Ep. 403 RIP Doubloons!

Ahoy there, pirates! This week, I'm joined by Caleb as we sit down to talk about the Doubloon reset that's coming with Season 19, the overall cadence of Rare's development for the game, changes to Hourglass, and some other topics. Caleb wanted me to include the notes from the show so you can get an idea of what we chatted about for reference. Check them out below!

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--- Show Notes ---

Doubloons

• History

  • Earned by doing Bilge Rat commendations (Actually called bilge rat doubloons) > Stopped giving them away from comms, now through certain items (and insider rewards) > Added them to seasons

  • Used to buy stuff from the Black Market

    • limited time items themed around the updates > bilge rat voyages & letters of recommendation & convert to gold > past seasonal items

• Now

  • Now more “scarce” and while you can “earn them in small amounts at sea” (confirmed reaper chest & season track) main source will be a monthly event, and those sources will earn you smaller amounts.

  • Black Market: Past Seasonal items, Past limited-time items (don’t know if letters of recommendation or gold revert will remain)

    • Don’t want to argue limited-time items for the umpteenth time.

    • Seasonal items already come back for doubloons, now they will just be in the black market instead of their respective shops.

      • Blackmarket used to sell new recolors for gold, and one day Rare threw them all into their respective shops instead; why are we going backwards here?

    • Why convert the current past seasonal items to gold if you’re still going to charge doubloons for new past seasonal items?

    • What’s changing?

      • Past season in the black market instead of the respective shops

      • Past limited-time items as well

    • Doesn’t solve the issue of long-time players having nothing to spend doubloons on.

Dev Cycles

• 2018-2019: Big updates every couple of months with small updates in between

  • Small updates called Bilge Rat Adventures

  • From release to anniversary update

  • Hungerdeep > skeleton thrones, gunpowder skeletons, mermaid statues > cursed sails

• 2019-2020: Small updates every month

  • From a few months after the anniversary update to the festival of giving (2020 - 2nd one)

  • Fort of the Damned > Seabound Soul > Festival of Giving > Legends of the Sea > Crews of Rage

• 2020-2023: Big updates every couple of months with small updates in between

  • Small updates are called events. Bile Rat Adventures was now just an umbrella section for commendations tied to the new updates.

  • Season 1 > festival of fishing, vault raiders > Season 2

  • 2022: Events dropped for Adventures

    • Season 5 - Season 8

      • The start of Season 9 had the last adventure

    • Events were now sparsely used for some time-limited things or to track stuff like community day

• 2023: Small updates every month

  • Season 9-10

  • Features released across the season

    • 9: Monkey Island

    • 10: guilds & safer seas

• 2023-2025: Big updates every couple of months.

  • Season 11-14

  • Notice I didn’t say small updates in between. There were, but they were mostly gameplay improvements and bug fixes. This was a period when we were really feeling that they were releasing things before they were fully ready.

• 2025-current (2026): Small updates every month

  • Season 15-Current (18)

  • These updates were all a part of one big theme. For example: Season 15 ancient megs, then hunting spears & ambient wildlife, wild boars & ambient wildlife.

  • Season 17 was intentionally spread feature release across the season, now in the form of acts.

• Of course, there were always delays and stuff

Recurring Events

• Seems like they’re setting up for the future. Get a suite of recurring events. Right now, we know of:

  • Last Ship Standing for Hourglass

  • Bilge Rat Weekender to earn doubloons

  • Molten Sands Fortress player-activated event

  • Smuggler Heist for smuggler loot at sea forts (key drop mechanic was cool by the way, would love to see this on a bigger scale)

  • Maybe Reaper Fortresses’ mega stash

Hourglass

• Commendation fixing

• Supply (baseline starts similar to arena’s equal starts)

• Circle (puts a soft timer on matches similar to Arena’s hard timer)

• Last Ship Standing (puts multiple sloops in a fight similar to Arena’s multi-ship fight)

• Friction

• Auto-Raising of emissary flags

• Lots of these things people been asking for since its release, glad they’re focusing on it now

• Commendation fixing

• Supply (baseline starts similar to arena’s equal starts)

• Circle (puts a soft timer on matches similar to Arena’s hard timer)

• Last Ship Standing (puts multiple sloops in a fight similar to Arena’s multi-ship fight)

• Friction

• Auto-Raising of emissary flags

• Lots of these things people been asking for since its release, glad they’re focusing on it now

File Size

• Currently: 129 GB (varies by console)

• 2019: optimization 47gb to 27gb

• 2022: 85 GB

  • And, Overwatch 2 is 22 gigs.

  • CoD Warzone 2 is 26 gigs.

  • CoD Modern Warfare 2 is 72 gigs.

  • Halo is 50 gigs.

• 2024: 103gb

• Helldivers: optimization 154gb to 23gb

  • “These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used…We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11%.”