The transportation tasks of merchants (shells, wooden boards, fruits, gunpowder barrels) need to be rebalanced and can only be obtained through drifting bottles and diaries on the island. The removal of parchment from the barrels in the 11th season has made it extremely difficult to complete.
Season 15 - State of Play
@sonicbob said in Season 15 - State of Play:
I was pleasantly surprised to see that this so far has only been a few hundred people, so my previous updates on how players should approach exploits may have deterred the behaviour at scale.
Hey Drew,
Speaking as a player, who is always curious about exploring and reporting exploits, I believe 3 big factors went into this being limited in scope.
- Previous exploits of this nature had rollbacks.
- People were gate-keeping the knowledge in order to be 'first' on social media to have HC 500, and an attempt to stop rollbacks.
- For most people, Rare's announcement that they were aware, and that there would be consequences was
- Clearly Communicated,
- Timely,
- And preceded the vast majority of people discovering or hearing about the exploit.
These 3 factors combined, would have led to the reduced number of exploiters, despite both exploits being relatively easy to find accidentally if you even had 2 crew fishing side by side, and is probably why it got missed in insiders, as it tends to be a solidary activity used as a 'down time' activity while you wait for crew members.
@realstyli said in Season 15 - State of Play:
@josuk35 said in Season 15 - State of Play:
I agree to an extent, they should rock the boat a lot... but at the moment, it's a bit broken.... as funny as it is
Flips are fun, but I wonder if they wreck havoc with anti-cheat movement detection.
I've enjoyed every flip that's ever happened to me, except when it lost me an hourglass streak upon spawning in the game because it yeeted me out of the border.
I would hope it doesn't trigger AC, but couldn't say for certain if it's possible.
Personally, I'd just like to see them rein it in a bit. Have it so the ship can rock to the point of almost tipping but doesn't actually flip.
---Post-Hotfix Update---
Hey Everyone - A further update, it's been an eventful day!After rolling out today's hotfix we began to see signs of game instability and after investigation it's been identified that the new Voyage Cooldowns we put in place are the root cause. As a result we've now temporarily disabled them to protect the game experience while we work on a resolution.
As these voyage cooldowns were part of our Hunter's Call exploit mitigation, we'll continue to monitor folks using this route to progress the Hunter's Call much faster than intended and they will all be wrapped up into our progression rollback action. As we've said before, genuine voyage play is not being flagged here but excessive use of Voyage cancelling to force specific island locations will put players under investigation - you've been warned!
We'll get to work addressing these issues and share more on our plans here when we have it!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
@kokokatten
Yeah, partially. Expecting a player to reroll their boat, simply because they are trying to find the Brian's Bazzare -> Roaring Traders route is very punitive. There's no spawn in the Roar when you start a new boat, so one must dive to Morrow's, and sail back into the sweet spot for the 1 and only chance to roll for the route needed (which they likely dont even know and wont find emergently about unless they are using an achivement guide).They should simply nerf the value of the keys if they are concerned people farming lost ship keys are boositng progression more than people who actually complete the voyage and collect the final loot. Or at least fix the RNG of the lost ship voyage so each route has an equal weight of coming up.
@mr-spx-ss said in Season 15 - State of Play:
The transportation tasks of merchants (shells, wooden boards, fruits, gunpowder barrels) need to be rebalanced and can only be obtained through drifting bottles and diaries on the island. The removal of parchment from the barrels in the 11th season has made it extremely difficult to complete.
This is overstated. The effort for finding merchant contract quests is similar after season 11 than before. The main difference is you need to LEAVE THE OUTPOST to find the quests, versus simply server hopping and searching barrels. The new meta for finding merchant contracts is to get yourself to a big island with a high density of journal spawns, and check them all. Same effort as the outpost, just different location. And slightly higher skill expression as you have to discover the journal spawns versus simply looking for big brown circular barrels sitting around in the open.
Really respect and appreciate your transparency, Drew. This update is really great and refreshing to see, and I am glad to hear of the action being taken on the exploits, this season. I only hope that alongside the level reduction, that the distinction rings are forcibly removed from their accounts as well, as to really nail the punishment.
Their convenience is the incentive to use them. It's another place to sell your hunters call loot with great all round visibility and you can park your bow sprit right by the Hunters Call representative.
@artie yea this sucks!!! There are a few hostages that I don’t agree with this restriction! This is one of them and also the animals voyages as well!
As I use this method for animals as I’m trying to grind them out and they are a GRIND and I’m done with chickens just need snakes and pigs and right now I’m often getting chickens still and don’t want those voyages! I really hope enough people speak up and they listen on this one!
as predicted. every time in the past 7 years yall have said smaller updates more spread out so we have a less buggy patch... nothing ever changes. a 7 year history of all talk no action. this concept of releasing the update in waves so you can be laser focused on bug fixes really only works if you actually not only play the games yourselves but try to play as a person trying to break the system not just play the game and make sure the system functions as you intend. seems like the issues that keep coming around are also just old issues youve never learned should be on a testing bingo card.
@artie said in Season 15 - State of Play:
@kokokatten
Yeah, partially. Expecting a player to reroll their boat, simply because they are trying to find the Brian's Bazzare -> Roaring Traders route is very punitive. There's no spawn in the Roar when you start a new boat, so one must dive to Morrow's, and sail back into the sweet spot for the 1 and only chance to roll for the route needed (which they likely dont even know and wont find emergently about unless they are using an achivement guide).They should simply nerf the value of the keys if they are concerned people farming lost ship keys are boositng progression more than people who actually complete the voyage and collect the final loot. Or at least fix the RNG of the lost ship voyage so each route has an equal weight of coming up.
I don't think it's about the keys, but what do I know..
Anyway, if this is the only way, I rather a player rerolls the session - as you said, unless they go specifically for that achievement, then they know which area to vote the voyage in.
If they don't go for achievement, and avoid the Devil's Roar area, well, then I guess they don't care about the achievements, and they probably will not get it in an organic gameplay but they probably do not care anyway.
I still think, that not trying every voyage type when you have to go for 50 cabins opened is not the best approach and in that case, perhaps the achievement is easily obtainable if the player is curious enough.Either way, those who want it still can get it, while exploiters are stopped - fine by me on this one.
@artie said in Season 15 - State of Play:
@mr-spx-ss said in Season 15 - State of Play:
The transportation tasks of merchants (shells, wooden boards, fruits, gunpowder barrels) need to be rebalanced and can only be obtained through drifting bottles and diaries on the island. The removal of parchment from the barrels in the 11th season has made it extremely difficult to complete.
This is overstated. The effort for finding merchant contract quests is similar after season 11 than before. The main difference is you need to LEAVE THE OUTPOST to find the quests, versus simply server hopping and searching barrels. The new meta for finding merchant contracts is to get yourself to a big island with a high density of journal spawns, and check them all. Same effort as the outpost, just different location. And slightly higher skill expression as you have to discover the journal spawns versus simply looking for big brown circular barrels sitting around in the open.
The difficulty on this oen is way too high, compared to the voyages that these were, right?
Once upon a time it was easy? I started to play when these were in the barrels/outpost soon to be removed, never experienced that as a voyage that it once was - perhaps should be brought back. The bottles loot pool is ridiculous and journal spawns is awful.@kokokatten said in Season 15 - State of Play:
The difficulty on this oen is way too high, compared to the voyages that these were, right?
The only difficulty is adapting to the new Meta and LEAVING the outposts.
The bottles loot pool is ridiculous and journal spawns is awful.
The journal spawns are approximately the same as the encounter rate of the old parchments in outpost barrels. On any journal run on the big islands I've personally done we usually find 4 to 6 of the journals present in the 10 to 15 spawn points that exists. And the journals seem to drop the merchant contracts at a higher rate than the bottle quests do (although my experience here is annecdotal as the sample size of my spreadsheet tracking the drop rates for journals is still to small compared to our bottle quest data).
Often one can do the run faster than barrel searching at outposts as you can see if the journal exists before arriving at the spawn versus having to stop and peeking inside every barrel (except those that are 100% empty and devoid of banana). Players don't even have to learn every large island, they can pick/choose thier favorites to visit every time they server hop.
There's a whole discord in existence for people which posts the exact locations (and photos) for every big island and optimal run paths to visit them all. Getting to the islands is simple as diving to a riddle (or a more advanced player would dive to a nearby tall tale and visit one of two islands they have mastered).
Again, players need to consider the design goal of the changes that S11 brought to the game. We can now vote for voyages on their ship while at sea with no need to return to the outposts to buy and stockpile voyages anymore. Additionally, emergent quests (aka bottle quests) had thier loot pools seriously buffed in S11 with the introduction of kingly loot to incentivise players to actually complete them and provide another reward for players who stay on their server (as diving deletes all emergent quests). I can totally see why the devs decided the barrel parchments (especially at the outposts) was no longer desirable as the boosted quest value should expect players to put in a modicum of effort to discover... Namely raising achor and setting sail at least once per session.
Go get them merchant contracts, they are out there to discover... and in no way as difficult to find as they were during Year 1 of the game.
Yeah, sucks that gunpowder barrels were removed from the Merchant voyages and the devs should consider rebalancing that commendation to 50 to match the banana/wood/cannonball crates as the mechanics of completing all 4 commendation are now the same.... But these commendations are still in reach for the most dedicated players for the game and thank god there's still some titles in game that have meaning when players rocking them are encountered.... Especially as how much Sea of Thieves has been nerfed from the fisher-pricing of the FOTD, nameplates on fish, etc.
Any update on taking away HC progress (would be better done before community weekend, where in fact some players may hit 500 legally).
At this point, exploiters only brag about their progress not being remvoed yet..
Hopefully it's due to you taking the time to consider more strict punishments than removing the progress/gold @Sonicbob@pdx-corgidad for all i care, i dont need lizards when some kid is quick swapping me throught the walls of the ship, ruining my crews streaks...
@realstyli there s no need for saying, i just need, wait not just me, we all need to see hackers gone, it s quite annoying to encounter them when i m on a hight streak and not only... that was my point
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