OK, this is really day 3, but I’m trying to look like I didn’t leave you all alone for two days.
I have just hit level 20 with my Priest of Mitra, Alfric, and it has so far been a great deal of fun. The quests have been well written, and enjoyable to pursue, with the exception of a couple of “kill 40 crocodile” type ones, which seemed to want an altogether unreasonable number of kills. That is only two out of about 50.
AoC eases you into the game quite gently. My pal Tina here can transport you between two versions of Tortage, a daytime one which you share with all the other players, and a night-time one that you have to yourself for following an archetype dependant series of “destiny quests”. She’s quite lovely, but unfortunately spoken for by the town’s gate guard. The destiny quests help to teach you the skills which your archetype will need in order to flourish in Hyboria.
Since my last post, my concerns about things being too easy have been ruthlessly dispelled by a variety of unpleasant deaths at the hands of evil-doers. Still, providing I don’t do anything silly I can usually survive most of what this newbie isle has to throw at me.
There’s been a fair bit of downtime since early access opened, but this is to be expected. I am a little irritated that the Trader, who functions as bank, auctioneer, and mailman, is currently nonfunctional. Your inventory is rather small, and I’m finding myself having to sell things I would have liked to have saved or sold. Other than that, I have found AoC to be surprisingly bug free, with very little of the weirdness that usually accompanies an MMO launch. Still, it is early days. In online gaming we’re never more than one mispatch away from invisible heads and vanishing inventories!
Anyways, I’d better get some sleep! Tomorrow, I do believe I shall be leaving Tortage, and heading into the wider world of Hyboria!
So, like I suspect quite a lot of MMO players, I’m sitting here waiting for the Age of Conan servers to come up for the Early Access period.
I shall be attempting to record my first experiences for posterity, that folks not in early access may live vicariously through my adventures!
5:55 BST I’m all patched up and ready to go. The servers are due to open at 5 GMT, which will be 6 BST. I notice that the official forums are down right now, presumably to get rid of the pre-release forum, and replace it with an equally annoying hive of scum and villainy.
6:01 BST They’re late! Consider my account cancelled, Funcom!!!!
6:07 BST Turns out early release has been delayed to 8 pm GMT. Let’s meet back here in 2 hours and fifty.
6:36 BST Rain stopped play for most of today’s England vs New Zealand Test Match. This has been quite a day of waiting for things to happen! Still, let us remain calm. I wasn’t in AoC’s beta, or I’d have an awful lot more worth saying at this point. My primary goal is to set up a happy little crafting guild, and if possible, build our town next-door to that of the Scions of Nordheim. Knowing precious little about costs, I don’t know yet if that is a realistic ambition.
7:29 BST Halfway there! What are you doing to pass the time, apart from randomly checking blogs for information? Drop me a note using my handy comment thingy down below! Me, I’m eating cherry cake.
8:49 BST OK, let’s try this again! Ten minute warning for the arrival of King Conan!
9:01 BST Oh Funcom, must you toy with us?
9:09 BST Oh dear. Well, see you in 50 minutes then!
9:23 BST I have some patching action going on. It’s a bit slow though, what with everyone else also patching.
9:24 BST And then the patch server went down again :(
9:27 BST I’m all patched! However, the login server seems unwilling to make my acquaintance.
9:54 BST Well, I’m in! I was a little dismayed by the lack of decent hair options, but Alfric is born!
11:26 BST OK, I’ve played through with a character up until opening the Acheronian gate now, and am now the proud owner of a level 5 Necromancer. I had been, right up until the end, a little concerned that combat was too easy, but it does seem to be getting a little more dangerous so I guess those crocodiles were just going easy on me!
Things began with my slave ship exploding, for reasons I have yet to discover. I washed up on a sandy beach, and was instantly approached by this gentleman.
A strange old man who apparently feels comfortable inciting complete strangers to commit murder. I am sorry, Sir, but I really don’t know you well enough yet.
But it didn’t seem like I had a lot of choice but to follow through with the bloodthirsty fellow’s plan, and so I set forth through a jungle wherein most everybody seemed to want to kill me, to their own regret.
The much vaunted combat system, thus far, seems to me a lot like hitting the 1, 2, and 3 keys at random until things fall over. I didn’t really need my spells up until the final bit. I do suspect that once I face some beefier opponents, taking a little more thought about what the heck I’m doing is going to wise.
Graphically, everything seems decent enough, especially given my meagre specs. A healthy enough framerate to play with, though I have yet to step into a city with other players, which is where framerates tend to suffer the worst.
Just a small tweak so not too much to talk about in this one, although I weep quietly for my expert carpenter. If the ad hoc spawning is finally truly fixed, then that will be a very good thing.
In other news, several major RvRing guilds on Roberts are going to be heading to Age of Conan, some merging to form the Scions of Nordheim. I’m going to be heading along to the same server, Ymir, to see what AoC is like. I’ll be trying to keep up with my responsibilities in PotBS, though I shall be cutting down the amount of time I spend there for now, at least until there is more to do for someone like me. I’ll try to liveblog my first impressions of AoC when I start the early access period this Saturday. I’m hoping that this time I eventually get the chance to build a city that I was denied in Vanguard and PotBS, who both decided it was an unnecessary feature to launch with.
I feel slightly guilty, as this is not going to help the dwindling population on Roberts at all, but at the end of the day I can’t let myself be bound to a game I’m not enjoying simply out of a sense of duty. I shall continue to try to help to make PotBS a better place to be.
PotBS patch notes continue below:
Continue reading PotBS Test Server Patch Notes 1.4.29, and a move to Age of Conan
Another test build has just arrived, and it seems the pendulum may be swinging back slightly, as the 4th and 3rd rates gain a little bit of target tracking, and the Hercules lose some.
64-gun ships are having the number of line bundles they require reduced from 8 to 3. I’m trying to figure out exactly what ships this means, but it seems to mean the 3rd rates, and maybe the Couronne. The patch is not yet live on the test server, so I’ll update when we know precisely who’s affected. (Update: It turns out the decision to only change the Valiant was deliberate.) The intent would seem to be to make the 3rd rates closer to the Pirate Herc in cost and overall power. A worthy goal, and one which I think will do a lot to reduce the National’s current indignation.
Cutthroats have lost their entire Evasion path, bringing them down to the same number of skill paths as everyone else. Fair, but going to be quite a painful pill for them to swallow.
Patch Notes continue below:
Continue reading PotBS Test Server Patch Notes 1.4.28
Some very encouraging things in this latest test server build. It is only the first test build, and we know there is another on the way, so don’t be surprised if something you were expecting isn’t in here.
I’m personally very excited about the new unrest system, which will help return us non-PvPing RvRers to relevance. Freetraders also get a couple of rather tasty sounding new ships. All careers gain new skills, which will give us more options, though it is hard to say how, taken as a whole, it will affect the current balance of power between the careers, especially with the arrival of those upstart Buccaneers.
The new outfitting rewards for turning in commendations will reduce the chorus of complaints that there was nothing worth buying with them for non-Freetraders, though until we see the stats it is difficult to judge their worth. Also, I am a little concerned that if they are not general outfitting, that might have a bit of a dodgy effect on the economy, though I guess since they removed ships as rewards in 1.3, we crafters should be willing to tolerate that.
There are a few dark clouds though. I think Naval Officers are going to be extremely unhappy about the changes to 1st and 2nd rated lineships, or at least the people who worked hard enough to get one will. This update does not seem to do much to help the Nations against the increasingly powerful Brethren of the Coast, and in fact probably worsens our plight. Not that we will let that stop us!
So, here are the 1.4.25 patch notes!
Continue reading PotBS Test Server Patch Notes 1.4.25
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.
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