Is Merchant Alliance a dead faction?

Skeleton ships, world events, and sea forts all spawn a good chunk of MA loot, if youre working on them as a faction; try raising their emmi and just playing the game as-is too

@koala2137 said in Is Merchant Alliance a dead faction?:

Recently I find Merchant Alliance really unsatisfying to play. The company got scrapped of what made it cool and I think it needs some improvements. Let me list some issues:

1. Animal voyages - the gold value of such is good, the problem is that takes a lot of time to complete. For example, we got to catch 4 animals on devils ridge and deliver them to Port Merrick. It takes some time to complete on the island and then you have to go across half of the map to deliver them. You can't really do anything risky on the way like fighting a skeleton ships, as you might lose your animals on cannon shots. Idea? Having to take care of animals is good, just make it feeling worthy resigning from other activities on the way. Combine the animal quests with request for resources, merchant crates that we could get from NPC's on large islands. Make us stop anywhere on the way to selling point.

AFAIK most of these are to be delivered close-by from the pick-up point (but I use the voyages on smaller island mostly, after doing a few the delivery gets further). You don't have to get the animals from the same island as you get the crates though. While the appropiate animals spawn on that island, you could pick up the crates from Devil's Ridge and get the animals from islands closer to Port Merrick.

2. New loot types - Gold Hoarders got a bunch of new loot types, such as King's loot (3 types of chests with ashen variants, new tinkets, many base game variants of trinkets and chests). Same goes for the Order of Souls - king's skulls, ancient relics revisited on skeleton lords voyages, new variants of skulls. Merchants got... crate of diamonds. One new thing.

Plus some variants of the cargo that have a higher value.

We need more variety of MA loot or a new way to obtain them. Now, we get decent amount of those in lost shipments voyage (mostly basic ones like sugar, tea and clothes). Idea? Make the NPC's on large islands sell crates. We could be getting like 3-5 crates from them and we would get a reason to visit any islands. Now we go in straightforward way - Outpost-Island with animals-Outpost.

Add new achievements - for sugar crate, tea crate, clothes crate. I mean, we have achievements for seafarers chest, castaway chest, marauder chest, captains chest, we just dont have achievements on selling merchant loot. Coral loot is also a thing - when siren shrines got introduced, a regular loot got new types - coral seafarer, marauder and captains chest, coral skulls. We got some merchant loot too, just a new variant that doesnt have corresponding regular version.

3. Crates of fruits, wood and cannonballs - It's really hard to get a bottle quest for delivering a crate of resources. The gold value is really good on those but still we make our ship weaker (losing 50 cannonballs on short session is kinda risky. Same goes for the wood.) Commendations are hard to complete or even have progress as bottle quests are random and you never know if you can get it on time. Idea? Remove time limit on delivery on resource crates delivery. With the cargo runs its obvious that we have limited time to deliver. With resources... I don't want to leave anything that I'm doing and rush to the specific outpost to sell one crate.

Guess that's why I got them already done: I did prioritise doing those voyages. As soon as a I found one - I get the crate (you can also collect them on Seaposts !) and fill it ASAP on outpost, fort or the outpost where they need to be delivered. Only when the scedule was really tight, use the supplies on your ship and restock after your delivery. I used to be able to find two for the same outpost as well.

They could do with an adjustment to the spawnrate, finding those now is much harder than it used to be. Perhaps increase the time to deliver a bit for some.

4. Emissary flag progress - it takes years to level up on animals voyages to level 5. We spend time looking for specific animals, time on going to the outpost that sometimes is across the whole map and we barely visit any islands on the way, as we can't leave pigs without feeding. Please, adjust the emissary flag progress on animals, especially on levels 3-5.

Only on long trips, pigs need some food. Their feeding time has been nerfed considerably. When not solo this is hardly an issue, perhaps one person should be on the ship until the other one found an animal and is returning, give a banana to the pigs and find the next animal. Or do the pigs last...

5. Resource crates delivery need their own quest and raising the achievement cap. If it was possible to get 'delivery of fruits quest' on demand, it would make us visit more islands on the way to gather resources, collecting random loot on shores, getting crates from NPCs. Then achievement cap of 50 is too easy to complete.

Please, give Merchants some love. This faction feels the most unrewarding, boring and not exciting to play with. I'd rather stack skulls or chests to get good amount of gold instead of visiting the outpost every 15 minutes for low achievement progress and not so good gold reward.

They don't need their own quest, they need to adjust the spawn rate.

@wolfmanbush @SavvyStraw37257

Thats true, the new playerbase wants faster experience and developers met their needs - diving to quests rather than sailing across the map, more control of quests duration, I get it all and appreciate it!

The problem with MA is rather different:

If you play gold hoarders, you can feel the progress - if you're new to the game, you start with simple digging with low-rewarding chests. Then you unlock vaults, that used to have 3 grades (stone, silver and gold, not sure if those are still the thing as we have 2 variants to vote on). So even if you're experienced player, you can get a quest that feels rewarding. You can still complete the basic quests, digging chests, but seems to me that more experienced players tend to stack loot, visit more islands before selling, and get paid for their effort.

Same goes for OOS - complete regular skeleton crews and captains on basic levels, ghost fleets on higher. Again, if you're experienced - you stack more. You can always find some emergent skeleton captain on shores, a skull in the water, some skulls on skeleton ships.

On Merchant Alliance theres really nothing to stack. Of course, you can repeat lost shipments over and over but as some people already said, those drop mostly crates of tea/sugar/clothes, that still feel basic. There's really no way now to feel the progress on the MA quests - you can't stack up the cargo, can't stack up the resource delivery quests, can't stack up animal deliveries. Trading routes with commodities trading got nerfed and feel unrewarding to the effort put in sailing from one outpost to another. You cannot do the loot haul on merchants, see your gold numbers going up for hundreds of thousands.

I already got GH lvl 189, OOS 178 and MA on 153, but everytime I go merchant quests I feel like I need to grind on the quests that people who just started playing are doing as well, in the same way - outpost, get cargo, deliver cargo, get another cargo, deliver cargo, get another cargo, repeat over and over.

Merchants is not dead, its just not fun, and with some of the changes that came from last season makes it just more of a grind. Its really only good for commodity runs if you want large piles of gold, or commendations. Otherwise it really isnt fun, and having the grind for the only things you do merchants for become even harder really doesnt help it.

Merchants did get a bit more than just a crate of diamonds though! They got purple plants that are worth more than normal! Which really is the same functional treatment as kingly loot, just a new look to the same thing with a boosted price, it just feels less creative.

Merchants has generally just never been fun, but there are some people who stick by it even to this day cause it offers some of the best money you can get if you know how to go about it.

I agree merchant voyages are no fun anymore.
Lost shipments used to get you grade V, now you need to do 2-3 of them.
Animal voyages are only worth doing at grade V and the quests are way too short. I'd rather have option to do 4-8 deliveries per voyage rather than 2-4. Those commendations take forever now.