Ahoy me hardies! I've been a member for about six weeks and I love this game. I love it so much that I spend money I make at other sites to buy extra moves and fame resets.
I have seen a lot of discontentment in the forums as well as seen some good members leave and noobs give up quickly. This post is a good example:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2325It is frustrating when you can lose more overnight than you can gain from farming and if you have a pocketful of gold, you dare not attack towns and greenies indiscriminately as your fame builds up at a very rapid level and leaves you open to being plundered! Even worse as the example above illustrates, if you get plundered good, chances are you will be gang plundered! I know this from experience!
I have not seen Socorban lately and rumor has it she went ashore after being savagely plundered. That is sad as she helped me and others when we started.
I have seen some good ideas in the forums and I have a couple of my own.
FAMENo matter what, a successful attack yields 1% on 0 fame. That's wrong! 0 Fame should be rewarded and a ship with 0 fame should be treated like a town with a maximum of 100 gold taken upon succesful attack.
After the first attack at 50% loss, successive attacks should be substantially reduced until the next fame reset is reached. This will discourage pack mentality and prevent discouraging pirates into quitting.
I have seen the suggestion of being able to keep unneeded fame resets, I also saw the objection based on not buying more to support the game. Perhaps a meeting in the middle of allowing pirates to keep 10 per month?
Limiting fame for noobs is an excellent idea as will will help keep them from getting discouraged.
Attack/DefenseDefense only protects a pirate from those weaker, if a pirate has a higher attack than your defense, he will take the same amount of gold if successful without regard to levels. There should be an Attack/Defense ratio, for example a pirate with level 5 defense would lose less from a pirate with level 6 attack than he would from a level 7 or 8. It works both ways, it encourages spending gold to protect onesself as well as spending gold to get more gold!
Stealing - what's with that? How is a pirate supposed to find out if he can overpower another pirate if he's afraid to hit them? It's bad enough you get 3 fame for a failed attack, why further it by taking gold too?
Hidden IslandsThe game grid is 400 x 400 which is 160,000 grid squares. Seems like a lot until you realize that the largest ship with the largest radar can effectively cover the entire grid in a rapid scan, picking out targets which he has learned from experience.
In considering the real pirates of the past, they worked relatively small areas of the sea on any given day and changed locations after long days at sea. Imagine if Blackbeard could see the entire ocean each day!
It's too easy for the largest ships to hit the most players. They have no doubt earned their upgrades so reducing the effective size of ships and radar doesn't seem fair but what if there was one island for each ship, a port, where they could hide to prevent being attacked overnight?
Not an assigned island but rather scattered at random so everyone would have to find them and if another pirate is hidden there, the island disappears and is reflected as ocean or reef so as not to show who is there to prevent ambushes.