Constructive criticism - lack of trade support

[Captain Solow 1]

Dear Grapefruit.

 

Please don't make the game too easy and soloable!

If you want a pirate mmo where people do piraty stuff like raiding trade ships, then there needs to be players who profit from running trade ships. For this to happen there must be a built in incentive for people to haul good or animals from point A to point B.

One such incentive is that you can't easily tame i.e. cows in frozen regions. The food required will spoil easily and so it's actually more viable to trade a local resource for a cow that someone else has tamed, which will force someone to get on a boat and haul the beast across the map - and then giving pirates something to plunder. This will make for great gameplay.

I see in the upcoming patch notes, that most beasts can now be tamed with berries. So you chose the easy way and flipped a bit in the game files to allow everyone to have every beast, instead of implementing a proper market, thereby inspiring trade, merchant convoys, pirates etc etc.

You seem to be doing the same with skill points and levels. Instead of forcing people together (the cornerstone of any great mmo) you give people the option to unlock every skill on a single character - one less reason to play with others and the tell-tail sign of a game dev who does not recognize that an mmo should force people into teamwork, cooperation, co-dependence.

You have this one chance to create a new type of mmo. Set the standard for the decade to come, and be handsomely rewarded in the process. Or you can take the easy and safe road and simply create an ok game, that will generate profit. I know the easy road is tempting, but I beg of you...

Please implement central trade hubs so players have to haul goods from place to place to make a profit, and make beasts and resources at least as local as they are now. Make trade easy and a central feature of the game.
Please don't make people less co-dependent by giving everyone every skill.
Please expand the Company and Alliance systems. Make the alliance chats toggle between specific alliances.
Measure new features now and in the future by how much they make people want and need to team up with and against each others, and by how easy they make it for players to connect, interact and bond.
And Please. Focus on stability and performance (serverside). I know you got some great statistics for how much you've improved this already, but don't be blind to the fact that there are a lot less players on the official servers now, which means the statistics of whatever % less crashes is barely a measure of anything. You've done some great work so far, but there is still a long way to go.

Finally I just want to thank you guys for having the balls to make this game. I know it's a huge gamble already, but I believe it will pay off (I think it already has?), especially if you continue down the path you started off on. Don't go for making this more ARK. Make it more MMO and people will come. Not this year, but the next. And you'll end up having to launch more official networks to accommodate those people.