In arena you would start with loads of supplies and if you got sunk you would start with a fresh stock. I have made many posts about increasing the starting supplies and most people have been pretty dismissive about the points I tried to make. I literally stopped being friends with someone in world of warcraft because he wouldn't agree with me on how stupid it was that your mana got drained whenever you swapped spec (roles) So lets say I was DPS and I needed to go healer it would be 60 second down time because I had to drink and there wasn't anything in the game that would restore 100% mana each food/drink took 30 seconds to finish and you needed to use 2 pieces. So that was 6 minutes on average per day drinking. Last I looked I had something like 3500 days played in WoW that's 21,000 hours spent drinking to recover my mana just from changing spec.
I have always been a little OCD about time. Time doing trivial things like that where its down time just for the sake of wasting a persons time. There's no challenge to sitting idle for 60 seconds just like in this game there's no challenge to gathering supplies. While I appreciate the ability to buy supplies it doesn't change the fact that now more than ever we need to rethink starting supplies. If not removing bananas from the starting supply at least throw in some coconuts. There were no bananas in arena ships (unless you looted island barrels). When they introduced ship damage you got 3 panks for a mast, helm, upto 3 for a capstan. That's an insane amount of wood just to fix the new damageable parts of the ship that doesn't even account for actually having to patch the hull.
Now more-so than ever the way they advertised this PvP mode like "lose a fight? que up again!! PVP on DEMAND!!!!" ok... but I spawned at an island with 2 barrels and no supply crates so i got like 5 canon balls, 3 bananas and 2 planks so I guess I got to sail to an outpost. Drop gold on supply crates because its cheaper than buying captaincy supplies. Then I can finally que up.
I get it that one could argue all our hobbies are a waste of time to begin with so why are we arguing about wasting time in the world we have chosen to waste our time in. It's about being able to get to the fun bits faster. I am sure just like before this will just be met with a lot of dismissive responses. The solution to bad game design choices shouldn't be "don't like it? Then don't do it or just quit. If we took that attitude toward everything SoT would have died in year 1. Suggestions to improve the game we love aren't a bad thing. This seems like a practical one. I think a lot of people are short sighted. They look at the "Well it doesn't take long to stock the ship"... Sure... if you look at it as individual sessions. How many times have you set sail? How many times have you stocked the ship? Do the math. Look at the big picture. I have easily spent a few hundred hours in this game stocking and sorting supplies. That is time away from actually playing the game and doing the stuff that is fun. It amazes me how many people never look at the big picture. They just live in the moment. Time wasted doing trivial things in the past doesn't matter. The fact that it literally took me EIGHT years to get ONE mount in world of warcraft. Over 12,600 attempts on getting the mount off a boss that respawned every 3 hours in a random location so you might not even make it to the boss before he died wasting that 3 hours. It used to take me 3 whole days to get all my attempts done back then. About 4 years into that grind they reduced the spawn time to 15 minutes and locked the boss to 1 spawn location. So now my 3 day job farming was cut down to 1 day. But that was still 1 whole day every week dedicated to this 8 year old content rather than playing the new content. Finally got it this weekend due to them adjusting the drop rate. But that's an example of game design wasting peoples time. Yes I was choosing to farm that mount... But so weren't hundreds of thousands of other people. There were crowds there every day of the week waiting for the boss to spawn.
Asmongold said it best "A game shouldn't waste your time. A game should be so good that it MAKES you want to waste your time" Nothing about stocking a ship is fun. It's a tedious task we have just been doing since day 1. I'm not saying they should pack our starting ships with supplies. But in the very least 3x wood, 2x canon balls, some decent food.
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