How to keep my friends playing?

I don't know, how did you market it to your friends to get them to try the game in the first place?

If it was anything like I've went through, you telling them "Oh it's great and don't worry about the PvP it's not as bad as people claim it is", then there is your first mistake: You downplayed what you identified as an "Anti-Noob" culture in this game.

Imo the game isn't for everyone and even people that like the experience might not keep playing for more than a hundred hours.
I've manage to get some of my IRL friends to play. They played between 40 to 110 hours but at some point they just shelved the game to play something else. Not everyone connects at a deep enough level with the game to play it as a main game for a long period of time.

The best advice I think is to find people already invested in the game to play with. I've met plenty of friends in the sea and on the discords. Some of them I met in real life and forged a true friendship over the years.

My group's story may be relatable...

My regular daily crewmate and I have always embraced every aspect of the game. We began our journey grinding PvE and tolerating PvP. These days, though, we absolutely love engaging in PvP and playing the hunter. The PvP part was an "acquired taste"...but once we really embraced it and treated loot like a cherry on top more than a requirement to our session, we absolutely fell in love with the PvP aspect. Thousands and thousands of hours in, we both still love it and lean more heavily on the PvP side of the game now.

That said, the rest of our group abandoned the game for similar reasons to your friends. They didn't embrace PvP, loot was the only reason they played, and they were sick of having sessions sum up in a "boss battle" against another crew where you had nothing to gain and everything to lose.

My regular crewmate and I had been sprinkling in tales of our battles and triumphs in our group chat. The glory. The laughs. The losses. The intensity of the great battles.

Then, we got them to bite. We said let's just do a session where we play the hunters. We'll collect loot along the way, but we're not doing any voyaging or world events. We'll just hunt Emissaries and have some laughs.

We had an absolute blast. Lost some battles, won some battles, laughed a ton and engaged with some other crews along the way with some laughs and grogs.

A couple sessions of that mentality and playstyle and they were in love all over again (they're all founders). I'll never forget after that first session, my one buddy was like "holy $&-@ SOT is super fun again!"

Now, when we all hop on to game on a Saturday night or something, SOT isn't the last choice, it's the first choice.

Take what you want from that story, but if you treat SOT as a PvE game and loathe PvP, then I don't have hopes for your friends ever enjoying the game. PvE in SOT is incredibly easy and monotonous. It's like powerwashing simulator...satisfying. It's only a fraction of the game, though, and you have no control over when the part that's actually challenging (PvP) is going to be on top of you.

Yeah, the OP is trying to convince people that they should be playing SoT, or to keep playing SoT.
I personally don't like to sway others opinions, meddling or "influence" others. I've learned that it generally demonstrates someone is a control freak, and maybe even intolerant. :D If people want to do something, they will do it or learn on their own without outside influence.

Show them the OG trailers, they either get hooked by then or they don't

they are driven away by sweats spamming "gg ez

They must be new to the whole Open world thing then. If that is what is driving them away...

trying to introduce them to the game.

watch a few Youtube videos and such. Best introduction and of course, rip the band aid off because it better to experience it now than later.

Spend a huge chunk of time getting skulls/chests/etc. Get absolutely slaughtered by people at the end.

Yeah..and? Could and happens to everyone. You get to comfy and suddenly something bad happens.
Like building in minecraft, you build a house only for a creeper to show up.

My frustration comes from how ANTI-NOOB this community, game, and developers are.

Anti noob? So you want a game to hold your hand?

That if we just keep fighting, they will get better at pvp and it will be better.

You are on the right here. Get better and practice, and if your friends dont wanna put in a little work to achieve it. Move on. Don't pester them to play something they themselves dont wanna work on because the game doesn't give them freebies
(Even tho Seasons, Daily/weekly rewards are easy to do and come naturally)

Unfortunately they, like the rest of my amigos that I have tried to get to play, uninstalled tonight.

That is on them. Some gamers can't handle a little pvp in an Open World PvpvE game. Gamers today (most the younger and pre-teens) are so use to games holding there hand, and giving them free stuff without a challenge. Once they see how they have to 'work' they quit the game.

How have you guys done it?

me personally.

• Make the game. It is what it is.
• Turn the adventure into out own fun. Listen to background music and chat among ourselves.
• Expect the unexpected and know what to happen. Game is so straight forward, after the first hour if nothing has happened...something isn't right.
• Its a game to do together. If one friend enjoys it, Im gonna stick with my friend regardless. Because it what they enjoy and they in turn, do the same for me.

Unfortunately, this is a love it or leave it game, in my experience.

When my son and I picked up the beta and started we were full of excitement for the retail release. I convinced my brother and my good friend to get it. We had a full crew and were excited.
The retail released, and SoT became our top game. We played constantly. My friend never really took to it, it was boring to him. He was the first to drop. This took about a month to happen. My brother was next to step off the gangplank. By this time my son and I would duo sloop. He got his friends into it and he was gone for a while with his new crew before they eventually got bored. Once he hit PL, after the first year anniversary, he’s pretty much not picked the game up. Occasionally on a new update he’ll hop on, for an update like Pirates of the Caribbean. Play for a few sessions and get bored.

So, after roughly a month or so of playing I lost my entire crew. I can not get them back into it and some other friends of mine won’t even touch it. However, I’ve made a lot of friends on this game. I’ve never made friends in online games. Just wasn’t my thing. About month 2, I met my main crew mate. We both had the the same mindset and work schedule. It just worked out. We made PL that first year and we’ve been sailing regularly since then.

In the time since, I’ve added hundreds of people that I’ve met. I’ve joined a couple of awesome groups. I can pretty much can find a crew anytime I want to sail. I do still sail alone quite often though.

In my opinion, this game requires a change in the mindset of the gamer. There is no other game like it. I’m no fan boy for the developers either. There are a plethora of problems within the game itself and the community. With that being said, I’m not commenting to complain about those things.

I’d love nothing more than to get my son and my friends to see this game the way the people who love this game see it. I show them crazy clips of my adventures to try and get them back. They just can’t/won’t see it, that’s ok though. There are plenty of us out there. Go find your crew.

Fair seas and following winds my friend.

Take them on sneaky offence adventures.
Like getting a rowboat and some kegs. Blowing up peoples ships when they’re at an island or fort.
The sneakiness is incredibly fun.
They’ll see that it can be very rewarding and profitable to sink other peoples ships. Give them a taste for blood in a fun low stakes way and they’ll realise PVP can actually be fun.
And when you do fail, it’s usually pretty hilarious.

I do the same thing with new people. I don’t expect them to be good at the game and they get to be a part of a fun heist with zero consequences if we lose. Highly recommend.

I bring them food twice a day and make sure the chains in the basement are secure.

@ssolutionss And if you tried that "Unique" style of play and didn't find entertaining but find the "Boring" PvE more enjoyable? What do you do then?

@crowedhunter Okay, but you make it sound like it's a bad thing that they want to play treasure seekers. I remember my time doing that, it was fun to do, even solved a few riddles.

To me it sounds like you expected them to become hardened PvP sailors but ended up preferring the simpler things and are annoyed with it.

@ssolutionss said in How to keep my friends playing?:

Find people who already want to play this game. Alternatively doing PvE missions isn't a great attention grabber for new people to stick around. The best thing you can do with new players is to Hide on someone else's boat, engage in some cleaver pvp instead of going head first into naval battle, show them how in sot you can win a fight just by doing some 1000IQ plays, or you can get into some other shenanigans with other pirates on the server. Engagements like this are what make new players want to stick around. Doing the easy pve in this game and then discovering pvp is a backward approach.

100 percent this. Show them what’s truly unique and in a low pressure way.

@witchcraft2737 Find me a PVE server related post that doesn't use the sentence "after hours of work", i dare ya.

I'm just wondering what the hell are you doing for so long? Especially after playing for 4 years.

Just play the game as-is. Introduced most of my friends via the Roar without flags as to not invite active hunting on a newbie crew from Reapers and that gave them enough of a love for the game to play on an on-again off-again basis.