Game Design/Discussion

From YPPedia

Ahoy! This page can be used to post and discuss player Game Design suggestions while the forums are unavailable. Each suggestion can have its section on this page, where players can comment. Feel free to edit and format as needed. Suggestions for Limited Edition Boxes or Gold boxes should be added on the Box Discussion page..

Concepts

Client Interface, Issues, and Refinements


  • [Add colorblind pieces for all puzzles / Bilge pieces]

Does anyone have the pieces file, with adjusted colors please? It used to be on the pp forum, but since that's gone, i cant find it anywhere. My laptop is in for repair, and i dont have the file on this laptop. The 50 shades of blue, are a struggle for my eyes, and i have been using the adjusted colors for ceveral years. Years ago, they have been posted as bilge for color blind pirates. File was also approved by three rings. Thank you so much in advance (Discord thread has discussion asking for feedback on all puzzles With that, I'd ask what other puzzles are a major issue with regard to this.)


  • AFK Logout time of 3 hours higher than dark seas.

Daily Lify mighy requite a few hours of keyboard Fix referral link so streamers can provide a fast way to new pirates to join YPP, add rewards for invite and join, make rewards with navy/crafting so new players get used to puzzle and actually keep playing.


Do you find it annoying when you're midway through a SMH and you log out - and when you log back in the next day you have to go through your trinkets etc with a fine tooth comb to identify what is new. Surely there could be an alert to show you what you 'won' from your previous gameplay?


When you first open ypp these days you are met with a beep much like an alarm clock and a red notification. Is there any way this could be any other color and maybe not beep? Maybe even just a spot on the notice board of all the current updates with ongoing updates to those situations like the bbc does with their stories?


I prefer to use the max size client in a lot of situations but have to revert to a smaller client when puzzling as it places the puzzle in a corner at original size. If it's possible I would love for max size client with puzzles to fit, I know some puzzles would go slower like gunning or patching but would make things like swapping between bnav/ship hunting and stationing a lot nicer.

If there are some issues I can't think of please say so 🙂


Trade chat is great, but it isn't anonymous and you have to be watching. Can we get an auction house function so I can list my trinkets, charts, pets, etc.?

  • I would prefer it to be anonymous, have a bid and a buy out setting, and allow the seller to set short or long listings.
  • No idea how keeping items in escrow or how delivery would work. Especially since Y!PP doesn't have a mail system.
  • Adding the auction function as a piece of furniture to the bank, like the safes for the gold boxes, would make use of an existing building.


for a decade. What annoys me is that I type in my very complicated strong password, only to be told my client is out of date and then I have to enter the password AGAIN. When my password is new I often fatfinger my very complicated password at least once before I get it right (and hope i don't get locked out because I typed it wrong too many times). Can you please make the program check for a new client update BEFORE i try to log in? I have countless other programs that can do so. Thanks!


  • Competitions

Whenever the leaderboard updates (regardless of being a participant), the client stutters for a solid second. It makes puzzling within the competition and outside of it unbearable.

A similar thing happens when you spot a "special character" for the first time in chat, such as "🐙".

Suggestion:

- Remove the lag.


  • Emerald as Default for new players

Please set "Emerald Ocean" as the default server. New players have a 2 in 3 chance to get either Meridian (dead) or Cerulean (dead). There were a lot of random streamers that stumbled upon this game, just to see nothing, puzzle for 10 minutes and leave. The same thing goes for Obsidian. [I agree with this! Some very sensible reasons too. Ameba]


(see Discord post for complete description)... I've been contemplating ways to make password managers more accessible. ... I propose the following suggestions:

  • Enabling copy/paste in the password field
  • Enabling auto-suggest and -complete in context
  • 2Factor through password manager


Incorporating inclusiveness through making the game compatible for every consideration, one example being the types of color blindness. Met quite a few people on this game that don't play certain puzzles because all the colors, or what not, look the same. Would be lovely to have an options toggle for certain types or some sort of check for a variety of conditions


With the confirmed death of a player the account should be locked to prevent a hacker from accessing the account and causing undue distress upon flag/crew mates/hearties/family of the deceased. This would also allow the said players to post death notices in peace.

The trick is how to do it without opening it up for abuse.

Perhaps a petition from an family member (i.e. someone with the billing info) -- which would be almost like a reverse ban-plea. Would be the safest bet.

But in the cases where the deceased player's family did not play the game (and has no interest, for which I don't blame them), perhaps petition(s) from multiple current crew/flag/hearties of the deceased pirate. At least two, but probably more.


Can we please have a way to send to pirates and/or accounts? I don't care if it is a hearty, I care that I can type in a name, add items and a message, and send it to be picked up later.

I want a way to send a chart (or item) to a hearty when my hearty is offline, and have my hearty be able to get the chart (or item) when I am offline.

It is not trivial the times I have been used as a relay in a chain of friends to get a KH chart to a hearty who plays on the opposite side of the world and is awake when others are asleep.


  • Mobile playing

Either create a mobile app for the game, or allow the use of remote desktop applications to play the game. Currently remote desktop applications are considered to be a botting program, but they provide no puzzling advantage and do not manipulate the game environment. Opening access to allow these remote desktop apps will increase player population.

A tablet version of the game used to exist. However, it needed a completely redone interface in order to be suitable. When Three Rings attempted to bring this interface to the non-mobile side, they got a TON of backlash from the community about it. And since they didn't have the manpower to maintain two separate interfaces, the mobile applications were simply dropped. --Thunderbird (talk) 03:26, 30 June 2022 (UTC)


The image shows the greenies' support links as they currently appear as of this message.

Since the forums are defunct for new players and are just bulletins now, there probably should be an additional line about an official Discord in New Player Help.

For that matter, there probably should be a button to Discord on the game's main website. Purpure


when we all started playing this game the intro music on the login page made us all excited that this kind of music would be all over the game, but then quickly realize it's actually the only time you will really hear it. Make more reasons to have sound effects on 😄


In most games, tips are given during playing. As screen changes or entering battles or in another ways. Small tips can be helpful to understand some of game mechanics.


  • Polish the user interface and make puzzles prettier.

You can literally see the pixels of the Bilge background and everything else has a blue border on higher resolutions...


Seasons Leagues Fresh Start Oceans A new ocean. Separate economy, much like Obsidian. From the start, it will be clear that this ocean will only be open for some amount of time. See OP for longer description.


In Whirled you used to be able to send images in game. I think this would be a good change for YPP because then you could post things (like memes, feet pics) to other players.


Maybe you could have an option "receive pictures from non-hearties" to ensure people don't abuse it


I would like to be able to switch to any other pirate on the same account without needing to log out and enter my password. Think labor alt account - do my crafting puzzle and switch to the next pirate. Save time. e.g. 'Return to Pirate Selection' instead of 'Log Off


I think it would be cool to be able to view the boards of another player. For example view someone bilging so you can pick up their strategies and try it out yourself so you can improve. Even maybe a replay option after swordfighting so you can see how your opponent played. Seems quite useful for beginners.

At the same time people could catch cheaters this way and report them.


Just what it says - a way (within! TOS) for the executor of a player's will, or another trusted player/friend to access a deceased player's account(s) and transfer items ONCE. When used the deceased player's account is (automatically?) frozen.

3rd Party

  • Yohoho Tools

Wasn't sure if this would be under a new topic since this technically wouldn't be under "Tips-and-Tricks > How to Install Yohoho Tools".

I've asked around and e-mailed regarding this.

Apparently it's not possible to import .xml assets into Yohoho Tools, a few players have tried - I've tried as well. If someone has figured out how to do this, kindly let me know.

Otherwise, is there a world where we can implement this option into the program? This will assist expanding the ideas from our YPP creators and their creations.

Ex. Old assets from prior don't always complement a certain type of ship (LE sloop assets don't fit on a WF). Example image attached.

Thanks!

Cross Ocean Ideas

As a totally separate thing from Hearties, I want to be able to see and be seen by people I choose whenever I am logged in no matter what ocean and what pirate I am on. I want a trusted subset of other players to be able to see it is me. This would let those other players /tell me to pull me over for frays, jobbing, parties, etc. I do not want to have to go outside the game to have friends ask me to switch pirates or servers. That happens in Discord now and I miss it. No idea how or if this would stack with a Carrier Pigeon / Mail system. Irig


I acknowledge this is an absolutely nuts idea but I'll put it here anyways, just for kicks.

As different oceans have come and gone in the tide of popularity I've been active on several oceans. If a merger of subscription and doubloon oceans just isn't feasible, what about some sort of display case which transcends time and space that one can, for example, place on Emerald that shows trinkets you put in it on Cerulean?

Obviously the trinkets are not removable from the Emerald side. It's a one-way inter-dimensional display case.

Obviously the trinkets would also have to be marked in some way so no one tries to swindle greenies out of their money for them in a "pay me first then I'll give you the item, I'm too cool for a trade window" sort of way. It's a clearly-marked one-way inter-dimensional display case.

Obviously it would also have to look cool and barely clinging onto the fabric of reality. It's a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey clearly-marked one-way inter-dimensional display case. Cattrin


  • Ocean Pirate Port

(The Ocean Pirate Port discussion started on this page but a player made a companion [Discord post])

Looking for suggestions on how to port a pirate from some oceans to another. This has balance issues and some items, like deeds, couldn't be moved at all. What items do players actually care about if we had to put major limits on this? How do we keep it from unbalancing oceans? -- Cronus (talk) 19:44, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

>> Ships,trinkets, furni and chromas should be fine. Don't move fam/LE pet wealth directly, just the pirate stats. Give the pirates a "wealth voucher" trinket that they can redeem in the palace shoppe for special goods (like out of date mystery boxes; or with many tickets even a random LE fam). Possibly combine that idea with a general "trade-in" shop, where people can trade their excess tan fams/bad pets for a cheap gamble ticket in general; e.g 1 tan fam = 1 ticket. 5 tickets = a fam box that has 80% tan fams (big games like counterstrike have a similar system for their skin items). Non-emerald players could get a handful of tickets on the production ocean and then either sell them for PoE (out of date mystery boxes are desirable and good PoE) or gamble. Something of that sort could be solving both issues. But there definitely should be limits in place so that prices/quantities of desirable items dont inflate. - Demontoad

>>I don't think inflation should be an issue worthy of being worried about. I don't think people should be punished for moving their valuables from other oceans over to Emerald (or other oceans) after having worked many years for them to achieve what they achieved. That said, maybe items that are sent from ocean to ocean could become untradable items? Regarding deeds, I am sure it'd be possible to create some kind of system to delete a deed from say Meridian, and then recreate a ship of the same kind on Emerald, perhaps without the same name/furniture/paint. I think most people would care about their personalized ships and their familiars. -Technitium

>> Keep it simple, give the players an option to move their pirate with the stats/trophies/items to another ocean. PoE, Familiars, Pets and other items that are on the pirate at the time of the move can be moved. Shoppe Deeds needs to be moved to an alt or will be lost forever. I like the idea of ships being traded in, and reclaimed for half the cost. There will be a semi-temporary inflation on the new ocean but things will adjust over time. People have a lot of valuable/Sentimental items but may be more understanding about why shoppes cannot be transferred to another ocean. Another idea is to add an option to Trading Posts for people to trade in ANY item for a percentage of it's value (how the value will be determined is up to you). That way instead of bringing over a ton of stuff/junk to the new ocean because we can't find player-buyers, we can just bring over items we value the most. - Stans

>> I agree with a lot of what Tech and Stans have said here already. I think that the potential negatives mentioned do not outweigh the vast positives associated with allowing players to port their pirate(s) to another ocean. Players have invested an insurmountable amount of time into their items on now "dead" oceans, so many of which may hold incredible value and sentiment to them (namely, of course familiars). I believe that offering this option would bring back old players, especially those who had no option but to quit as oceans became unplayable, without any incentive to start a new ocean and leave much of what they've worked hard for, and potentially spent money on, behind. - Velternal

>> I think the above has it mostly covered, Velt especially pointing out the vast amounts of time and money spent across FOUR servers now. I think you should let players reclaim all items; clothes (familiars included,) pets, furniture, chromas, trinkets. etc and transfer the char with all items tied to it. I am not opposed to having all my items non-transferable, I've been making that suggestion for years. However, I do not think it would hurt the economy if they were still kept tradable. I also think that our deeds can come with us using the sealed deed system. If you seal all of our deeds before transferring us, you can then spawn us onto Emerald or whatever new server and then as we unseal the deeds they'd spawn in on the island we landed on upon transfer. I wouldn't mind a character merge option either at that point, so I could have all the trophies and hearties from both mains on one. - Mordida

>> Another +1 to bringing across familiars and ships - these are the items that hold sentimental value to me and without them I wouldn't consider the port a worthwhile endeavour. I suspect many players feel similarly about pets and trinkets. Sentimentality should be the focus when deciding which items to bring across, in my opinion, so by all means make them untradeable if inflation is a concern - but I don't think it is. --Dementedduck (talk) 22:04, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

>> +1 to this suggestion I would much rather play Emerald than Obsidian with the current populations in the states they are. The only reason I continue to play Obsidian is because all the time and effort i put into gaining things there such as ships and fams. If I could have what I had there on Emerald I would swap immediately. I started off on viridian and lost that ocean dude to population decline then started back up again when obsidian came out. Both oceans I've put time and effort into are beyond dead currently and it demotivates me to play Emerald knowing what I have on other oceans. Dgk 22:42, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

>> I restarted playing on Emerald about a week ago. The things that I'm missing most from Meridian are my trinkets (especially the OM dollies and inscribed gifts from friends), my familiars, and certain trophies (like my game design ones and years of piracy!) If I could shift them over to Emerald, I wouldn't mind them being untradeable. --Adrielle ♥ =) 00:43, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

>>I agree its sentimentality thats should be the main consideration - but you also have to consider the collectors. a collection can be of anything, and holds sentimental value by virtue of the time you spend doing the collecting - often receiving portions of it as gifts. I personally am in favor of making anything ported across oceans untradable but if this isnt possible Stans idea of having to 'pay' in game for the transfer of items would solve the economy problem as you can remove the wealth generated by the import while still allowing a determined pirate the ability to keep whole collections. Ships as sealed deeds or as a non dusting ship in a bottle would work well in my opinion, maybe have it so people have to log in and clear the holds first like for swabbie transport. If you cant bring your trophies its not worth doing at all and if you cant bring the things people care about the most (ships and fams, and to a lesser extent pets and trinkets) then youll have very little use of they system. The only thing i really miss from my old ocean is my renamed ship. Ameba


Updates to all oceans should not be based off what happens on emerald. If you want to force game updates do it based on ocean size and the matter in which the game is played.


NOW what would be cool is if Three Rings created an "Oceanarch" which allows us to sail to the "New World" (each others oceans). You can sail and memorise the other ocean, but the natives wont trade with you, you cant buy anything, nothing is transferable between sub to dub or vice versa. so you have to bring or forage for what you need to survive. BUT here's the biggest catch, as you arrive into the New World ALL the mercenaries on your ship leave, no replacements/ no re-jobbing. only those who actually sailed the ship across the "oceanarch" can board that ship now or in the future, until that ship returns to its native ocean. (sorry you're going to have to plan and actually puzzle) AND on top of that you are automatically "at war" with anything or any flag of the opposite ocean, anything in your ship catagory +1 will try to sink you, no grapples, no disengage, you either win or sink. glug glug. The thing is is your going to have to fight them to earn the charts to move around the ocean. You can port however to take a break but only at uninhabited islands (once you find one) and you can forage for stock (balls, rum). So what's in it for everyone to do it? Well you may get a treasure map from a fight and you can dig for that treasure on the respective uninhabited island. These chest can be empty (majority of the time they will be) but they could contain POE or a very unique type of familiar (only found on that particular ocean). The deeper you sail into the New World the rarer the treasure map and an increased chance of finding a Familiar. On top of that there is also in the centre of each ocean an SMH with a unique monster only found on that particular ocean, unique trophies, unique items/rewards (no Fam's these can only be found on uninhabited islands by actually sailing around the ocean and digging for them). Chests will take up storage space and can only be opened on your return home, limiting your capacity. This wont be a pilly but a planned expedition.


Returning player (originally Viridian, then Meridian). From my understanding the oceans were originally merged to boost activity? Has there been suggestions or talk of merging Meridian and Cerulean Emerald? I would imagine more players who return to visit their account for nostalgia would stay to play if their "main" pirate could play on the new merged server. Obviously it would have a knock on effect on the "economy" but to what extant I cannot comment, being inactive for 3 years. Even if pirates were ported across by an opt in feature, leaving behind stalls, placed items etc and merely moving the account and inventory that can move "easily" be moved.


Title says it all, will we keep all our items? Or get reimbursements for our inventories? and keep our stat's that will adjust for emerald? and keep our trophies? thanks. Scottys

Economy

To fund a single blockade you need 10s or 100s of millions of poe. Right now the biggest package size is $200 for 1050 dubloons which is only about 3 million POE. By providing a viable alternative the Gray Havens could have more money for development resources and discourage RMT


Have dub oceans use the Emerald Dub exchange. If where are any places in the Dub Exchange where Ocean Server names are mentioned, drop the call or rename the field to Green or something.


  • MAKE DUBS GREAT AGAIN

Dear OMS, I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to discuss the current state of Dubs, the in-game currency in your game. As an avid player and supporter, I have noticed that the value of Dubs has remained stagnant at around 2500 coins for quite some time now. Given the ongoing inflation in the game economy, I believe it is essential to reassess the value proposition of Dubs for players. Currently, players have the option to purchase 1000 Dubs for $200. While this may have been a fair deal in the past, the increasing inflation has made it difficult for players to feel like they are getting their money's worth. I humbly request that you consider adjusting the amount of Dubs players receive when purchasing them for $200. I understand that balancing the in-game economy is a complex task, and any changes must be carefully considered. However, I believe that by reassessing the value of Dubs, you can create a more enjoyable and rewarding experience for your player base. A fairer exchange rate would not only attract more players to invest in Dubs but also foster a positive relationship between the game and its community. Best regards

&'s thought. Make Doubs in unpopulated oceans to value more so people can invest with money on their pillages. Also attracting Players to bring doubs to market and sell it cheaper if in a hurry for poe. Make an healthy exchange between oceans so people can always look to pilly at the most profitable ocean of the time

Overall Game Balance

(Specific puzzles should go elsewhere. Look at the Content list.)

  • Account Limits

The point is not to find ways to detect bots, the point is to introduce game mechanics that bots would find very difficult to complete, but a human would not. And then rewards the crews that can complete these. (see discord for details)



I want to keep this short and simple for the core post.

Discord has a character limit, so I’ve attached a writeup on a scenario in which a suspension was issued for straightlining, my reaction, and the response received from OMs.

The TLDR is:

  • Yesterday, I was suspended for the first time in 10 months for SLing - presumably for simply being present with alt accounts on several SL pillages. Players are allowed to create up to 20 accounts on one machine, and there are enough SL pillages running these days to make full use of that number.
  • The questions in the writeup should be addressed for player clarity moving forward.
  • I’d like clarification on exactly how many straightline pillages we’re allowed to join at a time, and exactly how many alt accounts we’re allowed to use to participate in vessel-based activities (whether that’s joining straightline pillages, hosting and navigating multiple pillages at a time, multi-tasking active Sea Monster Hunts, solo Kraken Hunts, blockades, or otherwise).
  • I’d like to suggest that, if suspensions are now being issued for players using “excessive numbers of alts”, that a limit on the number of alts allowed to be used for particular actions at one time be hard-coded into the game in the same way the current vessel limit is implemented - preventing players from unintentionally exceeding that limit.

I’ve always loved this game, I care about it (hence the post) and want to be able to play by the rules - but currently it seems like there are mixed messages being sent surrounding SL. No action is being taken against SL pillages - but suspensions are issued for participating in too many of them? There needs to be a clear set of rules in place if the intent is to normalize SL pillies.

As a topic for discussion - what’s people’s general sentiment towards straightlining? I don’t find it overly offensive personally, but I don’t think it adds much value to the spirit of the game as a whole. Curious to know what people think.


Ahoy I am Mitt Romney and here is my 5 point plan

1. New accounts cannot trade badges, dubs, be /tipped, buy dubloons with poe until a $9.99 purchase has been made. In addition to this, when an account is locked for inactivity, the same should happen. This will stop people using decade old fleets of inactive players. This restriction could be removed once an account is X months old, maybe 6.

2. Balance player intense activity (CI) to bring it inline with botted events.

3. When banning an account, automatically. Remove them from crews, remove all roomies from houses, lock all owned ships, remove managers from shops. All done via code, not OM admin tasks. I'm sick of the OM's claiming they are so busy when 90% of their work is self inflicted due to poor vision.

4. New easily accessible flag chest via the notice board. All donations must be placed by the donor and cannot be sent in via a third party. If the poe is not traceable to a legitimate source, it is removed. In the UK we have an unexplained wealth law which prevents people from pulling money out of nowhere without being able to prove how they go it.

5. Force all users to change their password on next login into the game. It's shocking, from a security standpoint that after a data breach nobody at GH has ever thought it would be a good idea to do this. If something isn't forced, it doesn't get done.

Conclusion. OM's can not fix this issue. Only code can.


  • General

Convert Meridian to PVE only.

  • OM owned islands 100%
  • Attraction buildings handled in some way.
  • Still allow PvP high seas flag to flag wars etc.
  • Maybe regular Event Blockades.
  • Compensate current Governors in some way, or hey, do that massive kraken sea monster island wiping event Cleaver sometimes mentions. Make an event of it. Have fun.
  • Is reversible in the future to either reinstate governors if flags are still active, or turn cades back on island by island or ocean wide.

The small active population of Meridian is an opportunity to do some fairly extreme experimenting with future possibilities. The game has more PvE sinking environments since it was first created, so there is still a POE sink to take ships out.

This thread didn't start this idea for me, but it did remind me I didn't put the idea up for discussion yet. ⁠docktarting⁠ Less cade fleet and cade stock and cade pay chest pressure could mean more play time to go to Adventure and other content.


Allowing the playerbase to adjust their starlevel/difficulty would give them a lot more freedom in their puzzling & also make it easier to achieve different kinds of labor (e.g very easy boards for basic/skilled labor).

Example: You shouldn't be forced to be stuck with 3 star constellations in navigating despite playing perfectly, or having your carpentry session end at MP6.


  • The price of allspice and rum spice is so low that its a no brainer to always use mercs to help with content instead of a challenging and fun economic decision. This is one of many key reasons that when mercs were introduced, people were no longer jobbed into blockades
  • It doesn't feel good to win some allspice like it does to win some KB
  • Lazy pillies on big ships have become standard practice because these ships net generate spice even when manned almost entirely by mercs

My proposal is to drop allspice spawn rates by 50% or so to raise the price of allspice/rumspice to make using mercs a meaningful choice and along with it to raise the allowed amount of mercs in blockades to 50% of all stations


With the reduced population I think it'll will benefit everyone to lower the numbers needed to staff a ship, take a sloop down to 5, a war brig down to 20, rebalance this to accommodate the amount of active players we have now


Proposal tl;dr: Playing labor/parlor puzzles = free, benefit = paid.

Pirates should not be locked out of playing puzzles. All puzzles should be free-to-play, pay-to-benefit. (see discord for more details)


I'm a returning player, I used to play 15+ years ago and it's frustrating trying to achieve even distinguished in almost anything, let alone maintaining it.

I've seen a lot of talk about changing the threshold and there was an update recently. Has anyone thought of changing the mechanic that you only have to do the puzzle once in 10 days to keep your rank active?

If this time or even number was altered, I think it would be more balanced and fair for all


  • Standings Changes

Please leave feedback for the standings changes on the Ice discussion page.

Jacqie (Cerulean) On cerulean there are not enough people to play parlor games with, so I like to play the drinking game and use the bots at the inns or the dock. They are all supposedly ultimate drinkers. I win most of the times, even with plain mugs. But my standing is distinguished and it seems it is not getting up in any way. How does this work? Does playing with bots not count as much for your standing as for real pirates? How do you get your standings higher with such a few peoeple on Cerulean (and I like to stay on Cerulean)

I am not sure this will accomplish anything but I would like to at least voice my complaint/displeasure. Specifically in SW (But also in every puzzle), a person getting constant excels/ increds shouln't have a major issue getting above respected/master. Its unfair that we can't provide expert labor due to high levels of botting. I hope that a better job can be done with preventing botting as it is ruining the game experience.


[Post ported over from the test server, with feedback from there already worked into it]

Earlier this year, the concept of scoring thresholds was added, putting a max on the score required to get certain ranks. This seems to have had a small impact on stats, but I believe it still needs tuning. Relevant information: I am mainly a shipboard puzzle player. This post may or may not apply to crafting puzzles as well, from discussions I've seen between players I believe that it does, however, I cannot personally comment on these.

Issue 1) On the lower/medium end of scores (think fines/goods) I think it's still very difficult to get decent scores at all for those newer to the game. This is not something I see discussed frequently (or at all, really) - and I personally have the view that getting fine, and the occasional good, should be reached at a 'kinda trying and having fun' level of gameplay and obtainable for new players. This applies to basically every puzzle.

Issue 2) For most, the balance for the higher end is still off, and the score required to reach incredible is too high. The biggest notable offender is Patching, where when people ask for tips on how to get an 'incredible' I tell them not to even try before they've reached the top of the ultimate list. Gunning also has a weird balance, where getting a high duty report is much easier than getting a high standing.

Issue 3) Not sure if this applies to every puzzle, but some/many puzzles seem to have an arbitrary penalty for not playing at the highest star level, which doesn't scale evenly with the amount of difficulty the star levels actually add. In addition to this, it takes a long time of single-session puzzling to go up star levels in some puzzles, the biggest offenders here being Navigation, Carpentry, and Sailing. This results in a frustrating experience for lower-ranked players, even if they aren't actually bad at the puzzle, because the game starts them out at a low star level, where it is actually more difficult to get a decent score than on higher star levels, and they cannot easily reach the higher star levels because of how long it takes - and every time their puzzling session ends (because of a grapple, or end-of-route, or citadel, etc) they are pushed back down to the lower star level.

Proposals: 1/2) Scale thresholds down. At the top end of scores, differentiate between the puzzles (Patching likely needs to drop more, I personally believe Sailing needs the least change.) Then, as ranks lower, decrease the required scores more. On a puzzle where legendary becomes mildly easier, Master becomes notably easier, and Distinguished becomes significantly easier. 3) Completely remove/massively tone down the penalty for not playing at max difficulty level except where the puzzle introduces new elements that increase the difficulty (such as when bilge adds another color). Elements like crabs (bilging) or the gaff (rigging) only make the puzzle easier and there should not be a penalty for playing without those. 3b) Combine this with a "choose-your-own-difficulty" implementation, such as ⁠Custom star level/difficulty. While I don't believe that fixes issue 3 by itself, it's a good system to have on its own and would at least reduce frustration with the star level system. Please keep discussion on that suggestion in its own thread.

In the current situation, for those less skilled at the puzzles it can be very difficult to feel like they are being useful on the ships they're on, and being able to feel like your puzzling is having a positive impact and matters to the ship is important for keeping players interested. Initially when starting to write this post it had new-and-returning player retention in mind, but it would also benefit the longer term players that are still active, who prefer playing their puzzles a little more casually rather than focussing on optimising their scores


The game is too difficult for beginners or newcomers. Without the need to look at your own character profile, many new-gen gamers will lose interest in the game. We, as partisans in this dignified community, smile at the chance to welcome any newcomer. I personally hearty-request every green user I see so that I can introduce myself and to ask them how they're doing. To get a good board in the navigation puzzle, for instance, I had to wait until apprentice/proficient and then hit duty report #2 on the route, all whilst getting "booches", "poors", and "fines". This is severely limiting the part of my brain that recognizes the limits and boundaries of good behaviors vs bad behaviors. It's not easy to see how a newbie could climb that well, particularly easing his access into the game that we all know lies in mid-game, end-game content. Please allow us easier access to golden indications or severely limit-test, yourself, on a new account who is trying to look good on his character page.


I'm not the first or the last one to say this, but YPP has always had a problem with elitism, but a lot of it is enforced by the game's archetype. As a high ultimate bnavver, I know how the formula for rating works. This is true for most high end rated players.

I think it's a serious game problem that many of the puzzles can't be played unrated, and this puts your players in a bit of a conundrum.

Scenario: I want to run a pillage. I am currently pushing for rank 1 bnav (I'm not, but stay with me). The scenario remains true if it's just "I'm trying to increase my rating"

However, the scenario requires me to run a low difficulty pillage - for example a grand frigate. I have to prioritize the quality of the fights being reduced to sacrifice for the group. Example Scenario 2, I am a captain teaching my new Officer how to bnav and we just have bots on. etc. etc.

The nature of the battle is that it is guaranteed for my high stat to drop, or my stat to not go up, because of the spawn mechanic. Maybe I just want to perform the puzzle under certain conditions.

These are my options in the current ypp meta:

  • Say f*** it - I'll lose my rating because I don't care about ratings
  • Use an alt to perform the puzzle
  • Just don't run the pillage and have someone else do it.
  • Instead, run a more elite pillage/experience where you can continue some path of isolation to avoid your problems

I think most people will go with 3-4 by default, or 1 - none of which are good solutions. I think for battle navigation (and perhaps navigation also), there aren't any alternative puzzles or even alternative methods to make the ship go, so this issue seems worse. But sometimes after I just grinded 3 MP18s back to back i might just wanna carp with my mind off instead of dropping 3 ranks because I was busy working on something else.

I think this could help improve the game - even if it was as simple as a toggle you selected before puzzling. It'd be sweet if you could still gain experience but I'd be willing to lose both to solve this problem, especially as someone trying to grow a crew / train new players / enjoy the game


  • SMH

Please please please please increase the Poe payout from CI's.


As the title says. Instead of having a timer with randomness around the spawning of GYs/citadels have the spawning linked to a set number of kills. To make these stay worth doing part of this would involve making it so that the spawns are located where the monsters/ghost ships are sunk. Such that if you sink Z1 atlantis monsters you get a Z1 citadel, or if you sink Z3 HS ships you get a Z3 graveyard. How this scoring is done would need to be balanced.


  • Cursed Island payouts

[Austee63] Cursed Islands require a very good or a good full crew to puzzle to get you in and out safely. Also, in CI the owner of the ship faces the possibility of losing their ship on Each entry and exit. After all that work you are lucky to get 3-5k for the effort of thralling, then battling and foraging (repeatedly), then puzzling again to exit safely. Yet a Kraken run offers no risk, no battles, and pays substantially more than a CI. Would like to see payouts re-evaluated based on risk factor.

[Empathetic] Please increase payout of Cursed Isles to keep up with Citadel Runs, Graveyard Runs, and even Vampire Lairs. It is incredibly disappointing to see an hour and a half's worth of work for 20-30k PoE.

[Dgkk]I've ran hundreds of Ci's they do not pay out enough and for the amount of effort that you put into it you do not get paid proportionally. It would also be nice to see something change with the items received inside, possibly some new serp colors, gator colors, types of furni, weapons? Give us cultist spears!

Spirit of the Game

  • Engagement

A lot of popular games have daily missions and a season pass type style to keep people coming back to play each day so they could rank up and I think it would be a great idea to add to the game. Popular examples of this can be seen on Call of Duty, Fortnite and Disney's Dreamlight Valley. For reference, I've included a Fortnite "battle pass" so you know what I mean.

I'm proposing a free level and a premium one that can be bought with dubs. With prizes including furniture, ships, chromas, maps, clothes and trinkets, obviously having better prizes as you continue through the season pass and depending on if you'd paid for the premium pass. The prizes would have to make it worth buying the premium level, but not too easy that everyone could achieve them without much effort.

You would have to do missions to earn points to progress through the pass. These would need to be trackable to encourage people to keep doing them. And would contribute a variable number of "points" depending on their difficulty.

Daily missions could include:

✅ Change your outfit

✅ Purchase something at a shoppe/stall

✅ Puzzle with the navy for X league points

✅ Buy an old salt a drink

✅ Do a crafting puzzle (can rotate this so it ties in to the "free" puzzle of the day

✅ Defeat zombies/vampires/skeletons

✅ Defeat a brigand king


Weekly missions could include:

✅ Participate in a sea monster hunt (would include KH, SMH, CI and HS)

✅ Run a pillage

✅ Complete X amount of expeditions


A lot of these things should already be trackable with the current systems used for tracking trophies (I have no idea how this works so I am probably wrong). I'd recommend the daily puzzles to be something you could just do quickly if you're only logging in for an hour or so, and give just enough points to make it worth doing each day. Weekly ones take longer and help hit better prizes. Anything that contributes to the community should be worth more too to help boost the game


The idea here is that there could be a system which has 'quest' style objectives for flags which drop PoE in the flag chest when they are completed. This would provide a source of funding for smaller flags (for events and kades) without needing to rely on donations or the monarch.

A couple examples

  • Run up a lair (3 available per week) and 25k is deposited into your flag fund
  • Do an imperial outpost (5 available) 10k/ea
  • Win 30 battles while pillaging 250k

To prevent abuse I think the flag would need to be of a minimum size/fame/age to be eligible


This weekend only, Atlantis rewards and drop rates for jobbers are increased 20%!

Did reading that get you excited? Have you always dreamed of having “Call of Duty Double XP Weekends” in Puzzle Pirates? Do you feel like there’s no incentive to do one SMH over another?

There should be increased rewards from certain activities in the game every weekend. Simple as that.

A list of activities that could be buffed:

  • Cursed Isles
  • Atlantis
  • Haunted Seas
  • Frays
  • Vampire Lairs
  • Pillages

Upvote this bullcannon!


This is my review as a game designer and an avid fan. The strength of this game lies in numbers. The numbers of users online exponentially increases the enjoyment found on any online sitting. The reason for this game's success is that it's the hardest. Making account goals while creating your account is amazing in this game. You can get a familiar. You can get ultimate in piracy. You can strive to be the best greenie pillaging crew there is. It's fun. But something's lacking... 2 things, really, that is causing people to leave.

  • Greenie exposure
  • No rest or peace for returning players

New players are the pivotal keystone in any genre of any game, ever. To make these players feel welcome. To give them a lot of activities to do. To make their first 3 hours the most enjoyable hours you can. Old players remember it: "Arrrr?!" "Indeed. Yarr" "Yaaaaargh?!" "Yargh... Welcome to the greatest game in the world." This game was inspiring. It was the game of life. You became a pirate. For the first time in your life, you could interact with things from the feelings that a pirate gets. What a joy it must've been for the young ladies of 2008 to spring on and govern the tricks of what a pirate has up his sleeve and disperse it to the masses.

Problem: New players log on and are not immediately greeted. Solution: Pirates need to stay busy around the docks

Problem: New players are left alone for the entirety of their stay. In 2023, this must be daunting, moving around a subpar graphical game where there's just blocky buildings and empty spaces in between. Solution: Create a greenie pillaging hall, a hall where all the new players can conglomerate and get a sense of what new people see and what new people do and what new people do wrong and what new people feel.

Returning players are handicapped by their lack of participation in COMMUNITY events. Returners coming back probably expect only 1 thing to have developed whilst away, a closer tight-knit community. Without it? idk


The month long Halloween content is a lot of fun. It varies a lot though, between werewolves and ghosts etc. The celebration is consistent, but the form of the celebration is very changeable. It makes it hard to plan ahead, or know when to double down and really dig into the content. (https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Halloween_events)

The OMs have also said Monster content is going to be a focus. (https://forums.puzzlepirates.com/posts/P2DICSXKWWPCN5AO.html)

I'd love to see an every other month mini event that follows the recent Werewolf island Fray to Pillaging Skull that gives Booty Boxes, that rotates around the existing Monsters.

I'd love the existing models for other mythical creatures and monsters be used to build the number of monsters out to 8 (full moon, plus 6 months, plus Halloween).

My idea is to have the timing similar to gold or mystery boxes, about 10 days I think. I'd love for the box content to harmonize with but be a less rare selection to the mystery boxes so people who only play with Dubscribing/POE can have a chance at the dustable mystery box content. This would also need less dev time cus the content exists and hopefully has a poe sink aspect like turning in trinkets and dusting (as in, no Familiars. No Deeds. Etc.)


Over the years, many of our pirate Pals have sailed ashore,

I think it could be a fun maybe yearly event to have a week long open house where all player owned homes become available for people to explore. It's a real blast from the past to see how players decorated back in 05 in comparison to the modern day with a variation in releases.

Could be a fun micro holiday !


  • SMH - a beginner friendly way of running SMH's.

[Zyre] It would be nice to have a beginner friendly way of running SMH's. Perhaps one day a week/month you would be able to run a no risk/no sink version of them but with much lower rewards, similar to how there are sinking and non sinking flotillas. This would allow new players to learn the mechanics.

Quality of Life

(Specific quality of life items may be placed in the section related to the desired change)

Known Anti-List

  • Apps

Release non-integrated stand-alone solitaire versions of the easiest to adapt puzzles as apps to mobile devices.

How to make it easier and profitable:

  • Doesn't have to be same code. Just reskin with Puzzle Pirates art.
  • No log in.
  • No standing.
  • Set scoring to a historic average.
  • Serve ads.

Puzzles that would reskin well (doesn't take flipping or rotating):

  • Alchemistry
  • Bilge
  • Blacksmithing
  • Bnav (maybe)
  • Dnav (maybe)
  • Distilling
  • Rigging
  • Rumble
  • Shipwrightery
  • Weaving

I would much rather spend my 'clicky game' time zoning out to bilge and give Puzzle Pirates ad revenue than give the gaming time and revenue to other platforms like candy crush. It could be a revenue and player fountain and if kept stand-alone might not be too much effort. I'm not just saying this because I want to practice whirlpools without tanking my stats. Perlandria

Just chiming in to say I think the above idea is a fantastic one. A way to generate additional revenue, bring exposure to the game, and even allow us to practice puzzles in our downtime is such a good idea. I'd wager you could find several players with the skills and desire to write these apps for you, too (hell, I'd learn to write Android apps to be a part of this). Dementedduck (talk) 22:18, 6 April 2023 (UTC)


Rather than continuously banning serial ban evaders allow them to come back to the game for a fee ($50 admin fee). Once you have been banned I agree you should lose "free" access to the game. Most people end up ban evading regardless and if they cheat they will get caught and banned again. Allowing them access has the benefit of them knowing they can play without fear, puts a real money costs on their actions and hopefully incentivises positive gameplay. The OM's will also know who that person is rather than them "hiding" and the OM's wasting time tracking them down. It’s also extremely sad when a friend is banned as there are close social bonds built around this game. Reforming > punishment


Add pirate pistols and a puzzle of shooting would be cool, imagine it also being a portrait item. Also hyped up to add a ship that has a a capacity of 23 to 26 or perhaps something a little larger than a War Frigate with around 100 capacity

Oh and a trophy for winning battles with a Straightline or the state of being afk lolol

Pirate

Appearance

Truly the only thing holding this game back


For a while I've been thinking of how it would be cool to have more hair options in the game. We do have quite a few hairstyles, but what about hair add-ons? Things that are removable and can be layered together on top of an existing hairstyle similar to Dastardly Mustache.

I've attached an image with some examples but I'm sure there's more things like these! They'd be usable for both body options.

Some ideas (like the bangs) would be easier to implement than the others (like the shaved side). Some add-ons would also be more difficult to make compatible with all hairstyles.

The add-ons would match your pirate's hair color, but could also be fun to be able to dye them with temporary hair dye to have parts of your hair that are different colors.

(OP is an excellent YHH!PP style artist and the mock up images in the Discord discussion are great.)


Can we please make idling time like an hour or something, it's a social game and some people don't like having to wiggle their mouse 9000 times a day. I heard this was applied on Obsidian and much like the poker rake was reimplemented this would be really nice

Also tied with this is hair dye, you lose it when you log off, can it be applied all day too for a swig?


I have been playing the game till 16 years, but only injury I got peg leg. I tried blackbox, sink run, blockade .. etc nothing. I might have strongest body on the game. Injury possibilities should be changed. My friend who created his pirate a year ago has eye patch.


This injury is only available on ice, would be cool to have it on the released oceans


put a mark on Statue of most people who win and lose in PvP


Something small that could be fun for the many people that like to coordinate their outfits and look super stylish and cute that is all.


Can we get more of a selection of tattoos than just the coring kraken one ?

Booty

As the title says being able to view someone’s booty similar to viewing someone’s portraits could be a really cool addition for the economy!

“Check my booty profile, everything must go!”

“All misc and furniture for sale on my booty”

If it worked similar to how it works to view portraits then it could be a very simple Game Design add on!


  • Badges

(See also Shop Management for Labor)

I think it would be nice if when a badge was in it's red text mode ie seven days left or less, if you could buy or unwrap a badge to add time to the existing badge. This isn't super helpful for most badges but it would stop those annoying pop-ups when your officer badge dusts, and if you have a labor badge you wouldn't lose half a day at your stall because it dusted in the morning and you can't log in until evening. Minor QoL change.


  • Bid Tickets
  • Bid Tickets

Tabs like trinkets but set by islands, so players can check a specific island have bid tickets filled. Having info if it's outbidded and how much have already filled would be nice Pirate: Indrox

Is it also possible to sort the bid tickets in the booty by commodity and not by island. I got many bidtickets and when I want to search for a commodity I have to search all through my bid tickets to find on which island I have a bid ticket Jacqie

I'd like to second the Bid ticket grouping idea, in an ideal world youd have it as a toggle in options as to if it sorts by commod or by island as both are useful. But either would help! Ameba


  • Charts / Ye Known World

Sometimes it's very hard to see the LP's that are memmed especially if the route is hard, sometimes its very close to the color a chart has. Would be nice to have a very different color


When I am memming, I can't see the needs or progress of the chart I am on as I am doing it. The Charting ------- covers up the LP o and I can't see what the LP o looks like.

Please change the way Charting displays to let us see LPs at the same time.


Discussion originally started in docktarting moving this here. The idea is to make a change to the memming system. Currently it's only based on duty navigation but it would be interesting to add another mechanic to the current system. You could start making progression towards memorizing a league point passively by voyaging without having to do some duty navigation, BUT if you are duty navigating it would drastically increase the progress to the memorization of that LP. Keep in mind that it would still take a long time to memorize an LP without duty navigation. I think this change would maybe entice people to run pillages on different routes then the classic (Osprey/Wissa-Beau/Gull Arch). Clarification: I am not suggesting that people who laze on a ship without a DR should get progression


Call me insane..... but maybe just maybe make it easier to mem the ocean.

  • Like we removed swabbie transport as an option so we need to be attackable for large portions of this effort (yes I know about navy hopping for hours to get the right routes). Which slows down memming. Or makes you have to multitask or pull an afker to shipwatch.
  • Maybe we can award a special trophy to all who have it memmed pre update with something to signify the extra challenge that it was before any changes. This will reward them for that whatever.

Two solutions I thought of:

1- Make it memorized on 2 passes of incredible guaranteed. 4 Excellent 8 good and fine is 10. With no change to any other mechanic. I'd even be open with 5+ passes randomized if you get a fine or good. With a cap at 10 for those who may not be skilled at it

2-Allow us to mem on swabbie transport. We still pay poe to have swabbie transported but we can be left alone in the hundreds of hours of memming we have ahead of us with the coin toss it is to mem anytime after 3+ passes regardless of score.


Add a percentage of how much of the ocean is memorized on the ye known world


  • Clothing
  • Male Clothing

Can we have more options for male clothing primarily a solid colored pants without stripes or patches.


Could we get some new clothes selection ? Maybe some clown clothes ?


  • Deeds

Met a player who had an original LE ship that was over 10+ years old. He was paranoid that they're gonna re-release it and crash it's value 😦

Just thought it might be cool if there's a way to distinguish if someone had an "original" or "vintage" version of a LE ship from years ago versus its re-released version for authenticity's sake. Maybe like Series I, II, III etc. in the deed name?


  • Furniture

To solve the problem of furniture filling up the inventory over time and no easy way or good reason to get rid of them, maybe there could be a way to reuse them. I'd like to see all those broken crates, barrels, woodpiles and anchors obtained from SMH to be able to be broken down for raw commodities in the form of bid tickets.

Depending on the condition of the furniture you would get a different amount. For new condition you could get a 75% 'commodity refund', good 50%, old 25%. The total commodities returned could be rounded down in case you end up decimal values. If the furniture recipe uses finished products like cloth, dye or enamel, the raw commodities returned should take them into account.

The bid tickets would be instantly filled after trading/disassembling the furniture. Maybe only let them be able to be picked up at Ringer islands through a certain type of government building, something like a junkyarrd? Ringer islands should have enough space left for the building for any ocean.

It could be too complicated to implement, there's already a trading post that takes trinkets and outputs items, what I'm suggesting is a place that takes furniture and spits out filled bid tickets. If not a different building, trying to fit it in the options of a furniture stall/shoppe.

Would like to hear if there's any interest in this and other suggestions to making it work. If one of those forum cyborgs like Faulkston is still around, maybe they remember if this has been suggested before.


Since the 2020-05-27 release we haven't been able to store fams in wardrobes. I agree they need air and sunlight. Could we please get a pet cage? We could even have an aquarium for octos or water loving fams, but im not sure how long monkeys can swim though.

This would be a great way to show them off.


Something I'd love to see in the game is the ability to recolour furniture. I think using current chromas might be a bit much for that, but having the ability to trade in say 10x of one chroma to make a furniture one, or even having it as a seperate item obtained in another way would be really cool, and allow a bit more creativity with colour combos when it comes to our houses.

In the same vein, I'd love a way to be able to paint using LE colours, though I realise that might mess up the ships. It can be difficult to use LE colour themes in houses sometimes, due to not being able to paint the walls with said colour, unlike ships that can come in that colour to begin with.

  • Furniture chromas

could have a farm type designed garden. - Galantis. (17 Nov 2023)


People literally have a million things in their Furniture tab. (myself included). And majority of items being impossible to sell unless a specific buyers is online at the specific moment in time you're advertising in /trade or worth too little to advertise..

Obviously a different name instead of rail but work the exact same way?


I want to be able to put a framed portrait anywhere on the floor of scene, away from the wall. Please give us a furniture item that acts like a Wall space but can be placed on the floor. If you reuse the Portrait Easel assets, I don't care.


The same way you can store other loadouts in the game, like your swords, bludgeons, and mugs; there should be a furniture item to store rowboats for future use. It can look like a bunch of rowboats on a rack, and be as big to boot! Maybe only hold a maximum of 3 - 5 kits?


  • Inventory Management

Spoken to Crabby about this before. Items that store things like trinkets, clothes, swords, chromas, etc. have a limit of 1 storage bin per room, ultimately limiting how much you can store in a room/home. Ideal solutions: Either entirely remove the limit of storage for a storage bin, or allow the possibility of adding multiple storage containers in a room and having this add to the overall storage limit for that room. Eg. 2 chroma crates in 1 room would double the storage capacity in the room. Added bonus, you can select either crate to access the combined room storage. Even from just a design perspective, I would like to be able to put multiple display cases or sword racks in a room for asthetic purposes. But of course if it can also serve a function, then lets do that

  • Inventory/Booty

Following on from Indrox's idea regarding bid tickets Id actually like to see these separation tabs for more of the item types.

  • misc have designs/charms/chromas ect.
  • furniture by source or by category
  • Bold textfamiliars and pets by type

Ameba


  • Items

Currently only some items can be wrapped. Fams, pets, ships (not seal) cannot be wrapped in a nice gift.


  • Misc.

Would chromas be able to be made combinable like potions, this would make trading and tracking how many you have way easier, would also cut down on too mich being in the booty panel which causes huge lag.


  • Pets

I think it would be neat to have those as pets


Please place colour tags on the pets as is with trinkets and fams ect, would make it so much easier for correct trades, specially for those with colour-blindness and us collectors.

  • Pets (mouse over color)

Adding the color wave of each pet when you hover your mouse over. It is the only thing in the game that does not display its color.

This was actually addressed by one of the developers, a few years ago (I forget which one). The code for pet colors is different from most of the color code in the game, so the time cost-to-return to do isn't practical. —Xelto


Could we please get new gator colors? I think it would look great.

Something like a emerald gator, or spring green gator maybe with yellow, banana or lemon stripes? 🐊


Apart from colors, i would like to see a variety of new pets? Being relatively realistic as a pirate theme game except for a few mythical things, livestock is a must, we have ponies pigs sheep rabbits, but what about cows? What about actual horses? Or lizards? Kamoto dragons? Or actual breeds of dogs like poodles , dachshund, spaniel, pitbulls, Dalmatian, st bernard? other suggestions please share


Like, chihuahua-little dogs. Or big fluffy dogs. Anyone else want more variety here?


I always thought it would be cool if pets played a more active role in the game. Like there was an advantage of having one in an sf or rumble: Kind of just like equipping a sword, equipping a pet that does a certain sprinkle pattern or something.


Hey if we have walking jugs of rum why can't we have a land shark? Or just a shark that flops around next to us?


We get ghost rats from HS, but we dont get winged rats from lairs Look how cute it would be


  • Pets

Pets/Familiars could require feeding/maintenance or they start to decay and eventually dust. They would be fed with foraged fruits at intervals unique to the pet. Fruits can be stored in crates on houses/ships or carried on the pirate. The fruits could also decay and eventually dust. This would give use to forageables and increase the value of familiar/pet ownership. This could also encourage pirates to log on more to feed their animals - Stans

Can we make it impossible to rename pets back to their original name? I bought a "unnamed" small dog that was actually just named back to Small dog with RM's so now its going to cost me RM's to name it if I want to. This doesn't seem right - Yahahar

In response to the above, (not sure when it was posted) but I'm pretty sure it is impossible already, I had actually tried to rename one of my named big cats to "Big Cat" and it didn't allow me. - Galantis. (17 Nov 2023)

I recoloured a white striped tiger and designed a Rainbow Striped Tiger, I have shared the design and a few people like it. I have also sent a petition in hopes maybe it can be made for Pride Month. A Rainbow Spotted Big Cat could also be an alternative or another idea too. Idea design here, if links are allowed: https://imgur.com/a/N2cZNyp :) - Galantis. (17 Nov 2023)


I quickly recoloured a tiger in Procreate as a rough idea.

Can also have a Rainbow Spotted Big Cat.

Perhaps a Rainbow themed mystery box for Pride month in June, released with other rainbow trinkets and furniture etc.


  • Portraits
  • Portrait Items

There's some old portraits where OMs hold items such as a Conch Shell or a Starfish. Is there any chance we can get some currently unreleased-to-regular-players portrait items out there? Patgangster (talk) 18:56, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

I'd suggest make all trinkets holdable in portraits -Bisca >seconded Ameba


  • Seasonal/Limited Edition Portraits

Maybe we can change the Limited Edition or the Seasonal text at the portrait easel to an expiration date.. For example: Bisca's Sweethearts (1) Available til 01-05 Or (1) Bisca's Sweethearts - 01/05


  • Potions


  • Trinkets (For trade in, see Islands, Trading Post)

The Vampirite doll is under Odds and Ends and not under Dolls. See link for screenshot of OP petition.

Go Home

i was speaking with a friend in-game and he was telling me how cool it would be if we can "set as home" docked ship provided they have a bed furniture, or a living quarter of some kind. might give those furni some utility as well as just making sense! thought this suggestion was too neat to let go

Petitions

POE / DUBs on account and on Pirate

We have chest for poe and I kinda wish we had a way to store dubs. I am the type of person that if I see I have it I want to spend it. I always keep my poe in a chest to kinda hide it from myself. I have been setting small goals for myself to have a certain amount of poe always set back for things like stock, maps, ships, badges etc. while also saving up for fun things that are long term goals (pets & fams). I wonder if something could be added to store dubs so I and maybe other people who have the same problem could store dubs to hide them from ourselves. I guess the best solution would be to just not spend them (its a personal problem I'm working on it), but I thought if we already have a way to store poe why not dubs too? I'm not sure if this would cause any future problems game mechanics wise. Would love to hear other peoples thoughts and opinoins on the matter as well.


RM Shop

Have it cost 100 rogue marks to un-name a familiar and 50 to un-name a pet. The rates to rename a familiar are 20 rogue marks and a pet 10 rogue marks. Five times the cost to un-name them would let rogue marks gain value as they are currently declining. And more importantly it would add a much desired feature to the game. I know myself and many others would love to un-name some of their high end familiars and pets. And now collectors can buy named versions knowing they can un-name them for their unnamed collections.


Having a ship rename approved by an OM is too inconsistent. It's seemingly a question of which OM you get at what time and what sort of mood they're in at the time. We have ships named things like 'Wrong Hole' and 'Salty Ball' sailing around which CLEARLY should not be allowed on the oceans. We even have pirates roaming the ocean named offensive things like 'Candycumming'.

Yet, legitimate fictional ship names that "has in some way distinguished itself above and beyond ordinary or routine service" (https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Official:Services) is clearly too vague for an OM to know and enforce. Even providing references it seems to come down to what mood or how busy a particular OM might be at any given time.

These fictional ship renames shouldn't be 'at the Ocean Master's discretion' that's too vague. Please open up renames to fictional ships that people can prove hold significance within the fictional universe that's important to them but don't exceed the defined General Ship Renaming Rules. If it's not going to be offensive (which apparently already doesn't matter) then it should be allowed as long as it qualifies under the other stated general ship renaming rules.


As a player I want to rename ships to any latin text. So I can express myself in game

Going with the usual product management prompt here feels weird and doesn't fully grasp the topic. When Y!PP first had ship renames (with Shanghai Points!), we were in a very different internet. Back then, actual roleplay was very common and the OMs made the at the time correct decision to require custom ship names to be real words.

Nowadays, we live in a world where actual yachts are called "Boaty McBoatface", you can play as Peter Griffin in Fortnite and even Y!PP is a lot more laid back with foxes, unicorns and even rum jugs as pets.

The internet has evolved away from role play and towards self-expression.

I think it just makes sense to incorporate that into ship renaming and remove the necessity for custom ship names to be real words. Let me attach myself to my ships more. And similarly, if someone chooses a ship name that sucks, that's yet another reason to turn it into a submarine.

Best thing about this is it needs 0 technical change, just an internal policy change. :3

Where are my ships

(also see Island Life: Docks)

Add a 'Crew Use - Stock' 4th option to the Navigation Lock. Maybe use a Coin on the Lock Marker. Or something similar.

The function I want is to be able to tell in game, easily and visually, how I am choosing to use my ships. I want to be able to tag my ships for common ways to use them like stock runs, pillaging, adventures or flotillas, PvP, maps and charting, bank ship, keep empty, ok to trade or sell, etc. If I can only have one of those, I think Stock Ship would be the most useful.

I think a simple place to do this is to add to the Navigation Lock function. It already has Crew Use, Personal Use, and Battle Ready. A cosmetic Crew Use that is called something like Trading or Evading or something that has a Coin icon on the lock would let me see at the Dock which ship is being used for what.

If the existing ship lock icons could be added to the Ye, My Name, Booty and then lists Deeds by type that would be awesome too.

Ye

(For Hearties, see Pirate to Pirate) (For Employment & Labor, see Island Life: Shops)

  • Familiars shown

I think it would be really cool if we were able to Organize the Familiars on our Pirate Pages.

Right now they currently show Top to Bottom based on the Date they were unboxed/won.

There are a great number of Fam collectors out there who I think would also like the ability to organize their favorite fams at the top and/or put them in order based on species, color, etc.


  • Familiars

Can we have a "manage your familiar" button so we can display our fuzzy friends in the order of our choosing on our pirate page please? Like the reorder trophy boxes option. It would be greatly appreciated as we can't always predict where our newly purchased friend will land and I'm not currently happy with the order of mine lol. Thanks <3

I'd like to follow this with being able to create a custom order like trophies would be amazing, but if not if they could be grouped by type then that would help clear up the look of the display at the moment. When the display of familiars on the pirate page was designed it wasnt really intended for the massive amounts of familiars now available in the game so could really use some kind of overhaul. Ameba


  • Owl familiar removal

Can we have an option to trash an owl familiar? As it's impossible to trade it, we cannot get rid of it off our pirate pages. Even the possibility to "unname" the familiar would be great, as it is untradeable anyway. Thanks!


there is monkey's and parrots , there could many more option with other fams


  • Houses owned


  • Portrait Gallery


  • Reputation


  • Skills

I know that most people in the top 10 have the skills to get #1 but think this would be a cool way to look at progress and make archipelago rankings more useful.

Imagine if you looked at the hiscores in runescape and you could only see the front page - I know this game is a bit "anti quantification" but that doesn't mean it wouldn't spark some competitive juices


  • Shops owned and managed listings


  • Trophies

It would be nice if we could see somewhere what the counts are for earning the trophies, I mean: how many strikes did I do, How many guns did I fill, How many greedies etc. How many do I need more to get the ...trophie. It would motivate to puzzle harder.


Obviously the game already does it; so why not make a way for us to see it, that way we can set goals: Like hey i only need 11 more GY to get a gold GY; lets go on an HS, or oh look 35 Cutters away from Diamond cutter; i should go sloop pilly.. Etc...


Legit, just more trophies. Diamonds for SMH. Open it up to the community to design the trophy image etc etc (Discord link has become a trophy suggestion discussion. "Thank you for adding list-like suggestions here. It makes it easier for me to add this to our internal suggestions. Obviously not a requirement, but it's handy for poor old Cronus.")


it would be cool if we could get some progress trophies for these two puzzles! like the ones on Piracy Trophies in Other puzzle trophies on YPPEDIA page!


We need trophies for patching like the ones in sailing and carp such as the grain bonus in carp and the targets cleared in sailing. Im thinking trophy for 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 gromets cleared

Pirate to Pirate

Crews

Hoooy c:

I,ve got an idea about something that annoys me now like a pretty amount of time. But what about a Crew log? Just like the Building or Hold records but just for the internal Crew Seníor Officer and Captain and/or Flag Royals. It shows when someone joined, leaved or got kicked out. Rank/Title Changes or any kind of changes that are possible.


Not a core game idea, but it would be a nice addition. Make it possible for a crew's captain to create custom crew titles. Also, make it possible for a pirate to be given more than just one title (maybe 2-3 titles max).

See OP replies for suggestions of more crew titles to add.


So I was thinking before as sometimes it comes in handy, to have different coloured names depending on if that pirate is a crewbie or a flaggie. But since greeters are a thing there could be a clash, which is why maybe symbols might help instead. Or a (pink) symbol to show greeter status but a different colour name to show crewbie/flaggie status.

Complain

(and/or Griefing)

As mentioned in several places so far, it's not too uncommon for people to run large ships, with large amounts of bots on board. Currently the main discussion point on these has been Haunted Seas runs (but the citadel payout nerf was also said to have been specifically targeted at botted runs) In some cases this has reached up to 30-60 per ship. At two /complains every two minutes it becomes a tedious task to even attempt to report these. it might be nice to see one or more of the following: (see discord for details)

Flags

In general we need more reasons to visit these communal areas and I think adding some furniture items that support flag/crew activities would be nice!


Part of the end game is to be high ranking in a crew/flag and own the most expensive bulidings( shoppes , estates, galleries, crew/flag hall

But it has come to my attention that crew/flag halls are a forgotten or ignored part of the game (...)

I propose giving halls a better role in the end game by allowing them to buy/sell ship supply and be able to store maps of all kinds like SMH, relic, wayfinders,expos, as many crew/flags already these 2 exclusive unofficial features but would more insensitive to visit or purchase a hall See OP for more description.

Hearties

I would like a shortcut to check my online hearties without leaving a station. For example '/wh' to list all my online hearties, click on single hearty in the appearing tab to execute '/w <name>' to see if they are on a boat/busy.


Tell / Chat & other / commands

As a colourblind pirate. I really struggle to read crew/jobbing/royal/alerts (Anything on a red background)

Is there any simple solution to allow us to edit the colour of the chat bubbles to something easier to read on? (I mean a full colourblind mode would be amazing too but I understand that's a lot of work)


We have /who for pirates, crews, and flags. But we also have a /who for vessels/ships. Since we can look up locations like a ship, can we have a /swho or /bwho for shops & stalls or buildings to the /who choices?


Hi! I notice when creating a new pirate, they have the trade channel turned on and the global chat channel turned off by default. Surely it would be more logical to have it the other way around? And is there a mission or something to explain the different chat channels and chat commands available?

Also I have noticed that you use /tmute to turn trade chat on and off, but global is /global-off and /global-on. Could these be made consistent?


Make it easier to follow conversations. Problem: Messages of different types are lost too easily. 1-I get a tell (private message imporant/urgent/relevant) and I have to scroll through 50 people leaving vessel two crew messages and 5 global trade messages to see on part of that conersation. 2- Vessel sinks in a cade and the boat leader shout shwta boat to get on and its lost in every member leaves vessel message. Solution: seperate by chat type similar to many other major multiplayer gamed


/fomute command or something similar to turn the FO chat off.


Especially when there's everyone and their nan enters the one flotilla that spawns for the week, it would be nice to have an open flotilla chat to say ur moves rather than me sending tells to everyone


Maybe an option to show only game messages or only trade messages etc? Or only tells? Would be organised


This has been going on for so long, I fix it like muscle memory.

After I’ve used my hotkeys to say/global/trade chat something for several rounds, all of a sudden, the hotkey will stop working????

The first fix is to type a space before then hitting the hotkey, usually that does the trick for another several rounds.

After a while that fix stops working as well, and then you have to go into the chat hotkeys, add a character (like a space), check and uncheck the box next to the chat message, then it has “reset” and you can start the process again.


Briefly discussed on Ice before. A filter similar to /global-on/off or /tmute but for game chat. Many players have (for a long time) complained about the gunning message spam amongst others.

With the filter on (/vesselmute or w/e), these messages would not be sent to the player.

Trade

PLEASE consider making owls and wolverines tradable, at least the LE ones! I understand the reason why in Dark Seas they were non tradable but there’s no point in having them non tradable in Emerald (:


Being able to add a K or a M would be a nice little thing to have the ability to do. (see Discord post for mock up image)


Can we please be able to trade mass amount of things by like clicking on a top corner of the box of what the item is or a select all button like trading post does but have it for trades as well, instead of clicking and dragging each item one by one. Takes so long to do trades thanks.

Community

Social Game /Social Media

  • Discord
  • Start a Discord

All the current games at this time (that I know of) have a Discord. You can even set a bot to monitor the Discord to get rid of unsavory remarks/characters, such as Dyno or Mee6. --Purpure (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2022 (UTC) [I would love to see discord as a replacement for the old forum, there was so much good there Ameba]

https://discord.gg/F7E8QrrYTm


  • Email
  • Email old players

("Your pirate got stranded on an island in a new ocean - Emerald. Yarghhh! [...] download the game [...]")


  • Instagram


  • Reddit
  • Engage with Reddit

If it's feasible, add the previous blog posts to YPPedia so that we don't completely lose the quirky history of 3 Rings. === --Purpure (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2022 (UTC)


  • TikTok


  • Twitch
  • Advertise the game through streamers.


First, I think Twitch Drops and other cross platform in game content rewards should be limited to things that dust. I just want to get that out of the way.

For promotions and visibility there are several platforms that let me connect my game ID and my platform ID so I get rewarded. This reminds me those games exist, and can be a fun way to get attention.

Can you imagine a Jazz Charity PP Stream where watching for 4+ hours gets you an item you can wear or hold in a portrait? He pretty consistently wears a sash jacket in his portraits, so maybe everyone that watched would get rewarded with a jacket in his favorite color.

Twitch and Amazon Prime also give In Game Content promos.

I don't know how technical or how actually expensive in real money setting up drops or in game rewards are. But we actually HAVE twitch streamers. Let's play with that?


  • Twitter / X


  • YouTube

Communication

Would be neat to have polls in the game or at least on this discord server. Like should kades be closed during the holidays? Or should the blockade windows be changed from 6 am to 6pm game time ? Or polls on new pet/fams/funi, color or style.

Get an understanding of what people want that are playing the game to make it easier on the devs and make the people feel they have input on the game we love so much .


  • Official Discord

(https://discord.gg/F7E8QrrYTm)

A long time ago they existed on the forums. Would be nice to see them back here on Discord. Would be nice to know about events they may planned before/during/after the blockade. We could also learn a little bit more about the flag.


As the title says, would be interesting do more detailed player reports about supposed hacks/botting here on discord, here we have the possibility to attach videos, full logs and documents, and images. There are some dirscord's bots that can manage tickets, making private channels with the reporter and staff.


  • Official Website

Just suggesting - the article that's featured right now has been the featured article for the last 10 years. Not to be that guy, but it might be time for a new one. Especially since the ocean merge is fairly well known at this point.

Not sure what should replace it, however.


closed post


This thread in Tips and Tricks prompted me.

In the past I think we remember there being a stand alone bilge puzzle on the website. And recently we've talked about missing Quid Pro Clothes.

2 things.

1. Yes please put a bilge back on the website so I can give my tetris friends a taste without having to install Java / a whole program. If I am missing it and it is there, let me know please. 2. Doll Makers are fun and can be popular. It would be nice to have a Quid Pro Clothes preview style dressing room / doll maker on the website. I want to see how stupid I would look with some of the hairstyles.


  • Official Wiki
  • add the previous blog posts to YPPedia

If it's feasible, add the previous blog posts to YPPedia so that we don't completely lose the quirky history of 3 Rings. Purpure (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2022 (UTC)


Just wanted to point to the existing content.

Celebrations

We should have a day set for these wonderful people . Any suggestions? (see discord post for suggestions)


In the last few years we've seen games start embracing the diversities in their communities and offer pride-related customization options, with the updates coming out in June for Pride Month (examples- Among Us and their pride flag nameplates, Neopets and their pride flag items). Can we please see some Pride-related reskins of existing banner items in YPP? :happypirate: Examples of current Wall Hanging items that I think could easily be adapted to Pride versions. 'Flag tapestry' and 'Heart tapestry' are other ones that might be easy to adapt. It could be just a rainbow flag, or the rainbow progress flag, or also branch out to the more diverse flags. They could be available in June at the Palace or Furnishers like normal seasonal items, or just available permanently as an additional option with the existing banners in the Wall-mounted section of Furnishers. Other specific flags could be the alternate views of a single item instead of having to have one item for each flag. https://items.jellyneo.net/search/?name=pride+flag These are an example of the options Neopets chose to implement- which includes the rainbow, progress rainbow, and 11 more specific flags. I'd love to see something like this available on YPP!


  • 20th Anniversary

something to remember this day by, could make it untradeable again, but useable in portraits?


  • October Monster Something


  • December Elfish Shenanigans

Special Releases

  • Gold & Mystery Boxes

With the lock-bump on the ice boxes thread reminding me of boxes: boxes. Last year the April gold boxes ended up being Spring Green - personally assumed that was because the March boxes had some ghosty stuff in them. That unfortunately meant we missed out on having any periwinkle content that year, though, please bring that back this year!

Plenty of stuff has not yet been released in Periwinkle, notably serpents, spiders, any hatted fams, lobsters, big dogs, pigs, ponies (ponies with horns don't count), seals, sheep... and probably more! (Would not mind blue-grey being splashed in these boxes a bit again either; in 2018 the april gold box was blue-grey, and in 2020 it included a few blue-grey rewards. Been a while by now, though!)


COMPLETE THE SET!


A bit silly imo to have a whole ship painted except the other rooms and not being able to have it match the rest of the ship because it's not possible to paint colours like wine, chocolate, banana etc ourselves.


Could we please have a pet rock thats yellow/brown? I want a potato pet.

Sincerely, HotPotato.


  • Gold Boxes

[Empathetic] Can tan/color & color/tan parrots be added to the loot pool for gold boxes? Bia pet tournaments have been cancelled for quite a long time, and it would be a good refresh compared to getting tan/tan parrots over and over again - they're very oversaturated in the game.

Conversely, or in addition to, add a reroll similar to bat reroll for tan/color parrots.


Also looking for a bit of a discussion on whether people actually get new conditioned clothing from mystery boxes because from what it seems like, it's majority or all good condition and no new condition, even though it states "good condition or better".

Maybe make all clothing new condition as default?

Also maybe get rid of bandanas? Seems like such a kick in the teeth reward to get tbh. (Arguably also getting rid of stripy clothing and patchy too but I guess some people like them).


Its very tragic that the ships come without all rooms painted, and since they're LE colors, you can't recolor them to fit the rest of the ship


  • Periwinkle

Please add a holdable flower trinket periwinkle as the color for the gold boxes in the month of April, similar to wine, spring green, and emerald that have been released in the past. This would accompany many pirate's trinket holder space and also add variety to portraits. The flowers are already coded in the game, an RGB code for periwinkle would need to be added. If suggestions for the color code, the darker color (as seen on the coreset/flaired pants) would match the best.


Hello here are my suggestions of furniture for the next box See OP for list of about 20 suggestions and a screen shot.


I picked warm cozy items that I would want to see to compliment the ice cold feeling. A cute table with some tea, cake, pudding, punch, roast chicken and carrots ;). A cozy fire and chair to sit down in after hanging up the cloak, from a long day of hunting meat and cutting wood to keep warm for the winter. ^__^ the perfect setting for a night indoors playing card games!


Trinkets from Mystery Boxes should not come in (random color) they should come in (random LE color). Pulling a standard color beachcomber trinket from a box feels really bad ngl. Almost as bad as getting white clothes out of the RB boxes.


  • LE

When will we see these rare items brought back? since they were all the way back in 2007 on the birth of Atlantis. As a majority of them yes have been opened but also stuck on very old accounts would be nice to bring back some tournaments with these!


I beg of you to create a Limited Edition holiday-themed cutter called the 'Cookie Cutter' that utilizes the Gingerbread bakery items and is generally themed around cookie baking and decorating. A cozy oven is a must. For the name pun, but also for the lovely smells of baking cookies to cover the less... fortunate odors of piracy. If you wanted to be really fancy the entire ship (or parts of it) could be made out of dough also... though probably not the hull, we all know what happens when you leave your cookie in your milk too long. Possible adjective names: Decorated, Frosted, Golden-brown, Spiced, Iced, Delicious, Chewy, Crispy, Warm


I would love to see trinket flowers in all LE colors! Periwinkle, plum, ice blue, banana, shadow, pumpkin, the booched colors, etc!

They currently drop in the emerald, spring green and wine boxes I believe. Plus blue grey for the tournaments!

These are some of the best trinkets in the game, it would be so cool to have them available in more colors!


  • Limited Edition Ships

- I would like to see another kind of Limited Edition Grand Frigate. Could we have a Jungle Grand Frigate? Please let me know if you would like us to send in design suggestions.


Pretty much what the title says. I love the rogue class ships but a little disappointed that the sloop still uses the original flush deck sloop model as its base. There's just something really appealing when a ship has a nice aftcastle/butt.

Rogue Mark II class can exist alongside the current Rogue class sloops. The same Rogue sloop designs (the items) could also be used interchangeably with both the original Rogue class sloop and the new Mark II Rogue class.


Some awesome furniture and trinkets were available only for a limited time, and if someone didn't start playing before it was available for a month, they have missed the opportunity to obtain them. For example, Brigand King dolls and Furniture.


So past 2 years all they have released is Sloop LE ships, upcoming January they are releasing Phantom WF which is great for this year can we also release Gingerbread WB and also Harvest Cutter, or whatever not just sloops all the time, thanks. Mentioned those 2 because I don't have them 😛

Notice Board in Tab Order

  • News Tab

Thoughts on getting a link in the client - on login screen - to the most recent release notes on the yppedia?


  • Puzzles Tab


  • Missions Tab

Getting to an island with a fray mission can be very frustrating because you blindly click the mission 10 times, then the fray started without you. As a player I want to have an island indicator on fray missions So that I can get to the right fray immediately.


  • Script a nice tutorial mission for new players.

Give them an amazing first impression.

Example: You design your pirate and meet an NPC. The NPC will swordfight and rumble (while explaining the basics) and give ye a bandana upon defeat. Then he'll ask you to hop on his ship to sail to Admiral island - on the way you will have to Sail, Bilge and Carpent. As a surprise, you get attacked, have to gun and yer NPC buddy sinks the attacking sloop with 4 shots (1 gunning board you filled). After looting the booty (treasure haul), you will finally make it to Admiral Island with a bit of PoE in yer pocket...


  • Voyages Tab

It isn't as bad anymore that there are skilled swabbies. But sometimes I just want any pillage, or any adventure, or any forage. The pirate putting up the jobbing offer could set it to Weigh Anchor (or pick a phrase). The voyage type could have a Weigh Anchor (whatever) button for prospective jobbers to select. Jobbers get auto loaded into the oldest job, or the fullest job of that type, or some other selection criteria that prevents 3-6 ship sitting at needing 2-3 more to be happy. Again, not really an issue anymore with skilled swabbies. But it would still be nice.


  • Notice Board Rankings

Change the algorithm, particularly for foraging offers. Currently the highest ranked foraging offers are alphabetical with no link to the amount of POE being offered. Either link it directly to the numerical values of the forage offer or change the offers to "small fruit" and "large fruit" or similar so that all offers are alphabetically identical.


  • Events Tab


  • Shoppe Jobs Tab

because it sorts the shops in such a bizarre way, and doesn't give information about queues / full reserve labour etc. If anyone knows how it is currently sorting them that could be helpful too.


Currently to forage, you need to have a pirate AFK for long stretches of time waiting on jobbers or have an army of alts to forage. This is the biggest hurdle I have when considering fruit running as a side hustle (I really only want the gold nuggets for my stall), because I work 50+ hours a week and cannot afford to idle my time away jobbing OR play 30 boards of forage every night. Is there some way we can set a forage offer without a pirate present to job people? Even if we have to hire some swabbies to be the guards so we don't get robbed, that'd be a preferable situation to foraging not being a viable part of the economy for some players.


Currently to forage, you need to have a pirate AFK for long stretches of time waiting on jobbers or have an army of alts to forage. This is the biggest hurdle I have when considering fruit running as a side hustle (I really only want the gold nuggets for my stall), because I work 50+ hours a week and cannot afford to idle my time away jobbing OR play 30 boards of forage every night. Is there some way we can set a forage offer without a pirate present to job people? Even if we have to hire some swabbies to be the guards so we don't get robbed, that'd be a preferable situation to foraging not being a viable part of the economy for some players.


  • Notice board / Shoppes

Would love to see a fix in the game design so that a shoppe that is displayed on the Notice Board actually needs labor. A good portion of the time I jump from listed shoppe to listed shoppe doing no labor because the ones listed do not need any labor at all.

I would like to second this. If it was easier to find places to work this would encourage more people to do the crafting puzzles and reduce the amount of trade/global chat advertising for workers. Ameba


And maybe make it last a day or a week or something so I don't have to refresh em once an hour


  • Blockades Tab


  • Competitions Tab

Can they try to be posted before the last few days of the month? They're a lot of fun and there are already so many fewer these days, so its nice to be able to try to make the ones that still happen.

Also, wouldn't hate having them more often again ❤️


With the Easter egg design comp being up now, I feel it may be a good idea to discuss competition generation and how the same puzzles are usually grouped together.

I for one would like a bit more variation of puzzles in the competitions. (Ideally having them, or at least the puzzles within them selected randomly). This would be a good idea as:

  • Having the same puzzles together all the time usually results in the overall categories won by the same people.
  • People may have a ‘bad puzzle’ which they are unable to score well in (looking at you distilling) which prevents them from performing well in the overall category on puzzles grouped together they may be otherwise good at.
  • In continuation to point 2. This may also provide more people to partake in comps making them more competitive in general.
  • More variation = less repetitiveness = more fun and a different challenge each time.

Sure there’s more things I’ve missed

The High Seas

Sea Monster Hunt

Currently, if someone leaves during a break the ship does not get a mercenary / swabby to replace them. However, during the regular round they are replaced.

The lack of replacement only hurts the run and it's often lesser-experienced players that leave on break because they don't realize it is detrimental.


  • Atlantis

Just a thought but instead of nerfing the drops to the ground maybe a better solution is increasing the time between cit spawns?


It would be nice to see TH on HS/Atlantis etc not count to stat. It doesn't count in lair, and forage doesnt affect it in ci either, so it doesn't make sense to me that it does in HS and atlantis. I tanked my Ult TH so I can go for some HS and atlantis trophies and from maybe 3 runs im down to respected.


Could we get the cits to yield the same amount or more then the current amount? Lots of people enjoy cits but they are uncommon now, its was the first SMH introduced in the game and have always been a fan favorite, now the only Atlantis runs are either backwall or sink runs(which I believe should be nerfed) ... I view a injury as a prestige thing and should be kept more exclusive, your thoughts? See OP for the full description of idea.


  • Cursed Isle

I feel like homunculi could've been rewarded in CIs in the first place instead of mystery boxes. As per the image, natural colours seem to include tanish, brownish, light greenish, peachish and rose colours.

New serpent colours could include more natural snakey colours like green, light green, lime...


Would be nice to be able to see how full the hold in in CIs like you can see in every other SMHs! I have had issues this week with overload of booty and it trash the CCs and take the bone boxes instead.

2nd suggestion: If we can't see the hold ... Push priority on higher chests when the hold is full (CCs for CIs)


  • Haunted Seas

With Haunted Seas runs now being PVP hunted left and right, I think the crow's nest should be accessible during Graveyard's so there is a way to see the entire map.


The inclusion of mercs was to help make up for a lack of an active player base. As time goes on adjustments have been made in blockades to combat the exploitation of full mercenary ships.

Now that adjustments have been made in the blockade scene, players have moved to abuse the mercenary system to greif and harass HS and Atlantis runs. These players are utilizing the ability to just bring a full ship in to PVP and outnumber an HS run, turning some HS runs into miniature blockades. These at first were targeted at specific HS runners but now seems to have been opened up to just about anyone regardless of allegiance or political standing.

These players are greifing and denying a majority of the player base this HS content and are acting outside the spirit of the game.

What I am suggesting is to not completely deny these players the ability to attempt to PVP and hit HS runs, but prevent them from exploiting the mercenary system any further. This can be done by limiting the mercenaries that can be on a ship for Haunted Seas and Atlantis runs to 50% or 33% just like they have been adjusted for blockades.


  • Kraken Hunt

I ran into an issue where i was happy to let crewbies run KH's off a ship i had setup but where i didn't want to put it on sinking ( LE sloop, bad experience in the past ) so they can't. I don't see why because KH has no sinkrisk. Could this be changed? Would be a nice QoL for me and im sure others


After many years of the kraken being out I feel along with many others that there needs to be a pet added like there is for the other monster hunt things.

Also afte playing ice which I have the kraken injury on, it would be great to see it on the main servers, its rather a neat injury.


I was wondering what if all SMH maps had the same mechanic as KH maps where every time you entered the map it would be a different map? Some times we wait months to see a good friglantis map. Then when there is a good map we some times see a lot of tension of people getting upset about over jobbing or having to wait for the next person to exit.

In KH several people can be at the same map and never run into each other. KH comes with a "cost" of entering the map which is the life boats you use to go in and if you decide the map is not worth running then you disengage the map losing the cost on the life boats. Maybe there could be a similar cost put into place for the other SMH maps. Could just be a small poe cost or maybe that's just not a good idea at all.

See OP for Pros and Cons

Expedition Maps

  • BK Brigand


  • Buried Treasure


  • Imperial Outpost

We have threads on forages and treasure hauls - maybe it's worth raising discussion on these, too. Current situation Focusing on Viking Raids for the examples, here's how they go:

  • Runner buys map (about 2k for small established, 3k for small fortified, 30k for large fortified, as today's examples)
  • Do the map. Estimate about 10 minutes for this (the gunning segment takes 5, the fray takes a bit, and while not in the calculations, one has to take into account the fact it requires you to be in the specific spot in the ocean the map is in and get to the correct league point, too)
  • Rewards! This part quickly has you feeling "Wait, there's rewards here"? Even if we go by the Yppedia-listed player sourced maximum rewards (which require a full boat of humans to get), at 20% restock (reasonable - I'd call it high, though) and at 30% restock (absolutely ridiculous, but I suppose you have to account for people trying to max out that stuff?) you get these:
  • the small-established awards 13k. At a 20% restock cut, the runner gets... 2600 poe - 600 poe 'profit'. at 30%, the runner gets a bit under 4k. 2k 'profit'. The jobbers get ~1.3 to ~1.5k each, assuming it's done on a sloop.
  • the small-fortified awards 16k. At 20% restock, that's 3200 poe to the runner. 200 poe 'profit'. At 30% restock, it's 4800 poe. 1.8k 'profit'. The jobbers get ~1.6 to ~1.8k each.
  • the large-fortified awards 150k. At 20%, it's ~30k to the runner. No profit. At 30%, that's ~45k to the runner - 15k profit. The jobbers get ~3.5-4k each (on a war brig; unsure if a war brig could beat this encounter) or ~2.3 to ~2.6k each (on a xebec)

Note that this has you fighting 50 to 145? vikings, and requires a full team of humans as mercs/swabbies take their sneaky share of the payout. If you theoretically did this, at 30% restock, with 50% mercs, you'd receive 75k, giving 25k to the runner - a 5k loss.

Doing these expeditions with anything except a full boat of humans is in no situation worth it - honestly, the large/huge expeditions could very well be straight up removed, outside of a potential 4fun on the yearly grand frigate pillage, they serve no purpose and are not clearable without using mercs, but that results in losses rather than profits.

Compare this to pillage data; using Aquaneer's at ⁠Booty Ramp / Pillage Data v1 for reference. I'll cut his profit numbers by 3/4th to reflect that pillage battles do take longer than the expeditions.

A "regular pillage" typically doesn't get to fill their boat fully, so swabbies/mercs are taking a decent share. They makes an average of 1.7k/pirate/battle - 1.3k after time-adjustment. An "Osprey" pillage (Typically slightly selective in jobbing) does tend to get their boat mostly full, and the payouts reflect that. They average ~3.5k/pirate/battle - ~2.6k after time-adjustment. A "Wissa" pillage is typically "elite", always runs on a full boat and aims for serious payouts. They average ~4.8k/pirate/battle, ~3.6k after time-adjustment. On top of that, pillages have lavish lockers which these expeditions do not. As runner, you are paying for a map that pays less than continuing your pillage normally would This is because they never were that good to run in the first place, and regular pillages have had their payouts increased twice as well as greedy brigands added since the release of these expeditions.

The idea Rather than a flat "increase the payouts!", I propose leaning into what expeditions were initially meant to achieve: A side-objective, or a mixup, during a pillage. Every battle won (Up to, say, five?) increases the payout of the next expedition - quick numbers 120%, 140%, 175%, 225%, 300%. At 300% payout, a small-fortified expedition's payout per jobber matches that of the elite wissa pillage for the jobbers. Maybe that's overtuned, but that's what balancing/discussion is for - and even then it's limited to "once every five pillage battle


  • Vikings and IOs

These currently reward players with PoE, Trinkets, Grog. With Mercenaries currently in development, it could be beneficial to these older voyages if for example, there were a chance of Spiced Rum added to hold of the ship after defeating Vikings and Imperials. You could make up some lore about Imperials seizing shipments of the Spiced Rum (or some of the ingredients for spiced rum) and players having a chance to win some of it back.

Players could also capture mercenaries from these voyages as prisoners that don't necessary need Spiced Rum to stay aboard but could leave the vessel after a certain amount of time.

Occassionally, add new items that could be earned from these voyages for a limited time or traded from trinkets from these voyages. You could take from the pool of furniture, trinkets, clothing items that were awarded in mystery boxes in the past but are no longer available. Stans


  • Vikings


  • Shipwreck / TH

I have multiple shipwreck maps, some with the same names. I ran two of them earlier but the other 4ish wouldn't even show up on the map. Do they move after haul? Is there a reset timer? Or is this just a known bug?


  • Yeti Sighting

Flotillas

Could you have more spawn through the week and random times, maybe even more now since you guys closed the kade window for 2 weekends.


  • Flotillas

Can we look into doing some changes to flotilla's as this week on all oceans, within 5 hours every Flotilla was killed off.

Some changes as follows are just some suggestions that could be done to improve them:

1) Increase the number of Flotilla's that spawn or increase the number of sinks to kill off a Flotilla.

2) Add a second spawn day other than just Thursdays. Maybe for example Monday and Thursday.

3) Provide another way to get a Flotilla spawn. Maybe like a drop from a black box chest.

4) Randomise the days and times Flotilla's spawn so everyone has a fair chance.

What ever we look into I think we need some sort of change to Flotilla's as its a little bit unfair for all the pirates that play who have prior commitments on a Thursday who also would like a chance to do them.

Any other suggestions welcome! These are just some idea's and would greatly appreciate more to make these more fun for everyone!

Monsterhunts - Emerald Ocean

(Wilfork - Emerald Ocean)

I second this, at the moment, after the mercs update, flotillas aren't even lasting a day, because you can fill your ship with mercs and shoot stuff and earn money, I see people entering in flotillas with 8 jobbers and the rest is mercs, you don't even need to have treasure haulers.

If we are being serious, flotillas aren't even that much profitable, most people that run it are doing it for fun. So any of the suggestions mentioned above would be welcome.

I third this. - Other options could include lowering the pay-out per ship, for more ship spawns to extend the Flotilla's life.

Could also include changes to add new maps to enter flotillas that have an 8 day timer, that are very common so you can still have multiple people on the same flotilla board.

I am unfortunate that when the flotillas spawn, I am actually asleep, I don't actually get to partake in Flotillas for that exact reason which is very disappointing.


As there is not always voyages to token, and flotillas are barely existent nowadays due to mercs, would be a good idea to have like a flottila but just a zone to token in, excluding event cades.

Monster Bash

(Also see Islands, Frays - Might move Frays up here to keep all Monster Bash together) Announcement 05/30/2022

  • General / Overall
  • Cryptid Calendar

Perlandria

I want to propose an entire year long series of events that use existing assets to get into the game quickly.

I propose a Cryptid Calendar of rotating events that follow the Werewolf Fray and Sea Battle model, reserving Ghosts for the longer Halloween events.

Cryptid Calendar - Every other month Monster Invasion Events starting 2nd Friday + 9 more days, with bonus all Oct special event

Because:

- Monster are fun.

- Halloween events have been uneven and a little sporadic, with gaps between being able to fray with Ghosts on land. This would standardize Halloween.

- Werewolf content has had a recent update, with the new rumble and the introduction of sea battles. The Fray, Sea Battle, and Boxes model is fun.

- Monster and Cryptid content in general has been more and more of a theme, including Vampirates and Haunted Seas as major items before the most recent Werewolf content.

- Leverage existing art and existing example of Werewolves to have more ways to play with less developer time hopefully.

- It could even out the frays to be 4 Sword Fighting and 4 Rumble, and give a chance for some less seen and less used SF and Rumble variations to get played.

- More monsters!

Considerations:

- Limit new art needed. Use existing art assets and existing code as much as possible. New trophy load, new maps load, but hopefully not full new color ways.

- Despite new art asset and code reuse goals, will need to reskin a SF variation and add 1 new Rumble variant, but at least reusing an existing Rumble mechanism

- Opportunity to reduce Pay to Win by allowing chance to win more common Mystery Box prizes. Such as LE furniture and more common. 5-8% and above items conceptually.

- The months suggested are the Mystery Box months and would offset the Gold Box months. This gives an in-game special box that can be earned with game play every month.

- Opportunity to add No Skill Needed Fray to Mission Board and introduce Fray concept to new or innocent players. If Yeti idea is used as is, or something similar.

- Add more timing variability to content to help create a sense of occasion similar to werewolf full moons.

- Add content that can be automated like the regular Tournaments.

- If Drinking and TD are used for the Banshee and the Djinn, create a reason to have a decent rank in those tournament puzzles.

- Shouldn't break the economy, hopefully, because box prizes can be redeemed in ways that are poe sinks.

How would this work?

- Every other month, for 10 days special frays would spawn. I am not for or against there being charms for the new monsters but that's a conversation.

- Those frays could be seen on the Mission Board, with the new monsters being seen if you have high Drinking for the Banshee, high Treasure Drop for the Djinn, and no skills at all needed for the Yeti as a gateway into the fray gameplay.

- The 3 new proposed frays can use 2 existing styles of Boxing one handed and Rumless SF, and the new style could be a variation on the special punch mechanism used with Werewolves. But that's a conversation.

- During the 10 days, the fray of the month would give a Sea Battle Map prize.

- The Sea Battle Map would work like the Werewolf Sea Battle Map, and spawn up to 3 battles and give boxes.

- The prizes can be existing content, with suggested places to mine content in the table below.

Puzzle Pirates 2023 Cryptid Calendar Sheet Perlandria.JPG Perlandria


I was thinking the other day when hunting merchants how disheartening pillaging can be for expo hunting during the vamp and wolf cycles, and thought it could be helpful to have items to 'turn off' those expos during that time.

The idea: A vampsbane or wolfsbane effigy either made via trinket turn in or purchased at the explorer's hall which can be dragged onto the navigation wheel like a BK compass during an existing pillage, lasting until the division of booty. Could give the ship a message such as Ye hear the hissing of cowering vampires. This ship is no longer hunted / Ye hear the whimpering of cowering wolves. This ship is no longer hunted.


  • Vampirates

So doing lair a member dc buy still reaps reward from TH and I can only minus 1 is the first issue. Secondly the game should recalibrate and either replace a member with a merc. Or have less vampires as this has ruined multiple games now for me... I'm sure this can be applied to other aspects as well


  • Vampire Graphics

I have concerns that the vampire graphics displayed on the forums are not unique enough. We currently have yellow, orange, green and silver coins in game. The newly suggested artwork looks great, but it is blue, blue/orange, orange and orange. We do not need another 50 shades of green and blue bilge puzzle!

Perplexing (talk) 21:06, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

The new colours work great, thanks!
Perplexing (talk) 20:15, 15 November 2022 (UTC)


the colours need more distinctions AND the white gem is impossible to see - Dien
I fully agree that the new colour scheme is a massive downgrade. The colours are way too alike and even the new Emerald blends in way too much with the coins. On a different note: although I understand that dozens of people making petitions to vent their opinions isn't the ideal way for you to receive feedback, I strongly dislike being sent to this section/thread for it. It simply is too seperated from the game and far from intuitive to leave feedback. - Peaced
It was a nice idea to revamp (heh) the background and pieces, but sadly its extremely hard to distinguish and the rendering doesn't fit into the YPP universe at all [the pieces are pseudo 3D]. Having to play a fast paced puzzle game and only seeing shades of orange and silver is very aggravating. Please just revert it or at least change the colors and make it look more 2D. - Demontoad
I agree that more contrast between pieces is needed. Here's an example of how easy a fix could be (my changes below):

Revampedthsuggestion.PNG

Also, I personally don't like the bulkier, pointy cursor thing, because I think it blocks view of surrounding pieces a bit too much. It was a nice effort and I like the overall vibe, but usability has suffered. -Wayfarer


  • Werewolves

Pillaging

Auto-target is almost never used - for good reason, it's usually detrimental to your pillage. The only pillages I've ever seen use it are the occasional SL pillage.

It's a really small change, but it would be nice if it defaults off and we don't have to click it at the start of every voyage.


I think that most would like the ability to opt out of pvp/engagements. Pvp ruins your ramp and your bnav rating while giving you the worst payout in the game. Too often skilled pirates simply go after rookies. Being able to opt out of pvp means that you could simply run a pillage and maximize the fun for all of the people taking the time to get on your ship. Also being able to dnav without getting attacked would be a really relaxing way to mem the ocean. Being engaged anytime you don't want to is not a challenge, it's an annoyance that is just not needed in the game.


  • Greedies

When a pirate gets eliminated, don't reset the scroll index. There's nothing more frustrating than 2000mph scrollwheeling trying to find your color when the enemy is getting eliminated.


It's totally annoying die while u was trying to find a right color between 150 enemies on a GF pilly, would be lovely some kind of quick search with colored buttons with then number of the remaining specifics greedy colors alive, or if they got sorted by color on the list, or even a quick shortcut to jump to next greedy on the list


  • Ramp


  • Rumble in Pillages, not the puzzle itself.

(Rumble Puzzle look in the Island section)


  • SF in Pillages, not the puzzle itself.

(Sword-fighting Puzzle look in the Island section)

See OP for caveats and full description. The description is detailed.

What I am suggesting is this:

Devious members of local brigand crews have caught on to the tactics of pirates and have began to take advantage of the new opportunity. Breaking from their main vessel, they sneak onto the opposing ships to quickly knock out any careless pirates who may be asleep in the midst of battle.

These early boarders, or Liquidators as I am going to call them, similarly hop aboard vessels like dragoons in Atlantean Outposts. But they have very specific targets in mind: any pirates who have been idling for noticeable periods of times.

(...) losing against a Liquidator results in the following:

The losing player will be knocked out and thrown overboard (washing up at the last island ported)! The lost player will not receive pay/a share for the resulting battle (see OP for full results list)


Instead of using black ship to combat straight-line voyages which could be abused to grief other people, could we try this instead?

  • All straightline alts (Edit: Rather than all straightline alts, make it so that all pirates that straightline a fray..) automatically get a minimum booty cut. 50-100 poe. They cannot get lavish locker cut unless actively participating in getting the greedies. For example: They need to actually get a hit on a greedy brigand/barb.
  • Navver cut also affected by the straight-line booty cut: this will reduce the amount navvers get.
  • Allow the amount of greedies spawned by SLs to stay so that the pirates actually puzzling can get a decent pay out from pillaging based on their efforts, making actual pillaging worthwhile. This should also actively encourage pirates to play the game...? (When I say actual pillaging, I don't mean running around in circles doing elite pillage battles for 15-30minutes, just casual yolo pillages)

Is something like this too hard?


I'm hearing that on ice if you have more than 10 straightliners 2 battles in a row you get the black ship.

This is a really bad way to solve straightline pillies as it can be easily avoided (such as a bot that holds down your left or right arrow key). Furthermore newer players will encounter the black ship more often and get frustrated

Instead just fix the core problem that rum spice is too cheap. Any pilly that has a ship 50% or more full of mercs just shouldn't be profitable

Right now as you pilly even with full mercs you net generate spice. Fix the drop rate and you'll see straightline pillies dissapeer


  • Variability

Ships Management and Functions

Ahoy, is there a reason for unlocked ships to have the option to "Arrange Furniture"?

Can unlocked ships be updated so that this option is no longer possible? I feel like certain things should be allowed (i.e. crewmates letting loose their pets on ships), but not arranging furniture. This leads into potential griefing (voluntarily or involuntarily) for things like LE ships' props.

The game already does not allow painting over ships not owned by you, even if unlocked, so I feel like furniture customization is in the same ballpark as that since only the true owner should dictate customization.


  • Divvy / Booty Pillaged

I love to join SMHs, but when you have to leave earlier because you have to go or you DC, there is no way to easily find the items you got when the booty was divided. Now I have to scroll through all my clothes/furni/trinkets to find what I got when I log back in. (Maybe I should clean up my inventory 😅 ) Might combine with "Mail / Carrier Pigeon system to send messages and trade items"


Issue: Currently the pay is only based on the outcome of the battles (and ramp) while other activities such as SMH and blockades are based on how well you performed and if you performed at all (do nothing, get nothing). The ramp system is great and should remain unchanged, but the way the booty is split should reflect on the amount of work performed inside and outside of battle. This suggestion could also be another type of voyage to keep the current system. (detailed suggestion and examples in Discord post)


  • Vessel Owner
It would be great if the VO chest payout would be adjusted.

Its really stupid for SMH/HS but even for CI/Vamp Lair as well.

Lets say you were on a warbrig cit SMH with 300 AC. The owner gets ~15% = 45 chests. That leaves 255 for the ship of 30 people (including the captain). 255/30 = 8.5 chests.

A jobber gets ~8-9 chests, the VO gets ~54 or 6 times as much. There is close to 0 risk involved, everyone spends the same time in the SMH.


  • Jobbers, Pirates and generally

Many threads here in game design have touched on the problem of massive armies of synthetic jobbers. I'd like us to explore a different approach to dealing with this issue. One that focuses on distinguishing real puzzlers from synthetic ones and giving in-game advantages to the crews of real puzzlers. (see Discord link for the rest of the explanation and discussion)


I found a rather old mockup I made stored in my files, and thought I'd share this here. It's a minor idea that came to mind back then, not sure how useful it would be. 🤷‍♂️

What if the vessel sidebar had more clearly-indicated station counts? At times, it can be hard to tell how full each type of station is, so a clear indicator could help jobbers and officers know which ones need filling, without having to hover their icons.

In addition, it could be interesting to display the average performance of stationers there too; we can already see each pirate's duty report anyway. This meter would take empty stations in consideration when calculating it, so "sparkles" would only be possible with full stations and generally great performance. It could provide officers with an estimate of how well-staffed the vessel is in each aspect, as well as tell jobbers which areas it would be good to help on.

Perhaps clicking the icons could direct the pirate to the closest empty station as well?


  • Wayward's suggestion on chat reduction

One of the biggest chat spams is people leaving stations - especially during SMH/HS/cades/etc .. and gunners are the worst. Most SMH/HS/cades shoot 8-16 a turn so you end up with at least 4 chat messages per turn that say "x has abandoned a gunning station".

Suggestion: Add a checkbox option in the settings pane that disables abandon station messages. This would make it far easier to keep chat windows clear and actually catch important chat messages in these excursions


Jobbers - Mercenaries

Mercenary Update: We’re in the early stages of an idea we’ve wanted to work on for quite some time. We’ve posted about it previously and are now able to start working on it. We haven’t had the time before due to the persistent attacks, but we feel like we can now shift our focus to this project. It has a few goals: (see goals in announcement)

Mercs have been a great addition to the game, they really have. You can partake and host content even when there's not many people online. But it's clear there's a few issues with it. It should be an ADDITION, or a HELP for pirates to enjoy the game. Not a REPLACEMENT for having humans on the ship. I think that unfortunately something has to be changed, they either have to be nerfed or the amount of mercs that can be aboard has to be reduced. I think this would help with the following things:

  • SL Pillies - whole issue of SL pillies would disappear
  • Every HS run getting griefed into oblivion. Now before you type "PVP is a part of the game" - yes, I agree. You grabbing 4 War Frigs loading them up with 1-2 players and going in whenever someone starts a run is just pathetic, that's not PvP. And the only reason this is possible is because of mercs. I don't care about your politics or whether you're supporting Crimson or DOTD or whatnot. This only hurts the jobbers, the people who are not at all involved. I'm talking from a Player perspective, this is not an enjoyable experience. Imagine you load for 1-2 hours as someone not involved and then get ganged on after one or two GY's. This is incredibly demotivating personally.
  • Blockades - Yes there's bot armies, that's a separate topic. But this is another reason why people complained about Expert Shipwrighting labor was so hard to get, because hundreds of War Frigs are being sunk every weekend and there's such a massive demand for Expert labor. What if... not every second tile is covered by a War Frig with tons of mercs? This will reduce the amount of ships that are in at once and now people won't need so much Shipwrighting labor. So this would cover the labor issue as well.

Let me know what you think about this, I love Mercs as a feature, I'm sure I missed some things but maybe it needs to be adjusted a little bit. (This is not meant to be a political post. But rather a serious game design discussion)


  • Mercenaries discussion started before release into production

Mercenary Update From the roadmap posted here. Please make it clear when your comment starts/ends. Any comments or comments unrelated to the release will be removed. Please "sign" your suggestions so we know who to follow up with if needed.

Companion - Ahoy! I made a video [1] and an accompanying document [2] for my mercenaries proposal. Thanks fer reading/watching/listening! By Jazz (talk) 21:38, 31 May 2022 (EST)

Very cool: Customization and "personalities" of mercenaries! Would definitely dress my mercenaries up very cutely and give them cool weapons.
Not a fan of the whole abilities system, I don't think that fits into a game like PP. I also think one mercenary per pirate on the ship is not enough in the long run and just delays the phasing out of larger ships instead of providing a long-term solution.
The puzzles they play: Unsure of the point of allowing the mercenaries to play the secondary puzzles (rigs/patch). Is that to make them a bit more likely to roll well on move-producing/boat-fixing, or to provide some variety? I hadn't thought about mercenaries being able to dnav, but that idea could work and definitely make life easier for many pillages where there is no (willing) skilled duty navigator aboard. I do think I like it.
Leveling mercenaries: I do like this, too. Might be a little awkward with many mercenaries being on the weaker side on release, but I love the idea of seeing everyone's mercenaries "grow" into better puzzlers.
(Note: Thoughts are based on reading the document, have not taken the time to watch the video. Assuming all important information and thoughts are in the document.) Patgangster (talk) 17:15, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Really well thought out plan, Jazz. I hadn't considered the customizable/personal aspect of mercenaries. I do agree with TriplePat though that limiting the mercenaries to one per pirate might not entirely solve the loading issue and I think it would be great to be able to hire more - potentially a whole ship full for a single pirate. Giving everyone the opportunity to nav flotillas, SMHs, etc. as long as they were willing to risk their stock and ship (for sinking events). For rewards/loot, I agree it shouldn't be the same as a normal ship full of pirates, but I think scaling it down, adding a cost to hire mercenaries, or giving the mercenaries a guaranteed large cut of the booty (say 90-95%) could be fair. Additionally it might be necessary to balance how easily flotillas could be sunk/beaten - possibly adding an "instanced" version of the flotilla if X% of the ship is mercenaries - that version wouldn't contribute progress to beating the flotilla but would still provide some lesser rewards (and fun!).
For your "Old Man" mercenary, I believe the intent of the Black Ship is for it to be "unbeatable" - as a punishment for attacking significantly weaker ships - and is really supposed to be a deterrent from engaging those ships in the first place. Obviously the balance hasn't always been there and the ship was beatable at times early in the game timeline, which led to some cool historical notes. But I'm not sure that encouraging pirates to hunt the Black Ship by making it easier to beat is really beneficial. I don't even think it rewards any loot, trophies, or anything for beating it. Hansbrough 10:20 EST 1 June 2022

Balancing

- I would not suggest a limit of maximum swabbies per ship, as this will create a situation where pirates in charge of the voyage will decline new/low skill players because the skilled swabby would perform better.

- My suggestion is, per pirate on the ship, a skilled swabbie would come aboard with equal stats to the player that has boarded the ship. The swabby could do any station the navigator requires, if the required liqueur (more regarding this below) is available in the hold. The pirate must not be dormant in the puzzle for their swabby to perform the puzzle on the ship; this is to avoid pirates reaching high stats and avoiding the puzzle just so their swabby can perform well in it. This would effectively cut the required pirates on board for a lot of voyages in half, allowing for bigger ships to be used for pillages and more sea monster hunts and flotillas. The only fault in this suggestion I currently see is - if the player base drops another 30%, this might not be enough again, and eventually reaching the same point the game is at currently. This would also only benefit the Emerald Ocean, as the other oceans do not have the player base to support voyages. {choice}

Liqueur - Add a new types of liqueur! (Please help finding better names, also recipes require balancing Adding fruit-distilled liqueurs will make shoppes more profitable, promote distilling, improve forage voyage type profits and provide more use to currently barely used grand frigate ships.

Lime wine Rum lime.png

Lime wine is a 60 proof liqueur, the limey ting is exactly what your swabbies need to preform good at sailing! 25 units are crafted using 8 hours of skilled distilling labor, 8 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 limes. Delivery cost is free.

Passion fruit wine Rum passion fruit.png

Passion fruit wine is a 100 proof liqueur, the sweet and tart mix is exactly what your swabbies need to preform excellent at sailing! 25 units are crafted using 4 hours of skilled distilling labor, 12 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 passion fruit. Delivery cost is free.

Banana wine Rum banana.png

Banana wine is a 60 proof liqueur, the mild sweet flavor allows your swabbies to preform good at bilging! 25 units are crafted using 8 hours of skilled distilling labor, 8 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 bananas. Delivery cost is free.

Carambola wine Rum carambola.png

Carambola wine is a 100 proof liqueur, the sweet and sour flavor mix is exactly what your swabbies need to preform excellent at bilging! 25 units are crafted using 4 hours of skilled distilling labor, 12 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 carambolas. Delivery cost is free.

Pineapple tepache Rum pineapple.png

Pineapple wine is a 60 proof liqueur, the incredibly sweet and fruity flavors is exactly what your swabbies need to preform good at carpentry! 25 units are crafted using 8 hours of skilled distilling labor, 8 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 pineapples. Delivery cost is free.

Rambutan wine Rum rambutan.png

Rambutan wine is a 100 proof liqueur, the sweet and creamy flavor mix is exactly what your swabbies need to preform excellent at carpentry! 25 units are crafted using 4 hours of skilled distilling labor, 12 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 rambutan. Delivery cost is free.

Mango wine Rum mango.png

Mango wine is a 60 proof liqueur, the creamy and fruity flavor mix is exactly what your swabbies need to preform good at gunning! 25 units are crafted using 4 hours of skilled distilling labor, 12 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 mangoes. Delivery cost is 1 doubloon.

Pomegranate wine Rum pomegranate.png

Pomegranate wine is a 100 proof liqueur, the sweet and slightly tart flavor is exactly what your swabbies need to preform excellent at gunning! 25 units are crafted using 16 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 pomegranates. Delivery cost is 1 doubloon.

Coconut wine Rum coconut.png

Coconut wine is a 60 proof liqueur, the tropical, nutty flavors is exactly what your swabbies need to preform good at battles (Swordfight, Rumble)! 25 units are crafted using 4 hours of skilled distilling labor, 12 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 coconuts. Delivery cost is 1 doubloon.

Durian wine Rum durian.png

Durian wine is a 100 proof liqueur, the odd combination of sweet, savory and creamy flavors all at once is exactly what your swabbies need to preform excellent at battles (Swordfight, Rumble)! 25 units are crafted using 16 hours of expert distilling labor, 25 sugar cane, 20 wood, 3 iron and 25 durians. Delivery cost is 1 doubloon.

Badge and Alcohol [Demontoad] I made a graphic to demonstrate my interpretation of a possible implementation. Click here[[3]]

- No badge, nothing changes. The mercenary badge offers privileges for a month and enables better pillages and faster loading times.

- Flavored rum should contain all fruits (multivitamin against scurvy) because else it would be too clogged and finicky. (Side note: Maybe "Fine Rum" will be more expensive as a result, making it viable for Grog/Swill to be used at all as an alternative. Also moving fruits will spawn more monkeys)

- If someone wants to take Mercenaries into a SMH or Cade, they'll have to pay 1 Roguemark. The supply is capped (10$ = 1 RM), keeps the market going and its only intended to grab a few gunner mercenaries or mediocre tokeners, not a whole boat.

- Labor can be tricky, there definitely has to be some fine tuning to be found. However, mercenaries for pillages/cades should be the bigger focus.

[Xelto] If you do any sort of flavored/deluxe rum, please change the formula of non-deluxe rum so it doesn’t use expert labor. That would make it easier for more casual starting of what is supposed to be a basic, easy stall. The deluxe rum would, naturally, need expert labor.

Alternate Mercenaries idea

[Xelto] Instead of (or in addition to) hiring mercenaries, have them be captives of brigands or barbarians that you can rescue during pillages. Rescued captives will take jobs at shops and will help with some sea-based activities. They have a preference for shops owned by the crew and flag that rescued them, are easier to recruit for seaborne activities by their rescuing flag and its allies, and will only blockade for their rescuing flag and its allies.

Eventually, rescued captives will return to the mainland and leave the game. How long they stick around will depend on how much they’re paid, either for labor or for seaborne activities. Over time, they will expect more and more money for their work (with a discount for their rescuers) and after X amount of time without finding any jobs that pay them, they leave.

Tie into labor From the roadmap: "We’re looking for ways for them to participate in the economy beyond being a sink.".

Here's an idea: weave this system into labor so that shopkeepers don't feel forced to have many "labor alts". Exact balance would have to be up for discussion, but my thoughts at first:

  • You'd have to buy your mercenary a labor badge.
  • You'd need to puzzle at the required level to unlock a mercenary's labor at that level for 10 days. (So, if you want a mercenary that provides expert level alchemistry, you (or someone else?) would have to finish a session of alchemistry that would have provided expert labor)
  • There'd need to be some sort of additional cost, reduced output, or effort (or maybe both effort and either cost or output?) so mercenaries don't replace hiring others for your stalls completely.

Patgangster (talk) 20:52, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Here's an idea: weave this system into labor so that shopkeepers don't feel forced to have many "labor alts".

+1. Please, please give us a way to supply more than 72 hours of labour without having to puzzle once every ten days for every labour alt we use. Ideally, do it in a way such that we can provide our labour to any shoppe or stall, not just our own. Using Mercenaries to effectively enable us to buy and use multiple labour badges, without having to puzzle multiple times, is an excellent idea. Dementedduck (talk) 19:41, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

There'd need to be some sort of additional cost, reduced output, or effort (or maybe both effort and either cost or output?) so mercenaries don't replace hiring others for your stalls completely.

We already have a way to discourage anyone else taking a job - low pay. One reason people do this is because it can be cheaper to provide their own labour. Another is that it's difficult to find certain types of labour (Need expert distilling on a remote island? Good luck to you). Mercenaries should help solve these issues. I actually don't think there should be a downside to using mercenaries for labour, if the suggestion of tying a mercenary's skill level to the pirate's is also implemented.
However, if there is no downside to using mercenaries, there should probably be a limit to how many mercenary hours of labour a single pirate can "provide" but I don't know enough about staffing shoppes to know what that limit should be. Should a single pirate be able to provide full labour for a deluxe shoppe, if they have a non-dormant stat and are able to pay for the badges? Should I be allowed to buy 100 deluxe labour badges, puzzle once every ten days, and get paid for 7200 hours a day?
Another point to consider is any stall/shop that doesn't have a labour puzzle. Should furnishers be able to hire mercenaries? What skill level would they have? (does it matter, given those stalls/shoppes already assign skill levels to hours paid for?) Dementedduck (talk) 19:41, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
You should absolutely not be allowed to hire 100 mercenaries, although I'm also not knowledgeable enough about staffing shoppes to know what mercenary limits should be. Patgangster (talk) 20:45, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
I agree, 100 mercenaries was an exaggerated example. I should not be allowed to do that.
An upgraded distillery shoppe can use 30 hours of labour per real hour of time (see Maximum labor throughput), so over a 30 day month it can use 21,600 labour hours if it is completely maxxed out with orders. I'd need 10 deluxe labour badges to provide that labour. Does that sound like a reasonable limit? Estate Agents and Furnishers have a max labour throughput of 90 hours per real hour, and a Shipyard has a max of 68. I'd need 30 badges for the former, and 23 (rounded up) for the latter. 30 feels a lot, 10 feels much better, but that would mean I could fully staff a Distillery by myself if I can provide expert labour, but not a Shipyard. Or I can fully staff a shipyard with two pirates instead of the 23 it currently requires, which still sounds like a fantastic QOL update. So I think the limit should be somewhere in the 5-10 range, and I think it's okay if people provide their own labour entirely (because it's already happening). Dementedduck (talk) 10:38, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
The 5-10 range sounds fair to me. I pretty much fully agree with this paragraph. Patgangster (talk) 17:21, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
I personally believe the mercenaries SHOULD require player puzzling to activate. In my vision of them, the benefit of mercenaries in labor would be that one will no longer have to maintain labor alt armies (or start them, which is maybe the worse part, getting many accounts to have the stats to provide the labor you want), not necessarily (though it could also slightly do so) make it require less puzzling to maintain labor. Patgangster (talk) 20:45, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
I agree mercenaries should require player puzzling to activate, but perhaps mercenary ability should be tied to the labour produced by the employees of a shoppe/stall, not to the puzzling ability of the owner themselves. Then I, as an average Joe pirate, can supplement employee labour to run my stall without needing to provide the expert labour myself if I am not capable, as long as I can attract employees. And perhaps it scales, so if I have one employee capable of providing expert labour, I can only have one mercenary; with two employees, I can have two mercenaries, and so on.
A side effect of all this will be that higher labour puzzle ranks become easier to achieve, because expert labourers aren't flooding the non-dormant population with expert labourers and affecting the curve detrimentally. Dementedduck (talk) 10:38, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Yes, the owner of the stall should not be the only source of activating mercenaries, I agree employees should be able to do so as well. a 1:1 ratio seems a bit harsh to me especially if owners can have up to 10 as listed earlier. Maybe an employee could have 3, or 5. (Or, like owners, up to 10, but they'd get to split them between their three possible jobs?) Patgangster (talk) 17:21, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps 10 is the limit in all cases? I, a single pirate, am allowed to hire up to 10 mercenaries with the same skill as me (in my non-dormant stats). Then I can choose to use those mercenaries to supplement voyage jobber numbers (and get additional booty - incentive for me to pay to hire my mercenaries? Or the voyage owner pays the mercenary fee to me?), or take jobs at any stall including my own (I pay for a labour badge for my mercenary, and receive the pay it generates).
I think there’s multiple ideas forming and starting to merge. Your original suggestion included different types of new rum to determine what skill level mercenaries could perform at on a ship, but we’re now talking about tying mercenary performance to pirate ability in stalls. Do you think these are separate ideas, or do you envision both systems being the best way to implement mercenaries? I think the two main concepts are:
  • (concept 1) Mercenary performance is based on the stats of the pirate hiring the mercenary. This concept further breaks down into:
    • (1) The voyage leader/stall owner hires and pays for mercenaries with stats based on their jobbers’/employees’ stats.
      • This ensures mercenaries never replace pirates
    • (2) Any pirate has the ability to pay a mercenary and bring that mercenary on voyages (maybe the officer has to decide to hire your mercenary first), or take stall jobs with that mercenary.
      • This has the effect of 'spoofing' higher population without allowing a flood of expert labour/high skill puzzling that is preferable to hiring less-capable pirates (because you must hire a pirate to gain a mercenary). Every pirate has the ability to hire the same number of mercenaries, so the game population can effectively grow by a factor of the mercenary limit.
  • (concept 2) Mercenary performance is based on the fee you are willing/need to pay (fees can be direct or indirect, so your rum idea would constitute the fee in this case).
    • On a voyage, this could be your rum idea.
    • In a stall, you’d have to pay a fee to hire a mercenary to perform at a certain level for you; expert costs more than skilled which costs more than basic. Anyone can hire an expert mercenary if they want to pay for it, regardless of whether or not anyone is providing the stall with expert labour. (This addresses Tilinka’s point below about hiring mercenaries for puzzles you cannot perform).
    • A glaring issue with this is that mercenaries can replace pirates entirely. A potential fix for this issue would be to limit the number of mercenaries hired based on the number of real pirates aboard/employed, but then we haven’t solved the labour alt issue. I have a distilling labour alt army because I can provide expert labour and very few other people can do that. With this implementation, the best I can do is halve the size of my alt army, and only in my own stalls.
On the one hand, it makes sense that only one of these ideas would be used so that mercenaries are consistent in the way they function. On the other hand, I think concept 1 is better for labour provision and concept 2 is better for pillaging.
Dementedduck (talk) 12:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
The rum idea wasn't mine, it was Napallday's. They're completely seperate ideas. I think their system works well at sea and ties well into the OM vision of "having a merchant empire helps with your mercenaries" (after balancing of recipes). Both solutions definitely do have their own strengths and weaknesses and could be more appropriate for different parts of the game. I hadn't thought about the importance of consistency. I don't think I like their system for labor solutions, and my solution is pretty specific to labor puzzles only. I can see them both fitting into the game. Patgangster (talk) 16:48, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Ah, my bad, I didn't see a signature on the rum idea so I assumed everything above your comments was your suggestion too. I absolutely agree their idea works well at sea and ties into the OM vision, as well as fitting quite well with what we would all consider a mercenary to be. My concern is we have two fairly different ideas for voyages and labour and I wouldn't be surprised if the OMs chose not to have that inconsistency. I do hope you're right that they'd both fit into the game, though. I'm thinking it may be wise for me to move that particular response of mine elsewhere on the page, maybe to the bottom of this section?
Dementedduck (talk) 12:05, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
Non-puzzle shops should be able to hire mercenaries just fine. They'd provide up to expert in those automatically.
As for availability of labor and to attempt to keep a dynamic where not every shopkeeper (fully) provides their own labor, perhaps the mercenaries could be tradeable somehow? IncredDistiller could perform a distilling puzzle to "activate" a mercenary, but receive that mercenary as a "mercenary contract" item which can be traded to shopkeepers and activated in any shop they'd want them? Patgangster (talk) 20:45, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
My issue with this suggestion is that any labour providers would have to trade with shopkeepers every month. This is not a big deal if you're providing labour to hearties, but if you just want to make some money off your expert labour capabilities, it could be a pain to find and track down people who want your labour. I've had similar arrangements in the past where people have bought my labour alt badges for me to provide them exclusively with expert labour, and it's a real pain to keep up with. Now if this system came with an automatic exchange update - like the Auction House OOO implemented in Spiral Knights - then that changes my tune. But until then, the reality is we play a very low-population game with players from all over the globe, and most of us are adults with full time jobs and other commitments. I certainly don't have the time to sink into this game that I had ten years ago. Locking efficiencies behind manually trading other players sounds counter-productive to me. Dementedduck (talk) 10:38, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Agree; this could turn into a hassle to keep having to buy labor regularly. I don't really see the game getting an auction house-style shop at this time, but something like that might be required to make this idea worth implementing. Patgangster (talk) 17:21, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Tilinka: What if mercs would do labor at some local, high paying stalls/shoppes in need of hours after the voyage they were on ported? Could set a max amount of labor the mercs can provide in a day and base how much they provide off of how many PVE battles the ship they were on won.

Would this mean they can only work at shoppes/stalls on islands where they port? I can see that leading to some islands benefitting from mercenary labour, but not all. Dementedduck (talk) 10:38, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
I'm thinking more of in the same archipelago, though mainly at the ported island if the labor pay rates hit some threshold of reasonable. It could encourage players to open shoppes on highly pillaged routes, which would be good for keeping the supply of stuff like rum and shot plentiful. This could be a bonus benefit that happens separate from hiring any NPC laborers.
I'm not keen on making what the mercenaries can do dependent on what the person hiring them can do -- there's no point in me sinking PoE/doubloons in a merc who distills (or sails) if they're going to be just as awful as I am at those puzzles. I'm for an added doubloon sink for the possibility of hiring mercenaries to keep players a preferable source of labor, but I don't think it would help anything if it's more convoluted than 5+x doubloons + paid hours to hire a basic/skilled/expert laborer for the month. (I would make it so that mercenaries refuse to work for you unless you're also hiring players at that threshold of reasonable rate). Tilinka (talk) 5:41, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Flag Mercenaries My idea to have a group of dedicated mercenaries that can be managed by your flag ties together some of Jazzx's ideas about customization and leveling to create a personal connection to permanent mercenaries, and the ideas about labor abilities. I think it could be cool if flags could hire mercenaries that stay with your flag in a "flag pool" of mercenaries and can be customized. These mercenaries could be contracted out from the flag pool by any officer+ of the flag to help with voyages.

Training

Flag Mercs would start out with very basic stats, but could be trained to increase their skill in each puzzle up to a certain maximum skill level like master or renowned. A flag could also have a very limited number of "Elite Specialized" mercenaries that would be more expensive and could be trained up to Grand-Master in only 1 puzzle and the specialization could not be switched to a different puzzle. The way they would be trained is by actually performing the puzzles on them to level up their stats. Any officer+ in the flag would be able take one of the Flag Mercs out to train them by going to the Flag Hall and going to a special mercenary room where they could access the flag mercenary hub and see a list of all the flag mercenaries names and their stats to see who needs to be worked on. They would select the mercenary to train and then they would take control of that mercenary and have to actually go perform the sailing/carp/bilge/ironworking whatever puzzle well enough to rank up the skill. They could do this on a pillage/evading/IO/SMH, whatever they want so it won't impact their ability to go on voyages that they like, and won't feel like a chore. When they are done they'd return the mercenary back to the flag pool of mercenaries to be available by anyone else in the flag again to either be trained or put on contract for a voyage. Similar to labor puzzles, mercenaries would need someone in the flag to perform the puzzle 1 time every 10-15 days(or maybe longer because theres a lot of puzzles) or they will become rusty and their skill rank will drop by 1 level. In the mercenary hub at the flag hall it would also tell you how close your mercenaries are to getting rusty in each puzzle to help you see who needs to be worked on. Even swordfighting and rumbling could be improved by taking the mercenary to the inn tables to challenge other pirates.

The Elite Specialized mercenaries would be limited to a smaller number available and be more expensive to keep them from being too over powered. Maybe a flag could only have 1 or 2 for each puzzle depending on flag reputation. Maybe these special mercenaries also can not be as balanced as the regular mercenaries are, where the other puzzles could only be trained to a maximum of distinguished or respected, but they excel in their specific specialization. I think it could be cool to have 1 elite swordfighter mercenary for example if one of your flag members is a really good swordfighter and trains him up for the rest of the flag members to have access to for pillages. The Elite Navigator mercenary could also be used as a charter, because he would be able to memorize the ocean, but someone or multiple flag members would actually have to take him training and memorize those league points before he could chart them.

I think this could be a fun way to include the community and teamwork aspect that has always been important in this game while providing a way for more people to have a way to help contribute to a flag's success other than donating poe to fund cades, by being able to train mercenaries for their friends to use by playing their best puzzle. For example I am good at sailing and could train that for our flag mercenaries where someone else may focus on carpentry and another person on gunning or swordfighting etc. This would also reward more active flags with the ability to have and maintain a larger amount of well-balanced mercenaries that could score well on a variety of puzzles and could switch to a different station if needed based on the situation. I also think this would make it harder for a flag to just buy good mercenaries to win cades, because it would take a certain amount of coordination and teamwork among members of the flag over time to maintain a lot of good quality mercenaries for their flag to use. By: Vancord

Quality of Life I'd like to see additional ship-wide orders that would be equivalent to "X needs more pirates to do some Bilging.", instead saying something like "X needs more mercanaries to do some Bilging.". It should not come with a whistle, nor should it come with a red background, but a chat indicator still might be nice. Perplexing

'Multiplayer' / Inn puzzles

Meridian is my main and overall, I am a pillaging pirate. But one of the sadder things I miss about playing now vs playing before, besides the pillages and the adventures, is being able to play Hearts. It is simple to leave PP and go play Hearts on an app on my phone, but if I could play here I would. We can play SF/Rumble against any white name pirates. We can play SF/Rumble against player pirate modeled dummies. It would be nice to be able to relax with poker/spades/hearts if/when I am able to get 3+ mercenaries. Perlandria

Blockade Balance Competitive blockading these days obviously has its issues, and to prevent adding more to it, I have a major issue to raise in regards to the specific line "Mercenaries will provide influence in blockades.", while you stated earlier that "Mercenaries will not be as advantageous as having a real human", these two lines plainly contradict one another. In the modern blockading scene, small ship spam is a very common tactic utilized by many flags - what they do is send in wave after wave of small ships, with barely enough pirates on them to influence buoys, not caring about how quick they sink. The relentless nature of this typically allows them replace the ships on buoys quicker than they can be sunk, and therefore influence the blockade almost as much as a fully-manned ship, which has to contest these same points. Allowing non-players to give influence, means this can just be abused even more - whereas before the bottleneck was how many alts your blockade team had to put on these small ships, now you'd be able to use these Mercenaries.

Adding mercenaries to blockades, and letting them influence buoys, will cause a situation where either severe rebalancing (and perhaps a complete redesign of blockading) would be necessary, or opening yourself up to even more potential abuse of mechanics. Nielsfour (talk)

No to mercenaries (Warofwords)

I am entirely against the idea of mercenaries at all, for a number of reasons.

1) Fundamentally, this is a social game. By removing/reducing the need for people still further, you reduce the interactions and the opportunities to meet and engage with new people. 5 minutes reading /global is all the proof you need that a considerable number of players need to practise their social skills more, not less.

2) As far as I can tell, all of the problems that mercenaries are meant to fix are problems with the same root cause... Low population. Would it not, therefore, be better in both the long- and short-term to find ways of increasing player numbers rather than simply replacing players with bots? I am a pirate who remembers not being able to login due to the server being at a 2000 pirate capacity. Those were better days.

3) Linked to #2, there needs to be some thought as to why players quit the game in the first place. There are obviously a huge number of reasons for this but the game design itself is certainly an aspect of it for some. I know a number of people who have quit over the years due to grievances with puzzle bugs which never get fixed, inconsistent application of rules by OMs (or OMs failing to act at all) and the continued success of botters and other cheaters putting actual human players at an enormous disadvantage. These are all issues which should be taking priority over adding yet more new tweaks to a game with an already dispersed population (see #4).

4) Another solution, though I think this should be in addition to, rather than instead of, #2 and #3, would be to concentrate the existing pirates on core aspects of the game, rather than spreading them out. Currently there are 4 different SMHes, pillaging, vampire lairs, purchaseable expeditions and parlor games/wagering, which spreads, what is a small population, very thin. As much as I love SMH and lairs, I think they need to be limited, maybe in a similar way to gold boxes, so that they become special, occasional, events and, the rest of the time, people have to pillage. Linked to this is the simple fact that, of the remaining players in the game, many are simply glued to the poker table, making them inactive in other aspects of the game. I don't think that playing 3 different 20k-200k poker tables on alts should be a viable way of funding a flag and it adds nothing to the game. Taking the, admittedly drastic, step of removing poker (or limiting it to smaller amounts) would make a considerable difference to the available jobber pool, along with modifying the economy and the path to success. A similar argument could be made for all high stakes wagering, which would inevitably replace poker for those good enough (or good enough at cheating - let's face it).

  • Jobbers - Swabbies


  • Ship's Hold

Proposed Change:

1) Raise Gem buying islands' market buy price from 1000 each -> 5000 each

2) Reduce forage quantity of gems from x5 -> x2. This limits potential foraging abuse and creates additional risk because even 1 gem loss would result in a good loss of poe.

3) Limit gem buy quantity from unlimited to 50 a day at the gems' respective islands, and quantity resets everyday at midnight 00:00 GAME TIME. Easy to adjust to poe inflation if necessary.

4) Keep sale price system and quantity of RNG spawns at all islands as is (UNCHANGED).

Reasons: 1) This will encourage people to sail across the entire ocean because of potential profit and maybe induce some more drama/pvp. Revives for more risky solo and/or casual-competitive fun group content. Gems are RARE and should be profitable in their unique trade run way like back in 2007. This simple change makes them viable again.

2) Foraging may also be of heavy interest to many people again because gems will arguably be just as valuable as gold nuggets. With price change, existing foraged quantity of x5 needs to be brought down to x2 to prevent abuse. With price increase, quantity reduction still ends with doubling the existing profit.

3) Gems also have innate risk in that they disappear after 15 minutes if nobody's on the ship, so it's not guarenteed that gems will be sold at the proper island market (esp if it's across the ocean). However, if they do, there can be a daily limit of 50 to prevent further abuse and poe inflation.

4) Nothing wrong with current system, just outdated prices. If the RNG spawned palace gems end up increasing in price, there will be no incentive to gem run them. There needs to be profit for viability. We already have greedies that bring in a ton of poe, this is EXTREMELY negligible compared to greedies in terms of poe inflation.

OPTIONAL: Create a trophy that tracks progress on # of gems sold. Trophy at 5 gems sold, 50 gems, 500 gems.


  • Gem Running

I recently began running forages for the first time, and I noticed a serious lack of interest among most pirates for gem running. Back when I played on a different account many years ago, gem running was a ton of fun and was a high-stakes, thrilling way to play the game. I believe that if you guys were to introduce a purchasable piece of ship furniture called a "gem chest" or something like that, which would preserve gems for a longer time (say, similar to a Sea Monster Hunt map or something?) then that would encourage those of us who want to re-enter the gem running world (but can't due to RL work) to stock up on some gems and then on a day off, or a light work day, we can make the run. This could also have a cap, like say no more than 30 gems or something like that...and, of course, it would have to be coded so that opposing ships can still pillage them as always. I'm not entirely sure how the coding would work, but I bet it would be a relatively easy way to reintroduce a really fun part of the game!

Ship Duty Puzzles

  • Rumble Puzzle (Look in the Island section)
  • Sword-fighting Puzzle (Look in the Island section)
  • Dnav used for memming (Look in Pirate Ye Known World)

Bilging

Bnav

Example for Cannon Hits to be placed in chat which wouldn't be a hard implement since we have a similiar function for when a ship is grapped!

"Argh!, ye hear the sounds of broken wood fall into the ocean as Greedy Haddock has hit Hispitable Gar with 4 Large Cannon Balls!"


Currently on the 3rd party blockade simulator, you can see your teammates moves overhead instead of just white squares. It would be the color of the moves as shown in the picture. This would be an amazing quality of life and blockade improvement if you guys were to incorperate something similar. This would also assist with accessability of players who may be deaf/mute and are unable to communicate with the rest of the team as well.


Carpentry

Regular Carpentry

The puzzle has way too much variance - the boards are too small and end way too early at low ranks. At higher levels a star level transition completely kills your score. The maximum is a masterpiece 17, which is only possible from a clean start. If you hit a perfect Masterpiece 17 and keep puzzling, you hurt your score because the next masterpiece will be an absolutely terrible masterpiece 1.

Suggestion:

- Make carpentry chains not end after reaching the star level.

- Treat consecutive masterpieces after a MP 17 as a MP 17.

Regular Carpentry

The puzzle is very unfriendly towards red-green colour blind people. For many years I have been missing the red warning outline on "new" holes and killing my score.

Suggestion

Adding a "colour blind mode" option that would replace the red warning outline with the blue one that appears while "holding" a piece.

Vampire Carpentry

Good carpenting does not get rewarded. Instead, everything is too much speed based and a bit degenerate.

Suggestion:

- 4 consecutive masterpieces should be treated as a "perfectly shut coffin", eliminating 1 vampire from the fray.


Crows Nest

Seems like such a simple thing that I'm surprised doesn't exist.

Its such a pain in the bum to take the helm and tell an officer your training to re-take.

Or if you simply just wanna spectate Bnav and the Moves. I end up having to watch from the bilge window haha 🤣


Dnav

Duty Navigation Only the top 2 pirates on the entire ocean get 9 star boards, which are a necessity to score well. In comparison: A regular ultimate pirate gets 6-7 stars on his board.

Suggestion:

- Fix the star distribution. - Fix the scoring curve - I've long been an Ult Dnavver and I can't even get it to sparkle on Emerald, let alone get my rank up. I'd like to meme but it's become impossibly difficult.


Forage

The idea is make Forage more useful for the economy of the game, at the current state, the only useful resource gathered from Forage is gold nuggets. So my suggestion is make a whole remake on the resources of the forage, while it still gives fruits like it's, but instead of gems on 3x2 chests, gives herbs, this way, making a direct contribution to the market. In counterpart adding the mining puzzle, where u could get the gems like it's, and for rares chests gems and minerals. Ofc that this would mess with the whole system as it is, but making forage more useful for labor, would make people look to do it more often


Gunning

Patching

Rigging

Sailing

Treasure Haul

Treasure Haul Its easy to get stuck, especially when you treasure haul in a vampire lair with 2 chests.

Suggestion:

- Add a diamond piece. It acts like the jellyfish in Bilging and clears all pieces of 1 type. It makes everything a lot smoother.

Uninhabited Islands

Hello, sometimes when you go to uninhabited islands, it is very hard to transfer goods there. It would be very nice to sell goods other people (ship to ship).

Foraging

Foraging Foraging is sadly broken. It works fine in expeditions and cursed isles, but for rated play its a nightmare.

Suggestion:

- Fix the scoring bug.

Island Life

Blockades

I know this is a very silly idea and I have no idea how it would work. The ridiculousness is why I want it.

During a BK involved blockade, I want to be able to job onto and station up on a BK ship. Mostly to say I did. See OP for more description.


Allow us to send Boarding parties during Blockades to take over the undermanned merc ships :D


Mercenaries being introduced into blockades was a great idea. More ships are involved that consume supplies and help the overall economy. However, it did not come in with the proper safe guards! There HAS been effort to rectify this by reducing the amount per ship and independent pay, but it’s still broken.

You CANNOT rely on player flags to set a fair playing ground. Flags can currently grief another side by spamming unmanned ships at max pay, and the other side is forced to either burn an un sustainable amount of resources, or just not participate at all. This is destroying the medium and small sized flags that want to participate on what basically is the “end game” of puzzle pirates that people work up to.

Possible Solution:

  • Have a set limit on how many mercenaries can join each side, and maybe increase this limit for bigger islands. (cap this to alliance or attacking/defending side)

Thoughts? What other solutions are there?


Currently War Frigates have been THE meta and it's a bit boring. This weekend Crimson blockaded with a bunch of Longships and it was truly a sight to see (don't bring a knife to a gun fight). Instead of having an unlimited amount of ships, would be nice to see a cap on every type of ship. Ex: 1 GF, 2WF, 3 WB , etc. Or assign a power value to each type of ship and limit the amount allowed to enter the board. If you wanted more firepower you could enter with more WFs but the other flag could opt for more ships and bring in WBs/Xebecs, etc. Flags could still enter with new ships once they are sunk, but that would diversify the ships we see in blockades.


Like the title says, alot of people unhappy with the state of blockades and how much of a mess they felt.

Why not just increase map size? Monarch could just choose the map size.


Right now the options are

  • Even
  • Jobbers Delight

A "Loyalty Pays" option would more greatly reward flag members who contribute to the blockade vs outside help


May i suggest maxing kade pay to 3k on large islands 2k med 1k outpost (see Discord post for speculation on impact of this change)


I believe the OM's should be on while all blockades are going on, been many times people needed their assistance and no OM in sight.

OM's can take shifts or shorten the Blockade windows.

Docks

(For ship management see High Seas)

It seems the OM suggestion to prevent ships from being sabotaged is to lock them between blockades. This is a good idea, but some flags have hundreds (even thousands) of ships on their islands. It would take longer to lock and unlock all of them than to do the actual blockade. I suggest a button to lock all ships you own on an island. This would be a great addition to the game. Please consider this. Thank you. (see Discord Link for image mock up)


Fairly new shoppe owner here with a quality-of-life suggestion.

  • All buildings, besides the shoppe buildings for stalls are white
  • "My Home" is green
  • Bubbles move and relocate on the map when identical shoppe types are added/removed on the island

I would like to see an alternative design to help distinguish and identify plots. We can associate the color of the bubble with how the pirate's status is with the plot and how it affects the priority of colors. (see Discord post for more explanations and examples of wanted function. There is a mock up 2 replies down.)


Scrolling forever to get to the Ferry is obnoxious. Please put Ferries to other islands on top before Vessels ye may board or Please give a way to close or minimize Vessels ye may board.


See post for screen shot of island with too many shop bubbles loaded to see anything.


Would be awesome to be able to see from the island view where you have jobs (Currently Hired) to easily find/go and also be able to see your shoppes and stalls (Mantid's Suggestion)

Frays

(Also see High Seas, Monster Bash)

Why do all frays have to start with 25, especially on dead oceans, can we please have them all start with 5 on dead oceans please or lower it to 4? (NOT EMERALD)


  • Frays

When a single pirate joins a monster fray of any type, the message from the monsters just says "One pirate is in the fray." You either have to start the fight, wait for one to leave, or have another pirate join the fray to see how many monsters there are, unless it's a small, easily visible group. It would be nice if the first message would say how many monsters there are, like the subsequent messages do.


1. to a fight where the players remaining is losing

2. to the least number of humans required to match (e.g. a 10/14 should take priority over a 0/5)

the amount of time people waste not being able to whisk is pretty ludicrous, consolidate your players don't totally randomize them


Make*

It's so annoying when you're the first one to join a fray, only to end up getting booted.

+ This would also help with summoned frays where you've invited certain people to help you with a charm, only for randoms to end up joining and stealing your spot.


  • Maps

Currently it is very stressful to do yer own little monster frays to obtain a map because there are a lot of people getting jobbed and taking spots in the fray. It always results in hectic moments where you pray that one of yer friends gets the map. Therefore my suggestion is:

- Monster fray was automated: Random pirate gets the map

- Monster fray was summoned: Summoner gets the map


  • Ghosts

Simply stated.

Skelies are grey, Zombies are Green, Vamps are Dark Red, Wolves are Orangey Red

Ghosts could be blue?


  • Skellies
  • Skeleton Bones

The skeleton bone is a very strong bludgeon which can currently only be obtained from skeleton frays resulting in limited supply. It could be good to add them to the trading post or otherwise make them easier to acquire in another part of the "Monster Bash" update. Patgangster (talk) 20:57, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

[Demontoad] I agree! We should be able to exchange the skeleton skulls for a bone. 10 skulls (obtained by staying alive) for 1 bone bludgeon should be a good trade off and investment of time.

Houses

(Some storage and display furniture ideas may be over in Pirate, Booty, Furniture. Especially with trinkets, if can go either way.)

Could we get a charm table for Skelly/zombie like there is for vamp/WW charms ? Please


  • Furniture (farm yard)

I think there could be an animal pen type furniture or fences. Some players like collecting pets, and especially with pigs and sheep pets you could have a farm type designed garden. - Galantis. (17 Nov 2023)


  • Furniture

Jacqie (Cerulean): It would be nice if we can place more that one trinket display cases in a room. I would love to have a room with only trinket cases, to put my collection of trinkets and to show them off. Now it is only allowed to have one trinket display case in a room. Now I am constantly looking for places to put a trinket display case, all over my world, instead I want to keep them together in one space.


  • House Customization

The rugs are awful! We should be able to delete them like other props. You can also add them into the furnisher so we can buy them in different colors and sizes. We could also have the option to change the floor type or color and to paint doors.

I want to second this with the rugs and carpets, if we cant remove them can we please recolour them - include them as part of the trim if you have to! Id also love to be able to buy rugs Ameba


Hello wanted to make this thread to post ideas for new housing OR if we can go to update our own individual houses.

Here is a cool idea for a landing entry room, a from deck of a house, cottage style 😄 i will keep adding things, feel free to contribute ^_^ See OP in link for screenshot of a porch/veranda.


I don't know if this would be in the form of allowing more storage items per room, or if it is hard capped at one per room, allowing you to buy multiple houses at the same spot (go to shack, buy 10 different rooms), or a brand new building sold at the gallery building, but we need a way to show these off outside of the inventory.

If you have every color of something, thats 15+ trinkets of one kind. There are so many trinkets its hard to sort anything


Hello I wanted to share my idea for housing upgrades, there isn't room on islands for new housing styles, so I thought about using the real estate upgrades like we do for shops. I understand it's not possible to change the floors or carpets of houses due to how they were made, but what if we offered an upgrade version of houses that is nicer and customizable, maybe even the possibility to select different color or material schemes for floors and walls just like we select colors for clothing or items


Most people I talk to hate the rugs in their houses. So many are not centered, overlapping and the same colors. They are really annoying to decorate around. Could you make it possoble to remove them or atleast make them change colors based on the paint color so they aren't an aweful eye sore in anyrooms that aren't a red or maroon color?


TLDR: Request for three things

  • Remove Scene limit on storage items
  • Add furniture to create displays of collections of Trinkets/Clothes/Ships/Familiars (and more)
  • New storage furniture for things currently trapped in inventories.

Many of us have collections of items at we struggle to store due to the scene limit on storage items. Given that we have been given the Gallery to encourage us to show off our collections it would be really nice if we could actually do that! My perfect situation comes in three forms:

1) being able to have more than one of each storage item in a scene - would allow for things like a walk in wardrobe! if they retained individual inventories this would be ideal but having each one add more size to a collective inventory would also be good (so if 1 trinket case holds 50, having two in the scene would give an inventory of 100 for the scene).

2) display specific furniture! these would show in some way the actual item stored inside, still prevent aging same as other storage furni but would allow for as many of each as will fit into a scene. In order of my personal wish list below

  • A trinket display shelf/table set that display the actual trinkets they hold, only accepts as many trinkets as it has display slots for, if each display slot looked like a specimen jar/box museum style then you can use the current images without needing to create new models. This would include a freestanding furniture piece that looks like a 2 or 3 tier stepped shelves, a glass cabinet cabinet and a wall mounted shelf for flexibility in display.
  • A version of the dummy that acts as a wardrobe for a single outfit and displays on the dummy (one male, one female). Not only would this allow us to populate our scenes with 'mannequins' its would also allow for a fashion show style gallery where you can actually see all of your outfits. If you use the existing model for the pirate but with a blank face, dressing the mannequin could be like dressing an npc. The different poses could also be incorporated - maybe you buy a 'Mannequin - crossed arms (female)' for example, it would also be interesting to have the body of the mannequin be available to the standard cloth colour palette which would make them easier for construction than the skin palette as well as less likely to be confused for people or npcs.
  • a sword and bludgeon rack/wall mounted display for 1,2 or 3.
  • a version of the mug shelf/rack that displays the mugs.

3)A partition wall furniture that accepts wall hanging furniture. Wallspace for portraits and banners is often awkward so some kind of placeable wall would open up a lot of design options.

I'd also really like to be able to display some things that we currently can't store at all

Ships

I have two main ideas here

  • 'Framed' Ship in a bottle. Similar to how when you frame a portrait it becomes furniture, id like to be able to turn a sunken ship into a furniture item that can then be displayed either on a table like a model or on the wall like the current ship in a bottle wall piece. Have the Funi retain the information like ship name and where it sank, similar to a portrait.
  • Ship 'portraits' either creating a model table top item that is just a scaled down version of the ship (including paint job and in a perfect world the furni too) or else exactly like a pirate portrait but of the ship instead!

Familiars

We used to be able to store familiars in a Wardrobe, but this was problematic. Given the prevalence of familiars now I'd really like to see a revisit to some way of storing them and i think this fits in with display of them too. Playing off the Familiar pedestals we could have 'enclosures', these enclosures would be large items of furniture (at least as big as the large beds, possibly larger) and only store/display a single familiar.

  • Avery - a large tall bird cage (footprint 3x3?). Would store All of the flying familiars and the Monkeys.
  • Vivarium - a long glass box on wooden base (footprint 2x4?). Would accept everything not suitable for the Avery.

The interior of the enclosure could either be the same fixed for all types, or else change based on whats placed inside. For example the Avery with a monkey in would be mostly tree branches but the Avery with a bat in would take on a more cave style interior or the Vivarium with a ghostling in would be a mini underwater shipwreck and the Vivarium with a serpent in would have jungle foliage. It would be a really nice touch if there were 'highlights' in the decoration that also changed to match the colour of the familiar placed into it. a small plaque on the front could also tell you the name, or if unnamed just the familiar default name.

Mechanically this could act like placing the familiar onto an npc, with the npc body hidden and the shoulder position being somewhere inside the display that makes sense and is visible.

  • New possible storage items

These would mostly allow easier sharing of resources for crews and flags as well as help clean up pirate inventories and add additional flavour to 'offices' in shops and homes.

  • Document box(tabletop) or Filing cabinet - Holds designs, Rogue marks and sealed ship deeds. **An addition to this would be the ability to turn your ships into sealed versions of themselves for a fee (fee would be higher than just swabbie transport a ship from one end of the ocean to the other and/or some amount of dubs, would have limits on ship being empty, could probably piggy back off the ship in a bottle mechanic) Reasoning for this would allow the clearing up of ship collections out of inventories while still being able to keep them while overcoming the difficulty of not being able to have a deed with no owner.
  • Ticket spike (tabletop) or Notice board (wall mounted) - Holds bid tickets and/or rogue marks
  • Map box/Chart pile(Tabletop) or Globe/chart table with cupboard/draws - Holds charts, prevents decay - has same limitations on charts as present wrapping does. This would help reduce total furniture items as people would stop present wrapping charts.
  • Jewelry box(Tabletop) - Holds wrapped badges and/or monster amulets. doesnt have to prevent decay or if it did limit to storing of one of each type?
  • Boat rack (think surfboards) - holds Rowboats. Prevents decay would be ideal but doesn't have to.
  • Mysterious box - holds charms. Ideally prevents decay but doesn't have to

Ameba-Emerald20/11/23

Governance

  • Banks

As title. Why not have the Bank on each island to have an actual use of storing items and poes similar like Runescape. Storing Pets, Fams and deeds that cant be stored in furnitures if needed instead of clogging our inventories. Allow own sorting and search function in the bank. Bank can also function to make multiples of similar items into one item as a representative similar to “Noted” function in RS for large amount of same furnitures or pets etc. This allows bulk purchase and selling of same items.

Implement limited bank slots and purchasable additional bank slots as a poe sink. Im sure there will be people with tons of stuff to store in.

Current use of banks is just for doubloons purchase? Seems impractica


  • Marketplace

I think that we should have a more sophisticated trading place - like a market. Pirates could display their own goods for a fee (e.g 5k per week advertised) plus maybe 5% of the sale price when the deals been done and market it towards the entire ocean. It would be a good PoE sink.


  • Player Attraction Buildings
* Black Market

It would be cool to be able to get yeti maps from black boxes as an alternative to pillaging for them


Please add skeleton pets!! I have nothing else to add. Oh and skeleton spiders!! Thank you.


* Explorers Hall

Since the SL pillies nerfing will remove the most fun thing I've done in this game outside of ci (screenie of the most amazingly fun long forage!), I would love to see small, medium, large forage and TH maps available the the explorers hall like other expos. Most of the maps i purchase from people opening boxes, or those I win on a pilly last about a minute or two most of the time which is disappointing and usually drops my position in the rankings when I do them. I would happily spend decent poe to know that I have a longer forage expo.

Potentially also have maps drop for expos when won on a ship so you can choose to do it immediately, later or onsell it. A lot of navvers just skip expo and I hate seeing a forage to go waste! I love forage but NB forage rarely spawns large chests so its not as enjoyable as some of these epic forages I got to really enjoy on the SL pillies, so just going on the nb ships doesn't even compare.


As things go, there is considerable access to reliqs during the couple days out of the month when frays spawn. However, the rest of the month those who want to run lairs often are subjected to purchasing black boxes. The cost of this adds up rather quickly, never equating to what the runner will make from a single lair. There are times when I've personally spent 300k to get just a single reliq, if I'm lucky. That being said, I primarily enjoy running/participating in lairs, so my poe stack is quickly depleted. The demand for lairs is not met by the availability of reliquaries.

Proposal to make reliquaries available for purchase in Explorer's Halls, as if it were any other expedition.


* Trading Post
  • Items/Commodities

A way to scrap items/commodities you don't need. Items and commodities can be broken down into a "Scrap" item which can be traded for new items at the trinket exchange. This would give pirates a way to get rid of unneeded items in their booty. The "Scrap" item can also be exchanged at ship/shoppe and turned into commodities that can be used to remake items in shoppes. Example - A woodpile/CI trinket can be converted into 1 Scrap item. At a commodity market, 2 Scrap items can get you 1 Wood or at the trinket exchange 10 Scrap can get you a Sea Green Chroma.

A way to trash items on mass would be appreciated by many. probably from the booty page or else at something like a recycling point at the palace. If this created a stackable token that was tradable at the trading post for something great, but this isnt required.Ameba


Please, I would love some used for the hundreds of KH Trinkets sitting in my pocket, could be furnitures, a ship design. Every other SMH Trinkets does have more uses than a chroma e a Shirt design


Anyone else think that redeeming 10 box trinkets is too much? Some of the boxes are quite expensive around 200k, so to redeem a chroma worth 15-30k would cost around 2m worth of boxes. Can this number be reduced?


I was thinking it would be nice to have the option to exchange your greedy trinkets for silver chromas.


  • SMH Trinkets for Poe exchange

[Vancord] Currently if you like to go on SMHs you will accumulate a ton of random Atlantis, CI, KH, or Vamp trinkets that really don't hold any value because there is not much you can do with them. I think it would be nice to be able to trade the ones you don't want into the trading post for a small flat poe value somewhere between 100-500 poe per trinket maybe, or be able to trade them for something similar to a greedy purse with a random amount of poe. I think this would give some value to useless trinkets and slightly boost the potential payout from jobbing with long SMHs, without being too much of a poe fountain. It might add a lot of poe to the economy initially because people have trinkets saved up, but I think it would balance out over the long term. A way to lower the initial influx of poe generated and spread it out more over time could be to implement a cap on the total number of trinkets you could exchange for poe each week.

[Demontoad] I think yet another small PoE sink is bad, unless its really just 100 PoE per trinket. Instead, trinkets should be able to be exchanged for better things instead. 10 trinkets = exchange for a chroma -> 5 chromas = recolor a piece of furniture | 30 trinkets = atlantis box (contains a random atlantean drop: chromas, maps, furniture (junk furni/amphoras/bellator statues e.t.c), atlantean clothing...)

[Tilinka] You can already trade Atlantis/CI/HS trinkets for chromas -- having that extend to the monster fray and vampire lair ones would be good. Could do crimson for the VL trinkets, shadow for fangs, ivory for skulls, burnt sienna for werewolf tufts, and, um.. I don't know. Bile or something for zombie hands. I'd also love to see furniture options for reskinning things like duty stations, rigging, railings, etc.

[Xelto] If you add in a "mainland merchant" (or however you want to trade trinkets to PoE), you probably need to decrease the PoE payout for the various sea monster hunts at the same time, as a balancing factor. And only do it if you can make trading easy! Dragging the 47 trinkets you got in CI over to a trade window one-at-a-time is a pain, but at the same time, some people want to keep specific collections or rare trinkets, so just grabbing everything is also not a good idea, at least not unless you add some way to separate out the ones you want to collect. (I know trinket cases can be used for this, but they have their limitations, as well.)

[DementedDuck] A really simple QOL improvement would be to allow us to shift+click or ctrl+click items into a trading window. Dementedduck (talk) 10:43, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

How about a new LE ship design. Kraken class Merchant brig Perhaps? Just a thought.

SE ("special edition") ships from the trading post normally try to match the ships used for what they're from - WF for atlantis, sloop for CI, the WB for HS was probably a misestimation from before release expecting graveyards to be more popular than they are. I'm up for more ship designs but a kraken class ship should be something that can actually be used for kraken hunts. A sloop or cutter (I don't see many KHs on cutters, but it technically has the biggest hold size of all KH boats by far meaning it can hold many more lifeboats, it's a good boat to use for them) probably fits best? Patgangster (talk) 22:29, 14 July 2022 (UTC)


  • Trading Post Items
  • Can we exchange Greedy trinkets for Silver Chromas please? They're pretty hard to come by at the moment and it would be a sink since we would have an alternate use for them besides Greedy Purses.
  • We should be able to exchange vampire fray trinkets (fangs) for vampire potions.
  • I'd like to see more chromas available for trinket trades, silver for greedy, crimson for vampirate, inky for kracken - so just the missing trinket exchange ones would be great. Ameba
  • I'd love to see a bronze chroma for monster fray trinkets - which would also help increase peoples participation in them.Ameba
  • Being able to trade in 'junk' (have the trading post accept any item) or unwanted clothes for chromas of the standard colours excluding black/gold/purple also has potential Ameba
  • I'd really really like a way to use the junk furniture that starts to clog your inventory. Have a design for a special version of the Junk ship that you trade in Junk furniture for - the design of the props on the ship could reflect the items that will most commonly be traded, all the common drop furni from SMH! Following this theme 'Junk' could become the LE type and have a family of designs like there is for gold/rogue, so 50 items gets you a sloop, 100 a Fanch, 150 a MB, 200 a Junk, 250 a MG, 300 a Xebek and 500 GF. Ameba


Maybe a new fam like slimmer from Ghostbusters or maybe use them to change the color of the ghost fam, Ghost that we can place in homes/shops or shops , kinda like they have on some ships already?


  • Govt Buildings
* Fort


* Market


* Palace

Youve likely supported YPP whether you know it or not since many of the items in the game require dubloons.

There are two portions of supporting YPP

1 - The actual purchase of dubloons with real money 2 - The use of dubloons

Grey Haven's accounting likely works the following way:

A purchase of dubloons: Debit Cash >>> Cash goes up Credit Deferred Revenue >>> Grey Havens still must deliver you a service

A use of dubloons: Debit Deferred Revenue >>> Grey Havens has delivered you an item Credit >>> Revenue

Think of it this way. Dubloons represent a service that has been paid for but not delivered (ex: you gave a contractor an upfront payment for work on your house). By using dubloons you are completing the work and therefore participating in the system

Every use of dubloons increases the price of dubloons and incentivizes other people to buy - so even if you havent directly contributed to buying dubloons you've still helped Grey Haven by using them. Its a great system that I would hate to ruin with direct microtransactions


Palaces can not buy Allspice. Please turn that on as a default without having to know to move one in.


I don't see why we should still have the option to buy it in the palace shoppe. The sanguine amulet is also missing from the trading post.

Inns

Deeds for Inns should be forcefully put to Auction if Owner hasn't logged in for X amount of time even if manually hosted by the OM's rather than waiting for a system to be developed.


Parlor Games

Add the 4 player game of mahjong to the table games. Whatever relatively acceptable scoring version makes it simplest and easiest to add to the code. Not the solitaire version. More like this. https://www.mahjongpictureguide.com/

I don't actually expect this to happen because there are so many other more important things, but I would love to have a mahjong table in my houses or on my ships. Mahjong trophies could be neat.


YPP puzzles all have their own "spin" and are unique. Roulette & craps being the exceptions. Im heavily against chess because people would just use stockfish and cheat.

Edit: And if its "just for fun" then you may as well play it on chess websites.


Maybe consider adding a card game Eucher  ? Fun 4 player game .


Cade nav tables so people can 1v1 or any amount of players, wagers or just to build stat. Would be great practice for people just breaking in or just for funsies, also have a nav against bk or general npc options with maybe raging difficulties? Needs to have spectator mode, and have an option to tick it off as well?


we really wish to play parlor games but unfortunately they are not available due to date, its took along time for the pirate badge to be deleted because it had no function and was a waste of dubs, i feel its waste of dubs when most tables are empty(ofc except poker)


the concept of battle ship board game is very fitting to YPP game theme, and would make a very nice addition. the game could be an exclusive 1v1 like TD, or it can be designed to host 2v2 and 4 against each other, if that's possible (with 1v1 having the "rated" option).

YPP already has a variety of ship sizes and types, which would make the devs job much easier, and to spice things up and make the game more fun and challenging, special abilities can be added (just like YPP bnav has these special moves that can be produced through tokens). I would suggest the abilities to be special shots inspired by the different types of cannonballs that were used by actual ships in the past, with each one having a unique effect. also, these abilities could be designed in a way that they are generated by each opponent through multiple factors (including being ahead or behind in the match maybe).


  • Hearts

I wonder why hearts and spades aren't like poker, so if someone gets disconnected, he lost the game even if it just started, there should be a reclaim seat button for the player who paid and (left/disconnected) until the game finishes - or the seat remains his until he forfeits the seat.

i guess its not hard to implement it since its already in poker which does the checking for you until the hand is over you cash out.


  • Old Salt NPCs

I can remember in the old days, there were announcements that a merchant with ....gold...valuable stuff... etc... was spotted close to island something. Is it an idea to introduce that again, it was fun to hunt for merchants. Or is it only me who think that was fun.


  • Changing NPC parlor game ranking for practice

- It would be nice to be able to change the inn bots rank/standing from able-ultimate to practice skill level.


  • Poker

My theory is that this involves the overall statistics of what a good game of poker should be all about. By keeping the door open, you're intruding on the math behind what is formally "poker". I don't think you could have rewritten the rules of poker better than the way it is played, at casino. Introducing this option on stumbling pirates introduces the anxiety that no matter what they bring to the table, it will always eventually be taken by someone, who to them, resembles something such as 'emperor' in treasuries. Unlimited buy-ins being parted away could introduce the possibility of some returners holding onto their accounts, as the twisted transistors in our brains are even often being twisted with the viewpoint that "wow, this is an empty game, surely someone could still take it over" (haha. xD) and then enjoyment leaves as they sit there, not willing to participate in an activity pitting their stacks of hard-earned poes against someone who leads CI pillies and/or is a demon at swordfighting or something generic of that nature. I would say, casually, that maybe a full buy-in limit of 2 would be satisfactory. It reduces gambling anxiety, and, even better, it disallows people with large stores of credits to eventually take over just by sitting there. Someone else just sitting there, suggested 1 buy-in per hour, but then screamed in emotion about how that would be bad for the game because it would grow the number of alts


Honestly baffled this wasn't fixed the first year it was out.. if someone raises 40k and someone has 42k and raises, it should cap the action for that player. People collude/abuse this constantly, and it benefits nobody in the long run except cheaters.


  • Idling

Poker tables often become half full with pirates who are not playing, just afk for extended periods, which is not fun to play with and clogs up tables with inactive players.

Suggestion: As with many online poker games, when a player is inactive for so many hands or so much time, they are cashed out. This should be the case in Puzzle Pirates too. 15 minutes is too long, it should be maybe 5 or 10 hands or 5 min. --Sagacious (talk) 16:48, 1 October 2023 (UTC)


Could we get a different color other then green while playing on a poker table? Since poker tables have a variety of colors on the outside could it match the inside? … please?


Hello, I am a poker player IRL and have played YPP for nearly many years now and have some suggestions to improve the quality of poker here. These ideas come from personal experience, casino rules, online poker rules, and the Poker Tournament Directors Association (TDA) guidelines. I will use some poker jargon so please ask for any clarification as needed.

1) Handling AFK players: Often people with be away for extended periods of time generally accidently but often to grief the table as well. Online poker tends to use a 'time bank' to give an extended time to make a decision as needed. For YPP this could be making all poker tables use the 10s timer and give a time bank of [X] minutes. This time bank will be used by default and can refill at a rate of [Y] seconds per hand played. For example if someone needs to think about call in an all-in, they can take a 1 minute from the time bank to decide, and over time the bank will slowly refill to full. When the time bank is all used up, they will be forced to fold and be cashed out of the table.

2) Waitlist: The current YPP system of joining an open seat is to spam click and hope for the best. A waitlist would allow for people to join the table in a First Come First Serve method. The player next on the list would have [X] seconds to join the open seat before being removed from the list.

3) Going South/Ratholing/Banking: This refers to players leaving the table with [X] amount of money and buying back in immediately with [<X] amount. This is a huge violation IRL and would likely get a player removed from the casino. Online sites force players who have recently cashed out to buy in for the same amount that they left with, and I think YPP should copy that. Players who leave the table with [X] poe would be required to buy in for [X] poe for the next [Y] minutes. This also allows for players who DC or need to take care of something away from the table to buy back in with a large stack.

Continued in pt.2


  • Preflop

People break tables and grief in high stakes "Preflop" games.

Suggestion:

- Add a special "Preflop" game mode (e.g changing the blinds & making them mandatory).

Global and trade chat are regularly overrun with "40k preflop" "200k preflop" and other similar memegames. As mentioned by the person above, these tables are also often griefed. In my opinion, there are two solutions.

1) Remove it. Instead, add "turbo" and "hyper turbo" tables.

  • Turbo: 0.5% ante, 2% small blind, 5% big blind.
  • Hyper-Turbo: 2% ante, 5% small blind, 10% big blind.

Then, add 200k-2m buyin tables. On these tables, if the numbers in this suggestion are followed, the hyper-turbo option will have 20k antes, 50k small blinds and 100k big blinds. It's not quite the ante levels of "200k preflop", but that is offset by the much larger initial buyins.

2) Embrace it. Add option to set a table as a preflop table, and when making a "preflop table", the creator manually set an ante on a table, ranging from the minimum buyin to the maximum buyin. Outside of the ante there will be no blinds, and the preflop betting round is skipped. Adding this will remove the need to spam /global and /trade looking for people to play these games. Patgangster (talk) 21:00, 1 June 2022

Suggestion: Add it to the Noticeboard or some other place so that players can look for active preflop games (even if local table only) rather than needing the /global spam to know where/what games are happening. ~ Warofwords


  • Rake Chat Message

Add the amount of rake retained to the in-game chat. --Sagacious (talk) 16:49, 1 October 2023 (UTC)


  • Spades


  • Tournaments

As the simple title. We have all other puzzle tournaments but not card games Poker tournaments, Spade Tournaments, Hearts Tournaments. No one thought about this before? 🧐


I don't understand how this works for example I had excellent, good, good, fine of 4 puzzles. I was in overall fine rank 2. I went and did carpentry again which was fine and ranked 13 and it went upto 8 but still fine because I stink.. but doing so jumped me over to overall good? How and why...? The same people keep winning overall fine and it makes no sense how it's calculated

  • Tournaments

[Empathetic] If tan/color & color/tan parrots would be too tedious to implement, can we restart the automated familiar tournament schedule? The schedule used to run every 10 days & 5 hours per carousing puzzle when Bia had it automated, and would cycle through all sorts of different tan familiars before gold boxes were an option. Newer pirates should have the opportunity to get coveted tan/color & color/tan parrots - color the ocean!


Why were tournaments only blue/grey chromas and not other colors too?

Parlor Puzzles

I think it would be a cool feature to add a replay option for the 4 common "PvP" puzzles, could also be for other puzzles, such as bnav but mainly for those 4. If you could have a "match history" and would be able to replay the last 5 or 10 puzzles you played. For Rumble and SF perhaps a feature that would show them side by side with the opponent? Could be so only you and your opponent can see this replay.

It could even be a primitive replay option, not one that tracks literally everything but just a history of pieces placed at what times.

Pros

  • Very useful for studying/improving your gameplay, you can also learn from your opponent(s)
  • Easy solution to catching speedhackers (for Rumble/SF)
  • Just overall very cool feature

Cons

  • Dev time
  • Slight strain on server/database to store this (Could be locally saved only)

Drinking

  • Drinking

Whoever gets to play the first piece has an astronomical advantage. The starting player gets an extra stain, dominates playable rows by +1 and also starts the game with more points.

Suggestion:

- Let them play a game of rock, paper, scissors (maybe cannonball, pirate flag, dagger) to determine the starter. The player going second gets +50 points.


would be cool i think

Rumble

  • Rumble

Artificially adding bruises is too powerful. Its even more powerful than the bruises from bludgeons. Most of the games disregard the games mechanics entirely - its all about sending the smallest combo possible (Triple), adding as many dropoffs as possible (9) and then pushing the layer of death down. If the defending pirate tries to clear those unbreakable black bruises, the game will push the board down every (8) clicks and include increasingly more bruises by itself. There are no comeback mechanics and the game is incredibly dry.

Suggestion:

- bludgeons contain grey bruises -> black bruises

- dropoffs are black -> grey

- a new layer every 8 clicks -> unchanged.

maximum bruise numbers (from dropoffs)

Combo Max bruises
2 4 -> 3
3 9 -> 6
4 13 -> 9
5 13 -> 12
6 18 -> 15

- excess dropoffs can convert grey bruises to black bruises ( every 2 excess dropoffs convert 1 grey bruise into black)

(1) Triple with 6 dropoffs = 0 excess -> 0 black bruises = 6 grey bruises

(2) Triple with 10 dropoffs = 4 excess -> 2 black bruises = 4 grey bruises and 2 black bruises

(3) Bingo with 9 dropoffs = 0 excess -> 0 black bruises = 9 grey bruises


It would give the game a lot more depth. You could either (1) send fast grey bruises or (2) alternatively "upgrade" them to black bruises by spending 4 extra turns or (3) upgrade the combo instead to send even more grey bruises (with the option to convert those to black as well). It would also make sprinkle bludgeons stronger and actually viable.

On the bright side, it wouldn't affect casual gameplay at all.


  • Rumble Brawl
  • Rumble Challenges


Sword Fighting

Please add new swords to swordfighting.

Out of the 17 total swords only 2 are viable: 

   Falchion (overpowered)
   Saber (broken)

The latest additions Katana/Dadao are more than 10 years old and the entire gameplay has been very stale.

(the Skulldagger and Scimitar are terrible too)


As a Swordfight enthusiast I want to be able to select SF game speed So that I feel like the game is fair and So that the skill ceiling increases.

This sounds crazy, I know. When wagering in SF, I never know if my opponent is playing fair or with a speed mod. It's quite annoying. I know that speed mods are a bannable cheat, but I can't prove they did. This annoyance leads to me just not wagering in SF at all.

So I want it for fairness.

Additionally, the huge amount of people who do play with speed mods regardless shows there's a clear interest in playing the game at a higher speed, so having that could increase the difficulty of the game.

The way I'm thinking of it is as a symmetrical mod that affects both players, but for all I care it could be an individual choice of each player as well.


The legend "Cleaver" himself said it would be a good idea to brainstorm about possible sword patterns.

  • Yes, I think this is a good idea. We could revise the existing sword patterns, too. I am not sure it needs a new channel -- a thread in GD is okay to start?
  • I suggest you go ahead and start a thread in the GD forum and post some of your ideas. I'm sure others will contribute and then, if necessary, I can prompt Crabby or Forculus to take a look and try some of the ideas.

Therefore if you have any idea for a new pattern, feel free to post it with the format:

  • Name of the sword
  • Pattern [has to be 6 wide, can be anywhere from 3 to 6 high]
  • Gameplay idea (Striking sword / Sprinkling sword / Fun sword / Allround sword)

Keep in mind that a pattern can look deceivingly simple and yet be very strong (saber) or look potent and be absolutely terrible (katana).

You can check the patterns on the YPPedia: https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Saber https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Katana

The biggest emphasis should be on the bottom 2 columns, as they are the sprinkle attacks that also "overlap" with the strikes. Furthermore, if a strike does a full "rotation" it loops back from the 4th from the top.

If you need a tool to draw patterns, ask me in a PM and I could supply one.

I'll see if I can add some pictures here later to format it properly 🙂

🚨 Make sure to upvote the sword patterns you'd like to see! 🚨


  • Swordfighting

The puzzle only has 2 viable swords - the Falchion and the non reversed Saber. The last swords were released more than 10 years ago. The vast majority of swords are terrible and havent been touched since 2003.

Suggestion:

- Add new patterns and/or revise the current ones. Especially a sharp stick would be welcomed.

Dealing with modders: Either remove the speed limit from the game entirely, so as to forcibly create an even playing field, or prevent green named pirates from taking part in tournaments.


  • SF Brawl
  • SF Challenges


Treasure Drop

Allow turbo option to be selected for 30s, 1 min and 2 min games. You'd have more time to play but the pieces fall fast still.


Would it be possible for the bots to treasure drop against you in the Inn for practice? Since there's not a lot of people to play against all the time.


  • Enable TD for NPCs

- Enabling TD for the Inn or island npcs/bots (just like sf/rumble/drinking).This could attract new players to a dead but fun game to play on the parlor table.

Suggestion:

Shop Bazaars and Shop Buildings

When people take vacation and aren’t able to play for more than 10 days, they often update their labour puzzles before going away.

But if their labour badges dust in less than 10 days, then there will be a few days of lost output.

This can be fixed by being able to top up labour badges back to 30 days by paying the proportionate amount of doubloons.


  • Island and Shoppe Closures

With the merger of oceans came a new problem. There are currently more colonised islands than people able and willing to fight to colonise them, making it not a challenge to own/hold an island and, thus, killing the blockade scene, which is an important wealth redistributor. In other words, there needs to be more competition for islands.

1) Archipelagos could be limited to a certain value of open islands. Let's say Large island = 3 points, Medium = 2 and Outpost = 1. Archipelagos could be limited to, say, 8 points. Of which there has to be at least 1 of each type. In reality, this would mean 1 large, 2 medium and an outpost or 1 large, 1 medium and 3 outposts. The numbers can, of course, be played around with but the idea of closing islands down is the point (perhaps BKs could blockade every island simultaneously and any island which the BK wins gets closed). Yes, it would suck to be a shoppe owner on an island which got closed. Perhaps compensation in POE could mitigate that particular pain (or a spot on a different island, see #2).

In addition to this, a number of islands have problems with shoppes that, whilst paying their rent, are effectively dead space, as none of the owners or managers have logged in in years and the shoppe therefore does not have the stock/labor to actually make anything.

2) A solution to the empty shoppe issue is, I believe, to empower Brigand Kings/Governors to nominate shoppes for closure (similar to Dark Seas but with an important tweak. The nomination could be blocked if the owner or a manager logs in and clicks a button in the shoppe within the 4 week period between the nomination and the actual closure - shoppe could then not be renominated for a period of, say, 3 months). This would then create space for people whose shoppes were lost during the closure of islands. As compensation, the owner of the shoppe would receive the average value of similar shoppes on that island/in the archipelago (value based on sales output).


"""Suggestions""" - Or make more options that can change an island's size and not make them uninhabitable, giving more gameplay. Could implement a pay system for changing the island, the bigger it is the more fee.


I would also like to see something done about any empty/unused shops. I appreciate part of the difference between a shop and a stall is the permanence however unlike ships the qty is not unlimited. If a player with lots of locked ships goes dormant it doesn't stop other players from having ships themselves, however if that same player owns lots of shops then they do act as a dead spot on that islands map. whether its a dusting process (so a shop that is dormant for a long period of time goes lights out then eventually becomes a ruin that can be cleared by the governor) or else deed recovery (to the island governor, when initiated) i prefer the first way as it creates another wealth drain to help with inflation but either way would help encourage player island ownership again. the timeout process needs to be a long one but something needs to happen. maybe as a one off the OMs could dust the inactive shops and because this is a major mechanic change players who lose a deed receive an IOU type trinket in their inventory asking them to petition an OM for some form of reimbursement, potentially a shop on an OM owned island. Realistically i cant see this actually effecting many people, and if theyve gone long term dormant once they probably will again and any shops dusting on an OM island is unlikely to be replaced so would be self balancing in the long run. Ameba


Introduce a slightly newer version of shoppes (tailors, IM’s, SY’s, etc) that have:

  • Slightly higher maximum labor throughput.
  • A separate and/or limited chest for rent.
  • The option to upgrade to the new version for all current shops.

All newly built shops should be of the newer version. All old shops should remain unchanged and left as is.


Hi all,

I was wondering if someone could clarify a question on labour for me.

On YPP under labour (https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Labor): it says

"Shoppes are also limited by the amount of expert and skilled labor they can produce. Stalls have these limits listed in their respective bazaars under the "Run your own stall" menu. Regular shoppes can produce approximately two times that of a deluxe stall. Upgraded shoppes can produce approximately three times as much".

On YPP under maximum labour output (https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Maximum_labor_throughput) it indicates in the table that an upgraded shoppe can do the maximum throughput of any labour.

So in my example, an upgraded SY has a labour throughput of 68h per hour. According to to link at 3x a deluxe stall the breakdown would be: 68 Basic per hour or 30 Skilled per hour or 21 Expert hour Or a combination in the ratio of 68:30:21

Whereas I'm reading in the 2nd link that for an Upgraded Shoppe it is just 68h per hour of any labour type. I'm guessing the first link is correct rather than the 2nd.

Many thanks in advance


I would like to see basic/skilled/expert labor based on archipelago standing instead of ocean wide.

I think this would bring a bit more balance to the labor market, because there would be more pirates who could provide a higher level of labor.

I know this is a game, but in RL if you're proficient at something; you're skilled, if your distinguished; you're an expert.


Shop owners have encountered a serious issues with running shops for profit over a longer time horizon

  • Many goods trade below the real cost to make them

An example: Sloops trade at 60k regularly in trade chat; when the dubs alone cost more than 50k Another example: Violet enamel has traded at like a 30% discount to the cost to make it on admiral for months

This is due to people running shops for fun, and rightfully so - this is a videogame. It SHOULD be fun. To make running shops a little bit more consistent and profitable a small amount of non-player demand can help some of the goods get out of profitability glut.

More orders = more fun More orders = more labor demand = more profit for Gray Havens from labor badges Orders from BKs/Brigands/Barbs = more realistic = more immersive experience

Seems like a win for everyone

Also seriously where do they get all those ships for flotillas?

Shop Management

(For Tailor Rack used as larger Wardrobe, see Pirate Clothing)

Now, on to how I propose to fix it. I believe increasing the MAX tax rate to 500% of its current value would shake things up in the right way. This is simply increasing the maximum, not effecting OM islands and not forcing anyone to raise taxes to this level. This would have the effect of discouraging people from sitting on unused prime shop estate. The entire game economy has inflated greatly since the time the current tax rates were set, so it's long overdue anyway.


I've branched this from my previous thread Increase max shop tax because it's more targeted to the issue of shipyard production bottlenecks. Taking from @Threcon's input: The current mass limit on a deluxe SY stall is 100k while a WF requires 116k. I'm sure there was a good reason early on to limit WF production to full shops, but I believe we have hit a point where this is no longer keeping up. The current prices of shipyards and WFs are a clear indication of this.

The simplest solution appears to be increasing deluxe stall capacity to 120k mass so they can also produce WFs. This would have immediate results and minimal side effects as the stalls still have very limited labor throughput.


  • Employment & Labor

When I look at Ye, my name, Employment, Jobs I can see the Shop Name, Island Location, date I started, and Pay ranged.

What I am not told is if this is a Weavery so I know to keep my Weaving active and not dormant.

Please add shop type to Jobs display.


Its really painful to sit in trade chat all day trying to get some help for my shops which are some of the best paying on the ocean and consistently use everyone's hours. To get around the limit of 72 hours/day many people use big armies of alts and some other shop owners that I know have even gotten told they are not allowed to make any more.

The end result of this are tons of shops that sit dormant, people who want to invest in production not being able to, and markets vulenerable to shortages (such as the hacks a while back that sent fine rum to 200/unit on admiral - if you could buy it at all)


  • Inventory Management

Recycler Add an item recycler to shoppe bazaars, and individual stall/shoppe management menu.

You can recycle any item that can or could be made in a shoppe. (see Discord for longer OP write up).


Currently there is not display of what your max units weigh is set to in market or your estimated investment , what i mean by this is many over the years many have dusted others dormant, inactive or low funded shoppes by maxing there available storage / funds

Im not saying the game should restrict how much we put as max units but it would be nice to have a estimate See OP & replies for description of possible solutions and more related visibility issues.


Please for the love of all that's holy make it easier to take things out of a tailor. As of right now you have to reset the prices of everything you want out to zero and then take them out. That is so time consuming especially if you're trying to move out a large number of items.


  • Order Management

I would love the possibility to scroll through orders, it's really weird that this tab don't have this possibility


Sales locked to a limited whitelist based on existing in-game lists such as Hearties, Crew, Flags etc. Maybe as a multiple selection of radio buttons. Otherwise, to the general public, the stall is not selling.

See OP for full description.

Shop Puzzles

Puzzles

Alchemistry

  • Alchemistry

The puzzle is very reliant on luck, especially when you want to score high. Most of the times the special pieces arent spawning, or the bottles simply have the wrong colors (and thus a high combo is impossible). Sometimes coins can spawn on a crossover piece, making them twice as potent.

Suggestion:

- Bottles at high ranks should always be tall.

- Multifill requires 4 layers -> 3 layers of the same color

- Crossover pieces are moderately common -> Crossover pieces are a bit more common

- Special pieces on a crossover piece score 2x -> score 1x.

- Fix softlock and scoring issues when using the multifill.

- Quite Challenging to level up despite repeatedly scoring excellent



Blacksmithing

It would be neat to have a 'training ring' in blacksmiths (for swords) or shipyards (for bludgeons) where a pirate can use a 'training sword' or 'training bludgeon' to test it out against a dummy. Potentially, you could test against a real person who is also in the ring and who is also using a training weapon.

Just for simplicity's sake I am going to use swordfight as example instead of tacking on (and rumble) to everything, but the idea can be applied to both puzzles/items.

The there could be training/wooden versions of all the currently available swords for testing, to help greenies learn which pattern is best for them without having to buy each sword, but it would also be cool to have a training sword that has a blank pattern which you can input in whatever you'd like. This would give a fun way for users to experiment with patterns not currently available and maybe find some cool new ones. 🙂

Mantid has a great tool to visualize custom patterns, and this is the sort of way I was imagining being able to input your own pattern into the testing sword. https://ypp.mantid.org/swords/index.php?custom=3md3554hgbp6

You would not be able to take the wooden swords away from the ring, of course. 😉 They'd not hold up in a real fight after all.


Distilling

Spices need a FORCED cooldown of 2-3 turns after each spawn. If you get bad RNG with the spice spawns & spawn placement, you get into an impossible scenario that always tanks your distilling standing. It happens too often and there's no counterplay, see picture.

Often it happens mid session (when you're like CC5+) and not just the beginning


Shipwrightery

Can we get a change to not automatically drop a pattern if it's off by 0.2mm? I'm moving dozens of pieces to set my board to use as many of the patterns as possible, and often I don't get finished until the board is shaking.

See OP for full description.


Weaving

Weaving The board clogs up very easily and a single bad luck moment can completely brick your session. Most of the times its almost unplayable.

Suggestion:

- Pieces can be up to 4 columns wide -> 3 columns

- Minimum spawn width is 2 -> 1

Suggestion:


Not Puzzles

  • Furnishing

There was a round of the Grand Crafting Puzzle Project for Furnishing, but no puzzle was chosen to be placed in the game.


  • Tailoring
Retrieved from "https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/index.php?title=Game_Design/Discussion&oldid=791854"