While in attendance at Gen Con Indy, the MMORPG.com crew had the chance to sit down and talk to FLS CEO Rusty Williams about upcoming improvements to Pirates of the Burning Sea and their rapid pace in publishing updates since the games launch.

It’s not often you get to sit down and chat with the CEO of a development studio, but we did just that with Rusty Williams, CEO of Flying Labs Studio about their game Pirates of the Burning Sea. In this industry you talk to a lot of different types of people. Some come across kinda stuffy and almost rehearsed when talking about their product, others like Rusty, you can absolutely tell he loves what he does and the product he’s working on.

It was very apparent from our talk that Flying Lab Studios is very dedicated to Pirates of the Burning Sea and turning it into the amazing game it has the potential to be. Since the game launched in January, FLS has released a major updated every month so far. Currently they’re working on update 1.7 which will introduce new tutorials and overall improve the new player experience. It also adds a new camera system, added repeatable missions and new ad hoc rules on how you get into fights in the open sea, to help fight ganking.

Read more here.

Incredible. Especially this part:

Along with update 1.7 will come a big marketing push. There hasn’t been much marketing so far because they wanted to get the game ready for a more casual group of people. They launched at a point where they felt the game would be ready to go and would be a smooth launch, even though the game wasn’t as ready as it could be.

So the devs refrained from starting an advertising campaign sooner because they were waiting to add more features to satisfy casual players?  And what have they been doing for the first seven months?  Throw "no crying in the red circle" left and right?  In other words, I find it hard to believe that they were just waiting for their "hardcore" gamers -- who ruined the game for many a casual player -- to move to the next shiny thing (first Conan, then Warhammer) , especially since the game basically catered to them for over half a year at the expense of everyone else.

FLS made a mistake, and now it is realizing it, but this still reeks of looking for excuses.  The game was not finished, this I'm pretty sure we can all understand, but we cannot sweep under the blanket the attitude of the developers themselves in the early months, where they all but condoned ganking as an appropriate style of gameplay.

Rusty's a nice guy - obviously a fan of games and really dedicated to his product - but he (and by extension his development team) is painfully unaware of the realities of the MMO genre.

Essentially all the issues they are currently dealing with are a result of the terrible choices they made during the development of PotBS - choices predicated on players "playing the right way" and reinforced by a bunch of yes-man beta veterans shouting down any suggestion that "average players" wouldn't necessarily play the game the way the devs intended them.

They've had two lead producers leave the game within the first year of live - that there is not a good sign to me.

For the sake of indie developers in the MMO game space I hope FLS has enough wherewithall to push through and make PotBS a success, but they've got a tough uphill climb ahead of them.  They can't afford to take the same route as EVE or other older games they may make comparisons to - the genre has matured beyond the point where that kind of come-from-behind is expected.

Personally I think we're looking at the next Shadowbane, not the next EVE - but I'd love to be proved wrong.

In closed beta most beta testers weren't "yes-man" fanboys! There were many who were very critical about features, gameplay and design decisions! And they expressed it in the closed beta forums over and over! But it was the FLS dev team who made the decisions. Almost all aspects of the game and problems have been mentioned and been discussed heavily in closed beta before release!

Originally posted by Costy

In closed beta most beta testers weren't "yes-man" fanboys! There were many who were very critical about features, gameplay and design decisions! And they expressed it in the closed beta forums over and over! But it was the FLS dev team who made the decisions. Almost all aspects of the game and problems have been mentioned and been discussed heavily in closed beta before release!

 

By no means did I intend to imply that all closed beta testers were.

There were however a core of very vocal, very wrong long-term testers that the Dev team knew personally and gave much credence to their approval.  This vocal minority supported the wrongheaded assumptions that the Devs were making and did their level best to discourage or shout down comments that may have helped the game in the long run.

Of course the buck stops with FLS - they made many naieve choices, and one of them was to give weight to testers that were giving bad advice.

Originally posted by Vetarnias

Incredible. Especially this part:

Along with update 1.7 will come a big marketing push. There hasn’t been much marketing so far because they wanted to get the game ready for a more casual group of people. They launched at a point where they felt the game would be ready to go and would be a smooth launch, even though the game wasn’t as ready as it could be.

So the devs refrained from starting an advertising campaign sooner because they were waiting to add more features to satisfy casual players? 

Indeed.

That is just a bunch of Bull Spin.

Do companies think that the MMO gaming community has short-term memory loss?  How then to explain why there were so many servers at launch if the large marketing push had not yet occurred?

A more respectable statement (and not even a Spin) would have been, "They are wanting to get the game ready for a more casual group of people and when ready will launch a new marketing campaign."  There is nothing wrong with stating of conducting a new marketing campaign.  Bad things happens or do not go as expected.  People know that.  So admitting to conducting a new campaign is acceptable.

But to state that a big marketing push never happened? 

What utter Bull Spin.

I didn't even realize this game was still around. Out of 4 servers left, only one, Antigua, seems to be left as a viable server.

Quite a fall from grace.

I don't think people realize how long it takes to actually change the core mechanics of a game. Most of the things people complained about at launch were decided six to eight months before they were ever seen in beta.

The come from behind like EVE isn't an impossibility these days. If you look at all the people turning back from newer games to try out some of the older ones I think you'll realize it's becoming a trend. Even Vanguard is picking up and it had a horrendous launch.