Streamline the Skill Grinding: We're not in 2004 anymore
Hello everyone!
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As an avid gamer of Uncharted Waters Online, I have found that the main problem of the game that scares off the huge majority of the players that do take interest in the game is the obnoxious, tedious skill grind that the game require you to take part if you want to progress on the game.
It's simply too long, too tiresome, and too repetitive. We're not in 2004 anymore, and skill grinding for hundreds of hours doing repetitive tasks isn't the industry default anymore. If the game wants to remain relevant in 2023 and beyond, it needs to streamline its skill system to make it easier and more accessible to players.
Let's start talking about the elephant in the room: Shipbuilding. UWO is a game about ships, and everyone wants to build better, bigger ships!
But the Shipbuilding skill has the shittiest, most tedious grinding process I ever saw in a game: the player needs to build and upgrade their ships repeatedly for several hundred hours. I just saw a table on another site and it says that if you're grinding "perfectly" (eg not losing any time between the ships), you would take 399 hours to reach the max, Rank 16 Shipbuilding.
It's literally 16 days without sleeping and ever leaving your computer. If we're thinking about a somewhat normal player that plays the game 2 hours per day, it's more than a half year fully dedicated to grind this skill.
The game could introduce new challenges or quests that require players to build or upgrade their ships in different ways, and giving out free shipbuilding experience to make the whole grind easier and faster. For example, the game could ask players to build a specific type of ship that requires unique materials or skills. This would add a sense of variety and challenge to the grind, making it more engaging and fun for players to acquire the Shipbuilding skill besides sitting AFK in a port waiting for your ship to be built.
Another obnoxious skill to grind is, obviously, Rowing. Rowing is an essential skill for players who want to sail fast in the game as it adds a % speed bonus. To level up this skill, players need to repeatedly sail with their ships indefinitely, which is both time-consuming and monotonous. This grind is not only tiresome but also discourages players from exploring the vast open world of the game: when you stop at a port or at a landing point to do stuff (trade, explore, etc.), you stop grinding your Rowing. So, to be more efficient, players just row away AFK and don't actually play the game.
How can we make the Rowing skill grind more engaging? My suggestion would be introducing challenges or mini-games that shows up while players are actually playing the game, representing different sailing environments such as choppy waters or strong currents. Players would beat the mini-game and receive Rowing experience. This would add a sense of variety to the grind and encourage players to explore different parts of the game world, as some mini-games would only show up in different, less-populated areas of the world (like Oceania, or South America).
Finally, let's talk about Adventuring skills like Biology, Theology, Art, Search, etc. If you try to grind those skills naturally, eg just playing the game around, doing explorations randomly, etc, you'll literally take several years to progress on the game. And, if you want to dedicate yourself to grind those skills, you'll have to get into an incredibly boring, repetitive task of farming dozens of the same Discovery Maps and then doing the same Discovery Quest over and over and over again.
In conclusion, the game NEEDS to make skill grinding more streamlined. No one wants to spend their free time doing the same task over and over again just to increase their skills in order to ACTUALLY be able to enjoy what the game has to offer. It's not a good gaming experience. Players just want to sail around and explore the incredible world of Uncharted Waters Online, not sit outside Venice building the same ship over and over again so they can actually upgrade their own ships.
Comments
hi, ya i get that the grind in this game can be long. Problem is this game was designed to be a long building mmog. But there are ways to make it faster. I made a comment on this point in another thread...
The grind... This is the biggest reason why people quit this game, the incredibly long grind times for some of the skills. This is not a game that gives 'quick rewards', you have to work for them or be satisfied with having less. This game is awesome when you first play it but it seems like it will take an impossible amount of time to finish some tasks and skills. People get frustrated and bored with the slow pace and leave the game. Papaya has helped in this area by offering constant buffs and many in game tasks get you rewards that give buff charms. If you do it right you can max pretty much any skill from a couple of days to a couple months now
As i mentioned there's many ways to decrease the time. Papaya gives regular server boosts and events as well as you can get skill boost charms in many different rewards from ingame tasks. Also there's a TON of vids and guides now for speed grinding pretty much every skill in the game. Some skills take much longer than others for a reason, it's because they are very powerful skills and so they take longer to keep balance.
Shipbuilding
This skill used to take forever to do but now it can be done from r1-16 in a few hours...
so as you can see shipbuilding can be quick if you follow different guildes.
Rowing
Rowing takes longer for a very good reason! It's probably one of the most powerful skills in the game mainly because unlike sail-handling, rowing can be refined for a massive boost in speed. This puts row ships at a significant advantage over sail ships that can only rely on the one skill. Also gear with sail-handling skill is FAR rarer than rowing gear. It's unfortunately a fact that this skill will take you and even the rest of us a long time to build (i'm still not a full rank yet lol). There are vid's though that offer guides and suggestions to maximize the rank points you'll get when you do grind it.
Adventure
Discovery skills also have ways to grind quick but when it comes to adventure, this part of the game is designed to be more slow paced it seems since many of the 'adventures' you go on do have a large amount of traveling to complete. And since the game has thousands of discoveries, it will take time to complete them all. One trick I used back on gama server, was that everytime i was in a town with a archive i'd just grind out a round of maps., Most of the time I wouldn't need to do the maps because i was only grinding rank points. If you flip back and forth between 2 close cites (like seville and lisbon) then you can grind up your ranks points quite quickly going back and forth (remember to always have boosts on). Talk to people in game on world chat and you can pick up many useful tips.
I hope this helps, yes this is a long grind game but then again so are many games. This one just is set up to take longer in order for a player to enjoy the content more. Jus remember...
This is not a game that gives 'quick rewards', you have to work for them or be satisfied with having less.
The grind is deliberate which is why so many spend real money on the game due to lack of patience
This is the biggest reason why the game is in the lower player base rankings
New players usually don't last beyond say lvl 60 battle or end up spending
In reality the game should be loaded with 100's of players but the increase in shop items which are not obtainable in game especially ships that are 10 times better and things like having to spam quests for patriot awards, not to mention the rather pathetic cost of items that new players will not be able to buy until after a few weeks are the reason the game died from the wonder ways when it was popular.
They do it the wrong way like many games - they create more paywall items due to greed but end up with a game with fewer players costing them more
@DRGoodfellow In reality the game should be loaded with 100's of players but the increase in shop items which are not obtainable in game especially ships that are 10 times better and things like having to spam quests for patriot awards, not to mention the rather pathetic cost of items that new players will not be able to buy until after a few weeks are the reason the game died from the wonder ways when it was popular. They do it the wrong way like many games - they create more paywall items due to greed but end up with a game with fewer players costing them more
This is clearly OFF TOPIC and irrelevant to the thread. If you want to talk about this subject then by all means make a thread. Regardless of any problems with the game you might have, Iuizeb clearly plays anyway and just wants to have a easier enjoyment for their game which is why they made this thread. If you don't enjoy the game then you're welcome to move on to another or make a discussion thread for people to give their input.