More Support for Existing Content

A major issue that I've long thought they should try to avoid more is killing off momentum with patches that tend to overreact to something happening and original designs that go outside of organic play.

The longest running example is commodities but there are many more.

Season 12. They turned the "fun season" into an extreme grind. Made the new tool irrelevant with wild and unecessary rng. Overreacted to people farming 1 item by doing a shrine as intended with a 250 item requirement. Making bad design worse and not fixing it until a season later. They should get credit for going back and making it better but there was an entire season of counterproductive design and decisions there.

Season 13. Commendations that really didn't even make sense (like 8 rituals) where all of the "captain the BB" commendations were generally terrible in organic play. Way too much one sided grinding and risk for a boat that just sinks slower than others.

Whether people liked the reaper change or not is irrelevant to the fact that it made the BB less appealing to captain after the change, and it very much showed and has shown ever since the change. That was an overreaction that led to a one sided change and the BB will never have momentum again. On top of this they removed the cof and added an irrelevant chest as the main prize. Every decision they made about the BB made it less organically appealing to Captain.

Yeah, reworking existing content can be helpful but not killing off organic appeal and momentum has to be a priority as well. Comms gotta be designed well at release and patches shouldn't put the final nail in the coffin of new content.

P.S. Guilds were just the 10th time they've created a cliquey status system in SoT that left out casual players. Like alliances it really added very little for substantive community interactions and encounters and just had people acting like bad bosses and underappreciated employees. Not good from the start, imo.

If feels as if SoT is reaching a more and more "content complete" point. There's so much stuff on the servers these days, with hardly any dull moments or open stretches of sea left. If you were to interact with all pieces of content you could on one GH Valut quest you'd end up fighting like 2 random encounters (old megs/skeleton ships), potentially encounter the ancient meg(s), or maybe encounter the kraken or BB. You would also probably pass a mermaid shrine, a skeleton camp, and a fortress. Probably find a bottle quest as well which would send you on a whole new tangent. The sea feels so full, so I really don't see what they can add except for a few new quests for the DB or whatever else.

The issue with SoT is that so much of the content doesn't work well. Like who is doing a skeleton fort? Why is doing non-raid WEs so weird? Additionally, there's a lot of interesting and fun activities that are simply no longer worth doing or haven't been updated for the new systems that have been added. Like the basic quests all use the old chests, which is fine but confusing. I wish they just updated them all to have the same new loot and changed the commendations to just use the new stuff. Captaincy, HG, Guilds, and the BB have all left their "honey moon" period and are getting very stale.

There have been many many many foundational changes made to the game these last few years and with Season 15 I think we've seen the payoff of all of that. Hopefully the pace of content that we got with S15 can continue and we see the team revisit and expand older features. Imagine if they were able to update all the tier 2 quests (like vaults, shipments, and fleets) in just one season! I'm hopeful for the future of SoT, I just hope they focus on real content rather than making a whole new progression system for the 8th time.

@fysics3037 said in More Support for Existing Content:

I'm hopeful for the future of SoT, I just hope they focus on real content rather than making a whole new progression system for the 8th time.

Add random weight to fishing. Add guild ledgers just for fun for guild members to compete/keep stats. Add ultra rare fish that are as rare as a shrouded ghost.

That right there would do more for fishing than just about anything else for an entire style of play.

Tavern entries. A tavern entry could be something tied to the site where people can submit stats they want to share and people can look through what people enjoy doing. People can customize it like a logbook and make it personal. Since logbooks are so often washed out or bugged it very much takes away from Captaincy. Let people create and connect outside of the game where it's not always as bugged. Whether it's fishing or hunting or HG or general adventuring it can allow people to share and get to know one another through their activity. Opt in.

There are these small cliques around SoT that largely decide what all the attention and focus goes on. It's outside of organic play and it's meta heavy all the time. One of the best adventure sandboxes ever made and the regs largely all focus on the same cosmetics, the same type of play, the same issues. A game that should be filled with individuality but is instead layered in conformity.

Should embrace the long game and the organic experience in future updates imo. Storytelling and individuality. Not just rushing the comms for the cosmetics in two days and then doing and talking about what everyone else does in the social areas.

@wolfmanbush I think season 15 did plenty for HC. It stuck to its roots while adding plenty of new content and rewards. We'll see how the rest of it comes together, but I don't agree that adding weight or ultra rare fish would really do much. After all the gameplay loop would be exactly the same.

I've made a lot of posts on potential reworks for older content that are doable, would help improve replay ability, and just generally freshen older content up. The one that best reflects my most recent thoughts and ideas are part of a very large rework to guilds, you can find it here (don't necro). Personally I think the game could be improved by incorporating out of game features/tools directly into the game, adding random elements that dramatically shake up gameplay or the experience, and improving PvP to be more approachable and incorporated for all types of players.

First of all, I think many of the tools/features (whether made by Rare or not) people rely on to interact with stuff such as progression, guilds, or reporting should be incorporated into the game. I went in depth on all the features I think are necessary for guilds in that thread I linked earlier, but I'll summarize it here. They should bring in the LFGuild system directly into the game, provide many many tools for describing and searching for guilds, and provide a guild chat with an announcement channel. It'd also be really cool if we could get some way to actually make LFC posts within your guild. Perhaps that could even link to the website somehow so you don't need to be at your computer to do it, and also so people could be notified of it. Another area that should be greatly expanded is progression tracking. Someone did make a tool for doing a printout of all the progression you made in SoT, with stuff like lifetime gold and percentage tracking towards all kinds of things. Like you can see your HG wr (crazy ik). There have also been tools made for tracking stuff like fish. Bringing a greatly reworked and expanded progression menu would be really nice, providing an easy place to look at all the different things you have done throughout SoT. The last thing is the reporting features. They've already started to bring that into the game but expanding that to more effective and varied reporting would be good. This would all just help make all the different forms of progression and stuff much more cohesive, which just makes it easier for casuals to approach.

The next thing I think they should focus on adding is random factors that can affect your gameplay experience, enhancing replay ability. On the WE side, I think they should bring back a lot of the old modified WEs like the Ashen Skeleton Fort/Fleets. They could bring back Fleefs and add a "of Fortune" version of all the World Events that is just harder and rarer, rather than having the CoF rotate to one thing and just sit there. They could add a bunch of other more common modifiers like having a ghost fleet go around a sea fortress instead (similar to that one event quest) or have an ashen winds that always has boiling water and the smoke effect. For the quests I think a similar thing would be cool. Maybe having a rare version of each quest would be cool, like a "Diamond Vault Key", similar to how you could get the BB in the OoS ghost fleets when at max rep. You could also change the enemies that you have to fight or add a small extra part of the mission. Imagine having to fight a siren queen or skeleton ship at the end of a lost shipment quest. Adding these kinds of updates would allow the game to feel fresh each time you play. It would also help create special moments that bring players together, like they want WE's to do, or create memories.

The final thing is just making improvements to HG and PvP in general. They need to balance the game well so that you can actually use whatever weapons you want and not basically be handicapping yourself. It'd just make it more fun for everyone. Also they should add some kind of tdm mode or feature that way the only way to practice a really important skill isn't just boarding boats. Especially with how they crack down on spawn camping so hard. Like if you wanna practice as a solo player what are you supposed to do?? It'd make it much better for everyone because the best players want the variety, the casuals need the practice, and it'd get people off new players backs. The last PvP/HG improvement I think they should make is vastly improving the defending system. This would let people play hourglass and do literally anything else. I think most people are "PvPvE" players and don't enjoy doing 100+ levels of HG that are just PvP. Also it'd help add variety to the naval HG experience without just making more modes (which distract from the core gameplay experience of a 1v1).

All of these just focus on improving the gameplay experience in all different kinds of ways, without changing the core of the content that is actually well done.

@wulfenthrad I always kinda imagined that it would just spawn in that way and if there were modifiers you could get extra rewards. And the modified one's wouldn't be raidable so they'd always have the adventure loot pool. I do kinda like the idea of amplifying the events with different things, like you were thinking of. Perhaps that idea could be tied into the "of fortune" versions y'know?

Also I don't agree with your take on balancing. The fastest way to kill someone in SoT has always been through swapping to the next weapon and shooting with that, over waiting for a reload. If every combo worked off that "one swap" mentality than you would get a consistent ttk throughout the entire game. From there you can tweak values such as ads time, individual damage (still has to combo), range, and whatever unique mechanics you want to create a "niche" for each weapon. At the very least, if every weapon combo could at least work off the "one swap combo" then they'd at least be viable. Further balancing from there would definitely be appreciated and help the game feel more varied and unique, but I wouldn't cry over it not happening. Currently on every boat you pretty much just always run sniper + something else... Not really ideal IMO. We could have it so playing a pistol/knife/whatever instead of sniper on certain roles would make more sense, without really needing reworks or anything.

@sirpebble323 did you just... miss S9? They have shown the capability to revisit old content with the season model before. No reason they can't do it now. Also using the small content updates in the beginning days of SoT as examples of good updates that satisfy the player base is just kinda wrong... On launch and for years after SoT was constantly criticized for not having enough content. Obviously the people that stuck with the low content would be fine with less content.

@sirpebble323 me and many others I've talked to agree that S9 would have been one of the best seasons if it didn't drag on. And that's no real fault on Season 9, more a fault on S10. I mean it literally made all the content in the game 10x more playable

@sirpebble323 ok? I mean I agree I guess, but that doesn't do anything to support your point about seasons being bad in general... Seasons and doing monthly releases w/ revisiting old content are not incompatible, nor are seasons at fault for most of what has happened with the game.