Pirates of the Burning Sea

Hi All,

The newly released Potbs is fun - but not for long.

I decided to play a pirate (and got it on pre-release), which is the best for quick fun, you can steal ships not buy them and lark about the place.

Unfortunately at this stage of this game I'd avoid it. Of course PvP is very limited as not many people are higher levels and everyone is scared about losing their ship, which take some effort to get.

Ship combat is fun (the best aspect of the game), and economy really brings its rewards, try that if you like buliding up your empire.

Personal melee PvE is quite rubbish - it's hard, and if you lose on many missions you need to revive yourself which requires smelling salts - which you can't buy and have to be made. I'm one of the higher players on the server I'm on atm (Bellamy) so it's not like I'm a lowbie being bitter, I'm just stating fact.

Larger PvP battles take a while, essentially you need to be building up contention points as the game calls them, and you need to have 8-10 people building them up for a couple of hours to even have a chance of starting that sort of battle so don't expect quick large battles.

The SOE platform system works nicely and I haven't had any problems with that, lower end PC's might find this a struggle though.

 As stated above - give this game some time to mature - maybe a couple of months at least. I still don't see (as a PvP player myself) any long term interest.

Hope this helps a few who are undecided.

Yeah, there's always the obligatory "wait six months" caveat, but my largest concern (and one of yours), melee combat, is not getting enough attention from Flying Labs.  Or they're keeping hush about it, since it's the most denigrated aspect of POTBS.

The newest updates are looking to tweak more of the ship-on-ship combat -- but that element of the game is already freaking excellent, everyone agrees.  Yes, there's always room for improvement, yadda yadda, but Flying Labs really (reallyreallyreally) needs to give hand-to-hand combat a real talkin' to.  The serious sitdown, life-changing type of discussion.  Because hand-to-hand combat is not a small or ignorable portion of the game.  It's not something you can just skip if you don't want to do it.  It's integral to the entire experience.

I totally agree with you, hardly any time has been spent on the melee system which leaves the whole swashbuckling experience disjointed and rather frustrating - sometimes in the same quest you can take on 5 NPC's and best them all, the next time one of them can kill you without being even scratched. It lacks consistency.

As noted though - the ship fights are awesome  

The rest of the game just doesn't live up to that aspect 

I agree about the mellee system, but I have to say as a big fan of PVP and having played pretty much all of them (UO, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, DaoC, EQ, EQ2, WOW etc....) I am very hooked on this game and the pvp, and contention battles.

I feel this game has the potential to be a huge success and will definately be around to see how it turns out.

But I hope they work on the stupid land battles/system.

I'm starting to sound like a fanboy but oh well. Anyway, stop saying stuff like "uh devs dont care about avatar combat they never mention it blabla". They are working on it, for one. And as for second, avatar combat before wasn't even planned to be in game. There you go. So, if you don't have patience, if this is such a big deal for you, then wait until they improve avatar combat. I perfectly understand that, and that's all fine.

The reason this game seems interesting o me is: good and interesting ship battles and economy. The other reason is: great potential. Now, this last thing can look silly, but I've seen a lot of games that had okayish core, but there was almost no room for upgrades. PotBS on the other hand has okayish core already, but it's such a great core that they can easily make tons and tons of upgrades, supported by current game world. Avatar combat can turn out to be great, I have already seen people in the forum saying they didn't like it at first but now like it. After patches go out, things could drastically change for the better (of course, they can stay at potential). Game world is also interesting, and potentially upgradable in tons of ways.

This is just my oppinion of course.

I hope everyone here realizes that missions in this game are fully optional, and that its actually faster to level out in the open sea than do missions. I agree that avcom is a weakness in this game, but its not a requirement and quite skippable.

There's a thread going on the Missions forums called "Why did that crank up the difficulty", or to that effect,  that tells of adjustments needing to be made on at least one mission.   Just In Time would be that mission.   Basically it's 3 level 16 Xebec ships piloted by level 10 NPCs which make no sense to me.  

That is just one mission that need adjusting and I'm sure there are more.

Originally posted by Annekynn

I hope everyone here realizes that missions in this game are fully optional, and that its actually faster to level out in the open sea than do missions. I agree that avcom is a weakness in this game, but its not a requirement and quite skippable.

Some of us like doing the missions for loot, money, and the sense of having an objective that takes the mind off grinding repeatably.

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Originally posted by Narug

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Originally posted by Annekynn

I hope everyone here realizes that missions in this game are fully optional, and that its actually faster to level out in the open sea than do missions. I agree that avcom is a weakness in this game, but its not a requirement and quite skippable.

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Some of us like doing the missions for loot, money, and the sense of having an objective that takes the mind off grinding repeatably.

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Well I agree that the money is good, but the loot is better out in the OS. Plus the repetition in missions makes them feel as grindy as the OS (if youre solo that is). I have much more fun getting a full group and going out to chase treasure convoys and such :). To each his own I guess

Originally posted by Annekynn

 

 

Well I agree that the money is good, but the loot is better out in the OS. Plus the repetition in missions makes them feel as grindy as the OS (if youre solo that is). I have much more fun getting a full group and going out to chase treasure convoys and such :). To each his own I guess

I meant more for the unique items that can pop up in missions.  Well at least some appear unique in my up to level 28 voyage so far.  If not unique they can be at least somewhat interesting.  

I'm in a duo most of the time and only solo when the missions force me to.

Edit:  You are right in that open sea hunting can be fun also though.

Originally posted by kiliarien

 

I totally agree with you, hardly any time has been spent on the melee system which leaves the whole swashbuckling experience disjointed and rather frustrating - sometimes in the same quest you can take on 5 NPC's and best them all, the next time one of them can kill you without being even scratched. It lacks consistency.

As noted though - the ship fights are awesome  

The rest of the game just doesn't live up to that aspect 

The PvP is instanced though isnt it? Like, if i have a friend whose getting attacked by another shipe they get instanced so i cant go find him and help. Am i right or did i just hear rumors?