Sea of Thieves – Fight Back, Dammit!
The other day, Stormcloud made a massive amount of gold, as well as making progress on ledgers and things like that. Not only did we manage to make over 350k gold, we also sank a few ships and I got to level 79 on the season. But the sinking of ships was rather odd. We sunk three ships and, well, none of them fought back.
Why?
I have no idea!
Seriously, one of them we managed to keg, with Fox taking an obvious rowboat all the way to the victim ship, and easily managed to detonate not one but TWO kegs on the ship with hardly any trouble. The others, one was just floating with no one around, and the other tried to run but weirdly ended up sailing directly into our line of fire, despite having the wind behind them and being generally faster than us.
But for some reason, no one bothered to fight back. In fact, the crew from one ship shouted the words “We’re friendly!” as we sunk them. But if they genuinely were friendly, they’d have the alliance flag, the universal symbol of friendliness. They didn’t, they were a standard emissary, and thus a valid target. And they only shouted that they were friendly AFTER we sank them. Not a word was spoken as we chased them down. One ship even turned at some point to face us, but they only fired one cannon ball at us, which completely missed. The kegged ship was particularly easy to chase because it had a glowing beacon from a Reaper Chest. A chest that people are known to hunt down and steal, because of the massive beacon.
I mean, come on, the whole point of the Reaper Chest is that it’s risk versus reward with its massive beacon that shows people exactly where you are.
It’s not like these ships didn’t have cannon balls either. I’d understand running if you have no ammo. But one of the ships we sank, we managed to grab about a hundred cannon balls and we were running on deck with three cannon ball crates. We didn’t have to buy cannon balls because we’d managed to earn them by sinking other ships. There’s no reason to hoard cannon balls, the best place to use them is to sink things. And we chose to sink other players’ ships, because why not. It’s a pirate game after all.
It really bothers me though that people will just run and not fight back. Or heck, not even bother to run. Just staying still and letting someone sink you. Any time Stormcloud has been attacked, we fight back, as hard as we can, to protect our loot. But other people clearly don’t think the same way. They’d prefer to drag things out by running away, rather than fighting back.
Okay, sure, it’s unlikely that you’ll beat veteran reapers like Stormcloud’s crew, but you never know, there’s a chance that you could win. And if you do, congratulations, you deserve the treasure. And if you don’t win and you sink? Well, it’s all practice for next time.