Universal Seabeard - (by Backflip Studios)

I agree I've been playing a little while now and I want to love this game but it could be so much better than it is.

Cash rewards are very low for some things, fish seem deceent for a base commodity but the rest aren't very good. It does take a while to earn money and upgrades and buildings do cost a lot.

The seabeard manor was pretty expensive but a bit of a let down for an empty building that brings visitors who constantly offer me less than I could get for my items anyway with low offers for fish and everything else, it should at least be an offer of their base value that I'd get selling them in the shop.

Mini games as we all know are stupidly hard and horrible and need changing and for some reason lately nearly all of my games are always the same one on hard! Still never seen any dynamite.

Energy now they made it a little better but it's still limiting especially as I hear there are more islands to unlock? My idea is why not keep the energy although finish tweaking the amount and regen time. But let people travel from island to island for free, the trick being that you can't play a mini game. You have to pay energy to play mini games when going between islands so that was it controls rewards from them while still allowing you to play as much as you'd like.

 

Maybe not the best, but better than just going "this game sucks blah blah blah" without actually trying to give any constructive feedback, like how can it be made better.

Actually there has been a lot of moaning, and to be fair a lot of helping out as well. Guess I was just seeing the negative yesterday

Wouldn't fix the fact it's too hard/long to earn money to actually buy the thigs you need to progress and feel like you have achieved something.

 

Good idea you had.

 

I don't read all of the comments, or if I do I usually forget them soon after.

 

So, I "worked" hard for days to get everything for the Seabeard Manor. Also spent all my Pearls, as there weren't any Wooden Spikes when I played and won the "Dangerous Waters" minigame half a dozen times (which also cost me Pearls, as I had to "change minigame" several times for it to appear in the first place).

So, the great moment comes! All green checkmarks. Tattttatttaaaaaaaaa!!! Click on "build" and BAM!!! ...it asks for another 4000 coins. 4000. 4bloodythousand!!!!!

What a wonderful surprise! The developers definitely understand how to treat and reward their players! How to give them the sense of achieving something.

This is just a crazy bad prank made on us. Too crazy even for a South Park episode - nobody would believe that THIS kind of game "design" exists...

(Yes, I am bitter (now))

 

Oh yeh tell me about it, after you get everything it'll tell you how much money you need too!

I usually get most things pretty easy but it is annoying the way it all works and so far the only building I've done which felt rewarding was the warehouse.

 

The balance of coin payoff from fishing vs crafted items (including cooked food) is peculiar and I'm curious if it changes later in the game. In terms of game progress, I have three traders, a warehouse, and everything ready for rebuilding the manor except the coins, which I'll probably drop on the 2nd crew house before the manor.

So far, fishing is a much more efficient way to earn coins than anything else: fish spawn (ha) quicker than anything else, are plentiful & common, don't require an investment in a recipe, don't require a trip to a crafting island before selling (and another to pick up if you leave), don't require time to craft secondary ingredients, sell in a reasonable amount of time, and yield (in my opinion) a reasonable amount of coin.

Whereas even the simplest and cheapest crafted items take far more time and energy and require an additional trip and are made of things that don't have a guaranteed spawn. Apple juice is a good example of a simple one: Selling it pays the same as the most common fish, but takes three green apples (which only fall from a tree about half the time, IME), runs to several islands and a half hour of crafting. More complex crafting (pancakes, the painted toys, etc) are exponentially more difficult and time consuming, without a corresponding yield.

If the developers are still listening or someone contributing to this thread is further along than I, my question is this: does this change later in the game? Because right now, I don't see a reason to fill my bag with anything other than fish, unless I have a quest that needs something.

 

If anything, fishing gets a little better because you can upgrade and catch better fish (not hugely better though)

 

Thanks for the info, although that makes the balance even stranger. I realize that diminishing returns are a big part of how games like this are designed, but it's very odd for there to be no advantage at all to more complex crafted items.

I'll wait and see what having more of the buildings / crew unlock, and in the meantime only craft stuff if they're related to a quest.

 

Hi all,

I just wanted to let you know that the 1.02 release should be live shortly. This includes:

* Fix for GameCenter login issue - this should resolve crashes at startup.
* Accelerated path for food trader - big reduction in cost for the requirements to get your food trader up and running which should help reduce pressure on your inventory early on.

We'd recommend updating when you can. This new build also allows us to tune the game more effectively (including travel costs). We'll be working to improve the experience over the next few days, so please bear with us!

In the meantime, we've been listening to your feedback and have plans to improve a number of areas (including sailing mode difficulty) and are working on the next major release which we hope will address much of this.

Thanks,
Simon (HandCircus)

 

uh-oh, max energy is back to 4 again! Is this just a mistake due to new release? Or is it meant to be a slap on the face?

 

Nope, not a slap on the face! We are exploring unlimited airship travel. Once you update to 1.02 (hopefully very soon!) airship travel will be free, although there will still be limits on the number of sailing challenges that you can play (current limit is four, which is what you are seeing). Thanks for all of the suggestions on this.

 

Very happy to hear your giving that a try, I hope it works out the way you want it to.

 

Yeah, thanks for listening!

 

Challenge-specific items like screws are hard to come by at the best of times. Been putting close to 3hrs a day into this game since soft launch and The shortening of the fuel leash might turn me off now. Been looking for a screw for 3 days but still getting on with all my usual trading. I'm wondering how long that might take now.

Couple of other notes - I think pearls are still too hard to come by in the early game. Few more from 12hr quests would be good. Coins are plentiful from trading and crafting so I tend to avoid the small quests if they're not economically sound

Also, maybe it's just me but while frame rate is great during 90% of the game, when playing sea-faring mini games I get frequent frame drops making me miss slaloms, making mines unavoidable or misfire my cannon - insanely infuriating given my first comment.

I love this game. I really do. You guys have done amazingly with it but the fun factor is slipping away from it a bit. For me anyway. Hope the final launch is as solid as I know it can be.

 

I'm looking forward to the update. I hope to see the sailing medium/hard levels reduced. I have had the blueprints for the warehouse for days but unable to beat any of the medium/hard levels to get the dynamite to clear a large boulder. Every time I win a medium/hard, I get an item I don't need.

 

Yes!
got the update this morning, and it has severely re-ignited my passion for this game!
It now actually feels like Animal Crossing/Wind Waker

 

Thanks for listening to the feedback. A couple of suggestions about refining this further:

First, you're still stuck on the current island if you have zero tokens and an active smuggling mission. This just happened to me. It's true you can opt to reject the mission if you know you have no tokens, but you don't see the available tokens when on an island. Any of allowing airship travel while having a smuggling mission, displaying the token count at all times, or making it possible to trash a mission would fix this.

Second, you might consider tying the max number of tokens with player level or number of discovered islands or something. Lots of games with energy systems use player progress to determine max turns, and it works pretty well.

 

When is this coming out in North America?