In-game lobby

  • CaptThreepwood
    Master

    Now that since many years the game is purposefully disencouraging solo players (that is one of the reasons I don't play so often anymore), it really needs an ingame lobby.Something like the Arena used to have. Where you can choose to enter, look the people, their character faces, nicknames, titles, behaviours, and decide whether or not join a crew.

    Discord, LFG and any other pre-game meet-up-system is disencouraging more people than ever wether because the overwhelming amount of text you have to read in order to get into a crew, or because some places are moded mostly by angry kids with bad-parent-scars. Whichever the case, it is an external system that doesn't work as the game needs. The game needs something inside the game.

    Is well known that SOT is a good game to play with friends, but what if you don't have friends or you can never sync to play together? You need new ones constantly and that also becomes frustrating and end up by abandoning the game. The capacity of making new friends is overrated in this society.

    The game needs a place for social interactions without the preassure of believing that another character can randomly kill us. A central-lobby that send players to different (round robin?) servers (kubernetes pods?) so no body can exploit servers with aliances.

    Probably it will not be just "one lobby" but many. Depending on the region, the infrastructure capacity and many other aspects. But the idea is to keep them full all the time. Once a group of people sails, the next conections gets inside that one.

    I'd rather use Port Merrick as scenario for it.

    Thoughts?

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  • WolfManbush
    Legend

    Tough to serve people that don't like open crew or the platform approach.

    I completely get not being into the resources outside of the game like discord (not my jam either) but open crew is pretty similar to what a lobby would be.

    I'm not convinced that people would find any more success in a lobby than they would by hopping around in open crew and meeting people.

    Any issue a person regularly finds in open crew they would find a comparable issue in a lobby.

  • R3vanNS
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    What this game could use is in-game group finder before setting sail, where you can have a dropdown or checklist table with filters for content to choose as a rule. Whether it be for selecting specific factions, or type of content (like FotD, HG, etc), or both (or even more stuff) at the same time. Whatever really, use your imagination. Basically what World of Warcraft and other MMOs have.

    The more filters, the better, as you can be as specific as you want to be, and get placed in a queue.

    People who pick and chose the same thing as you get grouped up with you. However, the more filters you pick, the longer it may take to assemble the crew, which is again a long time accepted thing in MMO games. Still better than randomly joining and abandoning people for 2 hours.

    PS. yes, I know, it's not always 2h. But I'm just not willing to bet on that, especially in cases when I have 2-3h of free time, to begin with.

    I'm honestly surprised this isn't a thing since the game got released in 2018. I know for certain that many players such as myself do not like being forced on specific content just out of fear of not having to search for 2 more hours until we finally find likeminded people, so we have to make peace with whatever the rest of the crew decides, even when we'd rather do different content.

    For this same reason I have maybe 5-6 times used Open Crew. NEVER again after that. In most cases it's just a waste of time anyways, and it's a good reason why I'm usually playing solo. Except for when I really need Discord for some specific content farm.

    EDIT: now that I think of it, I'm actually gonna post this as a separate suggestion thread.

  • CaptThreepwood
    Master

    I agree with what's said here. In conclusion we need something more organic to get the people together. I don't know about the pulldown menu thing. I'd rather use to choose with a knife on a company table if I'd like to join a crew with that company in mind. But yes.... the idea is there.

    In so many years I played so far, the Open Crew system never worked well. May be it is because I am in Central Europe and the traffic here is different than in the US. IDK.

    I honestly don't mind in which game I jump in. It is just some times I don't want to start as a captain from zero and I run out of decent options to join in an existing crew.

  • RedEyeSith
    Champion
    Insider

    I think a Guild Lobby could be cool, to enhance the potential social aspects of Guilds within the game itself (as I also think this kind of Lobby would be less prone to toxicity report issues). You could repurpose the Sea Dog Tavern interior as a Guild Tavern interior.

    Tweak a few things for this purpose, like removing some of the decorations and then allow people to do custom decorations (these could be available Trinkets or even new Guild based stuff attached to unlocks via Guild Commendations). Have the Shops available inside so people can do some shopping if they like. Have a table with Bottle Ships that represent the different Guild Ships so people can vote to embark on a Ship from in here (vote with your Dagger, door opens in a way similar to the Ferry, head out the door to load into a server like normal) or join an active Ship if there are open slots on it.

    They could also interact with any other members of the Guild who happen to be on at the same time (any given Guild can only have one instance loaded of their Tavern at any time, funneling all members together). As noted above, since they are in the same Guild odds are greater that the toxicity would be lower or non-existent here, and Guilds are capped at 24 players which is in theory a server player cap so it pans out there.

    For the Open Crew system I think that Filters is probably the best bet overall. You would select the Ship Type you want to do, then select the Filters you want to apply, if any, and then you enter a queue to be matched with people who meet the requirements. As the roster assembles, the selected Filters would still be displayed giving people a final chance to opt back out of the Crew if they see something they don't want possibly (people that didn't apply Filters as an example of who this may benefit). It doesn't have to be too complex even.

    Faction: Any, Merchant, Order, Horder, Reaper, Hunters, Athena, Guardians, Servants

    Emissary: Any, Yes, No

    Activity: Any, Voyages, Raids, World Events, Commendations, Tales, Hourglass

    Intensity: Any, Casual, Focused, Grinding

    And that is basically it. Would still allow for people to go in with a blank slate by placing Any on all options, but would also let people focus in on some specific stuff they want to get up to and hopefully be paired up with players who share a similar desire.

    I think by doing both the Guild Lobby and the Open Crew Filters it would enhance the overall experience by a significant amount honestly and would be a HUGE QoL win for the game to see implemented.

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