Currently, leveling up/hiring deckhands is based on your renown but this has a problem considering renown would be easily stolen in huge amounts in the v1.13 update. Deckhands themselves don’t need any changes, just the way to obtain them and increase their level/tier. So here’s the changes that I’ve thought of:
Hiring Deckhands
When you don’t meet the required renown to hire the deckhand to your ship, you can have the option to hire them for money. By doing so, you can only have 1/4 of the original stat of that deckhand. The dialogue when choosing this option would show an unenthusiastic reply from the deckhand, such as “Well, if there’s money involved, I don’t see any reason to refuse.”
If you do meet the required renown to hire the deckhand, the option to hire them for money won’t show up and instead the normal option to hire them would.
When hiring deckhands for money, they would have a trial period of at least a week, during which the countdown would still continue even if the player isn’t ingame. Once the countdown reaches zero, the deckhand would leave the ship the moment the ship is spawned or if it’s spawned already.
During the whole trial period, when talking to the deckhand, you will have the option to “Convince” the deckhand to stay. By doing so, the moment you stop near on any wilderness island, the deckhand would get off the ship and wait on a pre-set location for you to fight them. You have at least three chances to convince the deckhand, once you ran out of chances, the deckhand would think it’s a waste to stay with the pathetic player who got beaten three times. A successful attempt however, would mean you get the deckhand permanently along with getting its stats fully.
To make convincing them at least challenging, the higher the tier of the deckhand would be the multiplication of their stats. For example, the highest tier being legendary would have x5 multiplier while the lowest tier being rookie would have x1 multiplier. Meaning that legendary tier deckhands would at least act like mini bosses similar to Merlot/Kai. Leaving the wilderness island would also result in a loss.
Leveling Deckhands
When talking to permanently owned deckhands, you can now have the option to spar with the deckhand for a bet. Each win would mean a level up to the deckhand and respect towards you while each loss would mean losing some galleons and their respect towards you. The stat multiplier depending on the tier still apply here so that it can be at least challenging. Pretty much works the same as “convincing” them too, stop near a wilderness island and they’ll get off the ship and wait on a pre-set location.
New statistics would be respect which would affect tier limitbreaking and this can be seen when talking to the deckhand and choosing the “Respect” option. By doing so, he would tell how much he respects you, such as “I have very high respect towards you” as the max and “I have very low respect towards you” as the lowest.
Tier Limitbreaking
You can now send off your deckhands to travel around the seas in order to break their limit and increase their tier. The duration would also depend on their tier for example, from rookie to master would mean 20/30/40/50 minutes respectively. This way, it should at least take some time for people to get their deckhands to legendary to correspond on the changes to hire them.
A successful limitbreak would take some of their levels and a failure would mean losing galleons in order for them to be recover their health.
As said previously, the deckhand’s respect towards you would affect the chances of a successful limitbreak. Very low respect would mean the lowest chance and very high respect would mean the highest chance.
Respect can only be obtained by winning a spar with the deckhand.
Well, if there’s money involved, I don’t see any reason to refuse this suggestion.
but how does the convincing thing work? like do you have to battle or how does that work?
Mhm, I’ve checked out other’s suggestions on changing the system but I noticed that they’re focusing too much on something similar to renown which takes a ton of grinding. The problem was that it isn’t worth to grind them for a little bit of ship stats, increasing their stats would also make them too useful which would mean hella op ship builds in the future so doing that would be a no go
So pretty much I’ve thought of the simplest solution being money and fighting as to at least not make renown 2.0 which is basically what makes having deckhands not worth it due days or even weeks of grinds for very little investment
the only problem i can see is it getting a bit annoying when you’ve beat the deckhand like five times, the deckhand gets pretty strong, then you fail and you lose most of your hard-earned respect.
This sounds like a good way to mitigate the insane renown costs of deckhands. I think that being able to “convince” some deckhands in other ways, such as randomly generated unique quests would be cool. It would be more fitting for deckhands with non-combat titles, and you wouldn’t get bored of fighting the same dude over and over again with inflated stats.
I’m gonna keep it real, top level deckhands being reserved for high renown is completely fine with me like. Not everything, especially every minmaxing mechanic needs to be available to players who are elegiac to PvP.
Perhaps the funny green deckhands being an achievement was actually the intention anyway
If there needs to be a reward for having high rep, doesn’t the leaderboard serve that already?
Deckhands have little connection to pvp outside of ship combat, which is fairly rare between players.
If the leaderboard isn’t enough, why not give something else that is more related to pvp, and not deckhands?
Legendary deckhands are a little annoying to get outside of pvp, yes, but you only need at minimum 200k (and some galleons) to get one, and that’s not the worst to get.
If deckhands are supposed to be a pvp thing, then why don’t they hold more significance in that mode?
All in all, the changes mentioned in this post are pretty good.
I’d like to collect my NPC crew in peace.
Oh, ngl my experience with npcs only seem to have one problem and that’s the space for the fight to take place in
Places with enough room to dodge multiple times like Calvus or Argos’ boss area seems alright to me since im able to kill them with a little damage taken, the only problem is areas like Kai, Merlot and Elius’ area is a hella tight space, making it hard to fight them
So pretty much, it shouldnt be hard to fight them on wilderness islands with enough area to do multiple dodges, limestone key should work too but pretty much you can do it on any wilderness island that you want for flexibility
Same but seeing how deckhands would be really useful for dark sea, which is the next update in the roadmap, vetex would really need to rework it
I know vetex would rework it for the dark sea update but seeing how a lot of people have made suggestions similar to making renown 2.0, I was afraid that he would also make the rework a renown 2.0 so I created this to perhaps try and fight that chance
Grinding for the renown 2.0 just to get a little stat boost on the ship just aint worth the long grind, if he buffs the stats on them just to make the long grind worth it, then as I’ve said in my previous replies, it would result in op ship builds
To make it clear on how they’ll become op if he indeed buffs them would be for example, some ships would have a huge upper hand given the amount of deckhands they can have, so it should only be a little boost
When your paying the deckhand to join you I think it shouldn’t be a pre-determined number but rather being free to pay as much as you like.
Of course they’re not going to accept like 1 galleon, the system would work off of the difference between the required renown to hire them and your current renown, the bigger the renown difference the more money they’re going to want.
And the deckhands will have “moods” meaning if your offering them a small pay then they’re going to be a bit upset because your degrading their value so they’d want a higher number of galleons to join your crew. If you upset them 3 times they’ll refuse to join you.
Of course overpaying the deckhand wouldn’t be bad as they’re stats will increase depending on how much more you payed them than they expected. This is because they’re gonna work hard to try and impress you because of your generous offer.
Also feel free to comment on this with your opinions bc I wanna know if this would be a good idea or not.
That’s a good idea ngl but considering with the new deck unloading feature for v1.13, galleons would start to get inflated once again so ig that feature would kinda not matter
