Punished for PvE, punished for PvP, why bother playing?

@camscam4171 said in Punished for PvE, punished for PvP, why bother playing?:

Picture this: You just finish the tutorial, you jump into your first game and everything looks amazing, you're having a good time, everything seems like it'll be great.

I like it. Sounds good so far.

Then, you wonder what to do next. Do you go after the tall tales? Do you go on an expedition for gold? Well, everything and nothing! You can do it all at whatever pace you'd like, there's no progression or feeling like you're doing anything by accomplishing all of this, you just get cosmetics.

Intrinsic vs extrinsic reward. The intrinsic reward is that your sailing and fighting skills improve and knowledge of the game increases. You have a sense of accomplishment for completing some goal you made for yourself, or met the requirements of one listed within the achievements and commendations. The extrinsic reward is that you gain ways to show off your progress in the game and express your pirate’s unique style. A lot of successful games offer cosmetic rewards while keeping everyone on equal footing concerning tools and equipment. The great thing is that when you best another player, you know you did so based on more than artificially enhanced abilities that you had but that they didn’t possess.

Okay, well that's not as fun, but hey maybe the PvP is fun. You start searching for other ships only to find that there aren't ANY ships around. You keep looking, nothing. Finally you see a ship and it's a two-man sloop that instantly turns and sails away the moment they see you on the horizon. Okay, scratch that. You switch servers.

Let them get complacent. Catch them with their guard down. You gave up too easily. Let them amass loot and corner them.

Finally you encounter another sloop and you duke it out. The battle is fun and you both land major blows on the enemy ship. You sink them. No reward.

You don’t understand the game then. It is Sea of Thieves, not Sea of Vandals and Murderers. You are rewarded for stealing loot, not sinking ships and killing players. You aren’t penalized for killing and sinking others, but you picked a bad target. A ship with no loot. Let them gather loot or work on content until the moment is right to strike.

Well I guess PvP isn't the solution here, maybe you'll go back to PvE and go after that world event. It's an ashen lord across the map. You do a lot of damage, it doesn't seem like anyone is contesting you, so you commit to the fight. You go down a few times and just as you're about to kill the ashen lord you hear canons riddling the side of a boat. Your boat.

This is a good example. They waited for you to let your guard down. They outsmarted you.

You get back to the ship and by then it's already too late. They sink you and you are forced to respawn 10 nautical miles away from where you just were, nearly half way across the world. By the time you get back they've already finished the battle and looted all the items, now they're just sailing away from you and you cannot catch them no matter how hard you try.

Now you know how to do it. Learn from your mistakes. Keep a watchful eye on the horizon next time. Also, do what they did and go find players not paying attention to the horizon so you can catch them off guard.

Suddenly, an epiphany! You realize that only a quarter of the people in the game want to PvP and the rest are out doing meaningless tasks out around the outer edges of the map so that they won't be bothered. If anyone tries to attempt a world event the rest are just waiting to come and hijack it so people are DETERRED from being the ones to start a world event. You're playing a game that punishes you for being the ones to start events and people just hide around like rats waiting for you to do all the work for them so they can have an easy sink and an easy haul.

Then you finally ask yourself, "D*mn, why do people even play this game? You get punished for doing PvE and punished for doing PvP, what's the point?" And you quickly quit to desktop and uninstall the game.

So rather than learning from your experiences, you just decided the community doesn’t play the game right and you gave up on the game completely. Okay.

Yeah dude sounds like the game might not be for you. I wouldn't reccomend writing it off completely until you maybe get a few friends together and play it with them, solo isnt fun for most people ( inb4 the I only play solo and I have fun people show up, good for y'all). But yeah, generally speaking, if you are the type of person that prefers in-game systems of progression (like in an rpg or unlocks in some shooters) SoT is gonna be a harder game to wrap your mind around. The game is definitely more of an open ended, internal motivation kind of affair.

And that is perfectly fine, not everything has to be for everyone.

@camscam4171 sagte in Punished for PvE, punished for PvP, why bother playing?:

You're playing a game that punishes you for being the ones to start events and people just hide around like rats waiting for you to do all the work for them so they can have an easy sink and an easy haul.

And that is just the truth 10/10. ^_^
99% of "the endgame" hands down. :D
People will deny it but what you wrote is just exactly what it is!

People here are like the most toxic kind of communists.
No one wants to put in the work since the one who puts up the work will be the extorted one. ^_^
Suddenly people come swarming the actual worker and demand "redistribution".

PvP in itself is not rewarded by anything.
Even though it would be so easy for Rare to do!!!!!!

You need like 1000 sunk Ghostships or so for 'Legend of the Sea of Thieves'.
Why not tie cool titles to killing dozens of Pirates?
Or sinking playerships?

All those "catfishing" worldevents will not motivate people who can just lose it all without having something solid in the sack, for just participating.
The Zeitgeist has shifted!
Those bad in PvP have no motivation anymore to be just "mobs" without human rights for those who are good within it.

Even I who win most of my battles do not like this style of PvP.
It feels predatory and disgusting to me most of the time.
My so crazy virtuous empathy that nobody will ever thank me for! =)
I just feel bad to steamroll someone!
And the hard battles get toxic so often and swear-burdened.

This style of gaming is risky.
And the Zeitgeist has just shifted.
Fun fact:
Watching Pace22 on twitch right now, one of the most renowned PvPers of the game.
The absolute King, who just DOMINATE the entire game on their Galleon!
And even he says current PvP needs a massive overhaul "so bad".

But soon here will come the fanboys and defenders! ^^
And the circle continues.

Translation:
Sea of thieves is one of the FEW games where skill matters, and not how long you have played the game. And I want them to make it like every other game out there ever where a dumb player with 400 hours beats a pro with 100 hours only because he has a bigger cannon.

What is the reward of the game?

• Sinking other crew
• Saving your loot
• Experiencing the talltales (Some of them are great)
• Looking cool (Yeah, cosmetics are a reward, and they are progress.)

You can find PVP if you look for it.

• Raise reaper's flag
• Raise Reaper's mark flag
• Get a Reaper's chest
• Start a fort of the damned.

Most of those will get people flocking to you trying to rob you blind. Is it ALWAYS like that? Of course not. You want immediate PVP play Arena.

And funny thing, you say its impossible to find PVP, and a couple paragraphs later you EXPLAIN how to get pvp (start a world event and get people to try and come steal it) And then you whine about that X) You whine about PVP when you wanted it and about PVP when you didnt want it X)

I think you should stop whining if the game is too hard for you and go play some timesink game where no skill is required like so many games out there.

I've lost count how many times I've lost fort of fortunes and forts of the damned at the last minute because ships come just as I get the vault door key, almost as if they are using esp to know exactly when to arrive to hijack the entire thing they did nothing to earn.

honestly would not surprise me, their timing is impeccable every time.

Rocky didn't start out fighting Drago
Doc didn't start out fighting Johnny Ringo
Jean-Claude didn't start out fighting Bolo Yeung and Kurt Sloane didn't start out fighting Tong Po

Piracy is a craft. It's an art form.

It takes time to master. It takes time to gain the experience to earn consistency.

This is not a take a secret tunnel or find a hidden block and skip to stage 8 game.

Do what is realistic today based on what you're able to do. As you see more results swim out into more difficult and dangerous waters. Work your way up. Earn your experience.

In reality this isn't about the gold or glory it's about the completely random and very short interactions and occurrences that make you appreciate what a game like this has to offer. You never know when one is coming you just gain enough experience to learn that they are out there waiting.

@amybun
You do know people can:

• See you doing fort of the damn from anywhere on the map.
• Come to a nearby island and park in it
• Come to a nearby rock and hide their ship sails behind it.
• Leave their boat somewhere else and rowboat to fort of the damned.

If I see you doing fort of the damned and I want to steal it I am going to wait for you to finish it. Why? Because If I kill and sink you before you do it, I will have to finish it, and that will give you time to come and fight me for it.

However if I wait for you to do it. I can sink you, take all the loot and be gone to sell it likely before you are back.

But of course bad luck exists as well.

If you want to do fort of the damned its wise to all the time be having looks around, to check for mermaids, and to send 1 of your boys to sink nearby parked ships.

Like...are you surprised it needs these kind of efforts? You are playing an alarm all over the server screaming BOYS BOYS BOYS COME HERE BIG LOOTS! with that big skeleton in the sky. Fort of the damned is high risk high reward. If you want lower risk risk lower reward then do smaller missions that dont announce what you are doing to the entire server.

High risk high reward:

• Fort of the damned
  Mid risk Mid reward:
• World events (normal forts, fire tornado)
  Mid risk high reward:
• Raise emissary flag and do emissary stuff to level up your flag and sell for more
  Low risk Low reward:
• Sail around with no emissary flag and do anything that is not world events.

If you pick the riskiest thing to do in the game with the highest reward OF COURSE you will get people trying to rob you often.

Ahoy @camscam4171 ! We try to encourage natural discussion on the Forums and, while we understand your intent is to leave feedback, posts such as these can be seen as antagonising and do nothing to contribute to the discussion and tend to lead to negative sentiment towards other groups of players.

This is where Rare shared their thoughts about PvPvE - https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/topic/136693/pvpve-the-team-s-thoughts/1

This is the podcast where they discussed PvP and PvE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2uOdTVFiIQ

I will go ahead and lock this thread.
Thanks