Dewderonomy
Grandmaster
With the last few months' jump in sea activity, more folks are moving out to sea, from entire guilds to groups of friends to small parts of guilds looking for something else that land doesn't offer them. The Sea Champ is around the corner, Booty Island is about to be released and mibbing is as prosperous as ever. I recommend a few relatively simple tweaks to our current naval combat system to bring it in line with some element of land PvM/PvP.
There are three major problems with ships and how they are treated in-game currently:
1. No risk of losing them. They cannot be stolen, looted or lost outside of leaving them out at sea until they IDOC. Ownership is treated similarly to houses, in that whoever places the ship "owns" the ship (meaning no one else can commandeer the ship under any circumstance as there isn't even a key anymore). This isn't inherently bad, but it isn't met with a counter weight to deserve immunity from loss, a crucial element of Felucca gameplay.
2. No penalty for abandoning or sinking a ship. If a ship sinks it conveniently goes back to the owner's bank; in some cases people have said, "Yeah, just sink the ship and I'll grab it at the bank tomorrow." You don't say this about your meta pets, yet the ship is just as important to the fisherman as the pet is to the tamer. "The captain always goes down with the ship" might be a romantic notion, but here it isn't even considered.
3. No incentive to actually use upgrades or consider fighting. In land PvP, there is always an incentive to stand your ground: hold your spawn, loot your kills, chase off invaders on your gold mine, last stand as you're cornered or can't recall out, etc. It may not outweigh the current tactical circumstance (ie, 15 wizards about to e-bolt your eyeballs out of your head), but there is always a reason to consider fight or flight. At sea, unless you are looking for a fight, there is never a reason to stay. Your ship will go back to its bank and since the rewards at sea are MiBs, it is quite easy to grab one, recall to bank it, then back to the ship on your boat rune. Likewise, because there isn't an incentive to consider fighting but running at every opportunity, no one uses upgrades on their ships to increase their likelihood of survival, through superb sails, scanning with a crow's nest or even better guns to deter attackers, much less spending the time to level up their dinghy. It is always better to run than to consider fighting, and not even sailing away: simply recalling off the ship.
Because of this, I recommend three general fixes that will, by design, change the mental perspective of seafarers and engage them in this entire naval combat system, increasing interaction, emergent gameplay and immersion in the core system.
Ship Loss
In the past we had ransoming of ships, which was a great element to piracy and privateering, and gave ships a feeling of value: they could be lost or taken from you if you abandoned them. Taking prizes at sea was a real thing historically, and it became so in UOF. Ships nowadays are treated as throwaways; left out at sea, abandoned at the first sign of trouble, there when you want to run your fishing macros. The ship should be to the sailor what the dragon or mare is to the tamer; it is their investment, their lifeblood and the pivotal piece that makes their occupation what it is.
My recommendation is very straightforward:
1. Ships lose 1 level when sank. It goes down one level and has 0 XP at that level. This is to ensure sailors feel that their ships are investments - which they should be.
2. Ships at level 1 that are sunk are lost (destroyed, removed from game). This is to discourage ships from being treated as throwaways, which they currently are. A sense of consideration and decision-making is introduced to the sailor.
3. A ship can forego losing a level (or being lost for good) by ransoming the ship (ie, "ship insurance"). This is to give sailors an opportunity to bypass the penalties with a small fee (explained below).*
*Note: This system is simply a means to give sailors a way to avoid losing their ship. It's akin to the bounty/stat system for reds or petballs for tames. It would likely be the heaviest element of this list to code, but also the least important to shift the meta game of sailing. In short, it is a "mulligan" option and otherwise not critical.
Ship Ransom
To give sailors a way to forego losing their ship's level, they may pay a small fee based on the ship type and level to the ships that sink her. It could be a gump at sinking asking if they want to pay a ransom for their ship that otherwise times out after 10 minutes (to discourage AFK fishing of mibs). The fee would go to the captain of the ship that dealt the killing blow on the ship. Ransoms could be determined as so:
• 500 gold base fee per level (500-5,000 gold) no matter the ship type
• +500 gold for small ships, 1,500 gold for medium ships, 2,500 gold for large ships
• +1,000 for dragon variants (as these are similarly cost but designed for warfare, they should be treated as such)
• +5,000 gold for Tokuno Galleons
• +7,500 gold for Orcish Galleons
• +10,000 gold for Gargish Galleons
Example 1: Level 1 Small ship is sunk. Owner has option of paying 1,000 gold to avoid it being destroyed. That's nothing, and the 3 fishermen aboard with nothing more than a newbie pole and a vendor bow and arrows won't be risking much else to acquire mibs, nets and maps in bulk. AFK mib gatherers will be punished with coming back to no ship and having to buy a brand new boat at a much higher cost.
Example 2: Level 8 Large Dragon ship is sunk. Owner has option of paying 7,500 gold (4,000 gold for Level 8 + 3,500 gold for Large Dragon, a gunship) to avoid losing a level. These are ships that can fight back and take a fair beating, as well as being universally accessible by everyone.
Example 3: Level 10 Gargish Galleon is sunk. Owner has option of paying 20,000 gold (10,000 gold for Level 10 + 10,000 gold for Gargish Galleon, a ship-of-the-line) to avoid losing a level. Being that galleons are sold in the millions of gold, this should be well within the price range of anyone who can afford having that firepower solely to themselves in the first place.
As you can imagine, as the ship is destroyed and loses levels, it becomes less expensive to ransom, but the ship also has less upgrade slots and stats, making it easier to continue sinking. For the common fisherman, this means keeping the level low but also not treating the ship as a common horse; this is their nightmare or even meta steed, in some cases. In regards to the pirate or pirate hunter, refusing ransom at higher levels means the ship can still perform well and avoid a higher ransom fee, but not treating a ship properly means losing the ability to wage war at sea consistently.
As an alternative, the old ship ransoming system was cool, too, but ended up with a bunch of spare boat models that were no good to anyone. An ability to sell those to a shipwright like you can with house deeds (at a considerably cheaper price) would be awesome.
Ship Levelling
Currently ship levelling involves a variety of options: sinking spare ships, sinking afk/abandoned ships, or nickel-and-diming XP from NPCs. In order to allow fishermen to get XP without having to resort to piracy themselves or gimmicks in sinking your own ships, I recommend the following tweaks to leveling ships:
1. Every "MiB Recoovered" grants 15 XP. This is already tracked by the ship.
2. Double the experience earned for killing NPCs (4 XP from 2 XP), players (8 XP from 4 XP), and sinking ships (30 XP from 15 XP).
3. Increase the bonus of Experience Boost from 20% to 50%.
I would also recommend, in order to keep crafters busy supplying ships with upgrades, that any time a ship is sunk any upgrades on board have a 25% chance of being destroyed. Currently pirates have stacks upon stacks of upgrades. The PvPers at sea don't need to keep buying them, and the sailors who should be using them aren't getting them. Potentially destroying upgrades and removing them from the game means pirates don't gather too much of a surplus, sailors will need upgrades to keep their ships in good order and have a better chance at survival, and crafters will have an incentive to spend all these resources on the upgrades (which can be pretty hefty).
Considerations
• First of all, no one should think sailing is "for the poor fisherman". The poor fisherman who knows what he or she is doing is bringing in 500,000 to 1,000,000 gold a run in relative safety (ie, 5-15 deep groups of mages aren't passing through the halls every half hour). The rewards from MiBs are fair, although whirlpools could be given some better incentives right now (they're a little dull).
• Second, this could decrease AFK fishermen, meaning my guild ofpirates legal privateers tasked with its safekeeping won't have as much prey. While this is moderately accurate, the key here is bringing fishing in line with similar land elements: it should not be an AFK money maker that you keep on a second monitor while farming on your tamer. If it also means those people you find at sea are more likely to engage or make for an interesting encounter, well, that's why we play this 20-year-old game, isn't it? If you want to just earn gold safely without repercussions, there are plenty of servers out there for that sort of thing.
• I would also recommend that galleon recipes are used when creating a galleon. This would provide a reason for galleon recipes to be sold again; right now they're almost worthless. This goes for a lot of other items, since once you make a galleon there's no additional cost to maintain it and no risk of losing it (aka, buying another one or having to make another one).
• Finally, my intent is not to make it harder for "the common fisherman". On the contrary, I would like to see more rewards, rares and incentives for fishermen to achieve at sea. I'd like to see SEAQUESTS and escorts, convoys, smuggling and so forth, things that have existed on other servers or are active on production UO right now. However, before we can ask for more things, I feel there needs to be more people participating in the ocean and more risk vs. reward to warrant such expansion.
Edit: I just realized that you could shoot and scuttle your own ship. There would likely need to be some kind of gold sink element to the ransoming idea to ensure people couldn't keep sinking their ships to make money. Again, the ransom system is an idea to make it easier to swallow being sunk; it is not necessary to shift perspectives of making ships important in the player's eyes.
TL;DR: Players need to treat their ships with some gyaddamn respect. These are mechanics that'll start that process.
There are three major problems with ships and how they are treated in-game currently:
1. No risk of losing them. They cannot be stolen, looted or lost outside of leaving them out at sea until they IDOC. Ownership is treated similarly to houses, in that whoever places the ship "owns" the ship (meaning no one else can commandeer the ship under any circumstance as there isn't even a key anymore). This isn't inherently bad, but it isn't met with a counter weight to deserve immunity from loss, a crucial element of Felucca gameplay.
2. No penalty for abandoning or sinking a ship. If a ship sinks it conveniently goes back to the owner's bank; in some cases people have said, "Yeah, just sink the ship and I'll grab it at the bank tomorrow." You don't say this about your meta pets, yet the ship is just as important to the fisherman as the pet is to the tamer. "The captain always goes down with the ship" might be a romantic notion, but here it isn't even considered.
3. No incentive to actually use upgrades or consider fighting. In land PvP, there is always an incentive to stand your ground: hold your spawn, loot your kills, chase off invaders on your gold mine, last stand as you're cornered or can't recall out, etc. It may not outweigh the current tactical circumstance (ie, 15 wizards about to e-bolt your eyeballs out of your head), but there is always a reason to consider fight or flight. At sea, unless you are looking for a fight, there is never a reason to stay. Your ship will go back to its bank and since the rewards at sea are MiBs, it is quite easy to grab one, recall to bank it, then back to the ship on your boat rune. Likewise, because there isn't an incentive to consider fighting but running at every opportunity, no one uses upgrades on their ships to increase their likelihood of survival, through superb sails, scanning with a crow's nest or even better guns to deter attackers, much less spending the time to level up their dinghy. It is always better to run than to consider fighting, and not even sailing away: simply recalling off the ship.
Because of this, I recommend three general fixes that will, by design, change the mental perspective of seafarers and engage them in this entire naval combat system, increasing interaction, emergent gameplay and immersion in the core system.
Ship Loss
In the past we had ransoming of ships, which was a great element to piracy and privateering, and gave ships a feeling of value: they could be lost or taken from you if you abandoned them. Taking prizes at sea was a real thing historically, and it became so in UOF. Ships nowadays are treated as throwaways; left out at sea, abandoned at the first sign of trouble, there when you want to run your fishing macros. The ship should be to the sailor what the dragon or mare is to the tamer; it is their investment, their lifeblood and the pivotal piece that makes their occupation what it is.
My recommendation is very straightforward:
1. Ships lose 1 level when sank. It goes down one level and has 0 XP at that level. This is to ensure sailors feel that their ships are investments - which they should be.
2. Ships at level 1 that are sunk are lost (destroyed, removed from game). This is to discourage ships from being treated as throwaways, which they currently are. A sense of consideration and decision-making is introduced to the sailor.
3. A ship can forego losing a level (or being lost for good) by ransoming the ship (ie, "ship insurance"). This is to give sailors an opportunity to bypass the penalties with a small fee (explained below).*
*Note: This system is simply a means to give sailors a way to avoid losing their ship. It's akin to the bounty/stat system for reds or petballs for tames. It would likely be the heaviest element of this list to code, but also the least important to shift the meta game of sailing. In short, it is a "mulligan" option and otherwise not critical.
Ship Ransom
To give sailors a way to forego losing their ship's level, they may pay a small fee based on the ship type and level to the ships that sink her. It could be a gump at sinking asking if they want to pay a ransom for their ship that otherwise times out after 10 minutes (to discourage AFK fishing of mibs). The fee would go to the captain of the ship that dealt the killing blow on the ship. Ransoms could be determined as so:
• 500 gold base fee per level (500-5,000 gold) no matter the ship type
• +500 gold for small ships, 1,500 gold for medium ships, 2,500 gold for large ships
• +1,000 for dragon variants (as these are similarly cost but designed for warfare, they should be treated as such)
• +5,000 gold for Tokuno Galleons
• +7,500 gold for Orcish Galleons
• +10,000 gold for Gargish Galleons
Example 1: Level 1 Small ship is sunk. Owner has option of paying 1,000 gold to avoid it being destroyed. That's nothing, and the 3 fishermen aboard with nothing more than a newbie pole and a vendor bow and arrows won't be risking much else to acquire mibs, nets and maps in bulk. AFK mib gatherers will be punished with coming back to no ship and having to buy a brand new boat at a much higher cost.
Example 2: Level 8 Large Dragon ship is sunk. Owner has option of paying 7,500 gold (4,000 gold for Level 8 + 3,500 gold for Large Dragon, a gunship) to avoid losing a level. These are ships that can fight back and take a fair beating, as well as being universally accessible by everyone.
Example 3: Level 10 Gargish Galleon is sunk. Owner has option of paying 20,000 gold (10,000 gold for Level 10 + 10,000 gold for Gargish Galleon, a ship-of-the-line) to avoid losing a level. Being that galleons are sold in the millions of gold, this should be well within the price range of anyone who can afford having that firepower solely to themselves in the first place.
As you can imagine, as the ship is destroyed and loses levels, it becomes less expensive to ransom, but the ship also has less upgrade slots and stats, making it easier to continue sinking. For the common fisherman, this means keeping the level low but also not treating the ship as a common horse; this is their nightmare or even meta steed, in some cases. In regards to the pirate or pirate hunter, refusing ransom at higher levels means the ship can still perform well and avoid a higher ransom fee, but not treating a ship properly means losing the ability to wage war at sea consistently.
As an alternative, the old ship ransoming system was cool, too, but ended up with a bunch of spare boat models that were no good to anyone. An ability to sell those to a shipwright like you can with house deeds (at a considerably cheaper price) would be awesome.
Ship Levelling
Currently ship levelling involves a variety of options: sinking spare ships, sinking afk/abandoned ships, or nickel-and-diming XP from NPCs. In order to allow fishermen to get XP without having to resort to piracy themselves or gimmicks in sinking your own ships, I recommend the following tweaks to leveling ships:
1. Every "MiB Recoovered" grants 15 XP. This is already tracked by the ship.
2. Double the experience earned for killing NPCs (4 XP from 2 XP), players (8 XP from 4 XP), and sinking ships (30 XP from 15 XP).
3. Increase the bonus of Experience Boost from 20% to 50%.
I would also recommend, in order to keep crafters busy supplying ships with upgrades, that any time a ship is sunk any upgrades on board have a 25% chance of being destroyed. Currently pirates have stacks upon stacks of upgrades. The PvPers at sea don't need to keep buying them, and the sailors who should be using them aren't getting them. Potentially destroying upgrades and removing them from the game means pirates don't gather too much of a surplus, sailors will need upgrades to keep their ships in good order and have a better chance at survival, and crafters will have an incentive to spend all these resources on the upgrades (which can be pretty hefty).
Considerations
• First of all, no one should think sailing is "for the poor fisherman". The poor fisherman who knows what he or she is doing is bringing in 500,000 to 1,000,000 gold a run in relative safety (ie, 5-15 deep groups of mages aren't passing through the halls every half hour). The rewards from MiBs are fair, although whirlpools could be given some better incentives right now (they're a little dull).
• Second, this could decrease AFK fishermen, meaning my guild of
• I would also recommend that galleon recipes are used when creating a galleon. This would provide a reason for galleon recipes to be sold again; right now they're almost worthless. This goes for a lot of other items, since once you make a galleon there's no additional cost to maintain it and no risk of losing it (aka, buying another one or having to make another one).
• Finally, my intent is not to make it harder for "the common fisherman". On the contrary, I would like to see more rewards, rares and incentives for fishermen to achieve at sea. I'd like to see SEAQUESTS and escorts, convoys, smuggling and so forth, things that have existed on other servers or are active on production UO right now. However, before we can ask for more things, I feel there needs to be more people participating in the ocean and more risk vs. reward to warrant such expansion.
Edit: I just realized that you could shoot and scuttle your own ship. There would likely need to be some kind of gold sink element to the ransoming idea to ensure people couldn't keep sinking their ships to make money. Again, the ransom system is an idea to make it easier to swallow being sunk; it is not necessary to shift perspectives of making ships important in the player's eyes.
TL;DR: Players need to treat their ships with some gyaddamn respect. These are mechanics that'll start that process.
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