@specterr-27 yeah but it takes a long time and is a commitment
April Update - State of Play
@burnbacon
People definitely play hourglass for the pvp not everyone has 2 hours to spend fighting over a fof and the ability to supply up and que for an instant action and reward is nice.
It also allows for instant player to player interaction i find myself talking to the opponent often and leads to fun conversations.
Hourglass is also a great way to hone in players ability's in naval combat and game mechanics.
Hourglass also keeps a majority of the "sweaty" players that just wants to be competitive out of the sandbox and gives new players a chance to breath a little in High seas.
I think it's an essential cornerstone of SoT@specterr-27 said in April Update - State of Play:
@scorey-gz I pvp all the time and catch runners all the time
Yep, most runners make a mistake and it all comes undone for them. We chase most down also without issue, time always make you a winner.
Hey Everyone,
Following our update last week, we wanted to jump back in here and share an update on the steps we're taking to address the recent Live issues affecting Diving to Experiences.
Update from development
This week the team has been digging further into the migration system and working to identify the root cause behind players becoming stuck on a black loading screen after diving.
This is a pretty complex system that handles a wide range of scenarios across the entire game, but the team has used the Internal, Insiders and Live player data to hone in on the problem area.As it stands today, we now have confidence that we've discovered the root of the issue and the team is working on a fix. We'll be using Insiders this weekend to monitor migration behaviour and to further validate this as the root cause before we prepare to bring a fix to the Live game.
Addressing the issue in Live
As we approach the launch of our upcoming Season and our release onto Battle.net®, our priority is to stabilise the Live experience ahead of time and ensure we have a steady foundation to launch from.In order to do this, once we've built confidence from Insiders, we'll be scheduling maintenance and delivering an update that directly targets addressing this issue and in turn will also reenable diving to Faction Battles. We plan to target this early next week (Week commencing 12/05) and will confirm our timing as soon as we have those plans locked in.
I appreciate that we've taken the game down for maintenance multiple times since our last update and have had an extended window where Faction Battles have been disabled. However, we feel strongly that addressing this issue as our priority is the right approach and allows us to stabilise your experience in Live first and build our confidence ahead of our other updates scheduled for later this month.
Festival of Fishing
As our Live game has been impacted by the issues experienced with diving and recent downtime during the Festival of Fishing, all players have been provided an additional Hunter's Rare Fishing Map and Merrick's Recipe Request Voyage to use before the event ends on May 12th.Thank you all for your patience as we've worked through these issues and we understand the impact that this has had on the wider game during this time. We'll share more on the details of our planned hotfix early next week, so stay tuned on our channels for more info as those plans get locked in.
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
@sonicbob ha detto in April Update - State of Play:
Hey Everyone,
Following our update last week, we wanted to jump back in here and share an update on the steps we're taking to address the recent Live issues affecting Diving to Experiences.
Update from development
This week the team has been digging further into the migration system and working to identify the root cause behind players becoming stuck on a black loading screen after diving.
This is a pretty complex system that handles a wide range of scenarios across the entire game, but the team has used the Internal, Insiders and Live player data to hone in on the problem area.As it stands today, we now have confidence that we've discovered the root of the issue and the team is working on a fix. We'll be using Insiders this weekend to monitor migration behaviour and to further validate this as the root cause before we prepare to bring a fix to the Live game.
Addressing the issue in Live
As we approach the launch of our upcoming Season and our release onto Battle.net®, our priority is to stabilise the Live experience ahead of time and ensure we have a steady foundation to launch from.In order to do this, once we've built confidence from Insiders, we'll be scheduling maintenance and delivering an update that directly targets addressing this issue and in turn will also reenable diving to Faction Battles. We plan to target this early next week (Week commencing 12/05) and will confirm our timing as soon as we have those plans locked in.
I appreciate that we've taken the game down for maintenance multiple times since our last update and have had an extended window where Faction Battles have been disabled. However, we feel strongly that addressing this issue as our priority is the right approach and allows us to stabilise your experience in Live first and build our confidence ahead of our other updates scheduled for later this month.
Festival of Fishing
As our Live game has been impacted by the issues experienced with diving and recent downtime during the Festival of Fishing, all players have been provided an additional Hunter's Rare Fishing Map and Merrick's Recipe Request Voyage to use before the event ends on May 12th.Thank you all for your patience as we've worked through these issues and we understand the impact that this has had on the wider game during this time. We'll share more on the details of our planned hotfix early next week, so stay tuned on our channels for more info as those plans get locked in.
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
Hello drew, thx for the update. Btw, what about the inconsistency with pristine meg parts drop rate? I’ve killed 15 megs and got one tooth.
@sonicbob I'm sorry but this was a serious fail and the players should be getting levels for the inconvenience. Last time there was a slight hiccup we got 5 levels in each PVP faction because things apparently weren't getting tracked right. We have missed 2- 3 weeks of PVP. If we don't get levels rewarded that is ridiculous
People have short memories. The game was way more buggy than it is now, and considering how much more content, tools, and platforms there are now, it is remarkable. I am smiling that some are here complaining that they cannot quickswap or use 3rd party cheats because "the game should have the features already built in". Tells me the new anti-cheat is working. Kudos. As for the bugs, they get worked out sooner or later. Getting the boat flipped or bouncing off the pier is just part of the unpredictable fun of the game.
@sonicbob the continued push for the new season and content while a large part of the game is incredibly buggy feels very tone def towards your audience and customers, especially when a lot of us just spent even more money on all these new editions. PvP players are also running rampant spawn camping adventurers on alt accounts at a much higher frequency than in the past. As a player and consumer, it would feel much more reassuring to see as many updates to the problems with the game as there are posts pushing new content, and cosmetic competitions
I think it would be wise to investigate a different path to faction battles.
With the limited number of ships/players on each server and most people doing battles dive to the experience, that means in most cases 2 ship spots (well I’m assuming 1 plus the extra one) are being used for a faction battle. This means that is two ships, for the length of the battle, aren’t part of the adventure PvPvE experience.
I would recommend changing the mechanics a bit, and when you vote on hourglass it just activates the war map. The added benefit of this, new crews can still back out of it at this point.
On the warmap, there are 2 options depending on what faction you vote for: note this would also require that you aren’t able to vote on the hourglass if you have an emissary flag or an alliance flag.
1: Dive to Battle
2: For Guardians it would be dive to a PvPvE voyage, for seekers it would be Invade someone doing the PvPvE voyage.For everyone, if you choose to dive to battle it will automatically put up the faction emissary flag, and you would dive. However, instead of surfacing in an adventure server it would take you into an arena in the Sea of the Damned. In that arena there would be a turn in spot (could even have the ghost if Demarco in there) so you can restock supplies reliably, and turn in if you are done with battling.
If you choose the PvPvE mode:
Guardians would have their emissary flag put up, and would be given a unique quest by the pirate lord, tasking them with a Veil esque multi stage voyage.
Seekers will have Flameheart step onto their ship (could do something with the blade of souls opening a portal or something) or ding them to hunt down a ship doing the above quest, and they will dive to a server with someone doing the quest. (Possibly to prevent insane wait times, it would shift to invade a server or someone doing a veil, and there is no reason multiple seeker ships couldn’t invade the same server). They will get a quest map, which just is a rough skeleton drawing of the entire sea of thieves, and a special torch.
Their voyage would give them some things to activate, be it the large torches on the islands, or using the skeleton camps, to hone in on their target. Like if their quest is not in the shores of plenty and you lit the torch on Mermaid’s Hidaway it would shade out that region on the Skelton map. And if you were in the right region, the special flame on the torch would “point” towards the Guardian’s final quest island.
Guardians completing the quest would get a bunch of unique treasure and a special Athena chest which turning in would give them the fair amount of HG rep, and they would also get rep for any seeker ships they sink. Seekers would get a good amount of rep for sinking the guardians. If it is on the final stage of the guardians voyage they can disrupt it, and get a Corrupted Athena chest but not the full haul of treasure.
Anyone who hasn’t dived to this experience and turns in the unique items to the Mysterious Stranger or Flameheart would get a small amount of HG reputation, and a descent amount for either Athena… but not quite as much.
Basically this voyage should incentivize choice: do the seekers let the guardians finish the voyage to get the big haul? Wait till they get to the final stage to secure the Athena? Do the Guardians focus on the seeker’s ship risking their ritual getting disrupted?
And it will expand the choices for HG reputation. Let the PVP focused have an experience that isn’t third partied, but let the more PvEvP focused have a more unique experience that can allow more interesting stealthy plays in the final stage.
Plus forcing ALL HG experiences to either dive to the 1v1 battles, or dive to Voyage/Invade the voyage will prevent alliance servers from (easily) exploiting it, and will ensure that everyone taking a slot on an Adventure server either just logged in, or is an active participant in the adventure.
@poerised I love SOT and there is no game like it, but it is not remarkable by any mean, pushing new feature and plateform is the purpose of a game studio, but unlike many, Rare keep pushing broken updates, fail to fix long existing bug and for many years, let cheaters free of any proper repercusion.
Let's not bury our head in the sand, Rare need better quality assurance for shipping features and updates and fix those damn bugs.
@strangetamer497 I 100% agree with you on this one, 5 levels won’t cut it this time. Plus a G&G event to help smoothen things out with the pvp community
I feel like a huge reputation compensation is in order for both factions, for the loss of streaks, flags and potential wins before the diving was removed completely and after. The amount of loyal pvp players whose whole devotion to SOT is purely hourglass play who have missed out on all that reputation & gold. I really don’t think 5 levels compensation will cut it this time to keep the pvp community sweet for the 3 weeks of potential reputation lost, like the last time Hourglass had the issue of not gifting reputation after a win on the odd occasion. On top of the rep compensation a huge gold & glory event to make up for the losses too. I really do hope us hourglass enthusiasts are heard and not just brushed under the carpet with this new season drop that’s coming up.
@sonicbob Apologies for clogging up your feed, but I wanted to say thank you for the update. I imagine you're all working hard and often we don't get the messages of appreciation - so thank you to you and the team for your work on getting this fixed.
this is a terrible idea that requires way to many mechanics, the game can't even handle "two ships fighting in a circle". I'm not sure how this would solve anything besides making way more problems and the mode not work
Hey Everyone,
Following our update on Friday, we're back with news!
Live Hotfix 12/05
This weekend's Insiders testing has generated sufficient data to verify the root cause of the issue affecting Diving to Experiences and our team has prepared a targeted fix for the Live game. We've rolled this fix out behind the scenes this morning into Live and have been monitoring the improvement in successfull server migrations as a result.We'll be taking the game down for a short maintenance today (12th May) to re-enable Faction Battles and flush this hotfix out to all servers before bringing the game back up again.
The team will continue to monitor Diving as this fix settles into the Live game.Looking Ahead
It's worth us stating here that the system managing server migration is a complex one, and there are many real scenarios that can cause a migration to another server to fail. This system often runs at ~98% success rate for migrations across the whole game - and while that is considered a pretty stable experience, migrations may still fail at times. The critical step here though is that in addressing the root cause of this issue today, crews should no longer become stuck on a black screen when diving to an experience and if their migration should fail for whatever reason - they will be returned to the world safely.While investigating this recent Live issue the team have identified further improvements to the system to better protect from future issues like this impacting the experience. Given the critical nature of this system, we'll be scheduling this work as a priority area behind the scenes.
Thank you again for your patience as we've worked to address this issue, we appreciate the impact this has had on your experience over the last few weeks and we'll be taking steps to harden this system for the future.
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
I was very (positively) surprised by that sudden message ingame: "This Server will shut down in approximately 15 minutes"
First thing I did was check the socials and the forum here for information.
I have a question regarding todays Hotfix: Does this update "only" address the recent diving issue, which thankfully has been resolved, or does it also implement other small tweaks / fixes?Also, on the way out, Thank You @DevTeam for maintaining this game the way you do while receiving so much destructive criticism from all sides!
We are all happy this game exists and you make it what it is!@major-oslo "Touch grass" is not a great argument in reply to people who worry and want to play the game, even though the way they express this is misguided. At the end of the day is never pleasant to have a game you paid for be unavailable when you want to play it
@ii-stealy-ii said in April Update - State of Play:
Is there some sort of plan to try and solve this from being the ongoing problem every single time we get an update?
No games are 100% bug free. The devs can only do their best. Big multiplayer games like SoT are more prone to more bugs popping up on big update releases.
Sure you can't do some things at the moement in game like Hourglass, but at least there's other things you can do in game in the meantime.
I'm not having any major issues on HS doing quests etc.
Apparently the servers going down tonight is to fix issues with diving to experiences and re-enabling Hourglass battles.
@freakyflow2793 said in April Update - State of Play:
@sonicbob How much time will the game be down plz ? thanks for the answer :)
Seems to be up now
@sonicbob
https://www.seaofthieves.com/ru/community/forums/topic/178296/temporary-ban/12
what about the erroneous bans on the website?
57 out of 73
