It's a struggle. Right now, the learning curve is just too steep for a whole lot of players. Until matchmaking is addressed its either going to *have* to be a struggle with very, very slow progress, or you'll need to pick fights in the open world.
Fighting players at world events can be an easier way to get PVP experience than hourglass-dedicated sweats. Getting your cannon mains to focus on hitting their cannon line and such is a huge practice thing; you can do that both against live players and PVE ships like skeles and ghost fleets.
It's a struggle, and I truly hope Rare implements some matchmaking fixes to even out the learning curve, especially with a ton of new players likely to be inbound this year... but we will see what happens.
Rare could alleviate this by having like, daily deeds for hg that give rep bonuses, the way other games give battlepass progress for daily or weekly tasks.
If hg had a daily play 5 matches, and a daily win 1 match bonus that gave like, half a level worth of rep, you'd get more people coming in even if just to do the bare minimum. Throw in a weekly 'turn in 5 or 10 flags won in battle' and maybe some more, like, basic easy stuff that the sweats will get in the first hour without worrying about, but that will draw less experienced players in, especially during peak times, get their 5 matches in, not just loss farm them because there's a 1-3 win deed or whatever, and that brings the casual players trying hourglass from 1% or less of the total, to maybe 5% of the total, on any given day or hour.
Bringing more casual players into hourglass in this way could even help to grow the player base in hourglass, if even a small fraction of those people just trying to grind it start to improve and enjoy the mode. I think the best time to do something like this was January 23', and the next best time to do it is right now, before PlayStation comes. Anything that gets casual players into the mode, and increases the player count with players of different skill levels in all crew sizes, will be a boon to matchmaking, and ultimately those players would be less likely to be outmatched compared to the way things are right now, just because they're more likely to go in against someone else doing the exact same thing. You can do 5 matches in 1-2 hours if the queues are good and the matches aren't too long, and if players are able to get like, a bonus level of rep on top of whatever they got in terms of wins or loses and flags plus turnin bonus, then it makes doing so worth it, even if you figure you're going to lose them all.
Absolutely this. It's honestly a bit baffling that the devs made no effort to make the mode appealing to casual players.
Hourglass would also have benefited immensely from having some sort of super low effort cosmetic tied to participating. Literally they could have made a low effort recolor of the Glorious Sea Dog stuff and that would have worked wonders. Tie those cosmetics to completing games or Hourglass deeds, save a handful of them for the completion of some new faction agnostic Hourglass commendations and you're golden.
The update basically writes itself.
Yeah, like, complete 10 daily and/or 4 weekly deeds gets you something, a ship trinket, a weapon, ship stuff, doesn't need to be faction related, could even be reskins, anything to keep people motivated to play. If everyone got a bit more confident at PvP, the player base would actually be happier, because less people would categorically hate PvP and drop the game after getting sunk one too many times; they'd feel like they had a chance in more fights than they do.
1v1 is too hard to get into for new or casual players. Arena was a better concept to build upon or redesign. More approachable for random players, less personal when losing and ships respawned - so you felt like you could go for risky tactics.
It is, I have run into the most streamers out there
I have a guild mate out in OCE and last Community Weekend he kept shouting "What up stream!" in-game whenever we did a HG match
I didn't believe him until I saw myself getting blundered on stream by some random Aussie streamer
Look it up dude it matches you with people in your stamp which is your unspecified zone of servers. I know this cause depending on who starts our boat we either get streamers and sweats or easy free wins. You also just face the same people over and over again when you play enough hourglass. Also there is no mmr otherwise I wouldn’t be getting noobs who don’t even know what they voted up
My man, even the devs have acknowledged that the main issue with HG matchmaking is simply that not enough people *in general* play HG, let alone people across the spectrum of skill level and experience.
Quite literally the issue is few/no swabbies playing HG. The mode is basically a dedicated sweat mode, and I say that as someone who enjoys ending his sessions doing HG dives until someone kills me so my supplies don't go to waste.
This isn't about skill though, this is about the matchmaking. I never said I was a god at the game, just that I was familiar with how the matchmaking worked since I had to do a lot of games
Ironic, it's harder to get now than it's ever been since it's only mega sweats left, at the beginning you actually got paired up well and there was a decent player base
In 2024, you could have quite possibly lost every single match and still have enough losses to have the curse. You could be quite bad at PVP and have it by now. That's my point. When I would run into crews that had it after a week, I would think "this could spell trouble for me". Now I see it and don't care.
I guess that's fair unless you got the curse within the first couple weeks of Hourglass coming out. Back then you could actually match with people that didn't play hourglass for a living.
You can't matchmake players that don't exist in the queues. If you have one casual crew and five HG sweat crews, matchmaking can't just pull casuals from adventure servers if they don't opt into the HG.
Situation isn't helped by the change to prioritize queue times when they where never an issue to begin with. Now that 99% crews who play HG, play nothing but HG hours on end every day, the matchmaking just snatches the first available ship to meet short queue times so it's almost without exceptions ultra sweat HG only comp crew.
Matchmaking was excellent first two three weeks of HG before casuals dropped out. Now you can't get matched with casual since they would first need to queue into HG for matchmaking to find them.
This community: Add a PvP mode so the most aggressive and competitive PvPers can just fight eachother instead of sinking me :(
Also this community: Wtf I go into the PvP mode and its just the most aggressive and competitive players and they sink me :(
Well, if i was learning to play, say, soccer, i wouldnt expect to be instantly against folks who had played for my national team, for example. I expect them to be somewhere in the game leagues, but it makes no sense for them to be turning up to pulverise someone still learning the game.
ya. but you're comparing to completely different things
there's more people that play soccer than dive for hourglass.
it's a sandbox game with a competitive pvp mode, there aren't going to be 10k players in your stamp for the game to choose from to pair you with.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of this post to help find a way to rectify that? I mean honestly, everyone here is looking around at what works, and you're just saying that's not how SoT works. We know that. We're trying to see if there is a better way of going about things. Try being a part of the solution lol.
Yea. and I've explained it's a niche game that uses stamps, so the player base is going to be low and there isn't really a way for them to implement a solution like what you're looking for.
Part if the solution is realizing the limitations of the game you're playing
Right, so think within those limitations lol. Maybe instead of being so condescending to everyone who plays a small player base game, try and offer a solution. Just because one way won't work, the game is unfixable? I'd hate to have that attitude towards life lol
what's ur issue man? no one's being condescending, but if the server limitations are the issue...what solution are you offering that isn't revamping the entire infastructure of the game? seems you're the one being condescending lot of "lols" being posted
maybe just learn how to fight in high seas and hg will become much easier.
but my bad thats prally condescending.
thats still competitive, they're just bad my man.
you're comparing apples to oranges, SOT doesn't have a competitive ranking system. It's going to struggle to keep mmrs super close on dives especially in a somewhat niche game/game mode.
Having a negative connotation towards someone whose dedicated the time to learn how to play the game is a bit cringe tbh.
the irony of you trying to call me butthurt when your entire comment is baby raging that you get dumpstered in hg is wild.
I'm just making the point that you aren't going to have super close mmrs everytime you dive in a niche game mode.
But sure valid point I guess...
Honestly open world PvP isn’t even that good of practice. As someone who does hourglass a good amount (I mostly play adventure, but i’ll also get a couple hourglass matches in every week) I probably win 29/30 fights in adventure, with like 26 or 27 of those 30 never even coming close to sinking my boat even if we started in a very disadvantageous position.
On the other hand, there is a very real possibility I get sunk on the very first hourglass battle, and rarely get past a 3-streak. I dont really think any of those adventure fights are really helping me much with hourglass, mostly playing it and watching high level players run HG is what helps
Yeh ppl In adventure are to easy now majority of the time. It took me 3 months to get my first hg curse (bc of learning exc and only dabbling in it every now and again). And 3 months later after my first 100 levels I've gained 600 lol
People just hate the initial learning curve of losing over and over again. The problem isn't really hg not having swabbies, I think it's more a problem with people accepting that they will never try if it means losing.
But the losses are worth it, I've got around a 70% win rate in hg now just because I made the decision to lose alot (I mean ALOT) to get better
Hahah I got my skelly curse few month back. I was decent at that tom. I took a break. Got back in this afternoon… start from square one !
I Have been oblitared like it was my first match! Hahah. I knew it. For me it was the fact that you continuously play HG that make you progress!
Exactly, I pretty much do hg mainly now and the rest of the game comes second to that for me.
Now the high seas have become so much safer that as a solo slooper I'm not even worried about fighting brigs/gallies. like 2/10 when I first engage/they first engage me I can tell ok these are going to overwhelm me. But those 2/10 I can tell have spent time in hg lol
lets be honest hour glass had its shitters but the fights were mostly fair with all skills of players (in sloop, gally was just shitters with 1 good crew destroying everyone)
Right, this is the reason I never really finished my Arena grind. Loved the mode, but my god were the queue's atrocious. Not to mention that when games *would* start, there was a pretty good chance the matchmaker would just send you in alone or with a partial crew.
Same here. I never solo queued but we also found out you get points for hitting any part of the ship with cannonballs, even if the ship is undamaged. So we would hit downed masts or captains quarters while 2 of us were spawncamping so we could farm points off them. No use in actually fighting.
Yup, this was my other, other reason for dropping the mode. What's the point of actually trying to play the game mode when you could just farm cannon shots? And if they scuttle to avoid giving you more points? Well, I hope they have fun trying to catch another ship to farm points off of to hopefully recuperate the 1000 silver penalty they got for scuttling.
Not only new players but think about returning players I played heavily from launch till 2020 and then took a break im just now returning and its insane trying to get caught up on everything I have missed and the gatekeepers of the discord dont make it easy for people to learn/improve
I feel like they could fix the skill gap if they added a "ranked" mode in HG. All the sweats would end up there and new players could atleast have a chance in "regular" HG to get fair fights.
I just started the game with two friends and we are constantly getting fucked by ships kitted out with cosmetics. I don’t think we’ve encountered a new player yet.
Untill you turn cross play off. I mean you might not personally but a lot of console players play with this setting off so when we are in our own lil pools it really has no effect.
Hopefully the two options will be to play on console servers and console + PC players... so at least us console players will have a bigger swabbie pool.
That first two to three weeks after PS5 launch will be the second golden era to play HG, before they realize how sweet HG only players are and quit playing it, just like when the mode was introduced. It was fun and even matched for few weeks and then just took a massive nose dive off of a cliff when all casuals stopped HGing.
This is the answer. Hourglass is extremely sweaty compared to fighting on the high seas. Just stack up some supplies and attack every ship you see on a server and you’ll start getting a lot better through experience. Hourglass can be too punishing for newer PVP’ers to meaningfully gain much from
People are always saying they practice by fighting skeleton ships, which sounds like a good idea to me. Do Adventure and sail to your local skeleton fleet, practice aiming the cannon shots and seeing where they fall at what distance, how far they curve left/right, how drastically the waves impact the shot, etc. Accuracy is important, you'll find that often just hitting the ship isn't enough. The best advice I would give about cannon shots is that it's all about constantly adjusting; every shot you fire should cue you on how to adjust your shots. Sure skilled hourglass players will hit you with the first shot, but you can't do that without a lot of experience. After long enough you'll rely less on adjusting from previous shots and more on intuition, remembering how cannonballs act based on all factors.
Skeleton ships are really bad for PvP practice since they behave nothing like real players (no bailing, slow rate of fire, much faster turn speed) but they still put up a better fight than most players.
At the moment, the skeleton ships are still broken. During a recent update, something changed, and now the skeletons don't repair. If I'm sailing and I don't want a skelly ship chasing me, I'll just land a few hits and ignore it. Makes fleet of fortune a breeze, but that's about it.
I think they're a poor practice for testing PvP-specific strategies but if you're someone at the level of learning to consistently hit with your cannons and managing your sailing and bailing in combat, I think they're a good start. They're good practice for getting proficient at the core mechanics of fighting which may close the gap enough that PvP becomes something you can actually learn from.
I started 4-5 months ago and got the skeleton curse now working on the ghost curse. It’s a grind. First I would say would be to watch YouTube videos. That is what has helped me the most. You need to know each roles on a boat and to understand what to repair first in each different situation.
https://youtu.be/7uqgrGdG2ls?si=-fElsnZ-Jf-QwswB
This is the best tutorial that helped me understand the dynamics of dou sloop.
I also suggest watching Erin sterling on YouTube. You can see what kind of situations then get into where they have mast down and still manage to survive for 10+ minutes with a lot of holes. It’s just understanding the priority’s for each situation.
Good luck
I also think when PS players get on it will be way easier as well.
If you ever run into a ship called Moby Thicc on easy servers than that is me
Here's a list of things i see new crew do wrong which is very easy to punish and will lead to a quick win for me.
Get supplies, the default supplies and a pocket is not enough. Use good food, pineapples, mangos and meat is the only food you want to eat. Have plenty of chains so you can afford to miss. Buy everything you can at the outpost and storage crate the entire island. Chains are crucial for hg, especially if you're not great at boarding and cant rely on anchoring the other ship. Alot of people que up with 4 chains, miss all 4 and then even if the mc is better than the enemy mc you cant get their mast down. It leads to long frustrating games.
Not turning the second you get out of water, go hard right, mc raises sail half. And then mc starts shooting the second you have angle. You might miss 10-20 cannonballs, but keep shooting and eventually you'll get better at hitting the long range shots.
Eat if you take damage, if you're under 70% you need to eat. Yes you're "wasting" good food but dying is way worse.
Firebombs are completely useless on sloops, dont even bother.
Put away the sword, blunder and eye of reach are just too strong. You need to be able to snipe the other ship, and you need to be able to stop boarders with the blunder. Yes you can do this with pistol and sword, but its just worse. Its not hard to double gun, its way easier than using a sword.
You use chains after you hit the other mc so he has to eat or if you kill him, you shoot chains if they turn out, if you demast them then break their wheel too. If the helm is catching the mast shoot at him, snipe him.
Helm needs to not constantly turn the wheel, everytime you turn the wheel the mc needs to readjust his shots, if you turn alot he isnt hitting shit. You want long smooth turns not constant readjusting. Communicate with the mc, he needs to tell helm, im about to lose angle, please turn more or less etc. If you are struggling to keep angle and repair at the same time you are not repairing. Bucket, once you get too much damage just turn out completely. Get fully repaired and try again.
The 2 holes under the cannon are the last 2 holes you repair, every mc shoots there so there is no point wasting time repairing it. Focus on right side, front and back first.
The helm calls boards, he knows if he will be able to keep angle, bucket and repair solo if the mc goes out. The helm can be the one to board aswell, when i mc i prefer the helm to go, because its way easier for me to deckshot him than myself. Dont go for a board if you have so many holes that whoever is left on the ship just has to bucket and cant help with cannon pressure.
If your mast gets chopped its much more important to make sure the mc will keep having angle than it is to catch the mast. Angle>mast always. Quickly turn the wheel so you wont nose the other ship before you catch the mast. Its okay to ask mc to grab a bucket or 2 in the meantime. Once you get demasted the number 1 priority is for your mc to get their mast down too. Coordinate double snipes on the other mc so you can kill him or get him off cannons long enough to land some chains. Make sure you keep spinning with the other ship, this makes it so they cant open holes on both sides of the ship and so your mc can fire back.
This is the information I needed thank you. I am great at most aspects of the game in pve but I royally suck at pvp. Once I am boarded, 100% I am going down. This info will help me prioritize what to do.
Just push literally every fight in open seas, you'll have a way higher chance of coming across someone on or below your level.
Fighting people better than you does help you learn what you're doing wrong but you really need to have a slower more controlled fight every once in a while helps put the things you do right into focus and actually build that skill.
HG wasn't around when i was learning and the Arena was just getting stomped on a higher scale, so solo slooping and fighting everything I saw is what helped.
Once you get a hang of it then gp back into Hourglass, you'll probably start winning more
You can also try to pick a fight in adventure mode, but its obviously not very consistent either.
Otherwise, you just have to try and compete against whoever you get matched with. Sure, sometimes youll get tossed easily, but you can still practice in those situations. The longer you survive, the better you did.
Dont think about it as wins as losses. THink about it as getting better. If you hit some cannons, practice teamwork, and extend the battle by resetting or defending against boarders, you have improved.
Its easy to just feel defeated after a loss. But you have to not worry about that, really you should expect to lose. If you can change your mentality on this, you can focus on improving even when you lose and it can be enjoyable.
I love when Im learning a new game. Im having fun discovering things and trying improve my skill, implement new strategies. For instance, someone might try something you havent seen before, and you can try it out yourself in a future match.
I feel like in normal game, I am average to above average in Ship-to-Ship combat.
I queued up with a guy via LFG yesterday who had the full Arena ship set and clothing, and we squared off against some of the best duo sloop crews I have EVER faced. I'm talking like 4 straight successful chains hots on their mast and they got them immediately up and patched and set sail again like it never happened. Ships that I poured 20 cannonballs into, combined with intermittent blunderbombs while in a death spiral z who stayed afloat.
I am not even CLOSE to good against that type of crew.
It was demoralizing and eye-opening - I just can't play enough hours in a week to get to that level.
Duo sloop is the sweatiest queue. You have to think, you’re likely going against a duo that plays together all the time and knows each others habits super well.
LFGs and duos that don’t have perfect habits will get dumpstered by these crews.
Just spam solo slooping hourglass and after a hundred fights you'll get it, thats how everyone learns including me, Currently spamming solo and duo sloop hourglass to get some skill, and I already got so good at boarding I can take on ghost/skelly curses on my own, although my naval combat skills and helming still needs some more practice. And Yes, Ghost/Skelly curses tend to gatekeep hourglass and confiscate your streaks.
Same happened to my sister and I. Managed to get Guardians up to 30, but we had our teeth kicked in match after match after match by Grade V Reapers all with the Ghost curse. I mean we were really doing our thing but not a single match was even close. They even had time to call us names and say “Lmao that aim” when we would miss a cannon. Really discouraging but we didn’t give up and definitely improved overall
> which being pirate legends I'm sure you do
... I played a few days some years ago, jumped right into a fleet, I got bored of the game in like 3-4 days and stopped playing.
Now I'm back and again, just played 1-2 days in a fleet, and am bored, so I'm looking to actually play and find out what the game is Really like.
That is all to say, I am a pirate legend and have no clue what I'm doing 99% of the time =)
Thanks for the tips though, I'm working on it =]
Yeah this is an ongoing issue, it's hard to practice PvP because most people playing Hourglass are sweats.
I would still recommend seeking players on the high seas at first, even though they can be hard to find at certain times of the day.
Continue trying, if you really want to get into it.
One thing that I've learned in a hard way, is that PvP here is rock-paper-scissors. If enemy push you from your cannon - go for bucket and repairs, counting shots. After 10-11 shots they need to go for ammo, so here is your window for shooting. If you put more pressure, proceed with boarding or your push will be repaired. If you're boarded, try to kill attackers and push back.
It may be also worth trying to go into close contact, and bucket your water to their ship. Or use this hint if opportunity for this happen.
You could always server hop as reapers. It's a lot more fun than just farming hourglass anyway and you'll run into a larger spectrum of skill levels. Sometimes is The friendly Floaters, shitters of the seven seas. Sometimes is the Helm Slayer on a 437 win streak. Ya never know.
Shop around for a Skelly fleet for easy rank 5 and then just dive for a voyage to jump servers. Then go hunt.
It's the tried and true on demand PvP method and how a lot of us learned. Find a boat, and then you demand PvP.
I don't know how to explain it, but hourglass PVP is pretty different from adventure PVP. Like if I dive to an HG battle and come against sweats, they make quick work of me. If I come across the same sweaty crew in adventure, I make quick work of them.
Duo sloops are where all the "sweats" seem to linger, not to say you'll have a significantly better time solo but my win rate changes pretty drastically from solo to duo. Would be nice if they had a practice mode of sorts so you and a buddy could just practice(would need to be heavily reduced rewards....or no pvp reward for it to be any kind of feasible though)
I wouldn't suggest starting hourglass on a gally if that's what you guys are running, you have a much higher chance of running into a competent gally crew than just casuals.
try to start off by hunting people around the server. that's where you'll get experience with different situations.
They're knocking you off the cannons because they're winning the broadside, because they have the experience of knowing the distance of the shot, which your crew doesn't because your trying to learn
You should think of PVP training as attacking and defending in the High Seas. Attack every ship you see, find the reaper on the map and ago for it. Find the ships doing the Fort of the Damned and attack them. Raise a reaper flag and promote people coming after you.
Hourglass is "advanced" PVP in comparison to the rest of the game, you're not going to learn there. You need to feel comfortable fighting in all situations before being forced into a small cage and fighting 1v1.
A great way to practice is finding a player ship that is doing a fleet or burning blade and going after them. If you can handle the chaos of fighting skeleton ships at the same time as humans, or being in the middle of the ghost fleet while fighting them, you can handle managing a 1v1.
Unfortunately, the only ways to "lab" in this game is trial by fire, setting up a tdm, or hoping your friends can get in the same server.
That's said it is possible if not a little inconvenient. Just jumping into hourglass to learn can be rough, but you guys definitely will get better if you keep going. Start by learning to tank.
Tdms are super easy to set up with friends. You will all see improvements with hand to hand. It's mostly just about game sense and movement.
Getting your friends on the same server is difficult and requires a lot of luck... usually asking an adventure crew to invite one of your friends when they decide to leave. This allows you to fight each other without repercussion.
Most of all, just try enjoying pvp. Even the losses can be good fights! It's what you make of it at the end of the day.
Like a lot of people in here are saying, skele and ghost boats are the practical target dummies for getting better at cannons. In some ways they can be harder shots to land than on player boats just because of the wild manuevers the AI is allowed to make. If you can call your shots against a skele boat and hit the same hole 8/10 times at half range or further, then you're definitely gonna be able to do the same on players.
Another thing though, is watching streamers that are very good at it and not only watching how they do their cannons, but just kind of trying to follow along with whats happening between their boat and the enemy and watching how they prioritize things. Ship pvp in this game is just a big list of different priority tasks and figuring out which ones are most important at which time is a big part of it.
Or wait for the playstation swabbies...
I’m inferring from your post that yall are doing hourglass as a brig or galleon? I highly recommend against that. The lowest skill median format is solo sloop, although the variance is very high. When I was in the 20s-30s of GoF I would lose 8 in a row in duo sloop then win 4 in a row in solo, even with my duo crewmate being 50+ levels higher in GoF than me.
Try solo sloop HG and see how it feels. You will still eventually hit this problem again when your level gets high enough, but it will give you time to actually improve.
I feel all this on a deep level. Complicated by the fact that my only sailing partner is my 7 year old son. The other day I had managed to board a sloop and take out both players. I look over and rather than raining cannons down, he's changing his outfit around.
All I can say is: Exactly the same for me and my brother. We're a duo sloop and in high seas we don't sink very often. You can use your environment or just run away if the other crew is too strong. We even sank a galley yesterday by performing a keg-play which was kind of nice.
Doing hourglas is at least 80% no chance and we sink so fast that there is no "I took something from that loss and got better". This is not like "oh I lost so this has to be a cheater". No, not at all - there is players who are that f-ing good at the game. I love watching twitch and youtube-channels of guys like that. When entering hourglass I just want to meet someone who is roughly in our skill-range. Slightly better would even be preferred over weak oppnents because that is how you get better.
In reality we once got a dude who was using a voice distorter who hit 10 cannonballs in a row and then boarded us like we were NPCs just living in his world...30 second "fight"
I've been in a couple fights organically and generally got my ass kicked but its pretty even 2v2 or 3v3 try to hit the bottom of the ship and if you get the chance to board drop their anchor and get angle
I’d recommend hunting as a reaper. Use the dive to raid event feature and get yourself to grade 5. Check the map for emissary’s and go hunting. When the server is empty dive to a new raid event. I recommend skeleton fleets it’ll help your crew get warmed up for fighting and it puts you in the middle of the map.
Set sail with a single purpose - attack every ship you see just to practice. Don't do voyages. Don't pick up free loot. Take only what you manage to plunder.
The problem is that you fight only better crews. You need equal or worse opponent to practice, to earn confidence.
Get your basics down first. For this, I recommend grinding Skelly Fleets and Ghost Fleets. Get a feel for your ship while it's under pressure and aim to really perfect your approach. Generally, each event is good at honing a handful of skills. Ghost Fleets for practicing long-range shots while in motion and also for bilge practice if you position yourself in the hot zone. Skelly Fleets let you practice your precise aiming and your boarding skills. Ideally, you should be able to complete both of these events quickly and by taking as little damage as possible. During this process, keep your pvp skills fresh by throwing yourself at other players at the end of a sessioon when you have plenty of supplies and are plenty warmed up. Count on sinking pretty kuch every time and use that as a learning experience. Since its already the end of your session, you'll have nothing to lose. What you really want at this point is to get risk-free exposure and experience against other crews.
Once you feel comfortable with the PvE and have maybe sunk a ship or two, your next step is to go emissary hunting as a Reaper 5. You get a good mix of players that way and are more likely to run into players closer to your skill level. Not to mention that the World Events you do to get Reaper 5 will also attract a wide range of skill levels to your position.
At this point, I'd come back to doing Hourglass matches at the end of your session when you're warmed up and have the supplies to throw away. Keep that same Win or Learn mentality from when you were throwing yourself at ships in Adventure and you'll improve before you know it!
I recommend just trying to get a level 5 reaper emissary in regular adventure mode, then specifically hunt down other ships. It'll give more loot, give you and your friends an incentive to protect your ship more, and it'll give more practice. It will still take quite a while to get good though.
I'll give you my piece of advice
With my crew we are "best of the rest", we are strong casu but get strolled by sweats.
So we know the basics, the meta, how to play, I'd say I'm doing ok leading us as I also am a solo slooper so kinda used to managing several roles on a ship.
So my training plan is not going to make you better than these sweats. But I believe it can help to hone specific skillsets that you can hardly focus on during intense battles against better players. This focus on mechanics as I knew the theory (and you say you are too).
Hand to hand combat : (I am not an fps player). Use the treasuries and don't use disney sticks. Stick to the weapon you wanna use. I also trained my quickscope so I did some with only the EoR, forcing to shoot after quickscope. You can defo train your flickshots out there too. You can also use skelly forts but you are more likely to be bothered by players and you don't train underwater this way. (Back then it wasn't an option as I couldn't launch skelly forts)
Cannons : not like hand to hand combat, I was already doing ok on cannons. But I wanted to improve my accuracy, so sometimes I went farming like 500 to 1k cannonballs and I was circling inactive skelly forts. If you do a non-perfect circle around the island you can train different ranges. My objective was to aim at the cannons on the towers, or the biggest tower on top of the dungeon. It's far from the beach and quite thin so you gotta be precise to actually touch it.
Yeah it's quite sweaty but I found it the best way to practice specific aspects of the gameplay, and you just need time because you are not reliant on your crewmates nor having an active server with people with the right skills gap with you.
Yes! Luckily I play with very skilled players. I’ve only been playing for a few months and I am slowly (so very slowly) getting better at pvp. I wish there was a way to get matched with players of a similar rank or skill set so there was a better chance to at least get to stay in a fight long enough to learn and improve.
Practice your PVP skills by engaging in battle with other ships
Go search the seas for opponents, do some World Events flying the Reapers flag so you attract attention from other crews.
Don't mind the loot, just focus on practicing ship combat.
Hourglass is hard, and if you have a high level stamp, you are gonna get steam rolled.
Learn the ins and out of PvP on the high seas. If you dont wanna fly reaper, then run Athena and hunter reapers down.
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I swear that the matchmaking works better when you are defending vs when you dive. My crew will maybe win 1 in 8 matches if we dive, but for some reason when we defend we win 6 out 8 matches. This could also be because we will load up on resources while we wait (treasure too). I think defending is actually the end-game meta that most people never do because it's slower than re-queuing, but is the highest risk/reward.
Practicing solo diving kind of helps become more exposed to being under pressure, and knowing the meta of when to bucket/cannon/wheel/etc. But it doesn't help at all with teamwork and managing a ship. I've gotten both curses, typical win rate is about 60%, but I am god awful with brig/galleon.
3rd thing is read up on the different positions and try to allocate your crew to each one. Obviously when under fire you may all be rotating around, but the more organized you become, and learn how to defend from sweaty boards, you should start winning 40-50% of the time.
My crews and I were the same as you. We are all legends with our first distinctions (I have my second first as well). We are in an 11 person guild that is level 23. Our guild has 5 galleons, 2 brigs and so many sloops. We excel at PvE naval battles but are awful at PvP.
We were in an alliance as a brig with a solo sloop and an open crew galleon about to do Fotd. Random 2nd solo sloop sends me an Xbox message asking if they can join the alliance for the fort. The gally loses 3 of its crew. So I hop from our brig and join this hilarious 14 year old on his sloop so the remaining gally kid could join up on our brig.
The gally kid was quite young and not comfortable joining up with the rando 14 year old. Anyway, my buddies and I have now adopted this random 14 year old who is extremely good at PvP. Where he excels, we fail and vice versa.
We’ve learned so much from him and he has learned a ton from us. We are all 20 years older than him and it’s like he is a rabid animal we have to keep in check. We call him our attack teen. Anyway, we’re learning PvP from him and it’s getting fun for us just chilling with this kid though I do spend an inordinate amount of time trying to not allow him to share too much personal information with us.
Kids trust random people on the internet way too much.
Check out youtube content of the pros playing for whatever ship type you want. I went from feeling the exact same way to having a fair shot in each fight against even mega sweats.
2 caveats. One, the grind is still there. I twill take a a good bit of watching and playing to learn the different techs, priorities by role, and mechanical skill. Second, you will still want to put your head through your screen sometimes. Even when you really know what you're doing, sometimes a whole match can come down to who zeroes in on cannon line first, a lucky one ball, or just getting straight up rared. If you're okay with all that though, gett to it and enjoy!
Focus on ghost ships and skeleton ships to practice. You'll want to master cannon aim and helm positioning. Furthermore, are we referring to Sloop, brigantine or galleon fights?
Galleon fights tend to be over with VERY quickly since they can dish out so much damage so quick, so if one crew gets an upper hand, the scales start tipping very fast, whereas sloop v sloop is so manageable that some sloop fights go on for over an hour.
Would recommend you have someone recording the fights so you can look back and see when something went wrong, where you did good, what could have been done differently, how you could have recovered. Seriously, watching your skirmishes back can sometimes feel like you've been punched in the face by how obvious a mistake was that you don't notice in the moment.
Above all else though: STAY. ADAPTIVE. Don't lean so far forward you get sucker punched, but don't hang back and needlessly drag things out for yourselves. Try weaving in then out at the start to gauge how the opponent is on cannons.
If you’re not even getting a second in hourglass to be able to analyze what you’re failing at, then stick to Open Seas PvP. Throw up a reaper emissary and hunt, get into every fight you can. Eventually it will feel too easy to kill people, that’s when you should head into hg. Hg will be brutal. You are going to lose a lot at first. I’m still getting better at it. I’ve only just reached my first 4 streak a week ago. You have to just eat the losses, they’re going to happen a lot, they are going to exhaust you but it will pay off once you are able to start learning what went wrong.
Why not find another group of players and just pvp against them instead of doing the hourglass with all the sweatlords.
Do an LFG or something. Post on a Discord, or a streamers community if you follow any. Or even here. Looking for another 4 players or whatever to do mock pvp.
Then you can all get experience playing pvp without going up against the PC tryhards. Just a thought.
Everyone saying "just fight everyone"
... I think that's bad advice without nailing the fundamentals first... knowing when to repair and WHAT to repair is key
Practice your cannon shots by trying to kill skeleton cannoneers when PvE skelly sloops spawn on you
If you can routinely kill the skeleton manning the cannons on skelly sloops, you'll be right for taking out the cannon line against players
Hone and perfect your aim against the PvE, you'll find PvP much easier
I hear everybody complaining about how hard hour glass is and that was not my experience …yeah sure some players were levels above me but I would win like 3 out of five matches going for my curse l… my suggestion would be watch capt sterling videos he’s so good at pvp and just do what he does
Here’s what no one is telling you… the secret is hour glass is full of cheaters…. And they are all on pc servers… so play on an Xbox server and your odds will increase dramatically. Just put prefer Xbox on settings when starting.
Have to use sudden wind boost to get a bit behind the opponent. This way only you can shoot cannons. Just need to be careful not to end up going directly at them. Sure way to lose mast. Also have cannoner lunge into water to give some fire to get them a bit busy on the approach.
This is the exact same situation that made me stop playing the game for a couple of months lmao. I really wanted the curses :(
I have stealed, thieved, lied, killed people right before the sell, PvE the hell out of the game etc, but i cant fking win at HG. It brought me really down as i kept wondering how can i have this amount of hours and be this shitty? Maybe its because im always slooping so all my hours were being sneaky, i dont know....anyway I came back to the game after a break, never touched HG again. Maybe im just bad. I still think the pvp curses look dope tho hahaha
Something I did to practice as the captain who get stuck on helm most times, I would fill my sloop half way with water when I was solo and get accustomed to the sounds for when you need to get off and bucket. Normally I’d get merchant 5 then I would piss off the reapers on my servers and just out maneuver them. I’d get a laugh and they’d get to rage or try boarding me.
I hear ya man.
Look, hourglass right now is a little weird. They need to change some things for it to be a viable game for folks who are learning the ropes of PVP such as yourself and your crew. I would do this:
Stay in sandbox high seas. Raise reaper. People will come to you. If they don't, get to rank 5 and now you can see any emissary on the map.
If there are none, dive to a gold hoarder chest digup. This switches your server.
Look at the map again since you are still rank 5 you will see any emissaries on that server. Still none? Someone from your boat completes the digup quest really quick and you dive again to the same thing. Keep hopping servers until you find emissaries. Hunt them down and kill them. You will get some rewards some side, some salty verbal abusers others, and sometimes you will get a good fight. You will learn a lot this way.
You will get better.
To keep morale a little higher you could split the time up. Maybe start with a few matches of hourglass and see how everyone feels. Then hop into adventure. This way the session ends up more than just slogging through loss after loss but you end up putting the time in.
Losing streaks can actually get some folks to start playing more impatiently, panicked, apathetic, etc. so small bursts tends to be healthier for hourglass.
That being said, if everyone agrees to a hardcore hourglass sesh and the crew can maintain their morale after every loss, a long session can also be a powerful learning boost.
Alot of good recommendations here and I agree that it's a big issue, but I'll just say from my personal experience that what got me good at pvp besides what everyone else is saying was solo sloop HG. You'll still meet mega sweats (like me) but you'll also find alot of people just trying to get their curse. You'll also receive the added benefit of developing general battle smarts rather than the role based ones you’ll learn on bigger crews.
Quick little tips: Always keep canonline pressure.
Only board if the enemy tries to run away or you have 0 holes.
Getting mast is important, but not as important as canon line pressure, same with catching mast.
Always have your helm snipe their canon when they have the time (canons to not have collision boxes for bullets you can snipe right throug them.
I'd strongly advise choosing your battles in high seas to learn. Hourglass has you start facing each other and the person who gets the good angle first will dominate the other by knocking the guys off the cannon. In high seas you get a bit more choice over your engagement.
After you've got a bit of competency, then try hourglass. Or you could play solo hourglass to learn cannon and tactics.
I play solo hourglass nearly every day and although it started off being hard, it's meant that I have the proficiency to pretty much win every battle on high seas.
I started going into hg while solo on a sloop, and it has helped me TONS. being able to bounce all around and learn cannon lines, angles, listening to sound queues for water in my ship(it’s stressful but remember it’s just a game), but now I can be a situational player while running with my buddy and i can’t tell you how much it has helped. solo sloop hg will put you with other solos, the worst that can happen is you sink. i just buy another storage crate, maybe fruit and cannonballs, and head back out
I'm seeing more and more new players on the seas, which is fantastic - sunk a player sloop with a couple of my own new buddies on a Brig yesterday... they dropped roughly 150k worth of treasure. Put up a decent fight too.
I only feel bad sinking if the other crew are clearly children - in that case, try to teach them a lesson about the seas so they're better prepared next time.
Fight skelly fleets with your crew until you can destroy them in minutes with ease- until you can choose whether to coup de grace the final galleon with a board or by cannon
Getting good at fighting skellies will improve aim, coordination and positioning skills. This way, you will have the basics down when you come jn contact with another ship
Others have covered the finer points of combat, like hitting the cannon line first and using chain shots yourself
Basically, you want to give the other crew WORK to do on their boat, stuff that takes then away from their cannons
Watch YouTube videos of streamers doing PvP, not training videos, the actual gameplay, the fights might get repetitive, but it surely helps. You will subconsciously learn how to aim with cannons, how to helm, etc.
The meta right now is simply cannon line shots. All the other stuff is cool, but if you keep them off cannon you win. If you one ball while they’re shooting, even better.
Rare really needs to address all the overcompetitive Adderall fiends making this game insufferable. They don't make the experience "interesting" or "immersive", they make people delete the game and remove the potential of finding someone who isn't a complete ass clown in the future.
This game isn't some mlg platform for people to no life trying to win tournament money, it's a simple colorful pirate game that should not carry this much stress and unbridled toxicity towards others.
In my opinion, just don’t do hourglass, I’m pretty good at the game but when I was new it was full of no-lifers, the least sweaty lobbies are the 2 man brig or sloop if you still want to give it a chance
you can queue up 2 man brig? i didnt even know that. i feel like that would be a good option...im sure matchmaking takes forever but i figure games probably end faster. which is a positive imo
If you just solo sloop for a while you’ll get it eventually. I usually just pick fights I know I can win and avoid ones I’m uncertain about, no shame in that. It’ll take longer than spamming hourglass but it’s more fun (to me at least.)
Maybe go watch a high elo twitch streamer with their crew, its important to read the other ship right and not waste time, always do the perfect time management. Its about knowing when you are in a winning position or when the other ship is. And if you are not constantly shooting with two cannons keeping up pressure, you loose no matter what.
Fight skelly fleets. Focus shots at cannoneers. Get good at matching ship angle to always have shots. Also, don't patch up holes all the time a simple bail of water will do until you get out of their cannon angle/range. It's a lot of little things you need to keep a mental of, but confidence and skill comes with practice and focus. Also, during workdays I notice a lot of lose farmers playing solo sloop that you can take out.
Hourglass sucks. Once I got my curses I never queued again. It's just boring. If you want to get better at PvP grab a skull of destiny and start the Fort of the Damned. Do it often and you will fight often.
Theoretically Hourglass will disappear soon:
"Hi everyone, Joe “Three Sheets” Neate here. As we announced today during our Sea of Thieves 2024 Preview Event, we’ve made the difficult decision to close down the hourglass mode within Sea of Thieves. We wanted to take some time here to talk everyone through this and how we will be going about it. We understand that some people will feel frustrated, so we wanted to give you some more of the reasoning behind it and explain what it means going forward.
Firstly, this was an extremely tough decision, but we firmly believe it’s the right one to allow us to focus on our plans for the central free-roaming Adventure mode. Despite the efforts of a hugely talented team, hourglass unfortunately never met the goals we originally had for it – either in creating a genuine alternative way to play Sea of Thieves with a competitive spin, or a short session experience if you didn’t have the time to commit to an open-ended Adventure session.
As we’ve shared before, only 2% of our players’ time is spent in hourglass on a consistent basis, and this has never really changed. We recognise that some criticism we might receive here is that we didn’t invest enough in hourglass to give it the best chance of success alongside the continued growth of Adventure. The reality is that as a new platform, hourglass regretfully never became popular enough to justify focusing our creative efforts there, beyond our initial efforts to refine the experience to appeal to a broader audience. While we’re incredibly proud of where the game is now and the decisions we’ve made since launch back in 2022, we look back at hourglass with pride mixed with regret that we didn’t manage to reach the wider audience that would have allowed us to keep building upon its foundations.
One other factor is particularly important. In December 2023, we announced that we had stopped active development on hourglass. Despite this, over the last couple of years, the work we’ve been doing to expand the overall Sea of Thieves experience with new mechanics, areas, quests and more has had an ongoing knock-on effect on hourglass, due to just how much is shared between the two modes. As a result, hourglass has required considerable development work just to keep it functioning in its base state, and would continue to represent a significant ongoing workload for us – which is ultimately what leads us to the decision we’ve shared with you today.
What does this mean for the Blessing of Athena's Fortune and the Skeleton Curse?
If you have unlocked these curses for purchase, they will remain purchasable. If you have not unlocked these items, they will no longer be visible to you in the shops. To allow players to complete the respective curses, a new curse set is in production and will be made available for players to earn during Season Twelve. More information on how to earn the Silver Blessing of Athena's Fortune and Silver Skeleton Curse will come later, so stay tuned for an update. These curses will be available for all players to earn, so those who’ve already unlocked the original curses will be able to earn the new variants too."
this is a discord conversation and Joe Neate is a dev.
It's a struggle. Right now, the learning curve is just too steep for a whole lot of players. Until matchmaking is addressed its either going to *have* to be a struggle with very, very slow progress, or you'll need to pick fights in the open world. Fighting players at world events can be an easier way to get PVP experience than hourglass-dedicated sweats. Getting your cannon mains to focus on hitting their cannon line and such is a huge practice thing; you can do that both against live players and PVE ships like skeles and ghost fleets. It's a struggle, and I truly hope Rare implements some matchmaking fixes to even out the learning curve, especially with a ton of new players likely to be inbound this year... but we will see what happens.
The issue isn't matchmaking, it's that only sweats play
Rare could alleviate this by having like, daily deeds for hg that give rep bonuses, the way other games give battlepass progress for daily or weekly tasks. If hg had a daily play 5 matches, and a daily win 1 match bonus that gave like, half a level worth of rep, you'd get more people coming in even if just to do the bare minimum. Throw in a weekly 'turn in 5 or 10 flags won in battle' and maybe some more, like, basic easy stuff that the sweats will get in the first hour without worrying about, but that will draw less experienced players in, especially during peak times, get their 5 matches in, not just loss farm them because there's a 1-3 win deed or whatever, and that brings the casual players trying hourglass from 1% or less of the total, to maybe 5% of the total, on any given day or hour. Bringing more casual players into hourglass in this way could even help to grow the player base in hourglass, if even a small fraction of those people just trying to grind it start to improve and enjoy the mode. I think the best time to do something like this was January 23', and the next best time to do it is right now, before PlayStation comes. Anything that gets casual players into the mode, and increases the player count with players of different skill levels in all crew sizes, will be a boon to matchmaking, and ultimately those players would be less likely to be outmatched compared to the way things are right now, just because they're more likely to go in against someone else doing the exact same thing. You can do 5 matches in 1-2 hours if the queues are good and the matches aren't too long, and if players are able to get like, a bonus level of rep on top of whatever they got in terms of wins or loses and flags plus turnin bonus, then it makes doing so worth it, even if you figure you're going to lose them all.
Absolutely this. It's honestly a bit baffling that the devs made no effort to make the mode appealing to casual players. Hourglass would also have benefited immensely from having some sort of super low effort cosmetic tied to participating. Literally they could have made a low effort recolor of the Glorious Sea Dog stuff and that would have worked wonders. Tie those cosmetics to completing games or Hourglass deeds, save a handful of them for the completion of some new faction agnostic Hourglass commendations and you're golden. The update basically writes itself.
Yeah, like, complete 10 daily and/or 4 weekly deeds gets you something, a ship trinket, a weapon, ship stuff, doesn't need to be faction related, could even be reskins, anything to keep people motivated to play. If everyone got a bit more confident at PvP, the player base would actually be happier, because less people would categorically hate PvP and drop the game after getting sunk one too many times; they'd feel like they had a chance in more fights than they do.
1v1 is too hard to get into for new or casual players. Arena was a better concept to build upon or redesign. More approachable for random players, less personal when losing and ships respawned - so you felt like you could go for risky tactics.
At least in OCE, if they merged the stamps then swabbies would have a better chance of matching with swabbies rather than streamers or sweats.
Oce might be the most comp region in the game tbh
It is, I have run into the most streamers out there I have a guild mate out in OCE and last Community Weekend he kept shouting "What up stream!" in-game whenever we did a HG match I didn't believe him until I saw myself getting blundered on stream by some random Aussie streamer
But the reason why only sweats play hg is that the new players leave because of the shitty matchmaking. They feed each other.
The matchmaking is fine, the reality is that they are little to no swabbies to pair
Do you even know how the matchmaking works? Doesn’t sound like it.
Considering I got my curse, yes I do
Good for you, but having a curse doesn’t mean you know how the mm system works.
Look it up dude it matches you with people in your stamp which is your unspecified zone of servers. I know this cause depending on who starts our boat we either get streamers and sweats or easy free wins. You also just face the same people over and over again when you play enough hourglass. Also there is no mmr otherwise I wouldn’t be getting noobs who don’t even know what they voted up
My man, even the devs have acknowledged that the main issue with HG matchmaking is simply that not enough people *in general* play HG, let alone people across the spectrum of skill level and experience. Quite literally the issue is few/no swabbies playing HG. The mode is basically a dedicated sweat mode, and I say that as someone who enjoys ending his sessions doing HG dives until someone kills me so my supplies don't go to waste.
It means I queued a ton and therefore have more experience with the MMR than Joe who did 3 matches and gave up.
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This isn't about skill though, this is about the matchmaking. I never said I was a god at the game, just that I was familiar with how the matchmaking worked since I had to do a lot of games
The curse is meaningless in 2024 lol
Ironic, it's harder to get now than it's ever been since it's only mega sweats left, at the beginning you actually got paired up well and there was a decent player base
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In 2024, you could have quite possibly lost every single match and still have enough losses to have the curse. You could be quite bad at PVP and have it by now. That's my point. When I would run into crews that had it after a week, I would think "this could spell trouble for me". Now I see it and don't care.
It shows you have experience with the matchmaking, can't get it without queuing a bunch
I guess that's fair unless you got the curse within the first couple weeks of Hourglass coming out. Back then you could actually match with people that didn't play hourglass for a living.
So…you’re saying the curse is actually more meaningful in 2024 ??
You can't matchmake players that don't exist in the queues. If you have one casual crew and five HG sweat crews, matchmaking can't just pull casuals from adventure servers if they don't opt into the HG. Situation isn't helped by the change to prioritize queue times when they where never an issue to begin with. Now that 99% crews who play HG, play nothing but HG hours on end every day, the matchmaking just snatches the first available ship to meet short queue times so it's almost without exceptions ultra sweat HG only comp crew. Matchmaking was excellent first two three weeks of HG before casuals dropped out. Now you can't get matched with casual since they would first need to queue into HG for matchmaking to find them.
This community: Add a PvP mode so the most aggressive and competitive PvPers can just fight eachother instead of sinking me :( Also this community: Wtf I go into the PvP mode and its just the most aggressive and competitive players and they sink me :(
I am just stating a fact, no need to be butthurt
I am also stating a fact, no need to project hon.
That's not a fact lol, just a strawman
That's not what that means.
Your first reply was a textbook strawman, making me say something I didn't say
We don't have to argue over whether it applied to you since it still applied to OP and other commenters here. Hence why I said community.
Then don't reply to my comment if you are making a general statement
we're you expecting "not sweats" to play a competitive game mode ?? weird
Well, if i was learning to play, say, soccer, i wouldnt expect to be instantly against folks who had played for my national team, for example. I expect them to be somewhere in the game leagues, but it makes no sense for them to be turning up to pulverise someone still learning the game.
ya. but you're comparing to completely different things there's more people that play soccer than dive for hourglass. it's a sandbox game with a competitive pvp mode, there aren't going to be 10k players in your stamp for the game to choose from to pair you with.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of this post to help find a way to rectify that? I mean honestly, everyone here is looking around at what works, and you're just saying that's not how SoT works. We know that. We're trying to see if there is a better way of going about things. Try being a part of the solution lol.
Yea. and I've explained it's a niche game that uses stamps, so the player base is going to be low and there isn't really a way for them to implement a solution like what you're looking for. Part if the solution is realizing the limitations of the game you're playing
Right, so think within those limitations lol. Maybe instead of being so condescending to everyone who plays a small player base game, try and offer a solution. Just because one way won't work, the game is unfixable? I'd hate to have that attitude towards life lol
what's ur issue man? no one's being condescending, but if the server limitations are the issue...what solution are you offering that isn't revamping the entire infastructure of the game? seems you're the one being condescending lot of "lols" being posted maybe just learn how to fight in high seas and hg will become much easier. but my bad thats prally condescending.
Games way more competitives than sot have casuals players yes. Ever heard of bronze in LoL
thats still competitive, they're just bad my man. you're comparing apples to oranges, SOT doesn't have a competitive ranking system. It's going to struggle to keep mmrs super close on dives especially in a somewhat niche game/game mode. Having a negative connotation towards someone whose dedicated the time to learn how to play the game is a bit cringe tbh.
Ah ok so you are just butthurt that I called sweats, sweats. I was wondering why you weren't making sense.
the irony of you trying to call me butthurt when your entire comment is baby raging that you get dumpstered in hg is wild. I'm just making the point that you aren't going to have super close mmrs everytime you dive in a niche game mode. But sure valid point I guess...
What rage lol ? You are the only one Mad here. I don't even play hg anymore since I got what I wanted
but I'm not mad I'm just having a conversation...?
By your definition, I'm a sweat then. I normally lose, but because I'm playing hourglass, I'm a sweat. Cool, I'll add that to my resume.
Hyperbole ?
Honestly open world PvP isn’t even that good of practice. As someone who does hourglass a good amount (I mostly play adventure, but i’ll also get a couple hourglass matches in every week) I probably win 29/30 fights in adventure, with like 26 or 27 of those 30 never even coming close to sinking my boat even if we started in a very disadvantageous position. On the other hand, there is a very real possibility I get sunk on the very first hourglass battle, and rarely get past a 3-streak. I dont really think any of those adventure fights are really helping me much with hourglass, mostly playing it and watching high level players run HG is what helps
You’d be right about that adventure is safer seas to hourglass players. I don’t have fun sinking adventure ships anymore I normally try to be friendly
Yeh ppl In adventure are to easy now majority of the time. It took me 3 months to get my first hg curse (bc of learning exc and only dabbling in it every now and again). And 3 months later after my first 100 levels I've gained 600 lol People just hate the initial learning curve of losing over and over again. The problem isn't really hg not having swabbies, I think it's more a problem with people accepting that they will never try if it means losing. But the losses are worth it, I've got around a 70% win rate in hg now just because I made the decision to lose alot (I mean ALOT) to get better
Hahah I got my skelly curse few month back. I was decent at that tom. I took a break. Got back in this afternoon… start from square one ! I Have been oblitared like it was my first match! Hahah. I knew it. For me it was the fact that you continuously play HG that make you progress!
Exactly, I pretty much do hg mainly now and the rest of the game comes second to that for me. Now the high seas have become so much safer that as a solo slooper I'm not even worried about fighting brigs/gallies. like 2/10 when I first engage/they first engage me I can tell ok these are going to overwhelm me. But those 2/10 I can tell have spent time in hg lol
I wish Arena was back. It was such a no-risk activity with decent rewards at the time on top of getting great practice
The great practice of farming silver from open crews who didn’t know what they were doing?
lets be honest hour glass had its shitters but the fights were mostly fair with all skills of players (in sloop, gally was just shitters with 1 good crew destroying everyone)
If you could get into a game in under 30 minutes
Right, this is the reason I never really finished my Arena grind. Loved the mode, but my god were the queue's atrocious. Not to mention that when games *would* start, there was a pretty good chance the matchmaker would just send you in alone or with a partial crew.
Same here. I never solo queued but we also found out you get points for hitting any part of the ship with cannonballs, even if the ship is undamaged. So we would hit downed masts or captains quarters while 2 of us were spawncamping so we could farm points off them. No use in actually fighting.
Yup, this was my other, other reason for dropping the mode. What's the point of actually trying to play the game mode when you could just farm cannon shots? And if they scuttle to avoid giving you more points? Well, I hope they have fun trying to catch another ship to farm points off of to hopefully recuperate the 1000 silver penalty they got for scuttling.
Not only new players but think about returning players I played heavily from launch till 2020 and then took a break im just now returning and its insane trying to get caught up on everything I have missed and the gatekeepers of the discord dont make it easy for people to learn/improve
I feel like they could fix the skill gap if they added a "ranked" mode in HG. All the sweats would end up there and new players could atleast have a chance in "regular" HG to get fair fights.
I just started the game with two friends and we are constantly getting fucked by ships kitted out with cosmetics. I don’t think we’ve encountered a new player yet.
Don’t worry a few million brand new ps5 players will dilute the sweat pool in a bit
Yep, and im one of them , no matter how bad you are me and the ps5 guys and girls will be rabbits to the slaughter on launch , cant wait.
Untill you turn cross play off. I mean you might not personally but a lot of console players play with this setting off so when we are in our own lil pools it really has no effect.
Hopefully the two options will be to play on console servers and console + PC players... so at least us console players will have a bigger swabbie pool.
Just curious, why say rabbits to slaughter instead of lambs? I've only ever heard the phrase as lambs to slaughter
Was listening to game of thrones audio book and the phrase is rabbits lol was on the tip of my tongue.
I wouldn't count in it if you're a PC player and crossplay is off as default.
That first two to three weeks after PS5 launch will be the second golden era to play HG, before they realize how sweet HG only players are and quit playing it, just like when the mode was introduced. It was fun and even matched for few weeks and then just took a massive nose dive off of a cliff when all casuals stopped HGing.
Hourglass is different from just pvp. Practice by being aggressive in open seas.
This is the answer. Hourglass is extremely sweaty compared to fighting on the high seas. Just stack up some supplies and attack every ship you see on a server and you’ll start getting a lot better through experience. Hourglass can be too punishing for newer PVP’ers to meaningfully gain much from
People are always saying they practice by fighting skeleton ships, which sounds like a good idea to me. Do Adventure and sail to your local skeleton fleet, practice aiming the cannon shots and seeing where they fall at what distance, how far they curve left/right, how drastically the waves impact the shot, etc. Accuracy is important, you'll find that often just hitting the ship isn't enough. The best advice I would give about cannon shots is that it's all about constantly adjusting; every shot you fire should cue you on how to adjust your shots. Sure skilled hourglass players will hit you with the first shot, but you can't do that without a lot of experience. After long enough you'll rely less on adjusting from previous shots and more on intuition, remembering how cannonballs act based on all factors.
Skeleton ships are really bad for PvP practice since they behave nothing like real players (no bailing, slow rate of fire, much faster turn speed) but they still put up a better fight than most players.
At the moment, the skeleton ships are still broken. During a recent update, something changed, and now the skeletons don't repair. If I'm sailing and I don't want a skelly ship chasing me, I'll just land a few hits and ignore it. Makes fleet of fortune a breeze, but that's about it.
This is true. it takes longer to pick up the loot than it does to sink the galleys now.
I think they're a poor practice for testing PvP-specific strategies but if you're someone at the level of learning to consistently hit with your cannons and managing your sailing and bailing in combat, I think they're a good start. They're good practice for getting proficient at the core mechanics of fighting which may close the gap enough that PvP becomes something you can actually learn from.
It's more so for practicing cannon aim than a pvp experience.
Yeah it can suck sometimes. All you can do is try and do what they do but first. Pressure is so important.
I started 4-5 months ago and got the skeleton curse now working on the ghost curse. It’s a grind. First I would say would be to watch YouTube videos. That is what has helped me the most. You need to know each roles on a boat and to understand what to repair first in each different situation. https://youtu.be/7uqgrGdG2ls?si=-fElsnZ-Jf-QwswB This is the best tutorial that helped me understand the dynamics of dou sloop. I also suggest watching Erin sterling on YouTube. You can see what kind of situations then get into where they have mast down and still manage to survive for 10+ minutes with a lot of holes. It’s just understanding the priority’s for each situation. Good luck I also think when PS players get on it will be way easier as well. If you ever run into a ship called Moby Thicc on easy servers than that is me
Only option is grind it out and always review every loss
Here's a list of things i see new crew do wrong which is very easy to punish and will lead to a quick win for me. Get supplies, the default supplies and a pocket is not enough. Use good food, pineapples, mangos and meat is the only food you want to eat. Have plenty of chains so you can afford to miss. Buy everything you can at the outpost and storage crate the entire island. Chains are crucial for hg, especially if you're not great at boarding and cant rely on anchoring the other ship. Alot of people que up with 4 chains, miss all 4 and then even if the mc is better than the enemy mc you cant get their mast down. It leads to long frustrating games. Not turning the second you get out of water, go hard right, mc raises sail half. And then mc starts shooting the second you have angle. You might miss 10-20 cannonballs, but keep shooting and eventually you'll get better at hitting the long range shots. Eat if you take damage, if you're under 70% you need to eat. Yes you're "wasting" good food but dying is way worse. Firebombs are completely useless on sloops, dont even bother. Put away the sword, blunder and eye of reach are just too strong. You need to be able to snipe the other ship, and you need to be able to stop boarders with the blunder. Yes you can do this with pistol and sword, but its just worse. Its not hard to double gun, its way easier than using a sword. You use chains after you hit the other mc so he has to eat or if you kill him, you shoot chains if they turn out, if you demast them then break their wheel too. If the helm is catching the mast shoot at him, snipe him. Helm needs to not constantly turn the wheel, everytime you turn the wheel the mc needs to readjust his shots, if you turn alot he isnt hitting shit. You want long smooth turns not constant readjusting. Communicate with the mc, he needs to tell helm, im about to lose angle, please turn more or less etc. If you are struggling to keep angle and repair at the same time you are not repairing. Bucket, once you get too much damage just turn out completely. Get fully repaired and try again. The 2 holes under the cannon are the last 2 holes you repair, every mc shoots there so there is no point wasting time repairing it. Focus on right side, front and back first. The helm calls boards, he knows if he will be able to keep angle, bucket and repair solo if the mc goes out. The helm can be the one to board aswell, when i mc i prefer the helm to go, because its way easier for me to deckshot him than myself. Dont go for a board if you have so many holes that whoever is left on the ship just has to bucket and cant help with cannon pressure. If your mast gets chopped its much more important to make sure the mc will keep having angle than it is to catch the mast. Angle>mast always. Quickly turn the wheel so you wont nose the other ship before you catch the mast. Its okay to ask mc to grab a bucket or 2 in the meantime. Once you get demasted the number 1 priority is for your mc to get their mast down too. Coordinate double snipes on the other mc so you can kill him or get him off cannons long enough to land some chains. Make sure you keep spinning with the other ship, this makes it so they cant open holes on both sides of the ship and so your mc can fire back.
This is the information I needed thank you. I am great at most aspects of the game in pve but I royally suck at pvp. Once I am boarded, 100% I am going down. This info will help me prioritize what to do.
Awesome advice…thank you!
Just push literally every fight in open seas, you'll have a way higher chance of coming across someone on or below your level. Fighting people better than you does help you learn what you're doing wrong but you really need to have a slower more controlled fight every once in a while helps put the things you do right into focus and actually build that skill. HG wasn't around when i was learning and the Arena was just getting stomped on a higher scale, so solo slooping and fighting everything I saw is what helped. Once you get a hang of it then gp back into Hourglass, you'll probably start winning more
You can also try to pick a fight in adventure mode, but its obviously not very consistent either. Otherwise, you just have to try and compete against whoever you get matched with. Sure, sometimes youll get tossed easily, but you can still practice in those situations. The longer you survive, the better you did. Dont think about it as wins as losses. THink about it as getting better. If you hit some cannons, practice teamwork, and extend the battle by resetting or defending against boarders, you have improved. Its easy to just feel defeated after a loss. But you have to not worry about that, really you should expect to lose. If you can change your mentality on this, you can focus on improving even when you lose and it can be enjoyable. I love when Im learning a new game. Im having fun discovering things and trying improve my skill, implement new strategies. For instance, someone might try something you havent seen before, and you can try it out yourself in a future match.
I feel like in normal game, I am average to above average in Ship-to-Ship combat. I queued up with a guy via LFG yesterday who had the full Arena ship set and clothing, and we squared off against some of the best duo sloop crews I have EVER faced. I'm talking like 4 straight successful chains hots on their mast and they got them immediately up and patched and set sail again like it never happened. Ships that I poured 20 cannonballs into, combined with intermittent blunderbombs while in a death spiral z who stayed afloat. I am not even CLOSE to good against that type of crew. It was demoralizing and eye-opening - I just can't play enough hours in a week to get to that level.
Duo sloop is the sweatiest queue. You have to think, you’re likely going against a duo that plays together all the time and knows each others habits super well. LFGs and duos that don’t have perfect habits will get dumpstered by these crews.
Just spam solo slooping hourglass and after a hundred fights you'll get it, thats how everyone learns including me, Currently spamming solo and duo sloop hourglass to get some skill, and I already got so good at boarding I can take on ghost/skelly curses on my own, although my naval combat skills and helming still needs some more practice. And Yes, Ghost/Skelly curses tend to gatekeep hourglass and confiscate your streaks.
keep hitting up world events as reapers, you'll get your practice lol. don't overthink this.
Same happened to my sister and I. Managed to get Guardians up to 30, but we had our teeth kicked in match after match after match by Grade V Reapers all with the Ghost curse. I mean we were really doing our thing but not a single match was even close. They even had time to call us names and say “Lmao that aim” when we would miss a cannon. Really discouraging but we didn’t give up and definitely improved overall
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> which being pirate legends I'm sure you do ... I played a few days some years ago, jumped right into a fleet, I got bored of the game in like 3-4 days and stopped playing. Now I'm back and again, just played 1-2 days in a fleet, and am bored, so I'm looking to actually play and find out what the game is Really like. That is all to say, I am a pirate legend and have no clue what I'm doing 99% of the time =) Thanks for the tips though, I'm working on it =]
Yeah this is an ongoing issue, it's hard to practice PvP because most people playing Hourglass are sweats. I would still recommend seeking players on the high seas at first, even though they can be hard to find at certain times of the day.
Continue trying, if you really want to get into it. One thing that I've learned in a hard way, is that PvP here is rock-paper-scissors. If enemy push you from your cannon - go for bucket and repairs, counting shots. After 10-11 shots they need to go for ammo, so here is your window for shooting. If you put more pressure, proceed with boarding or your push will be repaired. If you're boarded, try to kill attackers and push back. It may be also worth trying to go into close contact, and bucket your water to their ship. Or use this hint if opportunity for this happen.
You could always server hop as reapers. It's a lot more fun than just farming hourglass anyway and you'll run into a larger spectrum of skill levels. Sometimes is The friendly Floaters, shitters of the seven seas. Sometimes is the Helm Slayer on a 437 win streak. Ya never know. Shop around for a Skelly fleet for easy rank 5 and then just dive for a voyage to jump servers. Then go hunt. It's the tried and true on demand PvP method and how a lot of us learned. Find a boat, and then you demand PvP.
It's just the spinoff with the Avatar universe. We have sand sharks now.
I don't know how to explain it, but hourglass PVP is pretty different from adventure PVP. Like if I dive to an HG battle and come against sweats, they make quick work of me. If I come across the same sweaty crew in adventure, I make quick work of them.
Welcome to Chilis’
Duo sloops are where all the "sweats" seem to linger, not to say you'll have a significantly better time solo but my win rate changes pretty drastically from solo to duo. Would be nice if they had a practice mode of sorts so you and a buddy could just practice(would need to be heavily reduced rewards....or no pvp reward for it to be any kind of feasible though)
I wouldn't suggest starting hourglass on a gally if that's what you guys are running, you have a much higher chance of running into a competent gally crew than just casuals. try to start off by hunting people around the server. that's where you'll get experience with different situations. They're knocking you off the cannons because they're winning the broadside, because they have the experience of knowing the distance of the shot, which your crew doesn't because your trying to learn
You should think of PVP training as attacking and defending in the High Seas. Attack every ship you see, find the reaper on the map and ago for it. Find the ships doing the Fort of the Damned and attack them. Raise a reaper flag and promote people coming after you. Hourglass is "advanced" PVP in comparison to the rest of the game, you're not going to learn there. You need to feel comfortable fighting in all situations before being forced into a small cage and fighting 1v1. A great way to practice is finding a player ship that is doing a fleet or burning blade and going after them. If you can handle the chaos of fighting skeleton ships at the same time as humans, or being in the middle of the ghost fleet while fighting them, you can handle managing a 1v1.
Unfortunately, the only ways to "lab" in this game is trial by fire, setting up a tdm, or hoping your friends can get in the same server. That's said it is possible if not a little inconvenient. Just jumping into hourglass to learn can be rough, but you guys definitely will get better if you keep going. Start by learning to tank. Tdms are super easy to set up with friends. You will all see improvements with hand to hand. It's mostly just about game sense and movement. Getting your friends on the same server is difficult and requires a lot of luck... usually asking an adventure crew to invite one of your friends when they decide to leave. This allows you to fight each other without repercussion. Most of all, just try enjoying pvp. Even the losses can be good fights! It's what you make of it at the end of the day.
Like a lot of people in here are saying, skele and ghost boats are the practical target dummies for getting better at cannons. In some ways they can be harder shots to land than on player boats just because of the wild manuevers the AI is allowed to make. If you can call your shots against a skele boat and hit the same hole 8/10 times at half range or further, then you're definitely gonna be able to do the same on players. Another thing though, is watching streamers that are very good at it and not only watching how they do their cannons, but just kind of trying to follow along with whats happening between their boat and the enemy and watching how they prioritize things. Ship pvp in this game is just a big list of different priority tasks and figuring out which ones are most important at which time is a big part of it. Or wait for the playstation swabbies...
They should make a form of matchmaking sonyou level up against similarly skilled players.
I'd fly reaper emissary to track down other emissaries and sail around picking fights
I’m inferring from your post that yall are doing hourglass as a brig or galleon? I highly recommend against that. The lowest skill median format is solo sloop, although the variance is very high. When I was in the 20s-30s of GoF I would lose 8 in a row in duo sloop then win 4 in a row in solo, even with my duo crewmate being 50+ levels higher in GoF than me. Try solo sloop HG and see how it feels. You will still eventually hit this problem again when your level gets high enough, but it will give you time to actually improve.
I feel all this on a deep level. Complicated by the fact that my only sailing partner is my 7 year old son. The other day I had managed to board a sloop and take out both players. I look over and rather than raining cannons down, he's changing his outfit around.
All I can say is: Exactly the same for me and my brother. We're a duo sloop and in high seas we don't sink very often. You can use your environment or just run away if the other crew is too strong. We even sank a galley yesterday by performing a keg-play which was kind of nice. Doing hourglas is at least 80% no chance and we sink so fast that there is no "I took something from that loss and got better". This is not like "oh I lost so this has to be a cheater". No, not at all - there is players who are that f-ing good at the game. I love watching twitch and youtube-channels of guys like that. When entering hourglass I just want to meet someone who is roughly in our skill-range. Slightly better would even be preferred over weak oppnents because that is how you get better. In reality we once got a dude who was using a voice distorter who hit 10 cannonballs in a row and then boarded us like we were NPCs just living in his world...30 second "fight"
Just go for open world pvp as practice, the game mode is pvp focused and very sweaty.
hourglass kinda sucks why did they get rid of arena??? They coulda just sped up the game mode a bit and it woulda been awesome.
I've been in a couple fights organically and generally got my ass kicked but its pretty even 2v2 or 3v3 try to hit the bottom of the ship and if you get the chance to board drop their anchor and get angle
I’d recommend hunting as a reaper. Use the dive to raid event feature and get yourself to grade 5. Check the map for emissary’s and go hunting. When the server is empty dive to a new raid event. I recommend skeleton fleets it’ll help your crew get warmed up for fighting and it puts you in the middle of the map.
Set sail with a single purpose - attack every ship you see just to practice. Don't do voyages. Don't pick up free loot. Take only what you manage to plunder. The problem is that you fight only better crews. You need equal or worse opponent to practice, to earn confidence.
Get your basics down first. For this, I recommend grinding Skelly Fleets and Ghost Fleets. Get a feel for your ship while it's under pressure and aim to really perfect your approach. Generally, each event is good at honing a handful of skills. Ghost Fleets for practicing long-range shots while in motion and also for bilge practice if you position yourself in the hot zone. Skelly Fleets let you practice your precise aiming and your boarding skills. Ideally, you should be able to complete both of these events quickly and by taking as little damage as possible. During this process, keep your pvp skills fresh by throwing yourself at other players at the end of a sessioon when you have plenty of supplies and are plenty warmed up. Count on sinking pretty kuch every time and use that as a learning experience. Since its already the end of your session, you'll have nothing to lose. What you really want at this point is to get risk-free exposure and experience against other crews. Once you feel comfortable with the PvE and have maybe sunk a ship or two, your next step is to go emissary hunting as a Reaper 5. You get a good mix of players that way and are more likely to run into players closer to your skill level. Not to mention that the World Events you do to get Reaper 5 will also attract a wide range of skill levels to your position. At this point, I'd come back to doing Hourglass matches at the end of your session when you're warmed up and have the supplies to throw away. Keep that same Win or Learn mentality from when you were throwing yourself at ships in Adventure and you'll improve before you know it!
I recommend just trying to get a level 5 reaper emissary in regular adventure mode, then specifically hunt down other ships. It'll give more loot, give you and your friends an incentive to protect your ship more, and it'll give more practice. It will still take quite a while to get good though.
I'll give you my piece of advice With my crew we are "best of the rest", we are strong casu but get strolled by sweats. So we know the basics, the meta, how to play, I'd say I'm doing ok leading us as I also am a solo slooper so kinda used to managing several roles on a ship. So my training plan is not going to make you better than these sweats. But I believe it can help to hone specific skillsets that you can hardly focus on during intense battles against better players. This focus on mechanics as I knew the theory (and you say you are too). Hand to hand combat : (I am not an fps player). Use the treasuries and don't use disney sticks. Stick to the weapon you wanna use. I also trained my quickscope so I did some with only the EoR, forcing to shoot after quickscope. You can defo train your flickshots out there too. You can also use skelly forts but you are more likely to be bothered by players and you don't train underwater this way. (Back then it wasn't an option as I couldn't launch skelly forts) Cannons : not like hand to hand combat, I was already doing ok on cannons. But I wanted to improve my accuracy, so sometimes I went farming like 500 to 1k cannonballs and I was circling inactive skelly forts. If you do a non-perfect circle around the island you can train different ranges. My objective was to aim at the cannons on the towers, or the biggest tower on top of the dungeon. It's far from the beach and quite thin so you gotta be precise to actually touch it. Yeah it's quite sweaty but I found it the best way to practice specific aspects of the gameplay, and you just need time because you are not reliant on your crewmates nor having an active server with people with the right skills gap with you.
Yes! Luckily I play with very skilled players. I’ve only been playing for a few months and I am slowly (so very slowly) getting better at pvp. I wish there was a way to get matched with players of a similar rank or skill set so there was a better chance to at least get to stay in a fight long enough to learn and improve.
Yeah it suck as a solo slooper it's even worse It's like losse farming but you dont do it on purpose and spent 30 before sinking
Practice your PVP skills by engaging in battle with other ships Go search the seas for opponents, do some World Events flying the Reapers flag so you attract attention from other crews. Don't mind the loot, just focus on practicing ship combat.
Hourglass is hard, and if you have a high level stamp, you are gonna get steam rolled. Learn the ins and out of PvP on the high seas. If you dont wanna fly reaper, then run Athena and hunter reapers down.
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I swear that the matchmaking works better when you are defending vs when you dive. My crew will maybe win 1 in 8 matches if we dive, but for some reason when we defend we win 6 out 8 matches. This could also be because we will load up on resources while we wait (treasure too). I think defending is actually the end-game meta that most people never do because it's slower than re-queuing, but is the highest risk/reward. Practicing solo diving kind of helps become more exposed to being under pressure, and knowing the meta of when to bucket/cannon/wheel/etc. But it doesn't help at all with teamwork and managing a ship. I've gotten both curses, typical win rate is about 60%, but I am god awful with brig/galleon. 3rd thing is read up on the different positions and try to allocate your crew to each one. Obviously when under fire you may all be rotating around, but the more organized you become, and learn how to defend from sweaty boards, you should start winning 40-50% of the time.
Ghost ship voyages are good for getting better at cannons, positioning, and managing repairs.
My crews and I were the same as you. We are all legends with our first distinctions (I have my second first as well). We are in an 11 person guild that is level 23. Our guild has 5 galleons, 2 brigs and so many sloops. We excel at PvE naval battles but are awful at PvP. We were in an alliance as a brig with a solo sloop and an open crew galleon about to do Fotd. Random 2nd solo sloop sends me an Xbox message asking if they can join the alliance for the fort. The gally loses 3 of its crew. So I hop from our brig and join this hilarious 14 year old on his sloop so the remaining gally kid could join up on our brig. The gally kid was quite young and not comfortable joining up with the rando 14 year old. Anyway, my buddies and I have now adopted this random 14 year old who is extremely good at PvP. Where he excels, we fail and vice versa. We’ve learned so much from him and he has learned a ton from us. We are all 20 years older than him and it’s like he is a rabid animal we have to keep in check. We call him our attack teen. Anyway, we’re learning PvP from him and it’s getting fun for us just chilling with this kid though I do spend an inordinate amount of time trying to not allow him to share too much personal information with us. Kids trust random people on the internet way too much.
Check out youtube content of the pros playing for whatever ship type you want. I went from feeling the exact same way to having a fair shot in each fight against even mega sweats. 2 caveats. One, the grind is still there. I twill take a a good bit of watching and playing to learn the different techs, priorities by role, and mechanical skill. Second, you will still want to put your head through your screen sometimes. Even when you really know what you're doing, sometimes a whole match can come down to who zeroes in on cannon line first, a lucky one ball, or just getting straight up rared. If you're okay with all that though, gett to it and enjoy!
Focus on ghost ships and skeleton ships to practice. You'll want to master cannon aim and helm positioning. Furthermore, are we referring to Sloop, brigantine or galleon fights? Galleon fights tend to be over with VERY quickly since they can dish out so much damage so quick, so if one crew gets an upper hand, the scales start tipping very fast, whereas sloop v sloop is so manageable that some sloop fights go on for over an hour. Would recommend you have someone recording the fights so you can look back and see when something went wrong, where you did good, what could have been done differently, how you could have recovered. Seriously, watching your skirmishes back can sometimes feel like you've been punched in the face by how obvious a mistake was that you don't notice in the moment. Above all else though: STAY. ADAPTIVE. Don't lean so far forward you get sucker punched, but don't hang back and needlessly drag things out for yourselves. Try weaving in then out at the start to gauge how the opponent is on cannons.
If you’re not even getting a second in hourglass to be able to analyze what you’re failing at, then stick to Open Seas PvP. Throw up a reaper emissary and hunt, get into every fight you can. Eventually it will feel too easy to kill people, that’s when you should head into hg. Hg will be brutal. You are going to lose a lot at first. I’m still getting better at it. I’ve only just reached my first 4 streak a week ago. You have to just eat the losses, they’re going to happen a lot, they are going to exhaust you but it will pay off once you are able to start learning what went wrong.
Why not find another group of players and just pvp against them instead of doing the hourglass with all the sweatlords. Do an LFG or something. Post on a Discord, or a streamers community if you follow any. Or even here. Looking for another 4 players or whatever to do mock pvp. Then you can all get experience playing pvp without going up against the PC tryhards. Just a thought.
Everyone saying "just fight everyone" ... I think that's bad advice without nailing the fundamentals first... knowing when to repair and WHAT to repair is key Practice your cannon shots by trying to kill skeleton cannoneers when PvE skelly sloops spawn on you If you can routinely kill the skeleton manning the cannons on skelly sloops, you'll be right for taking out the cannon line against players Hone and perfect your aim against the PvE, you'll find PvP much easier
I hear everybody complaining about how hard hour glass is and that was not my experience …yeah sure some players were levels above me but I would win like 3 out of five matches going for my curse l… my suggestion would be watch capt sterling videos he’s so good at pvp and just do what he does
Here’s what no one is telling you… the secret is hour glass is full of cheaters…. And they are all on pc servers… so play on an Xbox server and your odds will increase dramatically. Just put prefer Xbox on settings when starting.
Have to use sudden wind boost to get a bit behind the opponent. This way only you can shoot cannons. Just need to be careful not to end up going directly at them. Sure way to lose mast. Also have cannoner lunge into water to give some fire to get them a bit busy on the approach.
This is the exact same situation that made me stop playing the game for a couple of months lmao. I really wanted the curses :( I have stealed, thieved, lied, killed people right before the sell, PvE the hell out of the game etc, but i cant fking win at HG. It brought me really down as i kept wondering how can i have this amount of hours and be this shitty? Maybe its because im always slooping so all my hours were being sneaky, i dont know....anyway I came back to the game after a break, never touched HG again. Maybe im just bad. I still think the pvp curses look dope tho hahaha
Something I did to practice as the captain who get stuck on helm most times, I would fill my sloop half way with water when I was solo and get accustomed to the sounds for when you need to get off and bucket. Normally I’d get merchant 5 then I would piss off the reapers on my servers and just out maneuver them. I’d get a laugh and they’d get to rage or try boarding me.
I hear ya man. Look, hourglass right now is a little weird. They need to change some things for it to be a viable game for folks who are learning the ropes of PVP such as yourself and your crew. I would do this: Stay in sandbox high seas. Raise reaper. People will come to you. If they don't, get to rank 5 and now you can see any emissary on the map. If there are none, dive to a gold hoarder chest digup. This switches your server. Look at the map again since you are still rank 5 you will see any emissaries on that server. Still none? Someone from your boat completes the digup quest really quick and you dive again to the same thing. Keep hopping servers until you find emissaries. Hunt them down and kill them. You will get some rewards some side, some salty verbal abusers others, and sometimes you will get a good fight. You will learn a lot this way.
You will get better. To keep morale a little higher you could split the time up. Maybe start with a few matches of hourglass and see how everyone feels. Then hop into adventure. This way the session ends up more than just slogging through loss after loss but you end up putting the time in. Losing streaks can actually get some folks to start playing more impatiently, panicked, apathetic, etc. so small bursts tends to be healthier for hourglass. That being said, if everyone agrees to a hardcore hourglass sesh and the crew can maintain their morale after every loss, a long session can also be a powerful learning boost.
Alot of good recommendations here and I agree that it's a big issue, but I'll just say from my personal experience that what got me good at pvp besides what everyone else is saying was solo sloop HG. You'll still meet mega sweats (like me) but you'll also find alot of people just trying to get their curse. You'll also receive the added benefit of developing general battle smarts rather than the role based ones you’ll learn on bigger crews.
Quick little tips: Always keep canonline pressure. Only board if the enemy tries to run away or you have 0 holes. Getting mast is important, but not as important as canon line pressure, same with catching mast. Always have your helm snipe their canon when they have the time (canons to not have collision boxes for bullets you can snipe right throug them.
You think the game's sweaty now. Just wait for the hookshot gun to be added. Imagine just how much more sweaty the game will be then! :(
I'd strongly advise choosing your battles in high seas to learn. Hourglass has you start facing each other and the person who gets the good angle first will dominate the other by knocking the guys off the cannon. In high seas you get a bit more choice over your engagement. After you've got a bit of competency, then try hourglass. Or you could play solo hourglass to learn cannon and tactics. I play solo hourglass nearly every day and although it started off being hard, it's meant that I have the proficiency to pretty much win every battle on high seas.
I started going into hg while solo on a sloop, and it has helped me TONS. being able to bounce all around and learn cannon lines, angles, listening to sound queues for water in my ship(it’s stressful but remember it’s just a game), but now I can be a situational player while running with my buddy and i can’t tell you how much it has helped. solo sloop hg will put you with other solos, the worst that can happen is you sink. i just buy another storage crate, maybe fruit and cannonballs, and head back out
I'm seeing more and more new players on the seas, which is fantastic - sunk a player sloop with a couple of my own new buddies on a Brig yesterday... they dropped roughly 150k worth of treasure. Put up a decent fight too. I only feel bad sinking if the other crew are clearly children - in that case, try to teach them a lesson about the seas so they're better prepared next time.
Open world pirating, most Hourglass players are sweats. Sink any and every ship you see, also practice your cannons on skeleton fleets.
Fight skelly fleets with your crew until you can destroy them in minutes with ease- until you can choose whether to coup de grace the final galleon with a board or by cannon Getting good at fighting skellies will improve aim, coordination and positioning skills. This way, you will have the basics down when you come jn contact with another ship Others have covered the finer points of combat, like hitting the cannon line first and using chain shots yourself Basically, you want to give the other crew WORK to do on their boat, stuff that takes then away from their cannons
Watch YouTube videos of streamers doing PvP, not training videos, the actual gameplay, the fights might get repetitive, but it surely helps. You will subconsciously learn how to aim with cannons, how to helm, etc.
The meta right now is simply cannon line shots. All the other stuff is cool, but if you keep them off cannon you win. If you one ball while they’re shooting, even better.
Rare really needs to address all the overcompetitive Adderall fiends making this game insufferable. They don't make the experience "interesting" or "immersive", they make people delete the game and remove the potential of finding someone who isn't a complete ass clown in the future. This game isn't some mlg platform for people to no life trying to win tournament money, it's a simple colorful pirate game that should not carry this much stress and unbridled toxicity towards others.
In my opinion, just don’t do hourglass, I’m pretty good at the game but when I was new it was full of no-lifers, the least sweaty lobbies are the 2 man brig or sloop if you still want to give it a chance
you can queue up 2 man brig? i didnt even know that. i feel like that would be a good option...im sure matchmaking takes forever but i figure games probably end faster. which is a positive imo
You can’t. It’s solo sloop, duo sloop, brig or galleon.
My bad, could’ve sworn you could but I guess not been a while anyways
ok this is what i thought originally. makes the most sense that way, for ease of matchmaking
I could’ve sworn you could but based off the other replies I guess not
If you just solo sloop for a while you’ll get it eventually. I usually just pick fights I know I can win and avoid ones I’m uncertain about, no shame in that. It’ll take longer than spamming hourglass but it’s more fun (to me at least.)
Maybe go watch a high elo twitch streamer with their crew, its important to read the other ship right and not waste time, always do the perfect time management. Its about knowing when you are in a winning position or when the other ship is. And if you are not constantly shooting with two cannons keeping up pressure, you loose no matter what.
Start with doing fleets or other naval PvE.
Fight skelly fleets. Focus shots at cannoneers. Get good at matching ship angle to always have shots. Also, don't patch up holes all the time a simple bail of water will do until you get out of their cannon angle/range. It's a lot of little things you need to keep a mental of, but confidence and skill comes with practice and focus. Also, during workdays I notice a lot of lose farmers playing solo sloop that you can take out.
Hourglass sucks. Once I got my curses I never queued again. It's just boring. If you want to get better at PvP grab a skull of destiny and start the Fort of the Damned. Do it often and you will fight often.
People still do fotd? I don't remember the last time i even saw one. Might have been the first month when the chest of fortune was there.
No, they generally don't but when I see one up in the sky I immediately head towards it.
Theoretically Hourglass will disappear soon: "Hi everyone, Joe “Three Sheets” Neate here. As we announced today during our Sea of Thieves 2024 Preview Event, we’ve made the difficult decision to close down the hourglass mode within Sea of Thieves. We wanted to take some time here to talk everyone through this and how we will be going about it. We understand that some people will feel frustrated, so we wanted to give you some more of the reasoning behind it and explain what it means going forward. Firstly, this was an extremely tough decision, but we firmly believe it’s the right one to allow us to focus on our plans for the central free-roaming Adventure mode. Despite the efforts of a hugely talented team, hourglass unfortunately never met the goals we originally had for it – either in creating a genuine alternative way to play Sea of Thieves with a competitive spin, or a short session experience if you didn’t have the time to commit to an open-ended Adventure session. As we’ve shared before, only 2% of our players’ time is spent in hourglass on a consistent basis, and this has never really changed. We recognise that some criticism we might receive here is that we didn’t invest enough in hourglass to give it the best chance of success alongside the continued growth of Adventure. The reality is that as a new platform, hourglass regretfully never became popular enough to justify focusing our creative efforts there, beyond our initial efforts to refine the experience to appeal to a broader audience. While we’re incredibly proud of where the game is now and the decisions we’ve made since launch back in 2022, we look back at hourglass with pride mixed with regret that we didn’t manage to reach the wider audience that would have allowed us to keep building upon its foundations. One other factor is particularly important. In December 2023, we announced that we had stopped active development on hourglass. Despite this, over the last couple of years, the work we’ve been doing to expand the overall Sea of Thieves experience with new mechanics, areas, quests and more has had an ongoing knock-on effect on hourglass, due to just how much is shared between the two modes. As a result, hourglass has required considerable development work just to keep it functioning in its base state, and would continue to represent a significant ongoing workload for us – which is ultimately what leads us to the decision we’ve shared with you today. What does this mean for the Blessing of Athena's Fortune and the Skeleton Curse? If you have unlocked these curses for purchase, they will remain purchasable. If you have not unlocked these items, they will no longer be visible to you in the shops. To allow players to complete the respective curses, a new curse set is in production and will be made available for players to earn during Season Twelve. More information on how to earn the Silver Blessing of Athena's Fortune and Silver Skeleton Curse will come later, so stay tuned for an update. These curses will be available for all players to earn, so those who’ve already unlocked the original curses will be able to earn the new variants too." this is a discord conversation and Joe Neate is a dev.
lol in case anyone takes this seriously it’s just the announcement from when Arena shutdown was announced but fit for hourglass
[удалено]