Alliance trapping

@nam-ssob1

I think that alliances are a blight on this system altogether.

They designed the system to matchmake based on skill and ship size. That alone tells me that the intent was to have strictly balanced fights. When you invade and your opponent has multiple other ships with them (or even just one other ship), that is not balanced.

It is a clear contradiction to how the system was designed to work.

It seems tricky to deal with this in a way that doesn't negatively affect the organic shared world experience, but it can be dealt with. I think that if a ship is defending and has other ships with them when the one ship is being invaded, the other ships that aren't being invaded should have a peace ball curse inflicted on their ship until they leave the battle area.

More drastically, I might say that alliances should be disabled altogether when you vote to pledge allegiance to a faction.

@chronodusk

The peace-ball idea could work, but that doesn’t stop people boarding you which I’d say is a bigger advantage than having more cannons especially solo slooping.

Perhaps altering the system to stop you matching with people if another ship is nearby. It doesn’t entirely fix the issue but avoids an immediate trap, the invader will have time to sink the defender before an ally can get there.

I think they should just apply the red sea effect to any ships within the circle who are not being invaded. Double if they're allianced. Maybe even just put both ships in the red sea but with immunity to it.

@dartht15

I don’t think they’d ever do that as it can interrupt somebody doing quests. Putting ships in the red sea could work on paper but I wouldn’t be surprised if this caused more exploits that take too long to fix. I also don’t think that fits with what rare intended this to be, they wanted battles to be on demand but also part of the world and adventure mode.

That’s the problem with this, alliance trapping is so obviously exploiting the system but it’s hard to fix without redeveloping the whole PvP system.

My only other idea could be making a rule against it, the threat of a ban would discourage almost everybody doing it. That alongside disabling alliances while the hour glass is active could be a good way to fix it without overhauling the hard work the devs put in.

Baseline:
When you use the hourglass and the war map, you are not opting in to a totally fair 1v1 crew vs crew fight. Nobody should be under that impression, Rare was clear about their intent to have adventure still matter in full.
You are opting in to having your ship relocated near another ship, to save you the time and effort of having to find targets manually, while remaining fully subject to anything and everything adventure offers. Including the other 4 ships on the server.
The provision of sbmm and ship-matching, which is a good thing, is an added bonus, given to increase the occurance of "real" fights and decrease the prevalance of one sided roflstomps, but while still fully allowing for both.

As for "fair"?

Well you could argue that because everybody has the same ability to do a given thing, it's automatically fair for it to be done. The same logic for saying a fight between a ship with only spawning supplies vs a ship with stacked supplies is fair, could be applied for outnumbering opponents.
But I don't like that manner of logic. I don't use "they could have done it too, they also had the option" as justification for regarding things as fair.
So I still call the spawn-supply vs stack-supply fight unfair, and I still call a fight where a ship is outnumbered unfair.

But something being unfair doesn't automatically make it bad or unallowable; not by itself.
This game isn't about fair fights. Unfairness is an inherent and intended component of the game. Unfairness is allowable and justified.
Fighting people with more supplies than you, people attacking your unmanned ship when you're in a cave/vault, tuckers waiting on your ship with a keg for you to touch the shrine loot mermaid, crews that found tons of curseballs vs crews that never found any, being outnumbered, etc.. All unfair, all allowable.

All else aside, any changes meant to target actual alliance servers, would also affect organic alliances and possibly even incidentally placed people, and therefor shouldn't be done. The Red Sea idea is especially bad, for what should be obvious reasons.

Personal anecdote: So far in every instance I've seen of faction war ships being outnumbered, it was the defender that was outnumbered. Yes, I've seen people tell the stories of people invading into alliances, but I've only witnessed defender ships get invaded the same time an on-server ship attacked.

Imo, if the alliance trapping occurs too much, they should just get rid of the SBMM altogether. Its only purpose is to help getting fair fights. If fair fights don't happen regardless, SBMM has only downsides (queue time being the biggest culprit).