Did Six Ship Servers Secretly Come Back...?

It's rumored there is now an invasion slot. so yes, but no.

I have noticed that while I was on a galleon there were a few times I would see 2 more galleons on the same server so the player cap is probably back to normal too.

@super87ghost

Right, I know how the PvP invasion process on a full, five-ship server is supposed to work, but what I'm saying is that is completely impossible in this instance.

None of the four parked ships that were doing the Glitterbeard event had the hourglass activated (I personally checked), so none of us were repping the Guardians or Servants and thus were not the ones being invaded by the Reaper sloop that was attacking us. The Reaper also didn't have the orange flames across the bow, suggesting they weren't sailing for the Servants either.

The sixth ship we could see on the map table was a Reaper up near Smugglers Bay, which is TWELVE map squares north of Plunder Valley where the four of us and the attacking Reaper were located. It is impossible for it to have invaded our server to attack the other Reaper (the only ship of the five present that I couldn't confirm with my own eyes wasn't using the hourglass) from that distance without it being out of range of the ship they're invading and sinking.

Ships can only invade a server within the 'battle circle' on the map table in range of their matched opponent and upon one of them leaving said circle, the hourlgass explodes pretty quickly and sinks the ship with absolutely no way to avoid it.

So it is impossible that any of the six were there as an invading ship that had entered this server for a battle.

I bet it has to do with sloops specifically. The other day I swear I saw 6 sloops on the same server. I was very confused.

@d3adst1ck said in Did Six Ship Servers Secretly Come Back...?:

I don't know if the 6th slot is actually used for hourglass. It wouldn't make sense since players are reporting hours of play without being invaded if they are doing defense mode.

Well, if they are on a full server with multiple crews waiting to be invaded, it can take some time before it's your turn, especially when these become long fights.

Yes.
I believe its back.

Hello guys, I also think that this whole thing has something to do with ship size and maybe player count.

I had a similar situation a few days back, my friends and I were gathering more and more ships into an alliance on a server. In the end of this we had 5 fully manned brigantines in an alliance. By recent knowledge I thought this would be the maximum in both ships per server with 5 and crew size with 15 players only leaving one space open to 16 (which what I thought was max). But at some point we found another sloop on the same server. This must've been an open crew and pretty new players aswell. Nonetheless there were at some point 2 players on that sloop, so 6 ships and actually 17 players on the server.

The other ships were pretty close at that point and I do not think players from those crews left in that time, which would really mean 17 active players on a server. Also none of the ships on the server were active in hourglass pvp at any time.

The question is if the 6th ship on one server is actually some kind of mistake in server matchmaking, so just adding that 6th ship instead of leaving it open for pvp or if this is really just intentional by Rare's matchmaking.

@cloups42 So the mystery has been solved, today's patchnotes also offically state the changes about the server maximum capacity with 6 ships and 17 players. Allowing 5 brigs and a duo sloop on one server. Curious why it seems like this change has been in place before this patch and just was not announced, but I guess that is just Rare things :)