Oh dear, I bet you, my lovely reader, are looking at this post and thinking “oh for goodness sake, another post complaining about hourglass”. I’m not here to tell you that you’re incorrect, because that’s exactly what it is, but I’m hoping you’ll indulge me, maybe out of boredom or curiosity, either is appreciated.
I love hourglass. Or, I love the concept of it. A game mode where two crews duke it out to take home the win for their chosen faction, rewarded ultimately with highly desirable curses that all long term players have wanted at some point or another. That alone, is great, the music is great, the feeling of coming up from the dive with your factions theme is great, but the gameplay? It feels painful, long, tedious, and not worth it unless you’re playing on community weekend. However I’m not writing this to point that out, everyone knows these opinions already, but what I am trying to point out is that everyone, while declaring that a certain aspect of hourglass is the problem, forgets that it falls into the same trend that sea of thieves has always suffered from, which is repetition of the same pattern for risk of losing it all.
No, this is not me about to suggest lowering the level requirement for curses or adding rewards up the chain or increasing exp gain, as those are solutions that have also been mentioned repetitively with large debate. Instead, I would like to suggest that rare do as they have done since day one, make something fresh. An entirely new way to level up factions.
More specifically, I refer to different game modes that rare can implement that isn’t just “my ship sinks your ship and I get more xp* it could also be “my faction has claimed this island, now we kill the enemy and we win” basically like a control point but it’s entirely focused on land rather than naval combat.
Think of the old flameheart event where we had to choose between him and pendragon, we’d put flags up on each sea post to support our chosen, we can say that whoever has flag up until it reaches a certain value would win the mode, all while fighting off the enemy and the ghosts of the fort.
Or we could have another game mode like world event defence, where your job is either to attack or defend a certain target, defending that target will get you lots of xp, killing the target will get you lots of xp, either way you’re still going to be fighting the rival faction in the end.
The simplest idea goes down to 1 vs 1 death matches out of three, in which you’re placed in one area of an Island and forced to slash or shoot with no throwables or other interactive weapons other than those in your weapon slots.
I whole heartedly believe that despite hourglass making me feel like I want to stop playing the mode entirely (especially because of the rampant cheaters and toxicity associated with the mode) it has potential to be more enjoyable and an easier grind for people with more than just the one way to level up substantially.
Just imagine how bad it would’ve been now if we had to chase down all those merchant distinctions through putting animals in cages like we had to before there was anything new for the company. Getting to pirate legend was long. And not fun. Now? Now you can be a legend in no time and you are incentivised to do so.
But that’s essentially what these curses are in the end, just a glorified “pirate legend v2” cosmetic, because you’ve reached pirate legend already for the goat curse and reapers 75 for the skelly curse. the most I think can be done now is for a new mode of exp gain to come out, wether that be through 1v1, TDM, control point, attack and defence, or even anything similar to those.
Just to spice things up. Maybe when people haven’t had to sit through long queues for an enemy ship it will be more popular, especially without needing constant resupplies of a ship after battle.
