How PvE Could Work

@admiral-rrrsole I see a lot of people bringing up certain statements Rare made regarding the direction they wanted to take initially as some sort of guarantee PvE servers will never happen. People need to understand goals change, especially in a live environment where each update drives different and unexpected behavior. Goals and directions are bound to change on the development side.

That's not to say PvE will ever happen as a result of this game development nature, but if I were to guess, I don't think it's that far off to think it will eventually get implemented. As you put it, we now have AI ships and crews, so who knows?

@blam320 If you've been following the development of Sea of Thieves as closely as I have been and since as early as I have been, you should probably know Rare has made many statements since early Alpha builds, including the very one you mentioned among many others and for some of them they've done a complete reversal in the final build for the full game. And with each update, they've been doing things that range from small to big changes that go against statements they have previously made.

Judging from this pattern alone, don't take their statements to heart. It's likely to change depending on how the game grows with each update. At the moment, people wanting PvE servers like me are a minority. But I guarantee you, if player behavior dictates the need for servers with different settings in order to keep them engaged into the game for the long haul, you will see PvE servers in the game sooner or later.

I agree with the topic started, at least the first part. I disagree with the creating separate servers for PVE. I think and it’s what I was talking about yesterday that with things just being fine tuned and better you know better balanced that the game in its state right now could work well. Those that are heavily for PVP won’t admit, but this game isn’t or in my opinion meant to be a PVP focused game. They have since the start and as you can tell with events added, have tried focusing on a more cooperative style of game play, not a let’s go chase everyone around and kill them over and over again because we have nothing better to do style of play. I just like you play SOT with my wife a lot too and then if not with her I will usually play by myself. Just like you we run into the same issues on a sloop trying to do a voyage and than bam being attacked all right that’s cool we sink them and they come back lol I get it and something needs to be done. However, those that are big in to PVP won’t admit because all they care about is attacking other players.

@blam320 If you read my original post that started the thread, I didn't say anything about private servers. Other people responded with the private server suggestion. What I was going for with my suggestion is to have different servers, one for PvP and another one for PvE. In the same way you can lock your ship to prevent strangers from joining in unless they're invited by you, PvE could work in a similar way. Perhaps allowing people in your party to join in a sort of co-op session in the PvE server, with no PvP allowed. Think of it as Ranked/Unranked servers.

The point is to give options to players with different play styles. You'd think most of the player base would remain engaged into the game for the long haul, but it's a pretty difficult task to accomplish while the game's only offer is a server where people who want to play differently are discouraged by certain player behavior.

My wife and I could be playing this game every single day, but the very reason why we keep falling in and out of the game all the time is exactly this: people going out of their way to take us out of what we are trying to do in the game.

Take my treasure, I don't care. But don't keep fricking following me around everywhere I go both on land and on sea to try to kill me over and over again, preventing me from playing the game the way I want to play it when I'm joined by my wife.

@bababooey If Rare at least created a way to punish those who try to force you to engage into combat, that would go a long way and perhaps would make me think again about having a separate PvE server.

I 100% agree with you. People who say the game is all about PvP don't admit that's not the case because they find fun in engaging in combat over and over again. And don't take me wrong, that's totally fine as long as the other party feels like engaging too. The problem is when people follow you around expecting you to give in at some point. These guys they don't give up. They'll follow you until they get what they want or you leave the game.

@blam320 Scuttling my ship or server-hoping gets tiring. As I put in one of my replies to someone else, sometimes you spawn at an outpost and you set out to a fairly distant island. Then you come across one of those ships craving for combat, you scuttle your ship, you're going to spawn far away again. If you try to go back to the same island you were headed, I can pretty much guarantee you're going to come across the same ship again at some point.

Server hopping is the same. It basically puts you into an endless cycle of restarting over and that gets tiring when all you wanna do is play without stressing out.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with your last sentence. PvE servers can feature the same level of emergent threats and experiences, but instead of being player-driver it becomes AI driven just like we already have with Skeleton Forts, Skeleton Ships, the Megalodon and the Kraken. It's a different type of server that nobody is forced to play. Those who don't want PvE can just stay on PvP. Nothing changes. But there needs to be more options for players who are not into PvP.

@lewminous Same here. We just give up when things start going the incessant combat way. You did bring up something interesting though. PvP would be AWESOME if it was disabled unless two ships raised the flag to signal combat. Damage would kick in allowing those ships to battle it out to their hearts content. That could even be an option available in PvE to be honest.

@blam320 At every response you give, I get the feeling you didn't read my post at all. My suggestion had absolutely nothing to do with mixing PvP and PvE progression. They should be separate. What you do in PvE isn't supposed to carry over to PvP. This includes reputation, faction progression, gold, doubloons, cosmetics and anything else you get by playing the game.

It's meant to be a SEPARATE server, with a separate progression tracker. If you're level 50 in PvP across all factions, with a lot of cosmetics purchased during time limited events, none of that would carry over to PvE should you decide to play a few sessions there. And the same goes for the other way around.

Your experience with the game is clearly different from what myself and my wife along with many other people, as you can see by this thread alone, have had so far. If you're having a great time playing PvP, awesome! Your experience doesn't fit in to what I'm suggesting though as you don't seem to be affected by any of it.

Only Rare knows what their vision for the game is though. You can take whatever they say to heart, but no one but themselves know what really goes on whenever they sit around a table to discuss their development roadmap. I still think PvE is possible down the line and it'd actually add value to the game for people who just aren't into PvP. People complaining about the addition of a PvE server are basically saying they don't want Rare to give different options to different people because that's not how they'd play the game themselves.

If you want the game to survive for years like most of the community does, better advocate for more options as new games are coming out all the time and people can simply start flocking over to new releases if Sea of Thieves isn't engaging enough for them in the long term.

@themasterplan84 I could definitely get behind some sort of punishment for griefers in place of a PvE server.

Keep in mind that the main focus of my topic is not combat per se. It's griefers. As I said in another reply to someone else, I don't mind the occasional combat, provided I want in. If someone tries to attack me and I flee, let me be. Don't chase me for half an hour everywhere I go. And if you shoot a ship and the ship shoots back, enjoy the battle.

The point I was trying to make is that it seems like every single time my wife and I decide to play together, it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, but we always end up finding that ship on a mission.

A very recent experience which was what led me to create this topic happened pretty much as a one-sided combat. My wife and I had anchored our ship because we found of those mermaid statues and we were trying to figure out how to destroy it.

We noticed a ship quickly approaching but we kept focused on the mermaid. A couple seconds later, I saw two guys jumping aboard our ship, probably looking for treasure. As we weren't carrying any, I figured I'd just let them be, hoping that as soon as they realized we didn't have what they were looking for they'd just go away.

Instead, they proceed to blast our ship with cannonball after cannonball until they sank it. Still, we didn't do anything, we were still focused on the mermaid as we could just get another ship. Thought that would be the end of it, until both of them started snipping us.

Now, is this type of behavior really PvP? We wanted to explore the game and they wanted combat. Wouldn't it be much easier and perhaps fun if they tried to find someone in the mood for what they were looking for instead of pretty much ruining our session, making us not want to play the game again for another couple weeks as it's been since the game's release?

@themasterplan84 Definitely. That's something I think Rare should really focus on moving forward. Populating the world with tons more stuff for players to do. I think this will go a long way to keep people busy, but at the same time, there's only so much Rare can do about it.

There'll still be people who no matter how much the game has to offer will be able to complete it and find themselves in a state of boredom sooner or later, leading to the same type of behavior, which is why some sort of punishment would help curbing it to some extent. Let me be clear that by punishment, I don't mean banning these people. I mean in-game punishment like bounties automatically applied on the server side to people who crossed a certain threshold of kills within a certain time frame or players being able to manually place bounties on other crews that are kinda troublesome.

Anything Rare comes up with that helps discouraging griefing in any way, shape or form would be helpful.

@themasterplan84 I don't know how complicated that would be from a development perspective, but perhaps a system that identifies the behavior between two ships in close proximity to determine whether a bounty needs to be applied or not would be a great way to handle the Bounty System.

One scenario that comes to mind is that if a ship fires first, following by a shot back from the other ship, that would invalidate the bounty as both parties "agreed" to the combat. Now, if a ship fires and the other ship doesn't reciprocate within a certain time limit, that'd be strike one. Do that enough times and the server places a reasonable enough bounty to entice other players to go after said ship, marking the ship with the bounty on the map for everybody else to see, much like the Reaper's Mark. It'd be extra nice if the bounty carried over between sessions.

If you disconnected with a bounty on your head, next time you log in, the bounty is still active until someone effectively collects it.

Why does anyone care about others progression? There is no power to gain. It's just an insane grind. Nothing on this game means anything even within the context of videogames. If they added a pve mode I bet almost everyone would switch because the combat is not why most people play this game. It's fun to goof off with friends and relax.
The person to person combat is awful and the ship combat is fairly basic. Plus you have the insane pc advantage that Xbox users have to deal with. I had many friends that played this on Xbox daily. Now only one does and it's only because he is a sucker for a grind. He hates the pvp.
Few days ago we got a three man crew together that hadn't played together since thd. We were having a blast chilling and digging up treasure. Then 2 boats chased us for an hour. We finally lost them turned in our loot and we all quit. Not even the grinder has gone back.
If we wanted to play a pvp game we would play a real one like overwatch or bf1. This game is fun until the pvp happens. I understand that many will say that's just how this game works and if we don't like it we should find other games. And we did. Hell with fallout 76 then red dead coming within months this game might as well not exist for us.
This game has potential. I just don't think rare are the ones to realize it.

@blam320
Lol I couldn’t leave this post alone. Lol we must be playing different games. I mean trying to find people actively engaging in PVP...are you kidding me. I and my wife who are both legends and the third person we have playing with us who is almost legend, can’t accomplish a single voyage without being attacked or followed around the map. The three of us were doing an Athena’s last night and during that time alone we sunk a galleon(with the help of another galleon) and a brig(the brig sunk us in the very beginning as soon as we spawned in they were attacking our ship, so we went back and sunk them) and three sloops by ourselfs. I know we are legends, which also makes us a target and we can clearly hold our own, but like the original poster said the constant being followed around gets annoying and server hopping is not the answer and quite frankly stupid. Lol why would or rather should I have to server hop half way through an Athena’s, yea not the answer. Not to mention the fact, your just going to encounter the same problem in the next server and so on. Don’t get me wrong I love the PVP aspect of the game, but lol when it takes 5 hours to do an Athena and even longer than it should to do just a regular voyage on the hand of being constantly bothered it’s a bit annoying and not to mention you won’t or at least others won’t admit, but this wasn’t a PVP based game. The impression I was under before and since playing the game at launch and farther proves it by all the events and other updates released was that this game has always been about cooperative play with the added bonus of PVP, but never was it meant to be intended to just sail around and blow everyone up and follow them around the server. Geez...

@themasterplan84 A notoriety scale would do wonders to the game as well. I think we're pretty much like-minded when it comes to how Rare could handle this issue, aside from me disagreeing that a PvE server would ruin the game.

@orgrum I don't understand this obsession with progression either, especially so in a game where progression doesn't get you anything but bragging rights. It's not like you're earning a certain advantage over other players by being at a higher level.

I gotta agree with you when you say "This game is fun until PvP happens". My wife and I enjoy the game while we're exploring it. It's when PvP kicks in that we feel like closing the game and doing something else.

@bababooey Server hopping... perhaps the suggestion I heard the most since the game came out. I don't need to add anything to what you said because you just summed up our experience.

We can be doing anything, from aimlessly sailing around the seas hoping to find one of mythical creatures or doing a voyage, when someone shows up wanting us to engage, it breaks us out of whatever we were trying to do.

I'll say this to the very end of Sea of Thieves support: this is NOT a PvP game. It's meant to be primarily a co-op game with the possibility of a PvP component.

Skeleton Forts are meant to be taken out as a group. The Kraken and the Megalodon are meant to be taken out as group. The Cursed Ships are far easier to take out as a group and I'd assume the upcoming Cargo Runs would be easier to take care as part of a group.

Saying that this is a PvP game is like taking all this cool stuff Rare implemented into the game, throwing it down the drain and replace it with incessant cannonballs.

I just want a server or at least a way in the current server to actually enjoy this fricking game without being bothered.

@elysianlegion89 Good to see this community do have people who think as a community. Appreciated.

@elysianlegion89 I agree. If there's ever a PvE server in the game, progress should be separate from PvP.

@v**a-hombre I don't understand this mindset either. People trying to force others into combat, even without a response.

As I said many times before, I also don't mind PvP gamers attacking me when I'm playing solo or with strangers, but when I play with my wife, we enjoy the game a lot more when we're exploring it. Nothing turns us off from the game more than people trying to kill us all the time when we're clearly not interested in engaging.

@themasterplan84 In my point of view, when someone chases after you, no matter how much you show them you have no interest in whatever they're trying to accomplish and proceed to try to sink your ship and succeeding in that, try to kill you on land, restarting this loop should you come across them again characterizes it as griefing.

The example I gave about my wife and I trying to figure out how to destroy a Mermaid Statue while two guys sunk our ship and proceeded to snipe us, forcing us to just quit the game because we couldn't play the way we wanted to play it, that's the very definition of griefing. They could have gone away the moment they realized we weren't carrying any treasure and when they saw no reaction from us when they jumped aboard our ship.