#Safer Seas

[whiskeyworen]

Sea of Thieves Adventure: Never Ending Chase Music

So they just implimented the "Safer Seas" personal oceans for Sea of Thieves. You and your friends can wander the waves and not worry about being griefed by screaming 12 year olds or PvP tryhards. All you gotta worry about is the usual monsters and stuff. Me and my friend were taking a Brig out, and doing a Tall Tale, because he'd not done them before. It was fun, not having to stress out and constantly watch the horizon for the sight of a sail, or scanning the map for that ONE black-red cloud which was the Reaper team scouring the seas. We still had Bone Ships to deal with though. Case in point, just as we were heading to a particular island, the music suddenly changed to the Bone Ship pursuit music. My friend started freaking a bit, because we had a hull full of loot we didn't wanna lose, AND we were running a Brig, not a sloop, which meant we were slower than normal, and the very geometry of the ship tripped us up. The number of times we fell down the stairs while trying to cross the deck... Anyway, we pulled into the calm waters of the island, without the Bone Ship spawning up beside us. But the music continued. We went onto the island for like, an hour. The music continued. At some point, my friend was getting irritated and put on edge because that chase music would NOT go away. So eventually, when we went to leave the island, we both knew that it would spawn the MOMENT we hit choppy water. We hatched a plan; skirt around the island while staying in the calm shallows, and get closer to our destination...and then book it into open waters and hope the skeleton ship couldn't spawn where we were. The moment comes, and we pull up anchor, lower the sail and.... the music went away the moment we raised anchor. For whatever reason, I think, when we'd dropped anchor originally, we were still within that Bone Ship's radius of reach, that it could sense us, but we were too close to the island for it to spawn. So it stayed in a semi-active 'wait'. But when we raised anchor...we moved an inch forward, and crossed that fine line to safety. My friend kinda had a mental break at that point. It was hilarious. After an hour of nothing BUT that music, and the inevitability of running into that ship... it went away. Friend: "This is it. This is madness. I swear to god that if I hear that music again, I'm just walking off the ship. Just 'oop! overboard' and I'm swimming for the sea bottom." Me: "We'll get (insert friend) to join us, and then THAT music plays and, suddenly someone'll be "Hey where's (Friend)?" and we'll see you just walking off the aft board and into the surf." Friend: "Yup. I'm done with Bone ships. And that music. I'll be hearing that music in my sleep. For the next WEEK." So we had a good chuckle while he pieced his shattered calm back together, and then turned in our stuff. He told me that after I logged out, he went to fight a Skeleton Lord solo, as part of a Tall Tale. Apparently he'd gathered all the gunpowder he could into one spot, summoned the Lord, and set it off. The blast took out the Lord in one shot, but also launched my friend off the island with the blast. He tried to record it but the video borked because of the sheer size of the explosion. LoL.

[excalibent]

Sea of Thieves Still Sucks

So that's kind of harsh, but hear me out.

Sea of Thieves has never lived up to its full potential as the sea-sailing game, and at this point, it never will.

This is because of the fatal design flaw of forcing all the players who play Sea of Thieves to play around in the same sandbox, giving them ample opportunity to stab each other in the back and generally forge the flow of gameplay by fighting - and it's fatal because the developers are rigid and ungiving on the principle.

Safer Seas recently released, and the number of caveats that came with it was pretty telling; Rare doesn't want anyone to actually play Safer Seas. They want everyone to play High Seas, the 'actual' Sea of Thieves, toxic micspam and 'it's sea of thieves not sea of friends' and all.

As for why this is a fatal flaw, there's a few reasons. First: there is, at all times, a ticking clock whenever you leave you ship.

Someone- somewhere- several someones, in fact- are more than likely willing to sink you the moment they spot you on the horizon, and the possibility of losing absolutely everything because you were busy doing anything else for any period of time means that developers can only make events away from your ship and areas expanding in those events so big before they're guaranteeing that anyone who participates in that event will be sunk.

Secondly, combat literally cannot be improved at this point.

Sea of Thieves combat sucks. It's awful. The reload animation for your gun is tedious, and every sword swing feels slow - besides which, it never feels like you actually impact with something. There's hit reg, a cling, and some light effects, but in essence, whatever you're hitting just eventually disintegrates and whatever loot they're meant to drop just appears on the ground. This also can't be improved because, again, forced PvPvE situation, making any adjustments to give players an edge or a different way of doing PvE means, inherently, that they get a different way to do PvP, which means steeper learning curves, more toxic flexing on people who aren't that good at PvP, and more complicated, difficult-to-counter builds.

Like, the loading thing - if Rare even added ways JUST to reduce reload time, that small difference would make it significantly easier to run pure gun builds against other players, so veterans would always have one up on newbies, and the gate to entry becomes that much firmer.

Thirdly, the gameplay loop sucks.

There are quests and Tall Tales, and most of the fun there comes from uncovering lore and everything, but like the gameplay, it can only get so deep until it becomes a vulnerability on players who indulge in it to be used by players who don't - like, if a quest just takes too long to parse through at a single island, that takes long enough that another player can just come up, sink, the ship, and leave with the loot before the questing player can do much about it. There is a reason, by the by, that the Monkey Island stuff (and other things, too?) take place in its own instance; it takes way too long to run around on the island and get stuff done.

Plus, the lost potential.

There are hundreds of cosmetic options, and none of them do anything. Gold ornaments, trophies, etc. - all of it is basically solely for showing off, to yourself, a bunch of things you've bought by amassing lots of gold. You are not given much else; your ship, whether it's a sloop, brig, or galleon, it's all the exact same ship mechanics as it would be otherwise. Your ships don't get abilities or anything interesting outside of a cosmetic tune up whenever you decide to shell out some gold for it.

Combat, we already went over, but again, it's limited to 'swing sword and shoot gun'. The most interesting mechanics come from enemies, which still make it frustrating to engage in combat because everything takes so damn long.

Hell, an available mechanic for Sea of Thieves seems like it went past being drafted and made it into the game - the Shroudbreaker. It doesn't seem to do anything, really, but the lore says it parts the mist and makes the way clear to the Shores of Gold.

That would be baller. But it can't be used because it gives some ships an advantage new ships don't get (and everyone's still playing in the same box), and the weather system isn't dynamic enough anyway; sometimes you'll run through cloudy mists or a storm but it doesn't actually matter because you're not going to hit anything because you have a map 100% of the time on your ship, because if you didn't, you'd be at random disadvantages when fighting other players, which we can't have because again, everyone needs to be on the same playing field for this to work.

Plus, other minor things. Always having to collect storage chests and crates from elsewhere. Having to restock your supplies every time you get back into the game. Respawning on the ship of the dead on the sea of ghosts which, frankly, feels like it should be way more important. Quest progression being weird and meaningless because you can basically just start them whenever and you don't actually need to be renown before you start on a legendary quest for great treasure, which you don't even need to do or even start, ever.

If you're a big Sea of Thieves fan and you're wondering what I'd do to fix it, here:

Make a solo mode adventure or player-instanced servers so people can mess around more properly in a player-focused adventure.

Add mainland for players to explore since they don't need to constantly be at their ships anymore.

Add more things that can carry over in solo mode; the state of your ship, your amount of money, etc.

Also, add a banking situation or something, even a town, just anything that makes the economy of this Sea of Thieves remotely fucking believable.

Add more nuanced combat; parries, more competently telegraphed attacks and reactions to being attacked, more different weapons that isn't just 'sword and some kind of gun'.

Add stats to the guns so there's an actual choice and progression of character strength.

Add difficulty to also compensate for late game stats so players are still adequately challenged by late game bosses if they just grind out and buy the strongest stuff or something.

Add ship qualities you can change by altering the stuff on your ship.

This is too much, obviously, and it's not an overhaul of Sea of Thieves - it's just a different game at this point.

Anyway, that's all. Sea of Thieves still sucks, and is going to continue to suck until Rare finally puts some effort into developing gameplay progression that isn't just 'earn more gold and buy fancier hats while you either duck around or sink other players'.

[penofwildfire]

Something so so cool and fun to me about the idea of Nya having this intrinsic connection to specifically her own realm's water. She became the Endless Sea. She could feel and sense every part of it, getting pulled into the sky and forming clouds, raining down everywhere, going through the whole water cycle again and again and again. And yes she's regained a flesh and blood body, but parts of her will always be in the sea, intertwined with it all, with Nyad even. She can control water from other realms, sure. But it's not her water, and she can tell. She can feel where her own ocean ends and others begin, can feel the waters spilling into eachother, every foreign raindrop distinct from herself.

[petrichal]

It kinda messes with my head because we've been on the Grand Line for so long but the major tool for navigation in the world of One Piece isn't even a Log Pose, it's just regular compasses. The Grand Line is HUGE, yes, but when we look at the world from afar, it's just a strip of sea that goes around the world, and bigger than that are each of the four blues.

Considering how many islands we've already seen just after the East Blue saga, it boggles my mind a bit that the weakest sea in comparison, has that much and more areas to cover than what the Grand Line can offer.

[hermemescabin]

Sea of monsters

Sally Jackson, calling camp to check in on her beloved son: How’s Percy doing? :)

Tantalus: No idea, that fucker is in the Bermuda Triangle *hangs up*

[ashenwinds]

Skellie man's birthday is tomorrow. . . he's bringing out the Burning Blade in all it's rebuilt glory just for this occasion

[pixlime]

God help me also I wanna start streaming

[strawnav]

i finished re - reading alabasta a while ago, but i've been thinking about nami's tendency to hide when she's ill / fake it even if her illness is incredibly obvious. some of that's her pride, her hatred of vulnerability, her desire to save vivi...but i think about arlong, and how he didn't always feed her. about how he hit her when she didn't work fast enough or laughed when the others did. about how she wasn't allowed to rest even long enough to sketch a quick picture of her mother, who he killed. he wouldn't have cared if she was sick. just another weak human. if she said she couldn't work, asked for a few days to rest, he'd just beat her or threaten to go find a villager, maybe her sister, and hurt them instead. and so she worked through sicknesses, and so she pretended she was fine, and so she knew that the right answer to someone asking her 'are you sick?' was 'no, i'm fine, i can still work!' no matter how obvious it is that she's lying. and even though she knows this crew, her crew, isn't like that one...some things still sick.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Chakotay/Janeway/Tuvok is fun because none of them are ever actually dating. I literally can’t imagine any of those three referring to or thinking of the other two as their “girlfriend/boyfriend.” One of them is like ‘let’s not put a label on this’ the other is like ‘my race has no label for this’ and the third is like ‘if I try to put a label on this I bet they’re gonna run fast and far’ so they’re all kind of just in muddy water regarding what they are to one another. All that’s there for certain are actions and commitment and [un]luckily these are three people who know how to commit. 

[faaun]

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[aeioumy]

i wasnt gonna post these-- anyway i wanted to see elliot in travel in time so im drawing my own elliot from the altered timeline

[hobbinch]

What mutual was asking for that post that's being weird about nitrogen narcosis and acting like its a Big Mystery? It was on my dash so I have a link but dont remember who was talking about it

[retphienix]

An underrated part of the gameplay loop in sea of thieves is that they. somehow, built a means to have a perfect "send off" when you're play session is complete.

Sure, you could just log off, everyone saying good bye/later/good night and hopping off SoT for the day.

But, due to very smart decisions by Rare in regards to what "matters" and what "consequences" exist in the gameplay of SoT, you can instead all gather round, drink some grog, play some music, stack some bombs on the ship, pull the anchor, and take pot shots / toss firebombs at the beautiful lady as she sails out to sea on her own in a fiery blaze.

They created a means to end game sessions that I adore. You get to just chill with silly sea shanty music, drinking, throwing up in buckets, and story telling as you talk about what you accomplished (or didn't!) that day while watching the wonderful ship that accommodated that journey become a light show on the open waves~

[simplyghosting]

Thinking about my dad’s friend who likes to take his boat to various seatowns but isn’t allowed to carry fire arms because you can get arrested for having weapons in port which is unfortunate because that means out on the water you don’t have those kinds of options for protection, so you have to get creative when you come across the legitimate threat of pirates and have to use like… mace… for bears.

[ashenwinds]

hmmmn. . .

you good there Chi?

[mtreebeardiles]

Hmmmmmmm ok so I did enjoy PL a lot and there are a lot of themes/elements I want to explore but I’d have to reimagine it from a very different POV 🤔

Cuz I want it with my nomad V but he’s already more or less established as a fixer-in-training with Rogue so it’d have to be… well. Johnny.