Captain Missing D. Mark

What even is this post about anymore guys?

should stick to watching captain falcor for being a shill and blindly agreeing with every decision rare makes and their justifications for those decisions and ignoring any rational/intelligent argument against rares announcements. seeing so many passionate people calmly and rationally explain why things shouldnt happen and how rare could actually make the game better. it all falls on deaf ears. they started letting banned players back in because the player base is at an all time low and they realized they cant keep kicking people out of the game thats struggling to stay afloat. meanwhile they keep ignoring and alienating the people who are still here. its weird that changes happened early in this game. they were listening to our feedback. like they said ai ships would never exist in this game. now we have multiple kinds of ai ships because the players asked for it. i dont know why these companies start to decide to ignore players. i know this game was way more successful than they ever though it would be. even now at an all time low i think the player base is hundreds of times their initial projection of how many people would be interested in a nieche game. so at the height of its popularity i can understand community feedback was probably an overwhelming thing to try and look at.

a sad fact, we as a whole gave rare a bit of a hard time, and still do, when every update would come out broken. we would talk like we know a thing about the complexity of programming and comment on "how do they keep breaking the game on every update". the reality is its was a 2 fold problem, 1 fomo time limited rushed content, having a 2 week turn around time on new features that were only active for 2 weeks, it was never meant to be permanent content, they wanted to create tavern tales we could tell our friends in the future of days long gone... neat concept but when your game lacked content kinda flawed. and then their internal testing methods are a bit flawed. i think they test how they intend for things to work, is it functional? did it do what we wanted? can you hand a piece of fruit to another player? yes.... do we need to test doing this in water not just on land? nah... who would do that... bug achieved lol. what a weird bug that was. harpoons on ships. its meant to grab loot and players. it grabs loot and players. cool working as intended... can we use the harpoon to pull our ship all the way to the top of galleons grave? who would do that? we dont need to test such things... so guess what the players did? lol though i would argue stuff like that was just purely fun. i wouldnt have removed that. however with the addition of hourglass keeping that would have been bad. but that was years away. i think our comments on their struggle to release bug free updates was also the whole point of insiders nda. they didnt want people making fun of the bugs and developer textures and decisions being made behind closed doors. while the happens even in other games without ndas those comments are easy to ignore out of peoples lack of understanding that development is a buggy process. though i also suspect the nda was also to hide how a lot of bugs making it to the live version of the game had been reported on a lot on the insiders forums. showing that even a smaller subset of players on a slower moving forum were being ignored on issues actually important to the upcoming content releases. if they cant even read and respond to the people they have bug testing their game you can be certain they dont read the suggestion forums at all.

though i heard another developer of a small company doing a seasonal "games as a service" model that was massively successful with millions of players. he said that millions could quit. as long as they kept putting out stuff that kept even 30,000 of the whales around. those people who bought every cosmetic etc. they were enough to keep the game profitable enough to pay all the employees and keep the new content coming. so the reality is the player base can drop very low and become a small niche/dedicated audience and still be successful. so i imagine games like this or as much as people mocked world of warcraft for being a dead game. im sure they had a number where "if player count drops bellow 1 million then go free2play" blizzard has been double dipping on their audience for a while with the cash shop on top of making people pay a monthly fee to even be able to play. seems like rare is trying to do that with their upcoming private servers but without the ability to progress that subscription model would only appeal to streamers. and the most dedicated sot streamers i followed have abandoned this game at this point because rare is even pushing them away.

im sure drew actually does hear a lot of the feedback though. and i imagine the reason they chose or he volunteered? to be the new public face of the game is that he has thicker skin? or brushes off/dismisses things more easily and is like "we made our decision, it is law"

i know they have a community manager who is more likely to read stuff. and thats gotta be a stressful job. so much so that they even disabled feedback on steam altogether, though valid as most those comments were repetitive "bring back arena" and not really constructive the fact they want to hide anything but likes from public view is... odd. its like going to a companies google reviews and seeing 100% 5 stars... well thats odd. theres always going to be at least 1 angry customer. this seems sus. i think all platforms need to bring back the thumbs down button. youtube still has it shown because youtube looks are overall numbers. they dont care if you thumbs up or down a video. the fact you evoked the viewers emotions enough to trigger a + or a - is all that matters. its good content wether its generating negativity or positivity. its the same reason youtube does shadow banning vs blocking people from comments. a shadow ban on youtube means you can see your comment. so you feel vindicated that the content creator and other viewers can also see your comment. in reality only you can see your comment. you have ben banished to a void to talk to yourself. (you can check this by posting on a video, opening that video in a different browser with a different account or no login, or just private window and sort comments by new and see yours doesnt exist) so all that to say most of the steam sot community is probably considered the most toxic and thumbs down most postings. everything looks super positive because all that is allowed is positive thumbs up!

rambling a lot so no one will read. but basically i think the community manager might have too much on their plate and be too connected to the coworkers and company to view things objectively. it would be really cool if some of the dev team, the community manager and some of the more well spoken and rational streamers could have a little fireside chat kinda thing where they can have an honest back and forth with some questions about the choices, why feedback seems mostly ignored, get some real and honest and good arguments as to why some things are happening and others arent. [mod removed] in 2024 they were boasting over 40 million life time players (prior to playstation launch) so lets be generous 45 million life time players. if we look at last seasons most completed achivement, and this seasons most completed achivement. last season had 940,500 active players (impressive for a game this old), this season had about half that at 459,000 players (even thas impressive honestly). this is based off xbox achievements for "smuggler at sea" which was finding one of the new smuggler tomes on islands, the most completed of last season, and Vanquish of the eternal, defeating 1 eternal guard which has been the main objective for 2 acts of this season. according to chatgpt xbox achievement numbers are a total from all platforms as in order to play sot you need a linked account so xbox achievement count is the true completion % you wouldnt need to add steam, playstation %s to the xbox %s. so assuming thats acurate and considering i padded the lifetime players by a generous 5 million i think that might account for the players who avoid the pve portions of updates and purely pvp.

i tried and failed to tldr that... so tldrdr
have some devs and level header streamers do a stream together alongside the community manager. have some honest back and forth about the development issues so far, where we are going, why player feeback is almost universally ignored, try to come up with a way to allow players feedback to have more visability on the dev side. we all have our opinions and they disagree but we are clearly passionate about the game or we wouldnt be wasting so much of our time posting here. we want to love you, we want to keep loving your game. stop pushing us away. "youre tearing me apart, lisa!!!"

@sweetsandman said in Captain Missing D. Mark:

Here's the thing...I truly don't believe they're ignoring feedback. I think they listen too much. I also believe that they like making changes "their own" and that's why it always seems like they're missing the mark.

Nailed it. Sometimes they listen perfectly. They took the remaining Molten Sands requirements out of the Adventures at Sea commendations for S18. Proof they are listening to "Wow killing this same boss 20+ times is buns."

Likewise, during community weekend, developers were stream hopping took feedback and we got immediate changes from it. Small ones, but changes, good ones none the less. Again, changes to the commendation UI most havent noticed (unless you're a completionist) are most notable. It also seems like the HG change of re-queues and standardized resources started here (despite years of demands, but maybe the deaf ears were cough earmufs.)

@europa4033 said in Captain Missing D. Mark:

The issue is (without going into specifics via the warning from the moderator), if I want flying dragons in this game, and I'm saying that flying everywhere is much more accomodating, fun with friends, etc., flying dragons defeats the point of having ships/sailing.

I'm having Atlas flashbacks.

@europa4033 said in Captain Missing D. Mark:

LOL I'm having World of Warcraft flashbacks, when people kept spamming those forums, wanting mounted combat (I fly on my dragon, and can spew fire on you or on mobs from the safety in the air).

Well we got a whole expansion of that and it was both cheeks. 21 years and I called it quits for Midnight.

Sorry, but 21 years to give "The Hero of Azeroth" a house is too much.

Let's get back on topic, since we are having some conversational drift here.

It seems like missing the mark is pretty common with the team when they take "everyone is happy" half steps that don't break with 'their vision' none of these goals are compatible, as clearly demonstrated by recent developments.

Eg, Diving, is a way to make PvE faster for people not interested in the core of the game, it is implemented in a half step so that the PvP community is also placated. However, since avoiding full servers is an art, players do just that, thus Devs are forced to find a way to merge servers and force players together due to a condition they created by allowing diving in the first place.

Thus, player interaction is dead. It is PvP or nothing. The demand for dedicated PvE servers go up, Alliance server participation goes up and the seas continue to drain no mater how much engineering happens.

Gone are the days of sharing a deck and shooting eachothers pets at skellys on shore, because Rare chose instant gratification.

Instead, get rid of quick hits. That's what Treasuries and Forts are for. The approach needs to be make losses hurt less, respect the players time.
Simple to understand, easy to implement, does not run afoul original vision for the game, encourages players to risk interacting because losing loot will never be a total loss.

@karminiumsot I don't know, which one are you referring to?

The last few seasons have seemingly ramped up the number of things that track you on the map. I know they are trying to force players together to generate an interaction, but the problem is that it's forced interaction and that never works in a satisfying way.

Yeah, for real. But according to long-time players in here, that's all they really care about. Which is really sad for me, because this game's combat system is really sub-par for being as old as it is.

My honest, cynical opinion is that Rare deems the PvP as the "Sandbox content". And since to them, "Sandbox" just means "Make your own fun, quit bothering us" instead of "Here's all kinds of useful tools that have different, meaningful reactions with the world", things make a little bit more sense. That way they can essentially get away with copy-pasting everything they put in this game because so long as PvP is an ever-present, ever-hanging threat in this game, they can rest easy knowing that the Players are gonna make the "content" for them.

Molten Sands is just Fort of the Damned + Fire. The new Ashen Garrisons are just Sea Forts + Fire. Redmaw was Megalodon + Fire.

Content gets more tedious, seemingly to burn more time, and just make you more vulnerable to "The Sandbox" aka PvP.