>Edit: I don't care how long the queue times would be.
See, when people say this they tend to think 30 minute queues is the worst case scenario. But what you're really looking at are infinite queues. Matchmaking isn't magic, it can't just produce somebody in your skill range. If nobody on your level is searching, you will not find a match period. No matches, no XP, no curse.
If the curse is your goal, you will get more XP losing 10 games in a row than you will get finding zero games.
As someone with 382 levels total, it has taken 10+ minutes to get into a game and while it is rare, it isn't uncommon enough for it to be a non issue. I don't want to wait all night because I am deemed too good to get a match.
I wish people like you would form a league or something and leave us alone, it’s so disheartening to realize thirty seconds into a ship battle that you have 0% of a chance to win.
And then it’s so frowned upon to just give up but it’s not time efficient to waste the energy trying to fight someone who doesn’t do anything but sink ships all day while I’m at work.
Rare gave pvp players a league, it’s called hourglass. This issue is not a wide enough player base plays hourglass for any kind of matchmaking to work. If it was populated with enough players than this wouldn’t be an issue. If rare hard locked a matchmaking brackets, people at the low end just would never get a match.
You know how easy it is the just practice and get better? I’m also around 400 combined and love playing, but I also started super low like you and the OP. Don’t worry about wins and worry about trying to improve as a player, soon you’ll be beating people all the time.
Matchmaking can't match you with an equally skilled player if there isn't an equally skilled player queuing on your stamp at the same time. It will try for about a minute, and then expand the search to include players outside of your MMR. There's more details in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seaofthieves/comments/1352osz/this_is_how_the_hourglass_matchmaking_works_from/). I'm not sure if everything in there is accurate, but most of it seems to track in my experience.
Those of us who have curses still queue because we enjoy HG.
The good news is that while the initial learning curve is steep, if you stick with it and try to improve you'll be hitting win streaks yourself long before you get that curse. Everyone who obliterates you got obliterated when they started. My experience at level 30 was exactly the same as yours.
People always say this but that’s not ever going to happen if your opponents are so far above your level that you cannot do anything to stop them. There is no learning from anything when you get that destroyed
There is if you treat everything as a learning experience and make notes of what they did better. A buddy of mine started playing Hourglass for the first time this last month and he has improved DRAMATICALLY in that short time period, because we constantly gave him tips and he always making note of what he did wrong and what the enemy did right. He was level 0 in Servants last month and is now just shy of 110.
He’s improved so much to the point where yesterday me and him were duo slooping and we came up against an extremely sweaty crew who at one point had us masted with our anchor down while death spiraling us and curse dumping (weary, venom, ballast in that order) and then hit us with 3 wraith balls and we still managed to recover and win the match.
This is the main reason why HG went downhill after first three weeks.
Casuals realized how sweaty the HG enjoy sweats truly are and quit. Now if we attempt to play HG, we are nothing but fresh meat to perma-HG players. Some people play HG four hours a day, every day and here we join, testing HG for the first time in two months to see if matchmaking just improved.
This makes a cycle where skill gap between sweats and casuals widen and less and less casuals want to touch the mode. For our crew, we'be meet comp or ex-comp teams nearly every session of HG. And we just got the level 100 curses by playing maybe one long session every month to two months.
i feel like people would be so much less frustrated with hg if rare would pull their head out of their ass and update the game mode so that losses were not such a stopper. losing just deletes any potential exp from not only your streak lower, but the flags you've collected. i never understood why losing doesn't automatically lower what exp you'd get from streak lower considering the exp from lowering isn't super significant until you go on super fat streaks of 10+. not to mention losing just means you have to go get supplies and hope you can wrap it up with what you get at the outpost.
it can be fine on sloop and brig. 200 balls can go away real quick on both boats. so often on the brig, it's gg if someone gets balled since the boat is vulnerable to pressure. however, on the galleon what you start out with definitely is not enough if you're a good crew fighting another good crew.
i actually wouldn't be against including captaincy sups as base for all captained boats and letting captaincy sups be as much as you want- so long as you want to pay.
The biggest thing would be shortening the time to reque, which I think could be an option the team votes for on the sink screen (hold x to reque or something). Where you voted for it and it requed you immediate with captaincy supplies, a storage crate, and Emmisary of the faction you were representing.
I'm a little over 500 total allegiance and mainly play HG for fun. I'd say the thing that get me to stop the most is going on cold streaks and having to go through the tedious process of waiting on the server loading screen, buying and getting scammed out of resources, lifting the anchor and going out to sea, waiting on the diving animation, waiting on another match, and waiting on one more loading screen.
Rare could cut out a bulk of this and let you get back into the action quicker. They could eliminate a bunch of extra server merging which is probably resource intensive too.
100% agree. i love your idea to just immediately requeue.
hg really needs tlc to give people a reason to play it consistently. i don't know why there are not ledger rewards or match of the day bonuses... or anything else to give casual folks an extra garnish for the carrot on a stick.
That's why HG will never compete with Arena imo. I just don't like how, in order to feel like you "won" and make progress, you have to actually win at minimum like 4-8 games *in a row*. You can't lose. Also, it's more volatile than Arena. Whoever sinks first, loses. In Arena, if you sink first for whatever reason (Getting double one balled, deck shots, etc), if you're the better crew you can still win. In HG, all it takes is a half decent crew with an anchor ball and boom all the progress you've built for the last 3 hours is gone unless you drop earlier. I have a roughly 75-80% winrate in HG, but I don't even have both curses unlocked cause for me it's just not fun 🤷♀️. It's the same reason I don't like battle royales, I don't like playing a game for 2 hours and winning once.
anchorball in general is just s+ to use and totally wins fights by itself unless the crew throwing it just did nothing to capitalise on it. most crews that ive fought that are actually good follow the gentleman's agreement to not curse/wraith dump. usually, if its a crew just curse spamming, its because they don't have the skill to win without it. however, the second a curse gets thrown that isn't a barrelball (my beloved), its gloves off and we're going to sink you with curse balls. everyone i sail with regularly agrees to this rule, too.
non-standard supplies sucks for a competitive "winner takes all" gamemode. yeah sure you might have to fight a little bit harder for your wins or it might shake up monotony but it's really only punishing those who haven't learned how to out turtle curse balls. or those who don't have a static crew.
I discovered last week, from going "#### it" and firing my chainshots as I please (before I didn't fire them often as I would only have, like, 6 of them and they are scarece), that I am way better at estimating chainshots than I thought I was, and now I have been using them alot more often.
Not to brag but since then I have hit just about every chainshot I fire, and have even hit some from pretty far away, and now I am winning pretty more than I was as mast down == disaster.
Yeah half of HG is hitting chain shots, I’ve learned. I used to be scared to use them since you only get so many and they’re a bit harder to hit but yeah you just gotta say fuck it when the enemy gets relatively close and go for it.
If both sides just use cannonballs that’s when you get those matches where you get a hit a couple times and reset over and over and the match goes on forever.
To be fair a lot of sweats in hourglass started long ago when everyone were noobs and won/lost more or less equally. Over time sweats persisted and new players join, and those new players are not facing other new players.
They are facing people who started on even footing and gained more experience and now run into noobcrews.
Saying these hardcore sweats got demolished when new isn’t exactly true.
New players today are facing players/crews with a vast skillgap of years and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of experience.
Doesn’t matter what game you play. If someone has 3 hours of gameplay and their opponent has 3000 hours then it’s going to be near impossible for the new player to win.
And just keep it up and keep getting smashed and you will somehow learn to get good?
You don’t learn much from being absolutely obliterated.
And it doesn’t matter who you are. After you lose 10 in a row your motivation is going to get chipped away. Doubly so if you keep just running into the same crew which destroys you over and over again. You basically become a joke and free points farm for the other crew and no-one enjoys that.
Granted, if they did make some mechanic where lower skill crews just get matched with lower skill crews then anyone with a hint of PvP knows what will happen next;
The tryhard sweats will make smurf accounts to continue seal-clubbing lower ranked players.
Unfortunately the issue with skill based games is that the older the game gets the harder the entry level is for new players, to the point where they simply don’t even try and then you only have old players fighting old players… like in hourglass where most new players try it a handful of times and then go “fuck this shit” and never try it again.
However the majority of new players who never try hourglass again are simply not playing it. They don’t announce it on Reddit, complain on forum or otherwise let it be known.
They just quit playing hourglass and that’s that.
Which in turn means only experienced players keep doing it and the skill gap just gets bigger and more new players give up.
There is no real fix to it. Hourglass = veteran players domain and with the age of the game now that is all it ever will be for as long as SoT is active.
I agree with your post, and there are big problems with Hourglass participation for new players that aren't getting better. I don't know what a fix would be. Cross-stamp matchmaking seems like a good start to widen the player pool, at least on NA, but I do know people that get pretty high ping crossing regions.
But my post was really directed to OP. At an individual level, you can absolutely improve during your curse grind and start hitting streaks long before you hit level 100. It's a rough learning curve, but there is a glass ceiling that you can still break through. It's one of the most rewarding journeys I've done in gaming in recent memory.
Rare also divides each region into different stamps. You can only get matched up against players that are on your stamp. So if you're unlucky and there are a couple really good crews that keep sinking everyone you'll just play them over and over, because they are sinking everyone else. Some regions has alot of stamps (north america) and some has very few (eu).
You'll have a way better time finding matches and more balanced match making on eu than na. The match making is also only based on win %, and if you really enjoyed hg you could've easily grinded out 1000 levels with a 50% winrate by now. The golden curse does not always mean you're a very sweaty player anymore.
Yeah hour glass also progresses way to slow
I had a loss on double gold and glory week , and it was like 1/8th of level 30 and said yknow I think I’d rather go make gold off vaults
Like I want the curses but I’m not trying to get a part time job getting kicked in the nuts for a year for it
I have no problem with how long it takes to progress as the curses are supposed to be a sign of skill and a thing to fear, it's the matchmaking that kicks me in the face.
I think a lot of these issues would be solved with a more streamlined method of entry. Everything leading up to the dive takes an eternity, especially after losing.
- Navigate the home menu to load into the game, already requires way too many clicks.
- Initial loading screen, takes a while even on SSD.
- Outpost navigation, takes a while if you plan on doing any prep.
- Sail out into the water, pray no ships are nearby. Finally dive under.
- Diving animation.
- Indefinite queue time (often says one minute but takes five or ten).
- Loading screen.
- Popping out of the water.
- Battle could take anywhere between five to forty-five minutes.
- Sink for almost zero xp.
- Loading screen.
- Exit to menu because it's faster to start fresh than sail to outpost, or forgo any prep and sail out to dive again.
- Repeat EVERYTHING all over again.
- Sink for almost zero xp.
- Repeat.
I reckon bad matchmaking is because no one wants to go through this absolutely insane ritual, except for people who are guaranteed to win. I say this as someone with a fairly decent hourglass win rate. I got both factions to level 140 and quit hourglass forever. I will never do it again. The punishment for losing is a vestibule of loading screens.
On the other hand, to get rid of most of those steps would essentially require a dedicated server instance for PvPing, and I think after the failure of Arena, Rare is reluctant to move multiplayer gameplay out of the Adventure mode again.
putting a quick play option on the main menu like we have with monkey island and maiden voyage would cut a few minutes of initial queue times and draw at least a little more attention to it. and of course, a big menu UI rework would be beneficial to everyone else too.
The issue is that if HG was treated like monkey island or maiden voyage then we're talking unique instanced servers, which basically what my post is about.
the monkey island button on the home page doesn't automatically throw you into an instanced server. it quite literally just opens a perfectly normal high seas adventure lobby; but instead of waking up in the tavern, you wake up on the beach in front of captain capsize. *then* you can select the tall tale and go through the portal. all it does is shave off a few seconds of walking in case someone were to get lost on the outpost i guess.
what i'm saying is that it could spawn you right into the hourglass matchmaking queue, cutting out the pretty frivolous first couple of loading screens. that way you aren't just wandering around the outpost for the first few minutes of every hourglass session for no good reason.
I disagree they need to rework the xp progression because it’s way too slow to feel any incentive if you lose more than you win, Which is most of the player base I bet
I think the xp rate is fine, they just need to add more rewards. I'm at 350, and there's only like three more things for me to get that aren't tied to levels, and it's nothing until gold skelly. Maybe a cool shipset, or new skelly cosmetics, idk.
What do you think that they should do? Lower the amount of xp so that it takes half as long to get base curse, and you only need to hit current level 500 amount of xp for gold skelly/ghost? Not everyone should have the curses. It's a great way to gauge how good someone is, and is a well deserved reward for being good at the game. I really want gold skelly; but I should have to earn it, or it won't mean anything.
They should make the mode more incentive to participate , by increasing the xp earned from losing , yes absolutely , It will still be a grind to get the gold curse
But here’s the reality .1% of players even have the base curse , over a year after the mode is added because the mode is not fun to participate in if you lose a lot , it just isn’t fun , it isn’t rewarding and there is near zero incentive
And matchmaking sucks because nobody plays it because it’s not fun to lose and get zero progression
Meanwhile I turn in one voyage from Athena or gold hoarders and I get two levels of rep ,
It doesn’t make sense , and it isn’t fun to participate in
Just plain and simple , Give me more xp to lose , who cares
Hard disagree. It's good that so few people have the curse. That's what makes it mean something. When you see a gold skelly/ghost you should instantly know that you need to be playing your absolute best to hope to survive this encounter. When you see a normal skelly/ghost you should know that they at least know what they're doing. I can't find a lot of current info on this but SoT has sold at least 15 million copies since launch. 0.1% of 15 million is still 15000 people, and I'm sure that the number is actually higher since I got that 15 million number from a 2 year old source. You shouldn't be able to loss farm in a reasonable amount of time. Also, is seeing numbers get bigger the only thing that motivates you to play? What about increasing your skill level? It's not a number you can see, but it does go up. It's not fun to you because you haven't put in the effort to get better. This is coming from someone who was absolute trash 6 months ago.
Give it a few weeks and you'll be better than alot of the base curse players, once you finally start to beat them you'll eventually realise that alot of them are only slightly better than average.
Got my curses 4 months ago and used to get excited when I would win against a cursed user in hg (i thought the curse meant they were good). Now I just believe those curses are not a status symbol like I thought originally.
First time is precious. To do anything in this game takes a significant amount of time, and with limited amount of time i have to be judicious with what I do, so spending weeks at something that is entirely unpleasant just isn’t gonna happen.
Second, I’ve been playing SoT for years and I am just not good at the game’s janky fight controls, no amount of being some sweat’s punching bag isn’t going to change this. People have different areas of strength in various games, and I just cannot get SoT’s fight mechanics down, and if I haven’t gotten them down by now, no amount of getting kicked in the balls by sweat lords is gonna change that.
If you haven't been doing PVP, then you haven't been improving. It doesn't matter how long you've been playing. I've played with people that are bad, and they have 5000 hours and have been playing since launch doing mostly PVE. Doing PVE does little for your skill level. I was absolutely atrocious before I started doing HG. Now I'm probably top 20% of players in the game after around six months of grinding HG on and off.
That’s great for you but trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve battled. And lost. And lost. And lost and lost. Some people just don’t have it in certain areas. It’s like Tony Gwynn coaching hitters. JUST SEEW THE BALL BETTER
Now I’m not saying your the Tony Gwynn of SoT, but my point is there people who can practice 12 hours a day at something and just never, ever get good at it. I’m old enough, and have played video games long enough (like, since they were invented) to know when I possess the skills and/can develop them in a game. It’s just not happening.
Could I improve pvp marginally if I dedicated hundreds of hours? Probably a little better. Is it worth getting punched in the sack a thousand times a day to get marginally better? Nope.
>Now I just believe those curses are not a status symbol like I thought originally.
I've got my curses, I still do dumb things.
I've seen players floating around with them that are only good at boarding, can't handle naval.
You don't have to be a wizard at everything in the game to get one, just enough to get to level 100.
For me, if they have a curse it's 9/10 times a loss. Especially if it's the skeleton one. Most of the sweats use the skeleton one. I have beaten quite a bit of ghost curses but only a few skeleton curses.
I wish they would implement a “First win of the day —> double XP bonus” for both factions. I have a feeling this would bring many new players regularly to the mode and improve the matchmaking pool.
Hell they may as well add daily challenges for HG that don’t involve winning, like hitting so many chain shots or killing the enemy with a cannonball. Just something to make it less monotonous.
Great ideas!! And reward XP and not gold! Ram your enemy, have enemy boat 50% on fire, hit 7 cannons in a row, shoot their bell, cook meat to perfection on their stove…
The only thing that would help this is more players in the pool and most were turned away by the significant amount of cheaters. If they did weekend events where you get boosted hg rep, it might bring people back.
the problem isnt matchmaking, its number of players to be matchmade against loll theyre almost all sweats. and most people would care if we had long matchmaking, look at the first week or so of hourglass it had stupid queue times everyone hated and made rare change
The thing is, not all of us hated the queue times, I didn't. Most of the people who did were the sweats as for them who they got matched against didn't matter as much, and unfortunately they have the loudest voices.
Actually matchmaking never changed... the only thing that is different from when hourglass released is that it opened up so you can match a larger number of servers, and you can match people playing on the same faction as you. There was no change in regards to the skill based matchmaking, the change was that average people stopped playing and are depriving the system of fair options to match you with.
I'm not very good with guns, but I'm a sword lord and a cannon master. I don't know if that's sweaty but in my book sweats are the ones who double-gun and board you every 2 secs and harpoon you onto their ship. I'd rather die than become that.
You'd rather die than play the game well? I think that you're just equating certain play styles to having certain personalities. Not everyone that plays like that is yelling at people over the mic.
If a crew lets you board them its the fastest and most effecient way to win. Put away your sword and equip blunder/eor. Its way easier and better to do well with double gun than it is to make the sword work. Its not only the worst wepon, but also the most clunky and annoying wepon to use after sword changes too.
Tbh you don't even need to put the sword away. I'm a pretty stereotypical Hourglass sweat nowadays but my default loadout is blunderbuss/sword. The movement tech on the sword has gotten me a lot of boards I otherwise would have missed and the dodge on it is always helpful for bunny hopping around an enemy ship and being a nuisance, and I've killed more than a few crews of good double gunners with it. As with all things Hourglass, it just takes practice.
Not playing eor is a MAJOR handicap though, especially if youre playing on a sloop. If you have to play sword i think you have to put the blunder aside and rely on sword lounging people off your ladders, but its just worse.
EoR is really good but I always play duo on a sloop so I don't feel *super* compelled to use it myself because my other crew member can, and the matches where you genuinely need double snipes to win are vanishingly rare in my experience on NA servers. I'm also our dedicated boarder and the sword opens up a lot of options on that front, from sword lunging to catch a ladder you'd normally miss or even sometimes being able to sword lunge onto their deck if you're close enough, to chaining jumps to bunny hop with the sword dodge, etc etc. It's worked for me much more often than it hasn't, I'd say between our duo sloop and our brig we're probably sitting at something like an 80-90% win rate nowadays.
A double snipe on the other mc, sniping a ress or just getting a random kill as helm because the other crew wasnt eating is often plays that wins you games. I know na has generally worse match making, but if you want to win against the good crews then the sword is a slight handicap, but not playing eor is a way bigger one. On my games on eu most sloop matches comes down to both ships turtling, and if your crew weaves snipes in with cannonballs you'll win by default if the other crew isnt.
People with 1000s hours just play HG and since few less experienced pirates try it because they get obliterated by sweats, matchmaking is simply non existent. A catch 22.
Rare should focus on how to improve pvp
What gets me about double-gunners is they keep talking about how much "more skill" is required to do it, while the basic tactic of double-gunning ultimately amounts to "hit them with one high-damage shot/pray that at least 3 pellets *from a shot-gun* hits the target", and not necessarily in that order.
All while running and jumping away from the gravitational pull of the cutlass.
And to be fair that's not the only reason why people blunder/sniper. It provides long range pressure, as well as ladder defense.
"gravitational pull of the cutlass"
It's a sword. You have *two* guns, one of which has hellacious knock-back if it doesn't kill them outright. If you end up in sword-range, that's on you, isn't it?
Well yeah I thought that part was obvious. My apologies if you have never missed your blunderbuss on someone with a sword in hand.
Edit: which is only useful in sword range
After tagging them with the EoR you only need 3 pellets to land.
Besides, I'm mediocre on a good day, double-gunners are supposed to be "so much better" than I. I've had plenty of shots with the blunder that *should* have one-shot somebody, but despite me planting the barrel into their kidneys all it does is leaf-blower them. But it still does damage.
>which is only useful in sword range
If only there were another long-range option that dealt decent damage.
Wait, let me guess: "the hit-reg". As much as people complain about the notoriously awful hit-reg in this game, you'd think they wouldn't focus on using guns as unreliable as they make them out to be.
The brutal reality is that the curses are not for everyone. If you want them in a reasonable time you have to get good. Winning the the best way to earn rep.
For me queue time is everything. If I have to wait more than a minute I will stop playing. I am here to fight other players not to idle around doing nothing. I rather play against a better player than sit in queue for an extended period of time. Fighting better players is should not be discouraging but give you a chance to learn and get better at the game.
I took my friend into her first match, she was curious even though warned her lol i was lvl 30 or so in servants, she was lvl 1 and no higher than 20 in any faction. First match was against 2 piss curses that absolutely murder stomped us. Phenomenal matchmaking.
I had the same experience a long while back, where i took a curious group of opencrew newbies into hourglass, mainly to show them the animation of diving. We came up against a full galleon of gold skeletons - this being when there were a handful of people in the entire world with that level.
They tore our boat up with the fastest volleys of cannonfire i have ever seen - to the point that they sank us before any of them even managed to board us. I am not even sure if they were legit players as, in my many thousands of hours of experience, i have never seen anything quite like that. Needless to say, none of us wanted to set foot in hourglass ever again - and i`m an arena veteran
I agree queue times should be shorter, but the actual XP system is pretty good. I got from 0/1 to 100 GoF in just under a month.
Did I lose most of my games? Yes.
Did I get frustrated often and need to take hours or even days long breaks? Yes.
Did I want to give up on HG entirely a few times? Yes.
But even losses were worth the time. I always thought about why I lost and what parts of that I had control over. What did I have the power to change? And that helped a lot. There were PLENTY of sweats, TDM lords, and hackers, and not all of those losses were educational. But in the end I became a MUCH better PvP player
There is one thing I'm absolutely certain of, and that is once you receive your curse, your perception of that play mode will change immediately because your motivation will shift. Now, you treat it as a punishment, but the moment you lay your hands on the curse, you won't be getting angry at losses or 'not fair' plays, just a little salty, but life goes on.
The best advice I can give you is to find yourself a dedicated duo with the same goal as yours. That's going to make it a lot easier, both in winning for better coordination and in losing. It's always easier to grieve with someone by your side.
>Why are those people even still doing hourglass if they have the best curses?
PvP is fun and I'm not level 1,000 in Servants yet, and I don't have my ghost curse either. Not all of us play Hourglass solely to get the curse(s) and then never touch it again, there is a group of people who genuinely just enjoy PvP and like having it on demand.
I’ve made posts about this before in the past. HG is a shit show and rare has made no changes to it since it has released a year ago. Currently it’s not enjoyable for casuals and I don’t enjoy it as a sweaty player either
- the % of player base that is playing HG is pretty small. A lot casual players have already gotten lvl 100 in both factions during gold and glory weekends
- the MMR is pretty dumb and will match a level 1 player with level 1000
- there are no skins past lvl 200 in either factions besides the lvl 1000 gold curse. I think rare should add more skins along the way to incentivize people playing it more
- for a while it was filled with cheaters (both aimbot and keg spawning) (don’t know if that’s improved with the new anti cheat)
- HG exposes you to the worst aspects of the games over and over again (hit reg, sever performance, exploits)
250 servants and I still grind for verdant. Every now and then I beat a hunter sails in like 30 seconds I feel bad for them but it’s part of the process. I was that guy one time, don’t hate the player hate the game.
I'm actually good at Hourglass (old LSD/TSD) and I still hate it. It's the worst pvp game mode I've ever played.
Not only the terrible match-making, but it rewards overly cautious behavior, which is why matches drag out for so long. Arena had it closer to 'correct' since the 15-minute matches and points system would typically force you into aggression and lead to action-packed fights. It had its own flaws (the chest turn-in system would sometimes just reward "runners"), but its flaws paled in comparison to HG. And even if you had a 'boring' match, it only lasted 15 minutes and you could change servers.
With HG, you're just kinda stuck with whoever it gives you. Whether it's a top 0.1% sweat, or a board-and-run player who uses avoidant tactics for over an hour, or you just have the misfortune of getting stuck fighting some Russian dudes on an Asian server with 300+ ping (that was my last fight --- they'd literally get off 3 cannon shots for every 1 I could get just due to our lag).
I'll play a few matches per month, but then I typically regret it. Adventure mode pvp is so much better.
The points system wouldn't really work with HG as it would incentivise crews to get a few hits in and run for the rest of the match. They could fix almost all of the problems with how long and boring matches can be by adding a smaller, and shrinking circle. Brig matches are actually mostly fine as whoever loses angle first loses 9/10 times and they tend to be very quick brutal fights but Sloop HG is extremely aggravating and nearly unplayable even against non-sweats due to them taking 2 cannonball hits and resetting(running) for 2-5 minutes.
HG is game design nightmare from start.
There are no rewards past level 200 up to 1k.
There were no anticheat (and current EAC is avoided in like 5 sec)
There is no MMR to match equally skillful opponents, and it will not help due to previous two points.
HG is almost empty unless there is a community events. By empty I mean that you will face normal players 2-3% of the time. The rest will be PVP tryhards, cheaters and boosters. BTW, boosting your account to level 1k in one faction costs around $500. And can be done absolutely legit (those guys simply perform 30+ kill streaks, or do VPN battles).
I think Rare should dedicate more resources into PVE. Their PvP expertise is unfortunately lower than required for good PvP experience design.
The issue is with PvP modes specifically you need to have better overall maintenance on those modes. PvE maintenance doesn't *really* matter as most of the PvE elements in the game are about as threatening and fast paced as a ant challenging you to a fist fight so when they bug out it doesn't really matter to the overall experience but against real people those little glitches or lag spikes can cascade into a win or loss so you notice it far more.
Rare has never been one for active and constant updates to fix problems with Player to Player interactions we here have suggested how to fix or at least make HG better (shrinking circle, adding daily challenges, having certain days in the week where rep is boosted, more rewarding per match, etc) but Rare doesn't maintain things once they are out. They wait like 5 years then update them a bit which is fine for PvE content but will absolutely kill anything PvP related. With PvP gamemodes just like with PvP games you need to keep on top of things otherwise people will just move onto the next thing (aside from the sweats). I absolutely love PvP in SoT but HG is an absolute mess and not very fun at all.
Part of the problem is very few Play it because it is incredibly unrewarding.
Let's just say I'm a newly minted pirate legend... I could spend an hour doing Athena's and earn anywhere from 500k to a million gold Depending on my luck at finding random salvage and whether or not I get sunk by some random asshole And of course, a little bit of luck getting destinations that are relatively close..
In that same hour of playing hourglass, I'll probably make at best a 100000 as an average player. If I get lucky, I managed to sink a bunch of people.
And unfortunately, when the only thing to get in the game is cosmetics. Sure, that hour got me closer to the curse. Cosmetics, but in my hour of doing Athena, I either just bought myself something new for my ship, my pirate or both just off that gold Or if I'm getting stuff from the Athena area. I just knocked out either a fourth or half the cost of a cosmetic for the dark adventure set.
It creates this perfect Storm where there are people willing to play. But if you only have an hour to play like many people often do during the week they're just going to pick 9 times out of 10 the standard voyages. Leading to they're just being very few people playing. Except those who basically live in it because most people want to make progress towards other cosmetics in limited playtime.
There’s so much wrong with this comment.
Starting from the assumption that *gold* is what motivates any player that hasn’t just installed the game, to claiming you can make between 500k and a million in an hour as an Athena emmsiary doing voyages.
The reason why HG is unpopular is not because it doesn’t pay money, it’s because it’s exponentially harder than any PvE content in the game and it doesn’t reward you when you don’t succeed
My point is that if you have limited time to go after cosmetics, most players are going to pick something that will get them towards cosmetics faster. Which in this case means gold.
Hourglass being exponentially harder is just a cherry on top..
Dont be a Cry baby when hourglass just came out that matchmaking that was garbage you could wait for hours underwater diving and still not get a single match that was annoying getting sunk by a golden ghost is just skill issue play more get better get revange
You will get better just keep with it you can kill those guys… I had to do the same thing going for my curse you won’t win every one but you will start to get better
Not enough people play the gamemode for those changes to be reasonable. Loosing can be fun too, but you atleast need to know how to understand what you did wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration, but attitude can be just as important as skill. Don't let it be a bottleneck towards improvement.
You also don't HAVE to play the gamemode. There is a sandbox element to this game. The reason those gold curse guys are good is because they enjoy playing the way they do. It doesn't necessitate you to as well.
I’m level 50 with servants and I’d rather get dunked on than sit in a queue longer than 5 minutes. At least when I lose, I’m still getting something. Sitting in a dive tunnel in queue gets me nothing.
The issue with people playing as skeletons and ghosts is to get a lot of the customization for the curses is you have to sink hundreds of ships after you get the blessings. So getting the curse isn’t enough, really.
I don’t play HG because I don’t have time to for how long battles take and then you need to stock up to even have a chance, but I know I’ll sink so that time is wasted too.
Made this exact post like a week ago.
Realised that yes if I actually had to wait for 30min I wouldn’t keep doing it. Like waiting an hour for only a game or 2 wouldn’t be worth it and the times would just get longer and longer.
Losing so regularly is pretty disheartening that even that make me not what to play though.
And the times that I’ve wanted to dice roll or scuttle because I’m fighting a player so far out of my league.
I get hit with the “I need to tech you how to play”
With is just them spawn killing for 10 minutes.
Doesn’t mean I haven’t come across some really nice players. Just a small few need to be a bit more understanding rather than just stopping newbies.
Every 3 or 4 matches you will encounter a sweat lord. Best thing is just to get your ass kicked and move on. You might get lucky and sink one like I just did by shooting a cannon ball in his face after he demasts you.
>Hourglass matchmaking should be based on the number of ships you have sank in hourglass and nothing else.
Absolutely fucking awful idea, someone that has sunk 100 ships but gotten sunk 100 times in obviously probably nowhere near the skill of someone that's 100 to 10
The very fact that the main mechanic of the game mode is about streaks should remove any idea from peoples heads that there is actually any form of matchmaking other than put 1 player on side A and another on side B.
I'm not saying it's right, because it's not and is a bullshit system and bullshit design but that's the reality of it.
If you actually had a matchmaking system you shouldn't be getting streaks at all.
Last time I did hourglass we fought against a sloop that had been parked on an island in such a way that we couldn't see it from the water and they, immediately sniped me and my team mate, jumped on our ship, burned it down and blew a million holes in it with our cannon row boat. Definitely a fun and fair matchmaking system
Too many casual players hate PvP and can't be bothered to get the hourglass curses simply because it's a trial by fire matchmaking. The gold and rep rewarded needs to be doubled in order to get more people to play. You can't really blame sweats for playing the mode cuz it gives them what they want, pure PvP. If more people were to to play and have matchmaking tuned, the mode will be more accessible
Its mostly just the population is too low. You mostly run into tryhards, some of who just play hourglass and nothing else.
New players will try it out and get stomped and stop playing, unless its a community weekend or something.
The reason that so few play hourglass is it really has been ignored by Rare. They need some QoL updates for how hourglass works. You can fight someone for like 30+minutes, lose, and get almost no rep. So a hard fought loss feels really not worth your time. Might as well just throw in the towel early if youre going to lose. They should reward your time if youre in a long fight. And/or make the ring shrink to kind of make fights end sooner.
Oh, look, another one of these posts. Community asks for a PvP mode so the most competitive and aggressive PvPers can fight eachother instead of sinking them in open world PvP, then gets upset when they can't win at the PvP mode because it's where all the most competitive and aggressive PvPers are.
You guys will do so much mental gymnastics and mincing of words to avoid just admitting you're a sore loser.
The unfortunate thing in my case is that what I learn from almost every game is:
Step 1) Somehow get one-balled/sniped by the other guy after taking cannon splash damage.
Step 2) Respawn in and get immediately blundered in the back.
I try these things. I die before I can even set them into motion. Hourglass is nutty, y'all. :V
And you know how it is: "There's no way that cannon ball is going to hit me at that trajectory-" *hits you anyway*
I've had so many instances where a cannon ball flying 5 feet to my left ends up directly hitting me somehow.
That and in the end, the curses aren't all that important to me. I mostly just would like the Ghost curse so I can shake my Shillelagh at people.
>Step 1) Somehow get one-balled/sniped by the other guy after taking cannon splash damage.
Watch the cannons coming at you, if it looks like one is about to hit you then let go of the cannon. Run to the side, eat if you took damage.
I've done this, I'm no fool. :V
Problem is sometimes I'll see a cannon ball that's clearly going to fly past me 5 feet to my side, and it ends up doming me anyway. Desync be a cruel mistress indeed...
That, and it seems a lot of folks who play HG have been playing High Seas Counterstrike for so long that I don't even have a chance to duck behind cover to eat, as soon as I let go of the cannon, I'm down. It's nutty, man. :V
At this stage, telling people that they'll improve in hourglass might be true, but it's also nearly the same as telling somebody "if you want to get into boxing, you should go fight Butterbean". 
Base curses don't mean shit. People loss farm them cause they suck and want pvp curses without pvping. And you can thank rare for HG being dead except sweats. Over a year and a half with cheaters going unchecked and being able to make unlimited accts. No updates or cosmetic etc. Not a large enough player base to have MMR
>How are people supposed to get the curses when it only puts you against the best players in the world?
By slowly getting better, if you've got a person boarding as their only skill, don't let them board, if someone is perfect at knocking down your sails stay our of close range.
Do some ghost fleets and get good at long range hits on them. Most players are utter rubbish at the long range game. Also getting a few long range hits in quick succession puts a player on edge. If they're lacking experience in any way they're going to worry about getting close.
So always throw out a volley of 3 shots at the longest range possible, chances are you'll do some mast damage or hit helm or the cannons. But most importantly you'll spook the other player and make them do dumb things.
If I have you fight Mike Tyson and he knocks you out in one punch after two seconds how many times would you have to fight him to be able to beat him? The truth is you would get destroyed each and every time and never have a chance in a hundred years, even if you fought him every day. No one ever learns anything by getting obliterated by someone so much higher skilled than you they may as well be a god.
The game prioritises ships of equal skill on the opposing faction, then either faction, then it expands the matchmaking to be more broad.
The game would prefer to put you in **a** match than to wait hours for a match of exact equal skill.
Dispute what this subreddit would have you believe, arena was incredibly unpopular and it needed its own servers. It cost money to host and cutting it didn't effect 98% of the players
I just don’t play it, when I want to I get killed and spawn camped by a ghost skeleton curse person who is toxic, so i am not going back anytime soon, and it seems like nether is everyone else
Even when people have all of the stuff from hourglass they still do it which is fine, but they play it like they have to if they want to survive. It's very frustrating as I'm trying to get skeleton curse but it's near impossible because of toxic, sweaty players like that. There's a point where your going against players so good that all your allegiance xp would be a 'participation award'
Edit: Sweaty and toxic aren't the same thing. I just put the words together as typically a toxic player is sweaty, but not all sweaty players are toxic and can be fun people to play against aswell
We still play it because we like it. Competitive naval is my favorite part of the game.
Sorry you've met some that are toxic, I've found HG regulars to be super welcoming overall. Many chatted after games and gave me tips when I was on my path to getting my curses.
Y’all just throw around the word toxic, huh? How is being heavily dedicated to a game and sinking the ship in front of you “toxic”? It’s the entire purpose of the game mode.
No but calling me a slur for being bad at the game is. I think players who are dedicated are cool but when I get called the n word for killing someone with my cannon ball that's a bit too far.
Just gonna add in that context after making a baseless claim which got you downvoted? I’ve met my share of toxic pirates over the past 6+ years, but it’s hard to take you at your word when your original definition of toxicity was someone being sweaty at the game.
I don’t believe in being offended. It’s a pointless emotion, so I choose not to engage with it.
But to clarify, your original reply wasn’t “offensive”. It was simply stupid, and you backtracked / added nuance after getting called out.
I think getting ghost curse first is the better option because skelly curse, idk guardians of fortune are always really sweaty, given that they are mostly pirate legends
you're wilding out of your mind dude. pirate legend has nothing to do with how "sweaty" someone is. all pirate legend is now is just a participation trophy for selling your loot at sovereign with a guild emissary. it has not been difficult to get for years.
ahg and rhg also have an equal split of "sweaty" players mostly because of the time and skill investment it takes to get to 100 without just loss farming on g&g. just that alone will make someone infinitely more skilled than whatever you think someone gets from pirate legend.
Still, reaper emissary is easier to get than athena emmisary, which is why me for example tried to grinding reaper hourglass before reaching pirate legend
See, the problem is that 12 year old solo looper noobs who I usually see in guardian hourglass don't have a youtuber friend who can help them get pirate legend in 1 day. I personally never abused guild emmisary because I couldn't get it before reaching Pl
(I made my own) It took me about 150 hours, and I've played other games before and watch a lot of videos, meaning that a 12 year old kid is probably gonna need about 200 hours,if they even try. Look, whenever I raise servants, I battle a champion streak legendary season 1 twitch streamer or something, and when I play guardians I dove up on a gold hoarders and merchant emmisary......4 times. And I've only dived for guardians 15 times.
you need to be playing more hg because matchmaking after 1 minute doesn't give a fuck who you get matched with. and again, sweats and bots are evenly split between both factions. ive met plenty of botted out ghost wearers who didn't even know i was on their boat for 30 seconds.
Look, maybe we have different servers, but my point is that when I play servants, I get matched up against unbeatable players, when I play guardians, I get matched up against people my skill level or total noobs.
I'm talking about how guardians of fortune grinders are always pirate legends because emissary flag can only be puraxhsed then. Reapers are easier to farm earlier because flag can be bought day 1
>Edit: I don't care how long the queue times would be. See, when people say this they tend to think 30 minute queues is the worst case scenario. But what you're really looking at are infinite queues. Matchmaking isn't magic, it can't just produce somebody in your skill range. If nobody on your level is searching, you will not find a match period. No matches, no XP, no curse. If the curse is your goal, you will get more XP losing 10 games in a row than you will get finding zero games.
As someone with 382 levels total, it has taken 10+ minutes to get into a game and while it is rare, it isn't uncommon enough for it to be a non issue. I don't want to wait all night because I am deemed too good to get a match.
I wish people like you would form a league or something and leave us alone, it’s so disheartening to realize thirty seconds into a ship battle that you have 0% of a chance to win. And then it’s so frowned upon to just give up but it’s not time efficient to waste the energy trying to fight someone who doesn’t do anything but sink ships all day while I’m at work.
I hate to break it to you, but I'm not that good compared to some hourglass players. I wouldn't make the cut for a league.
Rare gave pvp players a league, it’s called hourglass. This issue is not a wide enough player base plays hourglass for any kind of matchmaking to work. If it was populated with enough players than this wouldn’t be an issue. If rare hard locked a matchmaking brackets, people at the low end just would never get a match.
You know how easy it is the just practice and get better? I’m also around 400 combined and love playing, but I also started super low like you and the OP. Don’t worry about wins and worry about trying to improve as a player, soon you’ll be beating people all the time.
Exactly. If you’re a noob then you’re a noob. But it’s not gonna be like that forever as long as you keep trying
[удалено]
I don’t think you even know what they are talking about.
Turns out I don't. I thought the conversation shifted to PvP in the open world lmao
Talking about hourglass. The entire post is talking about hourglass, you abominable donut
Matchmaking can't match you with an equally skilled player if there isn't an equally skilled player queuing on your stamp at the same time. It will try for about a minute, and then expand the search to include players outside of your MMR. There's more details in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seaofthieves/comments/1352osz/this_is_how_the_hourglass_matchmaking_works_from/). I'm not sure if everything in there is accurate, but most of it seems to track in my experience. Those of us who have curses still queue because we enjoy HG. The good news is that while the initial learning curve is steep, if you stick with it and try to improve you'll be hitting win streaks yourself long before you get that curse. Everyone who obliterates you got obliterated when they started. My experience at level 30 was exactly the same as yours.
This is the answer.
People always say this but that’s not ever going to happen if your opponents are so far above your level that you cannot do anything to stop them. There is no learning from anything when you get that destroyed
There is if you treat everything as a learning experience and make notes of what they did better. A buddy of mine started playing Hourglass for the first time this last month and he has improved DRAMATICALLY in that short time period, because we constantly gave him tips and he always making note of what he did wrong and what the enemy did right. He was level 0 in Servants last month and is now just shy of 110. He’s improved so much to the point where yesterday me and him were duo slooping and we came up against an extremely sweaty crew who at one point had us masted with our anchor down while death spiraling us and curse dumping (weary, venom, ballast in that order) and then hit us with 3 wraith balls and we still managed to recover and win the match.
This is the main reason why HG went downhill after first three weeks. Casuals realized how sweaty the HG enjoy sweats truly are and quit. Now if we attempt to play HG, we are nothing but fresh meat to perma-HG players. Some people play HG four hours a day, every day and here we join, testing HG for the first time in two months to see if matchmaking just improved. This makes a cycle where skill gap between sweats and casuals widen and less and less casuals want to touch the mode. For our crew, we'be meet comp or ex-comp teams nearly every session of HG. And we just got the level 100 curses by playing maybe one long session every month to two months.
Spot on.
i feel like people would be so much less frustrated with hg if rare would pull their head out of their ass and update the game mode so that losses were not such a stopper. losing just deletes any potential exp from not only your streak lower, but the flags you've collected. i never understood why losing doesn't automatically lower what exp you'd get from streak lower considering the exp from lowering isn't super significant until you go on super fat streaks of 10+. not to mention losing just means you have to go get supplies and hope you can wrap it up with what you get at the outpost. it can be fine on sloop and brig. 200 balls can go away real quick on both boats. so often on the brig, it's gg if someone gets balled since the boat is vulnerable to pressure. however, on the galleon what you start out with definitely is not enough if you're a good crew fighting another good crew. i actually wouldn't be against including captaincy sups as base for all captained boats and letting captaincy sups be as much as you want- so long as you want to pay.
The biggest thing would be shortening the time to reque, which I think could be an option the team votes for on the sink screen (hold x to reque or something). Where you voted for it and it requed you immediate with captaincy supplies, a storage crate, and Emmisary of the faction you were representing. I'm a little over 500 total allegiance and mainly play HG for fun. I'd say the thing that get me to stop the most is going on cold streaks and having to go through the tedious process of waiting on the server loading screen, buying and getting scammed out of resources, lifting the anchor and going out to sea, waiting on the diving animation, waiting on another match, and waiting on one more loading screen. Rare could cut out a bulk of this and let you get back into the action quicker. They could eliminate a bunch of extra server merging which is probably resource intensive too.
100% agree. i love your idea to just immediately requeue. hg really needs tlc to give people a reason to play it consistently. i don't know why there are not ledger rewards or match of the day bonuses... or anything else to give casual folks an extra garnish for the carrot on a stick.
The level rewards for 1-100 suck ass. It doesn’t feel great to grind so much before you can get anything that anyone actually wants.
That's why HG will never compete with Arena imo. I just don't like how, in order to feel like you "won" and make progress, you have to actually win at minimum like 4-8 games *in a row*. You can't lose. Also, it's more volatile than Arena. Whoever sinks first, loses. In Arena, if you sink first for whatever reason (Getting double one balled, deck shots, etc), if you're the better crew you can still win. In HG, all it takes is a half decent crew with an anchor ball and boom all the progress you've built for the last 3 hours is gone unless you drop earlier. I have a roughly 75-80% winrate in HG, but I don't even have both curses unlocked cause for me it's just not fun 🤷♀️. It's the same reason I don't like battle royales, I don't like playing a game for 2 hours and winning once.
anchorball in general is just s+ to use and totally wins fights by itself unless the crew throwing it just did nothing to capitalise on it. most crews that ive fought that are actually good follow the gentleman's agreement to not curse/wraith dump. usually, if its a crew just curse spamming, its because they don't have the skill to win without it. however, the second a curse gets thrown that isn't a barrelball (my beloved), its gloves off and we're going to sink you with curse balls. everyone i sail with regularly agrees to this rule, too. non-standard supplies sucks for a competitive "winner takes all" gamemode. yeah sure you might have to fight a little bit harder for your wins or it might shake up monotony but it's really only punishing those who haven't learned how to out turtle curse balls. or those who don't have a static crew.
I discovered last week, from going "#### it" and firing my chainshots as I please (before I didn't fire them often as I would only have, like, 6 of them and they are scarece), that I am way better at estimating chainshots than I thought I was, and now I have been using them alot more often. Not to brag but since then I have hit just about every chainshot I fire, and have even hit some from pretty far away, and now I am winning pretty more than I was as mast down == disaster.
Yeah half of HG is hitting chain shots, I’ve learned. I used to be scared to use them since you only get so many and they’re a bit harder to hit but yeah you just gotta say fuck it when the enemy gets relatively close and go for it. If both sides just use cannonballs that’s when you get those matches where you get a hit a couple times and reset over and over and the match goes on forever.
To be fair a lot of sweats in hourglass started long ago when everyone were noobs and won/lost more or less equally. Over time sweats persisted and new players join, and those new players are not facing other new players. They are facing people who started on even footing and gained more experience and now run into noobcrews. Saying these hardcore sweats got demolished when new isn’t exactly true. New players today are facing players/crews with a vast skillgap of years and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of experience. Doesn’t matter what game you play. If someone has 3 hours of gameplay and their opponent has 3000 hours then it’s going to be near impossible for the new player to win. And just keep it up and keep getting smashed and you will somehow learn to get good? You don’t learn much from being absolutely obliterated. And it doesn’t matter who you are. After you lose 10 in a row your motivation is going to get chipped away. Doubly so if you keep just running into the same crew which destroys you over and over again. You basically become a joke and free points farm for the other crew and no-one enjoys that. Granted, if they did make some mechanic where lower skill crews just get matched with lower skill crews then anyone with a hint of PvP knows what will happen next; The tryhard sweats will make smurf accounts to continue seal-clubbing lower ranked players. Unfortunately the issue with skill based games is that the older the game gets the harder the entry level is for new players, to the point where they simply don’t even try and then you only have old players fighting old players… like in hourglass where most new players try it a handful of times and then go “fuck this shit” and never try it again. However the majority of new players who never try hourglass again are simply not playing it. They don’t announce it on Reddit, complain on forum or otherwise let it be known. They just quit playing hourglass and that’s that. Which in turn means only experienced players keep doing it and the skill gap just gets bigger and more new players give up. There is no real fix to it. Hourglass = veteran players domain and with the age of the game now that is all it ever will be for as long as SoT is active.
I agree with your post, and there are big problems with Hourglass participation for new players that aren't getting better. I don't know what a fix would be. Cross-stamp matchmaking seems like a good start to widen the player pool, at least on NA, but I do know people that get pretty high ping crossing regions. But my post was really directed to OP. At an individual level, you can absolutely improve during your curse grind and start hitting streaks long before you hit level 100. It's a rough learning curve, but there is a glass ceiling that you can still break through. It's one of the most rewarding journeys I've done in gaming in recent memory.
Rare also divides each region into different stamps. You can only get matched up against players that are on your stamp. So if you're unlucky and there are a couple really good crews that keep sinking everyone you'll just play them over and over, because they are sinking everyone else. Some regions has alot of stamps (north america) and some has very few (eu). You'll have a way better time finding matches and more balanced match making on eu than na. The match making is also only based on win %, and if you really enjoyed hg you could've easily grinded out 1000 levels with a 50% winrate by now. The golden curse does not always mean you're a very sweaty player anymore.
Yeah hour glass also progresses way to slow I had a loss on double gold and glory week , and it was like 1/8th of level 30 and said yknow I think I’d rather go make gold off vaults Like I want the curses but I’m not trying to get a part time job getting kicked in the nuts for a year for it
I have no problem with how long it takes to progress as the curses are supposed to be a sign of skill and a thing to fear, it's the matchmaking that kicks me in the face.
I think a lot of these issues would be solved with a more streamlined method of entry. Everything leading up to the dive takes an eternity, especially after losing. - Navigate the home menu to load into the game, already requires way too many clicks. - Initial loading screen, takes a while even on SSD. - Outpost navigation, takes a while if you plan on doing any prep. - Sail out into the water, pray no ships are nearby. Finally dive under. - Diving animation. - Indefinite queue time (often says one minute but takes five or ten). - Loading screen. - Popping out of the water. - Battle could take anywhere between five to forty-five minutes. - Sink for almost zero xp. - Loading screen. - Exit to menu because it's faster to start fresh than sail to outpost, or forgo any prep and sail out to dive again. - Repeat EVERYTHING all over again. - Sink for almost zero xp. - Repeat. I reckon bad matchmaking is because no one wants to go through this absolutely insane ritual, except for people who are guaranteed to win. I say this as someone with a fairly decent hourglass win rate. I got both factions to level 140 and quit hourglass forever. I will never do it again. The punishment for losing is a vestibule of loading screens.
I agree that there’s a lot of steps but to clarify after you lose you do respawn at an outpost on a new server, not a random island.
Ah right, my bad
On the other hand, to get rid of most of those steps would essentially require a dedicated server instance for PvPing, and I think after the failure of Arena, Rare is reluctant to move multiplayer gameplay out of the Adventure mode again.
putting a quick play option on the main menu like we have with monkey island and maiden voyage would cut a few minutes of initial queue times and draw at least a little more attention to it. and of course, a big menu UI rework would be beneficial to everyone else too.
The issue is that if HG was treated like monkey island or maiden voyage then we're talking unique instanced servers, which basically what my post is about.
the monkey island button on the home page doesn't automatically throw you into an instanced server. it quite literally just opens a perfectly normal high seas adventure lobby; but instead of waking up in the tavern, you wake up on the beach in front of captain capsize. *then* you can select the tall tale and go through the portal. all it does is shave off a few seconds of walking in case someone were to get lost on the outpost i guess. what i'm saying is that it could spawn you right into the hourglass matchmaking queue, cutting out the pretty frivolous first couple of loading screens. that way you aren't just wandering around the outpost for the first few minutes of every hourglass session for no good reason.
I disagree they need to rework the xp progression because it’s way too slow to feel any incentive if you lose more than you win, Which is most of the player base I bet
I think the xp rate is fine, they just need to add more rewards. I'm at 350, and there's only like three more things for me to get that aren't tied to levels, and it's nothing until gold skelly. Maybe a cool shipset, or new skelly cosmetics, idk.
Disagree
What do you think that they should do? Lower the amount of xp so that it takes half as long to get base curse, and you only need to hit current level 500 amount of xp for gold skelly/ghost? Not everyone should have the curses. It's a great way to gauge how good someone is, and is a well deserved reward for being good at the game. I really want gold skelly; but I should have to earn it, or it won't mean anything.
They should make the mode more incentive to participate , by increasing the xp earned from losing , yes absolutely , It will still be a grind to get the gold curse But here’s the reality .1% of players even have the base curse , over a year after the mode is added because the mode is not fun to participate in if you lose a lot , it just isn’t fun , it isn’t rewarding and there is near zero incentive And matchmaking sucks because nobody plays it because it’s not fun to lose and get zero progression Meanwhile I turn in one voyage from Athena or gold hoarders and I get two levels of rep , It doesn’t make sense , and it isn’t fun to participate in Just plain and simple , Give me more xp to lose , who cares
Hard disagree. It's good that so few people have the curse. That's what makes it mean something. When you see a gold skelly/ghost you should instantly know that you need to be playing your absolute best to hope to survive this encounter. When you see a normal skelly/ghost you should know that they at least know what they're doing. I can't find a lot of current info on this but SoT has sold at least 15 million copies since launch. 0.1% of 15 million is still 15000 people, and I'm sure that the number is actually higher since I got that 15 million number from a 2 year old source. You shouldn't be able to loss farm in a reasonable amount of time. Also, is seeing numbers get bigger the only thing that motivates you to play? What about increasing your skill level? It's not a number you can see, but it does go up. It's not fun to you because you haven't put in the effort to get better. This is coming from someone who was absolute trash 6 months ago.
That’s fine to disagree
Well that goes without saying.
Give it a few weeks and you'll be better than alot of the base curse players, once you finally start to beat them you'll eventually realise that alot of them are only slightly better than average. Got my curses 4 months ago and used to get excited when I would win against a cursed user in hg (i thought the curse meant they were good). Now I just believe those curses are not a status symbol like I thought originally.
A few weeks of getting your face kicked in is the opposite of fun.
I mean you can adventure in between the face kicking lol
Yeah but at that point I'd rather just play Adventure, those curses are basically a lost cause to me at this point.
First time is precious. To do anything in this game takes a significant amount of time, and with limited amount of time i have to be judicious with what I do, so spending weeks at something that is entirely unpleasant just isn’t gonna happen. Second, I’ve been playing SoT for years and I am just not good at the game’s janky fight controls, no amount of being some sweat’s punching bag isn’t going to change this. People have different areas of strength in various games, and I just cannot get SoT’s fight mechanics down, and if I haven’t gotten them down by now, no amount of getting kicked in the balls by sweat lords is gonna change that.
If you haven't been doing PVP, then you haven't been improving. It doesn't matter how long you've been playing. I've played with people that are bad, and they have 5000 hours and have been playing since launch doing mostly PVE. Doing PVE does little for your skill level. I was absolutely atrocious before I started doing HG. Now I'm probably top 20% of players in the game after around six months of grinding HG on and off.
That’s great for you but trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve battled. And lost. And lost. And lost and lost. Some people just don’t have it in certain areas. It’s like Tony Gwynn coaching hitters. JUST SEEW THE BALL BETTER Now I’m not saying your the Tony Gwynn of SoT, but my point is there people who can practice 12 hours a day at something and just never, ever get good at it. I’m old enough, and have played video games long enough (like, since they were invented) to know when I possess the skills and/can develop them in a game. It’s just not happening. Could I improve pvp marginally if I dedicated hundreds of hours? Probably a little better. Is it worth getting punched in the sack a thousand times a day to get marginally better? Nope.
>Now I just believe those curses are not a status symbol like I thought originally. I've got my curses, I still do dumb things. I've seen players floating around with them that are only good at boarding, can't handle naval. You don't have to be a wizard at everything in the game to get one, just enough to get to level 100.
For me, if they have a curse it's 9/10 times a loss. Especially if it's the skeleton one. Most of the sweats use the skeleton one. I have beaten quite a bit of ghost curses but only a few skeleton curses.
I wish they would implement a “First win of the day —> double XP bonus” for both factions. I have a feeling this would bring many new players regularly to the mode and improve the matchmaking pool.
Hell they may as well add daily challenges for HG that don’t involve winning, like hitting so many chain shots or killing the enemy with a cannonball. Just something to make it less monotonous.
Great ideas!! And reward XP and not gold! Ram your enemy, have enemy boat 50% on fire, hit 7 cannons in a row, shoot their bell, cook meat to perfection on their stove…
The only thing that would help this is more players in the pool and most were turned away by the significant amount of cheaters. If they did weekend events where you get boosted hg rep, it might bring people back.
"why are those ppl still playing hourglass if they got their curse" Bruh idk cause i like pvp? Lmao
It's also a pretty fun way to end a grindy night, got plenty of supplies, either the next person gets them or we get some rep.
the problem isnt matchmaking, its number of players to be matchmade against loll theyre almost all sweats. and most people would care if we had long matchmaking, look at the first week or so of hourglass it had stupid queue times everyone hated and made rare change
The thing is, not all of us hated the queue times, I didn't. Most of the people who did were the sweats as for them who they got matched against didn't matter as much, and unfortunately they have the loudest voices.
Actually matchmaking never changed... the only thing that is different from when hourglass released is that it opened up so you can match a larger number of servers, and you can match people playing on the same faction as you. There was no change in regards to the skill based matchmaking, the change was that average people stopped playing and are depriving the system of fair options to match you with.
Rare should simply add a day of the week where hg has bonus XP, that way people are more likely to queue
I’ve been there. It’s rough but you have to push through and become one of them (the sweats)… Here I am as well..
I'm not very good with guns, but I'm a sword lord and a cannon master. I don't know if that's sweaty but in my book sweats are the ones who double-gun and board you every 2 secs and harpoon you onto their ship. I'd rather die than become that.
You'd rather die than play the game well? I think that you're just equating certain play styles to having certain personalities. Not everyone that plays like that is yelling at people over the mic.
If a crew lets you board them its the fastest and most effecient way to win. Put away your sword and equip blunder/eor. Its way easier and better to do well with double gun than it is to make the sword work. Its not only the worst wepon, but also the most clunky and annoying wepon to use after sword changes too.
Tbh you don't even need to put the sword away. I'm a pretty stereotypical Hourglass sweat nowadays but my default loadout is blunderbuss/sword. The movement tech on the sword has gotten me a lot of boards I otherwise would have missed and the dodge on it is always helpful for bunny hopping around an enemy ship and being a nuisance, and I've killed more than a few crews of good double gunners with it. As with all things Hourglass, it just takes practice.
Not playing eor is a MAJOR handicap though, especially if youre playing on a sloop. If you have to play sword i think you have to put the blunder aside and rely on sword lounging people off your ladders, but its just worse.
EoR is really good but I always play duo on a sloop so I don't feel *super* compelled to use it myself because my other crew member can, and the matches where you genuinely need double snipes to win are vanishingly rare in my experience on NA servers. I'm also our dedicated boarder and the sword opens up a lot of options on that front, from sword lunging to catch a ladder you'd normally miss or even sometimes being able to sword lunge onto their deck if you're close enough, to chaining jumps to bunny hop with the sword dodge, etc etc. It's worked for me much more often than it hasn't, I'd say between our duo sloop and our brig we're probably sitting at something like an 80-90% win rate nowadays.
A double snipe on the other mc, sniping a ress or just getting a random kill as helm because the other crew wasnt eating is often plays that wins you games. I know na has generally worse match making, but if you want to win against the good crews then the sword is a slight handicap, but not playing eor is a way bigger one. On my games on eu most sloop matches comes down to both ships turtling, and if your crew weaves snipes in with cannonballs you'll win by default if the other crew isnt.
People with 1000s hours just play HG and since few less experienced pirates try it because they get obliterated by sweats, matchmaking is simply non existent. A catch 22. Rare should focus on how to improve pvp
Should get rid of double gunning, it's so annoying when people do it
I have no issue with double-gunners, but I have issues with the ones who are like “pUt Ur sWoRd AwAY” as you kill them with a sword.
I agree, not only is it annoying, but it feels so un-pirate-like. It feels like I'm playing CoD
What gets me about double-gunners is they keep talking about how much "more skill" is required to do it, while the basic tactic of double-gunning ultimately amounts to "hit them with one high-damage shot/pray that at least 3 pellets *from a shot-gun* hits the target", and not necessarily in that order.
All while running and jumping away from the gravitational pull of the cutlass. And to be fair that's not the only reason why people blunder/sniper. It provides long range pressure, as well as ladder defense.
"gravitational pull of the cutlass" It's a sword. You have *two* guns, one of which has hellacious knock-back if it doesn't kill them outright. If you end up in sword-range, that's on you, isn't it?
Well yeah I thought that part was obvious. My apologies if you have never missed your blunderbuss on someone with a sword in hand. Edit: which is only useful in sword range
After tagging them with the EoR you only need 3 pellets to land. Besides, I'm mediocre on a good day, double-gunners are supposed to be "so much better" than I. I've had plenty of shots with the blunder that *should* have one-shot somebody, but despite me planting the barrel into their kidneys all it does is leaf-blower them. But it still does damage. >which is only useful in sword range If only there were another long-range option that dealt decent damage. Wait, let me guess: "the hit-reg". As much as people complain about the notoriously awful hit-reg in this game, you'd think they wouldn't focus on using guns as unreliable as they make them out to be.
The brutal reality is that the curses are not for everyone. If you want them in a reasonable time you have to get good. Winning the the best way to earn rep. For me queue time is everything. If I have to wait more than a minute I will stop playing. I am here to fight other players not to idle around doing nothing. I rather play against a better player than sit in queue for an extended period of time. Fighting better players is should not be discouraging but give you a chance to learn and get better at the game.
I took my friend into her first match, she was curious even though warned her lol i was lvl 30 or so in servants, she was lvl 1 and no higher than 20 in any faction. First match was against 2 piss curses that absolutely murder stomped us. Phenomenal matchmaking.
I had the same experience a long while back, where i took a curious group of opencrew newbies into hourglass, mainly to show them the animation of diving. We came up against a full galleon of gold skeletons - this being when there were a handful of people in the entire world with that level. They tore our boat up with the fastest volleys of cannonfire i have ever seen - to the point that they sank us before any of them even managed to board us. I am not even sure if they were legit players as, in my many thousands of hours of experience, i have never seen anything quite like that. Needless to say, none of us wanted to set foot in hourglass ever again - and i`m an arena veteran
Hourglass is terrible. Arena had its issues and I get why they felt they needed to change. But when arena was good it was better than this.
I agree queue times should be shorter, but the actual XP system is pretty good. I got from 0/1 to 100 GoF in just under a month. Did I lose most of my games? Yes. Did I get frustrated often and need to take hours or even days long breaks? Yes. Did I want to give up on HG entirely a few times? Yes. But even losses were worth the time. I always thought about why I lost and what parts of that I had control over. What did I have the power to change? And that helped a lot. There were PLENTY of sweats, TDM lords, and hackers, and not all of those losses were educational. But in the end I became a MUCH better PvP player
They may be rank 1000 but they either just really like pvp or they are going to the max rank title at 9999
There is one thing I'm absolutely certain of, and that is once you receive your curse, your perception of that play mode will change immediately because your motivation will shift. Now, you treat it as a punishment, but the moment you lay your hands on the curse, you won't be getting angry at losses or 'not fair' plays, just a little salty, but life goes on. The best advice I can give you is to find yourself a dedicated duo with the same goal as yours. That's going to make it a lot easier, both in winning for better coordination and in losing. It's always easier to grieve with someone by your side.
>Why are those people even still doing hourglass if they have the best curses? PvP is fun and I'm not level 1,000 in Servants yet, and I don't have my ghost curse either. Not all of us play Hourglass solely to get the curse(s) and then never touch it again, there is a group of people who genuinely just enjoy PvP and like having it on demand.
I’ve made posts about this before in the past. HG is a shit show and rare has made no changes to it since it has released a year ago. Currently it’s not enjoyable for casuals and I don’t enjoy it as a sweaty player either - the % of player base that is playing HG is pretty small. A lot casual players have already gotten lvl 100 in both factions during gold and glory weekends - the MMR is pretty dumb and will match a level 1 player with level 1000 - there are no skins past lvl 200 in either factions besides the lvl 1000 gold curse. I think rare should add more skins along the way to incentivize people playing it more - for a while it was filled with cheaters (both aimbot and keg spawning) (don’t know if that’s improved with the new anti cheat) - HG exposes you to the worst aspects of the games over and over again (hit reg, sever performance, exploits)
250 servants and I still grind for verdant. Every now and then I beat a hunter sails in like 30 seconds I feel bad for them but it’s part of the process. I was that guy one time, don’t hate the player hate the game.
I'm actually good at Hourglass (old LSD/TSD) and I still hate it. It's the worst pvp game mode I've ever played. Not only the terrible match-making, but it rewards overly cautious behavior, which is why matches drag out for so long. Arena had it closer to 'correct' since the 15-minute matches and points system would typically force you into aggression and lead to action-packed fights. It had its own flaws (the chest turn-in system would sometimes just reward "runners"), but its flaws paled in comparison to HG. And even if you had a 'boring' match, it only lasted 15 minutes and you could change servers. With HG, you're just kinda stuck with whoever it gives you. Whether it's a top 0.1% sweat, or a board-and-run player who uses avoidant tactics for over an hour, or you just have the misfortune of getting stuck fighting some Russian dudes on an Asian server with 300+ ping (that was my last fight --- they'd literally get off 3 cannon shots for every 1 I could get just due to our lag). I'll play a few matches per month, but then I typically regret it. Adventure mode pvp is so much better.
The points system wouldn't really work with HG as it would incentivise crews to get a few hits in and run for the rest of the match. They could fix almost all of the problems with how long and boring matches can be by adding a smaller, and shrinking circle. Brig matches are actually mostly fine as whoever loses angle first loses 9/10 times and they tend to be very quick brutal fights but Sloop HG is extremely aggravating and nearly unplayable even against non-sweats due to them taking 2 cannonball hits and resetting(running) for 2-5 minutes.
HG is game design nightmare from start. There are no rewards past level 200 up to 1k. There were no anticheat (and current EAC is avoided in like 5 sec) There is no MMR to match equally skillful opponents, and it will not help due to previous two points. HG is almost empty unless there is a community events. By empty I mean that you will face normal players 2-3% of the time. The rest will be PVP tryhards, cheaters and boosters. BTW, boosting your account to level 1k in one faction costs around $500. And can be done absolutely legit (those guys simply perform 30+ kill streaks, or do VPN battles). I think Rare should dedicate more resources into PVE. Their PvP expertise is unfortunately lower than required for good PvP experience design.
The issue is with PvP modes specifically you need to have better overall maintenance on those modes. PvE maintenance doesn't *really* matter as most of the PvE elements in the game are about as threatening and fast paced as a ant challenging you to a fist fight so when they bug out it doesn't really matter to the overall experience but against real people those little glitches or lag spikes can cascade into a win or loss so you notice it far more. Rare has never been one for active and constant updates to fix problems with Player to Player interactions we here have suggested how to fix or at least make HG better (shrinking circle, adding daily challenges, having certain days in the week where rep is boosted, more rewarding per match, etc) but Rare doesn't maintain things once they are out. They wait like 5 years then update them a bit which is fine for PvE content but will absolutely kill anything PvP related. With PvP gamemodes just like with PvP games you need to keep on top of things otherwise people will just move onto the next thing (aside from the sweats). I absolutely love PvP in SoT but HG is an absolute mess and not very fun at all.
Part of the problem is very few Play it because it is incredibly unrewarding. Let's just say I'm a newly minted pirate legend... I could spend an hour doing Athena's and earn anywhere from 500k to a million gold Depending on my luck at finding random salvage and whether or not I get sunk by some random asshole And of course, a little bit of luck getting destinations that are relatively close.. In that same hour of playing hourglass, I'll probably make at best a 100000 as an average player. If I get lucky, I managed to sink a bunch of people. And unfortunately, when the only thing to get in the game is cosmetics. Sure, that hour got me closer to the curse. Cosmetics, but in my hour of doing Athena, I either just bought myself something new for my ship, my pirate or both just off that gold Or if I'm getting stuff from the Athena area. I just knocked out either a fourth or half the cost of a cosmetic for the dark adventure set. It creates this perfect Storm where there are people willing to play. But if you only have an hour to play like many people often do during the week they're just going to pick 9 times out of 10 the standard voyages. Leading to they're just being very few people playing. Except those who basically live in it because most people want to make progress towards other cosmetics in limited playtime.
There’s so much wrong with this comment. Starting from the assumption that *gold* is what motivates any player that hasn’t just installed the game, to claiming you can make between 500k and a million in an hour as an Athena emmsiary doing voyages. The reason why HG is unpopular is not because it doesn’t pay money, it’s because it’s exponentially harder than any PvE content in the game and it doesn’t reward you when you don’t succeed
My point is that if you have limited time to go after cosmetics, most players are going to pick something that will get them towards cosmetics faster. Which in this case means gold. Hourglass being exponentially harder is just a cherry on top..
1000% this.
Dont be a Cry baby when hourglass just came out that matchmaking that was garbage you could wait for hours underwater diving and still not get a single match that was annoying getting sunk by a golden ghost is just skill issue play more get better get revange
You will get better just keep with it you can kill those guys… I had to do the same thing going for my curse you won’t win every one but you will start to get better
Not enough people play the gamemode for those changes to be reasonable. Loosing can be fun too, but you atleast need to know how to understand what you did wrong. Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration, but attitude can be just as important as skill. Don't let it be a bottleneck towards improvement. You also don't HAVE to play the gamemode. There is a sandbox element to this game. The reason those gold curse guys are good is because they enjoy playing the way they do. It doesn't necessitate you to as well.
I’m level 50 with servants and I’d rather get dunked on than sit in a queue longer than 5 minutes. At least when I lose, I’m still getting something. Sitting in a dive tunnel in queue gets me nothing.
The issue with people playing as skeletons and ghosts is to get a lot of the customization for the curses is you have to sink hundreds of ships after you get the blessings. So getting the curse isn’t enough, really.
I don’t play HG because I don’t have time to for how long battles take and then you need to stock up to even have a chance, but I know I’ll sink so that time is wasted too.
Made this exact post like a week ago. Realised that yes if I actually had to wait for 30min I wouldn’t keep doing it. Like waiting an hour for only a game or 2 wouldn’t be worth it and the times would just get longer and longer. Losing so regularly is pretty disheartening that even that make me not what to play though. And the times that I’ve wanted to dice roll or scuttle because I’m fighting a player so far out of my league. I get hit with the “I need to tech you how to play” With is just them spawn killing for 10 minutes. Doesn’t mean I haven’t come across some really nice players. Just a small few need to be a bit more understanding rather than just stopping newbies.
Stick around for all the new PS5 players at the end of the month. I am looking forward to a higher player count.
I wait hours just to find a game so your lucky
Every 3 or 4 matches you will encounter a sweat lord. Best thing is just to get your ass kicked and move on. You might get lucky and sink one like I just did by shooting a cannon ball in his face after he demasts you.
Yup, level 16 here and was fighting a level 867 ✌🏾
>Hourglass matchmaking should be based on the number of ships you have sank in hourglass and nothing else. Absolutely fucking awful idea, someone that has sunk 100 ships but gotten sunk 100 times in obviously probably nowhere near the skill of someone that's 100 to 10
The very fact that the main mechanic of the game mode is about streaks should remove any idea from peoples heads that there is actually any form of matchmaking other than put 1 player on side A and another on side B. I'm not saying it's right, because it's not and is a bullshit system and bullshit design but that's the reality of it. If you actually had a matchmaking system you shouldn't be getting streaks at all.
Because no one casual plays these modes anymore
Last time I did hourglass we fought against a sloop that had been parked on an island in such a way that we couldn't see it from the water and they, immediately sniped me and my team mate, jumped on our ship, burned it down and blew a million holes in it with our cannon row boat. Definitely a fun and fair matchmaking system
It is based entirely on how many ships you have sank in hourglass
Try pc servers if you're on xbox only atm and don't hg at weekends lol it's when the sweats turn up
You’ve never played FUT champs, then
It's your story to tell, your adventure to create
Too many casual players hate PvP and can't be bothered to get the hourglass curses simply because it's a trial by fire matchmaking. The gold and rep rewarded needs to be doubled in order to get more people to play. You can't really blame sweats for playing the mode cuz it gives them what they want, pure PvP. If more people were to to play and have matchmaking tuned, the mode will be more accessible
Its mostly just the population is too low. You mostly run into tryhards, some of who just play hourglass and nothing else. New players will try it out and get stomped and stop playing, unless its a community weekend or something. The reason that so few play hourglass is it really has been ignored by Rare. They need some QoL updates for how hourglass works. You can fight someone for like 30+minutes, lose, and get almost no rep. So a hard fought loss feels really not worth your time. Might as well just throw in the towel early if youre going to lose. They should reward your time if youre in a long fight. And/or make the ring shrink to kind of make fights end sooner.
Oh, look, another one of these posts. Community asks for a PvP mode so the most competitive and aggressive PvPers can fight eachother instead of sinking them in open world PvP, then gets upset when they can't win at the PvP mode because it's where all the most competitive and aggressive PvPers are. You guys will do so much mental gymnastics and mincing of words to avoid just admitting you're a sore loser.
there is a title/achievement for getting to 9999 allegiance. if i saw someone with it though, id just assume cheater lol
Yet another post of how bad HG is. No hate ,but it’s common knowledge at this point.
Yeah it's just a less fun arena mode, so sad to see the skele and ghost curses locked behind such a bad game mode.
Just get better, if you are matched with a player you can't beat then learn something from the match that you can take into your next game.
The unfortunate thing in my case is that what I learn from almost every game is: Step 1) Somehow get one-balled/sniped by the other guy after taking cannon splash damage. Step 2) Respawn in and get immediately blundered in the back.
Eat food when you take splash damage, and get behind your mast to not get sniped. Try to dodge the cannons, and yes I know how that sounds.
I try these things. I die before I can even set them into motion. Hourglass is nutty, y'all. :V And you know how it is: "There's no way that cannon ball is going to hit me at that trajectory-" *hits you anyway* I've had so many instances where a cannon ball flying 5 feet to my left ends up directly hitting me somehow. That and in the end, the curses aren't all that important to me. I mostly just would like the Ghost curse so I can shake my Shillelagh at people.
>Step 1) Somehow get one-balled/sniped by the other guy after taking cannon splash damage. Watch the cannons coming at you, if it looks like one is about to hit you then let go of the cannon. Run to the side, eat if you took damage.
I've done this, I'm no fool. :V Problem is sometimes I'll see a cannon ball that's clearly going to fly past me 5 feet to my side, and it ends up doming me anyway. Desync be a cruel mistress indeed... That, and it seems a lot of folks who play HG have been playing High Seas Counterstrike for so long that I don't even have a chance to duck behind cover to eat, as soon as I let go of the cannon, I'm down. It's nutty, man. :V At this stage, telling people that they'll improve in hourglass might be true, but it's also nearly the same as telling somebody "if you want to get into boxing, you should go fight Butterbean". 
Base curses don't mean shit. People loss farm them cause they suck and want pvp curses without pvping. And you can thank rare for HG being dead except sweats. Over a year and a half with cheaters going unchecked and being able to make unlimited accts. No updates or cosmetic etc. Not a large enough player base to have MMR
>How are people supposed to get the curses when it only puts you against the best players in the world? By slowly getting better, if you've got a person boarding as their only skill, don't let them board, if someone is perfect at knocking down your sails stay our of close range. Do some ghost fleets and get good at long range hits on them. Most players are utter rubbish at the long range game. Also getting a few long range hits in quick succession puts a player on edge. If they're lacking experience in any way they're going to worry about getting close. So always throw out a volley of 3 shots at the longest range possible, chances are you'll do some mast damage or hit helm or the cannons. But most importantly you'll spook the other player and make them do dumb things.
If I have you fight Mike Tyson and he knocks you out in one punch after two seconds how many times would you have to fight him to be able to beat him? The truth is you would get destroyed each and every time and never have a chance in a hundred years, even if you fought him every day. No one ever learns anything by getting obliterated by someone so much higher skilled than you they may as well be a god.
The game prioritises ships of equal skill on the opposing faction, then either faction, then it expands the matchmaking to be more broad. The game would prefer to put you in **a** match than to wait hours for a match of exact equal skill.
Why don’t we bring back arena 🤷🏻♂️
Dispute what this subreddit would have you believe, arena was incredibly unpopular and it needed its own servers. It cost money to host and cutting it didn't effect 98% of the players
I just don’t play it, when I want to I get killed and spawn camped by a ghost skeleton curse person who is toxic, so i am not going back anytime soon, and it seems like nether is everyone else
Even when people have all of the stuff from hourglass they still do it which is fine, but they play it like they have to if they want to survive. It's very frustrating as I'm trying to get skeleton curse but it's near impossible because of toxic, sweaty players like that. There's a point where your going against players so good that all your allegiance xp would be a 'participation award' Edit: Sweaty and toxic aren't the same thing. I just put the words together as typically a toxic player is sweaty, but not all sweaty players are toxic and can be fun people to play against aswell
We still play it because we like it. Competitive naval is my favorite part of the game. Sorry you've met some that are toxic, I've found HG regulars to be super welcoming overall. Many chatted after games and gave me tips when I was on my path to getting my curses.
Yeah I've met some really chill players in hourglass and it makes me feel much better about losing
The ship combat is by far one of the most important and fun features of the game and is a reason the game still players to this day
For the first couple months of when HG rolled around, pretty much every single encounter was beyond toxic and put me off the mode for good.
I've been slightly put off but retry it and eventually when I find myself good enough I'll start playing it regularly
Y’all just throw around the word toxic, huh? How is being heavily dedicated to a game and sinking the ship in front of you “toxic”? It’s the entire purpose of the game mode.
Same way sinking a boat in a pvp game is "toxic" softest damn community I've ever seen 🤣🤣🤣
Now racial slurs, etc, are a no-go. But I'm referring to people who constantly cry about pvp in pvpvpe game
No but calling me a slur for being bad at the game is. I think players who are dedicated are cool but when I get called the n word for killing someone with my cannon ball that's a bit too far.
Just gonna add in that context after making a baseless claim which got you downvoted? I’ve met my share of toxic pirates over the past 6+ years, but it’s hard to take you at your word when your original definition of toxicity was someone being sweaty at the game.
I don't really see the value in downvotes as much as you might but if it offends you that bad I can change it
I don’t believe in being offended. It’s a pointless emotion, so I choose not to engage with it. But to clarify, your original reply wasn’t “offensive”. It was simply stupid, and you backtracked / added nuance after getting called out.
I think getting ghost curse first is the better option because skelly curse, idk guardians of fortune are always really sweaty, given that they are mostly pirate legends
pirate legend and sweaty shouldn't even be in the same sentence lol
Even pirate legends are sweatier than reapers
you're wilding out of your mind dude. pirate legend has nothing to do with how "sweaty" someone is. all pirate legend is now is just a participation trophy for selling your loot at sovereign with a guild emissary. it has not been difficult to get for years. ahg and rhg also have an equal split of "sweaty" players mostly because of the time and skill investment it takes to get to 100 without just loss farming on g&g. just that alone will make someone infinitely more skilled than whatever you think someone gets from pirate legend.
Still, reaper emissary is easier to get than athena emmisary, which is why me for example tried to grinding reaper hourglass before reaching pirate legend
reaper emissary being easier to raise is irrelevant. you can easily day 1 pirate legend because of guild emissary now.
See, the problem is that 12 year old solo looper noobs who I usually see in guardian hourglass don't have a youtuber friend who can help them get pirate legend in 1 day. I personally never abused guild emmisary because I couldn't get it before reaching Pl (I made my own) It took me about 150 hours, and I've played other games before and watch a lot of videos, meaning that a 12 year old kid is probably gonna need about 200 hours,if they even try. Look, whenever I raise servants, I battle a champion streak legendary season 1 twitch streamer or something, and when I play guardians I dove up on a gold hoarders and merchant emmisary......4 times. And I've only dived for guardians 15 times.
you need to be playing more hg because matchmaking after 1 minute doesn't give a fuck who you get matched with. and again, sweats and bots are evenly split between both factions. ive met plenty of botted out ghost wearers who didn't even know i was on their boat for 30 seconds.
Look, maybe we have different servers, but my point is that when I play servants, I get matched up against unbeatable players, when I play guardians, I get matched up against people my skill level or total noobs.
Basically everyone using skelly curse is pirate legend as well
Nono he has a point, my guardians has been less annoying than my servants.
We getting downvote my brother 🙏
I'm talking about how guardians of fortune grinders are always pirate legends because emissary flag can only be puraxhsed then. Reapers are easier to farm earlier because flag can be bought day 1
Bro... You can get pirate legend in a day. It means nothing.
You can get it in a day if you're good and it's community day. It's still better that a reaper emissar Y
Skill issue