Add Incentives to NOT Dive (CONCEPT: New Cursed Treasures)

Players should not be allowed to dive if they have an Emi flag above grade 3 IMO.. I think that would help. So many players rush grade 5 and then dive and repeat to avoid conflict.

@thamb0

I definitely think something like this also would work really well to incentivize not diving. With the majority of quests being accessible just by sailing, I don’t see why that isn’t being encouraged more, especially as it leads to more player interactions/engagements which is one of the fundamental principles of the game.

Why fight it out at a random world event when you could just dive to one? Yes the loot is a bit better

Huh? For one, Loot isnt "better" and second, you still have to fight if someone comes along.

In modern Sea of Thieves, the gameplay loop largely revolves around: dive, sell your loot, dive again.

Then the average player looses out on the extra bonus they would of gotten if they had held on to said loot just a little longer with G5 (if they do have a flag) But, hey...the community cried out when they wanted faster loot gathering mechanic.

I think there should be some incentives to NOT dive.

It more beneficial to have more loot once you have G5 so you get that big bonus when you sell. So there is one, but most dont care.

There isn’t any reason to stay on the same server at present

I met some friendly pirates? Diving takes time, which I dont seem to have :p

This curse will break naturally after around an hour-two hours of sailing

As mentioned. Players now days want to do things quickly because they dont wanna waste time playing. They dont have time, they wanna get this and that right off the bat. So having something locked like this....will just be left alone.

@drewdigon I agree that the incentives of the game post S11 are an issue. I actually talked about it in another thread just a few days ago. However I don't agree with your solution.

The issue with this "cursed" treasure idea is that it hurts the purpose of diving. The idea is that casual players can quickly do a session of SoT. Making it so they can't fully cashout for an hour or whatever means that they aren't getting that payout. There's a severely diminished "carrot" at the end of the session. Also there's the issue of what loot is "cursed"? If you curse the most valuable item (usually like 10-30k) then you get the severely diminished reward. If you curse a random trinket (like 1-3k) then who cares about that? Just dive again and forget about it.

Rather than do this "cursed" item idea, I'd implement a Grade VI emissary, or Grand Emissary (cus it sounds better). This would give you significantly more bonuses at the end of the session. The only way to achieve this grand emissary would be to stay on one server and stack a certain amount of loot on your boat. Achieving this would reveal you on the map as well. This would truly embody the "become the world event" idea of the game. Players that are focused on playing for 3+ hours, going on a session with multiple quests and world events would be strongly encouraged to pursue this max emissary level. This would bring back the high loot targets and the single server experience that SoT is lacking right now, without ruining the fast casual experience S11 was able to bring to the game.

There are a couple of issues with my idea though. First of all, there'd need to be some kind of balancing so that you can't just make an absurd amount of money off the update. Especially alliance servers.

The other thing is that a lot of what S11 did was make the actual quantity of loot on servers smaller, increasing server performance. You'd end up inviting back a lot of those issues by encouraging stacking again. But I'd say that's not a bad thing. Getting so much loot it lags a server used to be a badge of honor, and wasn't seen negatively. The annoying parts of server performance was just when in normal scenarios between 2 boats, not special moments like a million+ coin loot stack. I'm sure there are improvements that could be made to past loot pools and balancing as well to ensure that the lag doesn't get too bad.

@burnbacon getting grade V is way too easy. It takes like 2 quests/WEs. It makes people go, "ooohhh nooo we're missing out on 1 extra raid worth of value (a 15 min activity) by not spending 20 minutes sailing around"

@thamb0 this could be a good and simple change. I just think they don't want diving to be too bad. There's definitely a desire at Rare to make SoT more inclusive for people that are busier/younger and can't be on as long. I'd expect that the S11 rebalance put diving at a an intentional progression speed, but they either didn't have the time or the desire to rebalance normal adventure play to coexist with the diving mechanics. So just outright nerfing diving seems like a path they wouldn't pursue. However idk Rare so maybe they would.oOverall, I think your idea would work.

@fysics3037 Ya, I think making it so that people have to decide if they want to pursue that grade 5 but be stuck to that server would be refreshing, because it would allow players to actually interact. I have had numerous occasions where I start sailing towards a ship that is clearly grade 5 and they just run far enough away that they can dive. Most of the time I am just trying to see what's up and don't plan on attacking anyways, but since it's easier for them to just dive and keep their grade 5, that's what most players do. That should NOT be what Rare pushes for, as it basically kills the game at that point and everyone becomes bored.. I normally get my Reaper rep up through HG nowadays, but can't even imagine the pain of Reapers getting to grade 5 to hunt ships and then just have them all dive to different servers when they see the big bad grade 5 bearing down on them.

@thamb0 yeah reaper gameplay was pretty much killed with S11. The issue with just making it so you can't dive above G3 is what do you do about LotV, Vaults, Merchant Shipments, etc. that all get people to G5 in one quest. They could simply just sell and lower and go again, feeding into the same play style. That's why I like the idea of a GVI, it allows them to create that incentive without messing with the balance of longer quests and stuff.

@fysics3037 I think both options added would be good. Even not diving after grade 2 would be good, but I know some players can cheese grade 3 by cooking meat and getting bait crates, for HC at least. But it is meant for players that get G5 and then just dive to easy sea forts or quick voyages that would normally only get them 1 grade level. Now they can't just get G5 and hide amongst the fast voyages. They will have to do the longer, higher risk/ higher reward voyages, like you mentioned, Vaults, Shipments, etc. Most people doing a vault will probably stay and fight on that server if being attacked, rather than crews doing small dig up quests that just keep diving after gathering a few chests and selling with their G5 they keep up all day.. idk. No one solution will fix it, besides getting rid of diving, which I would love, but many would not. Rare just needs to actually sit down and work on balancing gameplay health so we can go back to having meaningful interactions, whether that be PVP or simply meeting people. S11 def killed reaper gameplay and now you just rarely ever see them going after people. Now they mostly just do World Events to stack G5, because most Reapers know they're just wasting time trying to sail towards any ship, since they will just dive.. It's honestly sad what the games devolving into.

I think Rare needs to look at the misuse of lower-tier voyages (you know the one!), which enable players to hop multiple servers rapidly.

I think a minimum 5 minute cooldown should be put on voyages, even if completed in under that time. If timed from surfacing, this would be less than the likely time it would take a lower-level new pirate to complete those voyages, sail to an outpost and sell. If not completed, the voyage would still have the current 10 minute cooldown.

A more contentious suggestion might be that diving to a voyage drops the grade of your Emissary flag by one tier for each dive.

@thamb0 said in Add Incentives to NOT Dive (CONCEPT: New Cursed Treasures):

Rare just needs to actually sit down and work on balancing gameplay health so we can go back to having meaningful interactions, whether that be PVP or simply meeting people. S11 def killed reaper gameplay and now you just rarely ever see them going after people.

Yeah 100% agree on this. I think ultimately the first priority of Rare right now should be adding more content focused seasons like S15, bringing a massive amount of content and freshness to the game. But at least once a year I think we need to be seeing some form of foundational updates come to the game that really tackle these core issues. I mean S11 has it's issues but I also see a lot of people asking for updates to HG, Guilds, and weapons. I really hope Rare hasn't just called it a day on the games foundation, but they definitely shouldn't go back to this S7-14 content drought where there are big changes but nothing really new to do. I mean there are so many aspects to SoT and so many of them need some overhauls. We need a good like 2-3 seasons of new content each year but I really hope they go back and help give some new life to these outdated activities.

There's really only so much they can pump into the sandbox anyways. Outside of a confirmed Reaper update and adding a faction for the DB, what do they really do? I mean other than make minor expansions to the existing trading companies. I guess you could stretch some additions to the Sovs but SoT is really approaching it's feature complete status. Many of the key players in the story or sandbox are finally getting their grand moments in the spotlight. There's also the performance perspective. I mean we've seen them add all kinds of stuff that have created some major performance issues. Notably there's the BB, Shrines/Treasuries, Sea Forts, Skeleton Camps, etc. There's not a lot more they can pack in to the sandbox performance wise, and also space wise.

As SoT approaches a continually more and more seemingly sandbox complete level status I think it's imperative they tackle old issues and revisit old content. They should make it a priority to continue to revamp the world events, change the incentives, refresh old content, and improve the performance of the game. And to be fair, I think they've done a wonderful job with this. I mean look what they've been able to do with skeleton captains, bottle quests, merchant voyages, every world event in S9, etc. Now they gotta start looking back at S7, 8, 10, and 11. Stuff that might not seem that distant, but was actually a similar time period between S2 (with FoF) and S9 (in with the WE refresh with a major focus on FoF).

I think what SoT needs right now is more content and new features to entice players, but what SoT will need in 2-3 seasons will probably be another content refresh where the game is rebalanced and improved on a fundamental level. My hope is that Rare doesn't just ignore that need based on their mistakes of going on a 7 season run of content refreshes/core updates, and is able to find a healthy balance between content additions and content refreshes that keeps pushing the game forward without disconnecting the metaphorical rail cars of these seasons.