The Battle for the Sea of Thieves

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    This mode needs to matchmake you with a full crew, or have an option to do so. It is currently at least 70% of people just doing it and scuttling to grind levels. 1v1s can be fun but even that is not really how sea of thieves pvp shines. I'll explain my thoughts.

    Gone are the days of being able to fight crew v crew pvp in all it's glory through a matchmade mode, and while I understand the decision to "can" arena, I think the implementation of The Battle for the Sea of Thieves could have been much better. Look, I love the implementation of The Battle for the Sea of Thieves, it feels good, it looks cool, it has nice rewards, but we need to have a proper matchmaking system so that this can be enjoyed by all. Many of us want to queue up and dive davy jones style in galleons and slug it out in a real battle. Yes, I know you want to drive us towards adventure mode, and I think the hourglass is already doing that quite well, but it is not quite what it could be. It is almost like dark souls invasions. I enjoy just traveling around with the hourglass active and knowing that threat is there. Well done, but please, let us queue for full crew pvp through this system.

    Sea of thieves SHINES when a crew is present. 2 guys meta blunder sniper setup, firebombing each-others decks and doing the little sea of thieves solo dance is nowhere near as fun for many of us as two ships really playing the game, the laughs, the fun, it's missing, it's just a solo, mostly "gamed" system right now and it is not fun. Unless of course you are playing in a premade. Too many people are seriously abusing the system and just scuttling, your statistics should show this.

    But for those of us with certain tastes, daily requirements and maybe even social anxieties, random matchmaking suits our needs much more. For example, I mostly play with my fiance, but when she is away, I can't really do this activity and fully enjoy it because playing sloop 1v1 only is a bit of a let down. It is extremely hard to get a open crew galleon/brig to agree to do hourglass. So please, consider proper matchmaking for this mode. I am absolutely certain that many people would rejoice. Yes you could argue that I should, "Go make friends to do it with," but I do not think this is the right approach.

    I will end this on a positive note saying again that I do really enjoy the concept and the aesthetic of it all. It is quite cool, but the implementation has missed the mark. I would love to get some support for this here by like minded individuals, to maybe see these changes made.

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  • strangeness
    Lord
    Insider

    Why reinvent the wheel? Xbox has the LFG feature. Discord works well for finding or assembling a crew. Every feature requires dev time and there are already ways to get what you want.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    Any gameplay element that requires the user to leave the game to engage with is a huuuge negative and turn off towards the user. Many people will never do this. It limits the game immensely and I do not think that it is "reinventing the wheel" at all, currently there is no wheel in the actual game.

  • D3ADST1CK
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    @mastercheef3951 said in The Battle for the Sea of Thieves:

    Any gameplay element that requires the user to leave the game to engage with is a huuuge negative and turn off towards the user. Many people will never do this. It limits the game immensely and I do not think that it is "reinventing the wheel" at all, currently there is no wheel in the actual game.

    Steam is popular because it provides a ton of features outside of the games it sells, so I don't think that is true.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    I am shocked you think that people having to matchmake outside of the game is ever a positive.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    Also, a simple crew finder, with planned activity dropdowns listed for each crew could solve this issue entirely as people could simply search these active crews for a crew doing what they want to partake in.

  • strangeness
    Lord
    Insider

    There is a big difference between "that's a positive" and "that's not a negative." It fundamentally changes the underlying meaning and lets you set up a strawman argument based on something nobody said.

    Discord gained popularity for players/teams to chat without relying on game chat, and to gain access to features that weren't in games. While discord has gained other features since, that doesn't change that players chose to use discord instead of in-game chat and was quite successful because of it. So yes, players choosing things outside a game is demonstrably not a hurdle.

    Xbox LFG has been part of Xbox live for a very long time and is quite heavily used. It saves developers from reinventing the wheel (in game or not) and if it was as big of a hurdle as you say, every developer would do their own version of LFG and LFG itself wouldn't exist. Or need to.

    Additionally, the new things you've added since your first post actually work against what SoT is. As a sandbox game, a strict list of "do this, or that, or the other" for matchmaking would splinter the search. And what happens when you join a session, but something unexpected happens. You matched a with a crew that was going to do HG. But while stocking, a fort of fortune spawns and the crew voice-voted to do that instead. How does matchmaking account for that? Who has "permission" to change that on behalf of the crew in-game if there are empty slots still to be filled? If you join a crew that is doing something different than they set their filters to, is that a reportable/bannable offense?

    LFG solves all of those issues. The poster is an individual and they "own" their post. They can create any tags they see fit as well as a description and it isn't tied to any in-game feature or detection. They can delete their post at any time, and posts automatically expire. If the group changes it's mind about anything, nothing is tied to an in-game promise or feature so it isn't reportable or bannable as nothing in-game suggested or guaranteed that you'd get your choice of activity by joining.

    So while I don't see it inherently as a positive it certainly isn't a negative. There are legitimate positives to it, and they at the very least counteract the negatives, making it a zero-sum.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    No one has permission. I am not suggesting stopping people from doing what they want. Nor was LFG system really what this post was about.

  • Peteloaf777
    Champion
    Insider
    Founder

    @mastercheef3951 LFG is literally an integral part of Xbox multiplayer, especially SoT

  • Foambreaker
    Sailor

    @strangeness said in The Battle for the Sea of Thieves:

    Why reinvent the wheel? Xbox has the LFG feature. Discord works well for finding or assembling a crew. Every feature requires dev time and there are already ways to get what you want.

    Also if the rumors about guilds hold true we should wait and see what that brings. In other games most of the group play that I do is with guildies, pug groups are notorious. I'm super stoked about it.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    Im not sure how this has turned into a completely different topic. I am talking about matchmaking with a crew being integrated into The Battle for the Sea of Thieves hourglass pvp.

  • strangeness
    Lord
    Insider

    @mastercheef3951 You asked for a feature, and the later asked for specific sub-features. Those things happen to exist in a system you already have access to. Someone pointing out that LFG does what you want isn't changing the topic. It is addressing your topic. You are just choosing not to see it.

    To use a different example. Fair warning... I'm old. Like, shockingly old, compared to much of the audience here.

    Back in the early days of "online" gaming, one might buy (not "world of") Warcraft, or Descent, or Duke Nukem (3D!!!) And when you first fired up the game, they each had their own stack for networking. Your choices we're usually LAN, dial-up, and maybe some oddity thrown in. And many "LAN" options had a choice between IPX and TCP/IP. And many people still dialed into proprietary services like AOL or Compuserv.

    And if you DID want to play in the internet, you had to emulate a LAN. That usually meant a 3rd party IP service (like Trumpet winsock) and some sort of matchmaking service like Ten, MPlayer, or Kali (not to be confused with kali Linux.)

    But imagine today saying "I think games need to do their own networking. It'd be so much better than relying on Xbox live. You could.... Do stuff... And things.... And...."

    All of those components got shuttled into the OS, and into services like XBL, PSN, and Steam for a reason. Even Blizzard created Battle.Net to address their needs and decouple Diablo/Warcraft from the networking side.

    So yes, your post was about LFG, even if you didn't realize it was about LFG. And if you ever want a tour down the mental PC Gaming museum that lives in my head, feel free to shout.

  • MasterCheef3951
    Sailor

    Yeah when you look at it from that unfocused perspective. Sea of Thieves of course has some kind of LFG, it can matchmake you to crews by hitting a button. But it doesn't have a modern LFG feature like world of warcraft or anything else. Which truthfully I am not asking to be added. My focus is on the hourglass, but this has gone off the rails. I am not asking for any deeper matchmaking than what Rare already possesses, I am just asking for it ON the hourglass. Which I think is clear. So, I am not looking for an advanced, modern LFG system, I just briefly mentioned the possibility while brainstorming post-feature suggestion due to someone saying that leaving the game to join an hourglass crew is somehow ideal. I can see the issues with a more advanced and selective LFG system so we don't need to discuss that further, but my original topic is something I have confirmed at least anecdotally, most people want. I still don't agree that you should ever need to leave the game. The entire reason they made the hourglass was so that you didn't have to back out in any capacity to start pvp. They want us in the adventure mode to connect with any of the games features. I may not be shockingly old, but I am 30, I remember some things. I started on age of empires 1.

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