Post by
YourMomSA | 2021-06-25 | 14:48:11
You can, but it's risky and you have to be willing to live with uncertainty and stress the whole time... Between the 5-minute cycle updates, your ghost boat's position is approximate and doesn't necessarily match what's on the server. The grounding will be calculated based on what's on the server. You've likely noticed that when the wind is shifting rapidly and you're sailing a TWA angle, sometimes you'll get jagged edges in your trail, because the UI jumps your boat from its ghost track to the calculated server position with each 5-minute update. Your actual path wasn't jagged... It was on the track of the calculated 5-minute positions. And if you close the window and re-load, when you come back, your trail will show the server position track, not what was your ghost track with jagged corrections.
So... in situations like that, let's say you make a sudden turn to starboard around the tip of an island. Well, if the wind was stable and your ghost boat's position was accurate, you're fine. If not, then you might find that at the next 5-minute update, the server positions decide that you turned too soon, into a beach party.
The benefit of waypoints in those situations is... accuracy of the ghost boat (UI position) won't matter. It'll sail to each waypoint. The only thing that can get messed up is that it might get to a waypoint sooner, or later, than expected... But the course sailed will be identical in the server and the UI.
You can't skip over land. The grounding checks aren't based solely on your position at the end of each 5-minute cycle. (I think that may have been possible in a very old version of the game, before I started playing in 2014... I remember hearing something about it). The game checks your whole track between the 5-minute cycles (using server positions, not ghost/UI positions).
Of course, another challenge with WP is that you can't set the first one within a certain perimeter of your current location. So you need to get a chain set in advance, or hand-steer as best you can.
If you have Full Pack or VIP, the best thing is to set a string of waypoints around the contour of the island (assuming that's what you want to do, tactically), and then leave it alone and let it do its thing. Don't intervene unless you get an indication that you're aground. Don't tweak and adjust waypoints while you're close to hitting waypoints. If your ghost boat sails through a waypoint and then you change things before the server registers that you've hit the waypoint (or vice-versa), and then you confirm some changes to a later waypoint, or add one, you can get all sorts of weird impacts, such as your boat turning around to go back to that waypoint before turning to go forward again. VR has corrected a lot of bugs like this... It works much better now than it did a few months ago... But there are a few things in the game where it pays to be paranoid, and this is one.
If you don't have Full Pack or VIP, then it gets difficult due to the 2-WP max. I did Solo Maitre Coq on credits without VIP. I was very competitive and sailed the contours of every island rounding. To do so, I had to set a new second waypoint every time I hit a first waypoint, before hitting the next one. This meant that sometimes I had to do it when the ghost boat arrived, before a 5-minute cycle ended to confirm. It worked... Hence my statement that I believe VR has corrected a lot of the bugs. Maybe all of them. But it took constant attention and I found it stressful.
The killer was... after all that, I grounded when exiting the last island terrain, for confusing reasons. There's a causeway from Ile de Re to La Rochelle, and the West end of it appears to exist in the game as a very narrow "land" element. There must be some minimum granularity of time for the game's grounding calculations. Because I ran aground on it, and I could see in Dashboard that others had sailed through the same water (and even closer to Ile de Re) without running aground. Others also grounded (some further out than me). Best guess is that it was a matter of how the timing cycle of the grounding calculation matched up against your movement over the causeway. Not sure. Frustrating, but on the other hand, perhaps not unrealistic. If a large fleet sails through risky rocky waters, there will be some apparent randomness to who wrecks their keel.
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