Possible solutions to spawn camping.

How about you don't get to respawn if your ship has any enemy on it so if someone kills you, they can actually feel some sort of achievement

@cows-n-muffins well, dont die to 1 person as a crew of 4, problem solved. git gut ^^

@cows-n-muffins I'm not making anyone anything. It's a skill based game, if 1 person has more skill than all 4 combined, that's a well-deserved win. Otherwise what's the point?

If your entire crew dies, you SHOULD lose your ship. If you're getting spawn camped, it's by choice. You always have the option to scuttle. Respawning and retaking the ship SHOULD be incredibly difficult once you're overwhelmed by another crew. Camping your spawn is a valid strategy once a crew has bested you. If you're getting camped, you lost. Scuttle and move on. This isn't WoW.

@cows-n-muffins I guess I meant specifically battlegrounds in WoW. Who does world pvp anyways? I wish they would, world pvp was great fun. But let's not get off track here. In BGs, you respawn a ton of times in a game. If your whole team wipes, the game isn't over, that just might mean the other team takes the flag or that objective. Within the context of the BG, even if everyone dies, you didn't lose yet. It's surely not a great sign for your team, but you didn't lose. What I'm trying to say is, in SoT, if your ship gets boarded and all of your crew dies, I consider that as you having lost, not just that you died. You can die and not lose, but if they're positioned to camp you, you died AND you lost. In that situation, the other crew should get all of the plunder they can salvage from your ship, and you should have to start with a new one. It's a totally different system, but I think people are equating a full wipe in SoT to a full wipe in something like WoW or CoD. In SoT, wiping once is more akin to losing the entire BG, not just wiping in a BG. It's effectively the same mechanic, but the environment is totally different, and so similar fixes like limited invulnerability or randomized spawn locations are not only unnecessary, but actually detract from the feel of the game they're trying to create. Or at least, my perception of what they're trying to create. I could be totally wrong and they'll implement invulnerability in the next patch, but this is just what I think.

Did anyone ever play the multiplayer in Ratchet and Clank: Up your Arsenal? In that, you would claim nodes, and you could choose to spawn at any one you claimed. People would complain about spawn camping on that game, but I see it as valid strategy. If you spawn at a node that you own but is well guarded, you're going into it with the knowledge that you will probably die, but maybe the reward is worth the risk. If they're on your node ready to kill you as soon as you spawn, you effectively no longer own that node, but you can have a chance to retake it if you do really well. It's the same thing in SoT. If you respawn on your ship, and there's somebody waiting there to kill you immediately, you actually spawned on THEIR ship, not yours. They just won it. If you want to respawn for a chance of taking it back, go for it. Just know that it is now effectively their ship, and they are vastly better positioned to defend it than you are to assault it. And that's the way it should be. They bested you, they should get yer booty.

@cows-n-muffins Oh I definitely agree that dying should be fun wherever possible. I know what you mean about having some times where you die but you're happy about it. But for the most part, that has been my experience with SoT. I had an encounter where I stole somebody's treasure, and then they sunk my ship and killed me, and I was happy about that. I was camped a couple times, and those weren't fun, but after dying a couple times I kind of went "wait, I can just get out of this" and just scuttled and started having fun again. I think if I had just done that right away once I had been boarded and wiped, I wouldn't have even had any unpleasant feelings about the encounter to begin with. I mean yeah it sucks losing especially if you lost a lot of resources and chests, but doing that battle is still exciting and fun. There has yet to be a time where I felt completely helpless from the very start of an encounter. Like you always go into an encounter with a ship thinking "okay we got this, we can beat them." Once you're boarded and your crew is on the ship of the damned, it's pretty hopeless, but from my perspective, at that point it should be hopeless, and people who are respawning (instead of scuttling) in under that circumstance are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of fun. They can keep having fun by scuttling and getting a new ship, but they choose to stay and get camped and have no fun. That having been said, those people are still not having fun, regardless of the fact that it was their choice. So if there's a solution that helps those people, I'd probably be for that, but not at the expense of the cohesiveness of the world. Putting in a longer respawn would work, but I don't like that because that just takes you out of the game for even longer. Automatic scuttling once the whole crew is dead would also counteract this particular problem, but that is an awful idea and would introduce 99 other problems.

I suppose my sympathy here is not to the defender, but to the attacker. I think most people see this as "ugh why won't these damn campers leave me alone" whereas I see it from the opposite perspective as "ugh why won't this dead crew just admit defeat and let me have the treasure so I can be on my way?" Though I recognize there are some attackers who are much more malicious and think more along the lines of "my self esteem is low so I'm going to camp these people so I can feel superior" and I feel bad for those people. However, countering that maliciousness by scuttling is the same as countering people who use camping only long enough to secure their loot and then sink the ship.

To me, respawning on the ship is for when one of your crew gets eaten by a shark, or when you fend off an attack successfully, you can pick up the pieces and move on. But I think everyone is trying to use it as a wow-style respawn, and it just doesn't feel like the right way to use it given the structure of the world. I don't know what the correct solution might be (if there needs to be one) but invulnerability and/or random spawns don't make a lot of sense to me. The problem with it is that it's an inorganic modification to counter a particular strategy that doesn't really fit with the game as a whole. My worry with those types of changes is that it can snowball out of control. These kind of one-off counter patches start with invulnerability when you spawn, and end with pirates diverting power to shields to block the other ship's summoned meteor. And all along the way, the cohesion and immersiveness of the world are degraded for the sake of balance. This is especially true in this case, the counter already exists, and it seems pretty intuitive within the environment of the game, but people don't see it as a counter because they're trying to play SoT like they play Overwatch and I just don't think that's the direction the game should go.

Maybe some sort of mechanism where you could claim someone else's ship and thus force them to spawn elsewhere? Like say you could hoist your banner on their ship (and that process would take kind of a long time) and then their ship would become yours, and they would get a new one somewhere else, and spawn there when they died or took a merperson. With that change, you could counteract spawn camping somewhat. But then, I know some people would just board and camp without raising their banner and you'd have the same issue again, just lessened somewhat. Bleh, I don't know. To me, it's a problem that doesn't need fixing, but I can see where some people have trouble letting go and admitting defeat, so it might be nice to come up with something to help them move on. I just don't know of a good way to do it that makes sense in the world and doesn't cause all sorts of other problems.

@cows-n-muffins said in Add respawn invulnerability and randomized spawns to stop spawn camping.:

Title says it all. The fact that 1 person with a shotgun can camp the respawn of a 4 man crew and keep them dead until he runs out of ammo is pretty broken.

Right now on both the sloop and the galleon the respawn takes place at a very specific spot on the ship, with the crew member always facing in a particular direction when spawning. So if someone is standing behind that spot with a shotgun, boom. Easy spawn camping. Even worse on the small ship because the ammo box is right next to the spawn as well, so it's not like the camper will run out of bullets.

2 solutions I offer ye.

1. Add 3 second invulnerability to respawning. This should give plenty of time to kill anyone attempting to camp the spawn. This can easily be telegraphed by having invulnerable players glow with that pale green glow when they are dead ghosts.
2. Have the respawning players spawn in random places on the ship. This way the invading crew has to stay alert while running around your ship.

Combined, this will encourage hit and run tactics far more than continuous combat on board an enemy ship. Even if the invading crew is much more skilled at the game, the invulnerability and randomised spawning should still give the noob team an edge to fight back.

Good ideas!

@cows-n-muffins I never said anything about respawn invulnerability :)

@avirex-idyll said in Add respawn invulnerability and randomized spawns to stop spawn camping.:

It was not something I HAD to do but rather something I took upon myself to better ensure the time I spent on SoT was relaxing and positive.

^
I don't think a lot of players understand or implement this concept nearly enough.

The respawns must be addressed or this will be a very frustrating game ....even for the winner since he has to constantly fight over and over the guy he beat.
They are doing so much to make fair play and skill based combat but have a respawn system that basically comes down to whoever has the most bullets or cannons or planks to keep resspawing and fighting.

@cows-n-muffins I meant more on the avenue of self-care than in support of that specific solution. People will bang their heads against a wall for hours having no fun rather than saying "I'm not having any fun, so I'm going to modify the way I'm playing to make myself happier." I'd agree that it's not a great solution to have to relog all the time, but I see a lot of people playing a particular way because they think it's righteous or something, not because that's the way they'll have the most fun. I wasn't really trying to say "oh yeah if you're being camped you should just relog!" I was more saying that people have more control over the fun they have than they seem to think, but they're not exercising that control. For that person, relogging was the way that worked for him to maintain a fun experience for himself, so I fully support that. It hurts no one, and if it helps him enjoy the game more, I say go hog wild. I personally don't need to, but if someone else does, it doesn't matter to me.

Overwatch or MOBAs are a bit different. There are time constraints there, and your team depends on you for THEIR fun, so you deciding to relog in the middle of a match does hurt someone else. That said, I absolutely support logging out of a MOBA match if you're having a miserable time. I would say that you should manage your expectations of what you're likely to experience when playing said MOBA before entering a match, though. Think about whether you really are going to be able to handle the likely course of the game, and decide if you want to play based on that. If you're okay with a 50% chance of you losing, and an even higher chance of your teammates doing poorly, go ahead and join. If not, probably better to not join, because it's pretty rude to leave your team mid-match, and you'll actually be degrading their fun, not just controlling your own.

@cows-n-muffins you sound like the type of kids that made wow into the s**t game it is today, instead of the great game it was in the past. no the game doesn't need to be changed to be easier for you. I've never died in a white screen, as far as i can tell, you are invisible until you spawn, anytime anyone spawned in on me they instantly started moving. You can hear things before you spawn, but your body is not there till you can see, and yes, maybe as soon as you could see you got shot. I'm thinking you just suck at the game, and you want it easier for you.