Is this ship sinking?

Tobold recently posted:

Pirates of the Burning Seas announced they will close 7 of their 11 servers. In spite of the waffle about how their servers can handle more people now, I don’t think anyone is fooled: PotBS is losing customers fast. According to MMOGChart.com they started with about 65,000 subscribers, which already isn’t a whole lot, not even by pre-WoW standards (where we had an informal 100k-is-success rule). Now they probably lost more than half of that initial number, and you have to wonder how long that will be economically viable.

I really tried to like that game. But in the end it was too repetitive, and had too little content. Every nation having nearly the same quests, just copied and pasted, was a killer. I liked the economic game, but the PvP got into my way when I tried to enjoy the life of a trader. And the whole design of the freetrader class was horrible, having a class which sucked at both PvE and PvP just to be good at trading isn’t attractive enough. Now you could say its just me, but all the other blogs who took up PotBS with enthusiasm when it came out either went silent or reported that they stopped playing soon after. I predicted PotBS having a lack of longevity, but even I wouldn’t have thought it would sink so fast.

I fervently disagree with Tobold on the usefulness of the Freetrader, but other than that detail, I’m afraid he’s quite accurate.

As one of the organisers of what used to be the largest single Nation in the game, I’m pretty well placed to know how the population is changing, and the tragedy is, after an initial spike from the arrival of the refugees from the closing servers, our population is dropping away again, quite quickly. Already, folks on the remaining four servers are talking about player-initiated mergers. The release of Age of Conan on the 20th is only going to exacerbate an already bad situation.

Myself, I have found the lack of even the simplest community building tools to be frustrating. FLS said during Beta that they were making the game they themselves wanted to play. That sounds great, except that it feels like the majority of the designers would Bartle up as KAES. They simply do not seem to understand how players interact with eachother, and fail to realise that it is social bonds that keep people playing a MMORPG, long after they’ve done every quest. The Port Battle selection process is seemingly devised to be as divisive as humanly possible, causing a National argument before every single one.

Ship combat is PotBS is great fun, but almost every other aspect of the game feels like an afterthought, especially the laughably primitive avatar combat. If you don’t feel like doing ship combat, there is bugger all else to do. Crafting require no effort whatsoever, apart from hauling goods from port to port, which is not especially entertaining. If the majority of my time “doing economy” is spent alt-tabbed out to Firefox, or reading a book, while my ship travels across the map, I’m sorry but that’s not really fulfilling. The economy may be well-simulated, but there is no feeling of art to it. It’s just not “fun”. One MC Mediator is identical to any other, and there aren’t even any maker’s marks, and most trade is conducted anonymously through the horribly designed Auction House. There is nothing else to do. No fishing, no card-games, no musicmaking. The majority of entertainment I’m getting from PotBS right now is player generated, dealing with interguild politics and war planning.

The UI on release was pretty miserable. A couple of panels are getting brought into a half-decent state every monthly patch, but anyone who has ever been involved in developing UI for other MMORPGs will marvel at how long it is taking.

One final example. The world-builders spent, I think, four months building the new French Capital. A massive town, with equally impressive lag. A week after bringing it in, they’re responding to player complaints that it takes forever to get where you need to be in it, and so all quests and trainers are being moved to the front of the port. Making the 90% of it not at the front a complete waste of development time. Yes, it’s a beautiful city. Well done, but in the time taken to make it, they could have created any number of new environments for the Avatar missions (currently all missions take place in one of a very small number of maps), or many new regular port maps (Most ports currently share their map with three or four other ports). Simply bad time-management, and further lack of understanding of what players want, with disastrous effect.

It is possible that within a few months, PotBS will be sufficiently fleshed out that a free trial, and sending a free week out to past subscribers might be enough to get things back on track. If I sound bitter, I am, as I think this game did have potential, but I think it may be too late for it to serve as anything other than another case-study. Lack of experience and an extraordinary lack of foresight (Who could have foreseen that the French team would have found itself utterly outnumbered on every server except for the French speaking one? Everyone except the designers, apparently.) have combined.

I’m still playing it. I can’t just wander off when I’m running the faction’s forum, but there is going to come a point, fairly soon, when there’s not enough RvRers left to make it worthwhile any more. I know this sounds awfully doom-mongery, and part of me feels damn guilty about it, but things need to change, and change fast, if the Burning Sea is not going to be extinguished.

• Tweet