How to make the game less frustrating for PvE players...

Let's address another issue: Empty ships attacking the full of loot ships

There is the problem that while the empty ship has nothing to lose and chance to gain, the ship full of loot has a lot to lose and nothing to gain. To improve the situation I suggest two features - the pvp chest and the naval multiplier.

A) The pvp chest
Whenever the crew kills a unique player (CD 24 min.) the value of this chest increases by 1000g. The chest can't be stolen. When the ship sinks it gets carried over to the newly spawned ship. When left outside of the ship for 5 min. it gets moved back to the ship. When turned in the new chest spawns.

This little reward benefits both attacking and defending players for the pvp interaction.

B) The naval multiplier
For each ship that the crew sinks the loot currently on board gets it's value increased by certain percentage. The size of the bonus depends on the size of attacking and defending ship.
Sloop: Sloop +100%, Brigantine +150%, Galleon +200%
Brigantine: Sloop +50%, Brigantine +100%, Galleon +150%
Galleon: Sloop +25%, Brigantine +50%, Galleon +100%

The max bonus is capped at 500% of value (which with the change in the first post is 250% of current value).

This feature rewards the crew for sucessfully fending off attackers. It also encourages the attacking ship to carry some loot of their own which the defending ship can win.

Side effect of these two:
These reward both attacking and defending ship so it may encourage pvp. // In my opinion it would not make much difference so it's worth it.
Stealing loot before sinking the ship would be more rewarding.

@grindtony45 If by BS you mean "Brilliant Suggestion" then thank you Sir. Many of the posters here are just trolling and can't comprehend what this part of forum is about. But you could still be more specific about what you like and maybe add in a suggestion of your own that would make the game more entertaining than it is now. Cheers. ;)

@archaell I will have to say no to your whole idea. Heard it before and made comments about why it is a bad idea so I don't want to go into completely detail again.

However, I would like to add a counter argument.

This just an idea. I've made sure but no one in the PvE community has suggested it.

What if PvE players engage in PvP?? I mean this is an open world PvP game and was marketed as such with the dev's talking about having to defend your loot against enemy pirates.

So the concept is when a player is about to be attacked, they watch the horizon to keep track if any potential enemy ships are nearby. If they see them, they keep track of it and make sure its not headed towards them.

If the ship is headed towards them they get ready to fight or run. Maybe the ship wants to make an alliance, but if not and it wants to attack, then you just fight back or run away.

If you win, you keep all your loot. If you run away you again get to keep all your loot.

I know this is a weird concept. But I think its the best option :)

@xultanis-dragon The main reason behind my thread is that pve players are always forced to do pvp while the pvp players can't be forced to do pve. This could be fixed by adding pve servers and pvp servers. Everyone would be able to choose - which is fair. I am sure we can agree that pvp players dislike the idea that the easy targets would be gone - because they benefit from them. And so to balance this issue we should come up with features that would make the game less punishing for the pve players. My first suggestion about the bonus reward points would do that. My other suggestions reward pvp players more than pve players, but are still helping with the issue.

You can make stole rewards be worth -10%, i would lose my gold to hunt people down regardless.

@vulgrim-pvp You wouldn't really lose much because even when the loot would be 50% of it's current value (because the other 50% would be given to the crew that found it in delayed manner) there is still the second feature that multiplies the value of loot for sinking ships. Practically most of the players would benefit from these changes. I would even say that the pvp players that aren't afraid to pvp with loot on-board would benefit the most.

@archaell

Let me clarify a few concepts first.

PvP players do not argue against PvE servers or PvE suggestions because we are afraid of losing easy targets. Ships that don't fight back are boring. Most if not all of the PvP players I've talked to all agree the best time we had was when we would fight over contested forts before they were made redundant with the 5min respawn timer. Players server hopping for forts and where you would have an engagement of 3 to 4 ships at 1 location.

Why everyone keeps using the "You just don't want to lose your easy targets!" argument is beyond me.

Now onto your ideas. They don't add to the game in any way, you instead are trying to create a completely roundabout way to discourage certain actions in the game while protecting others from such actions if they do happen.

Another misconception you all have is that PvP ships have no loot. We always start with no loot and then after sinking a few ships and gathering loot, by the end of the run we are usually stocked with loot.

We don't attack a ship and head straight to an outpost. We carry it around whiling stacking more loot on top of it. You want your loot back? Come and get it.

Instead of trying to circumvent the losses, or circumvent certain PvP outcomes. You could instead come up with an idea that would keep PvP players occupied WHILE giving PvE players a chance to do their stuff as well.

An example of this would be again the old fort system. Whenever a fort popped up you would have 2 or more ships fighting over the fort for HOURS. That would have been the perfect time for any of the PvE players to go out and do their own stuff without the hassle from the PvP crew.

How about instead of trying to circumvent the mechanics and instead actually come up with ideas that would work to benefit both sides without alienating another??

@xultanis-dragon said in How to make the game less frustrating for PvE players...:

@archaell

Let me clarify a few concepts first.

PvP players do not argue against PvE servers or PvE suggestions because we are afraid of losing easy targets. Ships that don't fight back are boring.

In that case it shouldn't be an issue that the pve players would be playing on pve servers. While the pve players would not mind losing the pvp players, the pvp players for some reason do mind losing the pve players. That itself suggests it's one-sided relationship.

Why everyone keeps using the "You just don't want to lose your easy targets!" argument is beyond me.

Because the pve players that don't want to pvp are an easy target.

Now onto your ideas. They don't add to the game in any way, you instead are trying to create a completely roundabout way to discourage certain actions in the game while protecting others from such actions if they do happen.

They add in the protection of time investment for the players. Instead of losing all the progress the players always keep about half. Instead if wasting time completely the players get gold or better loot for pvp.

Another misconception you all have is that PvP ships have no loot. We always start with no loot and then after sinking a few ships and gathering loot, by the end of the run we are usually stocked with loot.

We don't attack a ship and head straight to an outpost. We carry it around whiling stacking more loot on top of it. You want your loot back? Come and get it.

It's not about all the ships not having loot, it's about almost none of the ships that attack you having more loot than you do.

Instead of trying to circumvent the losses, or circumvent certain PvP outcomes. You could instead come up with an idea that would keep PvP players occupied WHILE giving PvE players a chance to do their stuff as well.

An example of this would be again the old fort system. Whenever a fort popped up you would have 2 or more ships fighting over the fort for HOURS. That would have been the perfect time for any of the PvE players to go out and do their own stuff without the hassle from the PvP crew.

I agree this might encourage the pvp players to do something else, but in my opinion that's not enough.

How about instead of trying to circumvent the mechanics and instead actually come up with ideas that would work to benefit both sides without alienating another??

When the players steal loot from other players their ship is Reaper-marked for one hour. If another crew sinks them and returns the stolen loot to the players that lost it, they are rewarded 5 times the worth of loot and unlock special cosmetics. That would motive pvp players to hunt other pvp players and benefit pve players so it should make you happy.

@betsill Splitting up the gold part of reward and the rep and commendation part would be interesting. But also quite brutal for the pvp players... lol.

@TheUnknownD That's the game's design. The details tho can be tweaked.

@Maulocky It would be exactly the same - except the rewards would be distributed in more player-friendly (this is also a pun ;)) way.

@GrindTony45 I don't like the idea of pve servers either thus made this thread to come up with fair features that could avoid that. Btw. Even if the game was split up into pvp and pve servers there would still be players digging up chests. It would just be more difficult to get the chests because the players on pvp servers would have to start doing more voyages.

@archaell I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with any of this. I can tell you put a lot of thought and care into this post and I 100% respect that and I don’t hold it against you, but my opinion and the opinion of most people who play the game is this: this is a game with PvP elements that we all knew was a thing when we bought it and enjoy it. We do not wish for the game to have drastic changes to it just to meet the needs of people who don’t want to be engaged in combat. It’s just simply not something we want. Fighting and defending your loot is a core piece of the game and it needs to stay that way.

@cstrap Neither pvp elements, nor fighting, nor defending the loot goes anywhere. My suggestions just improve the loot distribution while keeping the core of the game intact.

I will provide example to illustrate this.

Right now: You get the Athena, you turn it in, you get the reward.

My bonus reward points suggestion: You get the Athena chest, you get half of the reward saved when you find it, you turn the loot in and get the reward for the turn in, for the saved part and other saved parts from previously lost chest.

If you lose the chest right now: You lose everything.

My bonus reward points suggestion: You lose only the turn-in part of it. The next Athena chest you turn in gives you the half of the previous Athena chest that you just lost.

What my suggestion does is that when a chest is stolen the thief and owner split the loot 50/50. That way the pve players still lost half of it but not everything so they are less likely to uninstall the game due to "griefers". That's much better in terms of being player friendly than the unforgiving system that we have now.

@theunknownd It's just a game it doesn't have to be completely realistic... as we know the players get rewarded by the NPCs. The NPCs can have plenty of weird reasons to reward the players more. For example - Maybe the chest is cursed and requires a password, the password is found at the digsite. When you turn it in, you tell the NPC password for the extra reward - but some pirates forget the passwords and other pirates steal the chests, so the NPC buys any additional password that you know because it could be useful in the future. Done.

@archaell yeah, I understand that you didn’t specifically say “PvP elements” and all of that, but let’s be honest here - the root of your suggestion is 100% because of PvP. What you’re basically saying is that it’s not fair to do an entire quest and then get killed before you get to turn in, making the last couple hours (or however long it takes you to gather said loot) completely wasted. I do understand what you’re talking about.

The problem is the way the game is right now is that loot is not 100% yours until you turn it in - and I like it that way. It’s what makes your loot worth defending. While sea of thieves looks like a nice causal game, it’s actualy quite stressful - and I like that stress. It puts me in that world. The whole idea of “well you get half now and half later” or “this chest does this in case you get attacked” - I don’t know. It all just another way of dumbing the game down to cater to people who play so extremely passive that they can’t handle when another ship rolls up on them. There’s plenty of ways to play the game passive (I’m a passive player), but it’s just not a passive game.

I guess it would make sense for you to get.. some.. experience for actually digging up a chest/collecting an animal/defeating a skeleton captain. I guess that’s a compromise I could live with. But you shouldn’t get paid until you turn in and that’s the way it should be - and you should get 100% of that gold when you turn in, no matter what you had to do to get it. This is the way the game is, it’s the way the game was always meant to be, and it’s the game that I paid for. I’d rather it stay that way.

@archaell Heres Why do you guys keep asking the game change to fit the needs of the PvE community?

Also thanks to @BloodyBil he pointed out the biggest problem with your idea. I was hoping someone was going to point that out sooner or later.

Your idea basically makes the game easy mode for anyone and everyone. You get 50% of everything regardless of whether or not you turn it in? Speed run everything. Why would I have to turn anything in? It would be faster to actually just speed run it then to bother turning it in for 100% or other.

One other thing is why is it so hard for the PvE community to just learn the simple rule of TURN THE LOOT IN. Everyone keeps coming to the forums to complain about losing their loot after X amount of hours. I have played with some PvE crews before and honestly, you guys do it to yourselves.

You guys are easy targets because you make yourself easy targets. The only person you have to blame is yourselves for that, not the game, not the PvP Community, its your fault.

The crews I've joined would jump off the boat ALL together without checking if any ships were nearby. They would leave the sails down and the anchor down half the time. They argue with me about turning in loot when the outpost is RIGHT next to us. "Its a waste of time if we turn in now, its better if we just do it at the end of the run."

I remember one instance I was at a fort with a PvE crew. I jumped off the boat and told one of the members of the crew to stay on board. Cycle on and off as players die so that someone is always on the boat. Eventually I noticed that all 4 of us were on the boat.

Our ship gets pelted to the bottom of the sea while I was arguing with the captain.

I've had crews like that before and honestly, it only happens on PvE crews. If you ever have a chance to PvE with a PvP Crew, you'll notice a HUGE difference in ability, communication, and alertness from others.

You guys need to just accept that PvP is in the game and learn how to defend yourselves.

@cstrap What I am saying is that there are players producing the loot without whom there would be no loot to steal and these players have to be motivated to play the game - otherwise they either stop playing or they change their play-style to the sink on sight mentality and do pvp instead of voyages like the rest. That eventually leads to the sea that discourages other social interactions than sinking, stealing and betraying. The players are no more pirates that you could have fun with and socialise with - they are the threat that has to be terminated before it terminates you.

The "loot is not yours until you turn it in" catch phrase is rubbish told by players that know that they could be nicer to others but because it would put them at disadvantage against the other immoral pirates like they are they can't do it. At the same time there is the fear of losing the PvE players to PvE servers, so it's used to discourage them from staying vocal about their issues.

@BloodyBil @Xultanis-Dragon Good point about the speed running guys. I am glad that you brough it up! Here comes the ingenious part about my suggestion. As I was considering it I came to the conclusion that if half of the reward was rewarded right away it would make the speed running too good. That's why the reward isn't rewarded right away, but it's rewarded only when you deliver the next item.

Right now: You speed run 3 chests - you get nothing.

With my bonus reward points: You speed run 3 chests - and you also get nothing... but actually you do get something! When you turn in the next chest you get 50% of the 1 of those 3 chests. So for each speed runned chest you need to actually turn in 1 to get the 50%.

We could argue that the rate is too high - well no problem! It can be changed!

For example instead of 1 turned-in chest giving you the 50% of the speed runned chest, it could be 5 turned-in chests giving you 10% each - that's why I named it "bonus reward POINTS" - because the rate at which the points are traded for better reward can be adjusted. ^_^

@archaell i don’t know man. It just seems like a complicated system you got going on here for something that’s just easily solved with “turn in frequently and watch the horizon”.

I’m probably done posting on this one after this. I do appreciate your effort in making this post (no sarcasm - this is one of the better PvE discussions), but I just don’t think i’m really ever gonna be on board for this idea. It was a good debate though. Good luck to you mate.