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Hard Core Member
Joined: 1/13/08
Posts: 180
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I posted this on the PotBS forums, but I wanted to share with the forum users here:
Please note: This is only the first part of several points I intend to make. The writing of it is so massive that it might take a few days before the rest of it is completed.
From the moment the game went live, I have heard widespread accusations that the developers of this game have been listening to a handful of beta players, some of whom are now apparently saying "bye-bye, I'll send you a postcard from Cimmeria". Now that they and several others have departed, what is left of this game? I was having a chat with society mates earlier today, and the general consensus seemed to be that this game has two or three months left to live. If you are reading this FLS, I will be blunt: I don't know your financial situation, but if I were you I would sleep better at night if I had Rails Across America 2 or any other project in the pipeline. As a company you certainly have maintained better ties to your playing public than I would have expected, and I thank you for it, but in the end I think Pirates of the Burning Sea will end in failure, probably before the year is out.
I normally don't pay attention to patches unless they solve major issues with the game, so when you are spending most of your time tweaking skills and ship statistics, I know the real problems are by and far going unaddressed. When I hear about the developers making a great deal out of the "new Pointe-à-Pitre" when there are precious few Frenchmen to enjoy it (and based on its reception, "enjoy" is a wicked misnomer) and actually very little to do in the town itself, I get the distinct impression that labour and money are being wasted on the wrong priorities.
As well, I could list a number of small irritants which make the game less enjoyable than it should be -- everyone reading the "Conquest" channel but only Naval Officers being able to talk in it; the impossibility of re-deeding a ship to trade (what happens if the player who sails the society-funded Invincible decides to quit?); unrealistic pirate stealth and the very notion of "debuff" (oh? because you push a button, I'm suddenly more incompetent?) in a game which purportedly aims for some form of historical accuracy over a fantasy setting, for instance -- these only compound the more serious issues plaguing the game at this point.
Here is my list.
"No crying in the red circle": I am tired of hearing this. I think it has contributed greatly to the bad reputation plaguing this game, especially regarding ganking. Over a month ago, I asked Isildur whether "no crying in the red circle" was "in danger of becoming the 2008 version of "Play to Crush" (Shadowbane's motto), even with no advertising campaign built around it". This had to do with coming across his remark made over six months prior, in which he claimed that "‘Play to Crush’ as a selling point and marketing slogan probably lost SB twice the players it ended up bringing them". Nobody at FLS, whether Isildur himself or anyone else, responded to my concern. But even if preventing the motto from being thrown around by players is next to impossible, I am dismayed to see the developers themselves embracing it, from that notorious remark by DrewC about about "how to make it not fair in your favor", to Aether using a graphic representation of the phrase as avatar, to producer Joe Ludwig quoting it on his blog masthead. The players themselves, by the way, seem to have gradually abandoned it, perhaps because they have abandoned the game at the same time (out of boredom, it would seem), which leaves the developers themselves as the only source of propagation.
This might be ancient history and the damage irrevocably done, but it remains that "no crying in the red circle" is embarrassing and is certainly no selling point for any game, as Isildur foretold. On a similar note, I don't believe I need to mention his own predictions regarding games with ganking run amok: "The people who want to gank are waiting for the Next Big Failure to come along, to let them grief noobs for a few months before it shrivels up and dies. This is because every sane developer has learned this lesson: griefing and ganking doesn’t just lose you the $15/mo from the person who was griefed. It has a multiplicative effect, creating an environment in your game, and a reputation outside your game, and people tend to steer clear." I have asked FLS about this remark as well, whether they agreed with it, whether they (especially Isildur) were satisfied with the current state of the game, and what that entailed for PotBS. No answer on any of those points has yet been offered. Reading these and other comments by Isildur about how a game which falls into Situation A is doomed to failure, only to find the developers not only sitting by while Situation A unravels in the game but encouraging it, has me wondering whether Isildur would go Alan Smithee with the current PotBS if the opportunity were made available to him.
(Please understand that I am not targetting Isildur because I seek to make him the object of ridicule, but because I wholeheartedly agree with him on what makes a successful game, and because I want to know why FLS seemed to pursue a diametrically opposed approach in the making of this game (he is after all the lead designer) . I will be discussing some of the points below.)
In the meantime the game has lost two-thirds of its servers and by the impression one gets reading these forums is [i]still[/i] shedding players. Some say they are leaving for a certain other game coming out within the month, but surely the situation does not apply to every player who leaves PotBS. Several mentioned leaving out of boredom; others because of ganking. Probably larger numbers leave without mentioning a reason, but we can surmise they must be no different from those of players who do speak out.
Port Battles: Elitists of the Burning Sea: Port battle at Irish Point on Rackham a few days ago, at 2 AM Eastern time zone to be exact. I am not complaining about the time of battle, though others might; as a matter of fact, even though I am a North American player I am rarely online during our normal "prime time" but play in the middle of the night. For that matter, I am not what you might call a "hardcore" player, so I'm not going to attend so-called "alarm-clock battles" if they fall outside of times when I usually play. So I'm satisfied that I did not have to move to Roberts to find a battle whose time frame suited me. However, even at such ungodly hours there were so many players online that I was placed on the waiting list, with 37 people waiting behind me and myself not getting a spot despite having 5% of all the Irish Point conquest points to my name. I am also not complaining about the lottery idea in general; it's probably the fairest method for choosing participants. What I find ludicrous in this case is that, even at 2 AM (or 11 PM West Coast) on a weeknight, there were at least 52 people lined up to participate in the port battle on our side -- "our side" being the French side, perenially fighting with Spain for the distinction of being the least populated faction in the game. The length of the British opponent's waiting list, I do not know. (And two nights later, at 1 AM, the same situation occurred at Roseau, also against the British.) But because of this excess of participants we have seen the usual elitism rear its ugly head again.
It used to be that the elitism was almost entirely level-based. On one case on Blackbeard when concurrent battles were still possible, the message was "anyone 40+ accept" for the battle we wanted to win, and "everyone is invited to go to that battle!" for the one we wouldn't even have enough people to defend. In another case, I indulged in schadenfreude upon learning that my own side's level requirements couldn't be justified for our low numbers placed them in a position where they could hardly afford to be choosy (insert random reference to the evacuation of Dunkirk here); so they played the elitist card and went to battle with a pitifully less-than-full group which promptly got sunk.
Level-based elitism was born out of necessity because of faulty game mechanics, and you can't blame the players for adopting it. I perfectly understand that in a situation like this you have to make do with the options available to you to ensure victory, and in this case it means letting the higher-level players with large ships enter the battle first. (Much was made of a player sailing a La Belle corvette into the battle at New Orleans recently). But now we are seeing the natural evolution of it into something which bothers me even more: ship-based elitism. At Irish Point, for instance, level-50 people with lesser ships (say, frigates or Fourth-Rates) were encouraged to decline so that people with First- and Second-Rates could enter the battle. (For the record: Our society's Second Rate was placed on the waiting list and never made it into the fight.) And we all know the outrageous prices for those -- so it means the optimized port battle system favours wealthy (therefore hardcore if entirely legit) players or those lucky enough to be sailing one of those expensive ships thanks to their entire society's efforts. Why, just before the Irish Point battle, a prominent French player urged that only those with a "ship of the line or equivalent" should attend. I play a Freetrader on Rackham, and the only ship that truly offers the equivalent of a Ship of the Line is the Couronne. Price tag close to three million doubloons for the equivalent of a Fourth Rate; in other words, really worth it if I could afford it. (Not that it matters, since I'm only level 44 and therefore unable to sail one at this stage.) Any pretense that casual players are in as good a position in this game as hardcore gamers, even if both are level 50 by now, is thereby thrown out the window.
Sure, the lottery system theoretically gives you the chance to attend a port battle even if you only have a Deliverance or Oliphant, but are you prepared to be accused of being single-handedly responsible for the defeat of your side in battle simply for showing up when you have been asked to leave your place to any John Q. Gamer with a Triumphant? Best way to find yourself being a pariah on your own side, and as a level-50 Pariah with a full Forum Alienation skill line, I speak from experience, not for showing up to said battles, but for complaining about this very point.
I happened upon a fantastic post by Yawntastic, which echoes my own sentiments and which I must quote here:
Jan/feb : Game comes out, some players level to max quick, dominate the slots for port battles by demanding lower level players pass on invitations - which they mostly did.
Late Feb: Many of those who passed are now high level, some want to take part in PB's but still get moaned at for not 100% knowing what to do as much as the "regulars". Others go off and try to avoid PBs because of the grief so partake in crafting, economy and helping their societies and nation creating unrest up to 5k and then others finish off the job - this was unappreciated by the elite, yet it continued.
March: Same thing continued, same old faces in the PBs, same old faces whining about not getting into PBs, same old faces demanding people to pass. Many players leave the game, all servers begin struggling for numbers, Roberts manages to keep some interest going due to map win looking promising for both British and Spain.
April: Server transfers, Brits win map, huge amounts of cancellations on ALL remaining servers takes place, amongst the cancellations are the "mainstays" of those who helped a lot with unrest creation, kept the economy flowing with goods, and did all the non-PvP things that keep the game going that most of the a*sholes who think they know it all think the game doesn't need.
May: Posts of "Where is everyone", "This game was a lot more fun when..." and "I'm Bored" start sprouting up on various forums and are posted by the very same people who ran down all the people in Jan-Feb-March and April.
Result: Not enough players overall to create a proper amount of unrest on the server, resulting in there being less than a handful of red zones about, even worse maybe 1 port battle a day overall if you are lucky.
http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showpost.php?p=342362&postcount=108
Which also raises a very good question: How do you learn proper tactics if you don't get a chance to see them in action? To this the standard answer seems to be: "Go read about Nelson". If you wanted to be a purist, you could say that Nelson should be irrelevant to the tactics in this game since he was not even born by 1720. Without going as far as this, and while acknowledging the genius of Nelson's tactics, I think a few things need to be pointed out:
Nelson did not have access to temporary boosts and debuffs. His ships did not bounce off sandbars. He could not entirely rebuild his ship from scratch by running away for two minutes. His patent bridge for boarding First-Rates can't be used in this game. And more importantly, Nelson was not yakking it up on voice chat to tell every ship in his fleet where to go based on an isometric aerial view. Orders through semaphore and code flags, okay. But human error and the fog of war were still distinct possibilities. It can happen in this game, but not nearly as much as it could in a real naval engagement.
So how do you learn about tactics in this game? Nelson notwithstanding, mostly through trial and error. But then, if you are excluded from genuine battles where everyone does their best to win because you're asked to pass in favour of higher-levelled players / better ships, and that the only port battles you can attend all happen to be lost causes (if your own side bothers showing up to begin with), it is nearly impossible to see or learn a thing.
Which brings us back not only to the casual-versus-gamer debate, but also to the question of grinding, the dullness of it, and the absolute necessity of it for most players to be able not only to afford those more expensive ships but also to keep up a busy PvP schedule.
In January 2006, Isildur wrote:
In WoW, I solo-ground my way up to 25, and looked at the next 35 levels, saw nothing that suggested they’d be any different than the last 25, and I stopped....
I hear people at work talk about their latest level 60 adventures.... I talk to people who assume that anyone playing WoW is playing at level 60. And I ask myself: Why is anything that sounds even remotely interesting in any game always locked behind arbitrary dull activities? Why is ‘max out your character and *then* have fun’ the recurring design in MMO-space? WoW didn’t do anything different; they just shortened the distance between start and max....
I like Puzzle Pirates. In Puzzle Pirates, I participated in a blockade — arguably the Y!PP endgame — on my second day. In Puzzle Pirates, I’ve been playing a month and I own a ship, and me and my crew sail around pillaging. This seems like a far superior design to anything else I’ve played, simply because I was doing ‘the fun stuff’ on day two
I don’t think there’s an easy way to apply the clever and bizarre Y!PP design to the standard level-up-and-kill-shit MMO model. Nevertheless, I think it’s better to acknowledge that the ‘play for months and then you can play the *real* game’ is a stupid design. At least make an attempt to give people the ‘real’ game as soon as you can get their fingers onto the right buttons."
http://brokentoys.org/2006/01/30/casual-friday/
Yes, let us talk about the blockades of Puzzle Pirates, a game I played last year (I semi-retired around November), which I must admit is far more complex than its artistic choices will let on, and with probably the most mature community I have ever encountered in a MMO game. It is true that the PP community gets vastly involved in blockades when they take place (there is usually one every weekend between an NPC attacker and a player flag defender) and that they have become key events in the game because of their scope. Most people who participate in them do not even have a direct stake in the political matters at hand; they take part, if nothing else, for the money being offered by the various sides in the blockade. Sometimes bidding wars for jobbers raise wages into extremely lucrative territory for those who attend, which may explain that while they go on, the number of pillages (NPC grinding trips for money), which have to rely on the same pool of jobbers but incapable of offering guaranteed income unless the skipper wants to pay them, dwindles to almost none. Just consider that a War Brig alone includes 22 stations, and a War Frigate 55, meaning that in a full-blown blockade, especially between two player flags, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of openings for people to take part.
But what you cannot do on Day Two in Puzzle Pirates is battle-navigate a ship in a blockade, as to do so you would not only need to join a crew part of a flag (sort of what a society is to a nation here, except that flags are player-run and therefore able to set policy) either attacking or defending an island (the equivalent of towns in PotBS, except player-run in many cases), but to also be promoted to at least officer in the crew. And those crews for which political considerations are a vital part of the game are very nitpicky about whom they choose to promote. In many cases they will demand a certain level of skill in battle navigation (and sometimes in all the major ship-based puzzles -- bilging, carpentry, sailing and especially gunning) as well as spending several weeks in the crew before they will ever consider you for promotion. In the worst cases the crews were cliques that never recruited and preferred to use their wealth (generated by a fleet of foraging alts) to hire mercenaries.
There is much elitism in Puzzle Pirates, though it takes place in more subtle forms than on PotBS. For starters, because better ratings on a puzzle by the entire crew means more loot in battle, there are those "elite pillages", though ironically the mention of the word "elite" usually meant "wannabe" more than anything else to anyone in the know -- the true "elite" would never use the word, as everyone knew the names of the best battle navigators on the ocean, and to be invited by them on their pillage was a great honour. Likewise, people quickly developed networks of reliable jobbers.
All of this to say that Puzzle Pirates included an element of elitism set up much like a caste system, but it did not prevent you from taking part in most of its activities. Furthermore, the elitism was almost entirely skill-based as opposed to level- or wealth-based. To own a ship, you needed officer status in a crew, but you had no problem finding crews with low promotion standards.
But in PotBS, the port battles can only accommodate 48 players in all, out of who knows how many people logged in at any given time. So only 48 players can get to take part in the endgame at the same time, a limitation which has repercussions even outside the battle itself. Because frankly, answer this: If I am to be told to stay out of the port battle anyway because I'm too low-levelled or because my vessel isn't a lineship, why should I bother helping out in red circles to create (or reduce) unrest, when all I am really doing is risk my ship and damage my reputation for nothing in return? So the urge for me to act selfishly -- especially if I have no production in or do no trade with the port affected -- is very great indeed. Let someone else risk his ship if in the end I don't get to take part. It's not like I love red circles anyway.
But as I said before, I understand that the port battle is the closest one gets to an end-game in Pirates of the Burning Sea, and therefore a privilege normally reserved for high-ranking players with the better ships. I don't like it, but there is nothing I can do about it. I also understand that historically the port battle has been the purview of Naval Officers; hence it is normal that their skills serve them best (as opposed to freetraders and privateers) in such a context. However, the problem is that, in the current game, the port battle is the [i]only[/i] end game.
Roleplaying!: And I don't mean Bonny-style role-playing, in which your wife's brother's death at the hands of pirates twenty years ago is the motivation for leading a ganksquad around Ruddy Cove 24/7; I mean, to bridge this with the previous section, something even more basic: the ability to play the class we picked at the beginning as said class would normally behave. Naval Officers pursue pirates and foreign nationals because it is their duty. Privateers do so because of the lure of money. Freetraders do neither; they engage in a fight only when it is inevitable, and their prime objective is getting away. While the gameplay of Pirates of the Burning Sea (and its emphasis on PvP and even PvE missions) might perfectly fit the descriptions of the two first classes, for the third to willingly engage in PvP or PvE defies logic, no matter how well the Freetrader skills in PotBS can be used in such a context. But then there is nothing else to do, and even other classes get roughly the same production and trade advantages as Freetraders. The only distinct advantage of the Freetrader is the ability to use larger shipyards; advanced structures are useless in a political climate where ports with rivers are always disputed (and so far away from trading centres, on the French side at least, that distance is a major hurdle) and a saturated economic market. Furthermore, most of the Freetrader's best features -- access to the Bermuda Trader's Sloop, Trade Connections, etc. -- are all available by level 16. No wonder the Freetrader has been relegated to alt status by many players, even though some would agree it possesses some very good points in battle.
There is a thread in the Economy section of the PotBS forums with the title "Economic Players -- Let's talk about PvP" (does "Sommeliers -- Let's talk about pastry-making" make sense?), which basically summarizes what it is that PotBS has in store for trader types: No salvation outside of PvP, or else pay. This was annoying enough before the patch, but now that Marks of Victory and Marks of Trade have been added into the game the Freetraders have clearly been told, go PvP, or buy them off the market as a way to return some of our stash to the economy. Now to be honest, as a non-PvPer I never had many Marks of Victory in my possession, even when you could still receive them for turning in unrest bundles. A guildmate basically took all his bundles and dropped them in West End just hours before the patch to take advantage; I had no intention of doing the same. But now that the Marks of Victory are basically reserved for PvP activity, non-PvPing Freetraders are basically expected to buy them off the market if they need them, basically filling the pockets of those who PvP. And because a double whammy is better, let's add Marks of Trade, so that PvPers can bypass the market to buy some of their goods! Or rather, what concerns me with Marks of Trade is not so much that they will obtain goods from outside the market, but that they will trade in their MoT's for goods which they will then dump on the market, thereby increasing our competition.
As Isildur wrote in an entry last month:
The ongoing goal with this change is to move doubloons from economic players to PvP players. Right now, economic players are essentially a doubloon trap. Collectively, you’re accumulating more money than you’re spending. This means that while the overall currency supply in the game is growing, that growth is concentrated in only a few hands. As more money enters the game, it circulates around until it finally reaches a rest state somewhere in the economy, at which point it stops. This is the worst of both worlds: it’s inflation because the currency supply is rising, and it’s depression because the active currency supply is falling, or staying the same.
http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10746
Doubloon trap, really? So we hoard the money and take it out of the economy? Perhaps some freetraders behave in such a fashion, but they'd have to be content to take a look at their bank balance every morning, because apart from buying more expensive ships, they have nothing to blow their money on, and no way to display their wealth. What annoys me most in that comment, however, is the assumption that Freetraders are not doing their bit in the larger war effort (such as financing lineships they in all likelihood cannot sail themselves). More on this last point later. And all that is really achieved is to send the money around more circles, but they will always end up with the economic players (whether they are Freetraders or other classes). Even with the blow given to traders by Marks of Trade, PvP players (except those buying from inside their societies, against which nothing can really be done) will still need to buy from the market.
Isildur is right in that individuals who are exclusively trading do not create wealth of any kind, as the only entry point for money is through grinding. If players spent actual game time crafting items, then they would grind in their fashion, and in the end the exchange would be between the NPC-ship grinder and the crafting grinder. Here the trader/crafter wastes nothing (except money) by producing goods, and can in fact go grinding at the same time and face no penalty. And indeed an academic pointed out this very fact: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/the-cookie-mons.html . Hence if traders are indeed a "doubloon trap", it is no fault of the players themselves but as a result of the developers' decisions in this regard. There are a few things I could suggest -- such as turning structure labour into a general pool which could be allotted by players between the various structures they own to maximize their production -- but such changes to the economy are minor considerations in light of the more glaring problems in the game at this time, such as the larger political aspect.
The second part will deal with map victories, underdog tools, plans for port governance, etc. |
