Uncharted Waters Online: Streamline the Skill Grinding - We're not in 2004 anymore

Source: MMORPG

Uncharted Waters Online: Streamline the Skill Grinding - We're not in 2004 anymore

Hello everyone!

This post has also been shared on Uncharted Waters Online official forums and on UWO official subreddit

As an avid gamer of Uncharted Waters Online, I have found that the main problem of the game that scares off the huge majority of the players that do take interest in the game is the obnoxious, tedious skill grind that the game require you to take part if you want to progress on the game.

It's simply too long, too tiresome, and too repetitive. We're not in 2004 anymore, and skill grinding for hundreds of hours doing repetitive tasks isn't the industry default anymore. If the game wants to remain relevant in 2023 and beyond, it needs to streamline its skill system to make it easier and more accessible to players.

Let's start talking about the elephant in the room: Shipbuilding. UWO is a game about ships, and everyone wants to build better, bigger ships!

But the Shipbuilding skill has the shittiest, most tedious grinding process I ever saw in a game: the player needs to build and upgrade their ships repeatedly for several hundred hours. I just saw a table on another site and it says that if you're grinding "perfectly" (eg not losing any time between the ships), you would take 399 hours to reach the max, Rank 16 Shipbuilding.

It's literally 16 days without sleeping and ever leaving your computer. If we're thinking about a somewhat normal player that plays the game 2 hours per day, it's more than a half year fully dedicated to grind this skill.

The game could introduce new challenges or quests that require players to build or upgrade their ships in different ways, and giving out free shipbuilding experience to make the whole grind easier and faster. For example, the game could ask players to build a specific type of ship that requires unique materials or skills. This would add a sense of variety and challenge to the grind, making it more engaging and fun for players to acquire the Shipbuilding skill besides sitting AFK in a port waiting for your ship to be built.

Another obnoxious skill to grind is, obviously, Rowing. Rowing is an essential skill for players who want to sail fast in the game as it adds a % speed bonus. To level up this skill, players need to repeatedly sail with their ships indefinitely, which is both time-consuming and monotonous. This grind is not only tiresome but also discourages players from exploring the vast open world of the game: when you stop at a port or at a landing point to do stuff (trade, explore, etc.), you stop grinding your Rowing. So, to be more efficient, players just row away AFK and don't actually play the game.

How can we make the Rowing skill grind more engaging? My suggestion would be introducing challenges or mini-games that shows up while players are actually playing the game, representing different sailing environments such as choppy waters or strong currents. Players would beat the mini-game and receive Rowing experience. This would add a sense of variety to the grind and encourage players to explore different parts of the game world, as some mini-games would only show up in different, less-populated areas of the world (like Oceania, or South America).

Finally, let's talk about Adventuring skills like Biology, Theology, Art, Search, etc. If you try to grind those skills naturally, eg just playing the game around, doing explorations randomly, etc, you'll literally take several years to progress on the game. And, if you want to dedicate yourself to grind those skills, you'll have to get into an incredibly boring, repetitive task of farming dozens of the same Discovery Maps and then doing the same Discovery Quest over and over and over again.

In conclusion, the game NEEDS to make skill grinding more streamlined. No one wants to spend their free time doing the same task over and over again just to increase their skills in order to ACTUALLY be able to enjoy what the game has to offer. It's not a good gaming experience. Players just want to sail around and explore the incredible world of Uncharted Waters Online, not sit outside Venice building the same ship over and over again so they can actually upgrade their own ships.

Thanks for reading this post, and until next time!

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