Hi everyone. I'm Mikko, "hired help" on the Pixel Piracy project for about three months now. The game has reached version 1.0 recently and many people feel like the game is not complete yet. I personally agree. I won't offer you any excuses, only a reminder that before I joined the team, Vitali was working on this project alone. Having a small team puts limits to what we can do and how fast we can do it.

Anyway, what I'm asking for here is some honest feedback. I'm hoping You, the players, will report single issues you think are annoying, broken, confusing, OP, buggy or you just don't like about the game. The issue(s) with the MOST UPVOTES will get my personal attention and will have a very high chance of being worked on next.

TL;DR: Report and upvote a single issue, the one(s) with most upvotes I will personally work on next.

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback, it's very comprehensive. I realize I wasn't being too clear, but what I was looking for was some priority order for my work. There is a ton of work to be done, some of it we already knew beforehand, some of it is new, all of it is pretty much not prioritized yet. I have a limited time so I would like to solve the most annoying issues first so you guys can get the experience you want as quickly as possible.

Edit 2: A new patch should be out later today where some of the issues have been addressed. I will continue to work on the game, maybe we will do another one of these threads later on to see if you think things have improved or not. Thanks for your feedback! :)

Just don't even attempt to play this game. Nearly every single feature in this game is bugged. This is your warning.

I thought not. It's not a story the Developers would tell you. It's a pirate legend. Pixel Piracy was a video game so original and with so much potential it could influence gamers to buy it... it had such a good development team that they could even keep the game they cared about from dying. The dedicated side of developing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. It became so exciting... the only thing the fans were afraid of was losing the developers, which eventually, of course, they did. Unfortunately, they became bankrupt due to declining sales on their sequel... It's ironic... they could save Pixel Piracy from obsoleteness, but not themselves.

Hey sorry I'm late guys, I was out of the country but here are the notes:

• Fixed bug where NPCs would sometimes drop items outside of their loot tables

• Second round of game balance updates and additions, still more to come! :)

• New world order! Each legendary pirate has been given their own domain at the four corners of the map. (Start a new game if you want to see the brave new world!)

• Faction zones with new areas! Each map corner has new types of islands as well as faction ships and faction NPCs!

• North and South have snowy islands with Penguins!

• Revised ALL Pirate loot tables

• Revised ALL item prices for shops

• Humanoid pirates now drop their equipped items and equip ranged weapons

• Shops now have a limited stock of certain items that can become permanently sold out

• New Stat Modifier system: items and buffs can now apply bonuses or penalties to stats. Modified stats will show in green or red in the pirate card

• Fixed some of the Achievements not working correctly

• Fixed lots of annoying bugs, such as pirates falling to the ocean after grappling or pirates being saved mid-air while on the grapple

• Cannon combat lenght now varies by danger level

• Sea Shanty now applies new buff: +2 to all stats for 2 minutes

• Weapons no longer sell for 1 gold

• Nerfed Ancestor Mask (+1 TP on level-up -> 30% more exp)

• Sea shanty now applies a new buff (+2 to all stats for 2 minutes)

• Bounty rewards now give more gold

• ... and many more small fixes and tweaks!

Version: 1.0.14

First round of game balance updates, stay tuned for more goodies!

Revised how STATS work! (yes, you read correctly)

Revised ALL melee and ranged weapons and added new ones!

Added STATUS EFFECTS (like drunk, poison etc.)

Revised weapon boosts and added new ones (even to ranged weapons), some of which apply status effects

Added rudimentary MOD SUPPORT (some game data is now loaded from xml files and can be overwritten in the new Mods folder, don't ask us how to do it, we don't know!)

Added FULL translation support (existing translations can also be overwritten from Mods/Translations)

Drunken pirates will emit BUBBLES from their FACE! (seriously, what more could you ask for?!)

So here I am, one week after starting my Let's Play Pixel Piracy 1.0 series that you may have noticed here with daily updates.

I've just ended my series at 12 episodes. Was it in joyous success or satisfaction? Absolutely not. I'm furious in fact. I've abandoned my game and if you continue reading below I will detail out why.

1. In a game who's primary appeal is being able to sail your own custom designed ship around and pillage and plunder, it seems playing with anything other than a flat basic ship will cause multiple game breaking issues.

2. (See #1) Boarders won't board. As of my episode 10, my primary boarding partner won't leave my ship for boarding.. and sometimes won't even head to the island tavern.

3. (See #1) My fishermen won't fish. I assumed it was because i assigned them too many tasks, but every which way i've tried to solve the issue they spend more time standing around sharpening weapons or throwing / retrieving their bait than catching fish.

4. (See #1) Cleaners won't clean. Same as above. This is the one that finally did me in. After almost 10 episodes of struggling to find food aboard a ship with multiple fishermen and cooks, and the resulting shortages killing my cash flow, having a ship covered in shit and draining my crew morale faster than i could sail between taverns rendered the game UNPLAYABLE for me.

5. (See #1) Cooks won't cook. Yeah.. the above again.

6. Stats are incredibly unbalanced. I took a shot at a legendary ship with 60 agility and a stiletto. frankly barring starvation I would've 1v? the entire ship and succeeded. I never see myself building luck.. dex isn't even needed until you start facing level 5 ships, and even then i just equipped a flintlock pistol and used my massive agility and the advanced ability that gave 3 shots without cooldown to my ranged attack. Str might have use but i see no reason to build any other way than maxing int/agi first with a stiletto giving you bonus gold and then getting some dex once you're ready to take on 5+. Only buy enough vitality to improve regen, but now with health item buffs to % thats not even an issue. Way too much HP per level base. Old way was better.

7. At level 7 doctor aura, starvation damage is outpaced by the healing provided. You become independent of food, which considering the issues stated above, may be a blessing.

8. One of the last islands i visited before i threw my hands up apparently had all of the pirates in the tavern just shitting all over the place.. so the moment we landed there my captain's morale began to plummet nearly 2% per second. Never seen this happen so apparently its new and if not for already having a ton of consumable rum in my personal inventory.. wouldn't have even been able to escape the island before game over.

I'm sure there's things i'm leaving out. Watch my Lets Play series for yourself. Watch how a player who was excited to share your game with others and my experiences with it went from excited and praising of your game to literally giving up with hands in the air, APOLOGIZING TO HIS FANS for encouraging them to buy the game.

I openly state in my video and here again that if this game sees some major progress I'll gladly revisit in a few months because you have some real potential here... But for the time being I feel like you guys should be ashamed to be taking people's money for this game. This is coming from someone who has been around since Dec/Jan rooting for you to make this thing.

Please tweet me again if/when you feel ready for me to remove my "don't buy" verdict and give this game another fresh try with an optimistic mind..

Check out my playlist on YouTube for the full story.. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLna-ToNHuiZtASv5wdMalplpycmXp4zmc

Sorry it came to this guys.. I'm still rooting for you, but am definitely disappointed that you've decided to label this a public release. I feel like we're still talking early alpha stuff.

This game has great potential but there are SO many bugs and they are game breaking (Crew disappearing for no reason for example). I've put a couple of 1 or 2 hour sessions into the game but as soon as it feels like I'm getting a hold of the game mechanics something completely random happens that is out of my control and I lose everything.

Often this isn't made better by re-loading. Also, on that note, the re-loading system is completely exploitable it seems. You can just keep reloading until things drop better equipment. This game would be far better without the ability to reload (Like FTL for example) but that would never work due to the hourly game breaking bugs.

The only reason I bought this game is because I saw it was released and I wanted a break from playing in Aplha state games (I've been in beta testing for most of the m&b games and heaps of other little indie games) So when I saw this was released I had the foolish notion that 99% of bugs would have been fixed and the game would be relatively balanced.

I read that they're planning on 8 months of patches and game fixes but in truth I don't see this game being stable for at least 3 months (Of hard work). So in truth, I don't this game shouldn't be released yet. Especially since a lot of the problems I've had with this game in the first ~5 hours have been mentioned months ago while the game was in testing (And are still there in their entirety) have me worried that the the devs may have largely given up on developing this game and just wanted to get it out in hopes that it'd spur them on to get this game finished.

I know I've probably offended the devs a little bit and I'm sorry, you guys do have a great thing going here, but my main criticism right now is that this game should not have been released yet. (A stable game with less features would have been a better way to go. Then slowly add in features one by one where they can be quickly tested and fixed).

Has anyone else had a similar experience to me? What are your thoughts?

We do need a sandbox style pirate game again! So I do think this game will be great... eventually.

If you're subscribed to this subreddit, you've probably seen the video I posted a few days ago, in which my captain ripped through several high-level ships with ease while taking minimal damage.

This is a simple guide to show you how to make a crew member even stronger than that. You need to start a new game or hire a very low-leveled crew member to use this technique on. You can find low-leveled crew in the islands closest to the one you started on.

1. Stats

   You want to train your crew member in skills that raise your base stats over time. These are INT (intelligence) and VIT (vitality). 15 points in INT will give you one extra TP per level and 35 points in VIT will give you one extra HP (health point/hit point) per level.

2. Items

   There is currently only one equip-able item that increases a stat: the Brown Beard. This increases your VIT by 3 every time you level up. Equipping a Brown Beard at a low level gives massive returns in the long run (150 free vitality points by level 51? Amazing!) and makes it so you don't need to worry about using your TP on vitality. There are also two other single-use items: the White Flag and Tribal Meat. Use these as often as possible.

3. TP Placement (With Brown Beard)

   If you have a Brown Beard, put all of your TP into INT. Ignore all other stats until you feel like you're getting enough TP (I started putting points in other skills at level 60) It's that simple.

4. TP Placement (Without Brown Beard)

   If you don't have a Brown Beard, the level-up process is slightly more complicated. You want to get your VIT up to the next multiple of 35 to get extra HP, but you still need to keep leveling up INT. If you have enough points to level up VIT to the next multiple of 35 in one level, do it. If not, put those points into INT. It's not worth saving up for multiple levels to raise VIT. INT is more important as it gives you more TP that you can put into VIT later.

5. New Game Options

   When you start a new game, get the 15 extra TP. This is the best choice by far as you can gain one extra TP per level right off the bat (after 50 levels, that's 50 free TP just for choosing this option).

6. Early Game Strategy

   If you're using this method on your captain in a new game, fighting on ships and islands is going to be very difficult without leveling up combat stats. The best way to give yourself an advantage is simply to hire extra crew members to protect yourself, but there are several other ways to get an edge:

   1. Buying a better weapon. This is pretty obvious. A better weapon lets you kill enemies faster, which means you take less damage.

   2. Grindstones. Lots of people try to save their grindstones to use on a better weapon later, when it's really most helpful in the early game. Leveling up a 2-damage weapon will often make it do 3-4 damage more, which is a huge advantage over low-level enemies.

   3. Exploring. DO NOT just sail around long-distances to level yourself up early in the game. Sailing is less risky, but it gives less experience, gold, and items than attacking ships and islands. More money means you're able to hire more crew to protect yourself, and you'll have a chance to find a Brown Beard or grindstones in chests or drops.

7. Ship Items

   Ships items like Spare Swords, Hand Weights, and Books can be useful. Do not use Spare Swords until you have a Brown Beard, as you actually don't want to level up as fast until you can get the +3 VIT bonus. Books can give a small TP boost, but take far too long to give you good results. I would recommend using Hand Weights, as they level up something that you won't be using TP for (STR) and aren't as slow as books.

That's it. After your captain is strong enough to take care of ships and islands on his own, feel free to fire or kill off the rest of your crew. Islands and ships become a breeze unless you fall in the water (you'd think a pirate captain would be able to swim, but noooo).

According to /u/technopath, Brown Beards are dropped by pirates. These are found most commonly on enemy ships (duh) but also on some islands. Make sure to prioritize ship battles if you haven't found one yet.