The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas

@r3vanns said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

@guildar9194

Even though I'm one of those spending more time in SS than in HS, I'd still rather have them go with your 2nd suggestion, and leaving SS as it is.

PvP is already degrading badly over the last couple of seasons, to be degraded additionally by even more incentivizing people to switch completely to SS.

---

That said, I've got nothing against your suggestion of some treasure generated. Maybe they could also create a range, and a bare minimum. Say, 10-20k. Random amount.

Because even for an empty aggressor ship, you can still sell their flag (and/or diary). I assume 10-20k random could be fair. But lemme try to expand a bit more on it.

Example:

1. Aggressor has approximate amount of more than 20k loot on the ship -- gets sunk -- game generates no additonal loot
2. Aggressor has approximate amount of between 10k and 20k -- gets sunk -- game generates some loot, but not to exceed 20k.
3. Aggressor has no loot at all -- gets sunk -- game generates random number of loot, ranging between 10 and 20k.

---

I'm basically applying Ancient Skeleton logic here. There are 3 tiers, and you don't know what you're gonna get, until you get it. If you manage to kill it, it's random. If you don't, you get nothing.

In this case, you don't know what type of aggressor is after you, until you fight them/check their ship, but you know you're 100% gonna get at least something if you sink them. Like with ancient skellies.

The best thing about this is - whether you're aggressor or not, you get something for sinking someone. Since the game most likely cannot figure out who's the actual aggressor anyways, this could be a decent solution.

I like that value-range idea!

@rambobrad said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

Yes I can use this to get lots of loot from new players and people loading in at outposts.

You'd get a little loot.
And there could be a 5 minute grace period when logging in, which gets removed early if the anyone on that crew damages another player or player-owned ship, which prevents treasure from spawning on sink.
It would prevent outpost camping.

@d3adst1ck said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

@guildar9194 said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

You'd get a little loot.
And there could be a 5 minute grace period when logging in, which gets removed early if the anyone on that crew damages another player or player-owned ship, which prevents treasure from spawning on sink.
It would prevent outpost camping.

I'm pretty sure your suggestion would do the opposite. You're increasing the value of new spawned ships by adding gold on top of the already available default supplies, making them more attractive to sink.

There's also no way to know how long they've been sitting there, so a 5 minute timer isn't going to influence the decision to get bonus gold from attacking new spawn ships if that's what they're looking for.

I think I said it badly.

When a new crew logs in:

• For 5 minutes, their ship will not award gold when sunk.
  This is to prevent outpost camping. A player camping a new spawn will not be rewarded.
• If that 'New Crew' decides to attack a player or a ship; This timer goes to 0 immediately. To prevent them giving 0 gold when sunk if they attack first or fight back.
  Damaging their attackers, or attacking first, means they are willing to fight. Thus, they give a treasure reward when sunk.

@rambobrad said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

@guildar9194 So I can stand in-front of the tavern door until they hit me then my crewmate can light up their ship, nice.

I mean, how often would that happen? It could happen, but how fast would a player have to move to:

1. See a ship log in.
2. Get to shore.
3. Run up & block the door before anyone can leave.

@d3adst1ck said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

@guildar9194 said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

When a new crew logs in:

• For 5 minutes, their ship will not award gold when sunk.
  This is to prevent outpost camping. A player camping a new spawn will not be rewarded.
• If that 'New Crew' decides to attack a player or a ship; This timer goes to 0 immediately. To prevent them giving 0 gold when sunk if they attack first or fight back.
  Damaging their attackers, or attacking first, means they are willing to fight. Thus, they give a treasure reward when sunk.

How can you tell how long a ship has been sitting there?

Why does that matter?
If they are willing to fight back; They will reward treasure.
If they run; It could assumed they aren't going to drop treasure. Or maybe they will.
If they sit still; They may be freshly logged in (And thus not on their ship) & not drop anything.

The idea is not to encourage outpost camping, so there will be 0 clue if they are lootable.

It's purely to rebalance the risk/reward of open-world PvP, which would, hopefully, cut down on runners. Because now they will earn something if they fight back.

@rambobrad said in The Risk/Reward Imbalance Of High Seas:

@guildar9194 Well I could just stand on wheel until they hit me off, or hide a keg on their boat and set a 5 minute timer. There's probably a plethora of ways you could a abuse it I think.

Also if the loot on your boat is from a world event would you think an attacking ship should drop loot still? Since the world events are designed to be fought over.

I think I'm not being clear:

If a ship in PvP has no loot (Or, as per R3vaNS idea; Have loot below a threshold): They will drop some randomly generated loot.

The point is to remove the unbalanced risk/reward of a ship with little-to-no treasure attacking a ship with treasure.

That's it. It's to make a defending ship GAIN something if they win. Instead of the fat 0 they get right now, which encourages running.

It's much better than it used to be. Used to be really really bad. They sped up selling and they brought time requirement down and it made it better.

Where they still have misses and still have some disconnect with the organic experience is something like what they just did in the update/patch.

They nerfed the poison dart against ancient megs. On the surface of that change many will just blow it off as whatever, but it's something they have done for years, tax the organic experience at no penalty to true cheesing.

The nerf only taxes the experience of those that play organically as solos and casual players. Server alliances don't care, overkill crews don't care, cheese crews in random servers don't care. This only targets efficient organic play.

Something that was well balanced before is now less appealing organically. It takes more resources and takes more time (aka more risk) for the same loot. Now they are entirely skippable organically and the spear did nothing to help out.

That's the kind of stuff where they really get their misses, imo.
Same thing happened to the trident.

Playing organically as smaller and casual crews ends up with a thousand different taxes and playing outside of organic play only gets more and more profitable.

@guildar9194 your fault for having treasure, nothing's stopping you from just attacking people...

When a boat with no loot attacks a boat with lots of loot, BOTH OF YOU are fighting for the SAME loot. It no longer matters who has it, the victor gets the same amount of loot, doesn’t matter who had it to begin with.
Also, ships dropping loot they don’t have doesn’t make too much sense imho. Even on skelly ships you can see the loot you’d get if you board them. Mechanically this can be exploited by ships in an alliance by repeatedly sinking each other for free loot farm. No matter how much you try to implement exploit counters, as long as someone knows how the system works they’ll be able to farm it with an alliance.

This is not a good idea.

First of all the game can't know what ship is the 'aggressor' and wich one the 'defender', because the latter can be the one who fired first out of defence, etc. This idea would therefore just create more of an incentive for attackers to attack ships, because now even 'empty' ships will get them loot.

Second: the real problems are that there is no incentive for attackers to carry 'loot' (an emissary flag), because either it will only apply to just 1 type of loot (GH, MA, OOS, HC, AF) or it will put them visibly on the map (Reapers, Guild), wich will warn potential targets. The other problem is that there is no incentive to be friendly. With all the diving going on alliances have become useless, because people are not long enough on a server to make it profitable to form an alliance, because the choice would just be allying and get 50% of the loot, or sinking the other and get 100%.

And my opinion, they could do the following things to chance things up:

1. Make it so Reapers and Guild-5's are no longer visible on the map (ofcourse then also remove the ability for reaper-5's to see other emissaries on the map). This way attackers can hunt stealthly while they fly a reaper's/guild flag and make a bigger profit, while a defender could win that flag. As a compensation Reaper-5's could get the ability see know how many emissaries per company there are and what level they are (just not where on the map they are), or perhaps a list of every active voyage in the world. I also believe a Guild-5 should also get a bonus (only one to not have it now), but don't know what yet. I think losing the current ability and the visibility on the map is better for both sides: for the Reaper is makes it so it can still hunt without being seen and it stops driving other emissaries away and for the other emissaries it stops severely increasing the risk (with no rewards). This would also help hourglass, since the reaper-side wouldn't put them on the map with the increased risk of third partying (this is one of the reasons to many people won't rease a reaperflag while doing hourglass, wich is also a complaint from the athena-side).
2. Make it so Reapers and Guild flags can be handed in to any company, so they are valuable loot for everyone.
3. Make it so alliances can reach across servers. You can still only ally up with someone you meet on the server (same as now), but when someone changes server (dives, portal hops, etc.), you keep your alliance with the other crew(s). This way alliances can get profitable again and people will again have an incentive not to be hostile all the time. Ofcourse there should be a limit of how many people can be in an alliance. The current one is 6, i would keep it that way. Therefore also change the allianceflag a bit, so it also have a bit of an emissary-style system, but then with hearts: 1 heart is a 2 ship alliance (you and 1 other boat), 2 hearts a 3-ship alliance, etc. untill 5 hearts for a 6 ship alliance (you and 5 other ships). This way you can also see if an alliance is already filled or not.