Quick Questions

Sena

Renek said:

Do crits proc'd off battlerage attacks count towards your overall crit rate, or is that a separate crit rate?

Every time you attack is separate, nothing "counts towards" anything.

Devran

If you had to give a rough estimate, how long would it take to earn back the cost of buying a ship?

Bear in mind I know nothing about what you can earn with a ship. I know there's like, trades and monsters and diving, but I don't know what any of these things actually are.

Aegoth

a week ago, i'd have said an RL day

Kythra

Aegoth said:

a week ago, i'd have said an RL day

Not if you spent it all to help your friends, though

Sena

Devran said:

If you had to give a rough estimate, how long would it take to earn back the cost of buying a ship?

Bear in mind I know nothing about what you can earn with a ship. I know there's like, trades and monsters and diving, but I don't know what any of these things actually are.

Do you mean just earning enough gold to cover the cost of the ship, or the ship paying for itself? Either way, the profitability of non-ship activities (like bashing and questing) would be at least as relevant; for the former, non-ship activities are likely to earn more gold and pay off the ship faster, and the latter depends on not just the profitability of ship activities, but also on the profitability of the non-ship activities you're comparing them to. For example (using made up numbers), say you can earn 200k gold per RL day without a ship. If you can only make 150k per day on a ship, then the ship will never actually pay for itself, and it will take ~17 days of ship activity to earn back the cost of a windcutter instead of ~13 days otherwise.
Although I can't give a good answer to either question, since I don't have up-to-date numbers on the profitability of any ship activities (though it doesn't seem like any of them easily surpass hunting and questing, from what I've seen).

Also, unless you just have a ton of gold lying around, I would not recommend buying a ship until after you have a decent amount of experience with sailing and find you enjoy it. There are a lot of ships gathering dust in harbours, both privately-owned and org-owned, you should be able to find one to use or rent. And then a lot of ship activities involve more players than ships (each ship being crewed by several players), so naturally most people who participate aren't in their own ship, you can find a group of seamonster hunters or pirates or pirate hunters or whatever else to join as a crewmember.

Devran

Sena said:

Devran said:

If you had to give a rough estimate, how long would it take to earn back the cost of buying a ship?

Bear in mind I know nothing about what you can earn with a ship. I know there's like, trades and monsters and diving, but I don't know what any of these things actually are.

Do you mean just earning enough gold to cover the cost of the ship, or the ship paying for itself? Either way, the profitability of non-ship activities (like bashing and questing) would be at least as relevant; for the former, non-ship activities are likely to earn more gold and pay off the ship faster, and the latter depends on not just the profitability of ship activities, but also on the profitability of the non-ship activities you're comparing them to. For example (using made up numbers), say you can earn 200k gold per RL day without a ship. If you can only make 150k per day on a ship, then the ship will never actually pay for itself, and it will take ~17 days of ship activity to earn back the cost of a windcutter instead of ~13 days otherwise.
Although I can't give a good answer to either question, since I don't have up-to-date numbers on the profitability of any ship activities (though it doesn't seem like any of them easily surpass hunting and questing, from what I've seen).

Also, unless you just have a ton of gold lying around, I would not recommend buying a ship until after you have a decent amount of experience with sailing and find you enjoy it. There are a lot of ships gathering dust in harbours, both privately-owned and org-owned, you should be able to find one to use or rent. And then a lot of ship activities involve more players than ships (each ship being crewed by several players), so naturally most people who participate aren't in their own ship, you can find a group of seamonster hunters or pirates or pirate hunters or whatever else to join as a crewmember.

Very informative, thank you.

I meant the ship paying itself off, by doing ship things that resulted in gold. It sounds awfully interesting and I'm the type of person that if I was enjoying myself making money back, it wouldn't bother me if it was not as efficient as doing something else that I enjoyed doing less.

Kyrra

Between ship trades, fishing/diving, and sea monster hunting, it'd probably take a while compared to other ways to make gold.

I'd assume that's talking about a windcutter as well because it'd take a few rl months to earn enough through ship activities to get the gold back for a strider or galley.

Greys

Find someone w/ extra ships and will let you borrow one and you can get a feel for it yourself IC. A lot of the payback can be in other forms like cheaper credits.

Klendathu

If you're lucky and you get a personal trade which is accept and complete at the same harbour, you can make out like a bandit as long as you have enough people to accept and complete the deal with the cargo (yes, I have had this confirmed as legal). However, those don't come up every day.

Not sure of the payouts of seamonsters above the kiddie pool, but kiddie pool seamonsters pay out 5k gold per kill, but you have to factor in the cost of ammunition (approx 21 ballista darts, of which you'll get 13 back, per seamonster), at a cost of 21800, so you really make a tiny tiny profit on seamonster hunting - do it for the crew experience, not the gold!

Having said that, you can add in periods of deep sea fishing / diving between seamonsters to boost your income.

tldr: You won't get rich solo sailing and it'll take an age to pay for a ship that way.

Mathilda

The real value of ships (after the ship trading fiasco) isn't really in the profits that can come your way from trading, seamonster hunting, fishing, or diving: it's in the privacy and security the ship provides. So while you may not easily regain the gold you spent on your windcutter, you have the luxury of a place that's really yours.

Nazihk

Making money off of ships is slow and uncertain, now. 

Figure, if you're bashing and you get ganked, you're out nothing but a bit of experience and a few curatives. As long as you were putting gold in your pack as you picked it up, you're not going to lose any of it. If you made 35k on this bashing trip so far, you'll still have that 35k after you die.

If you're doing a ship trade and you get sunk at the end of 2.5 hours of sailing through fucking chops, you lose a substantial portion of your cargo. That means you lost both the gold you put into buying your initial cargo as well as the time spent sailing around to trade that cargo up for the deal. 

That's why I quit trading after the first time I got pirated, honestly. I liked the ship fight. I liked the experience of trying to get away and getting sunk. I put a lot of thought into how I could react better the next time and made some plans for how to get away. My problem is that losing that fight still loses me everything and even a successful trade deal is already a fairly bad use of time as far as earning potential goes. I'm usually far better off bashing, both in terms of absolute profit and in terms of risk management.

However, I still love my ship and don't regret the purchase. It's easily the best player housing in the game. 

Dochitha

When you have a ship, the ship is your house. When you don't have a ship, the world is your house. 

Ryzeth

Nazihk said:

I'm usually far better off bashing, both in terms of absolute profit

While GENERALLY true, you also have to take into account that this gold isn't effected by the gold throttle that bashing is. If you know you can complete the trade risk free, and you've hit the gold throttle for the day, you might as well do it.

Atalkez

I think the security of ships is actually the worst part about seafaring.

Being back prism from harbour

Aegoth

Atalkez said:

I think the security of ships is actually the worst part about seafaring.

Being back prism from harbour

And forceboarding please

Atalkez

Aegoth said:

Atalkez said:

I think the security of ships is actually the worst part about seafaring.

Being back prism from harbour

And forceboarding please

With he death of forceboarding, so too did my interest in ships die.

Morthif

prism from harbour on say a 2 min aura. If I want to afk on my 5000+cr house I should be able to.

make slight improvements to weaponry, fuck forceboarding.

Nazihk

I'd have been all over forceboarding, but I can definitely see why it was removed. Ship combat should require ship combat, and it should be an avenue of conflict that isn't necessarily dominated by the standard PKers and their heavy artifact lists. 

Antonius

If the removal of forceboarding meant the death of your interest in ships, you were never actually interested in ships.

Atalkez

Obviously!

Antidas

Morthif said:

If I want to afk on my 5000+cr house I should be able to.

Disagree, no one should ever be entitled to afk anywhere ever. You certainly can, but the removal of any consequences for it is annoying. If you absolutely have to go afk all of a sudden, either accept those consequences, or just use a journal.

Jonathin

What's the difference between someone going afk on a ship and logging off or journaling? They remove themselves from the game (in a manner of speaking) either way, so it's p much the same damn thing. 

Atalkez

Except they don't remove themselves at all. They just remove themselves from any possible repercussions they could face, completely at their whim, with no available means to counter.

Kiet

Well, we saw what happened last time they made ships less safe, and I believe we'll just have to deal with what they are now.

Aegoth

i'm perfectly OK with making ships not safe. Death to seafaring!

Devran

Thank you for all the replies. I think I need to look at the ship as more of a 'house with benefits' type thing.

This helps me put it into context much better.

Jonathin

Nvm. It's not worth arguing.

Atalkez

Feel like you're being contrary for the sake of it.

Journaling and quitting doesn't allow you to send tells, shout, talk on clans, talk on city, house, newbie....I'm sure you get the picture.

Ship is nothing like journaling or quitting.

Jonathin

We were talking about afking on ships. Don't skip part of what I said because you want to argue the other part. If you are afk, you can't do any of that stuff either.

Ryzeth

Make it so you can portal to them: people will just monolith their ship.
Make it so you can prism to them: people will just buy anti-prism, it's considerably cheaper than it used to be. And the ones who're worth prisming to have more than enough gold to do so.
Result: You still can't get to people on their ship while it's in the harbour.

ITT: People arguing and whining about changing stuff (on both sides of the argument) that won't affect them either way, regardless of if it gets changed.

eta: why would you even want to. Ship crew are crazy strong now, and will just slaughter you if you don't have ship perms.