Passive Mode

@capt-1nsane I partially agree. But i feel private servers would be the way to solve this. Create private servers with a reduced gold/rep income and then you have your own server and can invite friendly crews in to play together if you wish... this would be great for the incorporation of community lead events!

@capt-1nsane I only say reduced as generally games that hold an open lobby are supposed to run that risk, and without the risk they reduce the 'income'. Even if gold is the same, and rep is reduced, just to stop people being power leveled in guilds, like joining a private server with one ship of newbies, and then 4-5 other ships of veteran crews, and then all the crews going off and gathering and meeting up and letting the newbies cash everything in... would ruin the grind to pirate legend and make it an empty title

@capt-1nsane said in Passive Mode:

@aarghmaargho
It's has nothing to do with changing the core design, it's giving players more choice & more ways to play.
So why didn't GTA look at it like that when they added it to their game?

I'd like to answer this :)

GTA Online in it's core isn't about a shared environment where the player is carrying potential loot you could take over. It is part of it, but it isn't in it's core. The free-for-all is really just a part of the game, but most people would usually get into the cooperative side of GTA Online. Or racing, somehow. Racing seemed very populair at the time.

The core of Sea of Thieves, however, is that any sail on the horizon could hold loot you could potentially steal. Originally any seal on the horizon would be a player ship that could hold loot, now that has extended to Player and AI ships that could hold loot.

The reason why a passive mode works in a game like GTA Online, is because there is a clear difference in what you decide to play: heists, cooperative missions, racing, business etc. Sea of Thieves just doesn't have those choices.

So unless the Sea of Thieves gameplay extends to more PvE content, adding a passive mode will indeed affect the core of what this game is about: obtaining loot in any way possible.

For now at least!

ps: I'm a great advocate for keeping the PvEvP environment alive at all cost. I very much enjoy it. However, I can see why people would want a passive mode and I understand that newer players will most likely get hammered down by experienced players. But unless more PvE content is added, I don't think adding a passive mode will benefit the game at the moment. I can see options for it to happen, but only if that specific type of content is added.

@capt-1nsane said in Passive Mode:

@murkrage
I see your point about the lack of pve content, but back during the alphas there was little content, much less than there is now, but i had some epic adventures none the less. They weren't pvp or even pve related, we would basically gad about having fun. We had secret santas who would sneak up & leave treasure on your ship. These types of shenanigans just aren't possible anymore.

A lot of people like the friendlier side of the game, meeting new people, forming friendly alliances just to be able to sail together & have fun. Also like @DuMy2008 mentioned it would also be great for the community events etc.

Those types of shenanigans are definitely possible! Heck, my crew and I still do them regularly. There's been a few cases where we're doing Athena's Fortune voyages and end up spreading the loot around ships we find during the voyage.

Just last week we were doing the Skeleton Ship battle at Smuggler's Bay with four ships. Everyone put the loot on whatever ship they could get on first and we ended up splitting the loot fair over on Sanctuary.

I realise there are instances that this just doesn't happen, heck my crew and I have been the reason why a few times as well. Again during the Skeleton Ships, we were fighting them in an alliance. A Brigantine joined in on the alliance and started fighting as well. On of my crew got knocked off our ship and he swiftly swam to the Brigantine to get on and continue the fight.

The Brigantine then started to give him slack for getting aboard and they shot him off. Up until then they weren't hostile but, considering they shot first, we diverted our attention away from the skeleton ships to shoot them to the bottom of the sea. The other ship of our alliance didn't take that too kindly and called us off on it so we in turn kept a weather eye on the Captain ship. Brigantine returned and the final wave was active. We made sure to stick with the Captain ship, sink it, take all the loot and just bail.

My crew has been part of all sides of the spectrum. From friendly neighbourhood merchants to back stabbing thieving pirates. We share our loot and we take your loot. We help you keep your ship afloat and we shoot it to the depths where it belongs. We play the way we want and we're able to because the games allows for all these different playstyles. Whatever we want to do that session, we can do because no playstyle is singled out.

this would be fine, provided you aren't allowed to complete quests when in passive mode... just sail and practice fighting skeletons etc... pretty sure that would suck though so it's gotta be a no from me

Any sort of passive mode that grants players invulnerability to other players is a hard no from me, having said that...

It would be cool if instead of designating yourself passive you aligned yourself as a merchant with an outpost’s npc, tying you to that outpost as one of their merchant traders. This would allow you to turn in some merchant alliance goods that were requested by that outpost during certain days of the ingame month, without needing a voyage and without having a limit to the number you can sell (a limit may be needed to prevent animal
Respawn exploits, but reworking how animals spawn and how often would be better). However as a merchant you wouldn’t be able to turn in OOS or Gold hoarders stuff at that outpost, forcing you to either take a route to multiple outposts, or gives a reason to hide/bury your treasure until you go and stop working for that outpost as a merchant trader, which would have to be done at the outpost npc.

This provides meaningful decision making to what activities you are going for, and the part that ties this all together and is the only part similar to the OP is that as a merchant trader you couldn’t attack first or would lose that status, but people who attacked you would gain a bounty or notoriety with other players and would lose the privilege to interact with the outpost that the ship was aligned with.

The one tricky part is the “who fired first” question but I think Rare could figure out something. Like attacking ships can fire and miss and trick merchants into firing and the attacker effectively avoids the penalty for pvp, while the merchant would lose their trader status. But if the attackers hit the ship or killed a player then the merchants have freedom to attack in self defense.

This would tie up a lot of loose ends when it comes to the point of piracy and how it isn’t represented at all in the game really. We have this wierd double
Standard at the moment of the game being meant for having fun but if you have fun doing the only thing with depth (pvp) then you are an a***e because there is no justification except that it’s fun, which leads to people saying you have fun making me have a bad time, you must be evil, and all types of other nonsense.

And I’m the last person to say things along the lines of “get good” etc. but they need to stop doing things like the alliance duplicating gold without any reason to drop alliance besides not having ships on the map when you can outrun people indefinetly anyways. A system like that is asking for people to get upset, and other people to be demonized for wanting to play a pirate game like pirates and not let everyone get a participation trophy, I have seen people in our alliances who were trying to help do more harm than good, and then if we drop alliance they go complain about it lol... terrible idea to duplicate gold...