How can we improve the alliance system?

What are you suggesting to improve alliances?

My crew alliances with people all the time, because we understand it’s a win/win in most cases and an increase in gold-per-hour coming in. It becomes especially lucrative when you can confidently run FoTD repeatedly.

I’m not sure really how they could improve on alliances besides increasing the % of gold gained?

We were hunting ships a couple nights ago, and came across a sloop that had just finished a fort. We were seconds from opening fire when we saw a galleon approaching. We teamed up with the sloop, sunk the galleon, and escorted the sloop back to an outpost. They then went and ran the FoTD while we protected the waters around them, sinking a few more ships. We both made a bunch more gold than we would have solo.

I have nothing against ships creating an Alliance..I don't do Alliances personally.. I just prefer to do my own thing wether that be solo or with my crew.. if a new player wants help..I'll help them without being in an Alliance

Getting more loot and gold is a bonus right? Not for me.. have that much gold and doubloons the appeal of gold is meh 🤷‍♂️

However I do have a problem with people trying to force me to join an Alliance.. I simply say no thanks, I won't join but I'm also not a threat unless you fire at me.. but then they get offended and keep going on and on and on saying "but more gold is great right". Or they keep following me and I automatically become a enemy because I don't want to be friends 🤣.. if there were incentives to team up i would.. like have a max number of ships in one Alliance.. say 3 so you could have fleet battles 👌 I'd be down.. needs work for sure that I can agree with!

@nic727

The alliance system needs more depth altogether. Betrayal is to be expected, as it's part of the risk that comes with the higher reward.

Right now the biggest incentive to alliances is how absurd of an amount of gold and rep you can boost/farm for. The fact that this is what makes alliances "worth it" to most people means that this mechanic is in desperate need of something to spice it up.

The focus of isolationist farming and boosting, and server takeovers needs to be removed from alliances completely. They need to do something with alliances that demands a little more actual close-knit cooperation and interaction to really earn those boosted rewards, rather than just let players put the flag up and sail on about their normal business, no differently than before,but earning extra rewards.

The current system is just kinda shallow and needs to be reworked in my opinion.

Think about why Rare added alliances to the game: The intent is extremely clear when you look at the timing of when this feature was added. It was added right after the Hungering Deep, which was an event which actually required multiple crews to team up on a larger task, and was added as a feature within the Cursed Sails Update, which again, was another event that required multiple crews to team up on a larger threat.

Clearly they wanted players to be brought closer in the world with this mechanic, like physically closer together to actually work together on something, and I feel that the current isolationist, antisocial boosting and farming is just a sad side effect to what they actually wanted alliances to be.

Personally I would like to see some kind of incentive or event to encourage alliance vs alliance behaviour.

@archaell

Too much risk, not enough rewards. The main issue is the risk tho. I would start with removing the option to leave the alliance. This alone would make the alliances much better for the normal people. Let the players to turn off the flag thingie, but keep up the alliance bonus for good. Wanna betray the alliance? Cool. But the other crews still get half. This change alone would make the alliance system more user friendly.

This only encourages cooperation over disaffiliation. This type of suggestion tips the scale into the favor of Alliances not into the betrayal of them. The expression is tools not rules, and by not allowing me to leave on my own terms, that is only added rules. It is rather silly to remove the ability to leave an Alliance. It goes against the spirit of a betrayal, because it begs the question, if you stole from them, why would they still get some? This is really similar to when people exchanged Athena Voyages to get the Thief title. While certainly it is one way to get the title, it was certainly not within the spirit of it.

I would argue adding 50% loot value per ship per Alliance is quite the big reward, especially when you have ships who will Alliance only to never see each other again. The goal of Alliance should be cooperation, not just boosting rewards.

I will just drop this here, some here probably have already read it, but I'd rather not retype everything or paste it here.

https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/106799/rework-alliance-system/16

@archaell said in How can we improve the alliance system?:

Too much risk, not enough rewards. The main issue is the risk tho. I would start with removing the option to leave the alliance. This alone would make the alliances much better for the normal people. Let the players to turn off the flag thingie, but keep up the alliance bonus for good. Wanna betray the alliance? Cool. But the other crews still get half. This change alone would make the alliance system more user friendly.

For how long ? What if the crew changes from the original ?

Then we could go for things like allowing respawning on the alliance's ships. This would promote cooperation a lot. You could have one person sail the ship, while the rest is helping the alliance find treasure.

Oh great, certainly for when the betrayal is gonna happen right after people dig up an Athena. Instead of being aware of where the other ships of the alliance are, the potential betrayers just can kill themselves and end up on your boat to either take a gander of what you are doing or take the stuff on your boat ?

Change how the bonus works. Instead of +50%. The bonus reward would be +75%, but you lose 25% from your own loot. It could be combined with my first point meaning that if you "leave" the alliance, you get 100% of your loot, but the alliance still gets 50% for it.

Give the alliance even more ? Nope, the allied ships can divide the bonus amongst themselves - more crews less money; the crew that turns in gets less than 100%. Say total is 125%, turning in gets you 75%; other crews get 50% / number of crews. I wouldn't mind if Rare decides the total can no longer be larger than of single crew turning in.

Also the alliances should have never been full server. Three ships are good enough.

Can get behind that.

1. Limit the number of ships in an alliance to three to prevent server takeover alliances.

2. Create commendations to encourage players to stay in an alliance and sell items while in an alliance.

3. Make those commendations to include selling while another alliance ship is at the same outpost - to encourage alliance ships to stick together.

4. Have alliance v alliance commendations to encourage fleet battles.

5. Mark the ship that breaks the alliance with a bounty (obviously, not when they leave the server). This could add some interesting conflict.

6. Have commendations for fighting other ships while you have an alliance-breaker bounty on your head.

Overall, I feel alliances should have a benefit but never be OP. They should always be a choice with pros and cons.

@realstyli some great points there.

Especially 1 & 4

I really feel they are missing a opportunity by not encouraging alliance vs alliance.

@nic727 Broadly speaking, I've always thought about the alliance system as more of a tentative relationship with another pirate crew. Sort of like, "well we can kinnnnnda trust em, but since we don't know theses pirates let's not trust them entirely.

Of course that's just the perspective I've made based on my experience playing with the system.

Since I'm the type of player who's willing to be open to alliances, but not looking to get robbed I've set up my own personal rules for who I'll maintain an alliance with.

Rule 1 They have to treat my crew with respect.

• Say for example I'm doing a fort, some other ship comes blazing wanting to ally up. To me it always feels like they're just using the system to get the benefit and bring nothing to the table. If I have the feeling another crew feel their entitled to a free 50% of the loot I earned because they were "nice" enough to not attack me. I take that as a sign of disrespect and entitlement. That I'd rather risk losing it all to sink them and put them in their place than join an alliance with them.

Rule 2 - They have to treat my ship with respect.

Another crew simply is not allowed to get within grenade throwing distance to my ship. If they touch my ladder I consider them hostile, because at best they're distracting me by causing the audio cue of getting out of the water to play that I associate with enemies attempting to sneak on board. At worst it's a ploy to try to spawn camp and rob me. Touch my ladder without asking they've broken the alliance.

Rule 3 Be professional. I go out and get the job done, so I expect an allied crew to do the same. If they're not out there earning and turning in. It's not benefiting my crew very much.

Breaking any of those rules is enough for me to disband the alliance... They can go earn their own way. I think all of my rules are very reasonable, but I'm sure the people who've broken those rules thinking they've done nothing wrong probably wouldn't agree.

So for the life of me I can't think of any suggestions to change the system that would help you, without negatively impacting me for simply playing defensively.

At first, I was thinking maybe if you attacked an allied ship or crew and then disbanded the alliance, You'd get a dialogue when selling loot, where the turn in NPCs said something like, "The mechandise is too hot, we can take it but we can only pay you 10% of it's value." Maybe for like 30 minutes it'd stay that way or untill your ship was sunk, or maybe each member of the crew would have to go to an NPC at the top of the sea dog tavern to get the price reduction penalty removed.

But as neat as all that might be, It'd still negatively impact players just protecting their own ship's loot.

Personally I think it's fine the way it is, I think you just need to get a little less trusting with the pirates out there.

Happened again last night. The alliance system is 99% trolls lol.

Boat comes up. Offers alliance. We accept and one boards our ship to say hi. My player stays on the boat while I jump off to find the chest. They're dancing and talking and as soon as I get far enough away from the boat, the enemy blunders my player and steals our boat. They werent very good, just caught us off guard.

So we respawn back on the boat, kill the loser, and then continue to chase them down and sink them. (They were stacked with loot)

The biggest issue here: as they sunk, they must have ragequit forcing a server merge. As the servers merged, all their loot in the water disappeared not less than 25 ft from our boat. AND we were right next to the Outpost...

Instacucked by Rare and the merge. lol. But yeah. Maybe make allianced members some sort of teammate. Could see the issue with not being able to damage them as they steal your loot an issue.. Forts are hard as an alliance, as we always end up accidentally killing each other when fighting the boss. (Blunder/sword)

There must be some streamer recently that has been joining alliances just to troll. All these little kids want to do the same thing but get so angry when you end up outplaying them and sinking their ships.

@xultanis-dragon

Hey Dragon, your post was very well said.

I happen to have been a player who got to athena's 10 before I finished my PL grind, and I did that thru normal skull forts. When I finished I felt like this game was nothing but a grind, and I was entirely burnt out and took a lonnnng break from it. When I heard the game begins after you hit PL I remember thinking, "there's no content, what a crock!"

Skippin forward in time, when I returned to playing, remember what made me fall in love with the game in the first place, I started doing more solo work, working on commendations instead. I remember there was this moment of clarity that hit me, that I realized only now was I doing the things I was supposed to be doing all along. Gold hoarder voyages, OOS voyages, Merchant.

Now I'm in this atmosphere where I'm thinking, "oh this is how people played the game BEFORE all that stuff that I took for granted was even released."

That's when I saw a HUGE leap of my own personal skill in this game develop. I began to learn the entire world map, instead of just knowing how to navigate the roar. I began realizing that the static spawn locations of tnt on forts was information WORTH remembering. I learned how to not only effectively defend my ship, but how to really stick it to players, often while I'm grossly outnumbered, for not respecting me as a player.

Confidence levels soared at that point to where I'm at now. I'm by all means not the best at the game, but now I know I'm heavily competent at the game, everything from sailing to fighting to never giving an opponent an advantage they didn't earn themselves.

I suppose in a way, by learning how to not be the prey. Naturally I became the predator who got to choose as you eloquently said.

I know in a round about way, this is all off topic. But I just wanted to let you know what you said really resonated with me, and I appreciate what you had said.

@nic727 said in How can we improve the alliance system?:

@doctor-meat a dit dans How can we improve the alliance system? :

Happened again last night. The alliance system is 99% trolls lol.

Boat comes up. Offers alliance. We accept and one boards our ship to say hi. My player stays on the boat while I jump off to find the chest. They're dancing and talking and as soon as I get far enough away from the boat, the enemy blunders my player and steals our boat. They werent very good, just caught us off guard.

So we respawn back on the boat, kill the loser, and then continue to chase them down and sink them. (They were stacked with loot)

The biggest issue here: as they sunk, they must have ragequit forcing a server merge. As the servers merged, all their loot in the water disappeared not less than 25 ft from our boat. AND we were right next to the Outpost...

Instacucked by Rare and the merge. lol. But yeah. Maybe make allianced members some sort of teammate. Could see the issue with not being able to damage them as they steal your loot an issue.. Forts are hard as an alliance, as we always end up accidentally killing each other when fighting the boss. (Blunder/sword)

There must be some streamer recently that has been joining alliances just to troll. All these little kids want to do the same thing but get so angry when you end up outplaying them and sinking their ships.

That’s why I think it would be better to get a bounty on people who destroy an alliance + a reward when you sink them. Maybe there will be less trolls.

Right now there is no penalty for them... only for you who played for hours for nothing.

The bounty idea isnt half bad. Marks them on the map for all on the server. Maybe you could buy it from the shipwright or at the bar.
A bit of a GTA online feel.