Is every puzzle supposed to be brutally difficult?

[Weylin]

I must be dumb or something, every single puzzle I've tried, to see if I have a knack for it, ramps up to such a difficulty that I'm happy if I can even score a "fine" in the duty report.

Guess I'm stuck being worse than a swabbie forever

[Weylin]

I'm going to try watching Pirates of the Caribbean and drink enough rum to cause slight intoxication and see if puzzle performance will be improved.

[perlandria]

Some of the puzzles are legitimately hard but some of it isn't you. I hope the rum puzzling is fun!

It can be a LOT harder to score high without the combo multipliers of special pieces or having a longer puzzling session. A longer puzzling session is usually how many stars on the left side of a ship duty puzzle.

If you are on a navy mission that is 2-3 league points, and new, then you aren't going to begin with stars, all the colors, or special pieces, and you won't have enough puzzle time to stack them up.

On Emerald, find a straight line or SL pillage where they don't care as much about how you do. Or a Bash pillage. You want a bigger boat so your work is a smaller impact. Hopefully they will spend enough time traveling or in battle you can start to get your types of pieces or star count up.

After that it really depends on which puzzle you are doing.

You can also find help in the Tips & Tricks part of the official Discord server.
https://discord.gg/Sgr5XRA5Pt

[Weylin]

Thanks, I'll check out the discord.
Honestly I've been avoiding joining a crew until I can at least figure out how to score a steady "fine" or "good" on the duty reports. It's been 10 years since I last played and I still not-so-fondly recall getting planked for what I can only assume was doing poorly LOL

[Sardonic]

There's mercenaries now which are better than bots and do most of the puzzling on ships, so puzzling score isn't really noticed anymore. Albeit some runs on Emerald will pay attention. Myself and others run GFs on Ceru where you can puzzle/laze to your hearts content as well.

[perlandria]

Originally posted by Weylin:

Thanks, I'll check out the discord.
Honestly I've been avoiding joining a crew until I can at least figure out how to score a steady "fine" or "good" on the duty reports. It's been 10 years since I last played and I still not-so-fondly recall getting planked for what I can only assume was doing poorly LOL

That happens. A lot of us don't like it. I am sorry you got caught in that.

A decent default apolitical crew to join while you find pirates in your time zone with your play style is The Last Navy.

Right now it would be useful to get on a GY/Graveyard run for event tokens to turn in for prize furniture. A breaker dissolves the ghost pieces with count down timers.

On the click path of Ye, Notice Board, Voyages there is sometimes a speech bubble by the captain. If you mouse hover over the bubble it will show a message the captain wrote about the voyage type. Avoid things like Elite or Thralling. Look for things like Bash, SL, Straightline, all welcome, recruiting, etc. There is some controversy that SL/Straighline is an exploit or against the spirit of the game but it has been openly done for like a year now without issue. And I think as a low pressure environment getting a returning player their sea legs is exactly one of the more positive use cases.

There will also be big jobbing calls put on the Emerald Jobbers thread in the Discord, but not as often as checking for Voyages.

Remember ships can not job pirates when the ship is in battle. If there are no Voyages, but a /who shows like 350+ pirates on? Everyone is probably in battle. Go Docktart on Admiral, tour some galleries from Events. take a free day shop puzzle from Puzzles, see what Missions are around etc. I hope you have fun!

[Sergeant Gooch]

Solid game, but the developers and player base aren't. Extremely disappointing lack of content from the developers, who rely on whales to pay their salary. One "pirate" in particular, "toomanybeans", has literally been sending me death threats and has been trying to doxx me for over a month now... Would highly encourage others to steer clear. Very, very toxic community, and there are much better games than this.

Edit: After nearly 6 months having not been online due to the prior doxxing from another player, it seems I have been permanently banned. Great customer service! Sadly and shamefully, I spent hundreds of dollars on this game, just to get doxxed and perma-banned. I would rate lower if I could.