A Few Suggestions on Safer Seas

@ictus-xxi said in A Few Suggestions on Safer Seas:

@coffeelight5545 fine, exclude the shrouded ghost commendation and make that achieveable or just dont have the SG enabled in safer sea (that would be a huge sellingpoint for veterans to not go there). However you wont be able to progress the athena commendation tied to it anyways since thats already confirmed to be locked and not up for debate.

I actually disagree with this

they don't have captaincy and they don't have the athena comm so I'm completely fine with the chance at the title/comm level

if megs are similar to high seas in spawn rate for 1 boat and I think it's fine to have the base comm and the chance.

I have no idea how safer seas is gonna operate on this topic but it wouldn't bother me if they had a chance if it's not easier to spawn them.

Alliance servers run meg-cheese meg hunts and have for years, I have no interest in some solo or some family/friends being left out of the chance just because they are chilling on safer seas.

@rikjaxx

Exactly this. My experience with finally trying to play Tall Tales, a few hundred hours in, turned me off to the game. I stopped playing all together it left such a bad taste in my mouth. All these unique stories created, but no way to enjoy them without just getting lucky. Even when I'd put my 9yo daughter on the mic, telling people we were just playing tall tales, no company flag, no loot, 9/10 people would just blast us out of the water. No one wants to play that, it makes Rust look like a pacifist enclave of monks.

Nobody enjoys tracing out ghostly footprints on an island with their kid, or trying to follow Brigsie's map, etc. and just getting blasted out of the water by people who roll a 3 man PvP team together 30 hours a week.

I'm very much looking forward to actually playing huge chunks of this game, the Tall Tales, that were basically shut off to me before.

You know, I have already read a lot of topics about safe seas and I am completely for safe seas. I've played this game for 1700 hours and I understand perfectly well why newbies don't want to stick around for long. The community and mechanics of this game do not give them a chance to get involved. When a player first buys this game, he doesn't care about it. He has no emotions associated with this game. Literally on his first trip, he encounters players who are more experienced than him (because there is no matchmaking) and on a ship that is larger than his (because there is no balance for ships). This new player simultaneously receives 20 shots at the mast and 3 borders on his ship and happily drowns under insults, ridicule and stupid voice chat music. Of course, the first emotion and understanding of the game will be so negative that he will never return to the game in his life.
At the same time, players who have been playing this game for a long time against safe seas for the sole reason that they will not have the opportunity to sink inexperienced players or players who did not want the battle in the first place. Online in the open seas will fall exactly as much as it will grow. There is no need to say that the game will die.
Experienced players do not need a safe sea. Beginners need a safe sea. Rare simply takes new players away from experienced players. But experienced players don’t like that there will be fewer easy and unfair victories.

I think that locking at least the following commendations at grade II or III would be a very good idea: GH vaults (grade II is 10, grade III is 25), Ghost ship voyage completions (grade II is 5, grade III 15) and lost shipments (grade II is 15, grade III 25) and animals (grade II is 20, grade III 50) for merchant. You cannot reasonably tell me, that anyone grinding for PL would realistically grind any of these commendation to grade III (on normal servers that is). You would maybe maybe get one of these comms to grade III but never all of them. Now given that rep is cut short to 30% if you want to grind to lvl 40 in the main trading factions you would certainly end up well beyond the grade III threshhold for pretty much all of these comms, as fotd and fof are disabled and you gotta get your stuff from somewhere.

Very few people playing in Safer Seas will ever concern themselves with this stuff, certainly not to this degree. There is no reason for Rare to go out of their way, certainly not more than already announced, to make it a "punitive" mode of play devoid of any and all rewards. The limitations on gold and rep alone already mostly eliminate anyone motivated solely by such things. Commendations are fun byproducts of playing, with a handful of them having some nice rewards attached. There seems to be this belief that SS should be completely joyless? These players deserve no reward or even the smallest achievement(s) without the threat of being pranked or trolled by the likes of Summit and his legion of imitators? Even so, these players are not commendation and title grinders, certainly not as a priority. They just aren't - even if a few 24/7 players will make a video about doing all of these things in SS.

Also, in the current mode of the game, outside of how a ship might be decked out, how often do you know what another player has or has achieved upon sight?

Answer: next to never.

@ictus-xxi

Safer Seas is not being offered to players as only an extended tutorial mode. It can and probably will serve that purpose well but it is not the only reason for its existence. Not even close. Arguing for the complete absence of any gameplay loops at all misses the point of it.

I never said they were unimportant, I said they were not as important to people inclined to play in SS as they are to the hardest core players, but that they are still nice rewards that will come to people that play to them.

I've no doubt the grinders will absolutely drop into SS to max things, as is their nature, but they are few and certainly not the people to make decisions like this around.

@ictus-xxi

IMO, splitting hairs on this kind of minutiae regarding comms is unncessary and caters to an extremely narrow POV. Alot of the CON positions on these forums are variations on OK but on Safer Seas sailing should be into the wind and all treasure should only be crates of bananas. There is nothing wrong with the general comms being in SS. It is already established that many of the most "desired" ones will not even possible.

Just let people play man. Don't worry about it. There will always be some people exploiting WHATEVER the guardrails are in any mode imagined. The majority of people that will be happiest about SS are not angling to make your worst fears reality.

@ictus-xxi

I listen fine. My POV is simply that SS is not only a tutorial mode, despite you saying so, or believing it only should be. It deserves to have game play loops and rewards for the players in it and not just be an empty tech demo.

They have already put fairly reasonable limits in that they've obviously thought quite a lot about. Whittling down further to minute and largely uncared about details about what those need to be (splitting or capping grades???) beyond what they've already announced appeases a subset of players that truly don't need to concern themselves with what happens in SS to enjoy the game as they always have.

I feel I agree with the level cap on safer seas and and limiting on chests but not gold it's used only for cosmetics nothing big ( 30% you got to work 3x harder for cosmetics), as far as the other limitations are understandable including rep/ plus safer seas is good not just for returning players but solo pirates. I get it's not suppose to be an alternative but 40% even would give that little bit more of a push plus if it's worth more or make a bit more of a difference wouldn't that be treasure worth protecting when getting attacked