My Feedback On Pirate Raids

[lakhnish]

The beta was finally stable enough to where you don't crash every second (for the most part), so I was finally able to play out the new content in my pre-existing survival world (and a fresh world) and this is my feedback on it, with some of this being said elsewhere.

Finding the island:

To find the island, the best way I've found is this: the map is a square so just explore the ocean map in a square in the rough levels of water and you'll either find the Moon Quay island or you'll get a Pirate raid that lets you know that you are in the right area.

However, in my case, I got my Pirate Raid, bribed them with a Banana and still had to spend some more days trying to find the island (it could have been in two spots for me). I think that if you beat a Pirate Raid, the first pirate stash that the player reads should be tell you where the island is for sure.

The problem I can see with this is scaling it for multiplayer because the stash generates based on monkeys stealing the items, not when players actually read the map, as far as I can tell (so you can get your stuff stolen by pirates and lose the raid, but you can find the X-marks the spot without the stash map if you look for it, as far as I can tell. It should probably instead generate after the player reads the map instead, but I don't know how difficult that would be).

Dealing With Pirate Raids:

Late-game, I think the main issue is the Prime Mate:

• If Prime Mates' crash into a Sea Weed, the Sea Weed attacks the player, even though the player was not the one who crashed into the Sea Weed! They should attack the Prime Mates' boat instead for being a bad driver.
• The Prime Mate's attack rate is pretty fast for a strong weapon; the attack rate can at least be as fast as how Powder Monkeys currently attack.
• The bigger issue is that the Prime Mate will smack the player from the edge of their pirate boat, but won't won't actually ever hop onto the players' boat, which is probably intended else they'd try to row away with your boat! For this, I think it'd be better if Prime Mates only attacked the player if the player hopped on the pirate boat. It'd help since Prime Mates are the main rewards for the raid and you want to hop onto their boat so they don't row away.

Unfortunately, the best way to fight Pirates on the boat is to hold F; there just isn't enough room on the boat to kite the monkeys like you can on land.

For late-game, people are saying "just use Panflute" to deal with them, but imo, I don't think it's good if the only way to deal with something is to flute them. Fortunately, they can be dealt without a flute, but are very brutal if it's a Pirate Raid + something else going on, such as being attacked by nightmares.

The game still crashes upon being Wonkey, so it's hard to comment on turning into Wonkey after a raid, but in theory, the raids should be a non-issue since the Pirate's don't attack Wonkey (though the raids will still occur and idk what happens with multiple people). It's just the problem of finding the island to undo the curse, as mentioned previously.

The amount of monkeys should also definitely scale on player age. Trying to deal with them early-game with basic logsuit + football helmet+ ham bats is pretty brutal, since they can tear your armor apart.

I found that it was only easy to deal with in the late-game if it was only the raid itself and I was in tip top shape. For future's sake in the late-game, I'm just going to carry Bananas to leave on the floor since that's very effective (and I don't need more raids unless I really want more Tricorns or Pirate Flags, since Bandanas are renewable via the Monkey Huts). 

Rate of Pirate Raids:

This one is hard to give feedback on, as sometimes the raids would happen back to back and that'd be too frequent and sometimes you have to wait a few days in order for just a raid to happen in zone 1.

At the very least, the rate of raids could use some tuning as well so that you don't get back to back raids.

 

[lakhnish]

Here's another thing I also thought of:

The raids shouldn't happen on coastal level of water. It would resolve pirate raids from occurring on the edge of the monkey island as well as raids happening near your dock/base in the event that your base/port is on range of the monkey island.

I can definitley see that as being a nuisance in the long run.