Why I am Worried About the New PvP Hourglass Mode

One of the things announced alongside the removal of our doubloons was that, during part of season 19, sloop hourglass will be replaced with a 6 sloop free-for-all, where the last ship standing wins. I assume this will be in a separate area, and we were promised chaotic battles, but while this sounds good on paper, in practice, I have my concerns.

Lack of focus

A free-for-all sounds fun, but in a deathmatch scenario, a 2v2v2v2v2v2 battle has no focus what so ever. There is too much going on. In normal hourglass, sure, you can get third-partied by other people on the server you dive to, but you know who to target, and the third party is chaotic, but you have choices on how to deal with it. With 4 ships, you can still focus on one person too, but with 6 ships, even simple things like arranging truces become impossible. Arena mode understood this somewhat, but this new game mode does not.

Time constraints, and Sloops are tanky

People already complain that some hourglass matches go on for ages. And almost every time, the match in question happens on in sloop hourglass. Most of the time, the reason for this is because someone keeps on running away, but it’s possible for this to happen naturally. Why? Because sloops are deceptively tanky, and it’s much harder to get them to the point of no return. That’s why the meta is to send a boarder to stop you from repairing and bucketing.

In a 6 sloop battle though, it’s much harder to focus, and sending a boarder to finalise a sink will be much harder. And, frankly, it takes a long time to slow down and sink a sloop in general, because they need two chainshots, holes in the back of the ship aren’t as effective and the anchor is much quicker to raise.

All of this means that each 6 sloop battle can potentially go on for a really long time. When people already have short attention spans and complain about long battles, this will just cause more complaints.

On the flip side, although they have more players, brigs can sink more easily because they reach a point of no return, where one person bucketting can’t beat how quickly the water comes in. Galleons also have a point of no return if they let water get onto second deck. While a 6 galleon fight would also take forever, I think 3-4 brigs or galleons would lead to faster matches than 6 sloops.

A shrinking circle may help somewhat, but considering it’s taken this long to get the idea into insiders, it’ll be a little too late to do much.

We are relying on 6-12 people for matchmaking

Let’s be blunt, SoT is hurting for players. Servers are pretty dead and hourglass queues can get lengthy. Sure, sloop hourglass does fill up pretty quickly, but this game mode would still need to wait for 6 ships to come together than just two. I’m actually surprised they’re not starting with 4 sloop battles. With dwindling players, getting 8 people in a match is much easier than 12.

Making the game mode time limited does alleviate this by abusing FOMO (a fear of missing out) but we shouldn’t be doing that in the first place. No one likes time limited events.

Sloops are also kinda boring

The devs want all out chaos in this game mode. But sloops aren’t really that chaotic, doubly so when they are tanky and only have one cannon per side. It’s also unlikely that we’ll be able to bring in things like horns, kegs and disney sticks, so the most chaotic thing that can happen is someone getting chained, or maaaaybe someone bringing wraith balls. Galleons and brigs on the other hand, they are way more chaotic simply because there are more cannons and more people per ship. The sloop meta is far better defined than galleon and brig metas, and because they sink quicker, things get more tense and thus more exciting. You can also do riskier plays because you have more people.

Overall though, I just think this game mode is going to drag on. It’ll be chaotic, but chaos gets boring after a while. Doubly so since we already have established metas.