TL;DR: Newer players often quit SoT due to the presence of a massive PVP skill gap between newer and older players, caused primarily by weapon variety, Hourglass mode, and Safer Seas failing to teach "High Seas" PVP skills. To fix this, I propose that stolen loot from non-Pirate Legends sell for 50% less gold and reputation. My hope is that this incentivizes alliances, reduces the likelihood of newer players being attacked by older players, increases the likelihood of older players teaching newer players on the High Seas, and helping newer players progress towards Pirate Legend status faster.
(These are only ideas, based on my experiences of SoT, so if they suck, or if I'm wrong in my perspectives, please let me know.)
At this time in the game, the experiences of new players in SoT can be very demoralizing, causing many to give up playing the game early on. I believe that a major reason for this has to do with PVP. At this time, I believe the skill gap between newer players and older players in SoT has never been wider. This is due not only to the significant presence of cheaters, hackers and other scoundrels on the waves, as well as the greater amount of PVP experience that older players have over newer players, like in most games, but also due to three other factors.
Firstly, since the game's release, the choice of weaponry with which to attack another player and their ship has diversified tremendously. Newer players will naturally gravitate towards the flintlock and cutlass, and choose cannonballs over all other types of cannon ammunition. This gives older players, who are wise about the advantages that different weapons give in PVP, an advantage: older players will use chainshots, firebombs and blunderbombs more effectively, and use throwing knives and blunderbusses to kill newer players with ease. This weapon diversity, although excellent and ever-expanding, widens the gap between players who know what weapons to use when, and how to use them best, and those who don't.
Secondly, the existence of Hourglass has also made PVP a central focus of the SoT playerbase like never before. Players now have a way to spend hours dedicated to fighting in naval and personal combat, improving their PVP skills as they do so. A glance at the SoT discord server's LFC shows me that most players now mostly crew up with other players directly, in order to do Hourglass. The Ghost and Skeleton Curses are very attractive. Newer players have nowhere near the same level of skill and experience as an Hourglass-baptized PVP veteran. Newer players that I've crewed with in the past have taken one look at an enemy ship crewed by Skeleton Curse players, and immediately wanted us to flee with our loot in terror, traumatized by past experiences of being absolutely annihilated by such seasoned PVPers.
Thirdly and finally, Safer Seas. Rare thought Safer Seas would give newer players a chance to learn the PVE side of SoT without being utterly obliterated and massacred by older players at every turn, investing themselves in the game so they would be less likely to quit it early on. However, there's one thing - which in my opinion is absolutely essential to playing SoT - that Safer Seas does not give newer players the chance to learn before they come to High Seas.
The High Seas mindset.
Every experienced player on High Seas sails with some degree of fear of being attacked, ranging from mild anxiety to outright paranoia. Especially when engaging with the more lucrative PVE content in the game, or at least content that increases your visibility to the server. Experienced players regularly look over their shoulder, scan the horizon and watch their maps for Reaper's Bones emissaries, keep anchor raised and sails raised so their ship can make a speedy getaway, and always recover and sell loot as quickly as possible. Always with the knowledge that another ship can come to try and rob you of all your hard work.
Because Safer Seas is practically a private server, newer players sail on a Sea of Thieves... without thieves. They can go where they please, taking as long as they want to recover and sell loot, with the greatest threats to themselves and their ship being Krakens, Megaladons, Skeleton Ships, and poor attempts to park their ship leading to holes they didn't notice filling their ship with water. On Safer Seas, newer players never learn any of the previously-described essential skills that older players have, and instead develop a bunch of habits that make them naive loot-piñatas for opportunistic older players.
On High Seas, players decide to PVP with each other based on the ratio of two factors: "what are the chances that I win the fight?" and "how valuable is the loot I get out of this fight?". For the sake of simplicity, I'll call the former "Risk" and the latter "Reward". As an example, if the other ship has the Dark Adventure sails, is entirely crewed by players with Golden Skeleton curses, and just finished looting a Fort of Fortune, then fighting them is a high-risk/high-reward situation. Newer players are likely to stack loot, have little to no experience with PVP, and are more likely to make mistakes during PVP that will cost them the fight.
Fighting a new player is a low-risk/high-reward situation. Therefore, the game is (unintentionally) designed to incentivize older players to sink and steal from newer players. The only basis I've seen for older players to not follow this incentive, is because it's immoral: "don't obliterate the noob, it's unfair.". As I am often reminded, in this game full of pirates, morality is often dictated by who has a Chest of Fortune, and who has a Golden Skeleton curse. But that's precisely the problem.
When older players fight and steal from newer players as easily as taking candy from a baby, and when this happens consistently since the gap between the PVP skill and experience of older players and newer players is so wide that newer players struggle to climb the PVP skill-and-experience ladder, newer players can easily become disillusioned with Sea of Thieves. They learn that their time in Safer Seas, and all the skills they learnt in there, was meaningless, since they haven't a hope of protecting their loot, their ship, or even themselves. Feeling lied to by Safer Seas, and that sailing the seas only to get utterly annihilated is a waste of time, they leave the game.
How to fix this? I believe that it comes down to the risk/reward ratio. Switch the reality of fighting and stealing from newer players from a low-risk/high-reward situation, to a low-risk/low-reward situation. Counterbalance the low risk of fighting and stealing from newer players with a low amount of reward - gold, reputation, etc. - for doing so.
Specifically, I propose this: any loot stolen from a non-Pirate Legend can only be sold for 50% of its original gold and reputation value. This reduction would apply universally; including to the Reaper's Bones. This reduction would disappear once the player reaches Pirate Legend.
Of course, the percentage bonus gold and reputation that players receive from selling stolen loot to the Reaper's Bones would still apply, and help to counterbalance this reduction. This would ensure that Reaper's Bones emissaries - who are supposed to seek out and destroy other ships anyway - would still have some degree of incentive to attack newer players. This, in turn, would make it slightly, yet still significantly, more likely that Reaper's Bones emissaries would attack a newer player than other emissaries would, since they would benefit more than other emissaries from doing so. As well as this, older players who, for one reason or another, do not care about the percentage reduction in gold or reputation from selling stolen loot from a non-Pirate Legend, would still engage in PVP with newer players. I speculate that these types of players would not care about the reduction in gold and reputation gained because they do not care about gaining gold or reputation in the first place.
This would result in the majority of older players who attack newer players being A) players who care about PVP for its own sake, and not to gain gold or reputation, and B) players who act as Reaper's Bones emissaries, and therefore gain more gold and reputation than emissaries for the other trading companies. As a result, newer players would be more likely to get attacked by the same sorts of players who older players would be likely to get attacked by. This would allow newer players to gain experience on what kinds of players are likely to attack them; knowledge that will remain relevant to them even once they become Pirate Legend and/or an older player. This would also make newer players less of a loot pinata to older players: when the children find out the pinata drops mints instead of candies, they will stop opportunistically hitting it.
Furthermore, I predict that such a change would incentivize older players to form alliances with newer players rather than sink them. Since players in an alliance receive 50% of the gold and reputation of an item being sold by another alliance member, it would be equally as profitable to form an alliance with non-Pirate Legend players as it would be to steal their loot and sell it yourself. In fact, it would be even more profitable to alliance with newer players than it would be to sink them, since the newer players would continue finding more loot to sell, giving the older players more gold and reputation overall than they would get if they sold the newer player's stolen loot one time. More alliances between older and newer players would also mean more older players helping newer players learn how to play Sea of Thieves on High Seas.
Speaking of older players helping newer players...
My experience of the SoT playerbase has been that when newer players join an older players' crew, the older players have little patience for the newer players' inexperience and lack of skill,
and equally little patience to teach them. I've observed older players becoming frustrated and rude towards their newer crewmates, and often I've seen older players refuse to crew with newer players on the basis of their newness. This contributes to the game struggling to accommodate newer players, and causing them to quit early on. But I believe the solution I've outlined can help with this! Here's how:
The 50% reduction in gold and reputation value of loot stolen from a non-Pirate Legend would still occur if the non-Pirate Legend was sailing in a crew with other players, no matter if their shipmates are non-Pirate Legend or Pirate Legend.
I believe that this would keep the disincentive in place to other crews who would otherwise sink the non-Pirate Legend's crew, leading to the aforementioned benefits. I also predict that this would cause Pirate Legends/older players to be more interested in forming crews with non-Pirate Legends/newer players, since the newer player would shield the entire crew from being attacked. Older players forming crews with newer players would also result in older players helping newer players learn the game on High Seas. This would help newer players form friendships with older players instead of just newer ones, and making them more experienced, more skilled, and most importantly, more invested in the game, faster. I believe this would cause older players to become more receptive, more patient and more respectful towards newer players, increase the likelihood of older players to encourage non-players to become players so they could benefit off of their non-Pirate Legend status, and increase the likelihood of newer players enjoying the High Seas experience as they develop the skills and experience to sail on it solo. This would counterbalance the mistakes, slowness and general lack of skill that newer players would have with significant benefits for keeping them on a crew despite their inexperience. All of this, I predict, would make newer players less likely to quit the game early on.
I believe that, since the older players would teach the newer players how to be on High Seas without getting easily sunk, and since newer players would be sunk less often because stealing and selling their loot would be less worthwhile, newer players would be able to sell more loot more often without as much risk of it being stolen, allowing them to rise from their status as non-Pirate Legend to Pirate Legend much faster. This would especially be true if older players included newer players on their crews, and stack Fort of the Damned or use some other highly profitable strategy, taking advantage of the benefit of the disincentive for anyone else to try and interrupt their money-making.
I would argue that this is a good thing. Gameplay-wise, being a Pirate Legend on High Seas unlocks a variety of fashionable, fun and profitable content which newer players are locked out of. Accelerating the speed at which newer players become Pirate Legend would also ensure that older players couldn't use a newer players' non-Pirate Legend status to safely farm gold and reputation over extended periods of time. In regards to how this would make sense in the game's story, I would argue that any pirate who is willing to brave the deadly Devil's Shroud, and not only test but also stay in waters where they are under constant threat from sea monsters, living skeletons, cursed treasure, and a never-ending amount of bloodthirsty pirates looking to steal their plunder... deserve to be considered a Pirate Legend.
Now, I acknowledge that there are some flaws in the ideas I've presented, and that they have potential to go horribly wrong.
For instance, an older player could create a new SoT account, thereby "pretending" to be a non-Pirate Legend newer player, and then keep themselves as a non-Pirate Legend by simply leaving their crew when the time comes to sell loot. This would theoretically allow them to eternally help their friends farm gold and reputation, as well as get the drop on any pirate who mistakenly sees them as a harmless noob. Admittedly, this would make the SoT experience for such players an unrewarding experience, since they'd be earning little to no gold or reputation, and therefore never be able to access the game's cosmetic items or some of its more exclusive features. But, as I've previously mentioned, there are SoT players for whom the gameplay is intrinsically rewarding, and therefore wouldn't care about gold or reputation. I'm sure there could be a way to prevent this, but I cannot think of any such way off the top of my head. Nevertheless, the SoT playerbase has, as far as I can tell, a longstanding tradition of finding and using exploits to earn gold and reputation faster, more safely and/or more easily. These range from stack-buying supply crates/captaincy supplies/hunting spears/etc., to alliance servers. Apart from the potential exploit I've just suggested, I can confidently say that the playerbase will no doubt find other ways to exploit this proposed system. The developers would have to prepare themselves for this inevitability.
Additionally, a clear criticism that can be made of my ideas is this: how would you truly be able to tell the difference between older players/Pirate Legends and newer players/non-Pirate Legends? After all, older players can just pretend to have the inexperience and lack of skill that newer players have, and by doing so, they would be able to convince other crews that they aren't worth stealing from. The best potential solutions I can find to overcome this problem would be by making non-Pirate Legends visually different from Pirate Legends, and ensuring that players lost access to this visual difference once they became Pirate Legend.
This "visual difference" could be a cosmetic item or a title for the player and/or their ship; maybe a Magpie's Fortune costume and shipset, emphasizing how recently they've completed their Maiden Voyage? This would allow non-Pirate Legends to choose whether to broadcast themselves to the server as a newer player whom other players shouldn't steal from, or to conceal their non-Pirate Legend status and experience the PVP of High Seas as newer players do currently. Alternatively, this "visual difference" could be something less restrictive to a newer player's cosmetic choices, such as their in-game name tag being a unique color or having a unique icon next to it. Admittedly, this would make it much more challenging to identify from afar that another ship is being crewed by a newer player, since name tags can only be seen up close; by the time a crew might notice the newer player's name tag, PVP might already be in full swing. Both potential solutions have drawbacks, I agree. But its the best I can think of at the moment. I'm open to suggestions!
Other criticisms I've heard from other players about my ideas include the following: "SoT is a pirate game. If you can't handle that, go play something else". Sea of Thieves is indeed a pirate game... and so much more. On High Seas, you are indeed a bloodthirsty scallywag, but you are also an adventurer, as well as a bounty hunter, as well as an explorer, and so on and so on. My experience is that older players who say this have often been subjected to the kind of PVP experience as a newer player that I outlined previously, and that this experience has embittered them. The sentiment from these players is therefore the following: Since they had to suffer and struggle in PVP as a newer player, why should the next generation of newer players get to have it any easier? After all, you only learn by failing; newer players can only improve their PVP skills if they lose and learn from those losses. If newer players aren't able to stomach losing again and again, and don't have the brains to improve, then they should just quit SoT.
I see this sentiment as unfair, and underestimates the PVP skill gap I've previously mentioned. I've often heard the statement of "it's a pirate game" be used to justify the toxicity, mercilessness and immorality of the playerbase towards newer players. However, I would expect that even the most toxic, merciless and immoral SoT player should want this change to occur, since that way, more newer players would play the game and choose not to quit it, which would increase the number of newer players for them to prey on. These changes would specifically be aimed at helping newer players be able to get a hand onto the SoT PVP skill-and-experience ladder, incentivize older players to teach and play with newer players, and increase the speed at which newer players become Pirate Legend. I don't believe they would make SoT any less of a pirate game, and would instead only make SoT a little more accommodating and balanced to newer players.
And here, I weigh anchor. Thank you for reading my post (although, by this point, I admit it's more of an essay than a post), and I apologize for the lengthy read. If you have any ideas or feedback on my ideas, please let me know!
