SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them

@fishst1ck said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

@WilliamHerschel
Although I think you approach most things from a very negative stance, I do respect your input here as it's very well written, thought out and detailed. On this matter I can even agree on the topics of bugs being a problem that really need to be dealt with especially the draw distances, crashes, performance, core functionality failing like OoS for Athena's and UI/UX issues. As for the minor bugs of a commendation not unlocking or a statue not always doing damage, that's not good and should be tested better but that's not really hurting the playerbase.

I agree with a lot of this, but I do think commendation issues are a bigger deal that you make them out to be. This is the game now for a subset of players, because there is a lack of anything else to do. If you browse LFG or Discord you will see lots of folks grinding towards commendations. It's really unfortunate, but Rare made the decision to make them a focus. Quite honestly my preference would be to remove commendations entirely, because I do not think they fit the original design concept of SoT.

Just a clarification for the differences between The Hungering Deep and the Bilge Rat adventures. THD was a content update they worked on since launch that had a dedicated team on it, while Bilge Rat Adventures seems to be more of a side activity for the teams with a two week development cycle. Seeing that THD did add to the sandbox in the form of the speaking trumpet, drums and the megalodon now roaming free, I think most of your critisism is directed towards the Bilge Rat adventures and the commendation system it uses.

I'm actually including THD in this group, even though I acknowledge that they are technically different things. Out of the 4 things, THD was certainly the best (and I really struggle to say that because the bar is so low at this point). The reason I qualify it as the best is because unlike the three bilge rat adventures, THD had the speaking trumpet which is probably the only meaningful improvement to the overall sandbox that we have had post launch. It's a minor one, but I truly think that the sandbox is what Rare needs to be focusing on. Some may argue that gunpowder skeletons also represent a sandbox improvement, but I'd argue that since they suffer from the same persistent AI issues that plague this game they moreso represent a temporary fix to alleviate PvE annoyances experienced during higher level OoS missions.

The points you make about these events are a point of disagreement for me though. The way of using events to add some small permanent things to the world is in my opinion a great and unique way of adding content. It would be nice indeed if those things would actually flesh out the sandbox, which in the case of the thrones and statues is very limited but for the gunpowder skeletons it added the fuse, push effect on barrels and ofc the gunpowder skeletons themselves.

The fuse and push effect on barrels are excellent features and I acknowledge them as such. Improvements on the same scale of fuses and more object/environmental interactivity should be added on a weekly basis.

Your observation of the events being the easiest types of events that require minimal development time is spot on, which sounds like exactly something you'd do if it's not really your core focus. The events seem to be just a way to offer minor variations or "something to do" next to the usual content. On the developer videos where they explained the teams and what they're working on, they mentioned each team working dedicated on one roadmap content update. Things like bug fixes had to be done as extra work and I recon the same goes for the "weekly" events.

My biggest concern is issue is that there is a lack of things to do in the game even if you've reached the "end game." We've now had a 6 week cycle where the meta game (that most people are participating in) solely revolves around farming arbitrary things on a list and exploiting game mechanics to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible. These are design level decisions that are making this game less enjoyable, less streamable, and less accessible for new players.

By stretching it to bi-weekly events they gave themselves a bit more development room, while presenting it as a way to give people more time to finish them. However even with a two week development cycle there's only so much you can do when it's not the core focus. Expecting completely new AI or big content updates as I've seen some suggesting here was in my opinion never a possibility.

I wish the focus would be fixing problems that are pervasive in the core game experience and sandbox, instead of releasing content for the sake of content. As someone who has been with this game since the alpha, I totally agree that people's expectations were unrealistic regarding this week and the the potential for mermaids. Again, the community in general is confused. Do people really want humanoid underwater AI threats when all of the current AI is as simplistic as it is? I don't even want AI ships, until they do a significant overhaul of all of the AI threats that currently exist. Ships will likely be introduced in the next content update, and it'll be just one more thing like the Kraken and Meg that people will complain about because, the AI in this game is just horrendous across the board.

As for the commendation, I agree that they should never be the main focus. The timed nature of the events and doubloons clearly put a focus on them which can make it feel like a grind and also limit the discovery they talked about in their videos. However they are something you can do alongside your usual voyages (the thrones being a slight exception with the multi crew requirement part). Even though hitting statues, exploding barrels or sitting on thrones might not be equally enjoyable for everyone it does offer a variation from the usual gameplay. Outside the events (especially for new players), the commendations would act more like the commendations of the other factions, small rewards for accomplishing something that you might not have been actively pursuing.

I think the encouragement of exploiting game mechanics is exaggerated as that's not the way you HAVE to do it and it's usually something you'd be more likely to see in crews that ARE grinding all the content as fast as possible. You're right though skeletons can't swin so they'll group up on the beach, scuttling your ship will transport you to another island and server hopping will increase your changes to do forts. I don't think these are easy things to solve though, especially not in the context of an event. Maybe Cursed Sails will deliver us our worst nightmare though, swimming skeletons.

Exploiting game mechanics is certainly not something you have to do, but unfortunately this game has had very little to do since the alpha. I maintain that really the only major improvement added late in the alpha/beta was the introduction of skull forts and the emergent gameplay that came out of those events. Rare claims that they didn't anticipate the race to pirate legend, but now they have a whole host of people who are just grinding towards meaningless horizontal progression like it's their full time job.

In my view, this is not what Rare promised with their original vision. Throughout development they talked about the toxicity in many multiplayer titles, and how SoT was going to be different. Unfortunately the emphasis on commendations has made it more of the same. The emphasis should return to organic emergent play that comes out of player to player interaction compounded by environmental events and AI threats. If the focus returns to this, I can guarantee that not only will the game be better, but people might actually want to start streaming it again. I can guarantee that relatively few want to stream sessions where the primary late game activity is smashing/farming statues.

Having Sea of Thieves being developed with streaming in mind is an ambitious thing to strive to as it's not a fast paced competitive game and it lacks the creativity of sandbox games like Rust or Minecraft. At this moment it's just an adventure game with fun moments, crew interactions and long stretches of sailing. I don't think anything Rare can add soon will boost streaming views for more than just showing off some new content. It's interesting to think about what they could add to make it more interesting to watch without making it less fun to play though.

Rare stated repeatedly during development that this game was essentially created for streaming. They've lost sight of this vision post launch. Again, I'm not a streamer, but I think the vision of creating something like Rust or Minecraft was a great idea. Unfortunately, I do not think there are currently interactive elements to create the types of emergent gameplay that exists in those titles. This is especially true if Rare maintains a focus on commendation farming. People will commendation farm like a bunch of addicts, until design level decisions influence player behavior to remind them that there are other more enjoyable things to do in this game.

I'm not blind for the issues that are in this game, however a focus on specifically these events as one of the "significant problems" and indication of Rare losing sight of their direction seems to be misguided to me. I'm having fun with the events as quirky little side things to do and have no expectation of them ever being more than that. I'm still positive about Cursed Sails being more like THD as a content update which adds to the world, I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks.

I'm looking forward to Cursed Sails too, but I really do not have high hopes for the AI ships. Rare really needs to put an emphasis on fixing the current AI, because I just do not see this turning into anything but just another mechanic to farm/exploit.

I can understand why when the alternative is no improvements/updates people will defend these bi-weekly events, but this is not what I think many alpha users had in mind when Rare spoke of being able to dynamically introduce elements into the game world during development. If anything, the E3 (2017; or was it PAX?) event where you had to triangulate some coordinates on the map in order to find a sunken ship containing a time-limited treasure was more in line with what people were expecting. Instead we are smashing statues, which again if the alternative is nothing, I suppose it is preferable, but it doesn't really suggest that this game is heading in a very thoughtful direction.

The AI ships are going to be terrible. Given all the existing AI right now, I can't see any possible outcome where they are a fun engagement. They will either be ridiculously hard due to incredible accuracy or ridiculously easy because of how dumb and exploitable the AI will be. Both paths lead to them becoming an annoyance rather than a rewarding encounter.

I'm surprised they caved on their "all ships on the sea are players" mantra, though I suspect it is due to not really having a direction on where to go with fleshing out the world and simply following the large number of requests for this from players who simply have no clue how terrible it is going to be, or they are trying to combat the incredibly low and dull encounter rates on the seas by planting these ships out there so you at least do "something" while ferrying from point A to B.

Right from launch they should have made fleshing out the world, improving the AI and revamping the voyage system their top priority. These are the pillars of Sea of Thieves and they've been neglected.

@d3adst1ck said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

The AI ships are going to be terrible. Given all the existing AI right now, I can't see any possible outcome where they are a fun engagement. They will either be ridiculously hard due to incredible accuracy or ridiculously easy because of how dumb and exploitable the AI will be. Both paths lead to them becoming an annoyance rather than a rewarding encounter.

I'm surprised they caved on their "all ships on the sea are players" mantra, though I suspect it is due to not really having a direction on where to go with fleshing out the world and simply following the large number of requests for this from players who simply have no clue how terrible it is going to be, or they are trying to combat the incredibly low and dull encounter rates on the seas by planting these ships out there so you at least do "something" while ferrying from point A to B.

Right from launch they should have made fleshing out the world, improving the AI and revamping the voyage system their top priority. These are the pillars of Sea of Thieves and they've been neglected.

When Microsoft does this sort of focus testing for all of their products it usually ends badly. It's no surprise that all of their IPs are as stagnant as they are in this Xbox One era.

Quite honestly, I think the vast majority of consumers do not know what they're talking about, have not fully thought through their ideas, or do not have the ability to articulate themselves clearly.

Meanwhile, the most thoughtful and articulate Sea of Thieves fans like @ShootHere4EXP (the user who created that wonderful post launch content poll, and ship design threads) seem to be largely abandoning the game or at the very least, posting here less frequently. Which is indicative of larger community engagement issues, and the fact that Rare has largely abandoned their official forums in favor of social media sites.

I still believe that the "bible" for the SoT universe is that art book that they released through Vertigo. Unlike most current Microsoft 1st party studios, Rare also seemed to have creative leads that at the very least had a clear creative vision for what this game should be even if they frequently ran into issues making that vision a reality.

@dunkachino1124

You can do them solo. I did two rubies solo last night. Probably impossible if they are deep in the water, but if they are only half submerged (like many are on the beach) you should hit them repeatedly with your sword for 5 minutes ish.

I think all of the problems with these updates have been the community actually being vocal about wanting content..

But we for the most part aren't exactly speaking up about what kinda content we want.

A bunch of posts there isn't anything to do. So they give us something else to do that isn't fetch quests.

Then there are mixed reviews on everything. Some people liked the GP skellies. Personally, I thought the event was too grindy and wasn't doable in a 2 week timeframe without server hopping or devoting 80hrs into the game. Which is unrealistic to ask anyone to do for such a casual game like this.

There must have been a HUGE backlash for AI ships.. which there was with the pve vs pvp debate.

Mind you, the devs are probably just now releasing things that we complained or asked for several months ago. For this, pretty much at launch. They completely ditched their original map because they are listening.

I guess, we need to speak up about WHAT and WHY we want certain things. Do we want more things to do?

Lately the same people that are complaining about lack of things to do... are also complaining that thrones or statues isn't things to do.

They are.. and they are different from the fetch quest base, but also something additional to do while doing those main/base missions.

I agree with what many have complained here about adding AI to the game.. when we already have dumb AI. I have a feeling these AI ships will just sail in their paths, playing like mobile skeleton forts. But they will introduce the new ship and cannonballs.

I've made posts trying to flush out ideas that seem to be based on the game already. I like others want to see more social experiences that bring people together, since there is already plenty of incentive for people to be cruel to each other.

I just posted earlier today my new idea regarding the casino/tavern games based on my convo last night with the barkeep. It got no traction at all. But there have been tons of posts wanting a Tortuga.. which.. if you look at my concept.. we can already have if they tweek the outposts.

This is something that can be done relatively easy.. as compared to building and balancing a whole new island.

But I guess that is where the community is lacking. We have had some good concepts... and I'm sure some of them Rare has had themselves. What they seem to be having a problem with is balancing these new ideas with ways to make them work in game.. I personally think that call for help was in that help wanted ad for a design contractor.

We have an empty world.. we have seen what kind of things they are able to add on a weekly basis.. with a couple months dev time. Let us be realistic with our expectations.

If we want evil merfolk.. which they have a design for, but unused.. what will they really be used for? What will they being to the fold that the sharks already represent? I mean, if we are just going to add another shark in the water that chases us like the homing-skellies on land that just has a merfolk skin... will that really add to the game, when there isn't any reason to go underwater?

Before we get merfolk.. we need a reason to be underwater. We need AI pathing to be more dynamic to really make them a threat so they aren't just the same monster with a different skin.

Lets help build the path to what we want to see. Lets root the building blocks in these little content like drops that will give us something to do.

Furthermore, lets be patient.

The statues seem dumb... but what if they are the building block to merfolk and being able to breath underwater longer?

Remember, there is a lot of magic in the game, but it is also difficult to give players the ability to do magic that also keeps with the core design of horizontal progression.

@puck269 The problem with the content they have been adding up to now is that it is all peripheral to the main gameplay loop. I'll just copy/paste some stuff I just added to a different thread which sums up my feelings on what is missing:

@d3adst1ck said in Sea of Thieves is becoming underwhelming.:

I don't want Battle Royale. I don't want Halo gear (whatever that would be). I want to be able to explore the world and find things to do - basically what all the pre-release trailers and hype were saying I could do - and that is just not there. There is no exploration beyond the initial couple of hours because nothing on any of the islands changes. There are no new discoveries to be made there.

I wrote out long explanations as to why this game does not deliver during the pioneer sessions in alpha and what they need to do to address the problems with the game's core gameplay loop. Their quest system is fantastic, but it is severely under-utilized. They should be introducing completely new mechanics or quest types for each Trading Company every 5 levels to add variety and within those 5 levels expanding on the new mechanic. By the time you reach the higher levels, there should be tons of variety to keep players interested in continuing on with the main loop.

Islands should have more emergent events occurring on them that changes up the experience nearly every time you go there - random caves, invasion encounters, story NPCs, washed up wrecks or NPCs, quest givers, etc... Enemies should drop small bits of loot, lore books, or even quests or hints to larger story arcs to make them worth encountering. Things should be changing so that you are encouraged to go out and find out what has been changed since your last session. The shipwrecks are a good example of this, but again - not expanded on or utilized enough.

There are lots of things they could be doing to make this game worthwhile, but instead they are pushing out short, limited-time distractions. I'm waiting around to see if any of the "big" expansions fix the core issues with the main game before I give up on it for good. This game has a lot of potential but none of it has been realized.

I also had a number of problems with how they've designed the map and how it creates issues that affect PvP, PvE and player meta. I think at this point it is probably a huge technical problem and is unlikely to be addressed though.

@d3adst1ck See, I tend to play in an explorer type way myself. I think the reintroduction of underwater item spawns will help with that..

I think a lot of what you are asking for is in the game, but probably not how you are intending to come across, otherwise you would be happy.

I've certainly been finding a lot of lore books (bottles on land) all over lately and increased spawning of those. The books are kinda neat too, with a little bit of story added in there.

Yes, it would be nice if some of the things in the base game were expanded on. It would be nice to have some differing quest types from each alliance.

Some of the things that would be nice isn't technically possible with the way the game has to be built around the fluid servers.. Like being able to bury treasure and have it grow in value.. but they could do things like the longer you keep a chest on your boat it increases in value by how much you travel.

If you look at it one way.. enemies dropping loot is now a thing. If you kill a skellie with a GP, you are able to keep the GP barrel if you don't blow it up.

They have increased the difficulty of the OoS quests while also making them less time consuming with the GP spawns.

It would have been nice had they actually programmed them to pick up random GP barrels like it implied that they could.. but maybe that will come down the road.

You asked for more thing beyond the quests... and the statues and thrones are just that.. they weren't overly time consuming, not very repeatable.. but it is something to do.

Like specifically, what is it you want to do that sounds like fun? You listed washed up random items.. in the game.. you listed lore books.. while not dropped from enemies.. is in the game.

We have had events that have changed up the world. That uncharted island in the middle of the map, that mast didn't used to stick out w/ Merrick's journal on it.. but that has changed.

I too would like to see more life in the world.. but I wonder how much of that was based on their hope of the servers being more populated then they are for balance of pvp issues.

Going back to the alpha, with suggestions.. we all knew back in the alpha we were told that these quests were just a fraction of what they had planned. I don't remember a lot of outcry about the repetitive nature, because things were so sectioned off.. and they never gave us the full build at once to play in. It was disappointing that the hoarders and OoS missions didn't change much from the alpha days. I think the minority like you that were complaining, were drowned out by the hope and optimism of the majority of us.

The game was also a lot more cooperative and friendly too.. which was a shock when all the kids got ahold of the game and became pvp jerks.

Yes, there was the outpost camping issue.. but I never experienced it myself. So I think when there was this pushback about how pvp the game was and people wanted pve stuff.. that really had the team drop their roadmap and push back all the fun things we should have by now, like pets, etc. because they needed to create a more friendly enviroment first like what we had in the alpha.. to get people to stop being so paranoid and aggressive.

@puck269 said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

You asked for more thing beyond the quests... and the statues and thrones are just that.. they weren't overly time consuming, not very repeatable.. but it is something to do.

Like specifically, what is it you want to do that sounds like fun? You listed washed up random items.. in the game.. you listed lore books.. while not dropped from enemies.. is in the game.

Yes, in isolation those are definitely more things to do - as a side distraction. They don't impact the day-to-day voyages or exploration that the game is built upon - or at least in the cases of the thrones/statues don't go far enough. This is why the events that introduce these features are missing the mark. The core gets incredibly stale quite quickly and the only solution that Rare has provided is to give more of the same but longer.

My entire issue with the game is that they have these ideas and features but they are so limited in scope. Its frustrating to look at nearly ever facet of the game outside of the ship sailing and wonder why didn't they delve into this idea farther?

Voyages - 4 types for 50 levels in each Trading Company. Surely there can be more variety here.

Washed up Items/Bottles - This partly ties into the first issue, because right now its mostly a random delivery system for the same 4 voyage types. I'm sure they could add more uses for these.

Skull Forts - just a larger version of OoS spawns. Can't the fort work in stages that you have to fight through kind of like a fort would actually work? Doors that need to be destroyed, or bridges raised or lowered. Something to make them more interactive than just doing wave after wave of the same simplistic enemies.

Islands - hand crafted but no soul. Nothing interesting every happens here. There is so much room for improvement to make these worth exploring every time you set sail. Randomization is needed here; paths, caves, fortifications, wildlife, inhabitants - anything at all to make going back to the locations some kind of surprise or to give the sense that exploring them again might be worth your time.

There are of course tons of suggestions on these forums that don't fit within the type of game that Sea of Thieves is trying to be - like Battle Royale, or basebuilding or stashing/burying treasure - but there is definitely room to expand upon the basic features they already have to enrich the core gameplay loop and reduce a lot of the repetitiveness.

@williamherschel said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

The new event/content updates continue to be antithetical to previously stated design concepts. Yesterday's update brought us static statues that do not move (and furthermore do not even function as intended). At the most core level I do not understand how farming randomly spawning statues adds to a multiplayer experience that was largely built around designing a game that was fun to stream and play with friends. Nobody wants to watch groups of 1-4 players whack randomly spawning small objects. Even if farming non-moving randomly spawned objects is your thing, they don't even function as intended. It's entirely possible to kill all three statue types as a single or duo player. This is largely due to the fact that the statue's damage radius doesn't work properly. You can be out of range of that radius and still make constant contact with your sword. In general, they feel really cheaply made from a design standpoint. The way that the statues interact with player weapons feel like interacting with a glitch. There is no sense of blunt force impact or anything outside of the "expansion/explosion" animation that the statues progress through as they lose health.

It still blows my mind that a game development studio would think this is a fun thing to add to the game. It feels like Rare is simply adding "things to do" arbitrarily, or rather they are simply rolling out the easiest possible types of weekly events (the type that require minimal development time).

Because Rare continues to ignore larger deficiencies in the SoT sandbox, the late-game meta has essentially devolved into commendation farming. Which is even more frustrating because commendations themselves have a host of glitches and UI/UX issues. We are coming off of a two-week event where the most significant (albeit also arbitrary) commendation didn't function properly throughout the event's 2-week duration. Now for some reason, the legendary gunpowder exploder title, from last week shows up as locked (incomplete) even if you completed it last week and purchased the 0 doubloon title.

This commendation-based meta game is truly antithetical to the core experience of SoT. It's fine if these things hidden bonuses scattered throughout the world in addition to more significant updates, but these cannot and should not be the focus of post-launch development going forward. They're dictating player behavior in a completely uninteresting way, and a good chunk of players are now simply doing things to make horizontal progression or check-off that they've completed a given commendation. This is encouraging late-game players to grind for the sake of it, and very likely making this game far less accessible and friendly to new players. Very frequently I see LFG crews who are essentially mining horizontal progression, and have essentially de-emphasized the social elements of this game entirely. This game needs the sandbox itself to be more fleshed out, not one-off events to be farmed.

To make matters even worse, the commendation-based gameplay is encouraging players to exploit the game's mechanics. Last week's primary strategy involved exploiting skeleton AI to aggro a single player (because they are glorified homing missiles) and drawing them all into the shoreline to group them together. I still do not understand why Rare would create a weekly event that essentially placed further emphasis on the AI deficiencies that exist in this game.

Meanwhile the game is still filled with significant bugs and performance issues. Last week's build had significant issues with crashing (especially during galleon vs galleon scenarios). Each new update seems to introduce new bugs, and largely ignore a significant chunk of bugs that have been in the game since alpha. Draw distance and performance continues to be (optimized/downgraded) with no mention in patch notes.

A lot of the folks I played with extensively in the alpha are minimally interested in this game now. I believe this is largely due to the fact that Rare has lost sight of the direction that made this game so promising in the first place, and are now simply trying to fill the game with "content" instead of giving players meaningful and fun things to do in the sandbox.

We can hold out hope that Cursed Sails will change course and begin to add more layers to the sandbox, but it seems entirely likely that beyond new canon ball types the update will simply introduce more things to farm in a largely empty world. Even though I'm not a streamer myself, I continue to maintain that the original concept to design a game that was fun to stream and share with friends was a great idea and spawned some wonderful mechanics. Rare has lost sight of that with these recent updates.

Winge winge winge

"New and interesting ways...'' - Mike Chapman repeats that in every interview yet I'm still waiting for a single interesting event to make me go back ot the game.

Those weekly events are totally useless and dont' bring any new players in. Waste of resources. Spend that time to work on new sandbox tools (dice, maybe some cards etc.)

Needs to be MORE vocal? You must not frequent the forums often.

@dem0nscarer said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

If I could sail to new unknown islands and actually feel and see the island brimming with life (more that just pigs snakes and chickens) and actually give the ocean more life and beauty and I would be happy. But I'm an ex pioneer what do I know

Yeah, this is a big issue for me. If you watch the early trailers for SoT, you can see how they originally wanted these islands to be filled with life. A lot of alpha players were holding out hope that at some point they would introduce more flora and fauna, but that really never happened, and the animals they did introduce basically just pace back and forth and scatter. Half the time they're walking under the surface of the water.

@lucid-stew said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

@williamherschel said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

Rare continues to ignore larger deficiencies in the SoT sandbox

That's because there is no sandbox. A while ago they published a little piece about optimizing for UE4, and sort of revealed the basic problem with SoT. They are dedicating so many resources to the ships that there basically isn't processing power to do much else. This is why every THING, except for ships and cannonballs, in the game is static, stationary, or an inventory item. They can't build a sandbox. This is why the most compelling content they've added so far is the Meg encounter. It's an interesting thing they were able to do with ships. Cursed Sails and cursed cannonballs? Ships. Cool stuff with ships and lame stuff on land will be the theme, because that it is the corner they painted themselves into.

Always wondered if the game was falling short due to something like this.... Sad to hear they finally admitted it, but it’s better than hoping in vain for another 2 years or whatever...

@williamherschel said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

@dem0nscarer said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

If I could sail to new unknown islands and actually feel and see the island brimming with life (more that just pigs snakes and chickens) and actually give the ocean more life and beauty and I would be happy. But I'm an ex pioneer what do I know

Yeah, this is a big issue for me. If you watch the early trailers for SoT, you can see how they originally wanted these islands to be filled with life. A lot of alpha players were holding out hope that at some point they would introduce more flora and fauna, but that really never happened, and the animals they did introduce basically just pace back and forth and scatter. Half the time they're walking under the surface of the water.

That's what I don't get. Why the hell Rare spends resources on c****y throne or statue events instead of adding more life to the game? Yesterday I and my mates watched the intriguing trailer of the statues event. It looked very mysterious...so after months of absence we logged in ti check it out.We spawned in. A statue was just next to us on the shore, half wet only. We destroyed it in a moment, it vanished, left nothing. End of mystery and event for us. Logged out. Waste of time. And I was once one of the biggest fanboys of the game.

Events like this makes me not want to try the game ever again. It's just so cheap. The trailer was very misleading.

@captain-surgee said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

@williamherschel said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

@dem0nscarer said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

If I could sail to new unknown islands and actually feel and see the island brimming with life (more that just pigs snakes and chickens) and actually give the ocean more life and beauty and I would be happy. But I'm an ex pioneer what do I know

Yeah, this is a big issue for me. If you watch the early trailers for SoT, you can see how they originally wanted these islands to be filled with life. A lot of alpha players were holding out hope that at some point they would introduce more flora and fauna, but that really never happened, and the animals they did introduce basically just pace back and forth and scatter. Half the time they're walking under the surface of the water.

That's what I don't get. Why the hell Rare spends resources on c****y throne or statue events instead of adding more life to the game? Yesterday I and my mates watched the intriguing trailer of the statues event. It looked very mysterious...so after months of absence we logged in ti check it out.We spawned in. A statue was just next to us on the shore, half wet only. We destroyed it in a moment, it vanished, left nothing. End of mystery and event for us. Logged out. Waste of time. And I was once one of the biggest fanboys of the game.

Events like this makes me not want to try the game ever again. It's just so cheap. The trailer was very misleading.

It’s like they try harder to make us quit the game than they ever tried to make us want to play it... again, just sad and pathetic compared to what we all hoped.

@lucid-stew If that's the case then it doesn't inspire much hope for them finally improving mechanics like varied ship damage. Things like torn sails/rigging, broken masts, disabled modules like the capstan/rudder/cannons, fire damage, etc.

In a Q&A back before the games launch we had an answer that implied we could expect ship damage to be expanded on alongside the introduction of the kraken. Turns out that rather than making ship damage more in depth, they just made the kraken super underwhelming instead.

Now hearing this and seeing how Rare has dealt with updating the game, hoping for this stuff seems pointless.

Rare said they wanted replayability with these events. I don’t see myself killing stone statues, launching to thrones and trying to get chain reactions from gunpowder skeletons once these events end... as there is nothing to really gain from them.