Conference of Monarchs:Cobalt (February 2007)

Notes on the Cobalt Conference:

First order: Don't worry, familiars are not going to be made untradeable, so we don't have to talk about it, and can all relax.

First Question from Hypnos: Blockade Maneuvers: How is the balance of special pieces?

 * Don't show up quickly enough with mid-high end people on board. You only get 1 of each special piece per round of a bloc and only if you stay afloat the whole round, which most ships don't.
 * Carpentry is the issue. It doesn't keep up with the others, and thus can't get any of the pieces to show up. In blockades, no carps can manage to get good or fine. Hypnos said that it's a little weird, because the carp doesn't show booched; it showed a middle range of scores. Also, people are too worried about the pieces and the ship sinks. Intentional non-masterpieces screw you up, vs. just an extra move or two in sails or bilge to get the special pieces.
 * Find a way to balance pieces vs. keeping the ship moving/damage-free.
 * Issues with event blockades not improving blockade experience, because: "hey, I can just take a ship in and get a little fun without really learning anything!"

Second Question from Hypnos: What are people more looking forward to out of the new releases that are coming?

 * Adventure Islands, still happening? We haven't heard anything concrete about them. Titans and Brigand King Blockading. The blockade oriented folk are interested in seeing these, as a sort of Adventure Island, and a way to motivate a stagnating player base.
 * Some people would rather see the pillaging improvements: Sea Monsters & Duty Nav Changes. When are these appearing? Cons to the current idea: being able to avoid PvP...people don't want that. Suggestion to drop PvP from the list of things you can pick to avoid.
 * Brigand Kings seem a bit broken, you have to take out severely understaffed ships to find them. Increasing the spawn a bit with dnav would be better. Add this to the list of dnav improvements.
 * According to Hypnos, Dnav improvements are the next thing, followed by Brigand Kings attacking islands.

Other issues raised by players:

 * KB is too cheap. Reduce spawn to increase price.
 * Paint brushes are booched...change the way they decide which shop to buy from.
 * Rum sickness in tournies please! Allow it as an option in Rumble and SF tournies, to make things more fun.
 * Skellie fights - last person killed auto-entered in next tourney
 * Skellie missions - lose 'em. Let people search around like they used to.
 * Complaint: Some changes in game cause people to not really have to learn the game to play. Things have been made easier for newer players to just become captains, etc.
 * Extended discussion of captaincy requirements. Do we raise them? How can we better educate the greenies at the beginning? Worry about greenies getting pressed into crews by greenie captains, and then leaving the game because their leaders don't know anything/can't teach them anything. How do we fix this?
 * New, better game introduction for greenies. Some kind of new intro mission; that really teaches them some culture (about crews, flags, etc), let's them know about greeters, etc.
 * Greenie pillage payout is too low. It's really hard to even cover the pillage unless you're out for hours, and you can barely give them anything. Hypnos said that they are working on a rather large change to this.
 * Pets in portraits please!
 * Giving tapestries and rugs to the weaveries so they have something else to produce.
 * Potion cabinets and map cases for ships/houses.
 * Alliances. Drop the allies of allies restriction. No one seems to like it. On Cobalt, noted that only 1 flag out of the top 15 can even blockade any islands. Being able to attack allies of allies, which most people don't talk to/care about anyway, would solve this issue.
 * More fine-tuned control of event blocs. Governor note that pops up upon entrance to the board. Notes on the notice board detailing event. Be able to list the jobbing contact on the board.
 * Shipyard list of premades that updates automatically when ships are delivered or removed from the shipyard owners/managers inventories? Too hard to implement?
 * Owner of ship listed somewhere, maybe on mouse over of ship on dock?
 * XO help: number of stations filled v. not. (i.e. Sails 4/9, Carp 5/6, Bilge 4/4) Disconnecting messages shown ship-wide, new jobbing notices popping below old ones instead of above. Happiness expressed about the Ahoy tab not overriding the other tabs anymore.
 * Complaint about delays in releases. We understand that things come up, but it was a bit of an unrealistic list, maybe try to set more reasonable goals and time-frames.
 * Familiar tournies at the same time as money tournies. This idea came from the crazy Non-tradeable familiars thread. Basically, by putting up 2 tournies, 1 with only a fam and 1 with 100k poe or something like that, maybe those ults that already have fams will just go for the cash, allowing others a shot and evening out the pool. But still up to the player, rather than forcing them out of tournies altogether if they have a certain number of fams.
 * Puppies and piglets and lambs as pets? More pets in general.
 * Pirate mail! Please! Please! Hypnos says it's hard to do in the current system, they've been trying to figure out a way.
 * Route difficulty. We've got too few yellow routes, only the interarches are orange, and we have no red routes at all.  Increase difficulty of some routes all around, and make our "red routes" (aka the interarches we call red routes) actually red.