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Originally posted by Vetarnias Ever since the announcement of the SOE contract the Oceanic game has been just one long series of drumrolls :-| And TBH I wold put my money on a third option: No Change. The reason is that I am betting Telstra/Bigpond have some kind of penalty clause in the contract if FLS pulls out. As long as there is one paying subscriber on Invincible, Telstra can claim (correctly) that these customers are theirs and if the server is closed this is lost business... There is also the issue of customer information. While it is not impossible for FLS to recover this information and hand it on to another company (SOE) to allow character transfers it would be a very difficult process - and certainly not worth the time and (legal) expense for only a few customers. So - my bet is that after a long wait the announcement will be "No change - but we are encouraging you to purchase the SOE edition." FLS might even subsidise the player costs - but again - they risk legal action from Telstra if they do for 'lost business'. |
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Originally posted by iceman00
Just to prove my point about Potbs being mainly economic i dug out a quote from Isildur - The Lead Designer. "The problem with the economy is that it's great. And you couldn't say "no" to it. You couldn't play the game unless you played the economy. You would have a terribly time if you didn't play with the economy. " This implies that players that come to Potbs for PVP only would have a terrible time. To promote Potbs as being mainly PVP & players that buy the game solely for PVP combat will likely find that it falls well short of their expectations; "you can't play the game without investing a lot of time in the great economy" Isildur |
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To Gyrus's post: I agree with you, there's probably some clause in the contract that would prevent SOE from poaching Australian clients. I seem to recall, however, that there is nothing stopping Australian players from actually ordering a Sony box from overseas, i.e. your IP address isn't barred because you're from Australia. I believe you once said you were doing this yourself. But I doubt that current players on Invincible would want to buy a second copy of a game that offers no guarantee of being around in a year, let alone six months. I would lump the status quo in with my own Option #2. Sooner or later, that server is going to close, and I can't possibly see how Telstra could be doing money off Invincible in its current state. Maybe that's why Rusty is so hesitant to announce anything; he has to wait for even Bigpond to realize that Invincible is dying -- the only way in which FLS can do something about it. To Iceman's posts: I myself rarely PvP in games. This has to do not only with the fact that I'd probably suck at it, but also with a few other factors that are notorious in MMO's as a general rule: Level-based advantage; gear-based advantage; sometimes class-based advantage; same old formulas used over and over again (stealth strike, kiting, etc., or here the famous "S" manoeuver downwind) to the point where it's not even a matter of skill, but a matter of who has the most time to waste reading gear and attack statistics. You know your game has a serious problem when everyone rolls the same class, uses the same gear, and favours the same attacks (stealth users in Shadowbane, I'm looking at you). In the worst cases, a skillful lowbie will lose every time against a high-level button masher because there is just no chance of winning in the first place. But where skill is involved, it is immediately limited to the usual formulas mentioned above -- think of PvP as your average afternoon soap opera. Even group formations in PotBs are like that: One tackler, five heavy pounders. As you can see, I'm not a big fan of individual PvP because of that, since it's pretty much a case of two guys duking it out until one falls (though I'd say that in all MMO's I have played, PotBS was the best for 1v1's, if you could find them). I like group PvP better, where you have to take into consideration the troops at your disposal, terrain, strategic placement, etc., all things which don't involve button mashing until a later phase in the engagement. The problem with group PvP, however, is that there will always be prima donnas who think exclusively about themselves and never as a group. I painfully saw that first-hand in WAR: tanks running into the thick of enemy lines instead of helping dispatch the melee guy attacking your side's ranged players, clerics thinking they're tanks instead of healers, and all that inevitable running in circles. Here again, PotBS was tops when it came to group PvP. It's just the instances which ruined any epic scale it could have achieved. Still, I mostly play the economic game in MMO's because, barring decent group PvP, it is the main aspect of the game where brains, rather than reflexes, is the main requisite. I'd even love to play the political game, but then I've never been a pillar of any MMO community to the extent where that became an option for me. In PotBS, I could have settled down as a rather successful newspaper publisher for the French side (as people seemed to enjoy my Newspaper of Record), but nothing more than that -- and that would just have been an aside for those reading the forums, really. If I return to PotBS -- and I'm waiting for the Winback program for this -- I will probably re-launch it, in the hope that the forums will look alive once more. But I think it's too late. Regarding RvR consequences: The rewards for a map win are completely inconsequential, since if they had been meaningful, they would have granted the winning team an advantage which would have accrued with every following win -- a situation which FLS wanted to avoid. However, I'm a bit surprised that you should say that you were in awe of the Blackbeard French fleet before the transfers in April. As far as I know, the only fearsome PvP players France had was The Mafia. I did not necessarily agree with their gaming mentality, but they were the only group in France willing to put up a fight with the British. "Le Devoir Avant Tout" had a few lineships, true, but they were also notorious for not engaging the British, preferring to attack Spain instead. And if you're saying that the Blackbeard Brits were disorganized after the transfers, you should have seen the French. (Oh, and you lost The Kraken; don't tell me it wasn't good riddance.) The only major French society which did not go to Rackham was The Royal Musketeers; the rest of them had left, my society included, and it was painful to see the aftermath. I rolled another French character on Blackbeard after transferring the first one, and there was nobody at all, and very little goods on the market (and as my new character was a Naval Officer, my low reputation prevented me from buying abroad). Right until the moment I left, level 25ish if I remember, I was using my fallback, because nobody in France was producing ships, except maybe the Musketeers. I do in fact remember Gosport Naval Yard offering to sell ships to all factions because of the shortage. And Ginger Magician... what to say? He was the guy everybody loved to hate (and not without reason, I'd say -- I'll never forget the hilarious time he and his buddies ganked me in my La Belle fallback), but as far as PvP was concerned, he didn't exactly earn a stellar reputation. He was hated for his gutter manners far more than for his skill. Then he became very quiet. I'd be curious to know, however, what was the matter exactly with the Yacht Club, especially regarding the "representing all that is wrong with this game" part. To GB's post: There's always something fun in quoting Isildur -- I should know, since I'm one of the worst offenders -- in that he can say a thing one day and implement something exactly opposite the next. And that quote in orange -- well, if I understand what he said correctly, the problem with the economy, according to Isildur, is not that it's "great", it's that you can't go anywhere in the game without taking part in it, and one does not equal the other. And that because of this, the economy isn't functional. At this point, I feel like bringing up again the post on the PotBS economy at Terra Nova, which detailed several problems with the economic framework of PotBS. That was in May, and already it was mentioning the problem of not pegging crafting to player time, no possibility of playing the economy as a sandbox game, no genuine wealth creation outside of grinding and missions, and "turtling" by societies. However, one point where the article turned out to be mistaken, if my own and Gyrus's experiences are accurate (and I hope some of you could offer corroboration or refutation of this), is in the assumption that the market would be flooded with goods in excess. Quite the contrary: Even with loot, the auctionhouses were depleted, AND there was no demand for strategic goods. Inflation without increased demand is already a rarity in real life, and in a game where everyone's a crafter, there is just nothing preventing someone from increasing the supply by starting production. If the PotBS economy, under such circumstances, is in an inflationary state, it just indicates, as I've mentioned in another post, that the economy probably doesn't have enough players (outside of closed-loop societies, that is) engaged in it for it to be successful. And greed did the rest for the price spike. Insurance, I'm more and more convinced, is just a red herring, apart from confirming to the economic players that everyone has more disposable income than they used to have if they maintain the same grinding regimen. Please correct me if I'm wrong, because I lack first-hand knowledge of the state of the PotBS markets these days, or of insurance. I'm forced to infer this from posts here and elsewhere. Still, that Terra Nova site also had an update in July: "It’s easier for me to describe Pirates of the Burning Sea as hovering on the borderland of failing not only because it was visibly struggling to retain its subscriber base when I last entered the game, but also because I had a very clear view by the time I stopped following it about what the structural and mechanical problems were with the game design, and how relatively irresolvable they were given the developers’ approach and resources. Pirates offers an interesting view of how an evolving consensus about a virtual world’s design can narrow all future development choices. Fewer subscribers constrains resources, but it also locks live management into a cycle of dependency and limitation with the players who remain, who by definition forgive the product of all its faults, or in fact see no such faults in defiance of what the now-absent former subscribers might have felt." The first part is spot-on, but the second part is nonsense. The players that remain, if the official forums are any indication, are fully aware of the game's shortcomings, and are trying to tell the developers because they *care* about the game, and hope that they can turn PotBS around. In fact, among those who left were some of the biggest yes-men of the community in the game's early stages -- and you guys, obviously no blind cheerleaders, still play. Also, there's an entirely unpleasant ignorance-is-bliss approach in that quote that bothers me (just look at the word "middlebrow" in the previous paragraph of the article, rarely used by people who don't feel above it), along with the implication that you can't possibly like a game in which the economy is deficient. (I wonder how the guy would fare with Warhammer Online, in which the economy is a genuine joke.) The PvP, for starters, is good. It might not warrant a $15/month subscription, but it is in itself fun -- even though it has no depth as far as RvR is concerned. But at one point, you feel like trying to convince the developers is a waste of time, especially when they go on tangents nobody asked for or actively petitioned against (6v9's, AvCom, Pointe-a-Pitre revamp, etc). "If you experience performance issues playing Limousine Online, please update your chauffeurs." |
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Those that hang on in the game are indeed aware of the issues the same as what FLS are but have managed to convince themselves that they enjoy the atmosphere or have enough friends to continue to play. On the other hand there is post after post almost on a daily basis from respected society leaders that they are struggling to hold on to its members that indicates that there is something wrong with the game mechanics. Those that do remain have somehow come to terms with these facts by accepting that PvP & the economic dependancies require a very flexible approach that requires an economic. combination of PvE, & PvP. These players are not mainstream mmo where you generally cater for PvP & PvE types in separate areas of the map. FLS has yet to face up to the real mmorpg world as they are warm & happy in their embryonic environment dreaming about creating a budget hollywood movie type mmo that will one day hit the mainstream & be successful like CCPs Eve. Despite all the known problems with Potbs they go ahead with new projects & only develop what they consider is the most important to themselves by putting all their limited dev resourses into the current avcom re-vamp. From this article: Isildur speaks out on the state of the economy Isildur states, "PvP is not sustainable without doing other non-PvP activities." The economy has fallen into the hands of the care-bear. That's not a bad thing, of course, since money is being made and doubloons are being generated. The problem lies in those warehouses so many folks in PotBS like to store things in. There are a lot of doubloons being generated into the hands of a few people and those coins aren't going anywhere. This leads to inflation which means PvPers, who don't necessarily make too much from PvP, are forced to partake in economic activities in order to stay afloat. Isildur continues to explain that this may have something to do with PotBS only containing around one third of the economic package that was originally designed. This one third provides for a few ways to make money but only one way to get rid of it. The way to get rid of it is ship loss. If you spend all of your time crafting, trading, and the sort, you may never have to leave port. Since the money sitting in coffers isn't going anywhere, we are met not only with inflation but also depreciation. Depreciation sets in because that money that players are making isn't doing anything, making the value of the doubloon decline. Sounds like pirates need a stimulus package too! So we now have FLS now putting all its dev resource's into avcom which is only one third of what is primarily a ship combat game with the other stated two thirds of the economy still missing. It's not at all surprising that they are losing their subcribers or populations, do they care? Dunno you would have to ask them or Rusty who is financing their trip into cyberspace.
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The devlog entry you link to is one of the PotBS "classic moments", but the Massively article that followed it completely escaped me until now. I think that Isildur's mistake is the assumption that the money hoarded by trader types is completely removed from the economy. Some trader types contribute their earnings to the war effort -- unrest bundles, shipbuilding, etc. As for others who don't spend it and are just content to hoard it (though I can't see what is fun in that), how could it be anything other than a sink, as though you were buying your goods from an NPC character? Because frankly, your options once you have money are: 1) Spend it on military contribution. 2) Do nothing with it. Might as well consider idle money as having been taken out of the economy; what might be dangerous is what would happen if non-military expenditures suddenly became possible (i.e. housing, etc.). Inflation in such a context as Isildur mentions might be very possible if the same resources, in limited numbers, could be used for military purposes or civilian 'luxury' needs. Then we could be talking about inflation, or rationing, this sort of thing. But as there is no competition between 'essential' and 'luxury' at this stage, it's a rather moot point. If suddenly every rich player could start spending money on oak paneling for the mansion, and that you needed common goods also used in shipbuilding to make it, such as nails and oak planks, then it would have an impact. What Isildur is basically saying, in a way, is that traders should be risking their ships to make the PotBS economic scheme workable, so as to contribute back some of the money into the economy -- but who would they buy their ship from, pray tell, if not themselves anyway? The non-economic player is penalized either way, because if the economic player loses a ship and has to buy a new one, true, he will be reinvesting some of his money into the economy. But who will the money go to? Not the PvP player who doesn't bother with the economy. It will go, again, to the economic players. The real problem is that the interdependence between the economic and the military isn't stressed enough. Military players, failing the presence of a government to fund them as in real life, ought to depend on economic players for funding; and economic players ought to depend on military players for protection. In PotBS, however, the two are distrustful of one another, and have completely different aims. Economic players hate risk; military players, instead of trying to minimize this risk (as they would in real life, duty notwithstanding), actually want more -- well, when it's in their favour, needless to say -- because that's how they enjoy the game. Economic players, if they bide their time, are in other words never dependent upon military players for protection, which in turn makes military players uninterested in the plight of traders, since they know the traders can just wait anyway. What would have been nice (if we disregard faction imbalance, which throws a steel bar into my nice little system as it does into everything else around the game), would have been a full PvP map -- which FLS never really considered anyway despite the pleas of players -- in which every item sold on the marketplace of a given country is taxed according to a certain percentage, withdrawn from the selling price posted by the trader, with the money given over at regular intervals to only one class -- the Naval Officer, who in turn must perform a certain amount of duties to collect his pay. That's how it would work in real life: Government taxes business, and funds the fleet with the revenues. FTers would make their money from trade, and privateers in a similar fashion to pirates, with a bonus to cargo loot, something like that. The other advantage of a tax on sellers would now be that there would be a major disadvantage to selling your wares in a foreign port: Not only would you be taxed, perhaps even at a higher rate, but the money would directly go towards funding the other nation's Naval Officers.... In such a situation, traders would face a dilemma of which they prefer: personal enrichment, or avoiding funding the enemy. But the flaw of such a system is obvious when coupled with faction imbalance: Frenchmen selling in Bartica because that's where most of the demand is would find themselves funding the British war effort in doing so, regardless of how much money they themselves would make out of it -- while they would starve if they only sold in French ports. "If you experience performance issues playing Limousine Online, please update your chauffeurs." |
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Time for a little history of BB. :)
As far as the Mafia, they were one of the first frenchies to transfer, weren't they? I specifically remember the Musketeers as the one with all the ships. Think Alpha still has screenies, will have to hit him up lol. I'm not the largest fan of instances, but like you, I'm a group PvP guy. I don't 1 v 1 much, if at all. I prefer the "organized chaos" of group PvP. I know the group I've rolled with on several occasions introduced new tactics, skill styles, etc and then started watching everyone copy ours. (Now everyone is chaning extra rations and flagship indefinetly lol.) And as I've said before, when you get a good 6 v 6, no game's PvP can even come close to it.
As far as the Yacht Club, they are an interesting breed. They contain the best of PvP'ers and people of class, and the worst at the same time. A few of their guys were notorious exploiters (i.e. a pherc standing up to 2 2nd's and a 3rd all using Ultima Ratio with explosive shot loaded at 95% accuracy, and the Pherc taking less than 400 damage.) There was the infamous boarding exploit where they found a way to generate a "shadow wave" where you had to take down the wave twice to have the waves reduced by one. (hence you had pirates being outnumbered 3 waves to 1, taking down all waves, and only losing maybe at most 1 or 2 waves.) On the other hand, they have guys like Ryan Winfield who simply does not know how to die in combat, the man has 9 times 9 lives. :)
When they were pirates, their 3 map wins, a lot of them came from the "4am flip" where they would only flip ports at 4am. the 6 v 9 reverse gank, they were about the only ones who thought it was a great system on BB. Yet at the same time, they re-rolled French for sever health, and ever since they've rolled French, a lot of the BS has stopped (except for a few of their more immature mates who you get in any society, annoying as they are) and PvP has been outstanding. It's why all of a sudden people are constantly trying to find a way to transfer characters from Antigua to Blackbeard. (And I hate that!)
Ginger is.... welll.... Ginger. Never saw someone who mastered the ability to dump guns like he could lol
As far as markets are concerned, there are a lot of truly perverse incentives that stop a fully functioning market. When the Dauntless frigate came out, the insurance on it was insane. A 17k ship (even if you paid for the Movs for it came out to about 30k) was offering 70k in insurance when it sunk. Many shipwrights produced this ship in bulk, went and got it sunk, and collected the insurance. While lineship bundles originally (and still in a sense) keep the biggest bundleboats still "somewhat" rare, the amount of resources required has caused people to go to closed society loops. Personally, I don't find that as efficient. My Corunne MC which is being built has been a national project. It's part of what makes our British alliance so good. While there are some loops, trade between socities is far higher than it is with most. The AH has become so borked on BB, a lot of people in the Brit side began going to private contracts. Since the blind auction house doesn't allow you to really do such (no buy orders, no ability to see what is available at what price) it was only logical. Someone would be enterprising enough to figure out that if he contacted the right people, he would corner the market, and give people very little chance to compete against him and the operation he maintains.
Personally I would've made the big SOL's rewards contingent on RvR participation. For the freetrader ships, they should've implented a system that allowed the freetrader to be a real smuggler in times of contention, where the goods he dropped off were of real concrete value in things, outside of the absurd "unrest bundles" which are only useful when tons of people are doing them, and in getting the port to initially flip so there are better spawns. But in order to do that, there would need to be real concrete purposes to winning a map, rather than a few citations of conquest, which are for the most part worthless. ign of all games: Ulot Ooma Notice: The views expressed in this posting are solely those of the author, and may or may not be the views of the management of MMORPG.com |
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Originally posted by Gyrus Ever since the announcement of the SOE contract the Oceanic game has been just one long series of drumrolls :-| And TBH I wold put my money on a third option: No Change. The reason is that I am betting Telstra/Bigpond have some kind of penalty clause in the contract if FLS pulls out. As long as there is one paying subscriber on Invincible, Telstra can claim (correctly) that these customers are theirs and if the server is closed this is lost business... There is also the issue of customer information. While it is not impossible for FLS to recover this information and hand it on to another company (SOE) to allow character transfers it would be a very difficult process - and certainly not worth the time and (legal) expense for only a few customers. So - my bet is that after a long wait the announcement will be "No change - but we are encouraging you to purchase the SOE edition." FLS might even subsidise the player costs - but again - they risk legal action from Telstra if they do for 'lost business'. Just an update on this FLS have announced that they are dumping Telstra/Bigpond as a partner http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=11048 Community reaction: http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44043 Well, modeation at FLS hasn't changed with Danicia going on a thread lockage rampage with regard to all threads Australian - making it very hard to have and follow a discussion. And as usual, many people, including some of those on Invincible are unaware of the news It seems FLS still doesn't know how to get news to the community? (System Message FLS... that's a hint) All that said - it doesn't address the issues of low populations and why the game has low populations in the first place.
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Yeah, I had the same reaction, really, though I'm not affected by this (and wouldn't be anyway if I still played the game). And the talk of adding Defiant.... The four SOE servers are at Light all the time, and they think a NEW server is going to fare better? Just take the worst off of servers (any but Antigua, from what I'm reading) and make it the new Aussie home by offering a new round of transfers to other players there. Or if you're really intent on adding a new server, just offer everyone on other servers to transfer the characters of their choice there and shut down the existing four. One server is probably all that the current PotBS membership could fill these days. "If you experience performance issues playing Limousine Online, please update your chauffeurs." |
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Linna
Novice Member
Joined: 5/01/05
Those who do not know their history, are bound to step in it. |
Originally posted by Vetarnias
How many inhabitants does the US have these days? 305+ million? And together with at least as many Europeans, they can't even fill 4 servers... so what makes FLS think that Australia, a country with approx 22 million people in it, can actually produce one viable server? The suddenly marvellous quality of the game? The excellent customer service? The great communication between FLS and its customer base? Don't make me laugh... Linna |
Originally posted by Linna
I think what FLS invisioned with the Telstra Contract was something like this: Australia has a lot of room for growth in the MMORPG market because we still have metered internet unless you have a business plan and pay top dollar. So, they made the Client free and arranged a deal with Telstra to have PotBS downloads unmetered. Telstra is also a big player here reaching a lot of people. So, I think FLS thought that Telstra would actually look after their business and promote the game - after all subscriptions = money for Telstra, right? But, they didn't look at it properly. Telstra is BIG, and BIG = bureaucracy. So while there may have been some people in GameArena who actually gave a damn that does not mean that Telstra as a whole gave a damn or that those people had the power to get something done. For example - they could have included a one liner on the bill of every BigPond customer to the effect of "** Free trial of Pirates of the Burning Sea online game available to every BigPond customer! Ask us how!**" IIRC they pressed 100,000 CDs here. If they had managed to retain 2% of that population they could have packed a server. But of that 100,000 I wonder how many CDs were ever distributed - and how many are still in boxes 'out the back'.
Then again, I cannot believe FLS was so naive as not to put performance benchmarks in their contracts?
And yeah, the rest of your comments are quite true. |
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