Hourglass Updates Announced!

Thing about these updates or changes. They need to be tested and made sure.
“Will this really work?”
On paper sounds fine but once it’s tried and tested. It may be thrown out the door. Like Many good things in the past.

I definitely think the fixing of commendations means making it so the "Sink X [opposite faction] ships" will apply to same faction battles, I think that's a change people have been begging for forever

Hope it doesn’t force players to fight a certain way or play. That be horrible design and break the freedom of playing and choosing how you wanna go about it.

Flags are fine I don’t care about those.
The idea of shrinking the play field. I’m gonna love seeing how they place those on the map

So many excellent changes announced. Downtime was by far the biggest pain point and factored into many other aspects of the experience. It created tremendous friction to continue playing after being sunk.

The things announced cover a lot of the issues with hourglass and I'm glad they were announced. I'm especially glad that their focus is on making entry easier for lower skill players while making it a better experience for veterans. If they follow through on this I might come back to get the golden bones.

It's great to hear. Hourglass is in a rough shape. Anything that gets more people involved is great. Minimizing re-supply and raising flag time and such will go a long away. Also keeping people fighting, rather than running and dragging fights out can only be a good thing. There's lots of ways for these things to be improved, so I'm hopeful

One idea I recall reading somewhere was introducing was a Daily Deed system. Encourage people to play the mode, with relatively easy tasks for some minor amount of allegience. Keep it simple, something like "Fight in 5 matches", "Hit 3 chain shots", "Hit 20 Cannon balls", that sort thing. Maybe one or two for each faction each day.

I’m praying that, alongside improving commendations, they might take a look at the Milestones and Trinkets for sinking Champion ships. For the maxed out variants, you need to sink thirty Champions (ships on a 4+ streak without lowering) of specifically your rival faction.

Finding champions is uncommon already, and running into one is a 50/50 if it’s the right faction or not. If it doesnt match, then whether you win or not, you get no progress on the milestone, making this trinket require incredible luck, patience, and not to mention, skill and coordination as you still gotta win against the proper opponent when you find them- 30 times, for either faction. It’s always been excessive, and if they won't reduce the requirement, they had better reincentivize staying as a champion to at least make it more likely to match against one. People rarely stay on that streak.

@burnbacon said:

Hope it doesn’t force players to fight a certain way or play.

@burnbacon said:

my running tactic

It forces players to engage. So they can't do cringe things like run the whole time and needlessly prolong fights that they're bound to lose anyway.

I think it would be a fun idea if they gave you extra supplies in Hourglass but didn't take them away from you if you win. Maybe some players would start trying to win an hourglass game to start a session. Bringing Hourglass to more players is what it needs right now.