OW Travel Speed

[Nym™]

Hi people. I've created this thread for everyone that feels the sailing in Open World is too slow and time consuming.

My goal is to get every likeminded player to come here and make some noise about slow sailing, counterwinds and everything related to OPEN WORLD Travel.

For any who would dismiss my arguments, I am aware the speed was increased a while ago, yet I am here to tell you it is not enough, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way about the current situation.

My goal with this is to make a bit of noise and hopefully get the devs to make some improvements in this department.

For any who would dismiss the willingness of the devs to acknowledge players demands and opinions, I politely ask you to refrain from posting. I've read all the "Devs are Evil" posts and I find them imature and nonconstructive.

For the devs: I have been spamming the F11 ingame every time I log in and try to do simple actions like getting to a mission or just getting out of port in counterwinds. I hope you do not resent me for it, I'm just trying to prove a point and I mean no ill will.


At the moment 80% of time is spent sailing towards some destination. The farther the destination the longer the sail(doh), and in turn the longer you stare at a screen doing nothing.

This is in ideal sailing conditions. Add some counterwinds and you might as well leave the computer and do chores and come back half a day later.

This scenario is ideal for players who are on vacation, or retired, or simply have nothing else to do and I've heard a lot of players actually play like this.

To those who are not bothered by this, I say, fair enough and good for you.

Just consider those of us who love your game, want to experience all the cool stuff in it but feel like, in order to get to the fun we must first be forced to sit through several hours of doing nothing before we can get the "reward".

It's literally like sitting in a queue at the post office.

Now, I get the fact that the game tries to emulate realistic sailing conditions, and it's doing a nice job in Combat Instances.

Open World is basically the map where the all the stuff is and where you need to get to. This Chunk of the game should be fast paced and represent the least amount of time spent in the game.

At the moment it represents the core gameplay.

Why?

Because if I had to describe this game to a friend I would say,"Naval action a game where you sail a lot on empty seas and ocasionally do naval combat."

It should be " it's a game where you do naval combat sprinkled with a bit of sailing for the flavor"

Open world is a great concept, but all other open world games have content in between the important areas of interest on the map.

The open world in naval action is missing this element.There is nothing to fill the empty space in between those important areas of interest.

And when you add a "realistic" sailing feel to the open world travel, at 2kn, this becomes a nightmare to the not so hardcore veteran player who is just sitting there, looking at waves, waiting for the wind direction to turn so they can get somewhere.

After 1h of waiting to travel a few lousy Km, you start asking yourself, why did I log on today?
To get your ship from A to B. To be continued tomorrow?

But, oh wait, what if I decide I want to go back from B to A? Doesn't sound like a very exciting experience, does it?

Whether you like this or not, this particular aspect of the game is keeping people from enjoying the cool stuff in Naval Action.

So what should the devs do?

In my opinion, the main problem stems from the actual wind system.

Very many times you log into the game very excited to do a mission or do a trade run or whatever and right off the dock you get counterwinds.

One's next thought is, "Oh ♥♥♥♥! this is gonna take me 10-15 minutes to manouver out of port, then another 5 till I get to my mission(which I clicked 1000 times so I can spawn it near to my port) if it's at a good wind angle.

If not, probably another 10 minutes. So you get 20-30 minutes of practically looking at a loading screen immediately after login, before you can reach your objective which is to play the mission.

Picture this scenario in any other OW game. I bet you a million $ it's not something people want to or enjoy to do.

I see a few solutions to this:

1. Lose the wind direction system in OW and increase the speed across all ships according to their tier. This is very fast and easy to do as you already have a mechanic to ignore wind and sail fast out of danger areas after respawn.

2. Have the areas around land masses use the current system but ignore the wind system once you are heading to open seas and have reached a certain distance from land. Also open seas speed shuld be increased to shorten the travel time.

3. Keep the system as it is but increase the absolut minimum speed from 2kn to 10-12kn so you actually travel instead of standing still. Big ships suffer horribly from this at the moment.

Additionally people have suggested to bring landmasses closer together/ shrink the map. Personally I like the current map size.

4. A combination of the above. High speed zones + no wind system when you are far enough from land. When you are near land, minimum speed increased to 10kn or so.

I realise you(devs) and some players might not agree with me, but at the end of the day you have to ask: What is the target demographic of this game?

If you guys(devs) are making it for the 100 veteran hardcore oldtimers who love the slow pace of OW, then you cand call the game done and split it into 10 DLCs and launch it yesteryear.

But judging by the effort and resources poured into the game, I'm thinking you actually care about getting more and more players in.

Subtract the 100 veterans from your current playerbase and you are left with new players who ignore the grind because of the excitement that Naval Action can provide, and players like me for whom the novelty is wearing off and still want to play the game but are losing patience to the point of abandonment.

You need to adress the issue that is dead time in your game.
I understand vision, I understand passion. I come from the same profession as you.

As a player I'm telling you, the current travel speed is not enough.
As a fan of age of sail and NA, I'm telling you, it's not enough.
As a "early access tester" of NA, I'm telling you, it's not enough.
In the most friendly and respectful manner possible, I'm telling you, it's not enough.

Let's try to find a solution for this.

[ramblingman13]

Good luck this has been posted about a million times that the game is great but 70% of your time is watching boaty screen saver not playing navel action. the 30% of the game you play is great. the devs have to be aware of this from the sheer amount of times it's been comented on in discussions. i get that it's there baby and noone likes critisim on the hard work and creative labour. but it is killing the game because people play games to do things. even if they just added a fast travel to the main map so people who want to sail slowly can

[Shoeshine]

Best post ever on this subject. And if DEVs rly care about the future of this game they need to adress this like yesterday. This is what's keeping me from login into and playing the game. I just cant stand watching the ship sail for hours upon hours doing jack ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Get your act (game) together DEVs and adress this now. Srsly.

[Jackrabbit_V6/ RSProduxx]

i´m still for scaling down the world by about (30%=random number)... or such... keep the speed/ feeling, make travel times shorter, win/ win..

American Truck Sim was scaled up by alot, and i guess it´s fair to say they had ALOT more assets and details to take care of... So it should be doable...

[Golem0]

There could also be some kind of fun minigame which rewards you with higher speed.

[elvismolotov]

i think with raising the openworldspeed the ganking will be reduced just because its harder to make a "good tag" .and that would be very good imo. with very fast ow speed only players who want to fight a battle would slow down in openworld ...

[Eyesore]

Well, you can always play 'Legends' when it comes out or play the beta during the weekend if you don't like the ow.

[TheSoulOfCybernerd]

Personally I wish they would make a real time server without speedboost as the sailing is the main reason I play the speed boost kinda kills the immersion for me

[delvarin]

... A real time server... Hey. Why not make the distances realistic? So you need ACTUALLY days from one island to another.... /s

[Shoeshine]

Has this increased at all lately? Just checkin in to see if it has. Gonna wait to return til it does.

[Kharon]

I used to play all the "Silent Hunter' games.. A nice mechanic they had was to get into high speeds until there was any ship within a certain distance of my sub.. the game then slowed down, allowing me to make decisions or change course or whatever.. Could that work here? Over open seas, definitely.

[Dat Zorro]

I understand being hardcore and all, but...

Does the open world really have to be that huge? You literally spend dozens of minutes simply sailing around with nothing at interest happening meanwhile. Just to get from port to port. And you are guaranteed to sail against the wind.

Seriously, where's the fun in that? That's just generating playtime for the sake of it. Pirates of the Burning Sea did it perfectly with it's strongly compressed Carribean.

[Hanny]

the ships move to fast already

[PhoenixOmen]

I guess he thought developers meant by sailing Open world game that the game is just a copy paste from LoL. And that your ships will have steam engines and much more TP options...yes, because open world games do mean such things.