[Mega Thread] Balancing Exploration and Player Combat - Part 2
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@evilalienhybrid You're opinion is valid, but the forts add an element that is crucial for this game. Instance-based player interaction. If you don't like the fort experience just don't do it. Don't try and get it removed for everyone. The gold/hr ratio for a contested fort is very similar to just grinding missions right now, so just do that if you can't handle the competitiveness of the forts. Please keep these in, Rare.
Also, when you have "troll" in your name, it's hard to take your input seriously. lol You complain about not seeing enough people, but then complain that you see/fight too many people at the fort. IMO this is a terrible post my dude.
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@barnacle-blake I like the idea of hiding treasure for later, but getting the map from them if you kill them.
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@greaseman85 Do you go on the Gears of War forums and ask for PVE? lol This game is PVP in nature. I'm not saying it's wrong for you to want a pirate game where everyone holds hands and sings together, that's just never been this game so it's slightly annoying to see you consistently trying to push this game away from what this game has always been and what a pirate game SHOULD be.
Rare is smart though, so I'm sure they realize that one squeaky wheel is representative of most players. Hats of to you, Rare for the balance as it is. The frequency at which you see ships is nearly perfect, and the incentive to fight and ability to avoid a fight is almost perfectly balanced as well. Very well done on that front!
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I think a reward for completing a wave of a skull fort would not only promote competition to control the fort but to work together as well. Say you solo sloop you fight every wave alone get down to the final wave and get ganked by a crew that sinks your ship. Ok that's fine just fight back. Whoops server migration separates you from the fort and player who sunk you. Got robbed of loot and the chance to fight back.
A reward for the wave completion would quell the heart ache from PvP and we would see 4 man crews splitting 2 on land fighting pvpve and 2 on the sea fighting to keep the ship afloat. -
Honestly, I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet but I see a lot about sending ghost crews after people.
Why not make guards in outposts that "keep the peace"? Strong NPCs (that CAN be killed if the players are good enough) that attack players who attack others at port. Even pirates don't want their taverns getting shot up all the time.
Also, what about roving gangs of privateers? Once again, strong NPCs in galleons that go after players who've killed other players. Even adding bounties to those players so IRL people are hunting them along with the NPCs. Things like this would not only make PVP more risky, as attacking another player could potentially lead to you being attacked by strong enemies, but also adds to the PVE element by making the world come alive more, giving PVP players more rewards (through having chests on those NPC privateers, etc.). If a simple game like "Sid Meyer's Pirates!" could do something like this, why couldn't Sea Of Thieves do it?
I would love this because it would add another layer of risk like, "Should I go after this player who may not have anything on them, to risk losing what I have?"
Also, bring the death tax on players like this. If you attack another player, you're a marked pirate, and anyone who kills you gets your gold. Lose more gold the more people you kill. BOOM, griefing solved sort of.
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@slugmetal4
But that doesnt fix the griefing problem. It only punishes pvpers. Making outposts safe goes against the entire point of the game -
I've made a few suggestions in the customisation thread but some would be better suited here.
In terms of PvP I agree with what Rare stated during the development. No stats for weapons so that everyone is on a level playing field. If every weapon in the game has the same base damage then it is on Player Vs Player not Player Vs overpowered equip player purely because they played the game before the other guy!
However for the PvE aspect, weapons with stats for PvE only could give a feel of progression. Example Sword of Souls that burns with a ghostly fire of captured souls! This could be used against the ghost skeletons as the light makes them solid to be struck?
Similar for the other types of skeletons so when a crew goes to take on a fort, each crew member can have a role in the fight?
Ship Flags
These could be used to give the ship/crew a buff of sorts.
Pirate Flag: small speed increase to catch other ships
Bounty Hunting Flag: Do more damage to Skeletons (crew buff)
Merchant Flag: Stronger hull to survive attacks.
White Flag: Passive/Ghost mode! however should any the crew partake in any activity like; start a voyage, collect a chest, engage in combat the passive buff is removed. Even inflict a plenty if you use it to try and sneak up to PvP under the pretence of surrender!
As mentioned in other posts:
AI Ships to attack, either pirate hunting or Merchant raiding.
The ability to load grapples in the cannons to make it easier to board ships. This could be only at a certain damage level or only against the NPC ships so PvPers don't abuse?
Different cannon shot to inflict debuffs that can be countered by the crew.
Chain shot for sails, repaired by cloth patches.
Explosive shot to start fires, put out with buckets of water or they spread and would sink the ship.
The ideas above are for the PvE side of the game to give some sense of progression and something to work towards, not to save up gold to change the colour of the items I already have as that is all we have right now!
Exploration
This sort of falls into this area more than the other threads:Hunting of animals for meats and skins. we currently have 3 types of land animals that could be killed to provide something else to eat and trade in, similar for the sharks!
This leads on to hunting other sea creatures such as whales, squid, different types of sharks.
Fishing for (guess what) fish, bit also catch quests (message in bottles), even special customisation for items and weapons.
Last thing, sooo many palm trees but no coconuts?? Might be a step up from bananas :)
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@inchristalone87
First of all, that is the dumbest comparison you could've made. Gears of War (which I love and play) is a competitive PvP game where the entire objective is to kill the other team. Second, yes Gears does in fact have PvE only modes, such as Horde Mode and Campaign. You could even play Execution or Warzone against an all AI team. -
@xbus6 griefing is intentionally hurting a non combative opponent with the clear knowledge that there is nothing to gain by doing so
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It's been posted before, but there has to be a pretty substantial rep and gold reward for completing a voyage, which also scales to the voyage level.
This fixes the problems of getting low tier chests/skulls during a higher level voyage(which are technically needed for achievement chasers), and it also alleviates a player's frustration over losing their hard earned chests to pvp; at least they know they will get something for their time. 2 birds, 1 stone.
Not to mention, I think you might help the pvp-pve balance in the process. As the game currently stands, many pvpers I encounter and myself find no reason what-so-ever to partake in voyages. It's skull fort or take from others. The closest we get is to vote & cancel until you get a map with several chests on one island, and you might do that one map and then cancel voyage. We would still hunt any ship on the horizon, but it might be something that keeps us busy and not actively sailing for ships.
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@nwo-azcrack I don't really see how that's punishment. If there's no "government" with rules, then there's no "pirates" breaking the rules. We are just playing battle royal-sailor edition. I think it'd add to the game world a lot and balance risks and rewards. I'm not saying it would have to be an unbelievably overpowered armada, or that the guards just keep coming at people. But outposts are pretty much safe zones for PVPers if they kill the other players, where as a fort sends waves of NPCs you have to battle along with other players, so make that for outposts too. So I really don't think it'd be punishment.
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@xbus6 I guess you only started playing video games recently if you think the fact that a game is not single player means it is expected to have lots of pvp. Before this recent era of gaming there were a whole lot of video games in which multiplayer involved co-op playing. Though co-op games have fallen off and companies seem to mainly be making pvp games nowadays, so I can understand why you would see things that way. The pvp in this game involves people hunting you down constantly to the point where you can't do anything outside of pvp. It really sucks when you did a lot of work to collect things to turn in and your ship gets sunk every time you complete a voyage. Especially as a solo player like me. I don't have anyone to play with, so I play solo and am often attacked by 3-4 men galleons, in which I have no chance against. When you are already sailing you can easily run, but if your ship is anchored you will be sunk long before you can pull up the anchor, let down the sail and turn your boat, so you don't crash. It takes like 1 second for a galleon to sank the smaller ship. Some players would rather play with other players just looking to do quests. My personal pvp experience is after they sunk my ship they jumped in the water and waited for me to spawn to continue killing me. pvp is no fun as a solo player. I'd really like an option where mid-game people could invite you to their crew. I didn't see any matchmaking when I tried to start a game.
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Hahaha, 'Balancing' exploring and player combat.
This is always going to be a moving target, and one that never completely satisfies.
Because of the vast skill difference in players, and even the Controller vs. Mouse advantage, there will always be a percieved imbalance.
If you increase distance between islands, you make the voyages longer and likely more tedious.
If you add a penalty system in, you then 'punish' players for using game mechanics and being pirates. (Yarrrrr)The thing I noticed on release, right after beta, is that there was a lot less PVP. (At least, there seemed to be)
Well, what happened?
People had things to do. More voyages to do, gold to get, etc...So, how do you balance exploration and PVP? Give players reasons to collaborate outside of their crew, and things to do.
Also, add more things to fight over. Chasing down a solo player and killing them for no loot is boring.
Sure, the thrill of an OJ-simpson pased chase can be thrilling once or twice, but really.... It's boring.If I want to PVP, I head to a skull fort. I KNOW there are going to people there who want to fight, and it's exciting. Either I'm going sink a few ships, kill a few people, or kill a crapload of skeletons and get loot. I've spent 3 hours fighting at a skull fort, left with nothing, and had a blast doing it.
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I struggle a lot with the PvP aspect of this game. Love the exploration, the PvE, but I'm not the best at PvP combat and I seem to always get jumped at the worst time and very often. No matter what I do, it seems like I just can't hold my own against any other pirates. It makes the game more stressful than it needs to be, because I'm constantly paranoid someone is coming after me, constantly worried when I find something good that I'm going to lose it to Mr. Bigshot who just wants to kill me, sink my boat, and not even take anything.
My point is that the game is hard for me to play when I'm always watching my back and staying on the ship while my crew is completing quests just to keep watch. I know this probably won't ever happen, but the option to turn off having players other than my own crew in the server would be so nice. I love the exploration aspect of this game and that's why I still play. It just sucks that it's ruined by overly aggressive players hiding around every corner, bloodlust in their eyes and froth in their mouths.
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Ship battles need a fix. This, you either jump on there ship or you fight forever is just bad. Either need some bigger holes or maybe ship health? idk but something needs to happen. No PvE zones is a good thing. PvP isn't that hard to avoid most of the time and really the only exciting part of the game....right now.A huge boost to PvE and PvP would be to add some NPC ships to loot.
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Melee combat feels awfully sluggish, as I press RT it takes a full second for a swing. The guns could be beefed up as well. For instance the pistol could maybe have two more bullets and generally reload faster. There's also an annoyance with the spy-glass rifle; it's reloading animation needs to be completed down to the second, if the player switches to the sword and then back to the rifle too soon it will have to reload all over again. I think this applies to all firearms.
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I don't like the melee combat either. There's no real connection to what you're pressing on your keyboard/mouse/gamepad to what's happening on the screen. As the skeletons get tougher, the guns become less useful, so it's back to the ship to shoot the skeletons with cannons as usual.
Don't get me started on having to face 6 skeletons with pistols!
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Most of the problem in my opinion comes from the fact that for many, PvP is the most attracting thing to do. It's exciting and surprising, and sometimes challenging in more ways than the PvE has to offer. As such, quite a few player engage out of 'boredom', because they feel like there is nothing else to do. (I won't defend spawnkilling or outpost camping, tho. That's just griefing to me). I have made a few suggestions in this regard in another topic, and could use some advices
The other part of the problem is that someday, people will have to accept the game for what it is, a mixture of PVP and PVE in which you cannot always win, and the unexpected comes mainly out of your encounters with others. This is not Skyrim, you are not the only hero of this story. Neither is this Blacwake or Overwatch, there are other things to do than killing your fellow players.
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@skirakzalus Not going to lie but I absolutely love the idea of a fleet feature good job thinking this up!
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@personalc0ffee said in [Mega Thread] Balancing Exploration and Player Combat - Part 2:
Mike Chapman has already said there will never be PvE only servers or toggles because it splits the community and they aren't going to do that.
It's a shared pirate world. You're going to get sunk, chased, and looted.
FYI, "the community" is already split, since the alpha tech sessions, between those that complain about not having enough ships to sink and those that complain that there's too many ships sinking them ;P
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@si-kyle This idea of carrying around ammo boxes and stealing barrels is a great idea and it should be done in game.
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Here's what happened to me last night, and I was only playing for about half an hour. It illustrates the problem with the toxic player and PvP aspect of the game, but because I only had the time to play for so little it didn't bother me much and didn't lose much.
Anyway, I was doing a merchant voyage, found the two pink bristled pigs, took them to the outpost I am supposed to take them to. Of course, there was a sloop there already with sails up. I actually turned around at first and went back a little later, but sloop was still there. Since merchant voyages expire after a certain time, I couldn't keep waiting so I decided to take the chance and dock anyway. I docked at the other side of the outpost and proceeded to take one of the pigs to sell. On the way, I encountered one of the other players. I immediately stopped and dropped the pig, didn't take out a weapon or anything. He shot what I assume was a warning shot to see how I would react, since I was standing still and he didn't shoot me directly (or maybe he was a bad shot I don't know). I waved at him instead and did an "ahoy there", picked up the pig, and kept going. He followed me, I went to the merchant and sold the pig, he did a little dance I guess to show he's friendly, I danced back, waved, and went back to the other side of the island where I was docked, only to see my ship had sunk. Now I checked the entire sloop before getting off to see if I had taken any damage when I docked. No damage, no water. So I can only assume his buddy sank my ship for no reason while he was acting friendly with me, or perhaps another ship appeared while I was busy on the outpost and sank my ship (there were no other ships around when I docked though).
Why do people do this? What could you possibly get out of doing this? I only had one pig on board, you could've taken it if you wanted to even though it is virtually worthless to sell unless you need it for a voyage. Are you that freakin' bored with the game, do you have that much time on your hands, do you have nothing better to do? This is what many of us are complaining about, and this is what the trolls on these forums don't want fixed because this is what they do in this game constantly.
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I think the combat as a start is good, facing skelentons is challenging, but I feel if you run out of ammo while facing the gold ones, you’re kind of stuck. I feel more areas and environments to explore would be good. Also, maybe some environments could include their own faction, to make you want to visit it to try out that different quest type. I strongly feel that making outposts ‘safe zones’ would ruin the shared world experience. If you’re chests gets stolen, they get stolen, go out and get some more or hunt for revenge
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@personalc0ffee said in [Mega Thread] Balancing Exploration and Player Combat - Part 2:
@koshdukai OH you.
;)
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@greaseman85 said in [Mega Thread] Balancing Exploration and Player Combat - Part 2:
Why do people do this?
hmmm... uh... in Sea of Thieves that's kind of a trick question, but I'll answer it, with what I know so far: Because they can.
PS: I stopped asking myself those type of questions where "sanity" is involved, when in Sea of Thieves.
So... to avoid this being an off-topic post, I'll add that, to me, it's hard to consider the game balanced when the "be whatever you want to be" is an Utopian myth for the majority of those playing it, as it is currently.
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@navarita I understand how you feel but, I think this is one of the things rare has done right. The amount of blood pounding moments ive had when ive got a ship full of gold and i see another sail round an island headed my way has been so much fun. If there were a way to completely avoid the risk of being sunk by another player I feel like it would take away so much of the experience. But i do get the frustration of having your hard work go to waste. sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
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I think the balance is in a good spot right now, myself.
More hidden treasures would help if anything at this point, to motivate exploration Vs combat.
All I know is you can't have a pirate life without parlay. It needs to be incorporated into the game at times in co-op events.
In the true nature of the word it would be a decision made by the ships captain and is subject to refusal upon request. -
@khaleesibot I don't know if this has been suggested but, a good solution to this may be a bounty system where players can purchase a range of bounties for players who have wronged them. This will generate a voyage or timed contract for however many hours of bounty or number of kills, you purchased that any players on the server can pick up to Hunt that other player. So a player who wants to work bounties just walks up to the vendor and is handed a stack of mugshots to go hunt for. Maybe even allow bounty contracts to persist and follow you across servers as well. Every time you kill that player you get a mark on you're bounty the more marks the bigger the payout capping out at whatever number of kills the purchaser paid for.
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@personalc0ffee plenty of times I've been to outposts and met with , drank grogg with, played a shanty with some very friendly pirates.
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This might have been mentioned in here already but I was asked to move this post here. Thank you for your time.
I just want to share a thought I had. I realize that this game is best with PvP on all the time. I would be okay with a neutral city you could enter with no loot on your ship to play games and gamble and such but that is another topic. When you feel the rush of turning in loot with ship sails headed your way there really isn't a better feeling imho.
The thing is I have found that the best form of PvP is mutual PvP. What I mean by that is Skull forts. Some of my favorite gaming moments have been forged in battle around a skull fort and all the craziness that ensues. The thing is people can choose to fight over that and if you decide to jump in you know you are in for a fight. Everyone knows whats at stake and if they want to get involved it's there choice.
That being said, Rare needs to make more dynamic events that might be worth less than skull forts but spawn more frequently. This way PvP focused players will always have objectives to chase and PVE people can just do voyages and stay away form events if they choose. If the system worked this way we don't have to make major changes to the game we can just encourage a less toxic play style.
That being said, if you want to hunt down PVE people instead of going after the value in the events then that is still your choice. I would never ask someone to stop PvPing in this game because it's great. Rare just needs to encourage better PVP, Mutual PVP.