What is happening to this game?

Nobody asked for a creative mode

Streamers, and Partners did. Many moons ago.

nobody asked for current emporium items to be included in the plunder pass

Players asked for other ways to earn emporium items, and often Past season items.

Player count is extremely low

Which system is lowest? PS, Steam, XB? Question is, How do you know...

I’ve all but given up on this game

Alright. I wish people who actually said this would really keep to there word. Months later they come back anyways, it funny. Even Streamers do this.

What really killed my interest in the game* was Drew saying they have zero intention of changing the timeframe on the Bilge Rat Weekender, and that it's meant to be content essentially only for folk playing at the peak time of the weekends.

Effectively, they've said folk like me that work a lot of weekends and long days don't matter, and it's okay that we'll miss out on the main way to earn a key currency and cool cosmetics.

It upsets me, not gonna lie. I loved this game for 8+ years, but clearly the devs do not care if a large chunk of their playerbase miss out on events or content.

As for the data, that's going to be skewed by the massive amount of FOMO and forced interactions in the game. There's a difference between how players want to play and have fun, and how they play when they're going to miss out on rewards.

I'm not going to quit the game outright but, currently, it's way down my list of priorities and there are plenty more games to play that don't waste my time or feel antagonistic towards their playerbase. I've been playing Windrose, I 100%ed 007 First Light, and Voidling Bound just came out.

(*I'm not going to go into the whole recent scandal, which also killed my interest, of course.)

@realstyli said in What is happening to this game?:

What really killed my interest in the game* was Drew saying they have zero intention of changing the timeframe on the Bilge Rat Weekender, and that it's meant to be content essentially only for folk playing at the peak time of the weekends.

A decision all the more baffling given Season 20 is going to be completing lacking in ANY content.
Challenges/Events could have been for the week and Doubloon voyages/Fireworks kept for the originally intended weekend.
Choose events that would create a focus point for a week.
Reaper Fortresses w/ MegaStashes, Molten Sands Event comes back, Royal Fortress Heist with Doubloon Reward, Siren Song with Doubloon Reward.
Potential is there.

Staggering they are happy to let Adventure stagnate for another Season.
Couldn't introduce another sweat chest? All Factions prestiged to X? Minimal development that gives us something.

Custom Seas is not compelling content for the vast majority of player base. Adventure is the way.

I've completely ignored the Seasonal Deeds for LSS given their inability to provide a level playing field of controller lobbies.
The FOMO has been successfully defeated.

@tek-lt

Nobody asked for a creative mode

People actually did. For years. And under other circumstances this update would be something to look forward to.

But the timing to do this now (for Season TWENTY) and the hard focus on quantitative data ... Agreed, that's frustrating.

@ghutar said in What is happening to this game?:

@burnbacon responding to you is quite waste of time but for other folks that wonder:

I insider's they tell that season 18 plunder pass was finished by 2,35% of players. Rare being rare took is as "season pass is to long to complete so we make it harder to complete with less rewards".

No, they didn't.
First of all, it's 2.7 %

They also used the time to complete the PP, and found the median is not to their liking.
You can also infer ("while most players found that it took too long.") that they used data from the surveys they've send out.

Their intention with making the changes is "to reduce the median completion time significantly, so most players should progress faster and complete the Pass quicker. "

Not much feedback by players who took the time to play on Insiders on that though ... or did you find it harder to complete or is that an opinion/expectation not based on experience ?

But one cloud wonder "Doesn't that mean that overall time player's spend in game went drastically down?" Of course one number without any context is worthless so let's look for any possible trend.

Oh, I agree one stat (or even two) is not enough to use for making changes, I doubt they used only those though, IMO they were only included to illustrate.

If almost all Insiders who voiced their opinion (by posting or upvoting) say don't change the PP, but significantly more people in surveys say the opposite, it's clear (to me at least) that Insiders is not representative of all players (at least regarding their opinion on PP).

Yeah, i know the 97.3% of people not completing the PP includes those that login and

• saw that there are still no emissaries and other features in Safer Seas, lpogged off and perhaps will try again next Season
• spend two hours on an Outpost and got sunk because someone needed to turn in a cannon ball crate, called the game toxic and uninstalled
  &c

But then we would need something like "percentage of people who actually played the game for some time that completed the PP".

@realstyli said in What is happening to this game?:

What really killed my interest in the game* was Drew saying they have zero intention of changing the timeframe on the Bilge Rat Weekender, and that it's meant to be content essentially only for folk playing at the peak time of the weekends.

Effectively, they've said folk like me that work a lot of weekends and long days don't matter, and it's okay that we'll miss out on the main way to earn a key currency and cool cosmetics.

It upsets me, not gonna lie. I loved this game for 8+ years, but clearly the devs do not care if a large chunk of their playerbase miss out on events or content.

As for the data, that's going to be skewed by the massive amount of FOMO and forced interactions in the game. There's a difference between how players want to play and have fun, and how they play when they're going to miss out on rewards.

I'm not going to quit the game outright but, currently, it's way down my list of priorities and there are plenty more games to play that don't waste my time or feel antagonistic towards their playerbase...

So. Much. This.

The overwhelming feedback for the Weekender was the extreme limited time and weekend-only design. It marked the effective exclusion of a subset of the playerbase that has been otherwise pretty dedicated...just not at the time of day/week they prefer I guess?

Candidly, I tried to cram as much of it in on a Friday as I could because my availability on weekends is virtually non-existent and I don't see that changing for a long time. However, I wasn't able to get it all done the first go-round. Further, like you said, because of the time crunch, I wasn't able to actually enjoy it and have fun with it. It's content that could be fun if it didn't feel extremely rushed and crunched into too short of a time window for those of us that aren't able to carve our weekend hours.

But no...the overwhelming feedback didn't matter. Whatever their data says or said just didn't align with the immense feedback I guess. Such a load of rubbish.

What really killed my interest in the game* was Drew saying they have zero intention of changing the timeframe on the Bilge Rat Weekender, and that it's meant to be content essentially only for folk playing at the peak time of the weekends.

Effectively, they've said folk like me that work a lot of weekends and long days don't matter, and it's okay that we'll miss out on the main way to earn a key currency and cool cosmetics.

What would be the best way to give doubloons without the risk of overloading them again so they don't become cheap versions of gold that nobody spends them on again? Make it a full week? What about people who skip that week who have to also work a full month? What about people who are away from home?
Nobody is happy with whatever choice is made here. Someone is gonna make a problem out of it. Out of an event to earn a "greater" doubloon count. But they havnt ruled out possible future events that would grant doubloons

Doubloon items are suppose to be, items that not everyone is going to earn right from day1. Grind for them. But we all know the word "Grind" in this modern age of gaming is a sin it seems. Rather get everything without actually...playing longer. All for digital goodies mind you. :D

@ghutar

It's so they don't get notified in order to respond. If it was me they quoted, I'm not bothered. I have them blocked so see none of their posts. It's better than getting into arguments with someone clearly sealioning (which is a form of trolling that is somehow okay here).