Hi. This is just a comment about the recent discussion about grappling ships,
and losing crew that tarken and others have been discussing in the news. I
think a while back, a pretty well known player (I think it was Zerks?) posted
complaining about the relative schizophrenia in the various sailor crew
training systems. I very much agreed with that post and this little note is
just an attempt to expand on that post. My issue is with losing my "precious"
crew. I think losing crew to pirates, for lack of a better term, absolutely
sucks monkey balls. Let's examine why.

Under the current crew training system, it takes 25 crew training pts to raise
a crew sailor typefrom lvl 7 to lifetime, then 28 pts to raise him to lvl 8,
36 pts to lvl 9, 45 pts to raise him to lvl 10 (the max). Let's ignore the
costs to get him to lvl 7 (both in time and batcash). That totals 134
shippoints. Each pirate ship roughly takes about 25mins of combat time to
chase down, sink, board, and loot. But for the sake of convenience, lets cut
this down to 15mins, and say that the average take is 4 ship points. Ok so
1hr/15mins = 4. 4 looted ships/hr * 4 shippoints per ship = 16 total
shippoints/hour. 134 shippoints / 16 =roughly 8.5hrs. Therefore it takes about
8.5hrs of real life time running around looting ships just to make a single
class 10 sailor. Now, add 50% to this for magi, i.e. 13hrs. There's what? 25?
Sailors on a class 5 ship? So now you're talking 200hrs of running around the
batworld sinking ships to max out your ship just for the sailors?

The point of these incrediblecomplicated (LDO) calculations is to show that it
just takes a pretty incredible investment of time, effort and cost to build up
your ship. THe point of this game is to "pimp your character out" and that
applies to ships as well. If you want to make ship crew much more fungible,
then you need to change the crew training system so that it's MUCH easier, or
quite simply, people won't participate in it (or, I'm sure, less people will).
If you put 8hrs into killing some big bad mob, just to have the eq disappear
in a few days later, ask how often that mob would be killed. Well I guess we
have a mob like that in game, nightmare, and I bet you can just do a log
search to see how often its killed. People invest in certainty and they invest
in permanency. If you remove that, you need to totally revise the ship crew
training system in response.

That's my 2 cents.

Blayke Badass