Hey everyone,
I guess it's about time I made one of these as well.
I've been around since closed beta, been active pretty much every day on the unofficial discord till a few weeks ago. (accident and then discord stopped working for me for some strange reason) I'm the guy who regularly asked for a t-rex pirate pet, hated on Paul's Aqua obsession and loved Damian's streams. Thx to my previous jobs, I have background in game development and even more in game journalism. (not in english as you can probably tell if you've ever heard me speak)
I've played about 25% solo, 20% duo and 55% galleon. Here are my thoughts so far:
I still love the game, but more content is definitely needed. Would love to see more customization, more variations in voyages etc. just like a lot of other people. Like others I have to admit, I expected to see something more on the launch after playing all the betas and scale tests.
I did encounter a few bugs and random errors, but for an MMO game of this scale, it's nothing I didn't expect, I'm confident it'll get mostly ironed out in time.
Regarding Rare's communication with the player base, i admit there is room for improvement, but it's still better than what I'm used to from other developers. I'm pleasantly surprised they seem to really listen to constructive criticism.
I'm strictly against any ideas that would split the player base, like xbox only sessions, BR mode, PvE servers etc. It wouldn't be apparent at this stage, but in a few weeks / months, when the amount of online players goes down (and it will, that's just a fact), it would hurt the game a lot.
My experience with other players was mostly positive so far. My English is far from perfect (we had student exchange programs in England, but that was over 20 years ago), I understand perfectly, but I have to get used to talk in English again, just need to practice more. So like many other non-native speakers, i'm usualy anxious when using xbox's LFG, I don't want to get yelled at or ruin the game for others. So far, around 90% of crews I've joined were absolutely amazing and welcoming.
With random matchmaking, that's different story tho... I stay in probably 10-15% of games I join randomly. Either noone uses a mic and since I'm on xbox, text chat is really limited for me, I just don't enjoy the game at all, or I spawn into a crew that doesn't want to cooperate at all, speaks Elvish or whatever, or server hops in 5 seconds after spawning.
Encounters with other crews were mostly good as well. Yes, there were some griefers, heard a few slurs just as I expected I would, got killed by some outpost campers cos we were careless, but mostly we had fair fights (regardless of the outcome) or even made friends with some. Among the most memorable was one over 6hrs long fight for a skull fort. (we won btw.)
I'd say I'm a decent player on either type of ship, so in PvP battles the outcome for me is 50/50 regardless of my oponent's ship. Balance is pretty good, I like the idea of a 4men sloop as long we get a 6men galleon as well. I know it's gonna be worse solo players, but it can be balanced with some type of ship movement or durability bonuses for strictly solo sloops, or penalties for bigger crews.
Anyway, that's it from me, I'll be sticking around this game to see what it'll evolve into, it has a huge potential and I hope Rare can keep the momentum going for a long time. See ya around Scallywags.
