Kevin "Isildur" Maginn, Lead Designer for Pirates of the Burning Sea, has written a nonexclusive devlog explaining the original concept of ambush gameplay, or in other words, a gang of pirates sneaking up on a merchant vessel on the high sea. In the devlog he describes how the original design concept failed in practice, degenerating into what can more accurately be described ganking, and their current efforts to reduce the occurrence of ganking.

Rusty asked me what we think about ganking. Ganking has a long and difficult history within our design and development process, so it’s a hard question to answer with a simple ‘we hate it’ or ‘we love it.’

The term I’ve preferred to use is ‘ambush gameplay’, which sounds nicer and has different implications for the user experience. In the earliest days of the Pirates design, one of the scenarios we envisioned and tried to support was the lone pirate or group of pirates catching an unwary merchant by surprise, defeating him, and looting him before reinforcements could arrive. That’s ambush gameplay—rewarding for the pirates, disheartening for the lone merchant. In some theoretical world before we actually started building the game, it made sense. You’d sail out from port, hoping to avoid danger, but there would be a sail on the horizon. Was it a friend or an enemy? Before anyone could come to save you, the sail would turn out to belong to a pirate, and you’d be fighting for your life.

Then we changed our world structure in a fundamental way: we implemented the Open Sea. Suddenly, that scenario didn’t work anymore. You could see lots and lots of people on the Open Sea. When you left port, you could quickly scan the area around you for threats. And with the introduction of the PvP areas, you could look for potential attackers before entering the red circle.

Read more here.

If I'm reading correctly, Isildur came to the (correct) conclusion that the initial vision of "ambush gameplay" is ganking, just with a prettied-up name.  I note this because some people like the whole ganker/gankee gameplay -- people still love original recipe Ultima Online, EVE's slowly growing population, people on WoW's PvP servers -- so I wouldn't discount the idea entirely. It's a perfectly reasonable model, especially when you take a wider "RvR" view: losing the battle but winning the war and whatnot.

I do think it's a fairly narrow model, though, and so I'm not surprised that the developers are rethinking it. While I get twitchy about games that have major remodels after launch (SWG and, to a much lesser degree, City of Heroes "ED" and economy), it sounds like this is happening early enough to work out. I'm also not a fan of gankplay, but I like the whole pirate schtick, so this may be good news. I've kicked PotBS in the past, but I'm impressed with FLS's approach to the game post-launch and may return once they finish the plumbing and the drywall.

This is good news to me.   Port Battles were always great but I never cared for open-sea PvP because of the gank factor.   Once I see how they change PvP I might resub. 

Curate, I agree with your comments, except I don't think it's nearly "early enough" to start thinking about fixing this.  The game's been out, what, 5 months now?  And by the sound of it it will take several more to try to do something about this, followed by several rounds of inevitable tweaking & balancing.  Isn't this why they have prolonged betas?  9 months post-release is too long to fix a fundamental gameplay flaw that is driving away players.

Ganking is why I never played original UO (although I played nearly everything else since), and ganking is why I never seriously considered buying PotBS, although it was relatively fun in the limited open beta time I had with it.  <edited for typo>

I posted and warned about this for a while in the beta.

It boils down to: who wants to play the victim, especially when the risks are high and the chance of winning/escaping is near zero?

Precisely no one.

It doesn't matter what game it is, ganking drives away paying customers more than it brings in (or even retains).

PvP is fun when the fights are fair. It stinks when they are not. Simple as that.

Glad to see they are finaly coming around to their senses.

Announcing this may prove to be the best thing that FLS has ever done.