but that is between a sloop and the other ships (blunderbombs having a bit less throwback and the mast now needing two chainshots to give a sloop the same amount of chains needed to demast as a brig and players on a sloop just as likely to thrown of the ship as on a brig).
However, that is not balancing between PvE and PvP. In that sence they have made it way more unbalanced. Most of the PvP players (in my experience) don't run as reapers (because people can spot you). So the only thing they have to lose is their supplies.

The PvP players you're describing are casuals, or not that high tier in PvP compared to what I see on Twitch and even in crew's I've joined. Tougher PvP players do not care if they're spotted or not on the map, because usually if they get close enough to you for as little as a board, you're already in a bad position and that fault is put on not watching the horizon and not watching the map. Of course that's conditional and not always in the player's hands (Large Islands, Sailor's Bounty's Trapmaker dungeon, Shrines and Treasuries, etc.), but for the most part you're responsible for what ship is in your sights and how vulnerable your ship is at all times.

But with season 8 they made the starting supplies way more, because that was needed to imidiately start a new fight in the Hourglass mode. However: that also means that PvP crews in adventure don't have to worry about losing supplies anymore, because after a sink they already started with enough supplies to inmidiately start hunting again. Also they made it so you get the supplies from the loser, so they also don't have to be thoughtfull of wich fights to pick, because they can resupply with the other ships supplies and be ready for the next fight without going through barrels on islands, etc. That to is a removal of risk (you don't have to be as picky anymore to wich ship is interesting to fight, since you can fight them all)

A common issue some PvP crews had were crews that would infinitely charge at you following every time you sink them. This happened especially when they stacked a lot of loot and know their enemy can get intercepted before a sell spot (which is usually Reaper's Hideout because these are content creators/tough PvP players, raising the reaper's emissary for maximum profit).

There used to be suggestions of 2 things: Merge players after X amount of sinks from the same crew - making the game tell the really stubborn and salty crew that lost their loot to get over it and move on, and allow a crew's supplies to drop as barrels when they sink, so that the crew now defending their stolen haul can continue to resupply and not be left to still defend the haul sinking their enemy for the third time in a row. As of now we see some version of the 2 common suggestions during Season 8's spotlight (and even Season 9 with the ability to scuttle and change servers).

On top of that in season 9 they removed red sea-ing, so PvP'ers now don't have to approach tactically anymore and be afraid that a crew runs into the red sea. Both those things removed basicly all the risk from the PvP'ers side.

It has been a hot topic for years that the Devil's Shroud shouldn't be able to invalidate loot and fort keys. Over these past 5 years they have proven to be an enabler for extremely petty behavior that doesn't reward anyone and is really griefing for anyone heavily invested in content. Some crews have been able to salvage what they could grab from these dangerous edges of the map, but overall, its removal was really appreciated as invalidating loot as a last resort was just not a very fun tactic.

Before its removal I was very neutral to the situation. It was still in the game, so it was still valid. Player's sentiments aren't exactly the developer's sentiments, which are what I stick by for the sake of neutrality with the game I still love to play and watch. Anyways.

As someone who does both sides, i have to say PvP has become realy boring to me now, because you can't realy lose, since there is no real risk left. I find that problematic. The most fun fights i had where when i did PvE and then won a fight, because then i actually had some risk in that fight, so there was some investment in the outcome.

PvP is only boring when the same things happen every time with randoms who don't say a single word or show any reaction to what you're doing to them. PvP is still dynamic, but there's 3 base outcomes you're bound to come by: You're equally matched, you're overpowered, or you're being overpowered by another, tougher/smarter crew.

Season 9 bringing back Adventure PvP to it's most chaotic has reintroduced a lot of the dynamics of PvP past the basic naval outcomes. With rocks, fort towers, added fog banks (ugh), gunpowder barrels, cannon rowboats, etc. While the best crew wins overall, anything could happen, and PvP isn't looking so boring when every player is getting involved with the content for different reasons that work with the concept of Season 9's structure.

Someone (i don't know if this was in this topic on another) in the search of a risk for the PvP'er said that their risk was that they didn't get the loot. But that is not even a risk, because they didn't had that to start with. A risk is something that you lose, not something that you didn't gain. That is just not earning the reward.

Time. Instead of fighting skeletons for a fat pile of loot to take and make some good dough from all of that, they choose to fight actual players that aren't supposed to be predictable, and risk wasting their time with a crew that will best them in sailing, best them in combat, and best them in supplies gathered to use against them.

Hopping for a server you want to hunt players on takes 10-20 minutes of hopping alone. It's not so bad with a crew or a community of people that can give you servers to hunt on, but we're not content creators, we're players that like to guarantee a fight against other players that are very likely to have loot on the line. Fail that, and it's another 10-20 minutes of hopping. All that time could have been spent doing a world event, visiting a sea fort and selling loot from that, doing a quick Captain's voyage that gets you at least 5k worth of loot.

The PvP players are rewarded loot they didn't have to play much of the "easier" game for, but it comes at the cost of the time they could have spent playing the easier game. Risk, and reward.

I think there are 2 serious issues with PvP at the moment:

1. the risk/reward system is completely out of wack. The PvE'er has the risk and (almost) no possible reward (the PvP'er carries nothing) and the PvP'er has (almost) no risk and all the posible rewards. That is an unbalanced fight and Rare definitely should take a second look at that. For the PvE'er there should be a reward to be gained in a fight and for the PvP'er a (real) risk that have to lose.

Defending yourself from pirates that have nothing to offer for your journey are the reward. They are after your current loot haul, your supplies, your boat's current position in the world (, your salty tears if you're going to have a bad attitude about getting attacked in the first place). You are playing the game the way you want, and need to defend that from players who are playing the game the way they want. There is no imbalance of such things, only a skill gap- oh wait you're about to talk about that too.

2. The expanding skill gap between the average PvE-player and the average PvP player. That gap is so big that most PvE players already know they will lose before the fight even starts.

Defeatists attitudes are self-fulfilling prophecies that cannot be fixed by the game or its playerbase. You cannot fix the game to fix the players.

The chances of winning a battle have been getting smaller and smaller for the average PvE player (and then we didn't even talk about solo sloopers yet). If then the chance of a fight (because of the reintroduction of the 6th ship) also increases, that does create a problem, since that means the chance they can get loot/complete voyages because increasingly smaller. This will turn of players. And since you see the number of complaints on this forum about PvP seriously increase (and most casuals won't post on this forum, so the problem might likely even be bigger), that does worry me about the health of the game.

You're acting like more ships make for more hostility. More ships does lead to more chances of hostile players to enter the server, but the game was always intended to have 6 ships at once. There was a point where you could have a maximum of 6 galleon crews on one server at once, and the complaints still came in regardless of the ship limit and player limit.

That being said, the average PvE player is a casual player that likes to set sail, go on voyages, make a ton of gold, and make many new friends because this is a very socially engaging game. The average PvP player, in my eyes, is a casual player that likes to steal treasure they don't have to "work" for and possibly get a rouse out of players who are not mentally compatible with the game for that session. Then there is the "PvPvE player", a casual player that likes to set sail, go on voyages, steal treasure, make a ton of gold, and make many new friends while reminding those that are not mentally compatible with this game that this game is PvPvE, and that you can be attacked at any point and just have to come to terms with it.

If players are getting turned off by a human player shooting cannonballs at someone else for any reason at all, I don't think those players are playing the game with the right mindset, and should consider better options because this game is not exactly what they're looking for, advertisements be damned.

I think reading the comments that those two points are the main drivers of complaints of 'toxic pvp' or demands for pve servers, etc. And lets be clear: pvp in itself is not toxic and it should be a shared PvEvP world. But the underlying issues underneath those hyperboles are real and deserve to be adressed and discussed.

The developers have stuck by a vision and do not seem to be detracting too heavily from it, as they have made their stance on the PvP vs PvE discussion well over 2 years ago via their podcast. Players not willing to understand how the game works need the patience to be taught so, or to find newer options. Fixing the game to fix the players takes away from what Rare made their game for. They know it's going to have problems, but they can't fix that, because most of the people complaining here and on most of social media are vocal minorities, yes, the PvE, PvP, Content Creators, and even boatswains are vocal minorities, they don't represent the larger portion of the playerbase that just logs in, sails, and see where the wind takes them.

Outside of requested balances vocal minorities would want for the game to make it more enjoyable for them, their friends, and anyone in their circle of mindset, there's nothing here about the basic game loop that needs to be addressed, and it's reached a fairly good balance, that only suffers a skill gap due to players not playing enough to know what to do and what not to do in combat scenarios.

@super87ghost
First of all there is no way i can know how many hours you have in game and the only reason i mentioned my background was to show that i have been on both sides of the spectrum. Second i said do not take this the wrong way because my statement about lack of understanding the base mechanics of the game can be interpreted both as a form of git gud or simply an observation. It was never my intention to offend you and i definitely did not mean it the way you understood it. However i could have chosen my words more carefully and for that i am sorry. You actually make some pretty good points i haven't thought of. I was mainly thinking about PvPvE players when i wrote it. Even so while i agree with some of your points i still believe that engaging in pvp always is more risky than doing a 20 minute voyage. While pvpers have a a set of skills they developed with a lot of time and practice, due to the nature and mechanics of SoT pvers have also a number of ways to counter them. I mentioned a lot of them in my previous comment so i won't be repeating them. Finding, hunting and sinking a ship is much more difficult than doing a gold hoarder vault. PvP is a high risk high reward playstyle when PvE is only risky if you let another ship come too close. Again i am sorry i offended you, it was never something i meant to do, just a poor choice of words

How many of these mythical pvp onlyers do you guys think exist?