@wolfmanbush Ironic you would challenge it being broken for years. I am seeing talk of people thinking they "added" a 6th ship to servers to accommodate more players per server with playstation coming soon. Why would we need 1 more ship per server for a new set of players when the game will just create more servers?
The game has been very broken from the moment it was released and I don't think it has ever gotten in a stable state. There have been some updates better than others. The games still playable the broken nature of the game and its servers has become just another quirk of the game honestly. I don't know what I would do if things actually ran perfectly. Certainly would be a shock to the system.
The game launched with 6 ships per server. A player cap of 24 players. You could have 6 galleons on a server. Not that the servers could ever really handle that, especially when all ships were grouped up and fighting. The lower ship count was to put a hard player cap on the servers so the game would run smoother. The more content they have added the more glitchy the game gets and the less players it can support. They increase in ship count was to try to get us back to 6 ships and the servers are supposed to restrict ship sizes from joining. So for example we will likely never see 6 galleon servers ever again. Heck even 2 on a server is a rarity though the brig is more popular anyways.
The fact that we had been stuck with 5 ships for about 5 years shows how bad it has been. The fact that adding back in the 6th ship that was always the intended server size is a surprise to people just shows how long it's been like this. Hit reg only started really getting focused on 5 years after the fact. Anti cheat also not coming in till this late in the game. The fact that they nerfed the old combat system to add weapon draw delay which makes the game feel gross to play... Then people figured out you could animation cancel that and they ignored that for over 4 years before finally coming up with a fix. They could have just rebalanced combat way back then and solved the issue and kept gameplay feeling better, but lets take the harder patch and create loop holes for people to exploit. Instead we over nerfed because "It feels back to get insta killed by 2 rapid shots" well it also feels bad to be 1 shot with a blunder. Then they show off this teaser of this double barrel pistol that 1 shots someone. Now I get it they are trying to over hype it for the PvP crowd and that probably didn't 1 shot the other player he was probably at like half health and they wanted to make the weapon look cooler from a pvp perspective than it really is.... But still.
When they added weapon draw delay I think most people forget they also lowered pistol and eye of reach damage by like 10 or something and they made hip fire have a 40% chance to miss forcing you to ADS to actually hit. Over compensating to try and ensure that double taps couldn't happen as easily. And then quickswap just allow it to happen anyway. And now it takes 4 eye of reach shots to kill a blue mermaid statue instead of 3, takes 3 eye of reach shots to kill a shark instead of 2. So now if you have cutlass and eye of reach you can only kill 1 shark with bullets and start on the 2nd shark and have to finish it with the sword. Before you could kill 2 sharks with the gun alone and have a 3rd shark at half health. This was a huge nerf to PvE for the sake of something that "felt bad" in PvP situations. That is something that STILL hasn't been addressed. Even now with the insane shark spawn rate... While all other PvE health has been changed to scale sharks have been an after thought. Blue mermaid statues haven't been touched. I believe they might have lowered greens health a big and obviously the big nerf was to red mermaid statues so players without a Disney stick can now actually solo them which was nearly impossible before.
If at any point in history you tried to defend SoT as not being broken that was just massive copium. Or a conflict of definitions. I guess one could view broken as 100% unplayable... Which was the last update when they added anti cheat and every non steam player was crashing every 10 minutes. I guess the issue here is some people view "broken" as meaning over powered. Others view it as completely literally unplayable like it was for a few weeks. Others view broken to just mean a buggy mess.... but still playable.
As much as I wish for a smoother game experience I have come to terms with this game just being a bit messy but fun. Never forget when they added the ability to right click to hand items to people.... Rare never even considered the possibility someone might try to hand anything to another player IN THE WATER lol. So it worked great on land.... but if you even tried to hand someone a banana in the water you would start flying up into the air... if im not mistaken that was the update they were like.... "ok maybe we should have an insiders program"
