Remove or drastically change "double gun" strategy
I am not someone who gets super involved in giving feedback to a game. I am totally happy with this game and the way it has been developed. Controversial editions such as the resource purchasing create room for debate which I think should be encouraged as it will result in the betterment of the game. However, I find that there has been one strategy in Sea Of Thieves that has brought me more agony than any other. Double Gun Strategy.
The double gun strategy; which entails the use of two gun weapons almost always including the eye of reach and a flintlock and blunderbuss often interchanged based on the players preference, I have found has caused me more pain than all the tuckers and arena cannon point farmers. The strategy has had several nerfs in the past and I am aware has been a long standing point of issue and controversy among the community. In my experience, when I come across another ship, and we prepare to cross steel, and they whip out double guns and two people wipe out our entire crew in 5 seconds, I no longer want to play this awesome game that I have played for upwards of a thousand hours, and since day one. I stand no chance with a cutlass and the reload time of my flintlock, and its just better to give up.
Here are my personal suggestion that I have thought of every time someone stuffs my sorry face with two rounds from their guns in a half a second:
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Make Ammo for weapons shared: This solution wouldn't even fix the problem that I hate, but it would balance it more. I think that the tell tale sign of a strategy that is too powerful is that even if I cut your shots in half while you were using double gun, giving you only 5 shots between your eye of reach and and flintlock, if you retained a great enough amount of skill, you would win every single fight against my single flintlock and cutlass.
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Make switching from one gun to another require a reload animation: The main issue I see with the double gun strategy is the ability to kill someone in half a second without them even having time to react. If you make it so that the time between firing those shots is increased by a little, you drastically change the damage output of the guns. I am aware and have considered that this would make the strategy much weaker since the opponent could have time to eat within that period thusly prompting a third shot, but to this I say this switch reload animation should be unique to the action of switching from one gun to another. the duration of this animation would also allow for the developers to adjust the period of this reload to balance the strategy to be more on par with players running a sword.
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Just remove it...: Lock players into using a sword. I understand the outrage people probably feel just hearing those words and I can sense the twitching muscles of every player who has ever said something along the lines of "its called Sea Of Thieves" or "You should just play the game better and learn to deal with the PVP aspect!". Bare with me, while I say yes, it is an incredibly drastic measure to take because it kills what I would even argue is a unique strategy in the game, but that the strategy drastically changes the effectiveness of this games most unique weapon, the sword, which is made nearly obsolete by skilled FPS players coming in from other competitive video games. I understand SOT is a competitive scene, and I encourage that. what I don't think is very healthy for the game is the shift away from unique weapons and methods such as the sword.
I would love feedback and argumentative points (other than those aforementioned above in suggestion #3) to change my mind on this because I would love to see some light in the double gun strat other than its encouragement of competitive gamers migrating following their favorite streamers and boosting the games player base. I just have only had horrible unplayable experiences with people running double guns, and am so very tired of bringing a knife to a double gun fight.
