apothecary

Map spawns are very broken, most islands have lost them due to player building. You want people on the sea more, right? Add treasure maps to yellow flotsam.

I think the fundamental problem is that this game is trying to be a PVE game and a PVP game at the same time. The two worlds don't mix well. Most PVE MMO's that add PVP nerf nearly every aspect of PVE power when it relates to other players, this one doesn't. So a company that does tons of PVE has a stupid advantage over smaller companies or solo's that don't do as much. Not only that, the stronger companies control the gates to the PVE. Want to farm SOD in powerstone grids for ship upgrades? Want to do Hydra? Expect big companies patrolling there that already did that content in decked-out ships to pounce and stop you from doing it. I personally think the game would be better if all the stats gained from BP's, both player worn/used and ship, only applied to PVE content. So a stronger cannon kills Hydra/Kraken better and faster, but it does exactly the same damage to a player ship as a common cannon. This makes PVP 100% skill-based and lets the average Joe feel like he can go toe-to-toe with any ship that enters his grid. Think of how scared the large companies would be with their 240% mythical plank brig knowing a level 20 from lawless could sink them with their common schooner if they knew how to sail better. All of the things that help you in PVP should be easily at your fingertips. Food, Grog, plate versus fur, etc. could all stay the same. Stop giving player attributes at 50 like someone else suggested. Getting to 50 is easy and the difference between a level 50 and a level 120 is silly. There is still great value from skill points but they don't seem to upset the PVP balance as much. However, I think it would be much better if you got 75% of your skill points by level 50 and those last 70 levels were about getting another 25%. The amount of PVE content you have to grind (without finding exploits) is crazy at the high levels so leave that to the hardcore that just want the extra 25% of the points. The rest of us can settle for 75% and still compete.

That isn't exactly true. I don't think I said anywhere in my post that it was my favorite part of the game. I wasn't trying to jockey an idea for my personal tames because I don't fear for them. If I lose mine I lose them. My idea was based on observations of medium companies quitting completely over all their tames being wiped and the fact that every Mega at some point parks every single important tame in FP. The game gives a clumsy mechanism (by accidental design) to give them 100% protection, I was just offering another alternative that doesn't have everyone parking tames in FP. My personal dog in this hunt is for the game to remain viable and have less people quit the game. The investment for breeding high quality Tames is nowhere near the investment in making a ship - even a mythical. One time investment is linear and one is basically logarithmic. However to argue against my own point - there is value in HQ tames and removing that value from an opposing company should be allowed. But if that is "by design" then make it so tames un-claim within 1 hour of being left in FP. That would bring us back to everyone's tames are always at risk.

I don't actually mean a server you control. I mean a private instance you can access online through game play. It would be subject to the same rules as any other official server on the grid.

I have another idea that could potentially solve a couple issues. First I know server costs are a thing and without recurring revenue we as a player base could end up losing our game due to it just not being financially viable to continue. Second we already know there are issues PVP and PVE players complain about - namely offline raiding and such. Lots of ideas have been tossed around and here is one more: You already have a segregated server model so it seems it would be technically manageable to implement something like this: Let us buy a private server grid that we can attach to the existing official server grid. Make the island on it a generic, small, possibly with slow respawn generic resources and only accessible by people in our company. We can designate one spot on the map that it attaches to (you could make them have to attach to Freeport zones for example). You would need a way to manage how you would "zone" to your private server but there are probably several different ways to do that. You could make different size servers that can handle different numbers of simultaneous players for different prices ($9.99 for 2 player, 14.99 for 5 player, 24.99 for 25 players, etc.) People would still claim. People would still leave ships on claimed islands. New players have a more manageable "haven" if they want to pay for it. You make recurring revenue. Tames can be stored there rather than at Freeport. No fast decay of ships anchored. No offline raiding of your main bank of BPs. PVE server has an alternative to claiming (which I hear is almost impossible anyway). I would hate to see the game go so I just wanted to share another idea. Take care!

First I am by no means a "super-qualified" player. I only have 700ish hours and none of that is in a mega-tribe with serious PVP experience. My perspective comes from someone with hundreds of hours of building and dreading the "loss" of PVP (which surprisingly is a significant part of the "fun" of PVP). Not sure what is being worked on or if ideas are still being incorporated into the design, but I had one. After reading a lot about why people leave PVP when wiped I am of the conclusion the most significant thing is killing tames. Aside from holes in walls most bases remain in-tact (I have walked the ruins of large raids on official). Sure you lose mats / BP's but mats are easy to replace. They have a linear cost. BP's can be decentralized super easy due to weighing almost nothing. 20 underwater book cases can hide 4800 important BP's. Breeding Tames, however, are logarithmic investment. A single wild animal can represent thousands of man hours of work. Some of that work is priceless because it involves RNG mining and can never be replaced. Unlike stealing resources and BP's there is absolutely no value in killing someone's breeding tame other than taking joy in their personal agony. So what about this: When you tame or breed a creature, it is inert. It cannot harvest materials, cause damage or be damaged or hold inventory. I would even remove the collision box from it so it can't be used to affect other players in any way. It provides no value at all to the owner except one: It can still mate. To make your creature affect the world it must be spayed/neutered. In doing so it also means others can kill it. So if you want that newly tamed bear to harvest fiber, spay it. If you want to breed it then you can't do anything else with it. This would actually make spay/neuter a valuable tool rather than an "FU" when selling your animals to others. There might be exploits I am not considering but I thought I would toss the idea out there. Moved to PVP topic. Spelling.

You CAN play this game solo. FInd a nitch somewhere - be it a settler, in lawless, on an unclaimed island... Talk to people. Most big tribes are helpful. Sail into an area, see who has it claimed and talk to them. If you tell them you are just starting out and want to know if you can be a settler you might make a friend or two. Being a settler means there are only 9 hours a day people can attack you. Find an island that fits your play time the best. Most griefers won't touch large company islands because they are afraid of blow-back. You can also hide in lawless for a LONG time if you keep your footprint small and use freeport to park your ship. That is what I did until I could get established. I got raided once and lost nearly a full brig of parts, learned some lessons, changed my approach. Grew, expanded, had fun! Sure there are people that grief, but that is part of the game. We swim in waters with sharks because it is exciting. Don't give up. The game is a lot of fun. It might get boring after 2000 hours but that is a LOT of fun that you can have until then. I am around 500 hours myself as a novice player and still having a blast. Don't expect to just plop down a building in L9 and find it standing tomorrow. Enter the game. Become part of the community. There is a lot of fun to be had. If you want more in-depth advice on bootstrapping yourself, hit me up on discord: Apothecary#5958.

Hey I know it has been a while but thank you for doing this. I have gotten use from it.

Can other players access your Ship Cargo Rack in the same way they can access containers? I need to park in a FP for a bit and need to know if I should move the stuff off it.