Advisory to stay clear of Naval Action.

[Flannery]

I think theDevs have shot themselves WAY toooo many times in their foot the last two years of development to really recover to greatness...
I dont know how long you have followed the game, so I am not insinuating you dont know what you are talking about - as taste and preferences are a personal matter, and luckily varies among people

But I have followed this game ever since BotBS's glory days and NA was first mentioned in the old general forum of Flying Lab - and it has been a string of disappointments ever since they strayed away from their original plan for NA...

I am staying way away from that game til I see proof of allot of change in many departments - and I dont expect them to deliver that promise.

 

[ptisinge]

I just discovered this thread - I have to say I feel the same about a lot of the negative points that were expressed here, especially the toxic community which reminded me so much of POTBS (I'm not surprised to see that it's probably because it's simply the same people).
I must say I've always been more of a solo player and enjoy a lot the slower pace of POTC, taking the time to simply sail around etc. Back then, I went to POTBS not to play pvp but mostly to have the opportunity to play in coop with my wife and friends. Back then the community managed to ruin it all quite quickly by harassing my wife almost every time she tried to play because she was a woman. It was just appalling to see how much this occurred. She got driven away from the game within a week.
With Naval Action, I got attracted to it because of the awesome sailing and finally a game with the ability to control sails individually. Sadly you're never given the opportunity to enjoy that sailing outside of combat - in the past I've been part of a few players asking for an opportunity to drop out of the open world map and into the detailed sailing engine (for example when sailing out of ports, or just anywhere on the sea), but this was ruled out - so there went my hope to juts sail around - sailing around in the open world mode is not satisfying. And then regarding combat, it became clear that all the things I disliked in POTBS, such as the constant ganking, would be back in NA, and from what I can see it's only getting worse.
Anyway, in short: help me Hearts of Oak, you're my only hope!

 

[Flannery]

Hey @ptisinge
I am sorry to hear your wife got shun away. The genre has too few women already as it is, too loose any from such distasteful behaviours.

I experienced almost the same with PotBS back in the days. My partner at the time started playing it with me, and we played it together for about a month before she dropped it because of one society in particular (which later became one the elitist guilds which now is in the inner NA circle) - and their constant harassment.

Now - she later begun playing again, but there were only the inner circle of our rather big society that actually knew she was a woman.

Our soc leader was a woman, and openly known as a female player. I was appealed at times of the type of harassment she had to endure - even though she is still widely known and somewhat active in the PotBS environment.

The whole soc was originally going to move to NA and continue our endeavors there - but as far as I know all have left NA because of the issues mentioned here in this thread already.

Me and my new partner (now my wife) also played BotBS a while after Portalus took over - as a direct result of us both totally loosing interest in NA. But sadly Portalus has not managed to bring any glory back to PotBS, and NA is toxic...

 

[ptisinge]

Unfortunately in our case the PotBS harassment was the nail in the coffin and my wife won't be returning to age of sails games. As far as I'm concerned, I may wait until I can play Hearts of Oak in VR before I return to the genre (VR has made it hard for me to play on monitor actually), while I think I'll enjoy playing VR Regatta (and someone else is also developing another VR sailing game as well right now) in the mean time.

 

[Captain Hog]

Its a shame about Naval Action.

I started playing Naval Action back during the sea combat trials phase where it was just quick battle lobbies. It was a huge amount of fun and I managed to get a lot of good communication and team work going across every rank from the smaller cutter/brig players right up to the frigates and SotL. Playing the Battle of Trafalgar with a full fleet forming battle lines with an appointed/voted admiral and issuing/following orders was fun and we were all very excited for "open world" to come.

I really enjoyed moving up from the small boats to the big guys, and nipping around the play in my little Snow raking the enemy while they tried to focus on our 1st and 2nd rates. I fell in love with the Surprise, my favourite Frigate and enjoying commanding a 3rd rate. However my biggest enjoyment of all came when I got my hands on HMS Victory, that was the highlight of the game.

However I stopped playing for a bit and when the game had flipped over to Open World, I never do like seeing my hard work grinding getting wiped, even in alphas/betas. I did give it a go for a bit but got rather frustrated with the lack of any map/chart telling me where I was, an ugly immersion braking place-holder UI for ports. The ability to change the guns on my ship appeared to be broken, earning money was a chore and I couldn't really see a way to engage in trading. The game seemed to be focused on combat, which is fine, but I do like to play a none combat captain from time to time, a simple merchantman or trader hauling cargo across the seas.

I never went on the forums and only ever used the in-game bug report feature so I have not seen any of this player hostility. My last real player interaction was during the combat trials which involved a lot of team-work and sportsmanship.

I hope things will improve as the game moves towards a proper official release.