SHIP TRACKING : I find it of no use to locate PlunderBeacons if there is many Ships in the area....

popps

How do you feel about Ship Tracking ?

Personally, I am not using it at all.... especially when it comes to trying to find PlunderBeacons...

Most of the time I follow arrows that lead me to some Ship whether players' Pirates' or Merchants...

And it ends up being a waste of time....

So, I ended up not using it althougether and, instead, look around the Sea for Plunder Beacons....

What about you ? Do you use it much or do you also think that this feature is much lacking and could be improved ?

Faeryl

I use ship tracking all the time. But unlike you, I don't find running into pirates or merchants to be a waste of time, as I gather most of the resources for guildmates, keep some for myself, and toss the booze and dye tubs for cleanup points.

However, I do feel it could be improved upon. At least in that perhaps, if possible, they could use different style arrows to differentiate between player ships and NPC ships. So you're not constantly chasing down other players...

Uriah_Heep

Yeah most of the arrows I end up chasing take me to player ships that dont even have a player on them at the moment.  Waste of time in my book

Tanager

I am starting to suspect that the plunder beacons are on the same spawn-table as the ships. Meaning that if a ship or beacon is destroyed, either a new ship OR a beacon can pop up from the spawn node. That means that if people kill only beacons, and never ships, eventually you will end up with ONLY ships in that area. Just a theory, mind you, and kinda off topic from the OP.

As for tracking, I just kind of ignore it most of the time for the afore mentioned reasons. I prefer a grid by grid search pattern. However, if it is a slow day and not many players are in that area, tracking is kinda nice. As Faeryl suggested, different shapes or color of arrow would be very nice. Or some sort of tracking filter, like the skill has, where you look for specific thing. Monster, Player, etc.

Zamot

popps said:

How do you feel about Ship Tracking ?

Personally, I am not using it at all.... especially when it comes to trying to find PlunderBeacons...

Most of the time I follow arrows that lead me to some Ship whether players' Pirates' or Merchants...

And it ends up being a waste of time....

So, I ended up not using it althougether and, instead, look around the Sea for Plunder Beacons....

What about you ? Do you use it much or do you also think that this feature is much lacking and could be improved ?

  It is not a waste of time as Tracking narrows down which direction to search in.  I would suggest when you find something that is killable that you kill it and move on to the next target.  If it is not killable then here is what I do in the EC client. The red dots have the sextant coordinates on them.  If I head to a dot and it is a player ship I make a note of the location(write down the sextant numbers).  If I am hunting ships and I find a plunder beacon I do the same thing.   The system could be improved, I agree, but asking for improvements when you state you dont even use the system wont hold much weight with the developers.

If blindly sailing around is your cup of tea then more power to you.  But I bet with using tracking I can make better use of my game time.

Also it does seem that if you just kill the beacons in an area eventually they seem to all be ships by the end of the night.  If I kill everything I come across during an outing then I seem to not run out of plunder baecons to kill.