Just how good of a pirate are you?

@william-flint I think your algorithm's busted... my rating's really low for my higher-than-average stats.

77.5309048

My ships sunk is 2,329.
My times vomited is 530.
My distance sailed is 15,921,006

77 feels really low. One of us did something wrong. lol.

@william-flint

The more i vomit and the less i sail the better pirate i become. This algorithm indeed had too much grog XD

I personally think times vomited should be replaced with chests cashed in if we are determining a Pirate score. Sure grog is an important part but the loot is greater! Especially considering the ratio of more chests cashed in to less distance sailed.

@klutchxking518 your problem my friend, is that while you have sank a respectable amount of ships your debauchery is lagging way behind, and for both of these scores you have sailed an astoundingly long distance, meaning that while bloodthirsty and successful, you are very inefficient. As the pirates are not known for wanting to work hard for their plot and debauchery this is a problem for your pirate score.

Still, that is terrifying, the crew of the Drunken Angler will have to keep a wary eye out for you.

@weakdexx
I understand it may seem that way, but in order to rate how good of a pirate you are you have to focus on a pirates goals, not what all the stories about them focus on.
More debauchery for less work = living the pirate dream. My algorithms are grog fueled, but spot on.

@kommodoreyenser
I understand why you feel that way, but this is our pirate score. History may find how much loot pirates took important, but in terms of pirates what really mattered was how much debauchery they could attain with said loot. Since drinking too much grog is our primary means of debauchery times vomited must remain in the algorithm.

Now how much loot a pirate took is an important factor in how we remember a pirate, but so is how well known and feared that pirate was. Any treasure hunter, adventurer, or merchant can show up with a chest of gold, and pirates were more likely by far to end up with a fishing boats catch as their prize rather than the contents of a treasure galleon. For these reasons we decided that ships sunk would serve as the value for the "historical " score (for lack of a better term). After all, you can't commit an act of piracy without taking loot from another ship.

These are devided by distance sailed because efficiency is important (if we wanted to work hard we would be living terrible lives on merchant or navel vessels) and the whole thing is multiplied by 1000 just because who wants their pirate score to be a tiny decimal.

@william-flint

Well in terms of termonology the best pirate means the most debauchery pirate.

I either sink 1 ship and vomite 10 times. Or i sink 10 ships and vomit 1 time. The score be the same. Now vomitting which would be your debauchery is considered as a hard value to decide best pirate rank.

Plus its a bit on the lose end when u take sailed meters in account. I understand your mention about most efficient. And i understand u take a number which is trackable. But i could sail all day and find no-one. Not to do with my ineffecienty. Just bad luck on finding targets to sink. While if i go arena i could sink 10 ships without sailing 1 meter.

Like the thought of this algorithm and i reckon use it to your hearts content :)

To show my willingness:

((3282 x 166)/22,496,305)x1000 = 24.21

And to add to this.

Your first commenter sunk about 1/3 of the ships i sunk.
Vomited about 10 times as much. and sailed about 1/4 of my meters. This turns out that this pirate has a 10 times higher ranking than me.

I could be top tier pirate by doing nothing but vomit.
1 ship sunk
100 vomits
10 meters sailed (left port to sink that 1 ship while being totally drunk.

((1x100)/10)x1000 = 10000 rank.
But can we call this examplairy person the best pirate? even if we just look at debauchery? This 10000 rank pirate is nothing more than a lucky drunk XD.

Still thanks for the algorithm.

PS: a sober pirate can never be a ranked pirate according to this formula. It will end up being 0. So even the best pirate will be the worst if it dont vomit. He could drink 100 grogs but if he holds it and 0 vomits than u are out of the rankings my friend.

@william-flint I'm actually quite peaceful. It's just in my amount of sailing time, I've accrued a bit of a record. I do, however, admit to being very against that blasted blue barrel on my ship. Get rid of it.

@klutchxking518 your stats are high in terms of ships sunk and vomiting however when you take into account the distance (an indicator of how long you have been playing) it reduces it significantly. The algorithm is designed to look at how potent a pirate you are. If you are sailing and not sinking ships you will have a low rating. For example you have sunk 4 times as many ships as me but you have sailed more that 3,000 times more distance than I have. Have you really sailed that far?

I've been playing a few months since the Steam release, my stats are:
Ships sunk: 540
Times vomited:442
Distance sailed: 4,834

((540 x 442) / 4,834) x 1,000 = 49,375

@weakdexx you raise some good points, especially about the sober pirate not having a score. To that end I had actually thought that we should add 1 to each value, so that such a pirate could be ranked. But as I drank a small pot of grog while developing this it must have slippedy mind by the time we finished it.

As for the luck....is not luck an extremely important part of being a pirate? Are the ships you find loaded with treasure or loaded with fish? Do you run into ships whose captains stop and turn over their loot, fight ferociously, or run so you have to give chase? Is the sail on the horizen a potential prize or the royal navy coming for you? Luck is such an important factor in determining whether you get to debauch into old age or end your days early in a noose that I have no qualms about it being a factor in the algorithm.

You are also correct that the algorithm can be gamed so that drinking is more important than hunting, and I have a few comments on that. First, as you acknowledge the ranking is just for fun and we wanted to keep it simple without too many extra parts to balance factors. Second, there is a certain amount of good faith that pirates will be trying to hunt down prey and not just drinking in the tavern. Third, as I think is important with any algorithm, this can be partially rectified by looking at the algorithm as a whole rather than just the score. A high score denotes someone who may be worthy of notice, but then you have to look at the numbers to see how they really check out.

Think of it this way: a drunk in a tavern telling tales of the ships he has captured may, for a time, impress the naive as a mighty pirate. But eventually everyone will realize it is just bluster.

And finally, your engaging with my ridiculous grog fueled ranking system has made me happy, so thanks for the comments.

@capteggpants wow, that is a ton of ships sunk for not much distance sailed. Do you play arena much? We didn't really factor that in as we don't play it at all, so that may be one giant flaw in our algorithm. Just another reason to hate that abomination of a game mode :p

Edit: looking at the stats it's not clear if they track ships sunk in arena too. If not you are truly terrifying.

@William-Flint I'm a measly 10.8

@capteggpants Been playing since launch!

@william-flint

All good matey. Its for the fun :)

one more discussion point ;)
The luck part on ship sinking u mention.
Wether the ship holded loot, handed it over or not, etc etc is not counted in the algorithm. it only looks at sink. Not what got gained from it. In that way its tied a bit to luck, wether u find them at all.

Would it make me a BAD pirate if i end up in servers where just 1 sloop is in the DR? i spawned at Golden Sands. Got to sail LOTS of meters to MAYBE find it.
This "value" for the formula is not influenced by me. All i can do is sail more to find the ship to sink. The more i sailed to find it the less best pirate score i gain from it.

1 ship sunk
1 vomit (else rank be 0 if vomit is 0)
1000 meters (couldnt find the ship to sink)

((1x1)/1000)x1000)= 1

Now i had to sail 1500 meters
((1x1)/1500)x1000) = 0,66

Could call it less effiecent as u state but it is not entirly up 2 my effecienty. Wether i decide to sink or not the found ship does influence my effecienty in this formula. Wether i found a ship and thus sailed more or less meters is something i hardly can influence to gain better effiecenty ranking as the best pirate. Thus that being the luck part.

@william-flint I'm not good, I'd say just about average. I have started to play arena so my stats may include that too. If so, I think I've competed in 130 contests or around that figure. I guess that could skew the stats. I'm just starting to grind arena a little more to try and work towards that cutlass. I'd be interested for them to add a counter for how many times some one has sunk my ship, although I scuttle/sink it at the end of a session or sometimes when I'm tucking.

@klutchxking518 That makes sense, that's a lot of miles! I only got the game at steam launch. I like to play FPS games and I watch Summit stream and it was though him playing the game that I got into it, though I never come around to the idea of buying it from the Microsoft store.

@william-flint said:

((Ships sunk × times vomited)/distance sailed) ×1000 = your pirate ranking.

((3150*316)/11255766)*1000 = 88.43

My pirate should party more.

@william-flint 97.5
But I cheated by moving the decimal point... and I lied. Cheating, lying and pirating... arrr!

@william-flint

Good enough to know I need neither 1v1 nor some arbitrary formula to tell me my legend's worth.

@william-flint said in Just how good of a pirate are you?:

Last week a dispute arose among my crew over who was the best pirate. Initially were going to have an epic duel over to settle the matter, but since we still can't do that years after release, we turned to math.

Can't have a duel? What about blunderbombs, firebombs, and gunpowder kegs?

I'm questioning your math.

@danquememe
Firebombs? Blunderbombs? Chucking things at one another is how children with water balloons settle disputes. Real pirates turn to the cutlass or grog fueled math.

@pollyoliverperk said in Just how good of a pirate are you?:

@william-flint 97.5
But I cheated by moving the decimal point... and I lied. Cheating, lying and pirating... arrr!

This is acceptable.

Ships Sunk = 133
Times Vomited = 73
Distance Sailed = -0m (yes my stats are glitched and Rare have said "its a bug we are aware of" and closed my support ticket)

and so 133x73/0x1000 = 9,709,000 (as you cant devide by 0 this step skipped)
I guess I win?
I am by far the best pirate ever XD

@durpdog96 unfortunately this makes you the worst at zero as you can’t just skip it but nice try. I wonder why the stats are bugged... seems strange :(

I think the calculation would be better by including chests instead of vomit. What do you think?

@william-flint I did some testing and can confirm the stats include arena.

@capteggpants said in Just how good of a pirate are you?:

@durpdog96 unfortunately this makes you the worst at zero as you can’t just skip it but nice try. I wonder why the stats are bugged... seems strange :(

I think the calculation would be better by including chests instead of vomit. What do you think?

it would be 0 if it was times not devide. so if we cant skip the step and cant devide by 0 it would not be possible to continue there for i am a mystery number so i am either the worst OR the best you may never know ;)

not to sure why its bugged i raised a support ticket and the response came back "its a bug we are aware of" and the ticket closed :(

also i feel chests cashed in should count after the life of a pirate is to find treasure so more treasure means better pirate

@capteggpants chests turned in can be indicative of pirates, treasure hunters, merchants, or land based thieves. We felt ships sank did a better job of indicating both the fear pirates engender in others, as well as being the only indicator we have in the stats of potential treasure taken through actual piracy. On the flip side, since most pirates spent what wealth they acquired on shameless debauchery, both on land and at sea, times vomited is essential to our pirate score.

It is disappointing to hear that arena ships sank are included in stats labeled under am adventure heading on the website. A potential correction is to devide the whole score by arena matches completed (+1) to make up for the high target environment, but since that stat can only be viewed in game as far as I know it complicates things.

@durpdog96 unfortunately due to this issue all we can determine is that you are the most buggy pirate to respond, and in need of a good delousing :p.

As for chests turned in, that was discussed. You can see my reply immediately above this for the reasons it was rejected.

In addition, I would argue that getting the most debauchery in before being hanged was the goal of piracy, and attaining treasure was just a means to the end.

@durpdog96 you are right, it’s not zero. It’s impossible. So does that mean you are not a pirate and I’m fact an agent of the Royal Navy?

@capteggpants said in Just how good of a pirate are you?:

@durpdog96 you are right, it’s not zero. It’s impossible. So does that mean you are not a pirate and I’m fact an agent of the Royal Navy?

Oh no my cover has been blown.

ABORT MISSISON