SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them

  • Lucid Stew
    Founder

    @soulless-rager said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    If that's the case then it doesn't inspire much hope for them finally improving mechanics like varied ship damage. Things like torn sails/rigging, broken masts, disabled modules like the capstan/rudder/cannons, fire damage, etc.

    Those should be precisely the types of things they're able to pull off because the ships are already a collect of components. Disabling the function of components or improving those components is in the game's wheelhouse. Making things that affect ships, and more specifically the ship of the player are what they centered performance around. As they continue to optimize, I'd bet some of those ideas would come to fruition. I'd also bet that the world itself will continue to be fairly static.

  • Maddious
    Founder

    @WilliamHerschel, I do agree with you, but Rare is showing a from of incompetence only seen by some starter indie game studios, and is asking full price for s.o.t. We can only hoop that they can pull a rabbit out of that Rare hat. But it's not looking good for future updates.

    I don't like it, but this game will be death at release anniversary next year.
    Based on Rare conduct, thus far.

  • Ghostpaw
    Legend

    I don’t mind the events just being filler. What bothers me is elements like the thrones and mermaid statues are going to remain in the world now. The reason this bugs me is there is no reason given for these things to exist in the game world. They just showed up. Why exactly are there groaning mermaid statues around the islands now? And why are we destroying them? Are they bothering something or hindering some enterprise important to the SoT world? Why are we sitting in difficultly placed chairs? In six months, is anyone going to know what purpose these elements play within the world?

    These sound like stuff pitched during a spitballing session about things to add for gameplay. But they were not refined much from the initial idea, and little effort was made to incorporate them into the game. These elements feel slapped on rather than being part of a larger narrative. Maybe someone with the Tales book can tell me if something in those pages explains the appearance of the thrones and statues. As it is I am baffled as to why they showed up and, beyond earning a new type of coins, why I am supposed to sit on or destroy them.

    I keep thinking back to the trailer for Forsaken Shores/Cursed Sails. The OOS merchant goes through a riveting narrative that was very similar to Galadriel‘s scene with Frodo in the LOTR movie. At the end she realizes the pirate doesn’t care about the story and just wants coins for the curiosity he brought to her. It feels like the introduction of these new elements is like that. “Don’t bother with much explaination, just give them coins.” No. That is how a 9-year old tells a story; just toss stuff in as it comes to you. Rare, you have a vision! You are extraordinary artists! You can do better than this. Either new elements make sense with the game’s universe or they don’t. If they don’t, retool the idea to make it blend with the game and provide us a motive other than gaining coins for caring about it. Get some storytellers in there!

  • Doomed Panda

    I'm still enjoying the game, but it certainly has lots of room to improve.

    I have zero complaints about the bi-weekly events. The statues were kind of a miss for me, but that's not really a big deal. These aren't supposed to be big mechanic/content introductions. Just little side quests for some cosmetics.

    Draw distance, AI, combat, and some solution to the riddle problem are top of my list. Merchants need a pretty serious overhaul.

    I would love to see more dynamic ship damage with fire, torn sails, etc. This would probably be a pretty significant undertaking from a technical standpoint though.

    More treasure spawns on islands, rewards for kraken and meg, and more ambient sea life would go a long ways towards making the world feel more alive.

  • Johhn0
    Master
    Insider

    I agree with the OP, the game is shallow and how Rare are going about adding content is pretty lack luster.

    What I find interesting is Rare intend this game to be a continued source of revenue via micro transactions and following the "game as a service" model, I just don't see it succeeding.

    Let's discuss pay to win for a second, assume the game had a vertical progression system and pay to win was an option. People would be annoyed right? No disagreements i'd imagine.

    Now, the game has a horizontal progression system, the clothing on your back is a direct relation to your effort in the game, how "good you are" so to speak, a direction indicator of your progression. If I can buy horizontal progression elements in a game where horizontal progression is the core.. how is that any different to a pay to twin scenario in a vertically progressed title?

    Its not.

    If you can buy an amazing looking outfit, or ship, people arent going to look at you with the wonderment they might look at a pirate legend, or Athena 10 player.. they'll just see you as a dude who paid for that set.

    In a game progression is literally cosmetics, micro transactions that allow you to skip progression for cosmetics is pay to win.

  • MattyDove74
    Marauder

    @ghostpaw Laaaaaaaaaaazy Rare. Casual game though, no need to worry about these things.

  • WilliamHerschel
    Castaway
    Insider
    Founder

    @deathcameras has some good suggestions in a feedback thread. Again, I think people fell in love with this game because of the sandbox. The sandbox needs to be the priority again.

    You have this team focusing on mundane weekly events, I’m probably not going to participate in this underwater statue nonsense, I don’t want to reward your team for making a statue model and randomizing its locations, I’d much rather those resources be focused on fixing disconnects, shooting out of the cannon bug that sometimes causes dmg although the dmg part may have stopped, and other problems that make the experience frustrating.

    Instead of the mundane Bilge Rat adventures I’d rather have things in the game that create better stories; like these mechanics:

    a) Force a player to walk the plank
    b) Swabbing the deck (how is this not in the game)
    c) More cosmetics for female players it’s lacking and you have a female player base
    d) Pets and fishing are still good ideas
    e) more ocean life like dolphins at least, and whales would be great

  • Hynieth
    Master
    Insider

    I agree in that some events are a bit lackluster. Not just the fact that we're doing boring tasks but mostly because there's no lore reason behind it. If Rare qould just add a couple of lines of dialogue to Duke for him saying things like "Whelp I don't know what this will do but it's not like we're going to unleach skeletons or something." Would help give this some background. Gunpowder skeletons was a great event, we got a new AI pattern and it got my hopes high for future content.

    I do however need to admit this is just weekly events. Little things to tide us over for the major updates like cursed sails and Forsaken shores.

    Now if Rare doesn't deliver on those I'm going to be truely dissapointed. However I have hope.

  • XRayLexx
    Lord
    Insider
    Founder

    @cardshark-360
    Sorry. Big fan of the game and was a little frustrated with the endless knitpicking and whinging. My apologies.

  • MrGrim67686

    @lucid-stew said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    @a-cranky-eskimo said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    Always wondered if the game was falling short due to something like this.... Sad to hear they finally admitted it, but it’s better than hoping in vain for another 2 years or whatever...

    They don't come straight out and say it. You have to look a bit at the data presented and read between the lines a little. Probably the most informative of their tech blog updates is this one:

    and then part 3 goes into a little more depth as to why the ships are an issue:

    Actually its worse than just the ships being a resource hog. One of the biggest issues is when a number of ships with a lot of items on board are all in the same area. This may be why people have/had weird issues around ships carrying a bunch of chests and crates. But, unfortunately what it basically means is that from a performance standpoint, the cheapest things they can add are content for a single ship or static stuff that has nothing to do with ships.(read statues and thrones) I think Meg works out ok because it's highly unlikely anyone would attempt it with scores of chests on-board, although it would be an interesting experiment to see if 3-4 heavily laden ships could get the engine to c**g. This also explains other design decisions like the limited amount of ships and players in an instance and the schizophrenic draw distance. i.e. its easier to say that you intend for ships to run into each other every 45 minutes than it is to say that the engine can't really handle more than 3 or 4 ships in close proximity.

    Aye. My attempts at fleet building have been met with mass crashes to the dashboard. The longer more than one ship sails together, thd more unstable the game becomes. Sailing three+ ships is a good way to get kicked off the server quickly. Just two will get you booted in about an hour’s time if you are staying close.

  • XRayLexx
    Lord
    Insider
    Founder

    @williamherschel I think maybe the best solution would be to keep introducing these little “weekly events” but don’t have an end date on them. Because players have a limited time to get the doubloons they spend most of that weeks/two weeks play time trying to complete the tasks.
    Personally I’ve enjoyed them all so far but with my limited gaming time and the deadlines I am having to spend most of my time swimming around looking for statues and not being a pirate.

  • MrGrim67686

    @hynieth said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    I agree in that some events are a bit lackluster. Not just the fact that we're doing boring tasks but mostly because there's no lore reason behind it. If Rare qould just add a couple of lines of dialogue to Duke for him saying things like "Whelp I don't know what this will do but it's not like we're going to unleach skeletons or something." Would help give this some background. Gunpowder skeletons was a great event, we got a new AI pattern and it got my hopes high for future content.

    I do however need to admit this is just weekly events. Little things to tide us over for the major updates like cursed sails and Forsaken shores.

    Now if Rare doesn't deliver on those I'm going to be truely dissapointed. However I have hope.

    We don’t even get Bilge Rats. We get Duke clones spouting bad innuendo.
    “C*m seeking... adventure”? Oy.

  • MarSara1
    Lord
    Insider
    Founder

    @xraylexx I agree. I've just been scuttling my ship and island hoping looking for mermaids statues, not actually playing the core game.
    Which in turn then makes me feel burnt out on the game only to have another 2 weekly event pop up. At least the Keg Skellies were part of the OoS quests.

    I think the doubloons should stay (or reduce) after the event, but the cosmetics should only last those 2 weeks to spur on engagment

  • dotcomrobots
    Master
    Insider

    Rare is recruiting right now... I think they are looking for talented people to counter those issues as soon as possible...

    I'm sure they can do it... there are other dev teams out there that have fixed problems far more complicated ...

  • KnifeLife
    Commander
    Insider
    Founder

    @williamherschel As usual, well thought out and written post. I completely agree with what you're saying and myself was thinking about the events a couple of days ago.

    When the game first launched i played it soo much with various crews but after about 3 weeks and with how little was added since beta ect i was just burnt out and stopped playing i couldn't be bothered to push the legend i just felt drained off doing the same 3 things on repeat.

    My big hope was the weekly events, i had been looking forward to them and was speculating the different ways which they could change the game up and add interesting new ways to expand and create new experiences.

    For me the only two events i actually done was "The hungering deep" and i had a little play around with the Skeleton Barrels also.
    But that was litrally because of community members here what pulled me back, @stacky-a and @Tartansnake-8 where kind enough to invite me on the last day of HD and basically carry me through it. And on the Gunpowder event i played that because @CaptnJaq invited me in. Ultimately it wasnt the events that got me playing it was the community.

    So now ive given my life story for no apparent reason lol i personally was thinking i would rather have a more fleshed out event once a month where the devs might maybe have abit more time to add an interesting spin on things. I think that would be better then the current ones, they just feel like a push to just try and buy time and keep players on.

  • Yo its Jerm
    Commander
    Insider
    Founder

    @lucid-stew said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    @williamherschel said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:

    Rare continues to ignore larger deficiencies in the SoT sandbox

    That's because there is no sandbox. A while ago they published a little piece about optimizing for UE4, and sort of revealed the basic problem with SoT. They are dedicating so many resources to the ships that there basically isn't processing power to do much else. This is why every THING, except for ships and cannonballs, in the game is static, stationary, or an inventory item. They can't build a sandbox. This is why the most compelling content they've added so far is the Meg encounter. It's an interesting thing they were able to do with ships. Cursed Sails and cursed cannonballs? Ships. Cool stuff with ships and lame stuff on land will be the theme, because that it is the corner they painted themselves into.

    Could this be fixed with some sort of instancing?

    Edit: not really a fix, more of a workaround.

  • MarsMayflower
    Captain
    Insider

    what is there is fun. can I be happy with what is there without worrying about what would theoretically be better?

    "i ain't got time to complain about something that ain't worth complainin' about."

    -some random guy

  • ZkilfinG
    Captain
    Insider

    I agree with most of it. Barrel skeletons is the most entertaining update so far. I hope Rare looks at big community events and think about how they can support that. Why not add sailing races or ship to ship arena battles as attractions in the game? Lots of other open world games have minigames etc.

  • ShootHere4EXP
    Captain
    Insider

    @williamherschel Thanks for the shout out!

    I suppose this is a good time to explain why I haven't been as active on the forums lately, and to be clear it has little to do with the game itself.

      1. Leading up to and following Launch was the critical time for the SOT community to make their voice heard for the direction of the game. It was the time to make it clear to the Devs that the current content wasn't enough, and influence their Content Plan going forward. I was most active in this period because it was the time I could have the most influence in making the SOT community voice heard.
      1. Once RARE came out with their Content Plan I felt as though my role was complete. The Content Plan I felt was a good start in answering the community's desires as voted on in my CONTENT POLL. Since then, I have been playing the game and watching as it grows, enjoying the progress and waiting to see if our hopes for this game can be achieved.

    • 3.The Content I created took a LOT of work, but I was happy to do it and enjoyed it for the chance of really influencing the community and this game. It was successful beyond my wildest hopes, now I want to give Rare the chance to respond. I play the game almost daily, but my life is also super busy right now. I work in Hollywood and I am doing more than ever before for my job, in my personal life I am also planning a Wedding on top of buying and taking care of a new house. I'm also fulfilling some art commissions in my spare time, so I simply haven't had the time to spare to do SOT content, especially when I don't consider it to be a priority now that we are in the DLC cycle.

    I will return to do Content Again when I think the time is right for the community to voice itself on the direction of the game. Cursed Sails is an expansion I'm very excited for given my work on the Brig Model, so I may be active following it's release if I don't find it satisfying.

    Thanks to all of you for appreciating and viewing my work, you guys are awesome and I really do hope this game delivers on it's potential. I'll keep playing, but always with a critical eye.

    S.

  • WilliamHerschel
    Castaway
    Insider
    Founder

    @shoothere4exp

    Thanks for the reply! It'll be interesting to look back on that content poll a year from now. NPC Enemies and Factions were the third most popular item, but I do think that Rare needs to seriously take a look at revisiting the NPC Enemies that they already have and making substantial AI improvements to each type. I think at the time of the poll, many didn't realize how shallow the PvE experience is, and how much of the overall strategy involves kiting and exploiting enemy tracking issues. It'd also be interesting to see how many folks would vote for an "AI improvements" category.

    Looking forward to future content from you!

  • TheOtherVillain
    Ship Mate

    @omnipotence13 said in SoT Has Significant Problems and the Community Needs to Be More Vocal About Them:
    but mostly it’s a quiet way of enabling new players to learn the required tools.

    That is a great argument. The one issue is that the rewards are temporary. If this is their idea of makeshift new player guide they shouldn't make it time sensitive. I know if I were a new player I'm not going to waste my time with a pointless check list just so I can say I did it. Might as leave it all in so new players have a motivation to learn the ropes.

  • Omnipotence13
    Captain
    Insider

    I have seen legendary pirates working with crews of low levels in order to secure low level chests and skulls to complete their check lists .

    So people will. But mostly an optional tutorial shouldn’t give a bunch of loot. It’s a guide for those wanting to learn

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