A. General
-Make Rankings within playstyles that grant bonuses to players.
-Allow for gear and experience to be an opportunity for each playstyle, incentivise play styles that are less played. (basically there seems to be this common concept that questing, trading, and exploring are suboptimal for leveling and gear by far. In my own personal experience this is a large stopgap with single player since zones are really only obtained by combat. Most high level players that started after early access got there by playing combat instances and Heroics. It should be mentioned that there are questing/trading instances however.)
B. Trading
-Change items to take up inventory instead of cargo slots.
-Create a production based system that requires multiple trades; Start at a town that produces raw materials, take the raw materials to be processed (wait for process?), take processed materials to be manufactured at a different city, take manufactured goods to be refined into an item at a different city, deliver item to different city. Gold gains for each part. (This idea could just be a quest imo, although it’s a good quest idea)
-Trading doesn’t keep pace with combat in experience, people will do combat in the game regardless, make trading better at leveling than combat to incentivise it.
-Allow for land exploitation, harvesting of lumber or natural resources. (maybe another captains tool?)
-Make a Trade hub/auction house for players. (I disagree with this one since I think it would devalue equipment and make gearing up a process of gold.)
C. Exploration -Make finding missions where explorers have to go to different zones to put parts of a story together. Make quests where they have to explore an area to find an item. (could also just happen in the same zone)
-Make a captain's tool that allows you to send people to explore islands (Sojourn exclusive?) to find new types of animals, cultures(potentially specialists?), tribes, artifacts (equipment), or even new missions.
Exploration doesn’t keep pace with combat in experience, people will do combat in the game regardless, make exploration better at leveling than combat to incentivise it.
Create timed zone exploration, give rewards equal to the speed that the zone is explored.
D. Questing -Bounty quests, players can place bounties on other players giving resources or gear as a reward for achieving the bounty. (This idea could also extend to player made quests for players)
-Missions to other zones(This could also be made obsolete)
-Decision tree missions, missions that have story and allow for 2 or more choices to be made resulting in different outcomes.
-Questing doesn’t keep pace with combat in experience, people will do combat in the game regardless, make Questing better at leveling than combat to incentivise it. (personally I think that questing should be the fastest way to level hands down, people like the combat and will do it, particularly for gear. Questing should be the fastest way to level, exploration and trading after it, and then combat. Combat gives a great deal of gear as well, it has enough incentive to need to be the fastest way to level; This would also make single player leveling viable)
-Pirates that spawn in as mirrors of players in the zone that are named in the same manner as the player they mimic, “Dread Lord Stoker Ace.” They would basically have the same gear setup and same exact cosmetic look, but would just be a little more powerful than the average dread lord.
-Environmental changes, Storms, Natural fog/patches of fog, Harsh winds(winds that greatly affect movement), Sea life, Natives and their boats, aliens?
-Special instances, rare finds of zones like a pirate fortress, or “Off the edge of the world” Where there is a unique faction that is more difficult but more rewarding. (Load up a new heroic to find a Midas empire that gives players massive amounts of gold/resources for each kill or city capture)
-Resources are to prevalent, they should require more effort to obtain. This suggestion related to a previous build of the game and how the resource cost to use skills is negligible.(I think this should be something to do with trading not combat, traders like that kind of resource management. In combat it should be managing a short term replenishable resource, dealing with skillshots, and managing cooldowns imo)
-Enhanced roles: Create a new tree at the bottom of specializations that gives a couple new abilities for each spec. For supports give a Mist that slowly heals over time and gives a slight armor buff. For tanks give an enraged crew, deal higher damage based on total hull missing (not % based but the actual number of hull missing). Give Damage a 1-2 minute cooldown that increases all damage they deal by 50% for 15 seconds.
-Add Underwater gameplay. (There were several suggestions of this mostly revolving around submarines, but I honestly don’t know how this would work out in the current game, ships can’t shoot underwater? Maybe a good DLC/Expansion idea)
-There was a few complaints about how the water barrel is basically required to counter the high damage of the Groglov Cocktail. I would suggest making these talents along with the explosive barrel launcher and then just have the remaining equipment be ammunition modifiers.
-Add mines as a form of weapon/support. (Could be done as talents or as the barrel slot, toss a barrel overboard to damage or heal the first target hit)
-Enhanced Volley: Make Volley a skill shot instead of automatically aimed. Add additional targeting mechanics attached to volley; Make it a skill shot within the arc instead of being forced to only autofire after aiming.
-Enhanced Volley 2: volley adds Counters to target, Successive volleys do more damage on targets with more counters (maybe link counters to the ship animation due to how damaged it is?) Volley counters decay to incentivise consistent combat. Have a counter cap. (one player can get up to 2 counters, 2-3 can get up to 3, 4-5 can get to 4-5.) Tank cooldown to reduce volley cap.
-Goal of combat system changes is to make the damage more about volley and less about AOE, use AOE’s as a multiplier to volley damage. Abilities and counters to those abilities.
-De-enhanced volley: Make Vollet automatically fire when there is a target in the arc. (I would prefer a game that gives players a larger skill ceiling, making it automatic reduces this imo)
-Groglov Cocktail Have the damage ramp up slowly at first with the last ticks doing a great deal of dmg; have it deal high sail damage. This gives time for reaction without nerfing the damage of the skill; it would give p eople time to react and put it out.
-Water Barrel: provide fire immunity for short duration (scales with rarity of barrel? 1-3 seconds?) gets rid of fire dot.
-Have the left and right cannons on different Volley cooldowns.
-Make the global cooldown only 1/3ed on an unused ability. (If I use the groglov cocktail then the cooldown on Fog comes up in 1/3ed or 1/2 the time.
Server based
-Bombing limit server option; give Admins an option to allow as much bombing as they want their players to have.
-Friendly fire admin server option, let factions hurt each other (this sounds like a bad idea to me, but server options /shrug)
-Have the server join give a second screen with details about that server and what mods it requires when joining.
-Allow Public servers with passwords
Expansion/DLC ideas:
-Player created economy, ship deaths require ships to be made? Bought lives?Production based economy trading, cities produce raw materials traded to cites specced in producing certain goods.
-Taxes, player land ownership within factions, being able to buy cities. Permanent faction membership. Politics, Top contributions to faction grant nomination to be voted by faction members, give purpose to pvp and zone control. Have main Faction base outside starter zone that can be taken over. Forts
-Underwater Combat, Submarines.
-Technological age advancement, Starting out in the current age and advancing as individual factions. (Not sure how this would work out with the higher tier factions but w/e).
Credit where due: These are people who inspired or straight up had some of the above ideas.
Fortune - Bismar7
Stoker Ace, Beravin, DEATH, Pinks, Morrex, Bleh, Seawraith.
Steam suggestion forums: Graz (fantastic combat ideas), Yadro, Hazey, Bluevoss, Fallopian Flusher, Beebs, LaniusExcubitor, Doc Holiday, Fredo, Compboy, Joelio, Pickle Fluids, reerou, Stavinsky, gghf, pocketofposies, DarkOnistar, Lab Rat, Dr. Jekyll, Physics, smiler, Funinacious, Nox, Isar, Tommmmmm, Phantom. SubReddit: SpectreSC, Littlebiscuitz, dennisbraschi.
Also well as many others I’ve met in this game, I don’t remember everyone’s names.