The Dark Seas are going to be something that we as a collective will probably end up spending a ton of time in. However, there are some issues with the general scale of the whole thing, and some more issues that come from that.
A lot of our time in the Dark Sea will be spent sailing, exploring the occasional island or diving spot, and fighting enemies (notably the Atlanteans and Sirens). However, not everyone is going to have the time to properly take their time and explore the Dark Sea in its entirety. So I propose two potential solutions to this problem for anyone with:
- Not enough time to actively explore the Dark Sea for multiple hours (you cannot leave with how the game currently works because you will lose all your progress).
- Those with terrible internet or those who want to play despite potentially having bad internet following or during some sort of event. This event could be a storm going over your house, probably while you were in the Dark Sea, and now the power is out meaning you potentially lost an hour of progress in an instant.
Solution 1: Saving your Location in the Dark Sea
This does pretty much what the title says, when you leave or are forced to leave while out in the Dark Sea. However, I should preface that this might not be necessarily very efficient for situations in which you lose power or your internet goes out (mostly because you lose the ability to communicate with the server). So I propose an auto-save mechanic that stores information pertaining to your ship’s location, and what is currently on your actual ship (sealed chests and the like). This could go alongside logging off normally as a way to get a more recent save state for your current situation.
There should however be some caveats and exceptions to this.
- Logging off while NPC combat logged will result in your ship losing 60% of its current HP and 25%-50% of the items currently placed on your ship ROUNDED UP. So if you have 20 sealed chests and 10 cargo and it rolls for 25% to be removed, it will take 5 sealed chests and 3 Cargo (up from 2.5) and DELETE them.
I’ll further this and say that after coming back you will gain a “Bad Luck” effect, which causes more negative Dark Sea events to appear around you and specifically TARGET YOU. Meaning if you meet up with a buddy, agro from ships is more likely to be drawn to you initially over your friend, and general bad weather events are more likely to happen to you or near you. - Player combat logging while out in the Dark Seas results in your ship being destroyed and you dropping all of your chests/cargo for the other player to take. Much simpler and arguably far worse since you lose all your progress, you better fight to the end out there or escape.
- Logging off inside of any severe weather event results in the severe weather spawning in worse the next time you get it. The game will remember the event you tried to hide from and amplify it to a limit, once it reaches the limit it will simply just spawn on top of you.
Notably the example I’m thinking of is the Rough Seas but I’m sure there are other weather events that Vetex hasn’t told us about. An example that I’m thinking of would be a potential tsunami event? Perhaps if a wave is coming towards the player and they log, assuming this is an actual event then the next tsunami that spawns near them will be even larger.
Logging off normally, beyond these and potentially any other abusable situations, shouldn’t necessarily come with severe consequences. You shouldn’t be punished for having a life outside of AO or circumstances beyond your control. Internet would still be an issue but if you lost connection then the game theoretically shouldn’t remember the event you lost connection to since it MIGHT’VE not reached the server. In this case it just goes to the most recent auto-save which comes with none of these problems. If someone can tell me how combat logging works and if it still happens if you lose connection then that’ll answer how this’ll go. At the same time I don’t want to encourage people unplugging their internet to escape a bad situation so it really just depends.
Note:
Auto-saves cannot occur while in combat or in a weather event, the timer will continue to go down until it reaches “0”, but it will never activate until immediately after the event or combat tag wears off.
By default, auto-saves happen every 10 or 15 minutes. I don’t think this should be changeable but it’s more so to give people reading this an idea.
Solution 2: Sealed Chest openers
Add in a tool that lets us open sealed chests whenever we want. Not the most ideal but I have some drawbacks in mind to not make shipwrights useless.
Drawback ideas:
- There is a 33% chance that you will destroy one of the rewards you will receive from the sealed chest. This has a bias towards actually good stuff like ship parts, enchantment scrolls, and rare spells/techniques/weapons. Meaning you’ll keep your sail cosmetic but you’re likely to not keep your Javelin or Selino scroll if you get one
I’m going to be petty and also suggest that it tells you what was destroyed so you KNOW what you could’ve gotten. - Reduced rates at getting something good, so let’s say rare gems are 20% and exotic gems are 10%. Now the rates for those are 10% for rare and 5% for exotic or something. For ship parts, usually they are guaranteed in Dark Sealed Chests from what I remember reading, but in this case they are now a 50% chance at getting.
- A combination of the two, reduced rates by 25% and a chance to ruin the item you received by 10%. So a 20% chance for rare gems becomes 15% and exotic gems become 7.5% with a 10% chance to ruin either if you do get them.
Don’t really have a ton of ideas beyond these few. By all means feel free to add to either solution when/if discussing this below. Although it should be noted that you can’t open these sealed chests unless you’re at least out of combat.
This is mostly something I thought up after I saw Vetex shoot down the suggestion for having Dark Sealed Chests automatically open when re-entering the War Seas to prevent potential opportunists. Both ideas could also be added, they aren’t inherently exclusive, and would grant the player the option to open their sealed chests early or save them as they make their way back. The saving mechanics consequences will also progressively make things harder and harder as they make their way back if they keep logging off at the sight of any form of trouble, and if they abuse the internet side of things then they’ll keep getting set back 10-15 minutes.
Feel free to ask questions, and I’ll clarify what I can.