Bad reputation needs improvements
For those who haven’t played as a bad reputation before I’ll explain the pros and cons for being a bad rep below, but as it stands bad reputation is not worth going at all, I understand why there is systems in place to make good rep and bad rep different from each other, as in AA having a bounty had no effect and even allowed you to spawn kill and constantly harass people compared to now, but this system is not perfect in my opinion.
Pros
Bad reps are allowed to fight any ship, and NPC without consequence other than gaining notoriety .
Bad reps are allowed to fight the GN without a reputation shield like good reps, meaning GN can’t just mess with you and steal sealed chests from boats you sink.
You can steal from private storages, not much of a upside when private storages have a very small rate to give items compared to normal chests.
Downsides
You will get jailed whenever a GN or a person that is bounty hunting you kills you, the duration at most is 10 minutes so it isn’t a big deal, though if you are ever in a team fight with your friends, you are automatically kicked out of the fight for around 10 minutes, its not very fun when that happens.
You can not talk to normal town NPCs, having to rely on shipwrights that are scattered around the world, there is currently only 4 that bad reps have to rely on, with none being on Revanna, meaning if you have a broken ship at max level, good luck. You also can’t buy stuff from merchant ships.
Notoriety system as a whole, you are forced to constantly go to a sponsor to get rid of your notoriety now that notoriety ships respawn if they idle too long, unless if you are willing to deal with 3 majors or commanders every 10-20 minutes, and for those who are good reps, these guys are over the level cap, and they pilot heavy ketches that are impossible to fight solo in the water, and even if you sunk those boats the NPCs will swim onto your boat, fighting overleveled NPCs close range is not viable at all. To add onto this, if you chose to fight them in a populated area like Ravenna because your ship is already broken, players will likely bounty hunt you while you are distracted.
How is this a problem?
I kind of talked about the issue before in the above, the cons outweigh the pros in this case I believe, as you have to deal with your notoriety constantly, its not a fun feature with how the NPCs work, they will constantly track where you are located at anytime, if you sink any of their ships or hit them directly, they will get off of their boat and start swimming towards you with infinite stamina, and can’t drown, forcing you to fight them, when its max notoriety you have to deal with 3 majors, and as far as I can tell because I’m a mage the best approach is to outrange them due to being over leveled and having to deal with a large amount of GN members at once.
Now that wouldn’t be a issue but this happens every 10-20 minutes, and trying to do a boat fight with 3 heavy ketches as a normal boat is not fun to do, since if you sink their boat out in middle of the ocean you’ll have to deal with a major on your small little boat with no cover or anything, good luck when they are over your level.
Jail time adds up, sure you can have someone free you but the idea of having to watch youtube or do something else for 10 minutes is kind of boring.
The rest of the downsides aren’t too bad, but the issue is bad shops do not have the same sold items as good shops, meaning you can’t buy the stuff that players sell to shop owners, and there’s only one location where you can access shops outside of shipwrights, and the shipwrights are somewhat scattered.
my main issue is imagine being a bad rep spawning at Ravenna, only for your boat to get annihilated because of 3 heavy ketches spawning around you the second you spawned in with too much notoriety, and if you try fighting them off a random player could just bounty hunt you while you’re busy, it doesn’t feel very fun to play.
“but why don’t you just remove your notoriety” the price gets pretty high at higher notoriety levels, and its a bit annoying to have to keep on constantly paying to remove your notoriety just because you sunk one ship and then sunk the GN notoriety ships that went after you.
The solutions?
-
Give jailed players something to do in the mean time, sure 10 minutes isn’t a whole lot of time, but it does add up, just being jailed 6 times is a whole hour, we could possibly mine stuff like in Revanna’s jail, or perhaps being allowed to roam around on silverhold to do multiple different things, such as being allowed to cook, checking the bounty boards, fish? if we try to enter the water we will just drown and get sent back to jail.
-
Add more netrual/evil shipwrights or check out my 3rd idea.
-
Make a disguise system for negative rep players to use, it won’t be a perfect disguise like for those who completed the storyline, but it should at least function for a short amount of time to let the player talk to some shops, perhaps a 5-10 minute duration at most before the disguise fails due to people regonizing the player (could scale with the amount of bounty the player has) once people regonize the player the disguise goes on cooldown, and will not work on the same island until a set amount of time passes.
-
Change the notoriety system, I have a few ideas written down but personally I think the best one would be to make it so notoriety NPCs hunting you down do not know where you are located at all times, having to rely on reports on you whenever you commit a crime, kind of like how the bounty board works, essentially they will only know the location of where you committed a crime, and not where you are located at all times.
-
To add onto 4, this is more like a potential bug report but I’m not entirely sure, but regardless, fix this or improve how much notoriety you passively lose, as I’m pretty sure either this feature got scrapped or it does not work, as the price for losing notoriety never changed for me despite not breaking any laws for around 30 minutes in game.
