Heavily dislike them and have been avid supporter towards their removal. They somehow manage to bring up most of what's wrong with this game. Adventures (A) would work well if they behaved like limited time events, but instead they work like limited time tall tales except they are worse in every way.
Because of the limited time, they are hard to get invested into since if you miss one, you probably won't be interested in the ones that follow. Limited time means time and resources devs used to create something in the game was removed, which implies time wasted. Being limited time, they add absolutely nothing to the game except the small cosmetic rewards given, otherwise, they lower the game's value and quality. Furthermore, they do not allow allocation of said resources, time, and staff to areas of the game that do require focus such as more game play tools, more enemy varieties, more weapons, more combat variety/ expanded combat mechanics, more quests, more ship mechanics and ship customization/ accessories.
Limited time content also means they have to rush to complete 1 A over the next, with limited time afforded to each adventure, which means that areas that we must go to will have limited things to do (This goes into down time which I explain further in). A good quest line will leave little to no down time and have set pieces or gameplay mechanics jam packed and clustered close together to create epic moments with smooth and close transitions so that investment and immersion is not obstructed. This is what happened with golden sands in A1, in which only 1 compass was found and nothing else to do, ultimately missed opportunity. Instead it would have been better to participate in the battle, ultimately leading to us loosing it, the residents being taken hostage, stakes being higher, and higher emotional connections being formed. Lots of down time in this one with islands having only 1 objective which simply sends u on the next goose chase.
Because of the limited time nature which leads to rushed content (And also due to the way they are expressed), the A's suffer from story "telling". For a game priority should go to doing, then showing, then telling (Do, show, and then tell). Since the game throws exposition on you, A's such as the one where u try to find the hostages taken from golden sands, suffer from player disconnection to those characters since we don't become connected to said character (instead it opts into believing that all players should have already formed a connection with these characters). Furthermore would u rather fight in a war in golden sands, experiencing the downfall urself, or would u rather have it as is and just hear that a war broke out in it? The reason for the battle and what happened to golden sands would still have been a mystery regardless. story "telling" in a game should be something done restrictedly and in limited occasions, with showing taking a bigger chunk of the A, and overall doing or gameplay being the majority of the game itself.
Because they are made to be played ins sequence from beginning to end, if A1 is a miss then it becomes that much harder to get invested in all other A's in the following sequence (First impressions tend to be the most important- psychology).
Because they re- use in game pieces and re- use content the value of adventures drops. Bosses with unique and intimidating appearances may re- use same enemy abilities, AI, etc which ultimately leads to a boring fight since everyone already knows they are going to be a damage absorbing sponge with already foreseen abilities and attacks. Re- usage of islands doesn't bring anything new to actual adventuring or exploration since what's seen before is what we see again and ultimately get. The more re- usage of already in game content, the higher the monotonous and generic in nature the quests or As become
Current enemies in game are basic, more so for the bosses with most just being attack sponges, almost no enemy boss requires the usage of the environment or other complex mechanic to take them down, so when A's re use enemy and boss mechanics it's just more of the same, attack repeatedly and directly to win, no strategy or difficulty, therefore no challenge involved.
Because some of them take you to islands across the whole map, they allow too much down time which is ultimately bad because it disengages players from completing the quest. The longer the down time, the higher the chance of disengagement.
Because they aren't well optimized (probably due to their limited time nature and dispersion of resources and staff personnel) VS. quests that pit users against others aren't well balanced. Some quests feel out of order, disorganized, or outright don't make sense (Such as the reapers disappearing halfway through the adventures and the dark brethren taking center focus as the main antagonistic force). Due to horrible optimization you have players attacking players in an endless loop with ability to continue said adventure, or A's with contradicting purposes or mechanics (Such as the A that required one to travel to the sea of the damned sea dogs tavern and that required crews to work together but the rewards are only for those who reach it first. This implied that the A. was a race for the crews to reach the top first but each section of the race required everyone to work together, if 1 crew decided not to work together/ to troll, then chances of the A became impossible to finish, increased. The other A that suffers from this was the one where u have to fight along side the ancients and go in the siren shrines. Once u collect the items u assume u have to speak to Belle at the island (I saw a few more crews make the same mistake in less than 1 sitting) but that is not so, the game wants u to speak to the ancient tribes men again for each piece collected, but nothing in the game points to that, it points to speaking to belle. Even if one managed to follow the correct path to continue these As, some of them are so heavily riddled with glitches that u might have to re- do that whole portion all over again.
I'm sure if I took the time I could find more faults or add more examples of Adventures fail, they are like taking the OG tall tales and OG voyages and merging them together in a way that feels like 2 steps back, in the opposite direction. The incentive reward is barely worth it, and without any real entertaining re-play value, most old salts will drop out of the game, some heavy supporters will only come back to do the measly rewards.
So you all can understand just how messed up these issues all are, these issues that I have presented aren't just a domino effect. Each one affects multiple other issues, it's like multiple snakes with multiple heads eating each other and themselves, causing and being an effect of themselves and other problems found throughout.
