Don't think these new voyages are fun.

Way too much Smugglers stuff everywhere at the moment, litterally every island has something for them whether its a message in a bottle or loot.

I guess this is just start of season splurge and will get dialled down.
Agree that the amount of loot from skelly ships and shipwrecks is way too much - I'm just gonna start ignoring the majority and looking for those cases of Floral Rum.

I'm also just looking for one more book - though I haven't been as enthusiastic than you in hunting for them.

I don't mind the voyage - it is an extremely quick one, with minimal set up and if the drop off point is contested you can start again with little hassle.
You do not have much investment in the voyage so you can have some fun - multiple times I have been making delivery from the back of Smugglers Bay while ships have been loitering in the Bay. Once managed to row a keg rowy to a loitering ship and sink 'em to allow me to make my delivery.

We can be thankful that the commendations and deeds are not too grindy.

@pc-monkfish Even better if you know someone is doing one and sit on the peak with a new keg, as soon as they drive under drop it off and boom.

Just sat at Smugglers bay for 3 hours, preventing people from entering the cave with kegs and black keg’s they happy deliver for me.

I think the mindset is wrong. It not about the gold, I’m a pirate and I won’t the items but also wanna blow stuff up and just listen to the “you cheaters!, Go play in traffic” players yell at me

Rare made it this way, I’m just doing what they intended. Chaos! Explosions! And laughter

@cptfatsparow594

LOL

I have started leaving kegs next to a buried trap/blunderbomb in the cave.

Probably triggered more often than not by omnipresent phantoms but it is my own contribution to the chaos.

The npcs certainly have a lot of dialogue like
"we abhor violence"
"we seek ways to make money without fighting"
"you should be stealthy, make sure nobody else knows you're there"
for a group that specifically provides a voyage that explicitly tells everyone else exactly where to come attack you.
Some real dissonance that.

But also the smuggler loot seems almost if not entirely pointless to steal anyway.
The act of pvp that would allow you to take someone elses smuggler loot will damage the bottles enough to make them worthless, detonate the barrel-kegs so they don't even exist to turn in, and you'd still have to deal with an annoying smuggler camp instead of a convenient sov.

@the-old-soul800 said in Don't think these new voyages are fun.:

The npcs certainly have a lot of dialogue like
"we abhor violence"
"we seek ways to make money without fighting"
"you should be stealthy, make sure nobody else knows you're there"
for a group that specifically provides a voyage that explicitly tells everyone else exactly where to come attack you.
Some real dissonance that.

But also the smuggler loot seems almost if not entirely pointless to steal anyway.
The act of pvp that would allow you to take someone elses smuggler loot will damage the bottles enough to make them worthless, detonate the barrel-kegs so they don't even exist to turn in, and you'd still have to deal with an annoying smuggler camp instead of a convenient sov.

Perhaps try to engage another crew in another way than to pelt them with cannon balls ?

@lem0n-curry
It's not up to you. It's up to them.
They're going to just sit there and let you carry their loot off their ship without a fight.
They're going to attack, and the act of defending yourself against them is liable to damage the loot, but even if you avoid it yourself, they will blunder bomb their own bottles just to devalue them to spite you, detonate their own barrel rather than let you win and take it, and so on.
Also on a sloop the voyage only gives 3 pieces of loot, and while I'm sure bigger crews get more, "more" is going to turn 3 into 6 or so, not 50, so as a matter of item count if somebody is running smuggler runs there's not enough loot to want to go for in the first place.

If your goal is to add gold to your wallet, trying to steal other people's smuggler loot just isn't that good a way to do it. And if getting gold isn't a goal for you, then you don't care about the loot anyway, so the loot doesn't matter either way.

Since this season started, that area around the marked route for the smuggler voyage is probably where I've seen the least other player ships (outside the roar).
Which might not sound like much of a sentiment given that the season just started, but also, with the season having just started, that voyage is certainly the main thing for the season right now, since most of what they're adding isn't added yet.

@the-old-soul800 said in Don't think these new voyages are fun.:

@lem0n-curry
It's not up to you. It's up to them.
They're going to just sit there and let you carry their loot off their ship without a fight.
They're going to attack, and the act of defending yourself against them is liable to damage the loot, but even if you avoid it yourself, they will blunder bomb their own bottles just to devalue them to spite you, detonate their own barrel rather than let you win and take it, and so on.
Also on a sloop the voyage only gives 3 pieces of loot, and while I'm sure bigger crews get more, "more" is going to turn 3 into 6 or so, not 50, so as a matter of item count if somebody is running smuggler runs there's not enough loot to want to go for in the first place.

If your goal is to add gold to your wallet, trying to steal other people's smuggler loot just isn't that good a way to do it. And if getting gold isn't a goal for you, then you don't care about the loot anyway, so the loot doesn't matter either way.

Since this season started, that area around the marked route for the smuggler voyage is probably where I've seen the least other player ships (outside the roar).
Which might not sound like much of a sentiment given that the season just started, but also, with the season having just started, that voyage is certainly the main thing for the season right now, since most of what they're adding isn't added yet.

So you see hardly any ships in the region the smuggler's voyage is, but you have "hard numbers" that say that they'll rather destroy their loot than let someone else get it ?

Somehow, I don't think your "statistics" are based on experiences of the last 5 days ...

@burnbacon Yeah about the only thing I can see being good about this season is the new potential for chaos. I used a keg rowie on a brig yesterday and had it docked before they even knew.

First of all, I don't like this season, but a little reminder: - here it is only the first part of the season, the PvP aspect will mainly be present in the second and third parts of the season. - regarding the books (and all the recommendations in the end), the developers were wise to make sure that it doesn't take x time to finish them. If you don't find all the books, blame your luck. Rejoice that you don't have to read 50 books; there are only 8. - the reward is mainly financial. - Having a reputation system for smuggling is an absolute nonsense, in the sense that you can't have an emissary system for a company that is hiding.

I was doing a skeleton fleet and the sloop I sank dropped like two of the kegs. Other skeleton sloop as firing cannons, hit one of the kegs, and they both blew up and just sank my ship. I didn't even have either of them on board either. I don't know why smugglers loot has to be in the world events.

@burnbacon No, I think the mindset is right. While I don't think that everything needs to have cosmetics tied to it (although in a game where the only real endgame is to get cosmetics, that's certainly always a bonus), I also think that sitting in a cave for three hours so that when maybe once an hour somebody comes in with a single piece of loot you can pull a lever and they'll die from spikes is just not a fun way to play the game for many people.

I do think that we should respect the effort that the devs put into the game, but I also recognize that may be difficult to do when the "content" offered is, as you put it, sitting at an island for three hours preventing people from doing their voyage.