i second this, fairly new to treasure hunting and though it's a great aspect to the game, i feel in a lot of ways it's been left abandoned to any new ideas/improvements. The way i see it is, adding/updating the ocean only makes this game more diverse and would attract people to enjoy more of the game contents.
word may get out that this game has a far more vast and interesting ocean than any other server and would initially attract more players, i know that would benefit not just the players but the devs themselves too.
in response to "not enough people interested in underwater for change" it may seem like a small or irrelevant thing to change but it doesn't harm to look at what could be improved. improvements big or small matter. it depends what you do and how you make those improvements that could turn something great into something fantastic. If a store refused to update it's stock it would lose it's customers over time, new stock brings new people.
that being said, i have a bit of a problem with the ghastly aura debuff. i feel the timer is a bit too long. To float one chest and then having to wait 120seconds to be able to raise another is time consuming and not many have that much time. i understand it's to stop botting but it just makes it harder for those who don't bot. the term (someone has to ruin it for the rest of us) comes to mind.
i suggested to reduce the cooldown, even just by a few seconds on discord and it was outright refused by one of the staff/devs without much thought. i'm not a botter but i can imagine how hard it is to bot under water as everything feels like it's in slow motion, and the time it takes to find a chest the botting program would likely run into a problem anyway. This debuff never used to exist at all, reducing the cooldown even slightly still helps prevent botting.
I understand the debuff was put in place with good intention, but initially it does take away in other aspects and because of this i ask you to please reconsider. waiting for a timer as going up and down for each individual chest (then waiting for the timer to finish when at the bottom) isn't time friendly, can get frustrating and the loot from the chests isn't worth that much work in the long run. If there's no chance of that changing then other things to make the water content more worth it.
if the submarine had an instant dive that shoots you underwater then that would make things a bit more less painful, even then i'll be sat there waiting at the bottom of the sea for what feels like ages because of the long timer. To increase the amount of items a sunken treasure chest drops, increase pack profit from sunken ships even a little, maybe even add underwater dailies that don't require a huge team to achieve it similar to the treasure event that give special items, would make the effort it takes to do underwater content more worth it. You might not agree with many things i said, but i would think you could find your own way to make things a little more even/improved by the suggestions made here on this post as a whole.
With anything comes trail and error, we wouldn't know if something works if we never try. I'm not saying you don't attend to the players or make any improvements as i see the hard work and dedication the staff put forward to helping it's players, but to write something off completely without thinking of all the possibilities is pretty dismissive of the concerns/problems players are facing.
This is what we read when we first open up the homepage (
free patron,
increased rates, Custom content, bonuses for new players and more) i underlined what i feel is relevant to this post. hopefully the underwater content will be put on the drawing board and be considered much more in the weeks/months to come.
not that they don't bot it because the content is lacking, which got confirmed above.