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@jon-sea-nah Why do they need incentive to leave the bubble? The two options for someone aren't "play Safer Seas" or "play High Seas". There is also, "play neither." You can't force people to play something they don't enjoy.

I could see them adding limited Captaincy - captained ships without milestone progression, if just so players can use trinkets, paintings and ship crests, as well as name and save the look of the ship.

It could also be a good way to introduce the concept of full Captaincy before players go to the High Seas, where they can take full advantage of the feature.

At this stage, this is the only idea for Safer Seas changes that I am slightly onboard with... again, with the caveat that it would be limited.

@merlin-mav-k said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

It's completely bizarre to see people arguing against Captained ships in SS. If you already have a Captained ship, you have put a TON of time and effort into the game as it has always existed up to this point. If you don't have one, a grind exclusively in SS to acquire enough resources to buy one would be a Herculean task few would ever attempt with seriousness.

As described, SS is a player literally alone, or with up to 3 pre-determined friends/family members on their crew. How anyone should concern themselves with how these people's ships are DECORATED like while playing this way is borderline unhinged? I can see an argument for taking away Sovereign turn ins in SS I suppose, but again if you've already achieved Captaincy it seems like a really weird and pointless penalty and if you haven't yet achieved it the work to do something like that exclusively in SS is kind of ridiculous to contemplate.

Most of the people that are going to be happiest with SS are just going to enjoy playing and do not concern themselves with peacocking rewards and cosmetics, or are looking forward to creating photos/videos etc. with the suite of things they have built up. Do people really think players are going to grind something like Captaincy in SS and then come to flex their endgame Galleons and Commendations in front of you during FOTD contests on Higher Seas? Do you guys hear yourselves?

My personal opinion from looking in, I think that it’s one of those tipping points. Like ya it seems small, but then so does harpoon turn in if they only get 30%, then more is added. Ship customization is still in there, you can decorate how you see fit. The point of not adding these things is to keep/move players to high seas.

If PVE players have everything they want in SS what incentive do they have to leave that protective bubble?

@wynnsworld94 said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@wolfmanbush Well they'd still need to earn their captaincy on the high seas, but then it would be good if we could then take our captained ship back to the safer seas.

But do you see how you still come back to ya, but…

Safer seas is meant as an extended maiden voyage. No captaincy should be allowed. It’s a very stripped down world to get you ready for high seas

Necromongers!

@gravesilence272

Why would High Seas become pointless? People who enjoy open world PvP will of course play there instead of on Safer Seas.

@auren-dawn said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@orloglausa said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

I suspect interest in PvE-only will increase post-launch, but if players can't save cosmetics/designs to ships, they won't buy cosmetics. That's a lost cosmetic market for Rare, given the path to making it possible (and/or easy?) for players is just enabling captained ships.

This right here is why I wouldn't be surprised if ship cosmetics end up being one of the first restrictions they relax on. A cosmetic a player in safer seas can't use is a cosmetic that player isn't spending money on.

ALL cosmetics that can be bought with real money can be used in safer seas, thus making your whole post irrelevant.

@cptnpotbeard said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@dekayone3006 LOL game is Sea of Thieves. PVP will always be a core part of the game. If you can't accept that this game isn't for you. So sick of people whining and crying about PvP in a PvP game. Go back to your little gathering simulators if you don't want a shared world.

I’m so sick of people having terrible attitudes and attacking other players because they do or do not prefer PvP in their video games.

Can we all grow up and remember the point of playing games?

@lem0n-curry

I believe they are referring to the numerous trinkets, and other decorations, that can be purchased in the Emporium.

@auren-dawn said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@orloglausa said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

I suspect interest in PvE-only will increase post-launch, but if players can't save cosmetics/designs to ships, they won't buy cosmetics. That's a lost cosmetic market for Rare, given the path to making it possible (and/or easy?) for players is just enabling captained ships.

This right here is why I wouldn't be surprised if ship cosmetics end up being one of the first restrictions they relax on. A cosmetic a player in safer seas can't use is a cosmetic that player isn't spending money on.

Before captaincy ship cosmetics weren't saved either - cosmetics were still bought. Not getting saved doesn't mean they can't use it.

@orloglausa said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

I suspect interest in PvE-only will increase post-launch, but if players can't save cosmetics/designs to ships, they won't buy cosmetics. That's a lost cosmetic market for Rare, given the path to making it possible (and/or easy?) for players is just enabling captained ships.

This right here is why I wouldn't be surprised if ship cosmetics end up being one of the first restrictions they relax on. A cosmetic a player in safer seas can't use is a cosmetic that player isn't spending money on.

@wolfmanbush said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@wynnsworld94 said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

Sorry, I didn't mean captaincy as a whole, literally just my ship with it's own name. That's all I want, not the progression. I don't see how that would be a problem at all.

I understand and empathize with that but as the goal is to get people into the high seas there has to be serious incentives to do so.

Don't kid yourself. The goal of Safer Seas is to bring more people in/back to make more money. It has nothing to do with an arbitrary honor/reputation system. If enough people complain about it and stop playing, it will get changed just as the very existence of Safer Seas is a perfect example of. The community was asking for a PvE only mode for years and it was always a hard "not a chance" and yet here we are. It is always about money. Rare and Microsoft do not care about your rank or how many times you've repaired your ship or how many fish you've caught; they care about their bottom line. To think otherwise is foolish.

@dekayone3006 LOL game is Sea of Thieves. PVP will always be a core part of the game. If you can't accept that this game isn't for you. So sick of people whining and crying about PvP in a PvP game. Go back to your little gathering simulators if you don't want a shared world.

I just want to see how many Skelton ships me and my ole lady have slaughtered or days we’ve been afloat or number of repairs made to the ship. The ship tells just as much a story as the pirates do!!Any way to have the ships with the logs but no access to sovereign selling ? I don’t know maybe be even a special captain ship only for safer seas since it’s kind of like a campaign mode already

No way they're running servers locally, unless they drop Xbox One support.

@d3adst1ck said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

The game isn't built that way, and re-engineering the structure of how the game works is not something they are going to do for this.

The game is built on a client/server network architecture: distributed instanced servers are pretty trivial given that basic architecture (I spent a decade designing them), especially compared to some of the literally impossible things players demand they do.

They could probably even make the changes without the client process even really knowing the difference.

@dekayone3006
Yet you cared enough to post about how you don't care. Ironic.

@ghutar sagte in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@dekayone3006
I just finish swiming in Carraibean (Rivera Maya) and the sea water there is less salty than your's post xD

Never cared less

@dekayone3006
I just finish swiming in Carraibean (Rivera Maya) and the sea water there is less salty than your's post xD

Enyway as one wise guy posted:

Użytkownik @ictus-xxi napisał w Safe Seas Rewards Too Low:

The idea behind safer seas is 2 things:

1.To serve as an extended maiden voyage for new players to get used to the game.
2.to serve as PTR for more seasoned players to test out things without the danger of getting interrupted. SoT shot sessions, loot stack pictures or speedrunning different voyages or encounters would fall under this category.

Safer Seas are NOT PvE servers where seasoned players can flee to to grind gold, reputation, milestones etc. in peace without getting interrupted. To prevent that from happening, but also to make it a rewarding experience for new players that make them curious for more, the devs decided to leave some commendations, leave some rep and Gold-gain un but to disable everything a more seasoned players could squeeze out of safer seas despite it going against the core idea behind Safer Seas.

Sea of Thieves is a sandbox PvPvE game where your potential goals are locked behind a struggle against the environment as well as players. If you play the game for its aesthetics, safer seas should still be able to provide a satisfying experience. However if you want the rewards without the struggle SoT is not the game for you - at least in theory. In practice no one is stopping you from joining/setting up alliance servers - it does sound like that’s the thing you’re looking for.

Same reasoning is for locking capitancy out of Seafer Seas to push players onto Higher Seas.

Personaly I would love if folks just enjoyed game without need to namecalling when it comes to PVP it's childish and honestly sadly.

@cptnpotbeard

Answers like that is exactly why im happy that Safer Seas is coming and it will grow to a full experience...
Accept the Future... The behaviour of the PvP Aspect changed in a way that many players left.
PvP will die out or shrink to meaninglessnes

@dank-jimb0 said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

My only argument against this is that there is one benefit of safer seas and that is just enjoying the tall tales. You will have to do the tall tales in high seas again if you want to get the captaincy trinkets complete.

Guild ships will be able to progress Captaincy, so you, personally, don't even need to do it (just buy the ship, pledge it to the guild, let those commendations, and thus achievements/trophies roll in). You just need to be in a guild and have someone do it for you. (And my cynical brain says we'll see for-profit guilds, with real world money changing hands. We've seen it in plenty of other games.) Guilds basically undermine the whole 'can't earn captaincy progression in Safer Seas' and simultaneously create a new set of problems for Rare to manage. But on the flip side, Guilds are an important social aspect, and come with a significant number of benefits for regular players (like a captained ship not being lost due to a networking issue and thus killing a session).

The most straightforward solution is to acknowledge that captaincy in Safer Seas doesn't harm anyone else, nor does it being gated entice people to the High Seas. More importantly, without the ability to save cosmetics to a ship, or to use trinkets, Rare isn't selling those to people who aren't otherwise going to play High Seas.

@d3adst1ck said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

The reason is for business. They don't want large numbers of players playing in Safer Seas, because running one of those instances is more expensive than a regular instance which services 5 additional ships and many more players. Running more instances is more overhead, more expense. They want to make it less appealing for players who already know how to play and an easy way to do that is disable features that are not for the specific group they are targeting (new players trying to figure out how the game works).

I have to ask, what's this assumption based on? The facts we have are:

1. They're introducing Safer Seas without charging for server access to it, which makes it very different to the old Custom Servers;
2. The Custom Servers weren't profitable enough to be used, and these are somehow just part of the game.

From that, we know Rare must have a vector to make money from it, so they've obviously found a way to ameliorate them. Adding a captained ship into that context isn't going to keep people in it longer, in fact, having a faster selling rate decreases the selling cycle time, so, it feels a bit backwards to say it causes some kind of harm. Those who don't like PvP just won't play, which in turn loops back into the problem.

Until Rare says it costs them a lot more to run Safer Seas, we can't assume that. From a business perspective, they've obviously decided it's needed, which means they've obviously partially solved the problem.

@every-henry said in Captained ships in Safer Seas:

@orloglausa , I see your point but before captaincy , we had to sell to respective company and it used to consume precious time in adventure mode. If I understood SS correctly , the time parked at a port won't be an issue anymore. Imo , Port Merrick is way better than Dagger Tooth.

Yes, and we've all been there (at least pre-Captaincy). But more time in port does mean more time with the server spinning, and people hitting High Seas withoout knowing about it. It also means, once again, less opportunity for Rare to get cosmetic sales through the emporium, which I have to assume is their primary revenue stream.

There's no Athena in Safer Seas (yet?), otherwise Ancient Spire would be a fun headache too.

For me, the bottom line is that Guilds undermine it to the point where it doesn't matter where people earn it. If anything, it's better for Rare, overall, that it's there. I'm a Pirate Legend, and have my ships, so it's not like this means a lot to me from a general gameplay sense. But equally, I don't want to see new players not using the Sovereign, not using captained ships because of the cost (thanks to the Safer Seas income nerf, they're a huge investment), and not seeing a huge part of the gameplay QOL. New players need to see they can earn QOL to keep them invested enough; moving to the High Seas won't tell them about Captaincy, and they won't experience it, so it'll actively hurt transition rates.

I feel the same way about emissary flags being missing (even if they were significantly reduced), and the emissary caps (because who does it actually hurt?), but those are future issues to consider when data rolls in. Captaincy is an issue pre-release, because it needs to be considered, and should exist in a way where you can introduce friends to the QOL they'll earn. It's really a combination of social and general support structures.

@merlin-mav-k
I know, right? As much as I disagree with the other restrictions on Safer Seas, at least I can see the reasons behind them. Gating Captained ships is completely nonsensical and arbitrary. If people are so worried about the commendations, they can just disable them and still keep the cosmetics, much like they are doing with the pvp commendations in the rest of Safer Seas.
Of course, the people arguing that it should stay removed are just as ridiculous, and I would even go so far as to say that they aren't borderline unhinged, but fully unhinged in the same way that most rich boomers are.

@dlchief58 How about being able to show it off to your family and friends (your crew) without having the "tour" interrupted 2 seconds in by PvP hungry players camping outposts? Or maybe being able to make videos featuring yourself on your own personal ship without having to constantly account for chaotic unpredictable variables like those same players hunting you down every time you try to do something other than pvp? If you think about it outside the bubble of flaunting your ship to people who don't care to begin with, it's pretty easy to find a good deal of points to having a named ship without having other crews around.