@car5876 said in PvP Fix Suggestions:
However in SoT almost every time you do get attacked, the enemy players are insanely good at pvp (and by that I mean spawn camping) so there is nothing you can do (unless you can fire the blunderbuss faster which I [wouldn't] exactly call PvP).
Spawn camping is usually beaten in 2 ways: you defeat them before they sink you, or you scuttle (either on the same server or to new seas). If you cannot break a spawn camp, you will have to understand that you may not be skilled enough to handle that crew, as they have seized your entire vessel very consistently and without much failure.
I have just over 250 hours of playtime in SoT and the other day I finally killed my first players (only because they weren’t spawn camping us). I’m not even bad at combat, I’ve soloed a fort of fortune and beat it deathless on my first try, I can beat fort of the damned in under an hour, skeleton and ashen lords aren’t a challenge.
Skeletons aren't a challenge, often they stand there, sponging up your sword hits and gun shots and wait multiple seconds before they actually do something to attack you.
A real player with excellent mechanical and technical skills, will try to shoot you in mid air, shoot you mid-sword swing, maybe even sword swipe you mid-sword swing. With players you have to play much faster than the game's PvE is asking you to, and often, it's because of that speed that makes PvE easier/non-challenging.
But at the end of the day PvE can only prepare you so much for PvP. While something like an area mode (cough cough Sea Dogs) would help, I think there is a better option in the form of skill based servers.
Skill-based matchmaking for regular sailing is practically impossible for these reasons:
- Open Crew
- Veterans inviting new friends to the game years after the vet joined
- Looking for Group/Crew on Xbox/Discord
To prevent people from going on lower level servers you could implement a trophy system like other games have. Basically the trophy system could work like trophy systems in any other game that has them. I understand that there would be several problems that would affect this such as player numbers, trophy dropping, balancing, glitches/bugs, etc.
This is mainly flawed due to the over complication of a system that honestly has very questionable achievement tracking. Even so, you ultimately crushed the potential of this idea by making this statement:
A quicker solution to this would be to allow friends to join friendly sea’s servers on their own ship. After all, safer seas, in its current state, only helps players learn game mechanics and PvE.
Safer Seas is primarily meant for learning the game, you cannot make much progress on there, and you're intended to be a single crew on an non-captained borrowed ship. On top of that, the developers and moderators on these forums have stated multiple times that nothing can be done to safer seas to make it stand out uniquely (as they are essentially just regular servers with several features turned off for Safer Seas).
Over all my suggestions are:
- Arena/pvp mode (in the game at one point, but removed (I don't know why))
Arena was removed as it was a sunk cost fallacy for the developers; low playtime numbers over Adventure mode, arena was a set of third party servers that Rare likely had to pay for to upkeep (that wasn't great upkeep because any major changes to the Adventure world would negatively affect Arena games as they weren't patched at the same time), and the ridiculous amount of toxicity reports that came directly from the mode (to the point that comms towards other crews were disabled for the remainder of Arena's time).
- Trophy system (would need A LOT of work)
Already noted its possible flaws earlier
- Friends can join safer seas on their own ship (Most likely)
Most unlikely, as this would significantly modify how safer seas works, which is by default a no-no with the dev team.
I know this is a very long suggestion and I hope you understand where I and many other players are coming from when we complain about pvp being too unbalanced.
The lack of balance comes from numbers and skill, if you do not have the numbers nor the skill, this game becomes very nightmarish to want to pay for and own after your first month of game pass (which is usually $1) expires.
This game requires its players to be much more aware, able to hold their ground, and able to learn from each of their losses. If that doesn't sound like something that interests you, you may want to consider a different, less skill-based type of game.
It isn’t that we are bad at the game, it is that entire crews are being spawn camped by a single person. No matter how different the skill levels are there should always be some risk to boarding another ship, besides a blunderbuss to the face when climbing the ladder or being knocked off by blunderbombs.
Currently there are many more items introduced to the game that help combat boarding in unique ways, such as:
- The Horn of Fair Winds (Literally blows players off the boat easily and does no damage to them)
- The Obsidian Ashen Winds Skull (same as the horn, but does fire damage)
- Traps (loaded with blunderbombs for greater damage)
- Blowdarts (Black Powder darts are great for setting players on fire, doing decent knockback, and doing decent damage)
- Throwing Knife (Position yourself right and you can scare an enemy player from climbing by tossing the 80/100 damage projectile down the ladder onto the enemy boarder climbing it)
- Sword Lunge (been in the game since launch and this attack, when timed right can launch a boarder clean off the top of the ladder)
- Bone Caller (turn your 1v1 into a 1v4 with these distracting skeletons at your side)
I would appreciate any balance change to PvP that isn’t adding in new items and hope that they become relevant to the meta (I haven’t seen any weapons, mechanics, food, etc added after season 11 being used much).
Playing by the meta in a sandbox adventure game is insanely boring. These new items breed creativity in a world where you should be getting some neat tools for sailing and exploring the world, tackling its challenges. That's why I listed those items that were introduced, because you can do stuff with them that prevent super easy spawncamping.
You'll have to excuse a lot of the criticism you may get, these suggestions are being made around a time the game most likely doesn't need them (the devs hardly look at/respond to them anyways, and their management of the game has been under a lot of fire in the last year).
