Pirates of the Burning Sea

After beta testing this game for a few months, hitting 50 three times and doing over two dozen port battles, my biggest gripes with the game (in no particular order):

1) Flipping ports. Its boring and tedious after its done a few times. You need to basically camp a town for hours on end, killing endless npcs, until you get 10,000 points on the town, half of which are spent in a pvp zone where you can be ambushed at any time. Some ports flip relatively quickly, but others take ages. Rinse and repeat this a few dozen times and it begins to be even more tedious than raiding in WoW.

2) Grinding for commendations. Want a ship of the line? Have the gold? Have a shipbuilder ready? Well sorry but no luck for you until you farm the snot out of npcs and collect enough commendation drops. Since commendations are a random drop, it makes getting SoLs a real pain in the ass. The system should definitely be changed in favor of you spending time to get the right materials needed to build the ship, like exotic stuff to make the cannons, hulls etc. That would atleast make it more realistic.

3) Speaking of realism, this game is NOT a simulator of the 1720s. Not even close. As soon as you see a ship throw up 30 second full Invincibility, or telepathically kill your crew without firing a shot, you realize that the devs have significantly taken this game into the WoW realm of fantasy. Thankfully we dont have orcs and dwarves walking our ships. The game is also not an adventure game. From the get go you see the entire map. There is no need to explore. Every corner of the world looks basically like any other corner. Since its based on the Caribbean and not a fantasy tropical region like Seadogs, there is no innovation or imagination here. This game is and only is a realm vs realm pvp game loosely based on the 1720s era. Set your expectations accordingly.

4) While some of the games graphics are stellar, like towns and avatar based areas, others are so incredibly dated that it makes you wonder just what the heck went wrong with the art department. In the Open Sea (OS), there is no weather of any kind. No clouds. No storms. No people on rafts waving for help. No fish in the ocean or any indication of life. No day/night. The world is always a sunny flat day. Speaking of flat, the ocean is a flat repeating texture/animation/shader, laid out in a nice grid pattern so if you zoom out you get to clearly see it. Yes, you can almost hear baby jesus cry considering this game is coming out in 2008 not 2001.

5) The devs boast that the ships have zillions of polygons and are super detailed, and yet they do nothing with that detail except release a bunch of staged screenshots of the ships being zoomed up close. The ships always take damage in the exact same way. Go into a port battle and people complain that they are getting poor frame rate, but honestly there is NO reason for it except for the fact that the devs have detail in places that clearly does not belong.

6) Port battles. Arguably the best thing in the game, big (upto) 25 vs 25 man all out brawls. Its fun, but only IF you got an invite into the battle (based on a lottery system with those that have more points on the town get a better chance) and IF it happens during your game play session. Battle happening at 3am because an asian or european guild is flipping your ports? Well too bad. PotBS learns absolutely nothing from the problems that plagued DAoC. I clearly remember waking up at 3am to do a highly important relic raid in DAoC, and as successful as it was, I swore I would never do it again. With PotBS the developers basically ENCOURAGE you to flip ports at off hours and that clearly is a poor game design choice.

7) Only half the game is truly a MMORPG (open sea, towns and port battles). The rest is basically a single player game due to the devs choice of making every mission and combat encounter in the game a separate instance. While I clearly understand the benefits of instancing, it completely takes away what makes MMORPGs so special: your interaction with other people. You can basically go from level 1 to 50 and except for who you bump into town or out in the OS, be all by yourself. There a big battle taking place in front of a town? Spanish and British squadrons duking it out? Want to watch from a distance? Nope, cant do it.

8) The world is tiny, which for PvP and RvR purposes is fine, but it makes for the game getting boring very quickly. I spent 2 years playing WoW and there were still areas of the world I had never seen at all, let alone fully explored. In PotBS you can see and do everything in 30 days, which also includes getting to level 50. Which leads to my next gripe,

9) Leveling is stupid easy. While this also has benefits of making the game less grindy and appeals more to the casual crowd, when you can hit level 50 in just 11 days from a server wipe (and not 6 months later with a twink character), the game is going to face the same issue that Earth & Beyond faced: players getting bored quickly because they saw and did everything in the first month and question what use is there to paying a subscription fee.

10) As wonderful as the games detailed economy is, there is one huge problem with it: the sheer mind numbing boredom that you face as you ferry goods from one end of the world to the other. While the world isnt that big, it is still very flat and boring, and moving goods from one end to the other when the wind conditions are not in your favor can result in a good 15 to 30 minute trek (each way) of basically sailing in long straight lines. If I did not have a second PC here to keep me occupied I could not endure doing the economy in any serious manner.

11) Port battles require you to have everyone on team speak or ventrilo if you want to be successful. That has been proven when 9 people could easily take down 16 (while taking no losses) because those 9 were on vent and could quickly coordinate targets and those 16 were not. The game has no built in voice chat, so you are forced to spam vent/ts info. Now if you have a port battle thats made up of members of multiple guilds, especially if they are rivals, it becomes very difficult to get everyone onto the same chat. The end result is a very messy port battle. Why not use the games built in text chat system? Well for one, most dont read it because they are too busy maneuvering their ship, using their skills, chosing their target, watching their ranges etc. And if you are doing all that, how can you have time to type out anything significant unless its at the very start of the battle before combat has begun?

12) Not moddable. For all the faults WoW had early on, the community quickly fixed them (and far beyond) with mods, which allowed you to change your interface completely (making the game fresh), spam instructions as popup notices on the center of peoples screens, and a plethora of other goodies (Blizzard then started integrating many of those mods into the base game). Ofcourse those who were too lazy to simply go to a website and download the free mods whined and complained, and PotBS devs seem to have listened to them. I do recall reading that since mods give some an unfair advantage, thats why they are not supported. Hogwash. If its free and available to all, there is NO reason not to support mods.

*taking a break to collect my ranting thoughts*

My playing time wit POBS is very limited but I have to agree with the op. The game was interesting at first but for me it was a bit disapointment, not to mention I still think that is too early to release it.

I beta tested this for a while, early on -- and once or twice since August.

Not for nothing, but the OP hits the nail on the head in every respect. It is on par with Dungeon Runners moreso than any pay-to-play, US-made, MMORPG on the market today.  Auto-Assault might be another close relative.

Put simply, it is an incredibly simplistic game with incredibly detailed ship models. And that amounts to not a lot, as it turns out.

Yes Annex and I are in the same guild in the PotBS beta for over 11 months now. And he has taken the words right out of my mouth with this review.

After you hit level 50 (which will be within 20-40 days) You will loose interest fast. Ya the port battles are great especially if you are in a good guild and on voice but you can only do so many of them (I have commanded over 50 of them)

My biggest gripe is probably the over abundance of instances. Every door you click, every mission, every beach, every open sea battle, Every single thing is an instance. It makes it feel very NOT MMO.

This is a niche game at best that will have start up fad subs of around 100K, dwindling from there down to 20k by years end.

Cal

Well what is going to make or break this game is how fast FLS gets new content for the endgame. There is plenty for level 1 to 49. But once youre 50, what do you do? Economy, pvp and port battles? That will not keep people entertained for long, so new content is going to be a must.

Pretty much right on the money with my opinions. 

Add in that it is not newbie friendly (poor documentation, unintuitive auction hall system relative to the genre - with no tutorial to speak of, etc) and that the community has a pretty large core of rabid, Vanguard-esque fanbois and it's bang on.

OP is spot on. I've posted this type of information on FLS boards since i've been in beta. I so bad wanted this game to be great.

They missed the boat so to speak badly.

You can explore the entire game world and every port if wished within a few days of release or beta.

Or just go to one port and you've seen them all. They all virtually look the same other then Tortuga.

Again, every mission past lvl 10 and you've again seen every map they used for said mission. Enter into combat on the OS and again after a few times no matter where your location and you'll see the same maps used.

Choose any other game out there and try that and see what happens. It just can't be done.

Yeah there is extreme repetition in missions as there are like two dozen maps or so. Yes they are adding day and evening and night variants but its still different colored apples.