I suggest extending the despawn timer for sealed chests from 2-3 minutes to 5 minutes. The current timer is excessively brief, particularly given that it takes at least 1-2 minutes or more to explore underwater ruins, and for your ship to despawn/redock. The current short timer for sealed chests can negatively impact the game experience, as players must worry about losing collected loot while exploring. This issue is further compounded if a player dies while exploring, as they’ll lose all their loot, have to respawn at Ravenna, wait 2 minutes to dock their ship, and risk having their floating chests despawn.
Alternative Soultiuions
Looting sealed chests underwater automatically Teleports them to your ship.
Similar to how treasuries work in Sea of Thieves, have a statue or tool that lets you collect sealed chests, and when you get back to the surface, interact with something that teleports them onto your ship (idea for this in attachments section)
New Ship Attachments
Cauldron: Adds a cauldron attachment that can be placed on your ship for you to brew potions when you’re away from an island. Can be found from looting sealed chests.
Cooking Station: Adds a cooking station attachment that can be placed on your ship for you to cook food when you’re away from an island. Can be found from looting sealed chests.
Diving Container: Introducing a new ship attachment - the diving container. This container can be lowered into the water to the depth of the nearest diving spot, allowing players to easily collect sealed chests without worrying about them despawning. As the container is lowered, a meter counter will indicate the depth. It’s recommended to lower it fully to get it as close to the submerged structure as possible. Once the container is lowered, you can store sealed chests found in diving spots by picking them up, bringing them to the container, and pressing and holding E when prompted. There’s no limit to how many chests you can store, but you must raise the container to begin moving your ship. This prevents players from avoiding carrying chests on their ship. Furthermore, storing chests in the container means you don’t have to float chests to the surface and worry about them despawning. You can obtain this attachment from sealed chests or sunken sealed chests, which are discussed in more detail in my idea for more sealed chests here: New Sealed Chest Ideas - Suggestions - Arcane Odyssey
Camp: If you place a tent in one of your ship’s attachment slots, you can limit your spawn location to your ship. However, if you already have a camp set up, you must remove it before adding a tent to your ship. Similarly, if you have a tent attached to your ship and you want to place a tent on an island, you must remove it. To prevent abuse of this feature, your tent will “break” and you won’t be able to spawn on your ship if its health drops to half or lower. Additionally, a new combat symbol will appear when your ship is engaged in combat. If you die while this symbol is present, you’ll have to wait 10 seconds to respawn. This gives you a chance to save your ship, but also makes it possible for your opponent to disable your spawn by lowering your ship’s health to half. If your ships spawn is disabled, you will respawn at Ravenna. If your ship isn’t in combat, you’ll respawn instantly on your ship. This is great for PvE players who don’t want to lose their loot or waste time respawning at Ravenna. Although Vetex has stated that ship spawns are unlikely to be implemented, I disagree with this perspective. In my opinion, the inability to spawn at your ship significantly detracts from the game experience, especially in a pirate-themed game that heavily emphasizes ship usage. If the community expresses sufficient interest in ship spawns, it may be possible to have this feature added to the game.
Thought? Suggestions? Feedback?
I intend to present these ideas in the tester chat if they receive enough support and feedback from the community. My aim is to amplify the community’s voice and provide a platform for your suggestions and needs to be taken into consideration. Furthermore, I will prioritize suggestions that have garnered significant community support. Therefore, please vote for the suggestions you want to see implemented in AO as it helps me and others to gauge the community’s desires.
I prefer this solution because surprisingly often I’ll raise sealed chests and they’ll end up inside my ship and rarely they’ll despawn entirely.
We could have funny crew AI that jumps off the ship, gathers the chests, and places them on the ship since it’d be nice to see them carry their weight for once.
I really paid a bunch of guys to sit on my ship, operate cannons, and get free food while I do everything else.
I love these but not having full coverage with harpoons is far more annoying than it has any reason to be.
I can’t wait to get a ship with more attachment slots.
I am split between teleporting chests directly to a ship and a new container attachment. I think instantly teleporting them to your ship would be nice, but, it completely removes any reason to drop chests underwater so they float to the top. Having chests instantly teleport to your ship also makes your ship more of a target as players passing by may be incentivized to sink your ship due to seeing the loot. At least with the new attachment you can store them until you are ready to teleport them onto your ship.
In regards to attachments, it’s a matter of trade-offs and personalization. You can choose between having a cauldron and cooking station for practical use or sacrificing those for more harpoon coverage. It’s up to the player what attachments they want to use over the others depending on what content they like to engage with. I agree, You’ll definitely want to have a larger ship though for more attachment slots.
While I do like the idea, instantly teleporting them to your ship seems kind of strange. I’d rather go with the Sea of Thieves idea that you said, such as the siren/mermaid statues. Also the statues in Sea of Thieves do not teleport the loot onto your ship, it instead makes them float in the water, where you can harpoon or grab the items and put them onto your ship.
I really like this idea, but the problem is the different kind of sealed chests (the sealed chest ideas that you suggested). If those were implemented, the diving container would need to have a UI that shows the amount of chests in it and which kinds of chest are in it.
I like the camp/spawn point idea, I can imagine this happeninf when Frigate ships being added and plus when frigates gets added you will able to customize the captains quater, not sure if setting spawn point in your bed will be possible but it would be a great idea in my opinion.
I’m trying not to copy sea of thieves mermaid statues which is why I don’t think it would be a good idea to have chests float to the top to harpoon through a statue.
Addressing your concerns about multiple sealed chests interfering, I don’t think it would be a problem. The container is only meant to be a feature to aid in collecting sealed chests from underwater structures. The container works similar to a mermaid shrine in SoT, except instead of having chests float up to the surface, you reel up the container which puts sealed chests on your ship. You’ll only be collecting sunken sealed chests or bronze sealed chests. I agree though that there would need to be a UI for it.
I believe ship spawns should be for all ships, not just for bigger ones. The idea for ship spawns came from how tedious and annoying dying around the map can be, even when using camps. I believe spawning at your ship when you die is a far more reasonable and practical solution.
I intend to present these ideas in the tester chat if they receive enough support and feedback from the community. My aim is to amplify the community’s voice and provide a platform for your suggestions and needs to be taken into consideration. Furthermore, I will prioritize suggestions that have garnered significant community support. Therefore, please vote for the suggestions you want to see implemented in AO as it helps me and others to gauge the community’s desires.