It's about time.

  • Capt Mik0e
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    Can we get a progression RPG mode now? It’s been a few years, and player numbers aren’t increasing, quite opposite. I love the game, but every time I come back to check out changes, one thing remains the same after a session, I feel like I accomplished nothing important. So i quit again.

    That said, watching newbies log out as you attack or before they sink is pretty funny, but half of them probably uninstall the game afterward.

    A separate RPG mode with a social hub, like Tortage, would be great.

    Or don’t, and stay stuck on a session-based PvP game, while getting the same results.

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  • CallMeBackdrafT
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    @capt-mik0e i dont see this happening, the game is about 7 years old now and yes while it has been going trough a rough spot over the last year that doesn’t mean they should basically redevelop the whole foundation of the game and build a whole new progression system.

    The game’s progression has been made as it is (horizontal progression) very specifically, making it so that if i, with my 8k hours or so, roll up onto somebody with 100 hours dont have a fundamental advantage over them.

    The only thing i have more is actual knowledge that I personally gained by playing it, not some magical upgrade i purchased.

  • Capt Mik0e
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    @callmebackdraft I'm sure when you steamroll a crew with 100 hours in the game with your 8k, they really appreciate the fact that you do not have a fundamental advantage, while sinking them faster than a skelly sloop.

    It's a bit of a stretch to call that 'progression.' Watching your achievements tab or getting your 501st pair of pants isn't really meaningful progression.

    All successful live-service games have in-game progression alongside cosmetics as a way to monetize. Here, cosmetics are the only form of progression with shop cosmetics which often look better anyway. So, you have a choice: show off your wallet or your achievements. How is that a good business model?

    Every friend I've introduced to the game quit after a few days because there was nothing to keep them coming back. The developers doubled down on this approach for years, but it hasn’t brought in more players. Maybe it’s time to try something different. There's no need to change the current game just introduce a new game mode. Servers are capped at six crews anyway, so there wouldn’t be a noticeable difference between 15k players in one mode and 50,000 split between two. Even if only 10-5k would play the original one.

  • iTz Majman
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    @capt-mik0e

    Every friend I've introduced to the game quit after a few days because there was nothing to keep them coming back

    Tons of things to do, do commendations, do Tall Tales. Go around PvPing. Every game can't lean into being Fortnite or CoD and that's what makes SoT amazing, the way it is. The randomness and uniqueness.

    The game has been around for soon 7 years, it's fine the way it is. Turning it into an RPG would be a mistake and a slap in the face to the community and destroy the whole thing that "everyone is on the same level, doesn't matter if you played 10k hrs or 1hr"

  • Capt Mik0e
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    @itz-majman The community decreased 3x in the past 4 years. They can either slap it or hug and kiss it into even less.
    And at what point does introducing a new game mode turn the game into something else? You’d still have the old version.

  • Capt Greldik
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    @itz-majman The community decreased 3x in the past 4 years. They can either slap it or hug and kiss it into even less.
    And at what point does introducing a new game mode turn the game into something else? You’d still have the old version.

    If Rare actually knew that doing what you propose would increase the player base, maybe they’d consider it. The problem is, they likely don’t know that. Just because you and a couple of your friends might like it doesn’t mean it’s good for the game. Maybe it is, but you don’t know that. 7 year old games tend to be less popular than they once were, and the reasons could be many. I joined in March 2023 and loved the game immediately, despite there being players with a lot of hours. That motivated me to get better so that I could be more successful at survival. Some people won’t do that, they’d rather just give up. To each their own, but your anecdotal evidence of what players like isn’t the same as my anecdotal evidence of what players like.

    This game being entirely about cosmetics is what makes it work so well, in my opinion. When we sink we don’t even lose anything. We get a brand new ship and our characters even keep the items on them. It’s about as forgiving as an open PvP game can be. Admittedly, the idea of only cosmetics was odd to me when I started, since every other game I played had some kind of progression system beyond cosmetics, but I’ve learned to really appreciate it now.

    If you ask me, nothing will improve this game more than conquering the cheater nerd problem. Nothing has demoralized my crew more than cheating. There have been stretches of weeks where we’re mostly inactive due to some cheater encounters. My initial obsession with the game in season 9 allowed me to tolerate the cheating (which was terrible at the time), but over time that is less and less the case.

    Edit; note that my latest several sessions have been cheater free, but we also haven’t been doing HG as much since most of the crew have met their goals.

  • CallMeBackdrafT
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    @itz-majman The community decreased 3x in the past 4 years. They can either slap it or hug and kiss it into even less.
    And at what point does introducing a new game mode turn the game into something else? You’d still have the old version.

    It is not as simple as “just” introducing a new game mode it is basically creating a new game system within the sea of thieves universe.

    It also jn no way shape or form guarantees any people coming back.

    It is a completely different idea, and out of all the MMORPG’s that have released over the years only a couple have actually held any long time success. Even less so in a first person format.

    Yes it might get you and your friends back and maybe a couple thousand with you but it is not something surefire and will basically cost the same development wise as creating a new game within the sot universe built from the ground up as a mmorpg with modern techniques instead of trying to force it in the current game

  • Capt Mik0e
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    @capt-greldik said in It's about time.:

    If Rare actually knew that doing what you propose would increase the player base, maybe they’d consider it. The problem is, they likely don’t know that.

    It’s clear they don’t. That’s why they need to take the direction they dismissed from day one and risk it. From my perspective, last year they’ve been nailing updates that fit the current game, but it just fails to attract new players or retain the current ones. No matter how many new tools and events they add, at the end of the day, the game doesn’t change at its core, and SoT wasn’t successful at launch. Not changing only works for games that were successful at launch because they nailed the core gameplay loops. There are many older games with a bigger audience than SoT.

    I don’t mind bugs as long as they’re fixed at a reasonable pace, so it’s not something that would turn me off, nor cheaters, because with today’s tools, they’re a bane to any online game and they will always fight against them until someone develops a miracle anticheat tool.

    @callmebackdraft said in It's about time.:

    Yes it might get you and your friends back and maybe a couple thousand with you but it is not something surefire and will basically cost the same development wise as creating a new game within the sot universe built from the ground up as a mmorpg with modern techniques instead of trying to force it in the current game

    Reversing your argument. Maybe it works for you and your friends, but you’re already here, and you’ve been here, and the numbers show there will only be fewer of you as time goes on. They either need to reach for a new audience, or the costs will blance out with the revenue, and it’ll be lights out for SoT.

    There is zero need for a new game, at best, they would need to undertake an upgrade to UE5 and add a new game mode, retaining both the new gameplay and the old, for the benefit of all, instead of abandoning the first game

  • CallMeBackdrafT
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    There is zero need for a new game, at best, they would need to undertake an upgrade to UE5 and add a new game mode, retaining both the new gameplay and the old, for the benefit of all, instead of abandoning the first game

    So and thats the thing, upgrading to UE5 alone would already be a monumental task, they had to stop updating with minor UE updates during development becaus eof the amount of work it caused every single time, why you might ask ? Well because they had to make ALOT of changes and additions to the engine to get sea of thieves to work at all.

    So yeah, we are working with an outdated UE version and what you are asking is to have an RPG style progression, which adds a whole new layer of complexity, there are games being developed that take years to just get that element in, because when working with such a system it touches EVERYTHING in the game. It is nit “just” a new game mode and if you fail to realise that i don’t know what to say, look at WoW, the elder scroll series etc etc etc they take years and years to develop and alot of that work goes into those RPG style progression systems.

    I never said there is a need for a new game, however the work involved to get something like this working would take just about the same amount of work/effort/time as it would take to build a new game from the ground up.

  • Capt Mik0e
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    @callmebackdraft Dude, maybe I'm not a professional, I do indie dev in my spare time, mainly in UE. Daily, I work a regular IT job. But I know it's not that overwhelming work. It’s an investment, but it pays off. Your explanation applies to both industries, and it’s just a bullcrap statement to shut down ideas company don’t want to pursue. Then a modder or indie dev comes along and does it in their spare time with minimal resources often in a reasonable timeframe. For example: Skyrim/Oblivion multiplayer, offline mode in SW:BF2, and the metro system in Cyberpunk. There are many more examples.

  • CallMeBackdrafT
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    @callmebackdraft Dude, maybe I'm not a professional, I do indie dev in my spare time, mainly in UE. Daily, I work a regular IT job. But I know it's not that overwhelming work. It’s an investment, but it pays off. Your explanation applies to both industries, and it’s just a bullcrap statement to shut down ideas company don’t want to pursue. Then a modder or indie dev comes along and does it in their spare time with minimal resources often in a reasonable timeframe. For example: Skyrim/Oblivion multiplayer, offline mode in SW:BF2, and the metro system in Cyberpunk. There are many more examples.

    Well i am a SR software engineer, but that is not the (main) point.

    It is a fact as stated by rare that it is a monumental task to update the engine. SoT was release 7 years ago in UE 4.10, they started dev in 4.6 but stopped taking updates after the 4.10 update because:

    we have heavily modified UE in order to make the game, the work involved with updating the the engine every time was not worth it.

    I am not pulling this out of my behind this is from RARE themselves at unreal fest a year or so after release.

    Keep in mind, 4.10 was already 3! Years old when sot released and UE had 9 minor updates between i4.10 and the release of sot.

    So yeah, every time i say this i hope i am wrong but the history reveals that any sort of UE major version upgrade is not in the cards, with unreal engine 5 now also being 3 years old, why not “wait” till UE 6 etc etc.

    Your point about modders etc falls flat, because while a modder can target a single platform, Rare has to look at a while slew of them, and how the game works on them:

    • XBOX One (original reference platform for rare)
    • XBOX One X
    • XBOX Series (x/s)
    • PS 5
    • PC

    Also a modder doesnt need to make money of his work, they can but it usually starts as a passion project, Rare is a commercial company that has shareholders/stakeholders to appease and mouths to feed they have hundreds of employees etc etc. If they say ok lets have 1 dev work on this for a year that is $ 75000 dollars just in salary invested (excluding any tax, benefits, holiday etc etc) it ramps up quick

    Then there is the fact about RARE’s whole design philosophy being centered about this horizontal progression so thats another hurdle to overcome.

    And then further is basically that if you want to move it to an RPG game mode, which like arena would take dev time away from the regular sot experience and is highly reviewed on multiple platforms (267k positive reviews on steam alone)

    Anyway which like arena would require a whole different system in order to actually work fundamentally as a rpg, which was unsustainable and got killed off. And the only thing that arena added was a scoring system and limited time based sessions.

    So yeah, hence why i said i do not see this happening

  • R3vanNS
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    @capt-mik0e

    Dude, maybe I'm not a professional, I do indie dev in my spare time, mainly in UE. Daily, I work a regular IT job. But I know it's not that overwhelming work.

    Source: "Trust me bro."

    It’s an investment, but it pays off

    For who, you and your friends? Again, source: "Trust me bro."

    shut down ideas company don’t want to pursue.

    Aaaand there is your very simple answer, you typed it out yourself. This idea is getting shut down because it is not something they want to purse. And I can safely assume, the majority of people on this forum as well. With a good reason.

  • Capt Mik0e
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    I'll revisit this thread at the end of the year. We can continue the discussion when player numbers drop by half again. It's time for devs to double down on the strategy that's clearly working.

  • CallMeBackdrafT
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    @capt-mik0e

    drop by half again

    Source ?

    You can see the numbers they are doing on xbox ?
    On ms store ?
    On playstation ?

    Yeah i guess not, you have to realise that players that play via steam is only a fraction of a fraction of the total install base, especially since for the first 2 years it wasn’t even out on steam and thats the only player numbers we can see publicly

  • Capt Greldik
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    I'll revisit this thread at the end of the year. We can continue the discussion when player numbers drop by half again. It's time for devs to double down on the strategy that's clearly working.

    This entire thread can be translated to: give me what I want because it will make Rare money. And you’re basing this off of a random opinion you hold.

  • dlCHIEF58
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    @capt-mik0e said in It's about time.:

    I'll revisit this thread at the end of the year. We can continue the discussion when player numbers drop by half again. It's time for devs to double down on the strategy that's clearly working.

    LOL, the game is currently #11 on the Steam top games list and still one of the top 30 most played games on the Xbox ecosystem. Best you sit this one out as you shown to be clueless and making up stats thinking that will somehow justify your demands. Sad you think this disingenuous blackmail has any effect, especially given the facts are out that easily disprove you.

  • Capt Mik0e
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    So it went from 8,600(31.5k peak) average players to 3,550(8k peak) average players in 9 months. Are there going to be any serious discussions about it yet, or are we waiting for concord level numbers?

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