Apologies in advance for the soap box I'm about to climb up on here.
I agree with the OP, safer seas feels like such a let down. Yes, I get that we're supposed to play High Seas more often, and use Safer Seas for practice. But as a player who nearly reached pirate legend a few years ago, took several years off without playing the game, and has recently come back? I was so excited to see that there were 'private servers' - and I was then very let down when I realized that Safer Seas are NOT that. I use them for grinding Tall Tales. I use them for fishing so that I can just chill and do my own thing without worrying about someone coming along and sinking me for no reason other than to take fish they haven't spent time working towards. But I don't bother to collect any treasure I see floating by. I don't dig up any treasure. I don't do quests/voyages. They're not worth it in Safer Seas, and that's super depressing. It's such a big part of the game, and it's so fun! But it's not viable at its current payout.
Before someone jumps down my throat and says that if I want to make gold I have to play on High Seas, I absolutely agree that we shouldn't be making full gold on Safer Seas. There would be little incentive to play High Seas at all if you could earn full rewards on Safer Seas, and the High Seas servers would devolve even further into a toxic PvP wasteland. It makes sense that you earn less reward for less risk. But at its current setup where you make roughly 30% of the value you would get when selling the item in High Seas? It just feels BAD. It feels so pointless, like a waste of time. It needs adjusting to be more balanced. My opinion is that earning roughly 45-55% would be a step in the right direction, pushing 60-70% of their High Seas selling price for some things like fish.
Let me give you an example here so you can see where I'm coming from.
I wanted to try something new, very outside my skill set and something I hadn't done before in High Seas, and I decided that doing it in Safer Seas was the way to go so I could get some experience. So my friend and I decided to do the world event where we have to fight Flameheart's ghost fleet. It's a long fight, and neither of us are experts in naval combat, so we were going to make mistakes and miss shots. It wasn't going to be fast or efficient. But we were going to learn, and we were going to have fun. We did it, even though it took us way longer than some other players would have taken. And we were proud of ourselves. It was great experience, both at the helm and on cannons... But when we got to the outpost, our moods quickly crashed: First, we had to turn in every single piece of loot we had earned by hand without the convenience of the Sovereigns. I know that a few years ago, the Sovereigns weren't a thing and all loot had to be turned in that way - and guess what, I hated it back then, too. I don't understand why the devs chose to take away that convenience for Safer Seas. If we're already earning barely any gold for our treasure, having to walk it all the way across the island is just kicking us while we're down. I've genuinely had sessions where I just give up and log out without even turning all my treasure in on Safer Seas because it's not worth the time or effort. My second complaint is the summary of the OP. After taking out Flameheart, there were more chests, skulls, and various treasure on the boat I'd ever amassed before. It was really cool to see it all stacked on the bow. We felt like we did something big and would have earned at least some decent gold. But every single turn in was so disappointing and lackluster. Watching those gold numbers roll in and be so small was such a defeat. It completely nullified any positive feelings we had about our success.
Another example is that I'm trying to get better at solo slooping. I'm doing short sessions in High Seas, and more often than not I get rolled, and I spend time in Safer Seas trying to get better. I will admit that sometimes I run into cool people who aren't jerks, which is nice. But it's not the norm. For example, I took on a sea fort for the first time, since they weren't part of the game when I last played. I wanted to be able to take my time and focus on the task, to see how it worked and how well I could handle it, and to learn what I needed to do better. And crucially, I wanted to do this without other random players coming and ruining my day while I explored content that was new to me, because while PvP is very much a part of this game that I respect, what I DON'T respect or like is if I get on the speaking trumpet and try to talk to a ship that's coming at me and say "Hey, I'm working on this hard thing, please don't kill me. I don't even have much treasure on board, can we talk and can you maybe let me finish this thing I'm struggling with first?" or something along those lines... people ignore you, kill you, probably spawn camp you so you can't do anything to fight back, and sink your ship. That's what people usually mean when they talk about toxicity and trolling in this game. It's just rude. Are you really having fun being a bully and WRECKING that solo slooper with your 3 man Brig? If you come across someone who clearly does NOT want to engage in PvP or is at a much lower skill level than you are, and they're doing something like a Tall Tale or a voyage for another company that won't benefit you very much if at all, WHY would you still sink them? Just to be a jerk? That's stupid, and that's the kind of situation I face almost every time I login because my PvP skills are not as high as people who spend their time doing hourglass and being sweaty. I just want to chill and be a pirate. If I'm sitting there with the one single skull I snagged out of some flotsam after logging in and I'm just trying to exist, LEAVE ME ALONE.
Yes, you could be smug here and say "Get Good." But the whole point here is, I'm TRYING to. But I'm not going to get better if people make me hate the game and want to stop playing it, because I can't ever accomplish anything.
So. All this to explain that I was hoping Safer Seas would be a place where I could play at my own speed, and also get better at the game - without feeling like I'm completely wasting my time. Because when I pull into an outpost after five hours with more treasure on my ship than I've ever had before, and make a TINY amount of gold? It just feels bad. It doesn't feel like I had a victory and accomplished something by trying out that fort or spending all that time taking out that ghost fleet. It just feels like a waste of time and effort. And it feels bad because I KNOW if I took the time to try these things at my current skill level in High Seas, someone else would come along who is better at PvP than I am and sink me while I'm already struggling from the long hard fight, and I won't have learned anything except that I hate people and I'm apparently not good enough to play this game that I otherwise really enjoy. Which I don't think is the message any game devs should be sending their players. Maybe that's just me.
