Are people normally such?

@sonaea I started playing from the start and quit playing for a couple of years because of brutal attacks from other players, even when you have no loot. A lot of players enjoy spawn killing and 'tucking' (hiding on someones vessel and steal loot/sinking the ship). This can be frustrating to new players. I play with my sons and they are frustrated with these game mechanics. I found out that there are still players who want to avoid attacks and even leave peacefuly when you ask them. Some of them even play a shanty with you or propose an allience. If you want, I can add you as a Xbox friend and play regularly games of sea of thieves.

Doesn't much matter if you're taken out by players or by the environment

the game is risk reward but what it really comes down to is countless moments of luck on a server. Good luck and bad luck. You will have both. Fortune will be handed to you randomly on a golden platter and it will be removed from your ship harshly in a moment.

Skilled players die and sink as well. Not as often but it still happens. This is a piracy food chain and nobody lasts on top. Nobody is immune from being humbled by the environment or by other pirates.

You can get over the waves that seem impossible right now by doing 3 things.

Efficiency: Move faster, sell faster, limit your losses, play to your strengths

Adapt: Get good at running/hiding or get good at killing. Trust no one. When you have loot that you don't want to lose you have no friends. Everyone is to be considered and treated as hostile until you have nothing to lose

Effort: Those who try over and over succeed. You will lose loot and you will get rich. Whether pirates kill/sink you or a series of unfortunate environmental events it doesn't matter. A death is a death and a sink is a sink just move forward and do it again.

Frustration doesn't stop in this game. It never goes away but you learn to deal with it. You have your frustrated moment and then you move on.

there's no profit in not being aggressive and shooting on sight in this game.
it doesn't always happen. sometimes you'll end up on a server where people are going about their own business.
i tend to be friendly (most of the time) because i don't tend to have much on my ship (i drop off treasure regularly) so what do i care if someone stabs my in the back for a couple of skulls or a seafarer's chest? i'll help out in a pve event and not expect much in return, or i'll sail away and leave the other crew to their own business.

but not a lot of people play that way. most crews i've been on when in open crews have at least 1 bloodthirsty player who wants to sink and raze everything.

the dilemma is this:
if you have loot you should attack first to get the advantage and protect your loot.
if you don't have loot then you may as well attack because you have nothing to lose and they may have loot for you to gain.
doing nothing or helping out only opens you up to being killed and having all your stuff taken. there's nothing to gain (in the game) from being nice usually.

there's no in-game reason to organise because the potential for loss is so much greater than the potential for gain.

solo is still fun. you just need to be either more wary, or more relaxed about losing your stuff. when i'm solo the thing that annoys me is having to sail back to where i was busy doing something. the loot etc means nothing.

if you can get a few friends together you'll find you get attacked a lot less (safety in numbers) and it's more fun socialising while bungling around the seas.

@sonaea said in Are people normally such jerks?:

Both times when I saw them I went out of my way to try and project that I just wanted to try and be friendly and do my own thing, but seems like that wasn't an option.

That is where your problem began. You were playing by a different set of rules. You saw them and thought, “I’ll let them know I am a nice guy and that I really don’t want any trouble.” When they didn’t comply with your expectations you got frustrated and came here. The game is primarily about thievery. Let that sink in. Stealing from each other. All the work you go through to get loot is to ensure you are emotionally connected to the stuff collecting on your deck. You care because you did work. You want to kept it and turn it in. And you are sharing the world with thieves. They want to rob you. Put up the white flag. Spam ‘We’re friendly’ all you want. Point your cannons into the air. Play music as you pass by. Whatever makes you feel good. It doesn’t matter. You are just making yourself an easy target. You would do better to adopt some paranoia, keep an eye on the horizon, keep your boat parked in a way that allows for quick escape (sails and anchor up and pointed towards open water), and TRUST NO ONE. You are trying to play a game of Archeologists & Couriers while surrounded by thieves. They are not being jerks. They are playing the game as it was designed. And you can thrive solo. Many of us have spent a lot of time playing solo and do just fine. You can too. Just know your own capabilities and the strengths of your ship and you will be just fine. Outsmart the other crews, keep your distance, and never hoard more on your ship than you are comfortable losing.

It’s far more effective to be tactically responsible than it is to inform your attacker that you are friendly.

When you look like food, you tend to be eaten.

Don’t look like food. Don’t hard anchor with sails down pointing towards an island; instead pull up parallel to an island and raise sails. Don’t put up a alliance offer flag unless you’re actively negotiating an alliance; it lets people know that you will offer only token resistance. Don’t take quests on large islands where you can’t see your ship; just stock up on quests and if they take you to Old Faithful, Cannon Cove, Discovery Ridge, Plunder Valley, or Thieve’s Haven solo, just cancel them and start another. Turn off your lanterns; they make you far more visible at distances during both day AND night, also they broadcast that you’re either careless, oblivious, or incapable of fighting.

yes. i reccomend playing with freinds that can carry you in pvp. thats what i did then i started to sweat in arena and now i carry people. im on xbox if you wanna play somtime

If you playing solo just sell every time you are passing outpost.
You can also try getting into alliance with somebody, some people will sink you but there is always plenty that will join alliance if you promise to stay away from their ship.
We let new players join alliance with us all the time so they can get extra boost. If they solo we often will handover ship with loot to them. Majority of us are level up so we play more for fun than loot. They can get our emissary flag at the end.

@noizepmp I get disappointed too. I joined this game 3 weeks ago, and I have seen its dark side. There are people that feel weak in their real life, and the only place they can feel strong is in online gaming. Many have been bullied in reality and have become online bullies themselves. Anyone that sails around seal-clubbing lone novices struggling to learn the game is a coward. It's simply maliciousness that I can't understand.

Am I against PvP completely? No, not at all. Mature pirates that have self-esteem can take on other strong pirates with similar desire to fight and steal. I think that can be really fun. I've been in some fights that I enjoyed, especially when a brave solo pirate takes on both my wife and me 1-on-2, and we have booty to steal.

I don't agree with the argument that "It's a pirate game; what do you expect?". Certainly, there should be some mutually enjoyable mayhem, as I said above, but the fantasy version of pirates that this game is based on also should include "honor among thieves." There is a certain respect among pirates that should underlie the times when they challenge each other to the (temporary) death for booty. When have you seen a fictional honorable pirate randomly kill other pirates that have no treasure and are minding their own business, as frequently happens to my wife and me?

As for me, I have become more adept at handling attacks, both in my precautions and in my ability to fight it off. While I might not always win, I will make it more challenging. Be patient, and when you reach that point, you will experience less stress and frustration.

I want to add, that I have run into friendly pirates, and I enjoy the occasions. I recently met another couple, and last night a guy watched my wife and me get cheated out of a skellie galleon kill (it was foundering and submerged itself to escape), and gave us words of sympathy.

Sonaea, you can join us any time (well, except Valentine's Day) for adventure on a brig.

@sonaea

Yes i'm afraid it is how pirates behave. ;)

I actually wish people who have complains about people attacking them to actually respond on there topic.... Seems like a lot of venting to me rather then having a genuine question or discussion but anyway....

It's just what the game is you get attacked once in awhile like me on my last game. Was busy with an order of souls voyage(solo) on an island and then i heard cannon shots and allready knew what time it is. On that moment i would call it more like cowards instead of jerks cuz i could not fight back cuz at the time i got back to my ship, it basically almost sunk. But hey its a pirate open world game it happens not all of them play fair so just shrug it off and try again.

Anyway playing with a friend decreases your change for PvP encounters significantly. I always scout the horizons when i play with my friend and we barely have any PvP encounters like that. But yeah even then sometimes they can have the jump on you when like fighting skeletons on an island. At that point just try your best and gain some experience to defend yourself.

Also if even then you can't change your mind set and really hate PvP then I would say next time you buy a game lookup for some video's and general information. That way you don't get disappointed. I prefer PvE to but i knew what i was going into when playing this game. And actually i like it when we get chased or attacked and feel the adrenaline pumping.

@Sonaea The most thing people don't understand is that they hide behind the fact that in that game, they are pirates. But the game still gives you the choice of either being a good guy or a bad guy. People like power and the game gives it to them. After my humble 150 hours of gameplay as legend, I would say 80 to 85 percent of the people i have met are actually having fun destroying the fun of other. So many players who just love the fact of farming Athena or whatsoever, doing fables, and those players are just destroying their fun. I'm asking myself why should I continue the game after losing my 5 hours solo farming emissary 5 Athena , and get rekt by 2 jerkies who just prefer taking the labor of others. People like what is easy and 80 percent of more in that world, not only in that game, will always make the easiest choice. The thing is, when you put 10 sharks and 50 fishes in a fishtank, maybe only 5 fishes would remain, because the sharks will eat them all and only the fishes that are able to escape will remain. This is exactly why this game is so toxic at some points and why there is no balance unfortunately. I still secretly dream of a fully pve server for people who'd just love to farm peacefully or have fun with friends just like me. Without being constantly harrassed by some random douchies
selfishly leaching all of their fun. But i guess that's just a dream. So yeah, if you have the mental to get through all those delusional people who think that killing and robbing makes you a good pirate, then go on.

@captainstab1n The game might be a pirate game, but still gives you the choice between being a descent person and a poorly educated guy that leaches all the fun of someone farming for 5 hours.

In my experience, the jerks come in three distinct forms:

1) People who feel like they must talk during PvP (or just in general - shout out to the monologuing idiots [especially those of you who think you can sing]), even when they are losing decisively. I don't know what little-league-diamond antics spawned this kind of behavior, but it's pathetic. I'm not saying you have to play some kind of friggin' mime in SoT, but you don't need to constantly flap your gums, either - especially not on the ship of the damned. You won - great. You lost - great. The gold is meaningless to me, either way. At the end of the day, I don't care about you attempting to repair/pad your ego, because I pretty universally don't care that you exist. As far as I'm concerned, you're just a voice box chained to a keyboard. If I want to seek sentience in another living creature, I'd have better luck in a running conversation with my border collie.

2) People who believe you are their servant - in all things. This is a catch-all for the following: crew members who don't sail. Crew members who don't fight. Crew members who don't carry loot. Crew members who think that playing a musical instrument somehow makes them cute and/or exempts them from all of the above. There's nothing like being left to solo-man a galleon while three idiots all stand on the bow sprit fishing.

3) The parents of young children, all of whom apparently believe that 'rando internet guy in his thirties' is proxy for a mentor. I am not here to look after your tot - I am not here to maintain a running conversation with your boy. I wouldn't approach your kid on the street; I wouldn't sit next to him/her on a bus; I wouldn't make eye contact with the child in line at a movie theater. Why in GOD'S NAME do you think it's appropriate to have your youngling non-stop chatting up adults in a video game? If you're going to be that much of an absentee parent, put the child up for adoption; ship them off to a friggin' boarding school. But don't ask me to step into your worn shoes.

@captainstab1n You still have to choice to do something easy and steal honest people who asked nothing or something harder which is farming. Be a good guy or a bad guy.

@stundorn I do sell more often, but the problem is the emissary. I get emissary 4 athena and everytime i get sunk because of one damn mistake. I think losing a 4 hours emissary farm is not balance. Maybe if you lose your boat the emissary would be divided by 2 so there would be less frustration... And everyone would be happy.

@solitarydrop202 so your wanting the reward without the risk? i honestly don't mean to be rude, but buck up buddy. with all great rewards (such as lvl 5 loot turn ins) there is always a risk. its what makes this game amazing!