We all know, and Rare knows it too, that the Hourglass and diving mechanics have broken the game. They’ve compromised server stability, emptied the world, and diminished the natural chaos of the seas. Nowadays, more and more players flee the moment they encounter another ship, diving away to avoid conflict whenever possible. Most importantly, the organic exploration between the islands of 'Sea of Thieves' has vanished. This strips away the beauty of a game that is, at its core, about pirates sailing the seas in search of their own unique adventure.
My proposal is this: make mission diving a paid feature costing 1 million gold coins.
Why this specific amount?
Player Density: It would discourage newer players from diving constantly due to the high cost, forcing more ships to remain visible on the seas.
Meaningful Choices: Those fleeing a threat would have to make a real tactical decision rather than having an 'easy out.'
Economy Sink: It gives actual value to gold. Currently, veteran players have accumulated millions with nothing to spend them on. Making the currency matter makes every single mission feel important again.
By implementing this, servers would feel more populated, diving frequency would drop (reducing lag), and players would enjoy a much more authentic and stable gameplay experience
I have the solution for RARE
@pirox3677
So, who would pay ? The Captain (or the person who started the session in case of a non-captained ship), every crew-member pays 1 million or would the million be divided among the crew ?Crew members probably wiuld just leave before the dive and rejoin when they surface, not sure if that would help stability.
Also, would give some crews a reason to keep following another ship, "forcing" them to dive and spend a million gold.
I do agree that diving should come with a cost (if gold should be lower so that it doesn't incentify others too much to force them to dive), but prefer an in-game/ session penalty such as lowerring the grade of the Emissary (but not in a way they can get to grade 5 - do the emissary quest, dive, lose a level and then get quick to grade 5 again - repeat).
At least something should be done about continiously diving, increase the time between dives perhaps.
Kinda agree with you, but making dive quests paid for huge amount of money won't solve the problem.
The game has accumulated many problems leading to a loss of interest among players. It is unlikely that there is a solution that can resolve these issues at once, only maybe slow rollback to gameplay mechanics of 2019-2020 years and ecomony reset.When I started playing, I always saw other players masts or ships nearby, which gaves a feeling of dangerous adventure and the risk of lose everything or get some more loot.
Not only dive mechanic, but other family friendly QoL updates killed the soul of the game.
Nowadays I rarely see player' masts, usually it's skelly boats.
Loot dropped everywhere. Back in the days to get some real amount of gold people were stacking fotd of the damned which required some time for preparation and knowledge and people were afraid of losing it, they were fighting for this loot. Now you just can dive to quest/fortress, loot few isles and get the same 100k gold as one fotd.The following were once mentioned in another post.
Few or All of the following.
- Should only be for Raids.
- Normal voyages should offer greater rewards than diving to location.
- Should not be able to Dive for high risking voyages.
- Diving loses Emissary flag or grade.
Only reason Diving excised is because "Got no time" or quick start which is silly than, silly now.
You still might gather supplies, wait for crewmates, change ship set, organize cargo. All before diving...by then you wasted time.Now, Diving is an escape or Server hopping tool.
@Pirox3677 I don't agree with making diving a 1 million gold feature. That is an extremely small amount of gold. My only big pro diving argument was if you started at sanctuary outpost but wanted to play in the devils roar that is a long trip. Now we can just dive to the roar and get to playing. This is a much better option than the tedious way of going back to the menu click 10 buttons to get back into the game to hopefully get to galleons grave or ancient spire so you can actually play the game. Some have suggested us being able to pick a starting outpost. But there is (supposed) to be a rule the server has about not letting ships spawn at an outpost that already has a newly spawned ship at. Though in the early days we did have ships spawning in on top of other ships creating a fun chaotic moment. So like with this season you couldn't have every single person setting sail at morrows peak as this would force their servers to just keep generating new empty servers over and over or giving us a que to get onto a server while they wait for the last new spawn to depart. I will admit lately if I see a ship even pointed in my direction and they are half the map away? Especially if they are reaper? I just dive out. Though most my playing the past few years has been PvE servers because I enjoy not having that stress. I would love to pay Rare so I can play that way whenever I want. But they don't like money apparently. Though their whole motto for the game is "Play how you want, when you want (as long as its not PvE only with actual progression)"
So solution 1 let us pick our starting outpost and remove diving? Problem - too many people picking the same outpost because of the season or time limited event.
Solution 2? Remove diving for voyages. Who ever came up with the idea clearly doesn't work there any more or the teams focus on making shorter bite sized sessions has now shifted back to making long boring content so the diving feature now conflicts with current design choices. Maybe only allow diving to tall tales though same issue. People would use it just to run. I use it to get to specific outposts quickly. Would stink to lose it but meh. I'll stick around to see what the doubloon FOMO cosmetics are and to see if they actually go through with this foolish currency deletion which doesn't solve the root cause of the problem. If the wipe still indeed does happen I know I wont be the only one closing the book on their SoT journey.@burnbacon Also why is scuttle to another server even an option? We can dive. Or relog. Scuttling costs your supplies and everything. It was a temporary fix if i recall added before diving just to get away from toxic players without having to go back to the menu and do your 10 clicks to get back into a session.
They have added a lot of changes like you said to try and generate quicker sessions, quicker to the action, quicker to sell, short sessions for people with little time. While this game has always been about wasting peoples time. Now we are contradicting all these changes they made to create a shorter more fulfilling session. There is some conflicting design choices here. Was the short session a Joe Neate decision? Did that direction change when he (I think) moved on to Everwilds? and now... IDK? Is he even still at Rare? We haven't seen or heard from him in forever while we all got so used to seeing him grow to getting comfortable being on camera from those early "We're sorry" weekly update videos after launch to the scolding PvPers for being toxic (welcome to online gaming Rare? lol). I miss our guy. Drew seems to either have the tougher skin of the staff or just doesn't get bothered (or bother reading) feed back after his posts since hes now the face of upcoming updates and the "Sorry we messed up". Though I still wouldn't mind an acknowledgement about falsely punishing some people for the burning blade exploit because they had no data to know who was cheating so they drew a line in the sand and punished anyone above that line. And that line was leader board value. I played a 30 hour session that opening week and didn't exploit and I was flagged as having exploited. The exploit was about being on a galleon and all 4 crew members voting on the ritual at the same second via count down on discord. I was solo slooping it so not even possible. It's water under the bridge now as I maxed out what I was working on it just hurt having a setback and always leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you get falsely punished for something you didn't actually do.
@pirox3677 Like the idea of a higher tax for diving, some other folks have offered good ideas outside of gold cost but if the cost was in the 50,000 - 100,000 range to encourage longer sessions that would make sense to me.
So, we're to go back to the old way of doing it, putting down a Tall Tale? Sorry but, now that it's out, it's going to be impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.
