ciceqi

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like you've completely forgotten that you even have players who play solo...?  Unless I've misread something, removing the gold rewards from everything but trade routes doesn't make any sense.  Some of this also goes for new players and small companies, but the immediate problems I see are:

1. you need gold to build anything larger than a sloop, but you can only get gold through trade routes...that basically means you can't get any ship larger than a sloop until you find an island you want to build on, which can't be a freeport.  As a solo player, I kind of just want to build a single nice base and be done with it, so I sail around a lot until I find a spot I like, but sailing is kind of boring without stopping to fight ships of the damned.  Now you're telling me I can't fight until I find a home, not just ships of the damned but ANYthing, might as well not bother with treasure maps because where am I even going to keep the loot in a tiny ship that can't hold much and needs to be fast to escape all the things I can't fight...basically there is no game until I find a home...?  Is that essentially what you're saying here?  Because that's pretty unpleasant whether you're playing solo or not.

2. you can't crew a ship without gold, but you can't get gold outside of the trade routes, and for that you need at least two markets.  Can you build two markets in SP and trade with yourself?  Is there actually any point to trading with yourself?  If the trade happened across grids, it would actually be a good way to shift resources from different biomes without weighing down your ships, but as it seems to be restricted to a single grid, it seems kind of pointless.  But the bottom line is if you can't trade with yourself, playing solo means you can't crew your ships.  And if you can't crew your ships, you're basically locked out of most of the game.

3. you need gold to do basically everything mid-game or higher, but you can't do that without a base...what happens to nomadic players who want to live off their ships, players who can't establish a base for one reason or another, or players who just want to explore?  You're basically tying us down to a single grid to pay our crew or upgrade our ships, or else forcing us to build markets wherever we go.  I get that you're trying to make your new mechanic look attractive, but quite frankly, I hate building.  I like taming and sailing and fighting.  Up until now, I could play the parts of the game I enjoy while largely bypassing the bits that I don't, but now it sounds like I'm going to have a recurring slog to look forward to or a pointless waiting game to collect pay to keep my crew happy.  So basically I'm either bored or AFK--and again, that's assuming I can trade with myself.

4. I've been sailing schooners and above for a while, so I may be misremembering this, but solo or multi--I have at least one friend who has motion sickness bad enough that she can't play the game until she gets a ship large enough (and crewed enough) to sail in zoomed-out third person mode, when the ship becomes "stable" instead of the camera rocking constantly.  (Until then I literally just build her a chair on deck and tell her to sit her character down and close her eyes when we travel, lol.)  With this system, it might become pretty uncomfortable if not outright impossible for some people to advance, but admittedly I don't remember how sloops handle while uncrewed.

Can we please get some more clarification on what your plan is for solo?  Or at least one way (that doesn't involve sea battles, as we're barred from that in the proposed system) for nomadic players to still farm gold?  Even if it's just flotsam recovery, which I don't see listed--you'd be forcing us to sail still, encouraging exploration, without completely putting out of reach basically everything that makes the game fun.

Guys, this is totally NOT a misleading thread.  I watched until I basically passed out from exhaustion (which cpjet64 should probably have done hours before himself, except he's apparently a machine), and he not only walked us through how to create a new map and how to get it running, he answered every question people had with more patience than I can muster on a good day.  The stream actually crashed at one point, and cpjet64's surprise that we were all still there afterwards is the bit fervid came in on (the hour long video is the tail end of the stream, not the entire session).  I suggest starting with the next to last video (yes, the 7+ hour one, and yes he stated multiple times that he intends to create short walkthrough videos without the Q&A when he gets a chance) and having some patience.  Yes they're long, because he stops to answer people's questions, but they may be questions you've had or will had, so pay attention.  Instructions are in the video; template files can be accessed through the twitch channel commands.  Multiple people got their servers up and running last night thanks to his instructions, so I'd call that pretty legit. 

Yeah, that's what we're getting too.    I went poking around and found the map in the server grid files and dl'ed it to see if it was blank (it wasn't), so I know there IS a map...we just can't actually see it in the game.  And we haven't been able to connect to the Nitrado server since version 5, so I have no idea if any of the recent patches fixed it.

Thanks for the screenshot!

Wait, so it's not just us?  Well, if it's the same problem--while our Nitrado server was working, instead of a normal image, when we pulled up our maps, we just got a solid field of grey fog and a few scattered landmarks on top of the fog.  The fog never cleared; we just had this grey blob.  Is that the same issue you're having?

Weapons in general seem to have a weird bug happening.  I was able to equip my fishing pole in slot two specifically because that's where my spear was.  My bow can also only be equipped in slot two if I'm replacing my spear, and I believe vice versa.  If there's no weapon already in my hotbar, my bow (and, I would assume, fishing rod) can be equipped in any slot...but when I go to place a different weapon in my hotbar, it can only go into the slot where a weapon already exists.

....I have absolutely no idea how this came about, but yeah.  XD