Pirates of the Burning Sea Correspondent Ernest Ross takes a look at the troubles of the game's Oceanic Defiant server and the difficulties that this game has had in reaching the Australian market.
Back in November, after weeks of promising an ailing Australian playerbase that a solution for their problems was in the works and an announcement would be made "soon," FLS CEO "Rusty" Williams delivered a devlog in which he outlined Flying Lab's decision to discontinue their business relationship with BigPond. BigPond, a subsidiary of Telstra (which is about as popular with Aussie gamers as Sony Online Entertainment seems to be with everyone else), had been Pirates of the Burning Sea's distributor Down Under and from the very beginning the majority of Australian players protested FLS's decision to work with "failstra," promising that no good could come of it. They were right.
So what was the solution? To dump BigPond and fire up a brand new server with a Port Battle schedule timed to cater to the Australian and late Pacific Time Zone players who had been expressing their own discontent ever since the PB Schedule system was put in place to prevent "night flips" (for those who don't know, this is the act of taking advantage of time zone differences by putting a port into contention while the bulk of the port owner's players were sleeping, generally carried out by European players on the North American servers and US players on the European servers, resulting in a port battle scheduled for a time when the defenders could not hope to field a full fleet). Since the beginning, FLS has chosen not to impose geographic restrictions on their servers. Among the reasons for this decision they have cited that many of today's MMO gamers are adults with jobs whose available playtime may not always coincide with the majority of their own time zone's players. The new Aussie server would be called "Defiant" and would be handled through SOE like the rest of the servers. FLS would also ramp up advertising in the Australian market to try and make up for the lack of advertising provided by BigPond.
