suggestion
 

ive only been playing the game a short time but i have a few suggestions to make it a bit more free flowing of a game and more interesting in combat(sea). i think the selling and buying structure is a bit tedious and annoying and not to mention the fact that if i require something like heavy shot i have to either wait or search from port to port to find some y cant we just have the auctioneer system for player trades and a port based local shop that can sell the basic necessities at port economy and unrest based prices?

my other suggestion is more of a request, as i said ive been playing a short time but ive noticed the only variable conditions in the sea combat phase are the use of night battle, day battle, very hot day battle and a storm. cant we have these mixed up a bit? and another thing can we have a new one perhaps a mealstrom? it would make it a little more interesting to involve that and maybe some shallow shoals or sharp rocks that ships could get caught on, i mean most of the time i find that if i dont hit something my own level, maybe give or take a few levels then i dont stand a chance against it its very annoying trying to challenge something that wipes the floor with you just because its got more cannons than you if these additions were used then a battle that at first was turning sour could suddenly spring into a victory, a small ship say a sloop could actually get in close enough to board say a frigate and stand a chance at hand to hand.

please let us know if any of these are possible

Few of us like either the AH interface (well, not for selling; for buying it is ok) or the personal trade window and have raised the matter here many times in the past.

Looking for goods for sale on the AH is not to me as bad as you suggest. At any AH you can see all the ports you are allowed to trade in within that Area; there are nine areas, for most goods you can ignore New Granada, Mexico and Louisiana and in general all you need to do to find anything is to look in your current area and look in an Antilles port.
Cutthroats and Naval Officers do have a difficulty, it is true, as they can only see ports of their nation. It is also easy for other classes to wreck their trade union reputation with other nations by injudicious sinking of enemy Trade Union / Smuggler / Contrabandista ships, or the Dutch.

However, since you use Heavy Round shot as your example, this can be bought at any port from the junk merchant, at the price equivalent of 300 db per crate.

And. It surtenly would be unrealistic if a small outgunned sloop could take on a Heavy Hercules! And if it could it would ter down the entyr production line. People would say: Why build/by a HH when you Can get a cheep sloop for 20.000 db on the AH (AH Price for a HH is about 600.000)

But some small ships like the Discovery, can eacely sink a bigg ship like a archelon. Course of the Discos fine turnrate!

A request to the FLS staf.
 

Irish Point the 21 August 1722


POTBS consists of two active servers (Roberts & Antigua) with different prime times for port battles. It's pretty clear were the majority of players from all factions, is in the light of night flips outside primetime. It is not accepted! And yet it is a handful that continue with it even though we have asked them to refrain night flips through game-chat, TS / Vent and talk here on the forum, many have stopped playing through the years and many will quit because of this! Just read through the forum here and see that most future all threads containing posts on the subject (even if the thread has a different headline)

So it's pretty obvious that FLS has to do something against this night flips and block for unrestpoints-input for Port flips out of primetime! If you disagree to this then I suggest you open a third server without primetime rules and see how many people are jumping on there ..... (I think you already had them and had to extinguish them down due to low player population!) So my request is now that you please don't make the same mistake with Roberts as it has always been an EU server.

Sincerely,

Totmes LeGaard - Navel Officer of the French fleet
Guardian of the House of Bourbon and loyal to His Majesty The King - Louis XV

I'm new to PoTBS so i am sorry if what i'm about to say has been brought up numerous times before :P

I know there are plans to introduce a society warehouse, but are there any other plans to expand the roles of societies? i've not seen any sort of way to browse societies or look for new ones things like that in game.

i also wonder about things like Society Hideouts, say if they got x amount of members they could have their own hideout where they can walk around and have their own production area not *as* limited as in the current towns... i must admit i'm more into this game for the social aspect of it and the group play so the idea of socities having a wider range of tools to aid each other i think would be good.

the ability of a hideout for the shared society warehouse or something.

FLS dont give a **** about this.. they have said that they wont do anything to prevent nightflips. I, for one, am tired of this and have been logging in less and less because of it.

low lvl gank ships in the game give me cancer. you only have to pass at 2 AM for a red zone and see azure mist and his friends with bermudas, hermes, and similar ships...

I’m sure there probably is. I don’t think it would be a high priority item however as the information can be found on both the world map and in F1 Help under Port Resources. Admittedly the presentation is not efficient and there is definitely room for improvement. We’ll just have to weigh the need for that improvement against the need for other improvements (e.g. Auction House improvements, Trade Window improvements, etc) as to when it actually gets done.

I think we do need to take a long hard look at the Auction House and its functionality in regards to making it more player friendly. That said, I don’t see going to an auction system for player trades and I’m pretty solid in feeling that NPC’s should be providing as little as possible in game when it comes to items that can be produced by players. Since players are capable of producing all of the basic necessities of the game my preference would be to see the player economy being the source of those items.

Mixing up whether sea combat occurs in day, night, very hot day or a storm is a very straight forward change since they are drawn from a random table. At this time they are just heavily weighted for day combat. I’ll float the idea of changing the weighting by Design and see what they think.

Creating a maelstrom is much more difficult as the effects used to create them in game would require balancing with the number of ships (both player and NPC) entering into combat to address possible performance issues and creating all the code to support it and other effects (e.g. combat modifications and potential ship damage from weather). Certainly it is a cool idea but not a simple one and as I’m sure folks will get tired of hearing me say, it would have to be weighed against all the other desired feature adds to determine whether it actually got worked on or not.

Shallows, reefs, and rocks in the open sea would fall in the nearly impossible to add category. Adding these items is major revision work for the open sea environment (which is the most difficult one to modify overall). Again not impossible but it would take shifting so many development resources to just that one task that very little else would be developed and it would still take many months to actually deliver it. If we can address a significant number of other issues we have to deal with first I’d be happy to revisit this.

I can’t go into depth at this time regarding these questions beyond saying that the roles of societies in game is something that has been discussed several times in the last month internally. We do have some rough plans but we need to determine the depth of the code changes required to make them functional and weigh that amount of work against other areas of the game that need improvement or new content before commitment. As these plans develop and if they move closer toward becoming something we intend to add to the game the scale of them would likely feature them as a subject of a round table discussion. In short more to come on this subject hopefully in the not too distant future.

I’d start off here by saying that there’s a very, very big difference between not caring about an issue in game and not taking action regarding an issue in game. To take action regarding an issue there has to be a solution to the problem that you can back and in regards to this particular problem there isn’t one for FLS. All the care in the world isn't very meaningful if there's no solution that merits taking action. A lack of action can understandably be perceived as not caring but that simply isn't the case regarding this issue for folks at FLS.

From FLS's perspective on one hand you have prime time players who are upset that ports are flipped outside of prime time for Europe on Roberts and the US on Antigua. On the other hand you have players that are already frustrated they can’t have port battles because their playing time isn’t prime time for either server and now have to contend with the opposite hand players advocating for the removal of the remaining RvR portions of the game they currently have from them. If FLS gives the prime time players what they want, off prime time players leave the game. If FLS gives the off prime time players what they want, prime time players leave the game. No matter what FLS does the net result is population loss.

At this point, based on what we know of player behavior from changes made in the past FLS has chosen to take the lesser of two evils and leave things as they are. All our data indicates that removing RvR from players outside the port battle windows or shortening the port battle windows will result in greater population loss than leaving things as they are. This more true now than ever since the closure of the Caribbean server back in May. Overall game populations are going up not down so this speaks to a larger problem for RvR/PvP than just out of prime time port flips. What is really needed is finding ways to get more of our current players involved in RvR/PvP not cutting players already interested in participating off simply because of their home time zone.

Regarding two suggestions made in the above quotes – there is little confidence internally that changing where port battles for out of window flips occur will reduce out of window flips. Flips being done to create red circles (in order to create PvP zones) are necessarily related to port battle attendance and where ever the port battles are being currently scheduled there is enough population to fill those port battles (the windows are based on overall concurrent game population). The fact some port battles do not wind up being filled is not an overall game population issue it's a RvR/PvP population issue.

New servers are not a viable option at this time and opening one purely for experimentation purposes is insanely reckless from a business standpoint. The only way a new server is going to be opened is when the population levels across both existing servers reaches a point where we felt we had the overall population to support three functional servers.

But why do FLS have too servers with different primetime windows then? What dod's this signals sends to the players other than its not ok to NF (Night Flip)? I think a solution is for FLS to tell new/old players that if a player wants to play within a specific time period to the day then he / she can choose the server that suits him / her during theyr time period of playing by selecting that server that is suitable for this. simple as that!

I to whant to se more players coming to POTBS and I'm ready to do "almost" everything to the outcome of that, but not if it means it gets worse for me and others who are already playing this wonderful game. As it is now, I feel the pleasure of playing disappears little by little every day and I know that many fell's the same wey abut that. And that is why I and many others oppose us against NF!

So if you do not see the urgent issue then you will lose not only veterans but many new players as well as they will be ganked without being able to get the slightest help. And it is at night that many new low levels are playing just to level up their toons without a lot of low level gankers like "mergatron and Co" who has this as hes Special goal on the Roberts server to kill as many low levels as posible in the red zones that he creates for the same purpose :(
And simultaneously he then makes portflipps (with huge amounts of unrest bondles) so that the upcoming PB will be at a time when many of us can't play because of work, school ect. at that hower. And if you can tell me where the game ballance in this is then I would gladly hear it course I can't se it!

with best regards

Totmes LeGaard