Reigniting the Flame, Storing Ships and Lore

[Razhael 4]

Hello fellow sailors!

I really like this game, but due to work and the current situation i've been unable to play it as much as i like to. But i`ve been reading the forums for quite some time.

The game actually is lacking active players, and why is that?. Many of the people that used to play this game quitted because of some time consuming issues and frustrating pvp ganking and griefing.

When someone suggest something about this issue, the clearly toxic pvper shows to say: "its a pvp game, just deal with it". But you are forgetting that some of this issues are the things killing the game,

you need that "cannon fodder" to fill the seas in order to have fun and sink something. In my case i really started on a pvp server, i like to play on small companies, most of the big ones are quite stressing with all that people.

So, to encourage people to return to the game, and SAIL (playing houses is another thing that kills the game, and lags it quite a lot), you need to develop a way to store the ships.

Actually the technology is there, in ark, the "pokeballs". So, my idea is to use 2 methods of storing them:

- The Ships in a bottle method (aka cryopods, yeah, pretty much pirates of the caribbean black beard's thing)
- And through the storyline by using the compass.

The first one is quite straightforward, allowing you to store many ships in a rack at your base, cleaning shores from shitloads of ships (and protecting them from attacks). In order to be balance you can allow a certain number of bottle racks
per company (lets say, 1 rack that allows a storage of 5 to 10 ships depending on the rack quality). 

The second one, and the most interesting one from a casual playerbase, is the one regarding the compass. With the implementation of an interesting storyline (questline), that involves SAILING around, fighting and/or exploring, you can upgrade your 
compass (leveling like the character), and gain a slot in a 3 tier storage system. This way you can store a Sloop, a Schooner and a Brigantine (galleons are probably too powerful to be storage this way).

The limitations to balance this system could be something like this:

For the first one (bottle system): - Ships only respawnable in a shipyard at base, and with a personal cd like the Ark cryopods.

For the Compass System: - Ships only respawneable in freeports, with personal CD shared with the cryopods but a diferent one for the ship tier.

Regarding the ship cargo, it will only store crew, the contains of the ship will be dropped on the summoners location (or deleted, with a previous warning, so this will force you to unload your ship somewhere, with the risk of getting caught in the process by filthy pirates :P). This also will force you to restock everything, food, supplies, weapons, etc.

There could be some issues on how to store all the ship customizations server side wise, but i do not have knowlege about pogramming and that stuff. Thats why probably the number of storaged ships should be tweaked because of this.

Thank you.

For the toxic Pvper that for sure is going to show, i like pvp too, but if you just make the game frustrating, the player base will just leave, i think this will encourage people more to use the ships, and without the fear of loggin out and knowing that you have to start all over again each time you log in.

[Whitehawk 382]

There was a thread a long time ago about storing ships, especially to reduce lag. I think a lot of players quit after they have beat all the bosses and completed game content, and are left with nothing to do but repeat the same process, that's why a lot of people used to ask for server wipes. Tbh I've played since release and I get pretty darn bored now, especially as tames aren't really my thing. No new content is something that puts a lot of the player base off from returning too. The only reason I am still playing is to build ships, cos I enjoy it, but even that with all it's combinations is getting a bit samey now. As for toxicity in a game, it's not ever gonna go away. It's human nature for some even in pve, in fact sometimes worse in pve than pvp. Games have tried everything from banning to bounties, and I still haven't seen a solution that works. Imo, new game content is the only thing that will bring back players and add new ones.

[Razhael 4]

56 minutes ago, Whitehawk said:

There was a thread a long time ago about storing ships, especially to reduce lag. I think a lot of players quit after they have beat all the bosses and completed game content, and are left with nothing to do but repeat the same process, that's why a lot of people used to ask for server wipes. Tbh I've played since release and I get pretty darn bored now, especially as tames aren't really my thing. No new content is something that puts a lot of the player base off from returning too. The only reason I am still playing is to build ships, cos I enjoy it, but even that with all it's combinations is getting a bit samey now. As for toxicity in a game, it's not ever gonna go away. It's human nature for some even in pve, in fact sometimes worse in pve than pvp. Games have tried everything from banning to bounties, and I still haven't seen a solution that works. Imo, new game content is the only thing that will bring back players and add new ones.

Thats why i aim to mitigate the consecuences of the toxicity and not to punish the act itself. Also, totally agree about the content, and i try to include this features by forcing the palyer to follow a story/questline (or completly avoid the story by combat leveling) to get game improvements.

Thank you for being constructive