About a week ago I sent this list of "fixes and suggestions" to PotCO, I may as well leave them here for criticism too. The list is copy pasted from notepad.
SAILING
- Make cannons transparent while firing them. Currently for nearly all shots the cannon covers the most important part of the projectiles trajectory, where it lands. In order to see where or whether you've hit your target you have to move the cannon, thus losing your aim.
- Graphical Lag from Fury is absolutely insane. Even with the graphics all set for performance it gives severe lag.
- Some enemy boats are losing their texture and become invincible but they are still able to shoot invisible bullets that register no sound or graphic at you sinking you with a stealthiness.
- Allow for unwanted cargo to be removed from the boat or for Cargo Crates to not exist on boats above a certain level much like royal chests can't be found on the lowest level boats. Having to dock with half of your booty being cargo crates while sinking level 35+ ships is disheartening.
- After a recently killed enemy boat respawns they gain a super speed and turning buff of some sort. I'm not sure if this is intended or not but even the most skilled captain couldn't dodge this. They gain ground on top speed boats with ramming speed up.
- People can Pull their Boats up next to yours, zoom in, and click your body to pull up your menu and "go to" you to board your vessel uninvited.
- Allow for a "Walk the plank" option for people to remove others from their boat.
- Cannoneers need some way to gauge the distance they're shooting. I'd suggest higher tiered boats have lookouts placed in the boat that allow for a ring on the ground showing the vicinity your shot will land.
PvP
- There is no organized PvP. This is my biggest pet peeve. People activated this game to play WITH friends not AGAINST them. Allow for people in crews to queue up together and place them in a PvP match when an equal duo of opponents is found.
- Massive Latency issues plague the pvp areas. It makes doll kiting people zig zagging across a screen nearly impossible to attune or hit.
- When zoning in to the PvP areas screens tend to bug out and stay black. I experience this multiple times a day and have to close the game to remedy it.
- Skin PvP players according to team. Both can stay zombies just make one brown or something, finding your teamates can be tough.
INTERFACE
- The interface desperately needs a clock. You cant "tab out" of PotCO to your desktop to look at the time without another window up in the background.
- Interface size adjustments aren't working properly. The setting itself saves but the size adjustment won't apply itself until you pull up the options menu.
- Camera panning while moving and in combat is needed. I prefer to know what's going on around me at all times. Panning your camera makes for a more alert play style and would keep me from getting zerged by rock crabs so often
.
- Allow targeting for friendly crewed members. There's nothing worse than having to run up and attune someone in need of a heal. PotCO is designed to have everyone fighting and im assuming you didn't want people standing in the back lines and becoming heal bots, but the cooldown timers and the ability to kick out great dps with the voodoo doll fixes that. Give us the benefit of not having to chase down our teammates to attune them for a heal, latency makes it a huge problem.
- The report system needs to be more general. As it stands now I'm hesitant to report people for anything because my description comes in one of four options and they don't cover much. Allow a description box and "other" option for specifics if needed.
- Allow more customizations, movable interface, remapping of attacks on the hotbar.
WEAPONS
- Allow for some form of a respecialization system. People make mistakes and revise opinions. If you realise at level 35 that you've just wasted a month or two leveling a character with 5 points in hack (from dps number crunching it is a mathmatical waste at the moment) you're more inclined to quit the game rather than spend another 1-2 months getting back to where you were. Over time I suspect abilitys to change anyhow, it's only fair to allow a steep penelty for respecializing. I suggest 50k gold per point to discourage constant respecs but yet make it possiple to fix these "mistakes".
- Grenades are painful to level, not only do they do insane damage therefore yielding little rep they're also terribly hard to aim and can hit you. Warping mobs you're attempting to kill while backpedaling make you hit yourself with next to every grenade and promote hasty deaths. The grenades also need some form of ground target to show where they're going to land, as it is now, people would rather find an exploit to level them in an area where they cant be hit rather than level them legitimately.
- The doll ability Attunement is out of control in the pirate vs. pirate environment. Assuming someone can attune you once they can follow you around spamming poke and life tap for a relatively easy kill all while healing their team. This crushes the viability of the gun, dagger, voodoo staff, and all grenades for any pvp encounter. Pvp matches come down to doll kiting and possibly a few cutlass styles while someone is shackled for a little burst dps. Attunement needs to be looked at as well as the dolls DPS in pvp.
- The life tap graphic has the same effect as fury from cannoning. Extreme lag.
- Hex shot is absolutely worthless in pvp and is only used to bug out mobs in pve. Players regenerate voodoo faster than a 5/5 hex shot can sap it, any of it. While being hex shot spammed I stay near 100% voodoo. In pve mobs that use voodoo are being hex shot to no voodoo (3-6 shots depending on rank) and killed while they stand there motionless doing nothing.
- Dagger and Cutlass have pre requisite points already added when you obtain them. These points aren't necessary and, in fact, decrease the the weapons viability, the second style in both chains highly reduce melee weapons dps since they're not worth upgrading and only increase the duration of your weapon chain. Remove Pre reqs from swipe, slash, and sweep. This also could be remedied by increasing the growth rates of these particular abilitys by more than 25% per point to slightly increase their dps as a 5 point ability.
- The staff has an auto recharge exploit. Have your staff equipped and your spell selected, then switch to another weapon, then back to the staff. When you switch back to the staff hold down the left mouse click and voila, your spell has an instant charge. This negated the use of the reduced cast time passive ability and increases your dps for all spells by a marginal amount if you're dextrous enough to pull it off. Needs fixed.
- Weapon upgrades, other than the gun, are nothing more than a way to reduce your gold if you're at the 65k limit. They have no real noticeable dps increase and there is no graphical change on anything except the sword and gun. For the price of these +4 dmg (lol) weapons they should at the very least scream, "I'm 15+ of this particular weapon and wasted the money on this shiny thing to prove it". Make the graphical upgrade worth the splurge at very least.
WORLD
- Some corners of walls can be walked through thus make it so mobs cannot attack you. Many people are leveling ranged weapons this way.
- Some mobs warp below ground while still attacking you which forces you to run until they warp themselves back up. This is very apparent in the navy mobs inside the navy camp in Padres Del Fuego.
- Mobs cannot move up levels. People are bugging mobs out by running up steps and getting them stuck below, this is also a ranged weapon leveling exploit.
- If you're snared while zoning into another area the snare sticks to you permanently. Some times it will show the snare debuff above your character's health and you can simply get snared by another player (pvp) or mob (pve) to remove it. Other times no snare debuff shows up and you're forced to log out to remove the debuff.
- Stop penalizing people for increasing their damage output. Implement a formula for experience gained based on the mobs level compared to the the players notoriety and skill specialization level. Currently you're punishing people for adding points to skills forcing us to level using exploits and rank 1 starter skills.
Shifty~
[Edit] Some of these are repeats which im sorry about, like I said it was copy pasted. My apologies if it looks like I'm trying to hijack the thread
[Edit] Fixed some grammatical errors