Welcome back!

Perhaps your original thread from the User Content: Ships Forum Archive will help jar your memory

Enlarging and then blurring rarely help as much as one hopes. It's always best to just start large. For some artwork, processing it with a utility such as Vector Magic can help.

Please submit bug reports. I have devs looking into this and am awaiting some updates from them.

I should note, there's no minimum number of votes, but rating helps prioritise what the devs look at.

Here's the deal: We have these things called pre-orders. We track their sales. Conventional wisdom (other MMO companies' experience) says there is a multiple of X (though X varies slightly from company to company). You take your pre-orders and you times it by X, and there you go. So far, we're tracking exactly where we thought we'd be. Will conventional wisdom hold? Boy, I hope so!

Tarabelle! Good to have you along and contributing!

Sorry to be away for a while, but the way I read the forums is to hit New Posts and read through them. When I have time, I read through them a lot. When I don't have time (travel, sickness, or busy at work) I don't read through them as much as I should.

So, the reason why I've been following this along and trying to understand where you guys are coming from is that we had different behaviors in the beta, and didn't see the response you're predicting. Changing rewards in PvP didn't really change participation, it seemed to come down along the lines of "people who like to fight" and "people who don't like to lose". The first group plays PvP pretty happily. The latter group doesn't play regardless of what the reward was.

So, the question is what will people do when we turn on contention? My theory is that the people who like it will play a lot of PvP, and there will be plenty of it. And people who are uncomfortable with losing will play intermittently/rarely.

But what if we're wrong? Then we'll start changing things. Someone mentioned way early in the thread that people don't necessarily behave in the live game they way they do in beta, which is quite right. So we're keeping a close eye on our metrics for this subject as well as others.

What this thread has accomplished is to a) get me more interested in exactly this subject, and keeping my eyes closely on the PvP when we open it and b) keeping these suggestions to improve rewards in the back of my mind.

That's not to say that we're not still interested in doing port conquest rewards, whatever the behavior turns out to be, because we're very interested in the feature for its own merits. But the outcome of our PvP might change its value quite a bit.

It is a trap, but in another way. It used to be that people discussed this in terms of hardcore features vs. casual features. But the inevitable coloring of language to support ones argument has changed this to niche vs. mass market, because niche is less sales, which equals bad, while mass market is always good.

The thing is, it's not as simple as that. Whenever you make any feature of any game, you want it to be accepted, understood, and loved by as high a percentage of your audience as you can possibly get. However, these elements fight against each other. If you make something generic ("for ages 8 to 80!!") you often wind up with something that's just like everything else, or has been robbed of its flavor, and so nobody loves it. Or you have a feature that works perfectly, but you reduce it for complexity, and then it makes the gameplay dull.

So, what are we targeting? A game that recreates the excitement and adventure of being a ship captain on the Caribbean in the 1720, and appeals to the broadest market possible. :-)

Ah, those were the days.

Have you tried running it in Window mode?

You're absolutely right. We have plans to build up discoverable areas in the Open Sea, as well as a treasure hunting system. Exploration is really MIA right now, and is something that we want to start building into the game.

As for the towns, we have the entire environment team working on a new French capital right now. Then we're going to switch over and start replacing some of the starting towns (all but Marsh Harbour) and then start replacing towns that are repeated.