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Comments
Maybe a month or so ago now, I had my first ever successful house prism (and I've had that house since Jules was pretty young). I really do pay attention (especially as I didn't have home invasion responses automated, so anything I did there was manual), and managed to lock the guy in the house. Then, I reported him on city channel. I was the first to report him as being in the city.
So, I was pretty demoralized at being charged by Cyrene for a security breach. I'll eventually talk to the people who handle that again, and hopefully pay to remove the charge completely, but it pretty much ruined hanging out in my house (even though my interaction with the would-be thief was pretty neat). I went ahead and bought no-prism, too, for a pretty penny, but I'm still pretty paranoid about hanging out in my house at all now, because it clearly might not be enough to not be that guy who stands there mindless while raiding parties keep coming in. Talking to another city mate, he'd just given up on having a sub house completely.
The possibility of getting in hot water, and the superior mechanics of ships make them a clear choice for "housing" for those with the means.
EDIT: and yes, my house did of course have the monolith, point is, I do think people worry about getting in trouble in their sub houses, even if they're fairly conscientious, so ship is a superior product there
I was going to point that out too. Some people have spent a huge amount of credits making their ship a home. Doesn't seem fair to just allow them to be ripped off the ship at whim.
Can't like these ideas enough. Buried caches you have to find and dig for kind of like relics. Things to shoot at for good guys and bad guys. Add in speical sea monsters you'd want to attack with more than one ship
Oh! A defned the ship type mission where one side wants to sink a target and the other wants to escort it. Something like that though you might need a system to que into to handle though. Any Red Vs Blue type mission will I think most of the time go uncontested because one side has people to call for a crew and the other side does not. Or one side has ships in the are and the other doesn't and just can't make it to the target in time, And then there would be an issue where people might only que if they have overwhelming numbers so there might need to be a crew size limit but then you can't really expect a bunch of people so stand around waiting on a ship hoping people from the other side are ready to go. quite a few things to work around for Red vs Blue type things but I think one way or another they will need to be addressed for any sort of organized ship combat experience to flourish
Island bashing/questing rewards are unreasonably low (eg. Eirenwaar, Umbrin), with some exceptions (eg. Prin). It seems like most islands were designed as standard areas with quest/exp rewards appropriate for the level of mobs within. But when you factor in the 10-30 minutes of travel time, each way, to reach them and return, and that most islands are low- or mid-level areas, they don't reward the hassle of a trip.
Pierce The Veil (or Token) + Shipreturn. Anyone can park their ship in an island's harbour, and use a token to teleport from their ship to Tasur'ke once per Serenade - or pierce the veil, as a dragon - to return to the mainland, and then shipreturn back to their ship. This isn't a big issue, and it does come at the cost of parking your ship in one location. But as cheat to bypass sailing time, it's an obstacle in the way of island rewards being increased.
Chop mazes are frustrating. Chops break up the mindlessness of sailing for long distances, serve as borders to the ocean, and provide some geography for tactical play in ship battles. But too many chops destroy the pace of sailing, and turn it into a very tedious activity. Sailing already has its pace regulated by winds and the max speed of rowing and sailing. The broader chop mazes to the south of the main continent (south of Sea Lion Cove, and between Sapience and Meropis) are well-executed. The much narrower pathways to the northeast of the main continent (around Umbrin/Colchis, and on the route to Ilyrean) are incredibly frustrating and time-consuming to navigate, and make islands like Ilyrean an unappealing destination.
More seamonsters please. These are potentially fun PVE ocean encounters. At present they're quite rare which I hear is because they can only be manually controlled by immortals. Seamonster AI and random spawning would be great. Seamonster encounters give ships a reason to equip weapons - at present weapons are a completely optional upgrade, and a hassle discouraged by upkeep and the cost of ammo which may never be used - which in turn makes those ships more likely to PVP against other ships.
Org-based multi-ship battles. These should be awesome. But at present there's just no reason for them to occur. There's nothing to fight over on the ocean, outside of events. There are no objectives, no way to stake a claim over territory.
'I need to log out but the harbours are full.' This is a pain: you've been sailing for 3 hours, you need to log out because you have a class or work or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is on, but now you have to spend 40 minutes sailing around to find an empty harbour so that you can log out without abandoning your ship to plunderers. This is one of those "Achaea is incompatible with casual play" problems. AFAIK the only issue with creating a solution is that people would exploit it, if they could, to escape pursuit.
I have some more thoughts on deepsea fishing, the needles-in-a-haystack nature of ships on the ocean stacking the odds against encounters with other ships, and ship trade, but I wanted to finish my post while the thread was still young.
I don't view the high cost of ships as prohibitive because I think they should be org investments. Your House should have a ship, your city should have a fleet, and you should be able to take one of them out. If you aren't comfortable commanding one yourself, you should be able to go island-hopping or fishing or diving with one of your House's or city's captains. Privately owned ships are a prestige possession for the wealthy.
Seems like a lot of PvP focus lately. Not that I'm against it but there should be some enjoyment for noncomms too
Ah something i forget to mention in my hundred plus previous posts. People HATE taking out org ships, in mhaldor and Ashtan. Even if there is no cost to them. They are just affraid of doing some sort of damage to the ship, getting it sunk or something. Even when I've stressed my total lack of fucks to give re:damage to the ship people just don't want to use them. And the crazy part is aside from a deliberate effort to kill off crew or a lack of token stores on the ship the damage done when a ship is sunk is so minimal.
My thoughts:
1) Agreed it's a overboard cost-wise to get involved. Would've gotten involved sooner, but took a LONG while to save up the 2.5 M entry level ship.
2) Should review types of ships. Even after spending 2.5M on a ship, I can't put a single weapon on it. When I ship scan at harbours it's 70-80% windcutters. So combat for everybody except for Strider owners (and Galley owners, but I don't know any) is basically just run/escape.
The whole point of combat is that there's danger on both sides and skill (and some luck) determines the outcome. Most ship combat is a Strider finds a WC and tries to take it out with no danger to itself and the WC tries to run. Doesn't really look designed for actual combat to take place particularly.
Even if I did buy a Strider (not going to happen as I have better things to spend 5M on if/when I ever get that much) I can't optimally Captain/Helm/Aim & Fire solo. That make sense, but as it's such a high bar to enter in the first place I don't often find others that are interested or have seafaring to man weapons separately even if I did have them.
3) Between winds, speeds and chops it takes -FOREVER- to get anywhere. Even with bonus xp on island bashing, with the time it takes to island hop it's way more time-effective not to.
It also means that if I plan to do a leg of a trade, or travel somewhere (all there is to do) I have to have a matter of hours set aside (as does everybody that comes with me) and during that time I basically just watch an unchanging wilderness map and occasionally get to deal with frustrating mazes.
Not worth going out otherwise as definitely can't just leave ship adrift in the open ocean.
4) Ship combat is fun and other than the fact that no matter how skilled and aiming, etc. you are you still miss 9 out of 10 shots, plus hitting doesn't do that much damage so if the defender knows what they're doing they can almost always get away. Might take a time or two to learn, but so does PvP combat take some learning.
I've been sunk myself and the only thing that was I felt a bit overboard on consequences was that I had just spent literally (not exaggerating) 5 hours sailing around on a trade deal and my cargo was gone when I raised the ship. Plus even though I had more than enough tokens for the whole crew, some didn't make it - so adding new crew dropped crew experience and morale.
I ended up dying myself as I didn't have enough endurance left to use a token and paid for the raising of the ship (rather than whole salvage ops cycle). Neither of those bothered me particularly.
Skills I use: ship warning, windboost, ship return, cloak, bearings (mainly just to reassure myself that my connection didn't freeze and I am still moving and getting closer to my destination), etch. Have used hullgird, sailgird, rainstorm, cook.
I almost never fish because I can bash gold as fast and get xp at the same time. Would've tried diving but skill layout for soundings didn't work out for me.
Suggestions:
- To handle people being scared of ship combat:
- Allow that if the ship has tokens in its stores, crew do use them.
- Allow that once raised from the depths ship cargo is still there.
That way all that's lost is time/money and I suppose the adventurers if they don't have their own tokens.
This would make it still suck to be sunk (loose gold to raise and time getting to wherever you were, plus crew morale), but not so dramatic that you end cycle on seafaring altogether.
- Allow some kind of weapon for WC. That would create more combat/interaction by itself.
- Another ship type at 1M. Sailboat or a yacht and that's the one that can't have any weapons.
- Review ship weapons - it's not only cost prohibitive to get a ship, it's cost prohibitive to get/fire weapons. The cost of ammo in a normal ship battle is insane. Also accuracy is rediculous even with skills and aiming.
- Trade deals need total overhaul. There's really only about 4 out of 60 that don't cost more to do than what you get out of them. Nevermind the time it takes to complete them.
- Maybe a skill that takes 15 minutes (similar to time to splice a warp) interrupted by anything (plus can't be moving, cloaked, barrier'd) and takes 2000 power from figurehead to get back to last harbour you docked at. That way it's not a combat defense, but there is a way to depart the realm without leaving the ship as a sitting duck in the middle of nowhere.
- Agree with everybody else on being able to break into somebody's ship. Can leave strongbox/cargo unassailable as it's like a bank account, but otherwise raising a measly plank shouldn't be on par with the most Godly protection you can get. Even if you just make the ships in the harbour part of the city/island where they are - acting as 1 room away from harbour. That way people can prism, meteor, portal, etc. "Physically" this would make sense as the ship IS right there.
I wanted to re-emphasize this point in particular, and most especially the token part. I wouldn't jump right in with both feet, but it seems really worth considering. I think part of why tokens and shipreturn work the way they do right now really is so people won't just say "screw it, didn't need to go to Karbaz anyways, and the custard will be half decayed by the time we get to Tasur'ke", but ugh, they also make it too easy to come back to the mainland because reasons, and if it's too easy to come back, people will feel like they have to come back, and they'll feel like you should too. If people can't come running back to the city so easily, they won't feel so much like they *have* to come back.
Shipreturn should be left as is. I thought about it too, but there has to be a way to get back and forth. If I'm on an island and Sartan says GTF back to Mhaldor, I'm tokening and on my way. No question. If the ship is on an island, then without shipreturn I've no way to get back to it. Plus if I token'd with plank up even if I get somebody to sail me out there, I can't lower plank from the outside.
The problem with people staying parked in harbours is because there's no reason for them to go anywhere and nothing really to do at sea other than ship combat (vast minority have seastriders, so not possible for most) and trade deals (which is only worth doing once every couple of RL months).
Potentially there's island hunting but because travel time makes it not worth it that's not so popular.
So they stay parked. Shipreturn has nothing to do with that. If I didn't have it I wouldn't sail more, I'd just park in a mainland harbour or potentially drydock, honestly.
On the issue of ship combat and pirates being a deterent to people wanting to get involved for one reason or another I think it's safe to say that most, not all, but most of the active PoM members would accept any change with ship conflict and ship combat that still gave us something to do that would allow us to define our characters as pirates. Like knocking over denizen like trade/treasure ships or fighting privateers or whatever.
That said, I love the chase. When you've got a target and they start to run (with something other than wavecall, fuck you wavecall) and you have to chase after them. Out turn them, out think them and bring them down like a god damn cheetah taking down a springbok that's what I enjoy most and I don't think any PvE system can really recrate the same experience you get from chasing a player. taking their gold or sinking their ship is the reason to chase but a good chase weather the ship gets away or not is always more enjoyable than some gold or a deathsight message.
The Ashtan navy on the other hand does more of a smash our enemies/sea police thing. They just go after ships that belong to hostile orgs/city enemies and board unknown ships or ships suspected of having city enemies aboard. So they run down ships and either sink them for reasons or board, look around, warn the captain/crew or kill people they feel they have a reason to kill. The latter being a more RP heavy experience. It's kind of hard to yell shit and shoot/pilot at the same time.
So if those sorts of things can be preserved I'm sure nobody will complain about not being able to do what ammounts to punching a baby in it's face. It's stupid stupid nerai face.
Most tokenings are more of a soft requirement. It's more that people feel it's expected rather than being directly ordered to return right now. But yes, I'm torn about whether changing these things would get desirable results overall, or just makes things such an ass pain people wouldn't bother.
Oh for sure people will say "nuts to this." and sell their ship/drydock/rage. But if more people take up seafaring and get involved because of ALL the changes including ones that result in people having to move around and create oportunites for conflict then it is for the better.
http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/221/chops-redux
To solve this, there could be a way to pay for your ship to be towed back to the mainland. For example, I go to Tasur'ke harbour, give Maelstrom 5k, and an Achaean day or so later the ship is back at Tasur'ke. That solves the problem of ships getting stuck at islands (which is already a concern for those with less than mythical seafaring), so you can disallow shipreturning to docked ships (should still be able to shipreturn to ships at sea).
I honestly don't think removing shipreturn would be a good idea. Modify it in some way, perhaps. But it really kills the attractive of going to an island to hunt if everytime I die, I am going to have to wait one whole hour for my ship to be delivered, and then who knows how much longer to go to the same place. And pray to the wild gods that I don't die again because then the whole process repeats itself.
There should be better ways to address this.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
If seaprayer is moved way down in the skill (I think it should be something you learn early on, definitely not a trans ability), then you'll have a way to get back to the ship when you die.
As an idea for deepsea diving, you could probably segment the difference seas to differing levels of difficulty. So for example Riparium Reaches would have smaller monsters more tailor to lower level bashers, whereas the Sea of Screamed Prayers would most likely have Sea Dragons.
@Kinilan all helm abilities can be used while melded.
As for things that need working with seafaring... the AB files. Many of them are still utterly useless. Examples:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syntax: SHIP MANOEUVRE EMERGENCIES
Details:
Initiate emergency manoeuvres in difficult circumstances.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is considered a 'difficult circumstance' and how does the maneuver help? Others like spyglass don't tell you half the things you can do with them (look at harbours from afar, look at sea denizens if you get close enough for them to shoot you).
Things I dislike about the sea combat system: the high potential for loss. You need to pay a fortune to get tokens for a larger crew, 20% or so extra for no real reason. You already have to buy tokens for 5k per for the crew, why are they selling me 20% cardboard ones? If you sink without, you lose a lot of crew (which is weeks worth of sailing to get from newbies to elite), either have to pay a small fortune in salvaging fees or go and salvage yourself (although I do like the manual salvaging system), and a chance to lose strongbox/cargo/food stores, along with likely death to whatever sank you (with the monotony of bashing, this is quite a painful loss). I think this is something that turns away many people from sailing in general, because having to pay that as a novice is just not inviting, even if you get to use the ship of another/city/house.
As stated, making it possible to board a ship in harbour is a tricky thing because it allows people to board and butcher your crew, with you being unable to do anything about it (four dragons sneaking aboard and butchering your crew... not the most entertaining mechanic to implement). Maybe only make that possible in natural harbours, as an additional tradeoff for being free to use? If I pay 2k docking fees, I expect the harbour to offer some sort of protection. Aside of that, it seems we are making AFKing continuously safer with the constant nerfing of theft. Making ships offer no protection anymore would be contradicting this, so be warned that there will be people yelling 'but I want to idle safely' if you stop the shipboard protection.
Chops: A pain in the arse, especially the bits that force you to sail straight against the wind. Watching your ship trudge south through a very narrow path with whopping one or two knots is about as far from thrilling as it gets.
Tritons/sea denizens seem to be a bit OP. I know they're supposed to be tough and that, but they shoot down your ship as if it was made from paper. Especially a cutter. I've also been trolled by them for a while, and attacked for no bloody reason whatsoever as soon as I stuck as much as a plank out of a harbour, or not even RP-justified as I was sailing through areas that were not even close to their reaches. They are also way faster, more agile, able to ignore chops and don't appear on shipwarning. And they can just ram you, stop you and fire at you for ridiculous damage. Never encountered sea monsters so far, but I hear they're just as bad. Challenge yes, masochism? No.
Gold costs: seafaring seems to be very expensive indeed even after getting it. Yes, you can make a fortune with trading/fishing/diving/island hunting, but... 5k for crew tokens, 2k for BLANK maps (with something around 150 months decay iirc), docking fees, salvaging fees, crew wages... then you have things that are cheap and easy to get, like food from a harbour (which is sold at a more than reasonable price). It just seems a bit unbalanced.
I can't complain about wavecall here, since I'm one of the very few people who didn't go to ship watch V.
Diving is fun, but as others said, the exp or gold is usually not worth it. Many of the aggro sea floor denizens hit harder than most things I usually solo on land, but they seem to give way less experience and never drop gold. Adding the difficulty of finding a good diving spot with acceptable loot, diving is a relatively unrewarding activity for the danger you're putting yourself in, moreso since you need to leave your ship undefended (or have to get the bell back up if you're under attack, or die if someone else raises it to get away).
Ship weapons: yes, their accuracy and damage suck. You usually can't outdamage the repairs of a large crew, so if you don't board and kill the captain, you'll burn through all your ammo and damage your weapons to the point of uselessness before the enemy goes down. You should avoid the other extreme (let's call it triton weapons) where a ship can be sunk within seconds, but it really shouldn't take hours either.
That's all I could think of right now.
The Seaprayer ability at Trans Seafaring (no SPPs) will deposit you back on your ship after you embrace death.
Shipreturn on its own is fine. I don't think anyone has any issue with the Shipreturn mechanic. People need a faster way to teleport back to their ship, if it's overseas, than hitching a ride aboard a second ship.
The issue is purely the Shipreturn/PTV combo. And shipreturn/PTV is not inherently broken. It's just that you can't balance islands for people who sail to and fro every time, as long as there are people who can bypass the trip.
If I spend 20 minutes sailing from Tasur'ke to Umbrin (because chops), 30 minutes bashing/questing, then 20 minutes sailing back, but I only earn an amount of gold appropriate for 30 minutes of bashing/questing, that is not adequate. That's an appropriate reward for 30 minutes, when I've invested 70 minutes. The 40 minutes of sailing is dead time for which I am not rewarded. (Never mind the added risks of piracy, or reaching the area and finding it bashed out, or the docking fees.) I may as well stay on the mainland and spend 1 minute walking to Moghedu or Arcadia. To make Umbrin worth bashing, its rewards must be increased by 2.5-3x. However, if you have people using PTV/shipreturn to skip the trip, they're now earning 3x as much, but bypassing the added sailing time which the reward is balanced around.
Actually, what if instead of increasing island rewards, you made the travel time of sailing pay for itself?
You could do this by revamping ship trading, changing it away from a One Red Paperclip system where you trade up towards a trade deal reward, and turning it into the buy-low, sell-high system common in space trading sims like Elite. So if I'm sailing from Aalen to Tapoa, I can buy tea cheap in Aalen, sell high in Tapoa, buy sand cheap in Tapoa, and sell high back in Aalen. So the sailing portion of my trip will pay for itself. People can still PTV/shipreturn, but they will not be able to take advantage of this.
Or if you don't want to fiddle with ship trade, you could instead create NPC passengers who wish to use player ships like ferries. If I'm sailing from Tasur'ke to Ilyrean (god forbid), I check HARBOUR INQUIRE PASSENGERS, and an NPC passenger boards my ship. When I dock at Tasur'ke, he pays me X amount of gold. And then I can do the same again to take another passenger from Ilyrean to Aalen. The reward wouldn't be much, as this isn't intended to be a profit-seeking activity, but enough to absorb the dead time of sailing and maintain an average amount of gold earned, overall, from an island round trip. If I take too long - like, a month - the NPC disappears with a message about disgruntledly tokening off the ship.
The perception of huge losses is the problem, not the actual losses. That's why Kinilan and others say they don't care if someone crashes one of their/the city's ships, because it's really not a big deal.
Actually you do loose your stores when sunk. It happened to me -- and after 5 hrs or so of sailing to complete a trade deal. Definite downer.
I meant food/token stores. You do lose trade cargo, which sucks, but trading should have some risk.
Well, you do lose the token stores that get a failed roll. There is a chance that a crew members fails to use a token. Perhaps that's the 20% extra he was talking about. (Granted I'm recalling this from Clementius talking about it on the Seafaring clan)
@Cahin: Quick, enact the Ritual of Binding to close off all dimensional rifts in this plane, and execute realspace-code "DimAnchor".
I know people don't like that ships are used as havens but people did it because they are cheaper than subdivision homes and beds. If people want to, they will find ways to be left alone. I really don't agree that you have an entitlement to going after people at any time. The majority of people I know who spend time on ships like that are usually distracted so otherwise would be just logging out.
As for getting people involved, I do agree the biggest obstacle is the cost when a ship is sunk. I just would refuse to take a city ship out to learn given the losses from sinking it. So yeah, its a matter of risk/reward. I feel bad for each of Targossas's Maritime Ministers as they keep trying but its so hard to coax interest.
Just need to be able to prism/portal to people on ships while they're docked. Make it no different from hiding in an out-of-sub house and the saferoom issue will go away.
@Aerek Ships are considered a separate area so cannot prism. Otherwise, you could just lock and radiance them.