Pirate The World - Online Adventure Game

What do you think?

obviously, this is an open poll where you vote and say why you voted how you did, then give some feedback...

I vote to scramble it after every month...

It seems that the piracy race will be conquered by those that are able to hop around and hit towns and such...with the map being scrambled, then it will cause more people to go back to mapping or go around blindly...

Although, a downfall is that this will make people move one space at a time, and there won't be that much action...

I like my maps sunny side up with rye toast

It seems to me Cap'n mentioned an idea of changing small areas of the map from time to time. Either way is fine with me...

ah, yeah.

doing small sections of the map would be cool too

my thoughts to why scramble every month is a bad idea!

1 - New people who join half way through the month spend their first week mapping, and the week after all their work has been for nothing, and how would they ever build themselves to be able to compete. After all we want to keep new people.

2 - If you get to day 4 in the week and you have attacked everyone 3 times there is not much to do without a map!

3 - I have a day off and have used my moves attacking everyone so am quite likely to buy some moves to cover my map. I would not buy moves to randomly move about hoping for the best!

4 - The game would just be too tedious if you had to build a map every month.

I think it would also take out some of the stratergy out of the game as it would just be blind clicking hoping to find a fame reset, islands towns, which brings me onto another point which is i think people will stop attacking after about 300 moves in case they dont get a reset.
If after 600 moves i dont get a reset then im happy to buy some moves to go over my map to find one as you also gain gold from that. I would not buy a reset everyday.

Hope this makes sense people, my essay OVER!!

all good points, smiller...

I do believe that the map should be reset every now and again though...or even portions like suggested before

If it's going to be scrambled, after 6 months is what I would think best.

BUT warn folks so they're not lost!

haha, of course!

if at all, then at every reset. just my 2 gold

coming from a mapper of course.


every month is the way to go, mapping takes the fun out of the game... is only for addicts, and gives players who map waaayyyy too much advantage over those who dont. We have no chance whatsoever of EVER catching up with any of the players who map.

scramble it once a month, and it would be fair... that way if players wanted to map they still could during the first week, they'd just have to re-do it every month.

it would defenetly even out the playing board somewhat and give us non-mappers [and newbs who arn't addicted after playing for 2 years] a chance to keep up with the big dawgs!!




to be completely honest i say reset the whole damn game and scramble the map every day!

OR

provide maping tools for every user, in game, to make it easier to map out the game for us who dont have 15 hours a day to play!

ALSO

what i said above is supported by majority of the players, whatever the poll says.

the fact of the matter is, is that majority of players DONT come to the forums and DONT participate in the polls.

however i know for a fact that MAJORITY OF PLAYERS do NOT map!!

think about it this way, the people who DONT map [or spend a ton of $$] have NO chance on the pircacy race, and NO chance to cashout.

and mapping isn't even an official part of the game!!!

what the hell is up with that???

do you see where im coming from here?

scrambling the map every month or even every week, is the only option that makes any sence

stop being greedy folks and lets make this game a GAME again and not some mathematical **** that really isn't fun anymore when theres NO chance to compete with those who ruin it for the rest of us by mapping.


dont you wonder why no one stays and plays anymore? LOOK at the bottom of the forum.. do you see most members ever online being at over 1000? we never get more than 2-3 these days because the fun has been takin out of the game by... yep you guessed it, addicted mappers.


check this out, i started playing about a month after the game started back in 2005.... so i know whats up and how to play the best as anyone.

however, i dont map.


i'm not even CLOSE to being at the level of ANY of the top players who DO map... even those who havn't spent any money, not being close is being 10-20 upgrades off, its rediculous.

period

mmmm i dont know if i would go that far, there are patterns that you learn to recognize

Sorry 3J, I managed to delete my post when I was trying to edit it.

What I had said that the post above this is responding to was Maybe we should do away with a solid map and make every location random each time you land on it.

We are constantly trying to improve the way the game works and make it so that the same people do not always win everything. That was a big part behind the prizes last month, CSS is very unlikely to win an award like the most upgrades in a month for April as an example. The piracy was changed to make it more fair, but it seems that it was not changed enough. It has not been talked about much, but there is an economy in the world now which means that mappers, especially ones who share their maps, will be adversely affected in the long run. Islands give slightly less moves so people can no longer play all day long.

I am not trying to be a jerk, but everyone has a complaint over the game either not being the same as it was, or that the randomness is off or that mappers are ruining it, etc. Cap and I are trying to make this a fun and challenging game, but some ideas which seem good can be a programming or database nightmare. Take the map as an example. The world is currently 401x401 or 160801 spaces. There are almost 600 active players that have come back or signed up new, so 600 * 160801 = 96,480,600 database entries for everyone to have a map on hand based on what they had 'surveyed' You can see that it would quickly become prohibitive.

Now, I came up with an idea for treasure hunts that would be fair for EVERYONE, whether they played at 1am or noon or 4pm game time. It would be a timed hunt that no one would be able to cheat by asking their friends for help on and the final results would not be known until the end of the day the hunt began on, though a running leaderboard could be available. The problem is coding it and Cap already has a lot of items on his plate. I am still in the learning process for PHP and anything I code Cap has to double check to debug since it is kind of a second generation language for me and I have to convert everything from my main programming language over to it and invariably I mess something up.

The game right now is both old and new, and the new parts are causing growing pains as we try and smooth things out and make it more fair. In the game that we do not mention, some people mapped as well, but *everyone* kept a list of coordinates of bases of interest. With the changes made so far, and the plans in place, it will more and more come down to places of interest rather than mindlessly following the same route day after day.

This should be a game about strategy and skill, not who can sit at their computer and search the most islands each day (or as in the old days, who can make the best bots to island hop all day long for them so that they never need worry about fame). Everything is a tradeoff, I can search islands all day long and never gain fame but it may take me a week or more to get my next upgrade, or I can attack towns all day and hope no one hits me while I have 250 fame, or I can sit and wait for a mover to come by and hope they have a high fame and a ton of gold or I can race around the world plundering everything in sight and then hope to get a fame reset before I run out of moves.

We could just make the islands only give storms and moves and fame resets so that 'farming' is a thing of the past. Or maybe we could just do away with storms and extra moves altogether and give people 900 moves a day to do with as they please.

The thing is, with perseverance, eventually people will all even out. When someone gets to where they need 3,000,000 gold for an upgrade, that means every sucessful attack on them will generate 30,000 gold if they have no fame at all. A brand new player has a very small chance of having a successful attack on that person, but if the long shot pays out they can immediately make several upgrades.

I guess the overall point I am trying to make is that you have a few different types of people who play this game. The people who want to cashout more than anything else, the people who want to somehow be at the top of whatever leaderboards there are, the ones who just want to play to pass the time and the ones that expect everything to be given to them, etc. You cannot expect to make everyone happy, you can only do your best to make as many as possible happy.

I vote for map reset once a month. That would make the game more fair for people who do no not have time to map.

whatever works for me

but i'd say mix it up once a month