Add Optional Friendly Fire via Unanimous Vote in Settings

@toshctdm5079

Dueling is regularly suggested and supported by a majority of the player base. The need/want for it is twofold.

1. Having an easy way to practice and/or teach new players on sword play and shooting without having to spend a bunch of time looking for a friendly crew to TDM with or starting an alliance server.
2. Giving players something to do while sailing from one side of the map to the other or waiting for a world event to finish before sweeping in for the steal. Yes, you can always work on getting supplies, etc., but it doesn't take good crews long to become stocked to the point of not needing any more supplies for the rest of the session.

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How to start a duel using existing game mechanics.
a) A new interactable location on each ship fort. This would work similarly to voting on the captain or emissary tables, resembling a bullseye that you stab a knife into.
Pro: Can have 3-4 crew members duel all at once.
Con: Requires a new location to be taken up on each ship. You have to be on your ship each time to start or join a duel. This is not a big deal. It could be the stern of the lower deck of each vessel.
b) An emote that both players can use on each other, similar to the 'add friend' emote. Challenging the other crew member to a duel, if they do it back the duel is on.
Pro: Easy to do anywhere.
Con: Only allows 1v1 duels unless chain challenges are allowed.

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Duel status indications & ending a duel
The color of dueling crew members' nameplates changes, indicating that they are in a duel. This could be purple, like the allied crew, or another color. A trip to the ferry would end the duel. Either side voting back on the bull's eye or doing a "surrender duel" emote would also end the duel. Optional termination of the duel could include any player taking damage from another crew or NPC, e.g., a skelly ship.

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Damage system: two options

1. Standard damage: The system works the same as if you are fighting an allied crew member. You take real damage and can die and go the ferry.

Pro: Easy to implement, all it would take is setting the player status to allied rather than crew.
Con: You can get caught off guard by a third party waiting to strike once you have injured each other. But that not going to happen often, its your choice to duel and there are a butch of other things in the game (tall tails, Journals, NPCs etc) that also mean you can get caught off guard. So toughen up, buttercup.

2. Special damage (advanced): Works similar to Dueling in other games like WOW. You get a second health bar. All blunder, fire, explosive, and fall damage is subtracted from both your standard damage AND your special damage health. This ensures that Dueling cannot be used as a shield against NPCs and enemy crews. The special damage bar also takes damage from dueling crews' swords and ranged weapons, while standard damage does not. Eating heals both standard and special damage. Once your special damage hits zero, you slump into a "dead" emote. You can choose to "offer" to end the duel or wait to be revived, in which case both parties restart with full special health.

Pro: You will be at full health as soon as an enemy crew turns up unless you have taken damage from throwables etc.. You do not have to go back to re-vote or re-emote to start dueling again.
Con: Harder to implement, which means a lot more work for Rare.

A handful of the same commenters don't like this idea, they make the same glass half full objections each time. All of these are not only unlikely to occur often but also do not make any sense in the wider concept of the game. So to head them off:

1. Players not wanting to duel getting attacked by crew.
   The system requires both side to agree to the duel, don't agree to duel and you will not get attacked.

2. Toxic players tricking new players to duel.
   There are already a butch of toxic things players can do to each other. Lock someone in the Brig for no reason, killing via blunder bombs or kegs, sail the ship into the rocks on purpose etc. Tricking someone into a dueling seems pretty weak sauce by comparson, especially considering the trick with the system descriped above would only work once. The vaste majority of the time it it would be willing individuals taking part, and the benfit of having this as a teaching tool would far exceed the cost even of both senrios occurred at the same rate.

3. Dueling players getting caught off guard by NPC and other players.
   It is your choice to duel. If you do not want to risk it, then don't duel. More over, the game has a ton of things like Journals, easter eggs, etc that distract players all the time. Getting rolled up on by another player is part of the game. Sounds more like a lack of awareness than a problem with Dueling being an option

Agree with OP 100%, and have made my own post in the past with the exact same conditions. With 1 additional condition. All crewmates must vote to enter Friendly Fire mode, but any 1 crewmate can cancel at any time. This way no one ends up salty if they were to find themselves essentially spawn-trapped by their own teammates.

@miserenz
Agree with a lot of your points here, but don't particularly agree with point b; if it involves having to do an emote each time you respawn, I think that would get old quite quickly. Also, to nullify your point about "Toxic players tricking new players to duel," the implementation of a system like I described above, where any SINGLE player can cancel the duel for all crewmates. It also helps mitigate the problem of "Dueling players getting caught off guard by NPC and other players," because any 1 player could cancel friendly fire making it easier to prepare yourselves for a real battle.

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I think it's a great addition, especially when players find themselves caught off guard in pvp situations, their only real practice in this game comes from fighting other players on rare occasion. You can go hours without fighting people, unless you opt in to hourglass, so gaining experience with the mechanics can be challenging unless you've logged thousands of hours in the game.

Many would also argue that they would rather content be added to the already content packed game, but I would argue this IS content and wouldn't eat up much developer time. Since all of the systems are already in place - UI menu options are probably extremely easy for Rare to instantiate and seemingly simply enabling:
if (bulletHit.entity.tag = teammate && friendlyfire)
Where friendlyfire is a boolean set by the UI menu option.

Also, which is more preferable: Players having two ships on a server to partake in a friendly duel or one ship on a server to get the same result? Opening up server space for more ships should be welcomed.

I see more cons of this being trolled and toxic between crews. Forced to vote and punished

Or your doing it to “train” and another ship appears. Now your killing your crew and enemy and no time to turn it off.

@burnbacon

I see more cons of this being trolled and toxic between crews. Forced to vote and punished

It's possible to more quickly find out who your real friends are versus the fake. I wouldn't want to hang out with anyone with such toxic characteristics as you mention that they would want to put me down like that.

Or your doing it to “train” and another ship appears. Now your killing your crew and enemy and no time to turn it off.

The risks of opting in some would say. Also something you would have control over. It could introduce a new way to play for players who want to have a more "hardcore" game mode (having to avoid damaging teammates and all). Also no one ever said it couldn't be safer seas only - This point can be invalidated.

The game was designed from the ground up to not have friendly fire. If you had looked at anything about the basics of design for this game, one of the absolute cores of it is that there cannot be friendly fire.

@potatosord
Do you have citation that leads to the conclusion that the game was built around not having OPT-IN friendly fire? I may have trouble finding it. Anything besides that fact that it does not YET exist in the game, and thus the feedback/suggestion post requesting the feature to be added?

Let's carefully examine the words "opt-in" and "friendly" to see if it fits the design for the game.

@bleu-solo What if there is a 4 man crew and one doesn't want to turn on friendly fire but the rest do not care and they brig him until he agrees? What happens if a player joins/leaves the crew? These will be abused more than the ability to kick people from your boat supposedly would be. People would leave a spot in open crew to force people to TDM with them or be stuck in the brig indefinitely.

What if one guy continuously trolls and attacks the boat until his crew mates give in and do it? That gives one guy enough power to force them to do what he wants or else he will continue to be a menace.

@potatosord
I see your point, and it's a good one.

As far as crewmates leaving/joining it could cancel the friendly fire, requiring a re-vote. With an opt-in system EVERYONE would have to opt in, EVERY TIME.

When it comes to players threatening the brig for those that don't join can be sidestepped by instead just making a game-mode option when setting up a ship for safer seas with crewmates invited and joining notified: "Beware, this is a friendly fire server." So players know what they are potentially getting into before joining.

Personally, if I were on that galleon and I was one of the 3 people that wanted to Friendly fire, and one person does not - I would just hop on a new server with the other 2 people that did. The system being so easy to enable it would take 1-2 minutes to enable the content we desire. No sense wasting our time trying to convince or bully another into doing something they don't want to do.

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I don't think it's productive to dismiss ideas by thinking, "There isn't a way to make this work." but instead asking the question, "How do we make this work?" :

It is a feature that is regularly requested- so obviously there are people, maybe not a majority - we don't know for sure, but DEFINITELY a community of people that would LOVE the addition of the feature.

Some people might want to hop in to spar in a sword duel with friends, or fighting with any of the other weapons. Ease of access is key, and the game is designed to be a sandbox. What's a sandbox if it's not impossible to easily spar/train with friends through natural means if that's what you've set out to do?

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We're talking about a video game, and a pirate one at that. There is no perfect world where everyone is going to play nice in a video game. We need to stop thinking that there is. By the logic of, "oh well people are going to be toxic" - then we might as well NOT build a video game.. because there will always be toxic people. We can only build systems that try to find how's the best way to make sure players won't be taken advantage of in ways they don't expect. Would you rather players attempt to force spar with other crews who don't wish to? That seems way more toxic than an opt-in system. But that's what some people end up doing when they can't easily duel their friends.

I've had friendly duels with plenty of people in the game over the years. People I didn't know; a majority of them turn out to be cool people. Just because there are some bad actors doesn't mean they all are - and we shouldn't let a few bad eggs spoil the bunch.

Anything to get TDM’s into this game. Never a fan of these requests and I hope Rare never add it in.

@tesiccl
Any points to elaborate on why that is that you don't want any TDMs in the game?

Do your points still apply if the duels were separate from something you would encounter on High Seas - basically having no impact on your play since you just wouldn't opt-in?

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I can think of a few things I was "never a fan of" but were added to the game anyway. Some people like things that others do not. To exclude what other communities of people find enjoyable just because you don't is oppressing; especially if it can be done so without impacting your play.

@burnbacon
You can say the same for being forced to vote for voyages.

More over the suggestions I made elminate your objection to not being able to turn off dueling, because anyone can with either an emote, a vote on the bulls eye or a trip to the ferry.

There is no reason to not implement this other than other features/fixes being a higher priority.

@bleu-solo

I do not think it should be a all or nothing vote.

At most if done via a setting under crew, it should be an individual choice. Three players can TDM while the fourth sails the ship taking no damage from their crew.

I can't find a video of the digital panel from Fest of Legends, but think that's when the devs confirmed they plan to add crew duels in the future. Apparently, it was intended to be added in a previous season but didn't make the cut.

This Twitter/X post (not me) references the info that was shared.

Also, in a post months prior to Fest of Legends, Mike Chapman indicated that crew dueling was on his radar.

@jdutton22 I can already imagine how it will go in open crew, with people bouncing from server to server threating to ruin someones progress unless they duel them, they duel, then the person ruins their progress anyways. Or if the whole crew is opted in, and it cancels if any single person opts out, then that means people in the crew will have to be in duel mode regardless of if they want it or not. They will be forced to participate. This feature is beyond worthless, can already be accomplished in game, and will only be used to troll and make the game worse.

The only issue I see is that you will have a disadvantage when another crew turns up (or come out of hiding) while you have Friendly Fire on and are shooting at each other.

But I guess that's a risk you'll have to take and that would be on the crew(members) who turn it on.

@lem0n-curry said:

The only issue I see is that you will have a disadvantage when another crew turns up (or come out of hiding) while you have Friendly Fire on and are shooting at each other.

But I guess that's a risk you'll have to take and that would be on the crew(members) who turn it on.

It's a risk you'll have to take, and one that some willingly might take for a "hard mode" experience.

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To the folks concerned about toxicity:

1] If the toggle option is only to receive friendly fire damage... then one could easily toggle it off to stop receiving friendly fire damage.

It's not something that you should need a crew-vote to toggle on/off.

2] It is already possible to do friendly fire to teammates (fire, blunder, kegs); and SoT already has rules against trolling ones own team.

If one truly wanted to be toxic to their own team, they have enough tools at their disposal that this feature wouldn't really change much.

Regardless, any unintended abuse of this feature could be addressed the same way other instances of toxicity/trolling are addressed...

File a report and move on.

@eligibleeel6171 said in Add Optional Friendly Fire via Unanimous Vote in Settings:

I think this is one of those ideas (like tdm islands, or boosting safer seas) where, counterintuitively, the number of people that want it, is the reason it won't happen. I think it's important to remember with suggestions like this that players who are doing one thing, are not doing something else.

The designers have put a lot of work into maintaining a (somewhat) consistent frequency of organic ship to ship interactions, with strangers, which have an unknown outcome, and so create tension (will they be friendly, will they attack, will they run away, will they ignore us etc. etc.). Tension and resolution is what creates drama and excitement. They are a fundamental part of any storytelling experience and this game is no exception.

Allowing friendly fire between teammates would likely (as others in this thread have suggested) mean a significant number of players would stop sailing the seas and hide away on an island out of the way somewhere and just play tdm games. This means a number of players would be taking up room on the servers, but not creating tension for other players, which I expect is something the devs want to avoid.

This is the first and only argument I have heard aganist dueling that makes any sense. I do not think it is correct though. Currently if you are on insiders you can easily set up a duel via HG and not be disturbed. But you do not see empty servers now because if it. My guild did this when testing the new weapons, but we quickly got bored with it and prefer to sail for the full experience.

The vast marjoirty of the player base would be like that because TDMing gets boring if you do that each night. If all you are after is TDM then there are other games that that is the focus. The purpose here is for trainning/practice for the full SOT experience and to pass the time when the action is low.

@eligibleeel6171 said:

... how will you prevent people from using this tool to arrange TDM tournaments?

Make the friendly fire toggle available in both high and safe seas.

Do that and you'll most likely funnel all TDM/practice traffic to safe seas. While high seas players could use it as a fun distraction during downtime in sessions, or to increase the difficulty of their experience.

Also I don't understand how this would be any different from a ship tucking themselves in a corner of the map, rather than interacting, for any other reason. SoT shot. Treacherous plunder. Relaxing. Whatever.

Interaction is to be expected in high seas, but that does not make it guaranteed or obligatory.

Even if people choose to TDM in a corner of high seas, nothing would stop any other crew from sailing over to interact.

How will you stop people tucking themselves away in a corner of the map and playing their own private games, rather than interacting with the open world and the other players on the server?

Well if the rest of the game is entertaining enough, then maybe people will actually feel motivated to do other things than shoot at each other.

Tension within the crew is not meant to be part of the game. It's written into the pirate code (article 5 - the crew bond is sacred)

I mean yeah but this isn't really tension is it? Lol. That's your good faith interpretation of this request? When it is two or more crewmates consenting to fight each other for sake of practice or "TDM," that breaks the crew's bond?

I mean the pirate code also says to settle disputes upon the seas, but we don't take that literally to mean that we can't PvP on outposts.

Friends helping friends keep their skills sharp? That's the crew I want to be on.