were soooo worried about the doubloon "economy" (yall really need to learn what that means in an online game) yet gold is also broken... and you keep adding the new cosmetics for insanely cheap. 40k gold sails etc... i feel like the idea here is you want to add some new stuff to the gold shop and because like 90% of the player base is new and not rich you dont want the cosmetics to seem out of reach. but at the same time if it keeps those new players around they will just become part of the base with a ridiculous amount of gold. when the game launched the rng of loot being on the highest level voyage could net you the lowest level loot. the higher voyage level just meant you had potential to get the top tier loot but it didnt gurantee it. but then you fixed that so then doing commendations for the lowest teir loot was now the thing that was hard to do. so after a while i knew many pirates who castaway chests, barnacled treasure, foul skulls were the most precious items in the game because of the rarity. then the commendation squish came along. and soon after the sea started getting flooded with more and more high tier loot. even the chest of fortune cosmetics cost dont match the payout from cashing in the chests because we need so many and the sources of them also come with a mountain of other loot.
im still fighting with myself over this doubloon situation. as i havent done ever season theres plenty of items i could spend them on and not truely lose the doubloons... but the reason i didnt buy the stuff in the first place is the doubloon cosmetics have the opposite problem of the gold cosmetics. the doubloon items cost too much for what they are. very few are worth the insane price tag attached. and seeing the items coming in the black market and how cheap they are doubloon wise and how many doubloons you are going to shower us with on the weekends just for doing the events.... it really seems like all you are wiping doubloons for is so we have to play 3-6 hours on the weekend vs logging in and instantly buying everything then logging back off.
really dont get how the point of the doubloon reset was to boost player engagement by making is regrind stuff but then you made the prices super low, and put a cap on doubloons because you knew people were going to cheese regaining them because despite your claims that seemed like the bilgerat weekend was going to be the only time we could gain doubloons... literally nothing has changed on the seas. all sources of doubloons remain the same, free 50 doubloons every month just for logging in, doubloons on the battle pass..... like this reset is literally just to pay your players play time a few more hours?
i mean hey... you succeeded in making me want to actually spend what i had so its not lost or converted into more useless gold.... but honestly whats next? deleting our gold and adding a cap there too? considering the value of items we sell = reputation gained from the selling and how reputation is all that matters now? or does it... is an extra ring that we cant even wear with fingerless gloves even worth the long grind?
are you going to start deleting our cosmetics so we have to rebuy them in order to deal with the gold issue? or making the cosmetics we have cost a rental fee so those who foolishly bought everything in the early days login every month to a hefty bill from the outposts for our cosmetic chests? or better yet bill us for docking at an outpost. force repairs on our ships in order to sell and pay a tax for being able to sell there as well. then jack up the repair costs?
now that you have created this system that can just put supply crates on our ships? why not add some captaincy permanent upgrades at a HEFTY cost? like do you want your ship to always spawn with an empty storage crate? 25 million gold per ship. always spawn with a rowboat? 50 million gold... and add rowboat customizations to the ship chest. allow the shipright to add a temporary harpoon or canon to our rowboats (temporary as in it wouldnt change the permanent spawning rowboat from being basic it would just be the current attached rowboats upgrade), could also had us pay a hefty fee to swap out rowboat parts if thats a system you would invest in. have hefty prices on all these as captaincy itself was meant to be a bought into system for experienced pirates who had extra coin. though even the cost of captaincy ships now seems a joke with how much gold the game is throwing at us vs how little the new cosmetics cost?
basically it feels better giving us things to spend our currencies on then taking them away and adding an arbitrary cap because you cant think of a better solution. and if our updates are going to look as bare bones as this seasons going forward you havent plenty of time to work on adding new systems and fixing current ones that have been broken for 8+ years. im sure there are still beta access bugs lingering around. it would just be nice to stop getting updates that seem like you are flipping us the bird for playing too much all to create a more curated experience to hopefully keep new players around. the game already has an overwhelming amount of content for new players compared to 8 years ago. lets just spit shine all that old stuff so the pain points arent as bad for the newer players.
and while ive seen a lot of people mention the emoporium change as being just another way to create fomo. someone kinda helped me realize the reality. you guys were doing what 4-5 new ship cosmetics a season as you needed something new each month as well as at the launch of the season PLUS the plunder pass set? so now rather than having new cosmetics to advertise with each month in the news videos you can just announce the rotation of bringing back old cosmetics so basically you only need to do the new season pass cosmetic set then you can hype up the rotation of cash shop cosmetics. so less work for your art team. this is kinda the ultimate red flag and definition of managed decline. blizzard did seem to come around and figure out "hey we should stop trying to manage the decline, stem the bleeding, and figure out what people actually want" like project titan which was supposed to be blizzards next big thing, they knew another mmo would dethrone wow at some point (though surprisingly none has even at wows lowest point they launched classic which saved the day), but they were developing a new mmo with the mentality of if someones going to kill our other game it might as well be our own game that does it... well the project failed miserably due to lack of direction and hubris and feeling they could do no wrong (thats not even making that up or insulting them, was legit said by the lead developer). so after titan got canceled they salvaged what they could and made over watch... which they then tried to market as something that would come to rival real spots like football (both versions).
i dont want to see the same thing that happened to doubloons happen to gold. i think a better fix needs to be devised. perhaps on the lines of what i said? boost the cost of everything across the board. in year1 some of the cosmetics were fairly highly priced like 100+ K when the average days worth of grinding might have got you what 10-15k at best? need to keep in mind how bad the loot was early on and then the fact some of us didnt know the best gold making methods so there was a learning curve there. but i dont think having high value items in the shop would be a deterant for new players. it would give them something to strive for.
the fact you made safer seas nothing but a gold farm is also a problem. it should be a reputation and commendation farm more than anything. like i would remove all the limitations on levels and available content (aside from pvp stuff obviously) and just give 0 gold, 0 doubloons for everything. pirate legend very quickly became a joke in this game as how it never really got new cosmetics and rarely got updates for something that took so long to achieve. now it takes no time or effort to become PL at all and theres plenty of content to do for them. but its status or pristeige is gone. like i heard you guys used to ban people who exploited the commendation for selling grade 5 emissary flags because that was meant to be a pvp title you earned but when you added burying loot to the game people found out you could bury your flag, dig it back up and it removed the "yours" tag so they could cheese the commendation. which i think has a title attached? so that was ban worthy? and now voyage of luck and like the ashen garrisons are just giving out emissary flags... well most of them. in true rare fashion we never retroactively improve anything so as far as i know you will never find a hunters call emissary flag. which is mean cause hunters call is supposed to be the chill faction pve players can just have a mellow session and grind out. similar to how you added bone callers as a throwable, and traps, yet neither of these come in the throwables bundle from the shipwright? why add stuff that fits under the catagory of past updates but then not retrofit that past update?
you want us to play more but your focus is on how to annoy and frustrate the players more than improve the game for the better...
