I know many people Probably agree with me. many people have probably posted about this, but merchant missions are extremely boring. I mean its the only alliance i have left to work on to become a pirate legend and its so boring. I have kinda stopped playing the game because if it. All you do is pick up animals and turn them in. Yes i know this is the same concept for the gold horder and the order of souls, but at least what you are rewarded with is a mystery. Plus you have to look for the treasure for the gold horder missions and fight off skeletons for the order of souls missions. It gives those missions a bit more excitement. The Merchant alliance you know what you will get and its utterly dull and boring. Plus the time you put in to a merchant mission vs. The money it pays out is so off. I shouldn't have to spend 20 to 30 mins on a merchant mission to only get paid 500 or so gold. Some excitement needs to be added to the merchant missions. The payouts need to be increased or something new all togather needs to be added to the merchant alliance to make it more entertaining and worth while. Maybe with the addition of npc ships they could have missions where you need to retrieve something from those npc ships that pays out a large amount. Even adding the ability to have multiple merchant missions active at one time would increase the payout and make the time spent worth it. I honestly think you should be able to have multiple missions for different alliances active at one time if you have the given open slots for them. But thats just me. I wana hear what you guys think and what you think could help make the merchant alliance more lucrative and fun.
The extremely boring merchant alliance
@aowsaladfingerz As @ENTICED-MALICE says, drop any voyages that don't have any gold animals (though after grabbing the animal cages for it) and put another one down until you get one that's going to earn you some decent money.
You can also buy levels from the Bilge Rats using doubloons earned during events, but I'd suggest waiting until you have enough to get you all the way to 50 as you get more for your money when buying higher levels.
All that said, I wouldn't say no to being able to do other voyages along side MA ones, but that would need a big mechanical update I think.
How to Grind Merchant Missions (The "Noah's Ark" Technique)
I found a group on the Xbox App wanting to grind merchants in a galleon, and this is how they did it. All were experienced pirates with levels in the 30s or 40s.
Step 1. Gathering Cages
Load up your ship at an outpost as normal, and all buy as many merchant quests as you can. Three of the crew lay down quests, vote for them, and then discard them. The fourth crew member stays with the merchant trader, quickly all grabbing the crates and cages between the votes "for" and "against". When you have a lot of cages, and are getting close to the end of the supply of quests, pick one with high paying snakes and/or chickens (at least two gold), and stick with it. You can even wait for 6:00am to roll around, buy a fresh round of quests, if you want. Finally, the whole crew shuttles the cages onto the ship.
Step 2: Loading the Ark
Head for a largish island with snakes and chickens. Crooked Masts is ideal, because it has plenty of both, and being sparsely vegetated, it is not too hard to find them. Gather as many gold and black animals of both types as you can, and perhaps a few red speckled chickens, and maybe a blue snake or two. When the island is exhausted, the whole crew should go and stand in your snake collection and let themselves be killed. When you are ALL on the Ferry together, the island will reset, and respawn its animals. Continue like this until every chicken coop and snake basket is filled.
You will encounter random waves of skellies as you are gathering animals. Take the opportunity to farm a few powder kegs too, by shooting the skellies from under them. Any largish island is likely to have a couple of kegs lying around as well.
Step 3. Cashing In
Sail to the outpost you need to unload your first shipment, i.e. that for the last quest you voted for in Step 1. Sell just those chickens and snakes needed for that. Then lay down another quest - or a few quests - until you get to one that pays well, and for which you already have most of what you need. If you get a good one that requires a pig or two too, that's okay. You can now collect those on the way to the selling point, without the hassle of having of care for many pigs for too long.
Repeat Step 3 until your ark is empty.
The only danger of this approach is if your ark should be sunk when it is fully loaded. You may need to defend yourself against other pirates, or monsters of the deep; but a full and experienced crew should be able to defend against these dangers. If attacked, you may even try to invite your attackers into an alliance, and continue on your way. They may very well welcome the 50% of gold and Merchant XP that you would give them for doing nothing, but leaving you alone.
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