I was asked to write, for the Boarding Party, what I considered the greatest problem with Pirates of the Burning Sea to be. This is what I wrote:
I play on the Roberts server, and I run my Nation’s forum, and coincidently am the chairman of the British Council of Guilds. I’m a talky type player, and as a result of these things I know a large proportion of our population.
I don’t know what your stats show, but I know what I feel. I’m being bombarded with goodbye messages. I can’t even muster up a decent force to flip a port any more. The initial lift to our population from the mergers has passed, and we are once again in a downward trend. In this thread, I, and the others, will try to explain why we think this is happening. Please understand, every player has their own combination of things which is making them unhappy, and these are just a few of them.
1. The Self-Inflicted Mission-Grinding Roundabout of Ultimate Tedium
There are certain high-end missions that are extremely profitable. Urgent Fury(and it’s follow-ups) and Woes of Santiago are two. By deliberately failing them they can be repeated ad infinitum. The “feature” that causes anyone kicked from a group to also be kicked from a mission instance allows these missions to be ground at zero risk. This is what is called the path of least resistance. Players will always follow that path, and in this case it leads them to literally spend hundreds of hours repeating the same mission. This burns people out.
Why do they do it? Because their guilds desire 1st and 2nd rated ships. But when, finally, through the labour of many people these ships are finally built, there is another problem. Most players are too frightened to use such a ship in any situation where they have the slightest fear of losing them. As by losing such a ship, they are not only losing it for themselves, but they are letting down their guild in a massive way, throwing hundreds of man-hours of mindless grinding out of the window.
Thus we have the situation we have seen on Roberts. A Port Battle between Spain and Britain goes like this:
The two sides catch sight of eachother.
They count eachothers high rated ships.
The team with the least high rated ships exits the battle.
The answer, especially for the losing side, is obviously to make more high rated ships, and so the grinding begins again. Except this time with fewer people.
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.
So, this blog has gone a little quiet for a month or so. What have I been up to?
The chief suspect is Pirates of the Burning Sea. I got quite heavily into it, running the forum for my Nation, and currently chairing the Council of guilds. My addiction seems to be waning though, so we might see a bit more posting here in the future.
Far more importantly, I was lucky enough to get the chance to do a week of work experience in the newsroom of Radio Broadland. It was a massive learning experience for me, and the folks I was working with were wonderful.
Even better, they hired me the next week to do some filming and film-editing for their website. Nikki Fox and myself travelled down to Wembley with Lowestoft FC in preparation for their FA Vase final on the 11th of May. Neither of us had ever done anything like this before, so I think the results turned out quite well, especially considering the only video editor we had was Moviemaker! If you look really carefully, you can see my head reflected on the side of the coach, and yes, that is me waxing lyrical about the joys of bacon.
Not got any more work coming up there currently, but I’m hoping they’ll get desperate enough to call me eventually. I’m missing the place like crazy.
I was recently asked to write an RP report on the recent happenings in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Unfortunately, it turned out they were looking for a straight journalistic report, rather than anything too fancy. But in the interests on never wasting anything, I may as well post my first unfinished draft (the only draft there shall ever be, now) of it here.
Sir Robert Walpole,
His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Kingdom of Great Britain,
First Lord of the Treasury
Sir,
I pray that this epistle finds you in good health, and enjoying your new role, and that the recent business with the South Sea company has not caused you any personal hardship. Myself, I was fortunate enough to have already moved all my financial stocks into the West Indias, though that was happenstance rather than any foresight on my part. In time I am sure that the economy of our Nation shall be revivified, and once again be the marvel of the modern age! Certainly, we shall never again fall into the trap of speculative “bubbles”.
For our part, here in Port Royal, we have scarcely even noticed the passing of the South Seas Company, bar the heavy financial blow the Mississippi Company took from it. The East India Company goes from strength to strength, and I would council it as a sound investment, at least until my own company becomes listed at Change Alley!
The French have finished the reconstruction of their local capital, Pointe-Ã -Pitre, and I am told it is a majestic sight indeed! With the finest gothic architecture transplanted from Europe, it may well become one of the most popular destinations for travellers and sight-seers. This will not do at all, and so I am pressing the East India Company for more funds for the rebuilding of Port Royal to an equal or greater splendour. It is a shame that our hands are bound by treaty, else we might well look to acquiring Pointe-Ã -Pitre for the crown.
The Astronomer Royal, Sir Isaac Newton, said recently, so the dispatches tell me, “that he could not calculate the madness of people”. If such a man as he cannot, then what chance your humble correspondant? The recent decision by your Parliament to return all captured holdings in the West Indias to Spain and France, has made many here wonder if the House has been paying the slightest attention to our struggles, the sacrifices in bone and oak, through which those ports had been won. I, of course, do not number amongst such people, and continue to be your most obedient servant, but I most surely hope that you gained the greatest of concessions in return, for the loss of those lands has placed us in a perilous place indeed.
As I write, a report lies beside my inkpot. In hurried hand, it tells of a rogue fleet of that most insolent of knaves, the false King William Kidd, which is harrassing our northern territories with newfound impertinence. Spain and France too, once again eye us hungrily. Their perfidy is immeasurable, and I expect, nay dread, the arrival of dispatches with news of their latest act of infamy. I beseech you to send whatever forces may be spared, that our flag may continue to fly over these lands for the greater glory of our illustrious Nation, and his most exceptional Majesty, King George.
God Save the King!
Arkenor Oakshadow, Chairman of the British Council of the West Indias.
There is an extremely good chance that I will be buying Pirates of the Burning Sea tomorrow, when it is released. I know I shouldn’t. I know I have better things to do with my time and money. But, but…
Pirates!
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