Season 11 and the Long Term Impact

@wolfmanbush I don't agree that it's unrecoverable. If there's been anything I can compliment Rare on from season 7 to now, it's that they've had a striking willingness to learn from their mistakes and focus on improvements that let them work easier. I think that is clear more than ever in Season 15. With every company having an emissary and a reaper update (supposedly) coming in the future, this is the perfect time to reassess the standard balance of loot in the world. They likely know all the new loot and quests coming to the game atp. I'm optimistic that if we encourage them, they will take the time to reassess what didn't work and take the game in a direction all players are happier with. I mean look at how they have shifted to a monthly update cycle with S15 (and likely with future seasons) after the community had encouraged them to do so.

@wolfmanbush I don't agree that we need some massive groundbreaking change to bring back stacking and playing on one server, if you're going to be on for a few hours. There just needs to be some incentive to do that. It's not a hard thing to add. All the diving stuff can stay and I think it's great for quick sessions, it just encroaches on long term play too much.

@wolfmanbush I mean there's definitely been inflation in SoT but that doesn't mean that the incentives are simply "more." If everything increases in value, nothing increases in value. So even though you can make more gold in a session than 2019, the incentives for players still pushes them towards diving. Diving is a similar gold output with easier stopping points, easier content, and less risk overall. The main issue isn't the overall increase in all value throughout the game, it's the fact that players don't have a reason to play the game the old way by staying on one server and just doing normal quests/WEs. That's the way the game is best experienced, but most people will seek the larger faster rewards of raids instead of spending a little more time having a lot more fun. And the sandbox works best when everyone (or most people) are participating in it the old way. It's what the game is built for.

I don't think it's impossible to adjust the incentives in the game, and gradual minor tweaks will eventually land the game in a good spot where players looking for an accelerated adventure will get a fun experience but not too high of a payout, and players looking for a true adventure will get a great experience with a great payout. Raids should be treated like Safer Seas where there is the expectation for getting less for an easier less risky experience. There just doesn't exist that risk reward balance where you go from Safer Seas to Raids to Stacking. Rather raids and stacking are put way too close to each other meaning stacking has become largely irrelevant.

Risk reward should always be a driving factor in game design, it's literally everywhere. Think about how investments, gambling, asking for a raise, changing jobs, taking a harder class, etc etc. Risk reward is just human nature, and the imbalance of it in SoT is killing the game.

Seasons 7, 9 & 11 combined have optimized the fun out of the game for me.

Between the world events being nerfed, being generified on demand to every faction, and the voyages all feeling 'easy' and 'samey', the Sovreigns allowing quick sell, and diving needing to remove all treasure which pressures you into selling prematurely to be time-optimal....

The sinks on other players offer little reward (1 voyage, or 1 fort max).

Voyages are over too quickly without interference from other players.

and world events routinely go unchallenged as you have no idea if anyone is there.

The Briggsy quest should have been the perfect content for me, but it was released as a permanent note on everyones ship, instead of a match-made or competitive world event raid, as it was 'released early', and appears entirely too frequently.

At this point, I play this game out of sheer habit and getting back into the hourglass grind now EAC finally doesn't make my PC cry in it's sleep mid hourglass fight.

But all my experienced friends have turned away from the game, and basically need to be begged to come back.

The sailing no longer feels dynamic enough too, but I don't understand why. (lack of being chased?) So would appreciate some tacking mechanics or more dynamic wind changes.

Tutorial Popups that never seem to shut up, Season Progress notifications nagging after every skeleton kill, as well add to ruining the verisimilitude.

TLDR: Game now feels like a finished and polished GAME, it used to feel like a World, and this is heartbreaking.

If it's truly going to remain a Game, and not a World, then we as veterans need 3 things to happen in return.

1. Allow us to opt into harder quests, (especially with the new weapon options) for better rewards, better skill = better time to completion for PvE quests = more rewards.

2. Emissary 4.0 rework, that makes emissary flags value scale based on the 'faction grade' treasure stash value of the loot for that company, have it recalculated when you leave an outpost, or x minutes after the last item is sold. People should be Stacking naturally as the 'most efficient route' should ALWAYS require more risk. (Yes! this means that selling your treasure will derank your flag)

3. Create a front-end pirate hideout, that captains can dive-to their first quest from, load us straight into the guild hideout or captain club or whatever you want to call it, allow us to have some control over advertising to open crews about what adventure we'd like to ideally have (but not guaranteed to have) In addition to this, limit how frequently a 'dive to' voyage can be done, it doesn't make much sense that I can server hop by spamming gold hoarder 1 dig quests without at least handing that loot in first.

These 3 subtle changes, will make the world feel way more real, and improve the gameplay loop dramatically. Ideal to me would be NEVER seeing the front-end menu again.

@honestauntyelle I have personally been trying to push a season where they go through and add tiers to the raids and maybe even an activate Hardcore mode. This would add so much depth and variety to the game. Making the boss fights the focus of these updates where each tier you go up the bosses get more attacks and become more complicated would be awesome. I actually got the idea from Hypixel Skyblock where they use a very similar system for their "slayer quests." By the time you reach tier 5 you've probably spent 100s of hours on the game and it is a truly massive challenge with complex and specific attacks. For the longest time SoT has felt like a great game with only 2 dimensions of entertainment. You have your PvP side where you can get better and you have your grinding side where you just shut your brain off and farm PvE. I see no reason they can't add a 3rd dimension of truly difficult and entertaining PvE.

Also I 100% agree on your point about SoT feeling like a finished game now but not a world you're taking part in. There's a million distractions from that world and while it's definitely possible to become immersed in a server and create an epic tapestry of a session, it's no longer reliable or common. People are constantly switching servers and they aren't stacking like they used too. It's no longer exciting to sink a G5 emissary because more often than not this is their 5th server and you are in for a massive amount of 1 sea fort. I remember back in the day you would see a grade 4 gold hoarder at a vault island and tuck for 30 minutes to just steal it all. Now you'd have just wasted 30 minutes. It's this fundamental shift that led to the failure of S14 and I think it should be clear that just adding content can't fill the hole in SoT's gameplay loop and incentive balance. SoT has added so much content and there's always something to do, I really appreciate that. And I think S11 does a great job at allowing those faster sessions and making it a more daily run kinda game. But it has sucked away so much of what the game was and that has to be remedied. Theres definitely a world where we have the quick nature of S11 feature with the old timey stacking gameplay still encouraged.

When it comes to Emissaries I'd love to see a "Grand Emissary" you can unlock by stacking loot on your boat. They already have the system from S8's defending mechanics with the faction grades, and allowing players who embark on a risky 3 hours journey to be rewarded greatly would be awesome. It could even reveal you on the map and give you a special captaincy title card to make it clear to everyone you're up to something crazy. It'd just breathe so much life back into the game imo.

From conversations with other people, I have found out that the main issue with stacking is the server performance. And while I understand the team has really been focused on improving and maintaining server performance recently, and made great advancements in doing so, I have to criticize cutting this specific area. Back in 2021 it used to be almost a badge of honor to lag the server. It was proof you were doing something truly insane and everyone was in on the action. You might have 2 fps and your boat is floating in the air, but you were STACKING. And while I think this probably isn't the best thing from a developer POV, it speaks to the passion players had around that play style. Now we have things like the BB, which while really cool, bring down the server performance a similar amount as a basic (not insane) 3 hour stack. These things are cool but aren't filling in the hole that SoT has right now. What I don't understand (from a purely objective view) is why you guys are doing these risky experimental updates instead of going back to your roots in a new and improved way.

Even if stacking can't be those insane images with 100s of chests covering an island anymore, can we at least get back to the value? Right now attacking someone is a gamble between risking your 10k in supplies for more often than not barely more than 15k in loot. We need to get back to when fighting boats and emissary hunting was the quickest way to make money (except maybe hg lol). It just ain't worth it right now. You can fight the worst player and the best player and both of them probably have 1 quest worth of loot with maybe a bit of random island stuff. The most valuable thing you'll get is their chainshots.

It's an especially massive issue with World Event Raids. There is no way to know if you're going to get 50k of random OoS loot at a Skeleton Fort or 80k of variety loot. The only indication is maybe the emissary but even then it's not guaranteed. And the loot changes and persists so even if they sank to a ghost fleet or something you're still going to get their bad loot for disproportional loot. This is why tiered raids is such a good idea. If you fight a really good player, chances are they're going to be on like a tier 3+ raid and you're going to get even more loot payout than if you did the world event normally. Also it helps balance the loot tables. If someone dives in and sinks, you can recognize whether it's the tier 1 or tier 5 variant and decide whether if it's worth the time and effort instead of just getting scammed when you finally get in the vault.

The only issue with tiered raids/hardcore world events is that if the good players leaves it would just get "stuck" on the hardest difficulty. Maybe there's some work around to have it reset. Otherwise you could just put a strict timer on the higher tiers (like 4&5) and make the world event cycle if it's not done in time.

While we are on the topic of Stacking, can we please revisit captaincy book values?

Time spent on server is a poor metric for scaling their value, and the range of book values is dismal when I can catch a single fish worth 50k in a storm.

Book value should be based on some sort of measure of skill or hostility not time, whether that's amount of treasure touched, or some amalgamation score of how hostile they have been in that session, and should be something worth harpooning.

@honestauntyelle it takes far too long to max out your book (I think 10 hours of continuous gameplay without sinking). Back when captaincy released the prospect of 50k was actually pretty crazy, but now that's just basically 2 skeleton camps. Also you can't ever cash in that value yourself which sucks. It'd be cool if you could turn in your chronicle to your guild or maybe even a writers faction (with Umbra as the head). The issue is that it is time based meaning it kinda just makes an afk gold farm. They could definitely make it dependent on the number of events in the book, that'd be way cooler.

This hits home. I agree with everything you said and think this is one of the worst things that have happened, for the health of the sandbox, in quite some time. It has ruined so much organic gameplay and interactions to the point i feel like i am not even playing SoT anymore. It used to be that each server had its own lore in a sense and ship interactions were more frequent. Now by the time you see another ship, the feeling of whether they are a friend or foe has almost been eliminated and by the time you think you are getting close enough to have an interaction they dive underwater never to be seen again. Hunting emissaries as a reaper is nearly impossible these days, making once a valid playstyle now completely useless plus it has ruined world events. It used to be that no matter what emissary you were running once you saw a beacon in the sky it acted as a way to bring players together and have interactions, which included fighting over loot. Now it's not even worth the risk since it will most likely be a raid voyage with specific loot, that is unrewarding unless you are playing the same emissary, which tbh you can't know beforehand, so why even bother?

@gosva5434 "each server used to have it's own lore" this is absolutely what is missing. It didn't happen every session, but seeing that Reaper 5 start to tear through the server was a sign for players to unite and fight back. There was villian's and heroes in a story you were truly a part of. An FotD in the sky brought massive battles between tons of boats. Or maybe there were 3 different crews tucking on this one island, everyone waiting to see who made the first move on that unsuspecting crew. It wasn't every session, but it was something truly special we've been missing for a long time.

I also 100% agree that the raids changing the loot pools have ruined world events. I mean you always run a real risk of getting some random OoS loot as a gold hoarder. It almost mandates playing with guild or reaper emissary so you always are getting the most. I think the way it works is fine, they just need to discourage constantly raiding every WE so you more often than not get normal loot pools. And maybe they can find some solution where the loot pools can reset or change later to fix that issue.

They really need to bring back the days where the fastest way to get loot is fighting and hunting other players. Bring back the days where stacking on one server was the best way to play. Bring back the magic of SoT where you were part of that servers story. Right now the only thing to do is just grind away at the PvE, and the PvE is not that fun tbh.

It's fine if S11 features are just used to do a "rapid" session and do a quest, maybe 2 at most. But the issue is that the there isn't a better option. At least not significantly better where it's actually worth all the extra risk of playing on one server or stacking.

There is so much that season 11 did to the game that i feel like sent it in the wrong direction, i always just feel like the whole voyage streamline and making them all accessable always was pointless since captain voyages was the system to give you most anything you wanted to do at a whim for quite some time to begin with. But not only that streamlining voyages to the point that you know exactly everything you will dig up near every time really took away the wonder and magic of getting a small island map with a dozen dig spots, or the joy of suddenly digging up a grog chest or just not knowing what you will find in your voyages.

Diving was imo one of the few choices that didnt make too much difference to me since as it stands voyages already sent you to an island that was typically close enough that it really didnt have a big difference in time traveled to the first island if you sailed there or dove.

The only things that seemed to really add to the gameplay in a meaningful way was bottle voyages and shipwrecks finally having loot good enough to actively go out of your way to get it, and the new raid variants of stuff, but even the raids suffered from just looking horribly underwhelming at season launch. When you would do a raid, even though the loot was new items well worth it, just seeing a couple pieces of loot was visually underwhelming. beyond that the voyages and content of s11 was either so moderately ok that it didnt really change anything for me, or just felt like a downgrade from the mystery and excitement of not knowing exactly what you would do.

I have been playing the game considerably less since s11 since it just feels like now i dont have much to look forward to since you pretty much know almost exactly everything you will get when you go voyaging, and you cant exactly dig something up and be totally shocked and excited by something you never expected. Streamlining isnt always good.

@goldsmen Yeah I agree. S11 really "gamified" a lot of aspects of SoT's relatively simple PvE. A lot of the complexity, depth, and enjoyment of the game came from SoT's unique approach to PvE. You'd embark on a mission but likely get distracted by various things throughout the play session. This really helped at to SoT's atmosphere and story. As you journeyed throughout the world you were faced with unknown and unexpected threats. You would occasionally find something unexpected or dangerous like a cursed chest. You might have to traverse through a World Event and have to sneak past an army of ghost ships. Diving has taken a lot of that away. And since the PvE itself is really rather simple, players are now finding that there is a lack of new and interesting things in their sessions. We're just stuck waiting around for another season to drop so we can get something new. And that really sucks.

It also sucks from the PvP point of view. You used to be able to consistently raise reapers, farm up to grade 5, and find at least 2-3 emissary boats. Those boats typically had quite a lot of loot on them and you were able to get like 2-3 quests worth of chests all at once. It was awesome. But now, more often than not, they only have like one voyage worth of loot due to having to sell before diving again. You'll barely even make back the money you spent on supplies. This just makes PvE reaper really the only viable choice (outside of hg) for the "PvP company" Also stealing World Events is a thing of the past. You used to be able to see someone at an Ashen Winds or Skeleton Fort and reliably steal a ton of loot from them. But now with raids you're likely to just get a few company specific trinkets totaling like 100k. It's turned WEs from the focus of the server to a low loot and often boring repetitive activity. Even if you never dive to nor steal a world event, there's still risk you don't get a proper payout. If anyone had dived to the WE before you, regardless of whether or not they are there, you will still get their raid loot. This just means doing WEs normally by just sailing over, you're risking your loot being downgraded for an action you never took. It's really really lame.

I think streamlining the quest process was fine, but only if people needed to play a quick session. It shouldn't be the default way to play or really encouraged as a method of gaining loot. Relatively low rewards for diving to quests and hopping servers would be ideal. And granting higher rewards for players that stay on one server and play into that core gameplay loop SoT is built around will also help bring that back. The incentives just need to change. If people were diving less then it would help fight back against the boring and repetitive nature of SoT. It'd also help the world feel more alive and interesting again. More like a world and less like a game. Finally, it would help ensure that World Events are frequently giving their proper loot pools and you aren't constantly getting scammed out of a normal quantity of loot.

Further actions other than just changing the incentives within the game could include stuff like a 6th emissary level for stacking a lot of loot, helping ensure that players are actually encouraged to stack in longer like 3+ hour sessions. Tiered raid voyages where you fight harder enemies and bosses in exchange for more loot could help bring more interesting PvE into the game while not "scamming" people as hard. I think it's clear with relative failures like s14 that just adding in more content to an area of the game won't fix the issues with the incentive structure. The game needs to be rebalanced.