I just thought I'd post my negative experiences in this game and see if anyone agree's with my issues and maybe we can make the game better by getting some changes implemented.
1st - Island pvp timer's being on 12hr intervals... This I believe is creating a massive drain on the playerbase. People spend tons of time on tames/ships/base building/resource gathering and they don't want to see their stuff destroyed or lost when they are offline. This leads to the feeling they need to be online defending their stuff... but nobody can maintain a 12hr state of alert and not get burned out.
Recommendations -
Lower pvp cooldowns to 3-4 hours
Have multiple island timers. One for pvp one for docked ship protections and one for building vulnerability. So maybe pvp is possible for 6 hours but docked ships are only targetable for 4-5 hours.
and building destruction is only possible for 2-3hrs *unless war decked*
2nd - Travel Time for long distance. This is a bigger issue for long distance transportation of large amounts of resources but also for maps as well. Many nice blueprints come from doing maps 15+ squares in a direction. With the current system this can be a 3-6hour sail time in each direction in order to accomplish this... Think about that for a second.... That's a 3-6 hour time investment to go somewhere then if the map isn't bugged or in an unreachable location 30mins of actually doing the map... then a 3-6 return trip.... most of the time this is attempted in a single login due to no real safety while at sea. It's not like you can island hop and do the trip over a couple of days. I think this causes people to be less willing to make these long map trips having to travel so long to do them. It feels like a job more then something fun to do. Also to build alot of these higher end blueprints it takes multiple resources from locations up to 10+ squares away sometimes more. Trying to transports alot of metal or stone or w/e heavy resources is very tedious. Many people were excited for the shipping containers but the 40% speed reduction can cause a 5 square trip to take 3+ hours.... These huge time investments on just traveling are a major killer to the game and should be looked at.
Recommendations -
Have some sort of explorer ship that travels 2x--3x the current max speed of brigs/schooners and maybe can't support cannons.
Smaller overall map size... lets face it most of the map is empty anyways.
lower distances for high quality maps.
Remove speed reduction from shipping containers they already take up a lot of room/weight which makes combat ships less likely to have them.
make all resources available within a 2-4 square radius.
3rd. Breeding/Taming - The way the game works Taming is 100% essential part of the game some of us like it some of us don't. Breeding is also a fun mechanic in the game many people enjoy and there are lots of benefits to breeding tames. However the way the game works you really want to just tame high level wild animals and you want to breed for stats and mutations. The problem with this is lets say you only want 25-30 wild tames only.... the average level of most spawns are 5-10... You can spend 8+ hours on an island looking for high level animals to tame.... if your goal is to go out and find something to tame this can be extremely frustrating as it can easily become a multiple hour event that can end in disaster very easily. Breeding..... Breeding is probably the most atrocious aspect of this game... Lets start with the fact the entire process can take between 1-3 DAYS! that means if you want to breed something you might need a 3 day time investment into the process.... who in the hell thought this was a good game mechanic??? This is even worse for meat eating breeds since meat only stacks to 20 and can take an hour to fill multiple feeding troughs. So lets say I'm breeding 4 tigers.... This is a 3 day event... that requires 2 feeding troughs be filled every 5 hours and imprinting is once every 8 hours.... which means for 3 days... I hope you don't have a job or any other plans you will be dedicating your time to taking care of the breeds..
Recommendations -
Raise the average level of creatures on islands.
Increase meat quantity per stack to 100 like berries
Reduce overall breed time to maybe 1-2 day event so it's more feasible.
Change imprinting time to be 12 or 24 hour intervals
Change food consumption rate for breeds
4th. Island Defense - Defending an island requires an insane amount of work and pretty cheesy tactics like creating giant harbor walls with 100+ cannons in them filled with npc's and 1000's of cannons... or Spamming pillars all over the island in an attempt to prevent people from building in undesired areas. Large islands are an absolute pain in the ass to try to protect.
Recommendations -
When someone builds on your island allow for tracking to be enabled on the atlas map so you can see where people are built.
Make changes from 1st issue.
Give more islands a natural harbor.
Give larger structures for things like cannon towers and cannon walls so there are 20,000 game objects being tracked for make shift structures.
5th Food/Water/Vitamin system - This is probably the most toxic part of this game... I'd love to look at some analytics as to how many player deaths are related to starvation dehydration and vitamin deficiency... I don't know of anyone who enjoys the current system and is probably responsible for many people quitting the game who are not hardcore survival genre players. And before the JuSt gEt ForTiFiCatIoN MaX responses.... this doesn't help new players. And if you need to pvp you need high hp/stam if your crafting you need high int and everyone needs weight... You shouldn't sacrifice your ability to do those things just to spend all your points in a stat that lets you not starve ever 30-40mins.
Recommendations -
Give all islands a natural source of water
reduce the decay of food by 50%
reduce the decay of hydration by 50%
remove vitamin system from the game or significantly reduce decay
add more buffs to food to make cooking for viable also longer lasting buffs.
