@drfauli said in invade ships with active siren song voyage:
For me personally, the SoSS voyage does not feel like the PvP voyage the trailer suggested it to be. ^^
It did though, when PvP oriented players still needed the commendations.
The problem is a bit the same with all PvP inventing content: as soon as the PvP oriented players completed the commendations, it will 'die out' or will be less played.
This is because of a couple of problems:
- There is no skill based servers. This makes it so realy strong players compete with casual players. Just give it long enough (and this game is already years old offcourse) and a lot of players will have learned that PvP'ing is 'useless', because they will face way stronger opponents and unwinnable conditions. This turns a significant part of the community away from PvP and high risk content.
- The PvP meta is to much reliant on boarding and double gunning. There are more then enough players who would be interested in naval combat, but (slowly/partly) loose interest because off the boarding meta wich just turns the naval fights into a pistolfight. And for a shooting match they can already play CoD, Fortnite, Halo, etc.
- A lot of PvP oriented players don't want to do the PvE-parts of those voyages and just like to hunt. They rely on PvE-oriented players to do the voyage so they can attack them. But because of the problem stated at point 1, a lot of PvE-oriented players either are turned off by such voyages or only run when someone tries to attack them, wich annoys the PvP players. This in the end results in a very small population still wanting to do the voyage and also a smaller population that wants to attack such players.
It's not just the SoSS that 'suffers' from this problem. We first got it with the world events that slowly died out. When they tried to revive it with the Chest of Fortune you see the same problem: every season (when new commendations are added for it) you see it revive a little, only to quickly die out again when most PvP players have the commendations. Here you also see the problem that the reviving effect is less every time, since a lot of PvE players who still wanted to take the risk to complete the commendations slowly were turned away from it, because their end goal (completing the commendations) only got further away from them, since every time more chest were needed then they could collect. With the SoSS the same: it was active in the beginning and died out when most PvP oriented players got their commendations. I will predict that the Burning Blade will face the same future.
The problem just comes down to the risk/reward structure. Because those voyages invite PvP (it shows where you are and that you have valuable loot) and there is no SBMM, the risk of those voyages so high for most players (because they will most likely have to face much higher skilled players) that the chance of getting the reward is so small, it just isn't worth it. Even though the reward for the SoSS is pretty high (50k), a lot of players just make the calculation in their head that the time needed to complete it (since most of the times they won't be able to), it becomes more profitable to do way less profitable voyages, because they will be able to complete those way more often.
Making the reward higher won't solve the problem, because that also increases the risk (those high skilled players will then also be more interested in attacking), just like letting ships invade won't help, because it will make the risk higher, wich will then only turn away more people from it.
It's basicly the same as why you often hear PvP oriented reapers complain that other emissaries lower their flag when they raise theirs: the risk becomes way to high because they are now visible. And Rare just keep making the same mistake: they keep thinking that if they only make the voyage more enjoyable or increase the reward, more players will want to do it and the PvP players can find their targets. But Rare doesn't realise that the actual problem has always been that visibility wich just makes the risk way to high that no reward can compensate it for a huge portion of the playerbase. It's the case with reapers, with world events, with the SoSS, with the CoF, with the FotD, etc. It's just a repeating cycle of being active for a short while untill the PvP players have their commendations and then dying out when the PvP players go back to only hunting en the PvE players (still) not wanting to do them because it makes them a visible target.
