I'll most likely get destroyed for saying this

@wolfmanbush I don't mind losing and of course even as an experienced player you will make mistakes, and i always take it as an opportunity to learn. But when the game is designed in a way that you can't influence the outcome of a fight against a complete beginner enough to feel confident in winning, then i think something is very wrong.

Dominating less “skilled” pirates. Makes you feel good?? Wow..

@burnbacon Well, yeah, that's what makes anyone feel like a good player. It's literally the definition of being good at a game lol.

You're saying it like it's a bad thing but people have every right to enjoy being better at the game than others. In my case though, that's not really what i care about, i'm more focused on self improvement than feeling good about myself. What i mean is basically that i think the skill roof is too low and the game doesn't reward skill enough.

My crew and I all completely suck at PvP. No, really. We've improved over the last three years of playing, but we're still pretty bad. Our best bet is always to stick with naval tactics, avoid boarders and play to our strengths. As long as we can keep the battle ship-to-ship, we're extremely likely to win in the end. But if we get boarded by halfway competent players...we're usually wrecked.

Having said all that...

There's almost no chance a crew of new players can destroy us. Even if they have great PvP skills from other games, they likely have no concept of naval combat. It's happened so many times. A group of players thinks they're "all that" with their mad PvP skills and tries to gank us. Then they promptly wind up at the bottom of the sea because they have no clue how to manage a naval battle. They probably watched some streamers for a while and thought, "hey, let's go be pirates and sink everyone." Doesn't work like that. There's a lot more to Sea of Thieves than the admittedly basic combat system. There's strategy involved. A good battle at sea is chess, not checkers.

If I were to add anything to combat, it would be simple things. For instance, I'd love to see "crouch" and "roll" commands. Just these things alone would add a lot, I think. But I'd resist adding too much complexity. Part of the beauty of Sea of Thieves is its simplicity.

Being someone who use to hate the term "its sea of thieves, not sea of friends" and used every trick in the book to avoid combat. I personally do agree with this. I got tired of loosing my loot and having to drop and run from every encounter, I started fighting and getting better. Not gonna say im anywhere near decent, but anyone can really see how bad the hits are sometimes. Theres points where I can say I know i shouldve died, or i know i shouldnt have died. Being a Day 1. I can also say that it also wasnt this bad

@skritsarn

and the saddest thing is it wasn't this bad at launch - but rare ruined it with their "balancing changes".

At launch you could literally shoot 2 bullets from a sniper and pistol on the same frame, effectively one shotting somebody without them even hearing the bullet before they die. You could also hit the ground while sword dashing to prevent the stun you get from missing the sword lunge, effectively allowing you to become a walking Beyblade dashing around the boat.

Anyways, it wasn't this bad at launch is an interesting take to say that least.

@kaijoi It was better then now

I 10000000% agree, the game has become worse over time and the combat system had become so bad its all rng and no skill is needed to win