Alliance Servers

@kashmero while I agree with your POV, Rare have stated that they don't see them as having much of an impact on the community as a whole.

Regardless of nerfing how many ships in an alliance, they will still form these for the safety aspect. What they need to do to at least balance the gold and rep earning aspect is cut loot straight down the middle. 1,000 gold captains chest in a full 6 alliance server nets each ship 167 gold, 2 ship alliance would be 500 gold each. This still removes the need to divide treasure manually like the old days while also balancing out the cheesing.

As you stated this will also still allow alliances to perform their main function of safety in numbers and working together towards a common goal.

Any argument against a simple and easy code change like this for balance is most certainly pro-alliance servers and doesn't want their cheese removed (I don't blame them, who doesn't like some easy cheeseburgers)

@kashmero
Just curious, what it to you how other people play the game? It's not cheating, it's not hacking, and really doesn't effect you either way. You can still get in a server and pvp till your hearts content. Maybe stop trying to gatekeep how others play, and play how YOU like to play and enjoy the game. Your way. Others can enjoy it, their way.

This is definitely something that needs to be worked on. If you happen to find yourself on these servers and you don’t join their alliance, usually they become verbally aggressive. If you sink them however the entire discord servers reports you for literally playing the game but you end up at high risk of losing the account due to the mass report. I’ve seen it happen to people and it sucks really. The most simple solution would be to have a limit for how many ships can be allianced in a server.

@retroraccoon741 said in Alliance Servers:

@kashmero
Just curious, what it to you how other people play the game? It's not cheating, it's not hacking, and really doesn't effect you either way. You can still get in a server and pvp till your hearts content. Maybe stop trying to gatekeep how others play, and play how YOU like to play and enjoy the game. Your way. Others can enjoy it, their way.

It’s not about doing PvP to our heart’s content. These servers are taking up space to exploit the alliance system and remove half of the gameplay loop to farm millions of gold and commendations with no risk unlike.

@illbushido305 said in Alliance Servers:

@retroraccoon741 said in Alliance Servers:

@kashmero
Just curious, what it to you how other people play the game? It's not cheating, it's not hacking, and really doesn't effect you either way. You can still get in a server and pvp till your hearts content. Maybe stop trying to gatekeep how others play, and play how YOU like to play and enjoy the game. Your way. Others can enjoy it, their way.

It’s not about doing PvP to our heart’s content. These servers are taking up space to exploit the alliance system and remove half of the gameplay loop to farm millions of gold and commendations with no risk unlike the rest.

Sort of sounds like how PvPers exploit the portal system to hop from server to server to keep their flag and supplies possibly? It's a "feature" to alliance, and is encouraged, so let them play how they they want. It build community and friendship and cooperation, which is what 95% of the story, tale tale's, glitterbeard, ECT are encouraging. Stop dumping on others and, with all due respect and no malice intended, mind your own ship. Its literally doesn't effect you, your gold, or gameplay.

@retroraccoon741 I'm here offering my opinion and my feedback on their Feedback forums.

How I play the game doesn't matter. Some players also enjoyed playing their way by using X-cancelling digs and bucketing. They fixed that, because it was an overused exploit giving an unfair advantage.

These (locked down for days) alliance servers are just as unbalanced as other overly abused exploits.

I don't want alliances to be gone. I want them to balance it to a point where they become what they initially wanted them to be.

And that is alliances formed organically when meeting random strangers on the seas.

Not having a large amount of people server hop until they have all ships on the server, or enough ships to be able to grief the remaining ships off the server by constantly targeting and harassing them until they either leave or give up their vessel.

It's a broken exploitable system that's been left alone for too long.

@retroraccoon741 Portal hopping is not only done by reapers. Every emissary does it
To either run or leave an empty server. You are really defensive about the situation which likely means you partake have partaken in these servers. Just because it doesn’t affect me doesn’t mean it’s right. Nobody is taking the friendship and collaboration out either. I’ve never had to take over a server with six ships to find friendships and collaboration in sea of thieves. The same way every exploit should be fixed, this should be fixed. Portal hopping can easily be fixed too by not allowing you through as an emissary.

@kashmero said in Alliance Servers:

@retroraccoon741 I'm here offering my opinion and my feedback on their Feedback forums.

How I play the game doesn't matter. Some players also enjoyed playing their way by using X-cancelling digs and bucketing. They fixed that, because it was an overused exploit giving an unfair advantage.

These (locked down for days) alliance servers are just as unbalanced as other overly abused exploits.

I don't want alliances to be gone. I want them to balance it to a point where they become what they initially wanted them to be.

And that is alliances formed organically when meeting random strangers on the seas.

Not having a large amount of people server hop until they have all ships on the server, or enough ships to be able to grief the remaining ships off the server by constantly targeting and harassing them until they either leave or give up their vessel.

It's a broken exploitable system that's been left alone for too long.

Exactly my point

@retroraccoon741 said in Alliance Servers:

@kashmero
Just curious, what it to you how other people play the game? It's not cheating, it's not hacking, and really doesn't effect you either way. You can still get in a server and pvp till your hearts content. Maybe stop trying to gatekeep how others play, and play how YOU like to play and enjoy the game. Your way. Others can enjoy it, their way.

Creating such a server by continuous hopping by several people does affect those on the servers they hop in to and leave.
Earning reputation in a safe environment for Emissaries is unfair to those who do it in real Adventure servers, and can be called cheating IMO.
Rare has spoken again and again against PvE servers, but their non-actions against these, is strange at best.

So, yeah - pre-made alliance PvE servers as it is now, is cheating and affects other people.

Limit the number of hops per person during a certain time period or punish those that seem to be a lot of time in these servers and release custom servers finally so people can get their friendships and community in those.

@lem0n-curry three ship limit per alliance would solve the problem

@illbushido305 said in Alliance Servers:

@lem0n-curry three ship limit per alliance would solve the problem

Would solve some of it, not the things I mentioned. The ones about the safe environment which you can use to gain Emissary reputation and do achievements the easy way.

@d3adst1ck said in [Alliance Servers]

I'll say that it could affect other players, even if they don't PvP, by increasing available gold in the game. This could be causing Rare to price items in shops much higher in order to remove this gold from player's purses and making these items harder to afford for the average player.

That is another good point I did not even think of...

They don't really affect anyone, if it's full then you're obviously not getting in one and therefore will never see it in the first place. AND if people want to put in the hours to do that sort of thing, then let them have fun; they're still putting in the work. Full server alliances are probably the most brutal grinds in the game, who is anyone to dictate how people play mutually in their sandbox game anyway? Oh no! There are players putting in hours of work to earn a lot of money in the game that they like, somebody should stop them! It's like Karen-pirates of the seas. If they're out-of-sight then leave them out-of-mind and stop letting it live rent free up there.

@d3adst1ck said in Alliance Servers:

@retroraccoon741 said in Alliance Servers:

@kashmero
Just curious, what it to you how other people play the game? It's not cheating, it's not hacking, and really doesn't effect you either way. You can still get in a server and pvp till your hearts content. Maybe stop trying to gatekeep how others play, and play how YOU like to play and enjoy the game. Your way. Others can enjoy it, their way.

I'll say that it could affect other players, even if they don't PvP, by increasing available gold in the game. This could be causing Rare to price items in shops much higher in order to remove this gold from player's purses and making these items harder to afford for the average player.

a certain 77 million gold set comes to mind. I know some people have gold to spend but that amount is significant to all players not alliance-server oriented that have under 2k hours in the game.

Bro don’t ask them to remove alliance servers somehow, if you manage to get into an alliance server you have an opportunity to slaughter them all.

@drizkillz said in Alliance Servers:

They don't really affect anyone, if it's full then you're obviously not getting in one and therefore will never see it in the first place. AND if people want to put in the hours to do that sort of thing, then let them have fun; they're still putting in the work. Full server alliances are probably the most brutal grinds in the game, who is anyone to dictate how people play mutually in their sandbox game anyway? Oh no! There are players putting in hours of work to earn a lot of money in the game that they like, somebody should stop them! It's like Karen-pirates of the seas. If they're out-of-sight then leave them out-of-mind and stop letting it live rent free up there.

Agreed, as much as it isn't my thing, it's not tangibly bothering my experience of the game. There's what, a super small population that I could be playing with? Who cares? Once you're able to get onto a server with other players then there shouldn't be a whole lot to complain about.

@thathappyhat said in Alliance Servers:

Bro don’t ask them to remove alliance servers somehow, if you manage to get into an alliance server you have an opportunity to slaughter them all.

Yes and then the whole game server or discord server reports the person that sank them and they end up at high risk of getting banned for having too many reports on your account. It has happened before unfortunately.

Do you guys plan on doing anything to these servers?

These are players that would be filling up legit servers, playing the game the way it's supposed to be played, bringing more organic life to the game.

No and so?
Does or do these alliance servers affect your overall gameplay? Where you can’t do a thing because of the alliance server you are not part of? No?

So why care? For all I know, they are in there own little playground. Doing everything they can. So when the day comes, they be the first to complain about “lack of content when majority of the content we have should take a long time to finish. Should.

Don’t care about them. The devs have said they are monitoring them areas. But atm they pose no threat or breaking anything. So no need to step in.

@burnbacon I hate getting involved in these... but. Every month there will be a group of people (similar in size to a group of alliance server users) who have just missed out on the ledger rewards. That doesn't seem fair, and why I'm against the majority of alliance servers existing.

I am mostly against alliance servers because I feel that it stifles creativity and the creation of any kind of economy or challenging content from Rare. I really have no issue with people wanting to play without threat of PVP, but I do think that it should be less rewarding to do so.

Why create more difficult or engaging content if it will just continue to reward gold which you can get easily from elsewhere? Balancing gold this late in the game would be a challenge, so I think it would be fine if Rare decided to reset everyone's doubloons instead (maybe give some ancient coins to everyone + some extra for people above a certain # of doubloons for people with obscene amounts like myself), and then decided to make those the new official "challenging to earn" currency which doesn't split between alliances anymore.

Doubloons could then become the "influence" currency, used to alter the game world in some way, change your ships attributes in some way to customize them, or buy challenging voyages which you can actually fail and which reward "coupons" to the emporium or doubloon store to buy certain cosmetics at a slight discount, or unlock the ability to buy others which are more rare. They tried a doubloon type economy a while back with the black market, but the prices were too low for some and too high for others. Only a full reset and making doubloons scarce / locked behind challenging content would have allowed this to work.

Nobody is going to do more challenging content or content which has more risk if you can safely do it elsewhere and earn the same boring old gold. So why would / should devs develop that content? FoF is competitive only for people who really need the athena rep. Otherwise, the gold isn't worth the risk for many people, and so it is losing popularity. And even if the majority of people don't participate in alliance servers, the fact is that outliers can doom an economy.

Take my example about repurposing doubloons into a bit more of an "influential" currency. I currently have close to 50,000 doubloons, and I know I am not even close to what some other people probably have though for others 50k might seem like a lot. But I earned those during a time where it was much easier to get them, and only did so because I thought that one day, they would finally wake up and do something meaningful with them. I actively worked toward them, got crews together to farm them, and had a blast earning something I thought would one day pay off.

Even so, my hopes for Rare doing anything with them are now nearly gone, and so I believe that they should reset them for everyone and reward people in some way for their time in earning them with a trivial amount of ancient coins.

From there, Rare should build the new economy on doubloons, leaving gold alone or maybe slightly nerfing the number of allowable alliance members, but making doubloons not split between alliance members.

I agree that any change to alliances would probably help the game. Maybe alliances work the way they do now for the first 2 members, but any new crews cause the gold to split. Or, require that crews turn in together at the very least so you can't optimally farm every event while running a bunch of voyages in a big alliance.

To clarify: I think forming alliances in the game is a good thing, and lets players like myself ally with new players, and help them turn in without feeling like I'm just giving away money with no reward. However, alliances really shouldn't extend to the whole server. 2 to 3 ships per alliance is about right. Alliances can then informally agree to a "non-aggression pact" but that tension will always be there.

Maybe another alternative would be to have "alliance queued" servers where you queue in with two ships which are automatically allied and split all treasure, and cannot ally with any other ships. Think that would be the best of both worlds, offering big groups a way to consistently queue in together without making it too profitable. Maybe options would be gally + sloop or brig + brig. If a ship has to leave, they can "open" crew and get a replacement ship, but this would obviously be less ideal.

@wsurftvveeds said in Alliance Servers:

@burnbacon I hate getting involved in these... but. Every month there will be a group of people (similar in size to a group of alliance server users) who have just missed out on the ledger rewards. That doesn't seem fair, and why I'm against the majority of alliance servers existing.

So if Emissary is the cause, and alliances are the effect, why not get rid of Emissaries? It would take care of flag portal hopping too so that's a triple win.

Alliance servers are literally PvE servers made to order... the biggest reason that I can think of for the playerbase being divided on this is because a lot of people have used them. Thankfully, alliance servers aren't huge.

The fact is, alliance servers are unfair to everyone. Sure, it doesn't personally affect anyone, but it's possible that it has changed a few things in the past. As someone said, it's likely that the price of cosmetics are based on the amount of gold the average player has. I wonder how much higher prices are just because of alliance players? I wonder if some commendations are hard to get just because alliance players have completed others really quickly?
I think one of the big reasons that I don't like alliance servers is because of exclusivity. How likely are you to look at a full Dark Adventurer ship and think: "Alliance player." That's my set! But a lot of the big spenders haven't earned their gold under the threat of getting sunk.
It's not a huge threat or anything but it's still something that should be protected against.

I like the idea of getting something special for Reaper 75 players but how many of those just sat in a server and grinded without ever having the risk of PvP? On an alliance server, there is quite a lot of Reaper's rep being generated.

The thing with alliance servers though, is that if you get with random people, most of the time they don't know how to voyage efficiently. There's no threat of being attacked, so why go quickly? If there was no alliance to leech gold from, efficiency-minded pirates like myself are better off on our own crews and voyages anyway. There's usually a couple top-tier crews making a lot of money (and Reaper's Rep) and a group of bottom-feeder crews trying to increase their reputation.

I'll admit, I did do an alliance server one time(though it wasn't a true one in the end). It was the Legendary Captain Challenge and I wanted to be really high in the rankings. Of course all of the alliance players were going to be up top.
So I join the server really late at night, and everyone's getting off. There ended up being only one other ship left in the alliance. That ship betrayed us and sunk us, but we had hid our haul so it was fine in the end.
Well it turns out the Athena ship on an alliance server is one of the bottom feeders. So the rest of my crew was just there to get the easy way to A20, and they knew nothing of efficiency, they weren't familiar with Thieves Haven X's, etc.
I would have been better off doing the voyage with a LFG crew.

So that was the last time I used an alliance server lol... I stayed in top 20 for the Legendary Captain challenge (by grinding in unsafe servers) until I gave up when the other top 20s got so ludicrous (I ended at #79). The top 3 players obviously had a whole server or two working to give them loot.

There's a possibility that newer players see a post for an alliance server on LFG, joins without knowing much about the game, and promptly (imo) get their games ruined. Giving a new player hundreds of thousands of gold coins is the worst thing. They have no idea what that gold is worth! If you instantly max out a noobs reputation and give them 10 million, are they going to stay in the game long? Probably not... they missed all the experience! People who know what they are getting into is one thing... but newer players might lose the value of Sea of Thieves with these systems. Gold needs to have a clear, simple value at every level of play, and the pirates with the biggest coffers are the ones who know how to voyage efficiently and fight for loot/protect their loot (PvEvP players). Instead, the pirates good at taking over servers are the ones who make the most gold.

@drizkillz never going to happen, but make a suggestion post about that if you really want lol

@wsurftvveeds I know, I just wanted to be like everyone else in this thread. 😉

@burnbacon said in Alliance Servers:

Does or do these alliance servers affect your overall gameplay? Where you can’t do a thing because of the alliance server you are not part of? No?

So why care? For all I know, they are in there own little playground. Doing everything they can. So when the day comes, they be the first to complain about “lack of content when majority of the content we have should take a long time to finish. Should.

Don’t care about them. The devs have said they are monitoring them areas. But atm they pose no threat or breaking anything. So no need to step in.

Whether or not this affects me, has nothing to do with anything.
What kind of argument even is that?
If something doesn't affect me, I should not have an opinion about something that's literally breaking the game?

@sshteeve said in Alliance Servers:

@lem0n-curry said in Alliance Servers:

release custom servers finally so people can get their friendships and community in those.

Trust me matey - they aren't ready yet.

That's unfortunate.
I hope they don't want to put in too many options for the creator and get caught in scope or feature creep, just a bare bones server without gold & rep and some powers to remove players / crews or close the server.

Everything else is a bonus and could be added later.

(FYI: not trying to fish for an answer as it is under NDA.)

@drizkillz said in Alliance Servers:

They don't really affect anyone, if it's full then you're obviously not getting in one and therefore will never see it in the first place. AND if people want to put in the hours to do that sort of thing, then let them have fun; they're still putting in the work. Full server alliances are probably the most brutal grinds in the game, who is anyone to dictate how people play mutually in their sandbox game anyway? Oh no! There are players putting in hours of work to earn a lot of money in the game that they like, somebody should stop them! It's like Karen-pirates of the seas. If they're out-of-sight then leave them out-of-mind and stop letting it live rent free up there.

So those in these PvE Alliance servers shouldn't be allowed to raise their emissary flag as getting gold in a risk free server is so much easier than in a standard Adventure server ? Because they might be "out-of-sight", but are there keeping players out of a higher Tier.

The main problem with the concept of Alliance Servers is that they screw up the economy of the game. THEY are the reason that commodities got nerf'd so hard. Commodities were one of the coolest risk/reward systems introduced into the game. The worst part is, the concept of the commodities with a high risk/reward system now cannot be applied to any other faction because alliance servers would force the economy of whatever it is to be nerf'd to a point where it's not worth doing. I guarantee if they ran statistics on how many commodities were purchased before the first nerf, versus now, it would be a hilarious disparity.

There are a lot of ways they could fix it. My favorite would be to create a second form of alliancing. Make it ultra risk/reward. You get a 25% bonus under the same mechanics that exist today, but only 2 ships can be in this type of alliance, and only those 2 ships can be in that type of alliance per server. Here's the catch...you show up on the map to everyone just like a Reaper does. This would encourage, if not force, those 2 ships to actually work together and take on any would be attackers as a team. And in order to get into this type of alliance, both crews need to vote for it in the tavern at the bar...that way 2 crews could not accidentally get into this type of alliance simply passing by another ship the same way alliances are often formed today.

Then, take the current alliance system and nerf it. There's a million ways to nerf it, but keeping it simple would be the easiest complement to the proposed high risk/reward alliance. Make the regular alliance system a 1% bonus based on your emissary level (regardless of faction). That's right...the cap would be 5%...and no additional emissary bonus on top of that.

We don't need to prevent alliance servers from their goal of a safe PvE playground for people seeking that type of experience. They want to play that way, that's totally fine. But, them screwing up the economy and preventing creative high risk/reward mechanics from being introduced into the game, it's a real shame. That is what we need to prevent.