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totrider

Hunting the ghost ship is as interesting as watching paint dry

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I mean, not only is hunting the ghost ship super boring, from what iv'e seen of other people encountering it, it doesn't even seem like there is any carrot at the end of the stick here, just an empty feeling.

So this is how our first go at it went, after extensive research into anything ghost ship related.
Knowing the route that it takes, not thanks to anything in-game, 3 of us tried looking for it. The first thing that hits you is how annoying fog is, and I would not be surprised if the ship sailed right past us in one of the 5+ total-no-visibility fog situations we encountered in the 3 hour search. Our search started in its spawn grid, and I sailed backwards along its supposed route as best as I could. That is when the second problem hits you, accuracy. I have no idea how closely you need to follow the route without risking the ship being out of render distance, and with all the ship of the damned in the way, I repeatedly found myself way off course, probably another situation where it might have slipped past us. We also have no idea how long it takes for the ship to do a full loop around, but using our estimate of about ~4 hours+ on average to go half the route in our brigantine with 2 fine large handling and 1 BP common large weight, and assuming that the ghost ship is slightly slower, I estimated about a ~5-~6 hour average for it to make half the route. This would mean, that even in the worst case scenario, you should encounter it, at most, after ~4 hours of sailing against its route, yet we did not see it at all, so my only assumption is that we missed on the route, or our scout missed it re-spawning. I will go on and assume it is way more likely we missed it on the route though, as every grid had an average of 2-3 players playing, and most of the time, 2 of them were us, meaning that I don't expect anyone to have taken it out, so our scout at spawn had nothing to miss.

Being glued to the screen for 4 hours straight without any chance of rest without the risk of losing any potential progress, along with the fact that you have no idea where the ship might be along this ~8 to ~10 hour route is just incredibly frustrating. Not to mention that after giving up, we now have to start from scratch again, and we have nothing to show for our efforts

Our next step is to just have more ships stationed around to help scout it, but we are limited to 3 players, and I can't imagine how boring this would be of an undertaken if you were by yourself. So our strategy will be to use our 2 brigs to sail against the route, while having a third scout vessel at its spawn location. Even though we somehow failed to find the ship in our first attempt, at least our briggs are now on opposite sides of the square frame that the ghost ship sails through, so at most, we would have to waste 4 hours of mindless sailing. 4, very boring, mindless, hours of sailing.

Commenting that "you could just do something else while looking for the ship" is not acceptable, as doing so would not only put our entire efforts at risk, but also mean that we will have to spend even more precious time on this quest. And even worse, if we get distracted, and the ship sails past us, there is practically no chance of us finding it in that sessions without spending another ~4+ hours, assuming we can keep our 2 briggs equally distanced while following the route ( I somehow doubt that is going to happen).

I have a few suggestions on what I would do to at least make it less tedious. Bear in mind that I don't care about PvP concerns such as ganking players trying to undertake this quest. I remember people in Sea of Thieves messing with other people just to prevent them from accomplishing certain quests, so it does need to be considered, but that is not my job 😛

Limit the route to either a 2x2 grid area. Not necessarily the best idea, as I assume the ghost ship will attack players on sight?

Add more routes. Pretty simple, have more routes, though I would still make them waaaay shorter than a trek that takes the ghost ship the estimated ~10 hours.

Make a 3x3 grid frame around each golden age server where a ghost ship spawns. Makes it a lot more likely that players actually happen to encounter the ghost ship naturally, as golden age servers already draw in combat ships due to higher level SOTD. I would not let them go through the golden age area though, as those are already stressed/saturated enough.

Give us in-game tools to find the ghost ship. I guess this would likely be fitting for the tarot card system or another use for the sextant?, but just anything that can lead us to it so we don't feel like we are just wasting time sailing into nothingness.

Have more than one ship on the current route? I know the ship is supposed to be special, and having a new ship spawn every in-game day at 06:00, or whenever, would quickly saturate grids along the route with ghost ships, also making it so people would not bother hunting it, but just camping the spawn area.

This leads to another suggestion though, just have it spawn in a certain grid and then have it sail around, requiring players to take it out before it de-spawns? Adding a specialized grid for it is obviously not ideal, but at least have an area on the map that clearly shows where it spawns so players can actually find it consistently. Who knows, maybe this might also be a good way to group up players to take on the ship alongside people outside their company?

And this is not really as much a suggestion as it is just pure inspiration. Play some Sea of Thieves, that game pretty much nails it when it comes to feed-forward for world events like bosses and similar encounters. Make some kind of in universe environmental effect that indicates something might be going on there. A permanent light fog that follows the ghost ship, and appears in a sizable area around the ship, so that you can see it from far away. Or a light beacon, or sound effect/ambiance. Or as some of the Sea of Thieves encounters happen, they come to you. Obviously not the best idea given how unstable Atlas is, making you lose your ship, 100% guaranteed if you crash while at sea and just about anything is chasing you. The point is just: make some reliable, re-usable tools that can empower us to find these kinds of encounters within the game, without the need for a wiki and reverse engineering of game mechanics, just so we have a shot at actually succeeding. Make the tools a challenge to obtain as well, so we feel accomplished when we do get a hold on them. Just whatever you end up figuring out, don't keep asking us to watch paint dry, it really sucks.

UPDATE:
Following the suggestion of going to the marker you get by selecting the quest, we tried again, but surprise, nothing... again.
This is where the marker has been within a time span of about ~8 hours (after re-checking it the day after we didn't find it the second time) :

g4bIdDc.png

Which does not even come close to the route it is supposed to be going along as of 23/06/2019:
drNO7Mn.jpg

So, I guess the marker is either broken, or just a red herring... great. I guess it was a red flag when we noticed the marker was standing still while approaching it, not to mention how it is so far away from the supposed route.

Edited by totrider
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13 hours ago, TerrorTrooper said:

If you click on the ghost ship mission in your atlas map it will show you the ghost ships current position.

O...k.... Well, I guess I will check that out. For some reason I did not expect that to be the case, you know, knowing how the rest of the game tends to treat you, so assuming you are not trolling, it does kinda make it a lot easier. Also did think about it today before checking on my post here, but didn't get around to testing it in-game.

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... great, wasted another hour on hunting an seemingly non-existent ship... great 😕

Took a look at the quest list on the Atlas, and we could see a marker for the ghost ship, but it was a bit off. For one, it was in a place that was way off from the supposed route that it would take according to the info that is available on the ship. We even checked the tools for the official server map, and it was still the same. The marker was just standing still for the entirety of us approaching it, and when we got there, nothing... We thought that maybe we had to be close enough for it to move, and it also had to be the right time of day, so we waited an entire in-game day cycle, but still nothing.

I noticed that the patch notes mention something vaguely about "Improved Ghostship appearance logic" whatever the hell that means. I really hope that this is just a bug or something, cause I wont really call this "improved".
The only other thing I could think of happening here, is that someone else already took it out earlier, and it is now on cooldown for respawning, as the info on the ship mentions. But how long would this cooldown be? Since we "hunted" it for an hour, and it wasn't moving since the beginning, it would have had more than an hour to respawn.
Still, this doesn't explain why it wasn't anywhere close to its supposed course. I mean, it wasn't even in the right grid of the closes section of the route. Gonna take a look again tomorrow and see if the marker has moved, though I am not getting my hopes up on this.

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Its course has changed since the original map plotting its course was created. New islands were added that were in its path and so now it has a different route.

Make sure you're looking at an updated map, and not an old one.

As for the marker staying still, you may need to uncheck and recheck the quest in the log to get an updated position, as the marker may not move with it in real time. Not positive on that one, just an idea to try.

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Hunting the ghost ship is the most boring thing I've encountered in video games.  I fell asleep several times at the keyboard over roughly 10 days of looking for it.  Then once we had it in our sights, it was sunk in seconds and gave no disco points.  I only did it because at the time I thought it was required for the ice cave.  Unless 20% extra gold from maps is a huge deal to you, its a hard pass.

 

The route has barely changed to move around the new island layout and that icon is meaningless and NOT on the route.

Edited by DocOlds

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6 hours ago, DocOlds said:

The route has barely changed to move around the new island layout and that icon is meaningless and NOT on the route.

Yea, that is what I feared.
At this point, it is more a matter of principle, and wanting to complete all the challenges that the game throws at us. But this is not a challenge, just boring.

8 hours ago, Kidori said:

Make sure you're looking at an updated map, and not an old one.

As for the marker staying still, you may need to uncheck and recheck the quest in the log to get an updated position, as the marker may not move with it in real time. Not positive on that one, just an idea to try.

As I wrote in my post, we confirmed the route with the route on the official map by using the tools needed for plotting your own ghostship route. It was the same.
Like you, i also considered that the route might not update unless you "re-tick" the quest, but we already tried that. We also tried re-logging

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I think the Ghost ship icon is bugged , when i click on the quest , it show the ship is in G13 but it been 2 days and the ship didn't move from G13 and stood still .

 

So much for the clicking on the quest tip .

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51 minutes ago, kampfer91 said:

I think the Ghost ship icon is bugged , when i click on the quest , it show the ship is in G13 but it been 2 days and the ship didn't move from G13 and stood still .

 

So much for the clicking on the quest tip .

Just because UE4 is capable of automatically updating HUD elements based on events does not mean that every UE4 developer is, too.

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Till today I wanted to call the Ghostship a myth, finally found it today, ty for the updated map you shared with us, made the search less hard and anoying. Speed of ghostship seems to be faster then the trader, one canonball  of the GS deals 2500 DMG to structures on ship without dmg reduction.

Seems like 50-100 Cannonballs are more then enough to carry for killing the GS (think I needed lessen then 24)

PS: To the other guy : was an nice race^^ I ´m shure you soon find another one

Edited by Breaker2k
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Fcking annoying, just spent god knows how many hours doing an entire loop of the penis shape route and didn't find the Ghost Ship. The Ghost Ship needs a rework asap..

 

FB57382A07503097A4BF2E73E357BAE903618C69 

The routes are far too massive and take far too much RNG and time to find the ship, and even when you do find the ship it is still buggy and broken so that you have to follow it for god knows how long until it is possible to damage it.

My suggestion: Buff it to 300k HP, make it spawn inside half of the Powerstone Regions and it doesn't leave that region. Remove the damage immunity/invisibility feature if it's still buggy.

The amount of effort, time and RNG required for the Ghost Ship, and the bugs still existing to this day is honestly terrible.

Edited by Vadearlst

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5 minutes ago, Vadearlst said:

Yea, extracted from official map

Are the others merchant ships?

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You know what's sad, is people actually care about the Ghost Ship at all...

Cheesed all the powerstones for PVP sake, but goodness gracious no one cared about the ghost ship, it was a complete waste of time. 

 

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the question is are they all active at the same time?

EDIT: nonesence, they are merchant ship routes

Edited by Kummba

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6 hours ago, Inigo said:

You know what's sad, is people actually care about the Ghost Ship at all...

Cheesed all the powerstones for PVP sake, but goodness gracious no one cared about the ghost ship, it was a complete waste of time. 

 

only at first, for curiosity, once you get to know it doesnt drop anything relevant, it just goes like: meh!

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Ok, only the bottom middle is the ghostship, the otheres are the merchant ships routes. I have seem one myself on the route.

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Allmost all quest rewards look underwelming.

Some value you only see when you dont have them.

- 20% gold is additional gold, and more importat more XP (form the gold).
- 30% taming, OMG compare to without!
- EQ buff from squid? I am still not used to not having it, i lose buff on a constant basis. And buff is super important.
- encumbered speed, I hate to not have it, it is a gamechanger.
- the boss rewards are super nice, but i think they are out of the question anyway.
- durability is a must with the basic low numbers, and also for BP goods.
- prone speed  and stam recovery is ..... can be used sometimes (monkey taming etc.)

So you hunt the ghostship for like 1-10 hours, and have several months benefit from it.

Edited by Kummba
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Well found the ghost ship in the E13 spawn location invisible at 1600hrs. Went through to next grid where it became visible just as fog started. I shot it once and it despawned. 

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Ok so my company and I are looking for this stupid Ghost ship and we can't find an updated map of the ships route. Would you please tell me where to find this map

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