user1

So somewhere on this planet a cage full of pathetic amateurs release an underdeveloped pile of bugs without any meaningful concept aside from the mandatory bear content into early access, but for some reason WE are the shitmongers for not accepting being spoon fed a seemingly endless stream of bad decisions without any measurable signs of game design and/or balance. Duly noted. To avoid most of the disappointment, don't ask for anything other than for more tames to be added.

Great. More cinderella castle lagfest...

I get insta sharks within 30 seconds of touching water. The amount of sharks and the frequency at which they appear is absolutely fucking nuts. And always a nice touch to have them push you off ladders, too. Since ladders are working so fine already and they hardly ever glitch, right?

That, and there also seems to be much, much fewer high quality maps around. I haven't seen a purple map in weeks.

It might be best that everyone gets a slider config option where they can set the amount of low-wind they want. Seems like some idiots thoroughly enjoy that ridiculous bullshit, so let them have it! Let ME turn it down to zero, though, please.

Weird logic, mate. The time a murderer is actually murdering people usually is much shorter than the time when they're not actively murdering people already. So what? So now we don't need to do anything against it?

I might repeat myself, but you should NOT increase the likelyhood of having your ship destroyed in order to "make sailing more interesting". I do not find losing a ship interesting or entertaining by any stretch of the imagination! You could of course introduce more things to encounter, but it should be a conscious decision of each individual player to encounter them. If you just want to haul ass from A to B, you should totally be able to do that, without too much disruption (if you choose to take the "boring" route). I have no wish to engage in SotD or mermaid battle when i am carrying tons of rare metals across the atlas. I understand that i should not be able to completely avoid them alltogether, but there should be some kind of risk vs reward balance in terms of risk to run into anything dangerous vs spending a little more time travelling but being more safe. I think having a "rain dance" type of song where you can shorten the time a doldrum occurs is a good idea, but probably difficult to get it right, as expectedly everyone and their grandmothers would immediately play that song like no tomorrow at the slightest sing of declining wind... But the devs should keep in mind that the very thing that makes any video game compelling is the ability to decide your own fate and to determine your next action. Simply put: having a CHOICE! Being forced to sit on your thumbs because you can't do anything due to sitting on a boat in the middle of nowhere without any means of propulsion and still having to guard it against NPC (who still have propulsion) is the exact opposite of both interesting and fun.

Yeah. The way to make sailing less boring is to reduce the time we spend at it when simply travelling somewhere. Increasing the likelyhood of losing your ship while at sea is NOT(!) a way to do it. I don't know why i feel the need to mention that. Maybe i expected them to throw some more danger at us without giving us a way to handle it when we're less than 50 people. I have spent almost 30 minutes trying to cross ONE server in an empty speed schooner, going with the wind in low wind conditions. You can take your estimates and stick em where the sun don't shine, mate.

Speed sails currently do not work. You do not get any bonus from crafting higher grade speed sails right now, so 50% of what you wrote is just bullshit. The other 50% are directed toward sailing against the wind, which is entirely not what this thread is about. It is not about the direction of the wind at all. It is that the frequency at which doldrums appear is much too high and that the wind force during a doldrum is far too low.

are we going to need 50 people in order to do the powerstone on L3 in singleplayer, too? or is 1 person and 2.000.000.000.000 attempts going to be enough?

Is it cheating to set the graphics quality settings to a level my hardware can support? because, you know, i'd have to use the options menu in order to do so, and it is not explicitly written anywhere that is is allowed to do so. TLDR: SOMEBODY is full of it. *cough*martyn*cough*

Just because UE4 is capable of automatically updating HUD elements based on events does not mean that every UE4 developer is, too.

Maybe if we keep mentioning the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in every other thread, the chinese censorship office is actually going to help us control this spam issue.

Q: Why did the console player cross the street? A: So the buildings on the other side of the road would be rendered. Have you already played through all the 7 games that are available for your trash toy so you need to get on everybody's nerves again?

and there are still people having been "set back" to "only" level 100 for when they were using exploits to level yet even higher. i'm at 82 right now and it is going to take me weeks to even get there legally.

You are supposed to actually use the ships, not only have a shitton of polygons slowing the game to a halt for everyone else. You need to build those ships much faster now if you want to maintain numbers large enough to make the game unplayable for everyone who has the misfortune of accidentally entering your server.

A "run" for salt. In the slowest frickin boat in the entire game. Without any guns. You could not wear a greater "KICK ME" sign tied to your boat than that. Use a schooner and outrun them! The sloop, in its current state, is an entirely and utterly useless piece of crap! The only thing it has going for it is the tiny aggro radius. You'd have to directly run into the center of a spawn to even be noticed by them, and then you'd still have to be in a coma not to realize the need to get out of there immediately. In other words: The SotD AI behavior is one of the very, VERY few things in this game that are absolutely fine and can stay the way they currently are. Also, ask yourself this: If you don't like losing your ship when you're driving a sloop, which of the other types of ships would you enjoy more being sunk? SotD must pose some sort of threat, even and possibly especially so if you decide not to defend yourself at all.

While we're at it, on a galleon, you can't climb the ladder when it is positioned on the right side right in front of the raised part of the planks at the stern. You always become stuck below the lowest deck when trying to climb. Left side ladder in the same spot works just fine. Maybe somebody forgot to mirror the collision bodies there?

There never were, but there is always lawless..

Ok, i'll bite. Which circumstance gave you the idea that they were playing their own game?

I'd like to see cities governed and policed by NPC who will blow any aggressor out of the water. Places where you can go and anchor for the night without getting wiped while offline when you dont have a million corp mates defending you. I think you don't need to be invulnerable there, but everything and anything involved in any way in the attacking of a player ship should be destroyed as a direct result of any attack against another player. Think of CONCORD in eve online. And there should be a very tight time window so that you'd need to bring either a huge amount of ships, or a few really expensive ones in order to kill anything, and you're 100% going to lose all of them. So there would be some risk vs reward involved. You can still offline wipe people when you absolutely need to, but it will cost you. And the cost for this need to be so high that it is absolutely impossible to "outgrow" them. Even mega corps should not be able to do this on a daily basis.

https://www.earnest.com/blog/the-demographics-of-video-gaming/ check on that, kid. dont miss school tomorrow, though.

So. Tames are the only thing they know how to do, and so we have no choice but to deal with this shit? Get rid of the fkin tames altogether already. Also, i think they might be taking the wrong approach to handle UE4 (to say something other than that they're too stupid to do it right). Why do you think the game runs like shit on a high end modern gaming PC? Is it because some brilliant genius started meddling with the shaders instead of using UE4's material approach (like the UE4 creators intended)? I say yes, yes it is. Are the players running away in droves because nobody on the team has any idea on how to do proper game design and balance? That's a strong possibility right there. Are tames and NPC disappearing from ships because they are using the physics engine to do things that physics engines were never meant to do? Probably. So, to sum it up, it is not the UE4 that is incapable of doing what the devs want. It is the devs lacking the required competence to do the things they want in UE4. Or just the devs outright wanting all the wrong things to begin with.

I assume that you are aware that with every boat you build, the server performance becomes worse and worse for everyone else, right? So you cannot and should not reward people building ships like crazy. In fact, there needs to be a strong incentive for players NOT to build more ships than absolutely necessary. People also shouldn't be rewarded just for playing twice as much per day as everyone else. There should be a strong mechanism of diminishing returns there, too, if you want to keep player numbers healthy. Most people simply can't afford to play 15hrs per day, and if a game allows for some welfare king to run loops around the average player because he can spend much more time in the game, you are likely going to lose that part of the community: The vast majority. Why should i even bother playing if there is no possibility of keeping up with the no-lifers who play 24/7? I don't need this game more than the game needs me. But most importantly: If you can't manage to visit a ship before it despawns, you almost certainly didn't really need the ship at all in the first place.

i just pointed out that when someone talks about having legit issues with the game, saying "i don't see your problem, mate. i'm having a blast" doesn't go far to adress the issue. i think we're all aware that they quadrupled sotd spawn rate recently, but there is still not nearly enough of them, especially in highly frequented grids, as you already pointed out.