I think it might be good if there was a sort of “Renown Lock” you could enable in settings, basically it’d just prevent you from gaining more bounty/fame depending on which one you play, but it wouldn’t prevent you from losing renown and it’d keep going like that until your at 0. It’d be useful for the players that don’t want to get bounty hunted but not much else.
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I’ll take these one at a time, this is going to be a sorta masterpost of my pent up feelings that I am sure will be overlooked, but here goes:
Do you feel satisfied with the current PvE experience? If not, how would you improve/change it?
No, and this is not for any reason other than the brewing updates push to constrict the options those who are casual players with PVE as their main focus away from some of the games core features. Now a lotta people complain about deckhands, but here I’m gonna complain about Clans.
Clans should not be locked to strictly a PVP thing. Especially with our knowledge of what’s coming their way on the horizon. I made a clan to have one with friends, to find a small community of people that I can team up to enjoy the game with. With recent changes, this pushes people who don’t want to be pvp fiends out of clans towards solo play.
Do you feel satisfied with the connection between PvE and PvP?
No, and this is just going to remain a truth of the game. Bounty Hunting as it exists is most of the time a very one sided interaction. “I hunt you while you are doing something else.” In most cases, this is when a player is trying to engage in any of the games other content. This blends awkwardly and messily, and makes a system where at any time- a player may be interrupted by another, seeking to kill them, and forcing them into long winded chases.
This is fundamentally a one sided interaction. You are basically railroading someone- who wished to partake in another area of the games content, into only doing what you want to do, which can leave a sour taste in someones mouth. It’s not something we can do much about.
Do you think the current system for ranking up in the Grand Navy and Assassin Syndicate is fine? If not, how would you improve/change it?
From an outsider perspective, kinda yeah, but at the same time, I find it dishearetening that GN and AS players can get small hunt contracts at all times, even if they are not actively hunting you. Personally I think this should go both ways, for if you are attacked by a GN/AS player, you have nothing to gain from winning, whereas they do, which makes it an uneven interaction by default.
More aligned with the topic, ranking up is fine. I would decrease Vice Captain and Captain down to lower renown requirements so Navy players don’t have to focus hard on getting to ranks we see very commonly from npcs lower level then the player
Do you believe that Renown as it is is flawed? If yes, how would you improve/change it?
Yes, well partially. I think leaderboard is flawed. It’s called a leaderboard, and as such should show off the best of the best. However, because the only way to gain renown is via hunting, it’s a much more grey area than that. Some people are on the leaderboard because they abuse strong potions, or because they jump people with a buncha friends, or surprise people when they are farming bosses/dueling at Munera.
This should be a problem that fixes itself however, when Duels and the like come out, proper duels should overwrite bounty hunting as the premium way to get renown, by players ‘betting’ renown against one another in 1v1s, that should make up the upper echelons of the leaderboard- peoples who fundamental skill and dedication are the best of the best.
What do you think should be added for players that don’t wish to engage in PvP?
I’ll split this into two pieces, starting with a rather negative one:
What I think should be removed
Yes yes, not the title of the question, but I’m going to circle back to clans for a moment. Clan island claiming, while fun, is far too punishing for losing an island. At higher ranks of clans, it is outright not worth it to take islands at all anymore. For example, Harvest gives 15 renown every 5 minutes. If your clan loses 130 if someone claims it, that means you have to be ready to drop WHATEVER you are doing and rush to the island if someone tries to overclaim it- it turns a fun game mechanic into a stressful babysitting job.
You have to wait 45 minutes for the island to break even if someone steals it from you. Worse yet, this is a flat loss. So it doesn’t matter if they steal harvest or sandfall- you lose the same. Imagine a small island now. 5 points a minute, -130 if someone takes it. It takes about the same amount of minutes as infamy you lose, 130 minutes, to break even if someone takes it. That’s over two hours of holding an island and making sure NO ONE steals it.
And before people say ‘well just disconnect’- The answer to problems in a game should NEVER be to stop playing the game. That’s an ass backwards way of solving problems.
What could be added.
Okay, positive thoughts. Love potions did a lot for pve players to tell hunters to fuck off. I have seen many people suggest this- but a PVE clan option is the best I can think of to let people engage with clan content without having to constantly stress over getting hunted or dropping what they were doing (Of course, there needs to be an easy way in server to tell PVE clans apart, maybe even call them ‘guilds’ instead of clans, there should be no confusion at a glance between the two.)
It’s a band-aid fix however, because then there would need to be basically a whole perpendicular clan system designed where there are multiple types of clans all pursuing multiple types of infamy gain, probably multiple leaderbaords as well.
Anyway, here are some rapid fire changes I think might help:
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Heavily reduce incentives to hunt people in groups (Cut renown loss/gain by half per person in a party hunting a single guy)
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Increase pvp level from 40% of max (level 50) to 60% of max (Level 75)
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Introduce renown punishments for hunting players lower then max
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And most importantly Don’t relegate vital information to tooltips. Looking at you ‘Sink ships first to get max treasure!’. Introduce this in a very early quest or something.
I know some of this is the ‘early game’ experience, but I think that’s where the game struggles to hold peoples interests. You have fun, run through quests, hit a giant level cap wall and then you are stuck with a crappy boat that can barely fight anything else on the map. It needs a rework. A quest that gives you cannons, teaches you how to shoot them, teaches you about naval combat, diving points, all wrapped up in the early part of the game.
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I’ve been told that in World of Magic, there was a stat called Arcane Government Reputation. Couldn’t you have a universal Reputation stat which is what the leaderboards for PvP are based on? In my opinion, let renown be solely PvE while this reputation stat is for PvP, or vice versa. Reputation has positive and negative values, just like Renown. You could gain Renown from PvP, but you can’t lose it from PvP- the renown you gain is a multiple of the reputation you gain.
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(Arcane adventures but same difference)
Maybe there could be a “tutorial book” in the menu which you can open up at any time to check out information. The game will give you a very obvious notification that’s more than just the current small notification on the bottom right of your screen whenever the tutorial book is updated, and the tutorials should have images as examples to go along with it. You can get new information either through specific quests or by discovering the related items naturally- for example, if you examine a cooking pot you can get the tutorial for that or you can do the chef quest in Redwake and it gives you the tutorial then. If you find a sealed chest and pick it up then the game will give you the tutorial on that. If you obtain a blueprint, the game will give you a tutorial about building and equipping it. If that blueprint is a cannon, obtaining or equipping the cannon will give you the tutorial about how to fire it. It also gives players the ability to go back and reference the tutorial book whenever they want, and these tutorials can also double as an encyclopedia to tell you what kinds of ingredients can lead to what results- especially for things like brewing or jewelcrafting to tell you what reagents and catalysts lead to what effects.
i guess maybe have more introductory quests that guide you through what is needed to do things in the game, like diving, potionmaking, pirate ship sinking, treasure hunting, etc.
plus, the spawn thing at ravenna is annoying. and the boat despawn option would be great but that’s not gonna change for some reason.
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In its current state, yes.
However something long term that’s more of a personal nit pick - that being NPC intelligence
Right now there’s a jump from:
Basic AI (run at and m1 player)
Mid tier AI (run at player but use a few abilities)
Advanced AI (Dodge, block, parry, etc etc)
This jump in intelligence is very nice as it provides a new threat and makes NPCs feel much more alive
My concern is that NPCs may stay this way for the rest of the game, save for bosses.
Sorry for making this so long but basically:
I hope that as NPCs get higher and higher levels they get their AI further improved, and not just get stronger. (Using tactics, acting more player like overall and getting better pathfinding) just to increase their unpredictability and the fun fighting them.
gah
aside from a pvp server, a pvp ranked system with matchmaking could be fun to fool around in
i doubt it’ll get added though
Either one would easily reduce the amount of random killing in the game.
Just a place with easily accessible fights.
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theres already an unofficial ranked 1v1 matchmaking system by boxi2012
Unloading your ship automatically with Quartermasters was an amazing QoL feature, but I feel like it could be adjusted slightly? I would triple the speed of automatically selling cargo and gunpowder barrels. It makes sense for sealed chests to be slow, since you likely won’t have many onboard and you need time to read all of the loot you obtained from each individual chest. But with cargo and gunpowder barrels, they only have small notifications telling you how many galleons you got, which you don’t in the slightest need time to read.
It’s been suggested before, but a visual showing where you’re going to place a sealed chest, cargo box, or gunpowder barrel would be AMAZING. Allowing shift lock while holding these would also really help with precise placement so you can optimize the space on your deck. And maybe doubling the speed of buying cargo could be good as well? All of these changes together would make cargo runs a much less frustrating activity and more players would consider it as a means to level up.
Deckhands need a rework more than anything else in the game right now. Either reduce the renown cost significantly, or change the prerequisite of recruitment entirely. Most players I see have about 10k-100k renown, and in that range you can barely get any deckhands. Grinding for well over 10x your current renown to get 3 more points in a certain ship stat is not worth it in the slightest, it’s almost laughable.
Yeah that always bugged me. I get this an overglorified anime and every attack turns every island into a rave but they seem way too distinguished. Hell the guys who recruit you stick out like a sore thumb.
Me who requested lvling req decrease in balance discord and got 20 upvotes: 
Right now after doing storyline, pve players dont have much to do. Yeah you can grind stuff for your gear and ship but that’s all. Dark sea would proooobably fix that, but i still have to make my own “end goals” for each random-build file i create to have some fun (and those end-goals are either simple or impossible)
Deckhands are bridge between PVE and PVP, and eh…Im not that big of pvp payer even tho i have ~600 kills on main file.
If you dedicate yourself to ranking up, you’ll do it pretty fast. 500K+ range is…hard…For most players.
Eh, its not flawed but like…Starting to decrease renown gain from 500k+ is strange for me. 1m+ is lb, so why stop pve players from getting fame/bounty for organization or deckhands half way through?
I think potions are nice additions for pve players. Invisibilty, love, agility, ironskin, volcanic and even supernova gale are great tools to stop someone from pvping you.
This would probably be a little too extreme of a change, but if the question is like that, i’d make some kind of either a checkbox or an NPC you can talk to that would purge all your fame/bounty at a cost (100% of whatever the Silverhold and Whitesummit NPCs cost to purge it) and would lock you at Neutral, unable to hurt or be hurt by others, gain no renown and infamy for your clan and unable to damage other people’s ships and would have some kind of “notifier” when you mouse over their name on the playerlist that they’re in No-PvP mode while the PvP players would still be able to fight eachother. This is a pretty drastic change to the game though, so it’s unlikely it will ever happen though, just throwing it out there. 
I agree, Vetex should’ve implemented something similar to the North Western Open Sea instead of a vulnerable PvP arena where you can still get hunted on, maybe Vetex could implement wilderness sea clusters (or wilderness seas) that could serve as a whole sea just with one purpose like PvP for example.
Max number of times a player can be hunted by the same player while in the same server.
Reset at server change.
how do the deckhands know merlot exists? The description of whitesummet says it’s thought to be abandoned
So uh…
I have 6000 counts of defeating criminals for some reason.
An idea I thought about was to “remove” your poster from the board for a time limit, you’d have to pay an NPC to do it(Like with Notoriety).
This way you’d just be another “random guy” instead of legit monarch of the sea in flesh and bone as soon as someone gets that poster.
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They still know about assassins syndicate, not their boss’s name so they can just tell you to kill the assassins syndicate boss without mentioning their name.
seems like a pretty tall ask, they want me to kill the highest ranking assasin syndicate member in the bronze sea (who they do not know the location of) just so I can get an extra point of speed?
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