It's been a long time coming. I rarely see merchants out on the sea, but who can blame them? The rewards for their efforts have been dwindled to near-nothing, and the hungry pirates of the waves have never been more numerous. Here's my proposed changes, that could make merchants more rewarding to play. Nothing that hasn't been in the game before, nothing that would require too much coding, and nothing that requires more assets.
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Animal crates appear on your ship when you start the voyage, and give 6-10 animals, instead of just 4.
This is a solid fix for the problem introduced by dives, whereby collecting a mass of animal crates suddenly required a bunch of sailing. It was doable for PvP, for the hourglass supply crates, so it should be doable here. Number fix is for a simple reason - nobody else's treasure can die on its own or kill their other treasure. -
Cargo voyages end when their crates get picked up, and give 6-8 crates, instead of just 4.
Another relatively simple fix - it used to work like this actually. Allows the kind of multitasking and sidegrade activities of which the merchants were once capable. As for the increase, nobody else's treasure can be destroyed by rain, lack of rain, or a single cannonball from any source. -
Increase Lost Shipment rewards
This one is... well, the rewards have gotten rather small, of late, from the downsizing of the crates you used to get from the clue locations, to the hoard itself being mostly sugars. -
Distribute the coral small merchant items more widely.
I promised "no new models needed" at the top of this post, so I won't call for non-coral variants to be added, but this is well past time, now that you can run with small items.
That's the list, but, outside of the constraints of my header, I'd also like to suggest, there could be a fun X marks the spot for merchants, where you dig up a rum cache, or a chest of coffers or whatnot. Plenty of merchant goods keep, you know?
