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10/30/08 5:39:57 AM#21
I suspect that with closed-loop societies, even economic players might be on the way out. No point in playing if the market is dead and that money is meaningless. Where I differ from you is on the question of insurance. Sadly, I left the game just before that was brought in, so I never saw for myself the amount of inflation it created. I heard that it had most devastating effects when coupled with the high prices for bundleboats, yet even without insurance, the end result would have been the same: bundleboats would have monopolized port battles sooner or later, with the larger factions (e.g. you guys) having an even greater advantage with this. Your society loses a bundleboat? You just get your members grinding to replace it, and if you collaborate with other societies as well, everybody just pitches in. Insurance just means, as far as closed-loop societies are concerned, a faster rate of replacement. This might minimally advantage one type of player: those who play in smaller factions and in closed societies, and who already have a bundleboat. In fact, even before I left, I saw inflation come into play, so while insurance might have compounded it, it cannot entirely be blamed for it. It also fails to explain why inflation started in the first place. Let's consider, for starters, that everyone can be a crafter, which if anything should lead to increased competition and a decrease in prices, and that the initial cost at the basic level remains the same -- no increase in taxes, no reduction in available labour, no frost to destroy your crops or an unfavourable exchange rate to reduce your purchasing power, just business as usual. Insurance, if anything, should have alleviated the reliance on the marketplace as a source of revenue; i.e. one could have posted at little more than above cost and it would have been sufficient to maintain one's standard, especially with marketplace competition remaining the same. Certainly, insurance introduced tons and tons of extra money into the market, but that alone does not explain inflation in a game, as stipulated above, where anyone can be a crafter. In itself, it's not a case where supply and demand as we know it really enters into play, as there is nothing whatsoever which forces a producer of oak logs (or any sort of basic goods) part of a closed-loop society, to sell his leftovers at 20 doubloons apiece when he could sell them at one doubloon above cost -- especially if all closed-loop society members who produce oak logs try to sell them at the auctionhouse. If anything, this should bring prices down, unless there is a shortage. And that is why I find the PotBS economic nut hard to crack in this case, because for all the economic theories we could cite, I have seen so much contradictory evidence that I can't make sense of it all in a single attempt. Back in June, i.e. pre-insurance days, I often saw two concurrent phenomena: a complete shortage of certain goods on the auctionhouse (which should have driven prices up), but also a complete lack of demand for them. And here I am not talking about certain luxury items like gold ingots or certain types of low-level consumables. I am talking about some of the products I did make, mainstays of ship construction -- hemp rope, wood tar, even leather at times. Sometimes I was the only seller on the market, and I did not exactly raise my prices to obscene levels -- just my usual selling price. Yet they did not sell for a few days. And that was not just in Grenville, the French economic hub, but in Sisal, Campeche, and Bartica as well. In other words, even at times when I had a monopoly, and selling at the usual going rates, my wares did not sell. Shortage and zero demand for strategic goods. Much as I tried to find an explanation, the only one which fits the bill is a combination of closed-loop societies (no reliance on the market, reducing demand), private contracts like Iceman's (a variation on the above, with a profit margin), and purely economic players -- those who hate to risk ships and who hoard money, the type of people Isildur once railed against -- quitting the game. Why did they quit? Perhaps because PvP was inevitable (and as I mentioned in my previous post, it's clear some economic players would rather avoid it altogether), and perhaps because there was nothing inherently interesting in playing an economic player in a game where the actual crafting required no involvement beside putting up structures and click buttons for a few minutes -- which everyone else could do. This post is pretty interesting in this regard. So instead of an overstocked market situation where profit margins are so insignificant as to discourage production with a lucrative purpose in mind (which in turn would have led to a shortage as people stopped producing, which would have led people to start again because of the shortage, and on, and on, which if I recall correctly happened in the first month or two of the game), you got to a point where the pure crafters just quit, leaving production to PvPers and societies -- people who sometimes don't want to be forced to craft in the first place, and would sooner grind NPC's than play the market. Then greed set in, because the crafters that remained, few in numbers, realized that people now had more disposable income thanks to insurance and that they had more or less cornered the market. So I would suggest that even though insurance increased the money pool, which *in real life* would have caused inflation, the real problem is that populations have grown too small to sustain an economy. You started seeing that in May/June, and I suspect it's just worse now. Bring back independent traders, and I suspect that, insurance or not, prices would come down again because of accrued competition. What I would have loved to see, to alleviate this, is a player-run insurance system, where the player decides whom he wants to cover, whether cargo, the ship, permanent fittings, or a combination of any of those are to be covered, what the premiums and payouts would be, length of coverage, etc. Which of course would need a new set of criteria to determine what happens in case of bankruptcy -- perhaps a negative balance, with "The Game" acting as lender, until you make things right again, while being forbiden to issue insurance until you have a positive balance. But in the meantime, what should have been done was to make insurance optional, with a policy to be purchased from a civilan ship trader (or perhaps pre-made templates made by players and sold on the AH in the manner of ship or structure deeds, with the payout coming from above as with the current insurance scheme). This would make insurance optional (if you forget to buy one, that's your damn problem), and affordable without being free (and perhaps more expensive in the case of bundleboats). That way, at least some money would be taken out of the economy. |
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10/30/08 7:49:13 AM#22
Originally posted by Vetarnias
I clipped this post to the bit which really caught my eye.
As for what needs to be done - well - lots of things. The interesting thing is that in the original developer blogs they talked about player run insurance and other ideas (like paying another player to haul your wares) IIRC. Yet they never put proper tools in to allow this to be done. The irony is - these things could be done relatively easily (in comparison to some of the other things they have done) and might make a significant difference to game play. My own idea was a way to quickly and (relatively) easily introduce a proper Naval Ranking and Command System into the game. This included seeing Naval Officers getting paid and being issued a proper assignment / posting. In fact I even planned to introduce it to Invincible on my own (to prove the concept was workable). But, the snag was that I cannot make money. My FT rarely sells goods so never has the money get the system up and keep it running.
The other thing is I wonder what FLS is actually playing at? I'm not much into conspiracy theories but I have even considered the fact that PotBS might be just one huge experiment for MMO designers throughout the industry to randomly throw ideas at and see what happens? Either that or they are still listening to this twit. This thread is a classic example of someone (or several someones?) unable to actually consider all the implications of their proposed 'rule change' through to all possible conclusions (keline is correct). I tried playing Real Life but the graphics sucked, the community was annoying too. |
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10/30/08 9:16:59 AM#23
I don't think anyone -- well, I mean other players; I wouldn't bet on developers -- listens to Jack Simple's musings anymore. That's what happens when you threaten to quit every other week, and have a narrow vision of the game to fit your own style, even though it wouldn't work on a larger scale. That later incident Jack is mentioning doesn't surprise me, but it's not exactly the most egregious example of cheating I've seen. Best way to solve all this would be to allow to fire on your own side; not only would it add an element of treachery, but it would also make battles much, much more realistic if friendly fire is enabled -- no longer will you get players firing through a small opening between other ships. (But I don't think the game could enable it in its current form). Based on what I'm seeing on the PotBS official forums these days, it's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The developers have abandoned the forums for the most part. Case in point: Isildur, who has posted less than ten times since the beginning of September, and even then mostly in FLS's current pet project, Avatar Combat. Is there anyone who has seriously ASKED about an AvCom revamp? It's arguably one of the weakest points of the game, but it's also one of the most inconsequential -- it's like saying my bathroom is the least decorated place in the house. An AvCom revamp is clearly not something that can be justified by saying "well, the art department has to do something, and they don't do game mechanics", yet up that alley FLS goes instead of the handful of more pressing issues around. The economy? Doesn't matter. Population imbalance? Shhh, it can't be helped anyway. Ganking? Why, we gave you our splendid idea of 6v9's to solve this, haven't we? There is a pattern emerging, and it's that FLS takes into consideration everything written on its forums as a way of deciding what NOT to do, and go instead for things nobody actually asked for. Hence we got, in turn, unrest decay shutdown, underdog tools, 6v9's, AvCom, etc. Oh, and that new pirate class in lieu of trying to justify just what the pirate endgame is supposed to be. In a way, I'm almost sorry I quit the game in June, because I would have loved to see those wrong-headed decisions first-hand. I would be surprised if a gaming reporter doesn't turn this into a lengthy feature, even a book. It's just too painful, yet comical, to watch, like a guy who thinks he's drowning in a puddle of water. Put all the gaffes together -- DrewC's remark, Isildur's "next big failure", the devlogs, the admissions of the game being incomplete at launch, the erratic development of new mechanics without a masterly plan in sight -- all of this could easily be a cautionary tale for the ages, a "Devil's Candy" for the gaming industry. The other thing annoying me of late is the developers evading questions and playing a little game of wait-and-see with their remaining subscribers. Rusty's overextended drumroll over the fate of Invincible vividly comes to mind. It's been two months since the issue was first raised; at one point someone is bound to ask him to put up or shut up. Especially pathetic, since everyone knows there are basically two options: merger with the rest of the servers, or closure. Just get it over with. Your ranking system is intriguing, but unlikely to be implemented (and I'm guessing that if they bring it in, they will just make it level-based like the rest of it, which would be the most straightforward and disappointing way to go about it). |
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10/30/08 7:20:18 PM#24
Originally posted by DJXeon
Don't forget PvP loss comprises of not only a dura point, it also includes the loss of all permanent fittings costing up to 50k & your unsecured cargo which can cost a lot more. In my mind at least this is the main reason why players avoid red circles & inhibits PvP fun. The economy has nearly all its loss or market from PvP players & this should not be the case for a healthy prosperous game imo.
There's a person on blackbeard that represents the Yacht Club. normally, i view their kind as representing all that is wrong with this game. But you made this point on the POTBS, and he came with what I view an equally compelling counterpoint, one that I found valid. You could make PvP entirely risk free, and many people would still not PvP. People do not join a game that heavily advertises PvP for no risk. A lot of people don't PvP...... because they aren't very good at it. That's not a knock on them. It's simply that this isn't their style of play. It's not a discussion of one being a "carebear." I remember when I played pre-cu SWG. PvP was for all intents and purposes risk free. There was a group of rebels who were essentially being bullies on Dantooine. We decided to challenge their perception, and had a few stalemate battles. We then decided to take the fight to them. We performed a march on their home city, taking the fight to their home turf. They came out to defend.... and got slaughtered. The slaughter continued for 4 hours. We marched all around their city, proclaiming that the Empire intended to restore order so that her children would no longer feel chaos. (Great RP arc lol.) This was absolutely humiliating for them. After that night, we didn't see them PvPing anybody for 3 months. They ran up against a team of obviously superior skill, and wanted nothing to do with it. For others, PvP is not their style. They don't want to enter something they feel they suck at. (Even if they might be good.) That's just the way things are. Making pvp "more accessible" by eliminating any sense of risk won't change a thing. Not to mention that it would wreck the economy, since right now, economy serves PvP. It should work to more, but right now, it doesn't. Of course, a lot of this is FLS' fault. They appealed to gamers who thought they wouldn't be getting what they got. They made the game as PvP having a niche, not PvP being all important in the game. |
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10/30/08 7:36:29 PM#25
Originally posted by Vetarnias Very interesting conversation, and perhaps the first sustained exchange of ideas in a few months. Loss might matter, but in the absence of a genuine RvR conflict, the PvP remains pointless, and the loss becomes a burden. Why should you risk anything if, in the end, your own side receives nothing for its effort, even in victory? Map resets are necessary to prevent a lopsided server that can't be rearranged without starting over. But that also means that the rewards must in themselves be meaningless apart from a purely symbolic value, lest that confer an advantage upon a winning faction. But even with that, it gets tiresome if you show up and lose every single time. I know both you and GB play Brits; I played French, arguably the least popular faction, and that made all the difference in the world. You never really had population problems; we did. And in the end, it meant showing up at port battles while being sure to lose because we didn't have the numbers; and even with a full 24, we knew that even if we won, we probably would face a much greater setback than the Brits would in losing the battle, unless we sustained no losses whatsoever. In a war of attrition, we would end up losing our ships and forced to grind to replace them, while all the Brits had to do was to pool together their greater numbers and replenish their fleet much faster. In the best of cases, regardless of PvP skill, it was your garage-league team facing the Yankees; with population levels becoming critical, it meant your left-fielder was off on vacation that weekend, and your right-handed pitcher had sprained his arm and was now throwing from the left. In the best of cases, barring a miracle, the final score is easily predictable; with even lower population levels, even showing up at all is a waste of time. Even with map resets, there is just no chance of changing the outcome with a major population imbalance problem. Get a 6v6 together, and I have no doubt that it's fun. But then I could get that playing NavyField, entirely for free -- and it gets tiresome after a week. Regarding the economy, I was under the impression that the economic players were among the first to leave the game, precisely because they were considered second-class to the PvPers. PvPers might have a tendency to think like this in most games, but in other games, crafting takes time and sometimes involves skill, so PvPers grudgingly acknowledge your presence, because they don't have the inclination to spend hours doing it themselves. But in this game, every PvPer can just waste a few minutes crafting his daily labour allotment, with no time lost by the player himself. Which meant, at best, closed societies where even the most ardent PvPer contributed to the crafting effort (such as your hemp producers), and at worst, cross-server lot-swapping and multi-boxing. At most, you needed one level-45 freetrader in your society to build the master shipyards, but for other people, a level-20 freetrader (usually an alt, so as not to destroy his reputation with foreign nations) was enough: Trade Connections, and the ability to sail the lowest of the cargo ships, the Dromedary, were all you needed. Maybe in some cases advanced structures were worth it; but when you were French and underpowered, your Antilles cities were easy pickings and constantly in the red, so it was not exactly an advantage to go there. You're right about the economy serving the PvP, and I remember writing something to this effect six months ago or so. But that is where the relationship ends. The PvP becomes meaningless in the absence of genuine RvR -- of actual need to control resources, which is warring has always been about. If you can set up production in an enemy port with a good reputation level every FT starts out with, cranking out vital resources immediately shipped to your own side on a ship which can't be attacked (in the absence of a red circle) with only a minimal increase in taxation, it basically means that the RvR is meaningless outside of deep water harbours, because of the taxes involved in the building of bundleboats -- but now I'm hearing they want to get rid of bundleboats altogether? So let's add risk to RvR. Prevent the production of certain goods in enemy ports (would you let a First Rate sail out of port, let alone see it being built without doing something?), put a heavy excise tax on other goods to discourage their leaving the country; charge prohibitive customs duties to foreign producers posting on your auction houses), etc, etc. In fact, I remember suggesting once that map resets ought to be done away with, to be replaced by periodic map calculations to determine the winner, and that then ports are slowly given back to their starting faction (in a "Dispatch from Europe: Treaty cedes Tampa back to the French!"). It certainly sounds more appealing and mysterious than: "Map reset. Let's start over." In fact, in the entire PvP/econ debate, there is one interesting remark I saw on several occasions: PvPers want red circles; economic players hate them. PvPers want to take a port; economic players with production there would rather have it firmly in the hands of the enemy, even if that involves higher taxes, rather than see it perenially contested, especially if their own side is the weaker one. PvPers understand that they need economic production for their war effort; economic players know that they need military action to make profits. But the two don't trust one another, and have completely different aims. Game mechanics just lopsided the relationship in favour of the PvPers -- and the economic players seem to have left.
Some good points. And yes, it always is good to have a real exchange of ideas. I completely agree that the "end game" is left undefined. There really is no consequence to winning a map. There is no consequence to a lot of things. What POTBS does have going for them is the sheer rush of a 6 v6 or a 24 v 24 port battle. Without a doubt, that is some of the most fun I've ever had in the game. I honestly don't think being a Brit has much of anything to do with it. There was a time when TRM on blackbeard owned the Brits. I remember the French and Brits teaming up once to counter Ginger Magician. We brits saw the french fleet and were scared out of our minds. We realized at that time "okay, they seriously have twice the SOL"s we have" (This was around the time of the original server transfers.) The transfers first to Rackham then to Antigua destroyed any organization on the Brits. We had no economy. Heck a national meeting in Vent produced at the time all the active players in the Brit nation.... all 15 of them. We did a lot of recruitment amongst friends and new players. and eventually people like myself, Rapture Lohan, and Chip Graybeard not only streamlined our economy, but greatly enhanced it. Alpha was around providing a lot more leadership in port battles. To be honest it is only just now for the first time since server transfers that we Brits are able to pump out SOL's like we do. And our numbers are still less of a story than you think. What we do have are several people who are serious about eco. This complements our people who are serious about PvP. (Some of us big eco guys are also big pvpers, we know our market lol.)
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10/30/08 7:48:44 PM#26
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'. I tried playing Real Life but the graphics sucked, the community was annoying too. |
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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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10/31/08 12:41:18 AM#28
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). |
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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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10/31/08 4:08:38 AM#30
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. |
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10/31/08 4:38:11 AM#31
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. |
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11/10/08 5:39:08 PM#32
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.
I tried playing Real Life but the graphics sucked, the community was annoying too. |
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11/10/08 6:56:55 PM#33
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. |
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Linna
Apprentice Member
Joined: 5/01/05
Those who do not know their history, are bound to step in it. |
11/12/08 4:25:38 AM#34
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 |
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11/12/08 7:34:25 AM#35
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. I tried playing Real Life but the graphics sucked, the community was annoying too. |
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