Over the course of the last few events, the developers have added a number of multi-crew commendations, requiring a surprising level of cooperation to achieve. I would argue that these challenges go against the grain of what one would expect from a piracy game: Especially one with the word "Thieves" in the title. While it is a way to play the game, it generally goes against the theme that the game promises, and thereby the cooperative play-style will be in the minority.
That isn't to say that these missions don't have their place. In fact, I find them a welcome change to the play-style. Sometimes I can be a ruthless cutthroat. Other times I can be a kindred spirit, sailing the high seas. The problem is that these commendations are being presented as limited-time events, and if you are unlucky enough to be spawned into a sea with no like-minded sailors, you may find yourself wholly unable to accomplish your goal, despite your best efforts.
I've heard accounts from dozens of people who each spent an hour or more sitting atop the Marauder's Arch throne, waiting for somebody else to sail by and try the skill-shot. I know first-hand that "pirate" sailors will sail by and sink the ship so that the shot is harder for the next players that come by. This commendation was only available for two weeks, and one throne alone took players hours or even days. This is just one example of the issue.
The biggest offender of this so far has been the "Legendary Gunpowder Plot" commendation, wherein a player must
shoot a gunpowder keg being held by a skeleton, and the resulting explosion must kill a total of at least five skeletons, while on an active fort, with at least two crews present, twenty times.
Let's break that down for a moment.
First, you need to shoot a gunpowder keg being held by a skeleton. This is not particularly difficult to do, but it is a skill-based challenge, and there is a reasonable margin for error.
Second, there needs to be at least four other skeletons close enough to be killed by the blast. On most islands this is rather difficult to pull off. Skeletons with different weapons move at different speeds, and rarely clump up in big groups. On a fortress however, the sheer number of skeletons makes this fairly easy to do. If you shoot a gunpowder barrel at the start of a wave, you're pretty likely to take out enough of them. Regardless, it is still possible to mess this up.
Third, you need to be on an active fort. This is actually my biggest grievance regarding LGP specifically. They don't happen often enough for this! Over the last two weeks I've played probably 30 hours of this game, and I've only seen a fort activate maybe five times... On the farthest side of the map... Against the wind... Every time. Once with only 20 minutes before the server shut down.
Fourth, you need to have at least two crews present on the fort at the same time. Technically, this doesn't require "cooperation", but when approaching the fort, your ship is going to take a few cannon shots. Which means you can either pull into a cannon-blind spot and begin repairs, or ditch your boat entirely and try not to die. If another player is already on the island and they want you dead, they have a huge advantage if they strike while your ship is vulnerable. Which means you need to hope and pray that anyone else on the island is willing to play nice, but as I said before; "cooperation" is already an alternative play-style.
Fifth, you have to do it twenty times. So if you're going for the "non-cooperative" version I mentioned above, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you stop to fix your ship and they ambush you: You die and the ship sinks. Zero commendation ranks achieved. If you ditch the ship and go straight for the island, you have until you die to shoot as many barrel-skeletons as possible, before you get re-spawned on the far-side of the map. And the blast radius is huge, so between that and the guy trying to murder you, you'll probably get maybe one rank. Which means you'd have to dive head-long into danger on twenty separate forts. Did I mention forts haven't been happening often enough?
As for the "cooperative" version, this is still a pain. If you're lucky enough to get a helpful crew, there's a finite number of waves that spawn before the fort ends. Meaning it is unrealistic to expect to do it in a single go. Which means you need to be lucky enough to find multiple active forts with friendly people on them. In my most recent fort endeavor, I found someone friendly, but that someone wanted the treasure and not the commendations, so he shot barrel-skeletons indiscriminately, often resulting in less than the five-kill threshold required. We got four ranks before a crew of cutthroats showed up and sunk our ships.
Additionally, there's just bad luck. #1, sometimes you mess up, and the skeleton detonates before you can shoot it. #2, sometimes the blast doesn't kill five skeletons. #3 sometimes you play for five consecutive hours without seeing a fort activate.
If all that wasn't enough, the counter has been bugged, and doesn't always register a rank. On the first fort I did we got at least eight good blasts off, but only the first one counted.
In summary, swimming against the stream and playing cooperatively in a game that encourages the contrary can be fun at times, but it feels really disheartening when the rewards are under an arbitrarily placed time-limit. The futility in trying and failing to find cooperation makes for a bad user experience. I recommend you either continue to make co-op mission rewards available after the event ends, or just stop putting co-op missions into your limited-time events entirely.
Thanks for taking the time to read this novel of a post.
