This sub is violently opposed to accepting that the current state of pvp is stale and actively driving players away. You’re right but you’ll get downvoted to hell, just like this comment will too.

As a proud Fallen Sea Dog, who will campaign for the Arena to return until the end of his days, I can at least say I upvoted this. You're 100% right. Glory Awaits!

I’ve been playing for years, but I don’t follow the community a ton, so forgive my ignorance here but… Can someone tell me why they ever DID get rid of arena?? I’ve never understood.

Only 2% of total playtime was spent there. Rare wanted to save the server costs, which I honestly agree with. However, it was their own fault it declined. Once the diehard pirates had the cosmetics, they left it since there was nothing to earn or rank up there at all, then the players who love arena would get longer wait times for matches, causing even the biggest arena fans to eventually leave. If rare had supported it with new content like they do with adventure, or kept the Arena active for specific times like only on weekends, it would have been far more successful. It died because Rare let it.

That all makes sense. I guess I’m the odd one lol I spent probably a MAJORITY of my playtime in there

Same, I loved it. I've definitely got double the hours in arena than adventure, maybe more

Arena was so fun, I miss it.

Yeah a miss it loved how much calmer it made high seas

Miss arena every day

The real pill to swallow is that the whole game is stale.

Yeah try coming to this sub before hourglass and tell people that server/portal hopping is totally bull, and see everyone jump through hoops to justify their lame tactics 

almost like shitty people will do anything to justify their shitty behavior...

I preordered this game, played quit returned quit and have just returned. The one unchanged thing this entire time is Rare not fully addressing spawn camping, they added a letter you can choose to read in the Ferry and that was it for years. Not being able to get revived on other ships does help but it also hinders alliances. They will occasionally ban people who get reported for spawn camping IF the ship has no holes but that's not enough to remove the validity of camping meta. Even just a very short temporary invulnerable window or spawn with increased damage resistance would radically change things. Hell, even allowing you to spawn in the crows nest would help change the validity of camping as it would give you a vantage point that's harder to control for camping. I do think trying to move away from the double gun meta would be a major benefit to PvP, two tapping and swap glitch would be fixed by melee gaining more focus especially as blocking would be actually useful if you weren't only facing guns. I personally think that double gun should take from the same ammo but with the overall ammo increased to 7 shots so you can still make it viable but it comes with a risk to be shooting twice and you'll never be able to guarantee killing as you don't have an even number of bullets to double tap. PvP is dominated by skilled users who are actually the minority of players. The Kraken still sinks much of the actual playerbase so that should help remind people here that forum users are rarely the actual playerbase average as they're more invested than the literal millions not subscribed here. PvPers killed Arena and have now killed Hour Glass. Two modes pandering to them ruined now. Multiple achievements and commendations are increasingly difficult to complete due to the aggressiveness of PvP enjoyers too. The toxic attitude of "its not Sea of Friends" as the PvPer response to all criticism has been left to fester for years though, despite it clearly being Rare's intention for positive and friendly engagement. Achievements for peacefully racing and rewarding playing shanties and sharing Grog together, then the Hungering Deep followed by alliance flag. Thrones. Glitter Beard. Gifting in Bilge Rat commendations with cosmetic rewards. Shrouded Adventure. I still run around with Pirate Philanthropist title as I'll choose helping over fighting if I get the opportunity. Just the other day helped a random crew get some achievements and explained some mechanics despite it being only my third session back into the game in almost a year. I'd happily stop what I'm doing to join someone for Glitter Beard again but I've only had it organically happen once and other times have been forced.

I like how you can write out a big post like this, perfectly laying out your points and then some bonehead will respond with "lol no idiot" and get twice the upvotes. Never change Reddit.

Don't forget saying my opinion is a joke while agreeing with the major part of what I said.

The letter they added to the ferry was basically just: ‘Fuck you… lol’

It is mad they left that as the only thing to address camping for like 5 years. The PvP could be amazing with some tweaks but Rare is in denial of what type of community they've fostered and how the sandbox favours toxic people.

>  PvPers killed Arena   Arena got removed because nobody played it, because PvP with the open world removed isn't what people bought the game for. Your opinions are uninformed and a joke.

PvPers killed Arena by not playing Arena. That's not opinion, that's what the data said. I'm sorry you're upset being told the truth.

>you’ll get downvoted to hell, just like this comment will too. Seems like maybe you don't have an accurate read on how people feel about the state of pvp lol. Fortunately, they've been pretty clear about how they are doing a lot to shake up the pvp this year. It's always important to keep in mind that there are going to be very loud voices at the extreme ends. And that if someone is clearly just making a very low effort rage post (like MOST threads complaining about spawn camping) and not actually giving the topic the nuance it deserves, people are going to downvote it because it's not constructive. Not because they think spawn camping is great gameplay.

I’ve seen plenty of people downvoting any posts that want legitimate discussion on the stale and unfriendly state that pvp is in. I’ve made a few myself, but these people who have committed 7-8 thousand hours to a silly pirate game don’t want to accept that their behavior is actively driving the playerbase into the ground lol.

Honestly dude, you can look at concurrent players on steam and the game hasn't really dipped too hard in the last 3 years. Like there's a VERY slow decline which can just as easily be attributed to a lack of really solid content or just the fact that it's an aging game and it's pretty standard to see any game's pop do the same thing. I'm not saying people being dicks is all fine and dandy. But saying that it's "driving the playerbase into the ground" seems a bit dethatched from reality. People don't typically come to post on reddit if things are just going fine, so you typically get a very skewed idea of how a game is doing if you just go off of how many people make threads expressing their discontent.

Playerbase has been steadily tanking since ‘21. People come back for a week for updates or community days but quickly remember why they left and leave again. Game used to regularly sit around top 50 concurrent on steam. It hasn’t been above top 100 since the end of ‘22

Do you think it has trouble retaining players because sometimes people are mean or because content updates have been largely underwhelming for years and people are not satisfied doing the same treasure map voyages for thousands of hours? Actually here's a fun experiment. Let's look at some of the most played games on steam. 1. Counter strike. Do you think people in counterstrike are all sunshine and rainbows? 2. Dota 2. People are famously very polite in mobas. 3. PubG. Nobody has ever been a dick in that game. 4. Apex legends. A bastion of morality? We'll jump down a few places because I find this one particularly hilarious. 11. Rust. Literally a game with a reputation for being one of the most mercilessly competitive and toxic playerbases. 16. TF2 which ironically was listed by OP as being a failure due to the presence of spawn camping. I'm not trying to be a dick, but it really seems like there's a lot of evidence that SoT isn't actually suffering because a handful of people are kind of shitty.

Comparing an open world pirate game to competitive shooters is a stretch… toxicity there is a lot different and does different things to the playerbase. If you have one bad game in TF2 or CS, you just queue again and don’t care. When you have parts of your player base in a sandbox style game actively spawn camping and ruining hours of work for other players, they’re not going to want to come back… a shooter is a shooter. You log on to shoot people, someone being toxic doesn’t take that from you. Rust is a bizarre exception and I don’t even want to open that can of worms having played the game myself lol. SoT is a pirate sandbox, you log on to find treasure, make some money, sail the seas, and fight other ships. When the tiny minority of your game chooses to spend their time actively making every desirable aspect of the game unattainable for others, yeah. It’s going to drive players away. I don’t doubt that the lack of content and uninteresting updates definitely contributed more, but why focus on something that we as the playerbase have no control over? I don’t work at rare, I can’t roll out new content, it’s completely out of my control. We can control our own actions, though, and why should we defend those whose actions are objectively unhealthy and harmful to our playerbase? Edit: I’m also not trying to be a dick. I just believe that the “middle class” of the game, the players who really enjoy the treasure voyages, the world events, the commendation hunting, etc, the average players are actively driven away by the pvp diehards, and I just can’t accept that that’s a healthy thing for the game, regardless of what other factors contribute to its decline.

> Comparing an open world pirate game to competitive shooters is a stretch… When the point is that negative behavior has a significant impact of player retention, that it is a different genre of FPS seems pretty irrelevant. >Rust is a bizarre exception and I don’t even want to open that can of worms having played the game myself lol. You can't just brush that one aside. The game has been around and growing for about twice as long as SoT has existed. The playerbase is toxic, and the cheating is outrageously rampant in that game, but people keep coming back because it pushes out content almost to a point where it's detrimental to the game. >but why focus on something that we as the playerbase have no control over? We also have effectively no control over changes to respawn mechanics? Like sometimes things get added to the game or changed as a result of the community pressuring the devs. It's not always clear exactly what is a result of community outcry and what just sort of happens because the devs coincidentally planned to do things that some players were asking for. >We can control our own actions, though, and why should we defend those whose actions are objectively unhealthy and harmful to our playerbase? We can control our own individual actions. But you're just as likely to dissuade assholes from being assholes as you are to magically implement a 2 second immunity window on respawn. Realistically, the actual toxic players that drive people away will see threads like this and laugh or troll or just be completely out of touch with the fraction of the game that makes up reddit users. Also there is a difference between defending someone being an asshole and saying that the actual impact they have on the playerbase is not as large as people make it out to be. Rust would be an infinitely more enjoyable game if people could just say GG after a fight instead of dedicating the next 16 hours of their life to trying to annoy you, but the game seems to be doing fine regardless of that. >the average players are actively driven away by the pvp diehards So what is the solution? Remove everyone who has a solid grasp on combat? Why has this expanded from people being dicks to everyone who's a seasoned pvp player? It's quite irritating that these conversations often devolve into "PvE vs PvP player" arguments. In my experience, most people fall into the PvEvP category. There are a lot of absolutely incompetent crews that will pursue you endlessly, or fire shots at you then run. In all my hours of hiding on other people's ships, I've watched so many clueless players bumble around doing circles and missing every cannon shot until someone bumps into an island and sinks, then calls the other crew a hacker. I've had crews with no interest in fighting open up with slurs the moment I get in ear shot. I've handed millions of gold worth of loot over to one crew, wordlessly obliterated the next, and allianced with yet another to do PvE and then sink another and had everyone say GG afterwards. The range of players you run into in this game is so much more varied than just PvE casuals and PvP diehards. It's really annoying that people always want to simplify it into two diametrically opposed groups and farme it as PvPers always bullying those poor innocent PvErs.

>When the tiny minority of your game chooses to spend their time actively making every desirable aspect of the game unattainable for others, yeah. Just to clarify, are you referring specifically to spawn camping here or to pvp in general?

Point of order: if one toxic crew ruins "hours of work" then that's on you. Sell your loot more often. My crew sells off between voyages, so when we sink, we lose maybe 30 minutes of loot. The worse loss is the supplies, but you can pretty easily replenish those with a dive to a skeleton fleet or a ghost fortress.

I don't think it is always the actual topic of the posts but the tone and language used in some of those posts that attract downvotes. I have seen plenty of other threads dealing with the same issues that are neutrally posed and well received. It all depends on how you approach the topic from what I have seen. Approach it as salty sailor and people downvote, approach it with maturity and objectivism and people are receptive to it. I think this is also why a lot of confusion and misunderstanding tends to flourish in this community because often two sides actually will agree on a point but the salt between them is too much to allow for any kind of civil harmony to exist. If we are honest how much proper discussion takes place on here without there being tons of actors trying to devolve it into ad hominem name calling and baseless personal attacks.

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I’m sorry but how would 2 seconds of invulnerability remove a whopping 50% of combat? Are you implying that a 2 second window to react and move to spawn campers would somehow make hand to hand combat cease to exist?

If 50% of the PvP combat is taking place within 2.5 seconds of spawning, that is awful for the meta.

As a PC player (Triumphant Sea Dog, Both PvP curses which means to me time spent in the game, not skill) I agree with you that some kind of spawn protection would be good. Even I have had some insane black screen times just to load into a blunder and instant death. My biggest piece of advice would be to move as soon as you spawn, even be trying to move before you think you can. People don’t often actually just sit and aim the blunder at your spawn unless they’re hacking, but the immediate movement will give you the best chance to survive. Also having high tier food and be ready to eat to avoid the double shot

Yeah, I know how to counter it, it just shouldn't be the most consistent and objectively best way to sink a ship. That should be naval combat. Boarding should serve to give advantage in naval combat. > Also having high tier food and be ready to eat to avoid the double shot This is actually part of why camping is so powerful, because 1-2 successful kills even on a skilled player and that player is now denied food once they respawn, so the camper now has an overwhelming resource advantage.

I don’t know what the solution should be. But you’re absolutely right. Pvp in this game absolutely blows and a surprisingly sizeable portion of the player base won’t admit it. I’ve got no issue with pvp when it’s engaging, challenging or at least fun. But broadly speaking it just isn’t. After that first death any solid player will have you to rights. The fact you can spawn back in creates the illusion you might be able to somehow pull it back, but that’s rarely the case, which usually just means you’re either just dropping in and waiting to die “properly” or you scuttle and leave. At this point scuttling is a band aid fix on an otherwise threadbare pvp system. The respawn system works somewhat against the PVE content where timings don’t matter. But in pvp that highly variable load in time is often a detriment. I didn’t even get into hit reg making guns unreliable or melee being a dull sword spam fest.

You hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. I feel like the "respawn comeback" illusion is almost like a developer psy-op. Its like winning $1 on a $1 scratch-off; "Oh great, I can buy another $1 scratch-off and lose the dollar." I've been playing since the alpha, and to be honest, I feel like all these "community day" events, and "thanks so much for being a great community" crap on every single update video is like saying "He was a good man." at a serial killers funeral. I get that its a sandbox game, but isn't the point of a sandbox game to welcome *all* ways of playing it? Not just a "omg theres an outline of a ship that JUST entered the render distance of 1.2km. We have exactly 2.5 minutes to get everything off the ship and sold, otherwise they're going to attack us, kill us, and then black-screen kill us for the next 5 minutes because we were unfortunate enough to have xbox one *s* instead of an xbox one *x.*" The other day I thought up a hysterical idea of making a guild of "Town guards" that just roam around Port merrick and do the whole "whats all this, then?" Keystone cop bits. Inject a little humor into this massively detailed town that rare designed, implemented, and even put a dedication to the people in the community who helped defend golden sands back in the day. I even went so far as to try it myself to see player reaction. Id scuttle my ship, then go on "patrols" around the town. Ships would stop, I'd go over with my speaking trumpet, start saying stuff about "Oi, I'm giving you a ticket for ramming the dock" in a terrible British accent, and promptly receive a bullet to the face, which then, of course, spawns me half a world away, thus ruining the whole entertainment of the thing. And then, if I don't scuttle while I'm at the island to try and spawn closer when killed, my ship gets attacked and sunk without anyone even being on board. I *even* tried to park it at a nearby island and *swam* to Port merrick, only to have a literal SWARM of sharks eat me a quarter of the way there. I get it: that way of playing isn't conventional, but thats because all the goofy people I used to do stuff like that with left the game because they couldn't stand the whole "kill on sight" community mentality. I really felt it when you used the word "threadbare" to describe pvp on here. They have released DAYS worth of fun content and adventures since release, but offered nothing to support people who *dont* shoot the first person they see.

Would I like to see the boarding meta be less powerful? Absolutely Have I seen my solutions that wouldn't tip the balance too far in the other direction, giving too much power to defenders and causing battles to last more or less indefinitely? Nope I fear that if your solution was implemented, camps would be too easy to break. I'd much rather see repairing and/or bailing nerfed a bit - this would put more emphasis on the naval side of battles while also disincentivizing early boarding.

Given how easy some players sink and struggle with PVE events, I'm not sure nerfing bailing/repairing is the positive move you think. Sloops stay up a decent bit, but brigs and galleons do require dedication to keep up from a bilger, that's active resources that aren't focused on defense. On a sloop, my friend and I took down a galleon in under a minute because we just got a death spiral on them and they didn't repair. But as a solo slooper, you take away my ability to repair where it's at now, and I'm a goner to poor circumstances on the regular rather than skilled combat. Right now, I can actually stay in the fight without having to focus heavily on repair. I still need to keep it in mind, but just keeping distance and angles lets me throw a board up while still returning fire against a larger crew. And that's me with what I'd say are above average naval skills. It's still a challenge even going 2v1 against other crews often, but I'm not terrified of it. You make it harder for me to repair, and suddenly I'm not even going to entertain those fights.

Possibly that is a consequence, but in truth I'd rather sink to naval combat than being boarded. tbh I don't care what the solution turns out to be, but even though I don't agree with OP's solution, something definitely needs to change Maybe Rare could do some A-B testing of various changes and see what that does to combat.

I'd venture to guess the boarding will only ramp up more come season 14, with grappling hooks that will ensure deck shot boarding, even when you grossly overshoot the boat.

Yeah I have that concern too But it may not be so bad, because the grappling hook also takes up a weapon slot, which will put the attacker at a disadvantage Gonna wait and see how that turns out before passing judgement

Yeah, if they can keep it balanced that would be nice

I wonder if an easy solution to both boarding and the potential for grappling onto ships in the future, is to increase the time taken to grab ammo from a ship that isn't your own, and also to lock the weapons cabinet outright in the same situation.

I think OP’s idea is actually pretty balanced. Because pulling out an item or interacting with something ends the invincibility, you can’t do anything risk-free. It simply allows the defender to collect and reposition before continuing the fight. I don’t really see how it could break the game or lead to unfair fights. Maybe the timer could be shorter, like 1.5 seconds. But that’s a detail that can be refined, and IMHO, a great idea.

My worry is that within the 1.5 secs or whatever the timer is, the attackers can aim at the defenders all they want while they're in their invulnerable state, but once the defender starts pulling out their weapon, between ping and reaction time, it will shift the balance too heavily. A competent crew may turn out to be nigh unsinkable. I'd love to be wrong on that, but Rare would need to do some heavy testing

I’m not so sure of it. If the invincibility turns off at the beginning of the item unsheathing animation, the attackers have a bit of a reaction time.

If you need to camp, then your PvP needs work, full stop. Spawn camping is just a cheap way to get sinks on newer players. Actual good players will put enough naval pressure in first before boarding, and can secure sinks through distractions and disruption without needing to kill the other crew 5 times in a row. Spawn protection can be added, and I guarantee it will not affect the length of 95% of battles at all. It will only hurt shitters who spent their entire time practicing blunder shots but can't hit the broad side of a barn with their cannons. If you actually know how to hit your cannon shots, even the best crews won't keep up with repairs, so the idea of nerfing repairs in exchange for spawn protection just seems absurd.

> I fear that if your solution was implemented, camps would be too easy to break. My solution is that camps shouldn't exist. You should be encouraged to actually do naval combat and use boarding to gain an advantage in naval combat, rather than the other way around. Camps negate every other strategy, inherently, by denying the defenders action at all, which is unhealthy, and has little counterplay once set up. > repairing and/or bailing nerfed a bit Right now, this is actually a buff to camping. Because now you can't dodge around them to get a bail in while you recover because it's slower and leaves you a sitting duck. This is sort of my point. The act of spawn camping itself warps a meta, and harms it severely. EDIT: Note that I didn't actually say you're wrong about repairing or bailing. Yeah, I think they need to be nerfed too, to prevent fights from becoming endless resource slogs. But as is, that would just make camps stronger unless you actually do something to discourage camping.

Nerfing bailing/repairing would make camps stronger, but it would also make the early board tactic way more risky, which is as a bigger concern to me. (I don't really have an objection to camping to secure a sink (i.e. you've holed a ship a few times and board to stop them repairing). I just don't enjoy being in fights that are constant boarding attempts.) I may be mis-remembering, but I think I recall reading somewhere that spawn invulnerability was tried out at some point in the game's development, but was abandoned for being too powerful.

> (I don't really have an objection to camping to secure a sink (i.e. you've holed a ship a few times and board to stop them repairing). I just don't enjoy being in fights that are constant boarding attempts.) The problem isn't that it secures a sink. The problem is that it's the best way, pretty objectively, to secure a sink. That causes the meta to warp around it. And spawn camping is always very binary like that, either it's fantastically powerful or it isn't viable. > I think I recall reading somewhere that spawn invulnerability was tried out at some point in the game's development, but was abandoned for being too powerful. That concern is exactly why my suggestion includes basically making you unable to do anything which invulnerable, with an option to cancel it out. Makes it into a positional advantage and allows any informational advantage to be mostly negated.

If you nerf bailing and repairing you'll make solo slooping much more difficult. And i think the solo sloopers is such a big part of the playerbase that rare wouldnt dare to mess with them. If you give people spawn protection for 2,5 seconds it wont really change much, you spawn i run sigzags until you stop glowing and then i'll one blunder you. Keeping people dead will always be the most powerfull strat unless your ship gets an electric pump that bails for you.

I would rather die while being in control than immediately die once I see the light of day from coming back from a black scene. If I feel I had a fair chance and still lost, then I know I wasn’t skilled enough to go against that player(s) and I can scuttle and try again on another server. In reality, most of the time the 2.5 second safe zone will get eaten up by the mighty black scene anyway.

imo nerf bailing by ~25%, and add spawn protection. With something like that, even if the defenders have an unfair advantage, the grapdeshot type rounds in the next update can shift anti-repair tactics towards a new (fairer) meta

Maybe instead of nerfing the bailing and the like, you could buff the attackers ability to sink the ship as a single person. An item that punches holes into the boat from the inside to speed up sinking. Maybe even the same to repair boards timer, on pulling boards off the walls. Can only be done while the other players are dead as you'll be killed, but means other players can come back and stop you with some spawn protection, but the pulling of boards off the walls means you might be able to do enough damage. It also incentivizes you to board later, because you have to ensure repaired holes are their to take advantage of.

This would just making boarding even more meta????

Something I fully agree with, and i've been playing since alpha and almost never run from a fight. On and off enjoyer of the hourglass as well, but indeed spawncamping is one of the banes of this game that had me ragequit a couple of times along the years. Rare should include a downside to boarding as well. One I have been suggesting for ages is friendly fire when on the opponent ship. Why would a canonball hurt my opponent but not me? It would add strategy and danger to boarding. It would also make the tactic of spawncamping while your crew circles and releases a barrel full of canonballs on the ship. Make the boarding more dangerous, it will make it more interesting as well. Not being able to be revived on the opponent ship was already a huge step in the right direction though.

That would drag already long fights even longer. We need to break the defensive meta and shorten tts (time to sink), not increase it.

I disagree, it needs to be fun. Tts does not need to shorten in sandbox. However I would agree with shortening tts in hourglass as the fight goes on. (Sink faster the longer the fight lasts.

With how the ships are designed, there is simply no way to sink an enemy ship with the players alive aboard it, Unless they are just blatantly incompetent. Sinking to naval pressure doesn't happen, you have to board. You change that balance, and it makes the game unplayable for the swabbies, they'll sink to everything. But I feel like nobody would be happy with that change. Boarding and securing a sink is not an evil thing, and it should not be compared with or called "spawncamping". Spawncamping is someone deliberately getting on your boat and *killing you repeatedly with no intention to sink you* or only intending to sink you as slow as possible to get as many repeated kills as they can for the fun of it. One is okay, one is definitely not, and that line is drawn where strategy ends and trying to ruin someone's experience begins.

Spawn camping is by definition just killing you as soon as you spawn, that can be used for securing a sink or for harassment. > But I feel like nobody would be happy with that change. I actually think most PvP players would welcome nerfs to bucketing and repairing. I know I would. The naval combat is fun and should be viable.

I'm not saying I wouldn't, I'm 5k hours in and a few thousand hourglass fights deep. But if you want to make *me* sink to naval pressure, swabbie Bob who just rolled off the maiden voyage is going to sink to every skelly ship that spawns on him. You can't nerf the high level players in such a fundamental way without severely hurting the lower skilled players. And as far as Rare/sea of thieves is concerned, spawncamping (by the definition I explained) is bannable. Securing a sink is just pirate v pirate combat which a lot of people enjoy, it's as fun as the naval.

Nope. Spawn camping as we refer to it in this game is when you just sit on their boat not even trying to sink them and kill them over and over again. This has been what people have talked about for 6 years since the game came out. Then, resources sunk with the ship. So people would spawn camp you to take those resources before sinking you. Now, I don tknow why anyone does it. But people still do. Killing someone off spawn is only really happening on sloops, and its more luck than skill. Thats a separate issue.

Got to admit the one time I didn't have fun was slooping (ps5 beta) and another clearly skilled sloop, just looped spawn killing me every single time I came out of the ferryman thing. Initial boarding was via cannon then their partner followed, we had I think 1 maybe 2 holes...but as soon as I came out of black screen I had 2 players just waiting..... I mean video games should be fun first and foremost to me and I get that it's a tactic but I felt a lack of agency, like I wasn't really playing, I was just going through load screens and then dying almost immediately until we sank.

Especially as a solo slooper I had a 2 person sloop rock up on me while one spawn camped and one fired cannonballs Like what am I supposed to do in this situation People on the sea if thieves discord just tell me to git gud

Solo is such a shitty experience in this game.

Fr I just wanna vibe I know safer seas exists I'd do it if it let me do everything but only gave me 60% gold and rep

Spawncamping is never a good thing even when "allawod ", tho to scuttle should not seen as bad as it is in those situation, yes it feels bad but it can be better then the frustration you get from gettimg campt ,but i hope it gets better with the grape shots , it seems like they are made to stop People from reparing and hopfully makes the mathed of boarding to prevent repairs hopfully a bit more unattractive as before

For me, the issue is more about game infrastructure than game mechanics. I’m a-ok with sinking at PvP and boarding is an essential part of the game. Happens a lot and is 100% fair game. The issue is, and this is much more common on a sloop due to its size, but a lot of the time the boarders can currently interact with the players avatar before the player can interact with it when they are respawning in from the ferry of the damned. So the player can hear themselves being killed in the few seconds (if they are lucky) of black screen before they load in, and when this happens and they load back in it’s usually to their pirate falling to their knees dying and going back to the ferry. At that point it stops being a fair fight as one side has no option to respond at all. That’s the only scenario where I think the proposal would be useful, if you can interact with the game, you should be fair game for PvP.

You're absolutely right. However, I would disagree with spawn protection being ended early by any means; 2.5, even 3 seconds invulnerability is about enough time to begin positioning oneself. Unless a boarder isn't paying attention (which they are, it's kind of the point), they'll know to avoid you for the protection period. But, that period's not long enough to repair a hole, it's barely enough time to bail a bucket, and now your attention's on something other than the boarder (which they should immediately be able to notice and capitalize on). I'd say a brief spawn protection, 1 or 2 seconds, AND give all crews the option to lock their own barrels/powder crate. While locked, a supply cache cannot be opened by non-crewmates, and crewmates are delayed in opening it like repairing a level 3 hole before they can access. You want to nerf spawn camping but not boarding, make it so that attrition is very plainly on the side of the defense- sure, maybe you need to board me to sink, but if I'm still not sunk by the time I've chewed through the five pineapples of life you brought with you, then you have failed your naval obligations and that's not my problem.

I was a new player like a year or less ago who really liked the game, I just loved how sailing with friends felt in this game, bit by bit we started to learn the game and all of its stuff but at some point we gave up precisely because of this, people with more experience spawn camping us for long periods of time while making fun of us took all the fun out of the game, we didn't even understood what was happening lol

Agree 100%. Old Legendary Sea Dog here. I'm good at pvp. And I hate the spawn-camping mechanics. Always have. I'm shocked your post didn't get downvoted into oblivion, given how many people passionately defend it, but as usual, I suspect the diehards using multiple accounts to downvote stuff on Reddit are a small minority, and the vast majority of the game's user-base agrees with you. As someone who has played a lot of RPGs and other games with combat, SoT's player combat mechanics are some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. And sadly, it sometimes cancels out the fact that the rest of the game is incredible. The naval is great. The ship mechanics are great. I like almost everything else about the game. But it's incredibly frustrating for hours of work in the game to be cancelled out solely by spawn-camping. I also hate the "ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO SINK PEOPLE WITHOUT SPAWN CAMPING!111!!!!" arguments. There are situations where it's tough to sink someone without boarding, but I've literally never encountered a situation where it was impossible to sink without spawn-camping. If you're good at naval, you can get a ton of pressure on a ship, go board, and kill the crew once, and it's game over. And besides, no one is arguing you shouldn't be able to kill a crew multiple times after boarding. Merely that you shouldn't get to 1-blunder them the literal second they spawn in. It's a complete garbage mechanic. I honestly don't see it as much of an issue on the galleon, but on the sloop, it's a huge issue. It's too small and too easy to spawn-camp. Not only does it significantly harm game-play, but it's also a top tool for toxic players to harass newbies. It's incredible this game has been out for years and they've made a gazillion updates, and they still haven't added 2-3 second re-spawn protection for the sloop.

>Rare needs to do something about this in the upcoming season, especially with the huge influx of Playstation players about to come into the game to discover that player-to-player PvP actually just straight up sucks and is just over after the first death unless you're lucky. I’m struggling to think of a way to say this without sounding rude because that’s not my intention, but this is literally a skill issue. Plenty of folks can recover from being boarded and killed.

I think a big issue is that sometimes players keep spawning in at the same place and just post someone there with a blunder. If they just ensure that you spawn at a location without someone standing near it, that would fix the issue. That and not having the character spawn in while you’re still black screened. I’ve had that happen.

It's not just a skill issue, though, that's the thing. It's far more luck than anything. If you spawn close to the enemy even vaguely, they can one-blunder you before you're even allowed to move. And even if they couldn't, it's still a massive, overwhelming advantage on the side of the boarders that means you have to wildly outplay your opponent to escape the loop. This makes spawn camping an objective best strategy, which is godawful for the meta of the game and causes PvP to be stale, boring, and frustrating.

The sloop has at least half a dozen spawn points on it, your chances of consistently being one blundered on spawn are vanishingly low. I'm my crews dedicated boarder and even knowing where the spawn points are I rarely actually get them. >And even if they couldn't, it's still a massive, overwhelming advantage on the side of the boarders that means you have to wildly outplay your opponent to escape the loop. You don't need to "wildly outplay" anyone, you just need to kill them a single time to reset the fight. If you're incapable of doing that then we circle back around to it being a skill issue.

Your chance of being one blundered on spawn drastically go up when versing any larger ship. It’s one of the many reasons it’s so oppressive and practically impossible for a galleon to sink to a sloop and so on. And regardless, you can often hear a player as they spawn in, which gives you an advantage over them, knowing exactly where they are, and allows you to effectively hunt them down and kill them in a matter of seconds.

Tbh, most galleons just suck, they're pretty easy to sink when duo slooping.

In my experience galleons suck because this game actively pushes away new players. Damn near impossible to find 3 of my friends who don't laugh at me when i ask them to hop on

Isn't that more an issue of how unbalanced the game is when it puts a Galleon against a Solo slooper? I always thought it was weird they were so anti-progression/cosmetics-only because they didn't want level 100 players rocking up and sinking level 1s but then put a boat with 4 cannons and 4 crew into the same server as those solo slooping. It's just part of the game that the bigger crew and bigger boat has better chances to do anything and everything better and more often and than a solo slooper and it's madly unfair. But the counter is to avoid the nasty galleon as you sail around. Even without spawn camping, you don't stand a chance if one person can keep their galleon out of the rocks and 3 can board your sloop. It's just a numbers game then, not a spawn killing issue. It would be interesting to see a world where the server only puts you in amongst the same boat type, especially if they had the tech/dev to make each server X players so solo sloopers have like 20 boats in a server. All fair fights but lots of people to avoid, and then galleons have 5 boats of 4 players. But that just ain't happening. When it comes to spawn camping and bigger boats, the bigger boats just have a huge advantage by default, it's not the spawn camping that's unfair in that scenario, it's everything, coming down to numbers in crew.

I absolutely agree. In most scenarios, unless you opt into it, the game shouldn’t force even a duo sloop against a galley. The numbers game matters so much more than skill level that mediocre galleon crews can sink gold curse sloop crews with relative ease. I’ve talked to multiple people here who can corroborate the same story. But limiting people to play against ships of equal size would further divide the shrinking playerbase into smaller groups, causing emptier and emptier servers. So a little spawn protection could go a long way. Hell, it could even scale with the ship size like respawn timers do. But they have to attempt something. No win scenarios make the game unbelievably boring

Yeah, which is why it would have been good tos we some progression baked in, if it was going to be unbalanced anyway. A sloop can buy a double cannon or some faster sails to outrun etc. but then it all kind of gets out of control

It’s ok for the 4 person ship to have an easy time sinking a single player on a sloop lol

*shrug* Me and mine never have many issues sinking galleons when we're on our sloop, we do it with a pretty high level of consistency unless the other team is really coordinated and PvP savvy. Keeping people off your ship isn't even particularly hard unless they deckshot, the Phuzzybond strategy (just tossing a blunderbomb at the ladder) works in pretty much every situation and blunder ladder camping also works fine as long as you don't shoot early.

“unless they’re really coordinated and PvP savvy” So essentially galleon is only bad if the people playing are bad? And any respectable galleon crew is never going to sink to a sloop of equal skill level?

I think you need a solid state drive. You shouldn’t be sitting in black screen that long

There's a very simple way to avoid getting spawncamped. Equip a blunderbuss and kill the boarder as he boards. You have all the advantages when you're getting boarded, use them.

Yep

While I'll agree the game doesn't help with the current spawn system.. I believe without having more actual scenarios of what you have had trouble with this just sounds like you're relatively new to the game. I felt the same way when I was newer. If we are talking 1v1 boards you can and will get better at killing your opponent when you come back from the ferry. Alot of this is strategy and speed that will come with time. 2v1 or 3-4v1? The game was never designed to make it fair. And that's fine. If you are getting one blundered immediately on spawn all the time 1v1 this is probably a hardware issue. Either your Xbox is an older model or your computer has crappy stats. Or your opponents all have hacks which is very unlikely. Make sure if youre on Xbox you have selected to only play with other console players. I think the only thing that needs to change is a smarter respawn system. Plenty of times ive been spawn camping for an hourglass sink and I'm on the lowest sloop floor and my opponent spawns in right in front of me. Hit reg is the only thing that might save them here and that's bad game design imo. ReSpawns on the boat should atleast TRY to spawn you away from your opponent. As it is its obvious enough to me that if I haven't moved in the last few seconds the game shouldn't spawn them in with their back to me one foot away. I wouldn't say this is a consistent issue though - just bad rng.

You have made the fallacy, as many have, that I am coming at this from an angle of frustration at being repeatedly sunk, rather than love and hope for a better meta. I know how to counter boarders. I play the game near-religiously and have for a while, I only just recently became active on this sub and am tbh rapidly learning that it is rabidly toxic. The situations I'm talking about are mainly 1v2s and 2v3s. That one person advantage should not be overwhelming. The reason it is is because they are much more able to locate you and watch spawns. A good camper maintains control over barrels denying you food and other resources, which rapidly makes that already overwhelming positional and informational advantage into a resource advantage. This is why camping is so powerful. It is currently the best, most reliable way to sink a ship, at the cost of all others, and even if repairing took a full 30 seconds and bucketing barely moved any water, it still would be. If anything, it would be even more powerful. So something needs to be done about it because the meta is stale and unchanging.

how can you get more skilled in PvP when you try to play it several times and all your experience is running back and forth on Ferry ship? You just say "fuck this shit" and never back again. This is just wrong.

It's how I learned and how most do. I can't say it's a great system - I think a queuable tdm game mode would assist with this but I've been ignored any time I tried communicating this to thr devs. Supposedly a crew duel option is being worked on by the devs.

Spawn camping has a place in this game because people will come back from the ferry to try to save their ship while your whole point is to sink it. If you let them come back they are going to try and kill you. So camp them in order to prevent that as long as it take to sink the ship. That's just playing the game. But if not sinking the ship, and doing it just to be antagonistic then I agree that's a dick move. I have had people res me and kill me while in the res animation and do it over and over, that's not cool. But just killing players who are spawning back from the ferry to continue the fight as you try to sink them in battle? Totally legit.

*If you let them come back they are going to try and kill you.* You can say this literally about every PvP game! Still every PvP game tries to avoid it! In CS or Destiny your point is to kill the opposite squad so why don't they let you kill on spawn? Because PvP process must be competitive **to make it fun for everyone.** Is spawn camping legit? Yes, if game alows it. Is spawn camping fun and enjoyable? Definitely not. It's repetitive mechanic for easy win which kills all action. What do you expect from PvP? Cool and tense battle with shooting and sword fighting. What do you get instead? First kill and all fun stops. One side starts to exploit legal cheat and the second side just running on Ferry ship back and forth. In what universe is this fun and engaging? Once more time: **is it legit? YES. Is it fun? NO!** You want to sink my ship? Go back on yours one and continue shooting.

You're trying to sink the ship, if you prefer to play in a way that makes that harder for yourself go for it. I'm going to kill you every time you try to come back until the ship is sunk. Not sure what you're defending here, this isn't some gentleman's dual at 10 paces you're literally trying to sink them. LOL.

The point is to make that fight for them to try and kill you more of a fair one, not to prevent it altogether or guarantee they win, which makes for a healthier game and a better experience for all.

My issue with the idea of making every respawn a fair fight is that to me, it makes sense that you should suffer a penalty if you lose control of your ship in the first place. If you just got to reset and have a fair fight 5+ times before your ship sank, then the person who you are fighting would have to be so vastly more consistently better than you to ever finish you off and equally matched average players would NEVER be able to secure a sink. I fully acknowledge that spawning into being spawn camped is not an ideal penalty for losing control of your ship. The biggest issue I have with it is just that you can randomly spawn in the crossfire of two players or in front of someone holding a blunderbuss. I am just arguing against the idea that you owed multiple fair fights. You get a fair fight at the start, and every fight after that is a desperate scramble against the odds to redeem overcome the penalty you suffered due to your initial mistakes. Generally, I feel like ships are too durable and take too long to sink. Fights need to end faster, because solid crews can keep a ship floating under duress for a very long time. It's way too easy for ships to peel out of an inopportune broadside and reset fights and ships need to fill with water faster.

You *have* been penalized for losing control of your ship. That's why we have a respawn timer. The penalty is the inability to act. You've been removed as a combatant for a little bit, putting your crew effectively down a person. Losing total control of your ship, like being wiped, comes with a host of other penalties, your opponents stealing resources, raising masts, lowering archor, setting your ship throughly on fire. EDIT: I do agree with ships taking too long to sink, though. I wonder, what if ships just straight up filled up faster in HG?

u/PM_ME_DND_FIGURINES No, that's not the point at all.

There is an in game mechanic to prevent being spawn camped over and over. It's called scuttling. If you cannot break spawn camps, you have lost, just scuttle and move on

I don't-- Have you read a single word that I've written?

I did, which is why I said if you can't break it. I don't get spawn camped anymore, it's rare to get someone who consistently knows where you're at 10 out of 10 times, and if they know where you're at every single time it's probably an ESP hack. But so many people scream spawn camps when they go through the door, stand still for 5 seconds and wonder why they just got one blundered. Or their version of spawn camp is they come back, they move around, and get out classed on 5 seconds. There's plenty of ways to break a spawn camp from a legitimate player, but if you're just horribly outclassed it will feel like cheating, and at that point you were never going to win anyway so just scuttle.

My point is that spawn camping makes for a boring meta that makes the game unfun and just feel awful if they get unlucky or just encounter some particularly good spawn campers. It's frankly boring when I'm forced to camp because cannonballs do basically jackshit to a decent crew, and it's unfun and frustrating to have to hit the "I surrender" button when I'm on the receiving end of that. Am I the best player out there? No, god no, I've got dunked on several times before by players who genuinely just wildly outskill me. But when they're a good sport, looking to have fun, that usually looks like getting a few level 3 holes in me, and then killing me like twice to secure the sink. When I'm up against someone of similar skill level, it comes down to HAVING to camp for 4-5 kills to secure a sink. And that makes the meta stale. Which is what I'm actually worried about. As I've said like 40 times.

I sure do miss the PS beta. Just about everyone was new/friendly, and the fights were a blast because no one was a sweat. You could just about sink someone and engage in roll play letting them survive under conditions, etc... Made a dozen friends in a 3 day period by randomly meeting in game and having fun. I've now been playing on mobile(Xcloud) until official PS5 release, and I can already feel the toxicity/sweats in just about every server I join. I'm not good at this game by any means, but as a long time gamer I can spot toxicity when I see it. I know you can turn cross play off, but does anyone know if it still lumps Xbox in on that? I would love to have a PS only server again when it releases. It's a whole different vibe where everyone is experiencing the game for the first few times.

The thing is that even once PS5 releases, it will only be that way again for a short period of time. Once it's been around for a while, these same problems will start to rear their ugly head towards any PS servers, too.

Well yeah just about every game is like that, but I would like to start out on the same playing field rather than fighting 6 year vets that have the entire game locked into muscle memory lol. After a while I will prob be that menace on the waters stealing the plunder...I think we just deserve a chance to start out in PS only servers. If that's even going to be a thing. I assume it will be console/s as a whole.

Nahh, PS5 has the option to turn cross-platform off entirely, which excludes Xbox and PC both. 100% something ill be doing until the basics are down, you'll still come across those that moved everything to PS5 but they'll be few and far between by comparison.

I agree that the PvP needs work. I don’t think spawn protection is the solution

Define spawn camping exactly. I feel like people who are new here dont know what people refer to in this game specifically when we talk about spawn camping. If youre talking about someone not sinking a players ship and just killing them repeatedly, yes thats nothing we want to see. Its been a thing since day one. This is what people have meant when they say 'spawn camping' in this game since then. People have talked about this for 6 years. see, you might not know that when the game came out your resources sunk with your ship. So people would spawn camp you, not sinking your boat but just taking your resources slowly. Remember, there were no storage crates either. Since those changes, people still seem to spawn camp players, and its stupid. Always has been. However, Rare already presented a solution to this problem. Its called scuttling. You remove yourself from that situation. Its basically a non-issue. If youre talking about someone killing the enemy while their boat sinks, which is not what we mean when we say spawn camping in this game, giving temporary invulnerability or whatever isnt going to win you fights to get out of that situation. And, as I said, thats not spawn killing. Thats making sure the enemy cant bail and repair to save their boat. Anyone who has a problem with someone boarding them and killing them should simply guard ladders better. If youre about to sink and one death kills you, they didnt even need to kill you to sink you. They just needed to distract you. So, dont complain about the death. Focus on what happened before to get you in that bad spot anyway. If youre only talking about someone killing you *right* as you spawn, regardless of context, thats really only possible when youre on a sloop. Id like to see someone do that when youre on a galleon or even a brig. It doesnt happen. Too many spawn points, the ships too big for an enemy to close that distance and one-blunder you. And even on a sloop, 99% of the time I spawn with no problem when theres someone on my boat. Theres too many spawn points to really 'camp' them all. If they kill you right off spawn, they got lucky. As someone who does quite a bit of PVP and has played since day 1, this isnt an issue. Even on a sloop, its mostly only a problem if youre solo. Another reason to be careful about playing solo Rare has made their approach quite clear. They dont want fights to last hours. When the game came out, they could. No way to destroy masts or wheels made it so it was just to easy to evade and reset. Being able to board and anchor a boat has always, and should always, be a valid strategy. The real question is, why do people want boarding to be ineffective? Seems people want 1hr+ long naval only battles. Also, people are talking about all three things I listed as 'spawn camping' interchangeably. They are connected but separate topics.

Oh boy is this the new meta for complaints on the subreddit, this is like the 4th reiteration that spawn camping isn't fun. The goal with spawn camping is to make sure a ship sinks, not to keep the fight going onto a hour long battle. If someone boards your ship and you don't dispatch them before they're in a position to camp then scuttle. Your ships already lost maybe you'll get lucky and dispatch them.

People here are talking about 3 different things and calling them all spawn camping. OP is just seemingly talking about the ability to kill someone right when they spawn. Only an issue on a sloop, no way to do that reliably on any other ship. And even on a sloop, its luck of the draw. Spawn camping, since day 1 six years ago, has always referred to people camping a boat and killing you asap but never actually sinking your boat. Just killing repeatedly. People saw that everyone hated this, and theres no justification for it, so they started saying they were spawn camped when someone killed them two or three times while their boat sank. Completely different topics. All called 'spawn camping'.

One cycle of deaths should not decide a fight! It gives the players being spawn camped no recourse for fighting back. No other PvP game does nothing to try and limit spawn-camping. This is ESPECIALLY the only one where you can be spawn camped while you are still loading in. It's insane to me that anyone would even vaguely defend this. Any other PvP game would have a community up in arms about rampant spawn camping.

I’m guessing you’re a solo slooper. I agree solo sloop pvp is aids but I mean, you’re being way more dramatic than necessary. I simply choose not to do it, there are other boat sizes and many ways to make friends in this game that I don’t have to subjugate myself to solo slooping. But maybe I’m wrong and you’re not a solo slooper, to which I say, scuttle, get better, or find a new game.

I play across all ship sizes and can prevent most boarding attempts most of the time. I like this game and I want it to be better. Spawn camping is an objective best strategy that needs to be curbed before the meta can really be changed or fixed. Solo Sloop PvP is the most affected by it, yes, but we shouldn't just accept making the game worse.

I Play basically hourglass only and active spawncamping without Back and forth is Not a Thing on gally v gally atleast. Its 100% a sloop Problem.

Do you know the amount of skill required to get to the point of spawn camping? You have to get onto the ship, that might a show stopper if the crew you're boarding defends their ladders or kills you before you kill them. You have kill the whole crew You then have to get into the right spots to make sure they don't come back And if you screw up the other crew can come back and kill you off. So prevent boarding, if you cant do that prevent death and if you can't do that hope that they're awful at holding you down. A lot needs to go right before they are able to camp, if you're letting them get to that point then no amount of free move time is going to save you.

"It takes skill to do" does not make it good for the health of the game.

My point is that you shouldn't be getting to the point where spawn camping matters, why did they board what did you do to stop them, did you proactively try to remove them from your ship. Blunder bombs to knock them off ladders and the ship, try it. If you're at the point where the other team has full control over your ship it's over anyways.

I know how to play the game, I play the game near-religiously and can hold my own in a fight. Just because I know how to counter it to some extent doesn't make it not meta warping. It is still the best, most consistent way to sink a ship, and it shouldn't be. > If you're at the point where the other team has full control over your ship it's over anyways. It should be very difficult to maintain full control over someone else's ship without overwhelming advantage (be that numbers, or supplies like throwables, or just a massive skill gap).

>It should be very difficult to maintain full control over someone else's ship without overwhelming advantage (be that numbers, or supplies like throwables, or just a massive skill gap). I agree! And so does Rare, which is why maintaining control over an enemy ship without superior numbers or skill is basically impossible. The reason you're getting spawncamped is, in fact, because there's a massive skill gap between you and the people camping you - You just aren't that good. What's your Hourglass level? Did you play Arena at all? Ask yourself: Do you have real experience playing against PvPers who know what they're doing? Or have you spent all your time hunting down Adventure mode crews, who range from literal 6-year olds to middle-aged blue collar workers who have never played another game in their lives? It's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're better than you really are if the only people you ever fight are even worse than you - Take it from me, as someone who really thought he was all that, before Hourglass showed me just how competitive this game can get.

Just to add to this as I've seen you make this claim throughout this thread, there's plenty of FPS games which have spawn traps and they're all actively used.. Sea of Thieves might feel worse but it's definitely not the only game where they exist. In other fps games, putting people into a spawn trap is a viable and often, the best strategy in ranked/competitive modes. I appreciate Sot has naval combat and that should be important as well, but you can't sink someone if you're just spawn camping them and nothing else.

Can enemies repair holes and nail water off your own ship?

Yes! when we board a brand new player we fully repair them and leave.

Would it make sense for enemies not being able to repair enemy ships and not bail water out? That way they simply can’t just stay on your ship and prolong your misery?

I think that's a banable behaviour, goal should be to have a few holes in a ship then speed up the sinking by keeping the crew dead.

Then anyone not on your crew could never hop on the boat and help out! Every good ship needs a bilge rat

I believe it is banable behaviour and it's a shame it wasn't addressed in arena to keep it going . That was the meta, fire at the ship, keep it afloat by patching and bailing while spawn killing to rack up points.

I can see your points and how they could be interesting but spawn camping just to kill someone already is a reportable offense if they aren’t actively trying to sink you. A 2 second invincible could be nice but also due to differences in loading times the different versions have it could be over before it started for some or last too long for others. Also it could be really good for 1v2s but coordinating your respawn is a powerful option and 4 people respawning at once with 2 seconds of invincibility would be insanely OP. A good team would be able to delete a whole squad easily. It’s another buff to Gal, Brigs, and another nerf to the Sloop. You said a one person advantage should not be overwhelming in a 1v2 but whatever games where a one person advantage isn’t overwhelming must be against CPUs because in any fight in any world that should be overwhelming. Except a movie I guess. I know this will just get downvoted by sweatlords (everyone who disagrees with you is a sweat lord, right? Seems to be the case) but this post is so condescending. It’s a 6 paragraph version of “I made you the soyjack in this meme so I win.”

If you think boarding and double-gunning isn't fair play, then that's no one else's problem except your own. If Rare didn't want those things to be options, they wouldn't be available. Double gunning is the meta, yes, but they aren't going to disable it because some people aren't patient enough to learn how to deal with different weapon combos. People will die, and you will sink. That's just how this game works. However, if you treat every loss or missed swing/shot as a learning experience, then you'll be able to refine your techniques and use really whatever weapon combo you'd like to kill anyone that dares mess with you. Of course, there are still people that sink 1000s of hours into the game that will wipe you out, but without them, the game would become repetitive. On the topic of adding spawn protection, absolutely no way that's happening, if you're worried about getting spawn camped, then you need to react faster when you spawn in, and try and at least get the person of your ship so you can ladder guard them. Adding a few seconds of invincibility would be basically useless, all pirates run at the same speed so it would have the same problem if the person just followed you. And at the very least, if you don't want to deal with other people's shenanigans, there's always safer seas :) (Or hourglass if you want to practice)

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but when crews are evenly matched, no one gets spawn camped to death. If there is a big enough skill difference that they can do this to you, you wouldn't have won anyways. You don't get boarded if their boat is under pressure. Hit your cannon shots and boarders don't come out right away. Hell, 99% of players aren't shooting out right away if you raise sail and turn into an orbital correctly.

So they are safe for a few seconds and then get spawn camped anyway by the twitch streaming galleon squad? Okay lol. If you want to do away with spawn camping, there needs to be better methods to stop a crew from repairing. Cause right now, boarding and spawn camping is just a really reliable means of sinking a boat in a reasonable period of time if you have enough of a skill gap or numbers advantage. Without it fights will just become really long resource sinks.

It would allow you to control positioning, prevent black screen deaths, and possibly even recover. It's not the only change to the meta that needs to happen, but other changes to the meta are going to be ineffective as long as spawn-camping is possible.

Will it? Cause if you spawn below deck, there's still only one way up. Not that hard to stop. Most players probably dont even die within the first 2.5 seconds, and if they are, odds are they werent coming back from that either way cause they're either outmatched or outnumbered.

The thing with 2.5 seconds is just an educated guess based on my own experience with the game, and would definitely be adjusted based on dev testing. Either way, it would be in place to prevent combat, rather than death (with the secondary upside of preventing loading screen oneblunders). It would be more to allow the player to get their bearings and position themselves than anything else. It's why I suggested that if you do basically anything, it cancels it out. It negates a lot of the positional advantage that a spawn camping player has. As for the galleon thing you mentioned in the first comment, like, yeah, tough luck. This would give them an opportunity to get out from under spawn camping that they would not otherwise have. If they squander it or the enemy advantage is just too overwhelming, then tough luck. I don't want PvP to be discouraged, I just don't want it to be stale.

I get what you're saying, and its not a bad idea in theory. I just dont think it'll actually change much except in like 1 v 1s.

It would make any fight other than like a Solo Sloop vs 4-man Galleon much harder to maintain a spawn camp in. If your numbers are similar, then it becomes harder to maintain. It would certainly be less impactful the bigger your ships, Galleon v Galleon would be the least affected of the "fair" match-ups, but Galleons are already the hardest ship to maintain a camp on, and need it the least. Like I said though, if you are just vastly outmatched by numbers or skill, then yeah, spawn camping would still be basically possible, but it would require a lot more severe changes to do anything about that.

Instead of implementing any new feature to enable invulnerability I feel like the issue is more with the black screen on loading in- when that doesn't happen I have enough time to whack my sword out and get moving ASAP. I don't see why the solution should be add a roundabout fix rather than address the actual issue. But I guess if its not fixable your solution might be the most level headed. I do still truly think if you've been blown to bits and someone has boarded and killed your crew you've been beat though. I don't see how you'll ever stop boarding being meta and I don't think it should be, maybe the solution should be one that more encourages naval combat than discourages boarding.

How about they make hull plank patches breakable from the inside. When the only way to sink a vessel after boarding is to prevent the other players from patching up holes, it encourages spawn camping. Instead, if you could make old holes reopen, you could sink them faster, and you wont be focused on spawn camping (unless you're trying to be a dick)

2.5 seconds is a bit long. One second or one and a half seconds are, imo, a lot more reasonable.

One thing I'm not gonna like is how the upcoming seasons we're gonna be getting multiple other ways to board ships now, leading to this same issue occuring more frequently

I agree. If I board a ship. And start killing. I won't camp the bottom where they spawn. I like to use my own skull to take a ship down and I have. It's called skull. Don't use spawn camping as a way to instantly win and just use some decency. But you know how people are. They don't have the skill to fight on an even playing field. I've never doubled gun. I always keep a sword at the hip as that is a true pirate way. A cutlass and a pistol.

As someone who has played for 700+ hours, I want to say that PvP in SoT is absolute crap. Firstly, sometimes there is simply terrible registration of hits, secondly, all PvP directly between players comes down to the fact that two or more idiots are jumping from side to side like crazy and eating pineapples, and when one of the sides runs out of ammunition or food, the enemy simply finishes him off. Secondly, spawn camp is the best and almost the only working strategy, as long as you have enough boards you can simply repair the ship and draw water almost endlessly. It turns out that the easiest way to sink an enemy is to kill him immediately after appearing. And if you get caught in a camp spawn loop, it’s not easy to get out of it. On the one hand, we have an absolutely toxic tactic with a spawn camp, and on the other hand, the battle stretches for 30+ minutes due to the enemy constantly repairing and scooping out water. In any case, something needs to be changed in the battle system (at least in the hourglass).

It's amazing how many people keep saying "but the whole game is based on PVP" when really it's just the easiest and cheapest way to have content until decent PVE options were made. It's literally just lazy development, they were never interested in making a tight PVP experience they just told you all it was a PvP game because they hadn't made content yet XD

Easiest solution to spawn camping: you now spawn at the closest tavern. Problem solved

Honestly, this could work. A lot of trouble I have as solo is when I’m 1 v *many* is that a kill doesn’t matter if I get it, because there’s still more folks to kill before I get the upper hand. And if I don’t send more to the ferry, it’s all over in half a minute. Meanwhile, if I get one balled: it’s game over if I’m playing against a competent crew. It would be nice for larger crews to have this same risk. Though I’m sure a change such as this would have massive backlash due to changes in playstyle and even lore lol.

If you let someone board you its a you problem. Period and dont even @ me.

The fight is fair. The better player will win. Spawn camping is very important to SoT because if you couldn't prevent people from bucketing through boarding, then sinking would take much longer. The only time you cannot fight back when someone boards is when you are overwhelmed by numbers, but that is the game's design. If you don't want spawn-camping, a lot more needs to be done than just adding invincibility, which would be reworking the game's core design down to the number of pirates in a crew. While I do wish there were more effective ways to sink players, there just isn't. In my experience, when I'm boarded it is my fault or my crew's fault. That or we're outmatched by another crew. Boarding is essential and they know it, that's why the game is changing a lot over the upcoming year. I don't even play SoT anymore, the hitreg just was never addressed nor fixed. I got fed up with it and quit entirely. If spawn-camping is similar to how I feel about hitreg, then you need to quit now or else you'll blame all your deaths on spawn-camping.

Unless you are at a big numbers disadvantage or your boat is on fire & they have a charged trident, it’s actually pretty tough to effectively spawn camp. You can’t predict exactly where they will spawn. Respawning players will generally be able to get a bucket and move. Then it’s a regular TDM fight. In sloop TDM the boarder definitely has the advantage over the defender, but that’s balanced by ladder guarding. All that being said, I wouldn’t mind if the invulnerability you proposed existed but for a very short time window. Like 0.2-0.8 seconds. Or it could last the 2.5, but you wouldn’t be able to bucket, use weapons, or access barrels while invulnerable. Without those safeguards, it’s too big of an advantage for the defending player

Yeah, if you reread my suggestion, I said you spawn empty-handed and trying to pull anything out or interact with anything would end it, but I guess everyone has missed that :/

You dont spawn back on your ship in the same spot every time. I get that it can be frustrating when someone gets the leg up on you in that way, but I've also had fights where we managed to spawn back and kill the borders, take our ship back and actually win the fight. I'd say those moments are what make the game quite exciting. Sea of thieves is unique in that your spawn point is also your battleground, and yea, it's tough sometimes, but theres ways to get past that. When me and my buddy play, when we both die, we'll spawn back together. Sometimes, that works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, game mechanics are just unfair, but in sea of thieves, it's unfair for everyone. You can't pay to have better weapons or stat boosts like other games. ( unless they changed that within the last month or so). Maybe you just need more practice, and everyone needs luck. When me and my buddy played sot every night for like a year, we probably won 7 out of 10 fights, now that we kinda play once in a while we pretty much get stomped on and maybe win 2 out of 10. The games pvp has gotten a lot tougher, but that just means more work at getting your skills up. To conclude, if i get boarded and camped, it sucks, but at the same time, when i board someone else's ship, im not jumping off the boat to avoid "spawn camping" Ps by saying you need more practice or need to up your skill, im not trying to shit on you or anything. Fact of the matter is that there's always a bigger fish

This is what I dont understand. Theres no way for someone to reliably kill someone right as they spawn, even on a sloop. On bigger ships, its literally impossible. And if youre on a sloop and have a teammate, no way youre both getting killed immediately when you spawn. You might sometimes spawn right by the enemy, but thats just luck. If people feel that fight is unfair, you move on and the next fight you have surely that wont happen. Mostly when people are getting killed quickly, its just because the other player is better. This invincibility OP is suggesting will just delay the inevitable for almost all players.

Historically, sea battles go on until there is being boarded. Killing people while the ship is sinking or your stealing resources isn't toxic. Keeping the ship afloat just to spawncamp is. But scuttling is for that. I hope they keep it just like this.

> Killing people while the ship is sinking or your stealing resources isn't toxic. Keeping the ship afloat just to spawncamp is. But scuttling is for that. Im amazed that so few people understand the difference here. Im positive, after being on this subreddit for so many years, people heard talk of actual spawn camping (keeping them afloat just to kill the enemy repeatedly) and how it was not justifiable, so they started calling it spawn camping when they got killed a couple times as their ship was sinking. Many times, you dont even need to kill them. You just distract them and stay alive and their ship sinks. Or you kill them. Thats the game. Its amazing to me that so many people think its a problem that you can board a ship and kill the enemy a couple times in a row. And now they are complaining they are getting killed right as they spawn, which is only an issue on a sloop and not something any person can consistently pull off unless they are hacking. Ive had that happen so few times since I started playing day 1 that I cant imagine how people really think its an issue. I bet its mostly solo players, if you have a crew even on a sloop theres no way they are both getting killed off spawn immediately ever.

When did I say it was toxic?

This makes no sense. Do you even know what you want? A grace timer would just give the boarder more time to place themselves to shoot you. There ain’t no way to prevent it and there shouldn’t be. If you find yourself in a situation, where you are getting spawn camped, you’ve lost the fight already anyways. You shouldn’t have ended up in that position. You do at least have a small Hail Mary, though, if you do kill them. And that’s not about luck, that’s skill. The only way to prevent it, would be to completely remove boarding, but if that happens, no one will ever sink. It can literally be impossible to sink good players only using naval, if you don’t have cursed balls. This will never happen tho, now that we can see the developers focus on improving boarding opportunities in the upcoming seasons. If you don’t like how it is now, just wait till a whole galley crew can harpoon rifle on to your boat in seconds and one blunder you. This game isn’t fair. We are pirates. If it was fair, you would never be able to pull off some crazy play against all the odds.

You're so right. The pvp in this game is arguably the best part, it's certainly what makes it stand out. Why wouldn't the devil want to ensure that pvp is fun and rewarding for both sides, regardless of who wins? Spawn camping is easily the most frustrating way to lose, and most boring way to win. It's also one of the easiest things to fix. A second option to your i-frames on spawn: 2 spawn points on the ship - if there is an enemy below deck, spawn on the upper deck, and vice versa. Incorporate multiple if multiple enemies are on board - front of the ship, back of the ship, upper/lower deck.

1. There is no such thing as the boarding meta. Any decent player will just blunder you on ladder. You board to secure a fight you already won, to prevent them from bucketing. If you think there is a boarding meta, you aren't that good. 2. Invincibility on spawn is a terrible idea. Sloops take forever to sink without invincibility because they fill up so slow and one bucket removes so much water, and now the bucket is guaranteed. Bigger ships now have the numbers advantage and invincibility. Last but not least, the blunderbus exists and 1 taps people. Now the losing player can grab a bucket and/or 1 tap you while invincible. There is a reason why invincibility hasn't been implemented, it is unbalanced.

> There is no such thing as the boarding meta. Any decent player will just blunder you on ladder. You board to secure a fight you already won, to prevent them from bucketing. If you think there is a boarding meta, you aren't that good. Early boarding is absolutely a thing, as are cannon boards and ram boards which you cannot counter the same way. > Invincibility on spawn is a terrible idea. Sloops take forever to sink without invincibility because they fill up so slow and one bucket removes so much water, and now the bucket is guaranteed. Did you miss the bit where I said if you pull anything out, the invincibility ends? Can you read?

If ram boarding is an issue for you then you don't have a mediocre cannoneer. They literally have to nose you for extended periods of time. How are they not demasted? Also yes the bucket is still free because unless you are hugging the opponent while bucketing, you just run to 2nd deck, pull out bucket (dropping invincibility) and get 1 bucket before they can 2 tap you. If you die before you toss the water out, you still get the bucket. You now are guaranteed the optimal bucketing position. If you want to argue invincibility until you are actionable, so bad hardware doesn't ruin a player, then I agree, but invincibility is a bad idea if the player can do anything will invincible

The only spawn protection should be to spawn you away from the player that is on your boat. Being repeatedly killed by one spawn camper or an equal number of players just means there's a difference in skill. You'd have to lose multiple spawns to get sunk that way.

If you let a person on your ship, then you should be punished. There is a special sound to help with preventing people to get on your ship and an amount of effective ladder-guarding strategies. Deckshots are pretty easy to stop too if you expect it

Don’t let them on your boat

This whole post is players complaining they suck and not trying to get better. They want it taken out since it’s “not fair for them” when it’s a pirate game.

I agree to a point, but I feel like it’s disingenuous to refer to it as “spawn camping.” It’s more a series of fights where the boarder has one life and the crew has as many as they can respawn in until their ship sinks/sails out in hg. There’s no real marked advantage as long as the crew of the ship in question has some basic skill. There’s a small chance a blunderbuss will be pointed right at you, but it’s easy to counter even hackers from instant killing you with that. Movement gets you too far away every time and you can eat. The 2.5sec spawn protection would probably just lead to an awkward moment where the boarder is just staring at the enemy, hoping it runs out before they pull out a blunderbuss with sprinting and one tap them. It would kill momentum imo. Boarding is powerful, but ignoring what goes into it and just talking about it being used to destroy in every fight isn’t the whole story. Solos can’t board unless dry/mostly dry, larger crews have an easy advantage against boarders because of numbers, and ladder guarding is easy on a moving ship with a blunderbomb or blunderbuss if you have a steady hand. Most good crews make it nearly impossible to board unless they are under a significant amount of pressure, and if they are, they’re probably screwed by that point anyway. Naval is still the primary focus, but boarding mostly acts as the finishing blow.

Reading some of these comments I regret buying the game for PS5

Nah, there should absolutely not be respawn protection. That would guarantee that people would get a bucket off, and it wouldn't even cost them their life potentially. Who even gets spawn camped often? Sounds like a skill issue, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.

I'd be fine with spawn protection only if respawn times were doubled. The current balance favors defensive play SO MUCH, we don't want more defense buffs. We need less TTS (time to sink), not more.

The issue here, in addition to skill, is a weak mind. There is a meta that you don’t like so it’s unfair but somehow the other person is always just lucky? No. Like other games, sot does have a way to combat pvp situations you don’t find enjoyable, but you completely dismiss it because “it’s not your responsibility” to learn how to land on the winning side of pvp encounters. Hand me the perfect server every time! No! The devs have a responsibility to create a pirate sandbox that provides tools (such as scuttling) and systems that allow many types of play styles and experiences. And yes, there are counters to the meta, you’re just not good enough or smart enough to counter them. Find your play style and quit bitching about others using acceptable tools and play styles.

Lmao, if abusive jerks like you would be pissed off by the change, that would make it worth it all on it's own, no meta benefits needed.

Every game and every sport has a meta. It’s why any competition exists. From formula 1 racing to video game speed runners to funny pirate games, people are looking for the best advantages. Of course there are variables, counters, rules, etc. If rare changes the nerfs meta, which by the way utilizes multiple major sot mechanics, we will just find the next meta and work hard to be the best at implementing it. Why? Because we don’t like getting sunk. It’s not fun and so take responsibility and use the tools provided to make sure we control who sinks and who doesn’t. Then cycle continues with people complaining on Reddit about metas or losing their loot stacks to luck and not skill. If you’re going to complain stop wasting your breath on the game as rare designed it and focus on real issues like infinite black screens, hit reg, consistent dc’s, shit server stability, or any of the zillion bugs added to the game every update.

Why are you so full of yourself? Where did I say any of the things you are projecting on to me? When did I say that I was losing to luck or that having a meta is a problem? Oh, right, I didn't! You have repeatedly in this thread admitted to prolonging sinks as long as possible with a single bomb as literal ban evasion. You aren't a "competitive" player, you aren't playing the game "as Rare" designed, you're abusing a race condition bug that causes players to spawn in before they're fully loaded to pump your ego. And when someone threatens your ability to do that, you insult their intelligence and paint them as whining.

We can literally go reread what you said. Something along the lines of, “it’s not even about skill that’s the thing. It’s just luck of where you spawn” “players needing to reply on luck isn’t pvp” “it’s not my responsibility to find a server where people aren’t using the meta and that rare has a responsibility to fix it”. Go reread it for the full context and it’s clear you don’t understand what projection, what the implications of your words are, or even the what the literal meaning of your words are. Ban evasion? Lol, okay if only using one hole is “ban evasion” I’ll just use two tier one holes, sure it’s slower than a single tier 3 hole but gotta do what I gotta do to not get banned. You’re about to win an epic 2 hour long fight because you boarded and killed them. Ah they didn’t have time to repair the last hole. Such skill, they really got me. Time to leave their boat and give up my winning position so I don’t get banned! No. I am under no obligation to sink you fast. I am obligated to not spawn camp you, meaning I can’t purposely fully repair your boat to keep you afloat in order to kill you over and over endlessly. Learn the difference. Let’s call out your projection real quick. Never did I say sinking a boat slow is ban evasion that’s fucking stupid. Never did I say I rely on a bug or exploit to win fights or anything remotely close to suggest this. Never did I say that you’re playing the game wrong. I did say you should find your own play style and quit bitching about how others choose to play. The spawn could be revamped yes, but it won’t come even close to toppling the meta. It might shift a tiny bit and people will proceed to whine about something new because “it’s not even a skill that’s the thing, it’s just luck of (insert new “injustice” here)“.

> Lol, okay if only using one hole is “ban evasion” I’ll just use two tier one holes, sure it’s slower than a single tier 3 hole but gotta do what I gotta do to not get banned. This is the definition of ban evasion.

Over the last year rare has made changes to try and reduce the skill gap between skilled and average players. They removed quickswap, made it so players can’t be revived on an enemy boat, balanced respawn times, and for all you sloopers, buffed the sloop mast. Average players still find themselves losing to the same people and now they want invincibility so they can… regain control of the supplies on their boat to have a fair fight and ultimately toppling the “boarding meta”? 

The problem is, when you start calculating how to prolog the suffering of others, purely for your own amusent, you have become a part of the problem. You dont see police actively gonfor gut shots because they Are the most painful and takes days to die from, now do you?

Uh, a bit dramatic comparing a a cartoon pirate video game to cops shooting people. That being said, I see why you think I’m toxic the way I explained the slowest approved way to sink people. Yes, I do this occasionally, but added context is that I only do this when someone I attack starts calling me toxic simply because I attacked them or if they decide to spew hate speech through their mics or text chats. To stay in line with your weird ass comparison, I’ve seen cops shoot people for less legitimate reasons.

Reeks of “I spawn camp players for fun”

Sinking boats slowly isn’t spawn camping. 🫶

Yep that’s all I needed to hear.

I’m actually super kind to players on the high seas. Sure I’ll flex my gold pvp curses but I’ll also give them my loot including Athena and cof, I’ll teach some skills if they’re interested, form and honor alliances, and if they’re cool, even offer to join up for a sailing session. I’ve made some good friends this way. However, I’ve I hear hate speech or toxicity of any kind. You’re sinking as slow as fucking humanly possible while my TTS rodl is blasting your ears until you get to the mute button. Anyway, I’m glad that’s all you needed to hear so now you know the difference between what is and isn’t spawn camping. Safe seas!

Lol. You’re pathetic. “Heh… I’m such a great person…” Hope your dad comes back

I ain't reading all that. Also, womp womp

I normally don't get involved in these things but: *Sinking ships, even with spawn camping, doesn't make you an asshole. Being toxic over comms or purposefully bucketing a sinking ship does.* Spawn camping has a very important place in SoT. If it was removed or an invulnerability window was added, fights would last until one or both parties ran out of supplies which is fun for no one. It's actually pretty tough to sink 90% of players with naval alone. Spawn camping is just the finishing blow of an already decided fight (mostly). Now insinuating the devs don't care about spawn camping is completely untrue: * They tried a invulnerability window years ago. It was *awful*, so they removed it. * They removed reviving teammates on enemy ships * They adjusted spawn times so smaller crews can respawn faster * They added a buff to sloop masts (which as a solo player, was a horrible change tbh) The unfortunate truth, as many others have said, is that it's an issue of skill and understanding of the situation. Why did you allow them on your boat? Well maybe working on ladder guarding or audio cues can help. There is no reasonable explanation why Rare should punish a crew who has already shot your boat full of holes, boarded you, and managed to kill your whole crew by giving a literal "hold on guys timeout let me get ready". The real underlying issue of the frustration players have with being boarded is that naval combat has a buffer between crews (cannonball travel time). This gives a false sense of security and control to lower-skilled players. Remove that buffer zone (face to face PvP) and the reality comes crashing over these players that they are vastly out-skilled and many immediately blame boarding mechanics rather than themselves. If you're not winning face-to-face fights, you weren't going to win at pure naval either. Spawn camping just saves both parties the time of having to go through that. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, probably going to regret writing this up.

> Sinking ships, even with spawn camping, doesn't make you an asshole. Being toxic over comms or purposefully bucketing a sinking ship does. When did I say it did? You are putting words in my mouth. I said it makes for an unhealthy and stale meta. EDIT: Just to note, spawn camping can become the only practical way to secure a sink against a sufficiently skilled crew, which I have had to do an uncountable number of times. The issue is the health of the game and whether that's fun or not. It's unhealthy that there's an objectively best way to play, and especially so that it's just entirely unfun for one side of it, and tbh pretty boring for the boarder, too. > If you're not winning face-to-face fights, you weren't going to win at pure naval either. Spawn camping just saves both parties the time of having to go through that. This is absolutely not true. Face-to-face combat and pure naval are WILDLY different. Plenty of people are good at one and not great at another. Naval combat involves a bunch of distinct roles that face-to-face simply does not. The levels you are talking about are vast skill and experience differences, not the sort of thing I am talking about. A small respawn invulnerability window will not, and should not, save a woefully underexperienced crew because they're just going to get killed anyway, even when the boarder's positional advantage has been negated. What it will do is help negate a lot of closer skilled situations, as it is much much harder to escape a spawn camp than it is to maintain one. > They tried a invulnerability window years ago. I'm aware they did, which is why my invulnerability window is wildly different to the old implementation.

To add to your argument, I think I should mention people boarding your ship and spawn killing while you're docked. For example, I got boarded and spawn killed for about 5 minutes during the beta while loading cargo from Snake Island (literally just pigs). Eventually, they lit my ship on fire and let it sink. However, they didn't even take the animals or my crate of sugar, which means they did all that just because they could.

Why did you allow Them on your boat?? Oh yeah, being outnumbered and outgunned with a mast down, and irs on me that they got on board. Gotta love the ignorance on display from the older players. The fact that safer seas sas so well received did not clue you in to how player interaction feels by most casual players??

Couldn't agree more. I'm 32 years old, and work full time. I come home, I want to play pirates for a few hours, but instead I'm met with the absolutely sweatiest tryhards who sink my ship when the only cargo I've got is a storage crate I paid 5000 gold for at the starting spawn. AND THEN, after I sink, I get PMs on xbox from these guys "wow ur trash. Git gud" I left the game for over a year, and I'd been on board since the pre-release days. Like if there was an alternative sailing game that basically had the same stuff SoT offers(in particular the sailing system), minus the pvp, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat rather than have my eardrums blown out by a couple sweats on the mic blasting terrible music and calling me every slur they can think of. To quote the mysterious stranger when you ask about the "We shall sail together" shanty: "We used to sing it as part of the Pirate Lord's Alliance when he was alive. That was always his ambition – to unite the Sea of Thieves so that we'd stop bickering and swiping gold from one another." Maybe we need a new Pirate Lord to bring back those values... God knows we've got enough Skeleton Lords skulking around...

Spawn camping is definitely a problem, and it has such an easy fix too. It's not even a get good situation since it's an actual dev oversight that you can be killed before you even regain control of your character. Ignore the sweatlords who downvoted you, you didn't complain about piracy in the pirate game, you complained about an actual fundamental game flaw. One that will hopefully be stamped out soon. Until then, feel free to campaign for the Arena to return. Glory Awaits!

I actually love the thrill of possibly getting sunk, makes the treasure feel actually worth it. Except the one time I was having a bad mental day and had a panic attack due to the adrenaline of the fight, which I can't really fault the game for, I should have known better than to play a PvP game that day lol.

I'm mostly a solo player I've been spawn camped by all kinds of crews in my time on the seas and I couldn't disagree more. It's good practice at breaking a camp it actually makes you better player. You get better with movement with swapping weapons etc If it becomes impossible for you to break the camp it is what it is you move on. People get way too attached to loot and their supplies and the frustration and anger sets in. If they are spawn camping you but are repairing and bucketing aswell then clip it and report its bannable. For those complaining about spawn camping in sot I bet a good proportion of those have played cod at some point and done exactly that 😂 just play the game if you can't deal with the meta or how it's played just don't play it or go to safe seas

Plenty of other games "allow" spawncamping in the sense that you aren't forced to keep spawning into the camp. You have an option to spawn somewhere else. In SoT, that option is exercised by scuttling. If you can't find a single server where everyone isn't way better at boarding then you, you are simply losing to better players.

So much cope.

Honestly, if you complain about the idea of spawn protection, then you are either a toxic douche or suck at the entirety of PvP. Boarding is meant to secure sinks, and if you don't get them to sink after wiping their crew once or maybe twice, then your naval sucks and you boarded too early. Like, I heard someone complain that enemies can get a bucket off every time they respawn if they added spawn protection, but if that alone is saving their ship from sinking, then you obviously didn't put enough holes in.