A review which basically damns the game and its developers followed by posts saying that the article is understated.
Glad I stayed clear of this release.
And no! I dont hold "hope that the game ends up doing well" I actually like seing MMO's dying off quickly than a long drawn out affair. NCSOFT has the right idea - if its not working, get rid.
You see them as having "improved" the game, I see them addressing window trimings and lawn chairs; not the problems with the game that drove the vast majority of initial players away from the game.
Dressing a turd up in tinsel and painting it red still leaves you with a turd...and thats all FLS has done. The original "review" was beyond pointlessly optimistic, it read like it was written by a damage control specialist in FLS marketing, not a real player. Most of the real problems have been mentioned here and they aren't being touched by FLS. PS. SOE gets dragged into the discussion because they are the ones keeping PotBS on life support. If the game was a stand alone, unsupported, it would have closed already.
A bit strong language but I think it addresses the point very well.
Certainly better than the:
"Some gamers will argue that we've heard such promises from Flying Lab befre, and in fairness that is certainly true. However, given all of the changes that have taken place to bring Pirates of the Burning Sea where it is today, I think the outlook for 2009 is very bright indeed; it's shaping up to be a very happy new year for PotBS and all of its players!"
Then again one can argue that an item wrapped in tin foil and painted red looks bright.
I was a beta tester and heavily involved in the pve-pvp debate.
You wont be surprised that i never bought the "finalized game" . They wanted (my interpretation) the best of both worlds and ended up (once more in my opinion) with a terrible compromise.
Still, the theme has my fullest attention ( i really would like a pirate game, not a game with pirates) and the moment they will get their act together i will jump a board.
i agree with all the people that say that your character should be improving (evolving) even when you reach the maximum level. That is something high on my prio list.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained. Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
Although I agree with your opinions I don't agree with your "posture". Let's think about it this way, is the game better now than 1 year ago? Yes, immensely. Coming from beta I saw many, many bugs get fixed. I saw mechanics that were not working get fixed. Many missions that had problems got fixed. Many skills and ships got rebalanced. Lots and lots of fixing really improved the game. Then we had a lot of content added, new ships, new eq, new clothes, new missions. We also now have new UI's and new systems like duels and insurance. Now more recently a whole new avcom system. Is it better now? My opinion is yes, really better than the simplistic old and people having to learn something new (which most people just hate especially if they were good with the old system and now, not so good) is not an excuse to say it sucks. Also we can still look on the horizon and see more content being added like missions, ships, eq and clothes but also two new systems in the form of skirmish and port governance and maybe some economy improvements. What all of this shows to me is that FLS is still eagerly behind it's baby and working to improve it. That is very important. So to come back to my initial remark, i don't agree with your posture. You would be right to be angry and disappointed if the game was dead, if they were not fixing it. So look at the year past, has the game improved? Yes. Look at the future, does it seem like that new stuff is going to improve it further? Yes. Then you should be optimist as should they as should anyone writting a review. Instead, in this WOW world, anything but perfect instantly gets spitted on and it's that behaviour that is really stopping the wow-killers from showing up and nothing else. PS: In fact I bet most of you are employed by blizzard just to spread bad things about other MMO's to keep their game at the top LOL. I jest, but I wonder if that is really true and they do employ people for that purpose hmmm
You see them as having "improved" the game, I see them addressing window trimings and lawn chairs; not the problems with the game that drove the vast majority of initial players away from the game.
Dressing a turd up in tinsel and painting it red still leaves you with a turd...and thats all FLS has done.
The original "review" was beyond pointlessly optimistic, it read like it was written by a damage control specialist in FLS marketing, not a real player. Most of the real problems have been mentioned here and they aren't being touched by FLS.
PS. SOE gets dragged into the discussion because they are the ones keeping PotBS on life support. If the game was a stand alone, unsupported, it would have closed already.
I don't know how the review was written, or whether there were external forces involved in the outlook of the text (though I doubt it). I'm not even sure of the author's preferences when it comes to gaming. If he comes from WoW-type games, it would turn out one way; from EVE Online, another. Since the writer is new, and did not expand at length on his own preferences, I can't guess and would prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt.
What I will say, however, is that there is an "official" tone to the article that in its worst iteration in journalism consists of rewrites of press releases, with perhaps a rebuttal from the "official" opposition tacked on to the end (if as much). It's not as bad as that here. However, what annoyed me was that the writer seemed to have based his review on a blend of FLS devlogs and patch notes, and maybe the occasional interview or article here and there. That in itself is fine, but there's something missing -- and what exactly? Pretty much any sense of what you could call the "oral history" of the game, and this you get from player blog entries (there are a few) and forum posts (whether at FLS or here). And this is what is galling: There is a subforum on POTBS on this very website, and the author gives no indication of ever having bothered checking it out and reading a few of the threads.
Who knows, maybe we denizens of said subforum all come across as, in the words of a certain American politician, nattering nabobs of negativism. But there is factual evidence there, buried among all the theorycraft and the occasional SOE-bashing: We're talking about the exploits that were used, weaknesses in game mechanics, the outlook of the game, the failure of the economy. You get a feel of the game that you can't glean from a bunch of devlogs, Rusty interviews and screenshots. Many of us have written a few hundreds if not thousands of words on Pirates of the Burning Sea. We played the game. Some of us still play, some don't (I fall in the latter category, though I'll look into the Winback programme to see if anything has changed). And we know what has happened and what is going on with it.
The impression I'm getting is that the writer perhaps tried the game and maybe even played it at length, but obtained most of the information in hindsight, and jumped right over the essentials. The failure to mention "no crying in the red circle" when it was all over the forums, here and at FLS, from roughly January to June 2008, strongly indicates that either the writer supports this type of gameplay (or otherwise chose to bury his head in the sand), or was not playing in the early months. It was impossible to not mention it when we consider the controversy it generated over a four-month period.
(And for the record: I, for one, never read patch notes unless they are meant to solve a major problem affecting me personally. I don't have the patience for it, and I'm not one of those gamers who grabs a calculator to see how it affects my leetness every time the developers change a comma in the coding of their game. But if a patch is underwhelming, or adds new problems, the official forums will fill with posts -- and those I still read on a regular basis.)
I was a Beta tester for two months, and then played the game for the first three months before giving up on it. So I don't know if that qualifies me at all.
I came across this article while looking to see if anything has changed, whether it is worth returning to POTBS. It doesn't sound like it. What I wanted was a historically-based game that featured lots of PvP and had a large, functioning economy. I wanted realism, in other words. I felt like FLS retreated from their original claims (I started following it on the forums in 2004 or so) more and more as release came, a bad sign of reverse feature creep. My problems with POTBS when I left:
- PvP was crap. I could either blunder into a red zone as a loner, and get jumped by 6 ships at once, or I could sail around in a 6-ship group for hours, and never once see an opposing player. Every port battle on my server (Antigua) got scheduled during the day when I was at work. I even skipped work one day, but didn't get picked or the servers crashed or something.
I wanted PvP everywhere, not just the Red Circles. That idea has got to be the dumbest one I've ever seen in an MMO. Personally, I was hoping for more of a WWII Online thing, where your character was in charge of a fleet and you could jump in an out of your various ships to battle, so if you lose some it's still a pain, but it's not your one big expensive ship.
- The economy was bad. I kind of like the setup originally, it was novel. But the very bad flaws became apparent right away. FLS spent so much time balancing things out into their production chains that would make everyone just specialize in one small area and ensure an active marketplace - yet in-house guild chains rapidly made the marketplaces a sucker's bet. No one needed anything because there guild was doing it, and no independents could make stuff because there was nothing available in the marketplace for a reasonable price. Also, the whole economy was based on making ships - and if no one is losing ships, then nothing is moving. Two friends and I set up our own consortium, in a big guild, and had shipyards sitting idle for a week at a time due to lack of demand.
I felt the economic aspect would have been better if there were other things to do, like various ports and cities requesting other non-ship goods, so that PC merchants could actually make a living producing bulk items and selling to NPCs - and being prey to pirates.
- The avatar combat was retarded. It was the NGE in Star Wars all over again. Click click click click. Tell you what, the avatar combat system in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean is way, way better. FLS kept saying they could never do a point and click-timing avcom system (like Mount & Blade, what we compared it to back then) due to MMO restrictions, but Disney seems to have done it.
And I really disliked the "buffs". Stupid cartoony magic stuff.
- The PvE was boring. I wanted some PvE, mostly to explore new things. And FLS made such a big deal about their mission editors and their 1000 different missions, etc. Sadly, there were three missions with all kinds of window-dressing for about 95% of those. I could navigate the Jungle setting and the Pirate Beachead setting in my sleep I did them so many times.
- The sailing was meh. I was stunned when he devs talked about how they forgot or overlooked water depth when designing their engine, and basically said it would never be implemented. How in the world can you claim an accurate sailing game when sea depth makes no difference? In that day and age, in that setting, water depth was only slightly less important than the wind. I thought that was kind of disappointing, making it more gamey than I wanted. Similarly, the sailing itself is only slightly better than Sid Meier. People who talk about its accurate representation never sailed a boat with more than one sail. It's a joke. Personally, I wanted to be in charge of designing and calling for various sailplans, requiring players to learn the difference between a spanker and a spritsail, a topgallant and a mizzenmast.
- The developers were not nearly as cool and interested in the community as they claimed to be. Some of us beta testers (it seemed like most) screamed that the game was not ready, but it blundered ahead into a release too early. And we were right, things were badly balanced and tons of easy bugs still present. They needed a big release buzz and totally flopped. Maybe they can get by, but it was brutal. A quarter of the stuff in release was never ever tested in beta, and that stuff has been causing most of the apparent overreaction and overreaction to the overreaction since then.
And then once the crap hit the fan, the devs and all the dev logs and friendly interactions just dried up. They no longer need that pre-release buzz, people were paying them money, and they bolted the forums. I guess this happens in any MMO, but it was disappointing after they claimed to be so different.
----
So, to sum up, has any of this changed significantly? Should I try it, or not bother? To know where I am coming from, I like EVE, but didn't love it, have never played or even seen WOW or EQ, and am currently playing WWII Online though I am tired of it after a year and a half.
Before I quickly get my2 cents in, i will say that i only played beta, never bought the game, although intention was there in the begining.
I found out about PotBS about 12 months before beta release. Got into finding out info about the game, and followed it until they got their own forums set up. Got into the forums, and then into the beta. Played tested, and even gave back several reports back in beta forums concerning feedback and bug fixes.
From my first report after about a week in beta, none were realy toughed throughout beta. When I hit them up, they talked baout dealing with more important inssues.
Strike One!
In beta forums, a question was raised, and polled by one of the official dev's regarding PotBS bringing SoE into the mix, as a publisher. Testers were furious, demanded that SoE be ignored. Developers responded that SoE would have nothing to do with the game, only the publishing and advertising of the game. Still fans were upset, and asked that the dev's not make the mistake of bringing SoE to the table, who has killed every MMO they have touched. SoE came to the table with one of their shell company names... Then in the middle of beta, devs said they were goign to open beta early, and would be releasing and publishing game on the recommendations of their publisher ASAP.
Strike Two!
Im am from Australia. Some might think, what has that got to do with anything, well i will tell you. All servers are opened, game is released, pick a server you want to start playing on. WRONG, it you live in australia, you get the choise of the Australian servers ONLY. No one else can play on our servers, we cant play on theirs, all alone in this little server of our own.
Testers in Australia are pissed, hit the beta forums in protest. Ask why, how, what can be done to fix. Dev's came back at first defending their actions. At first blaming their publisher and a game stores, saying that because an agreement could not be made before release, everyone missed out.
People started supporting the australian players, when they were getting the wrong boxes, recieving australian copies, or not recieving copies at all. Uproar on the forums. Instead of the publisher (SoE) or the developer stepping in and solving the issue. all went quiet. The forums were a riot and the admins, devs all went quiet.
A few days later, the forums were deleted, new ones were in place, and anyone complaining on the first original forums was banned from their foums.
Strike Three!
So in summary, they dont care, dont listen. nothing was going to change, money money money. I dont get their companies and their short sightednes. Now they will be hard pressed to ever release a successful MMO, and as for SoE, has just reinforced my thoughts on them. To say the least, after being igrnored, deleted, banned and refused an international copy like the rest of the world, i did not buy a copy on release, and let the game store keep my beta deposit.
Eve Trial <- Try 14 days of Eve for FREE Im against SOE
Comments
oh dear
A review which basically damns the game and its developers followed by posts saying that the article is understated.
Glad I stayed clear of this release.
And no! I dont hold "hope that the game ends up doing well" I actually like seing MMO's dying off quickly than a long drawn out affair. NCSOFT has the right idea - if its not working, get rid.
A bit strong language but I think it addresses the point very well.
Certainly better than the:
"Some gamers will argue that we've heard such promises from Flying Lab befre, and in fairness that is certainly true. However, given all of the changes that have taken place to bring Pirates of the Burning Sea where it is today, I think the outlook for 2009 is very bright indeed; it's shaping up to be a very happy new year for PotBS and all of its players!"
Then again one can argue that an item wrapped in tin foil and painted red looks bright.
I was a beta tester and heavily involved in the pve-pvp debate.
You wont be surprised that i never bought the "finalized game" . They wanted (my interpretation) the best of both worlds and ended up (once more in my opinion) with a terrible compromise.
Still, the theme has my fullest attention ( i really would like a pirate game, not a game with pirates) and the moment they will get their act together i will jump a board.
i agree with all the people that say that your character should be improving (evolving) even when you reach the maximum level. That is something high on my prio list.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained.
Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
You see them as having "improved" the game, I see them addressing window trimings and lawn chairs; not the problems with the game that drove the vast majority of initial players away from the game.
Dressing a turd up in tinsel and painting it red still leaves you with a turd...and thats all FLS has done.
The original "review" was beyond pointlessly optimistic, it read like it was written by a damage control specialist in FLS marketing, not a real player. Most of the real problems have been mentioned here and they aren't being touched by FLS.
PS. SOE gets dragged into the discussion because they are the ones keeping PotBS on life support. If the game was a stand alone, unsupported, it would have closed already.
I don't know how the review was written, or whether there were external forces involved in the outlook of the text (though I doubt it). I'm not even sure of the author's preferences when it comes to gaming. If he comes from WoW-type games, it would turn out one way; from EVE Online, another. Since the writer is new, and did not expand at length on his own preferences, I can't guess and would prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt.
What I will say, however, is that there is an "official" tone to the article that in its worst iteration in journalism consists of rewrites of press releases, with perhaps a rebuttal from the "official" opposition tacked on to the end (if as much). It's not as bad as that here. However, what annoyed me was that the writer seemed to have based his review on a blend of FLS devlogs and patch notes, and maybe the occasional interview or article here and there. That in itself is fine, but there's something missing -- and what exactly? Pretty much any sense of what you could call the "oral history" of the game, and this you get from player blog entries (there are a few) and forum posts (whether at FLS or here). And this is what is galling: There is a subforum on POTBS on this very website, and the author gives no indication of ever having bothered checking it out and reading a few of the threads.
Who knows, maybe we denizens of said subforum all come across as, in the words of a certain American politician, nattering nabobs of negativism. But there is factual evidence there, buried among all the theorycraft and the occasional SOE-bashing: We're talking about the exploits that were used, weaknesses in game mechanics, the outlook of the game, the failure of the economy. You get a feel of the game that you can't glean from a bunch of devlogs, Rusty interviews and screenshots. Many of us have written a few hundreds if not thousands of words on Pirates of the Burning Sea. We played the game. Some of us still play, some don't (I fall in the latter category, though I'll look into the Winback programme to see if anything has changed). And we know what has happened and what is going on with it.
The impression I'm getting is that the writer perhaps tried the game and maybe even played it at length, but obtained most of the information in hindsight, and jumped right over the essentials. The failure to mention "no crying in the red circle" when it was all over the forums, here and at FLS, from roughly January to June 2008, strongly indicates that either the writer supports this type of gameplay (or otherwise chose to bury his head in the sand), or was not playing in the early months. It was impossible to not mention it when we consider the controversy it generated over a four-month period.
(And for the record: I, for one, never read patch notes unless they are meant to solve a major problem affecting me personally. I don't have the patience for it, and I'm not one of those gamers who grabs a calculator to see how it affects my leetness every time the developers change a comma in the coding of their game. But if a patch is underwhelming, or adds new problems, the official forums will fill with posts -- and those I still read on a regular basis.)
I was a Beta tester for two months, and then played the game for the first three months before giving up on it. So I don't know if that qualifies me at all.
I came across this article while looking to see if anything has changed, whether it is worth returning to POTBS. It doesn't sound like it. What I wanted was a historically-based game that featured lots of PvP and had a large, functioning economy. I wanted realism, in other words. I felt like FLS retreated from their original claims (I started following it on the forums in 2004 or so) more and more as release came, a bad sign of reverse feature creep. My problems with POTBS when I left:
- PvP was crap. I could either blunder into a red zone as a loner, and get jumped by 6 ships at once, or I could sail around in a 6-ship group for hours, and never once see an opposing player. Every port battle on my server (Antigua) got scheduled during the day when I was at work. I even skipped work one day, but didn't get picked or the servers crashed or something.
I wanted PvP everywhere, not just the Red Circles. That idea has got to be the dumbest one I've ever seen in an MMO. Personally, I was hoping for more of a WWII Online thing, where your character was in charge of a fleet and you could jump in an out of your various ships to battle, so if you lose some it's still a pain, but it's not your one big expensive ship.
- The economy was bad. I kind of like the setup originally, it was novel. But the very bad flaws became apparent right away. FLS spent so much time balancing things out into their production chains that would make everyone just specialize in one small area and ensure an active marketplace - yet in-house guild chains rapidly made the marketplaces a sucker's bet. No one needed anything because there guild was doing it, and no independents could make stuff because there was nothing available in the marketplace for a reasonable price. Also, the whole economy was based on making ships - and if no one is losing ships, then nothing is moving. Two friends and I set up our own consortium, in a big guild, and had shipyards sitting idle for a week at a time due to lack of demand.
I felt the economic aspect would have been better if there were other things to do, like various ports and cities requesting other non-ship goods, so that PC merchants could actually make a living producing bulk items and selling to NPCs - and being prey to pirates.
- The avatar combat was retarded. It was the NGE in Star Wars all over again. Click click click click. Tell you what, the avatar combat system in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean is way, way better. FLS kept saying they could never do a point and click-timing avcom system (like Mount & Blade, what we compared it to back then) due to MMO restrictions, but Disney seems to have done it.
And I really disliked the "buffs". Stupid cartoony magic stuff.
- The PvE was boring. I wanted some PvE, mostly to explore new things. And FLS made such a big deal about their mission editors and their 1000 different missions, etc. Sadly, there were three missions with all kinds of window-dressing for about 95% of those. I could navigate the Jungle setting and the Pirate Beachead setting in my sleep I did them so many times.
- The sailing was meh. I was stunned when he devs talked about how they forgot or overlooked water depth when designing their engine, and basically said it would never be implemented. How in the world can you claim an accurate sailing game when sea depth makes no difference? In that day and age, in that setting, water depth was only slightly less important than the wind. I thought that was kind of disappointing, making it more gamey than I wanted. Similarly, the sailing itself is only slightly better than Sid Meier. People who talk about its accurate representation never sailed a boat with more than one sail. It's a joke. Personally, I wanted to be in charge of designing and calling for various sailplans, requiring players to learn the difference between a spanker and a spritsail, a topgallant and a mizzenmast.
- The developers were not nearly as cool and interested in the community as they claimed to be. Some of us beta testers (it seemed like most) screamed that the game was not ready, but it blundered ahead into a release too early. And we were right, things were badly balanced and tons of easy bugs still present. They needed a big release buzz and totally flopped. Maybe they can get by, but it was brutal. A quarter of the stuff in release was never ever tested in beta, and that stuff has been causing most of the apparent overreaction and overreaction to the overreaction since then.
And then once the crap hit the fan, the devs and all the dev logs and friendly interactions just dried up. They no longer need that pre-release buzz, people were paying them money, and they bolted the forums. I guess this happens in any MMO, but it was disappointing after they claimed to be so different.
----
So, to sum up, has any of this changed significantly? Should I try it, or not bother? To know where I am coming from, I like EVE, but didn't love it, have never played or even seen WOW or EQ, and am currently playing WWII Online though I am tired of it after a year and a half.
Before I quickly get my2 cents in, i will say that i only played beta, never bought the game, although intention was there in the begining.
I found out about PotBS about 12 months before beta release. Got into finding out info about the game, and followed it until they got their own forums set up. Got into the forums, and then into the beta. Played tested, and even gave back several reports back in beta forums concerning feedback and bug fixes.
From my first report after about a week in beta, none were realy toughed throughout beta. When I hit them up, they talked baout dealing with more important inssues.
Strike One!
In beta forums, a question was raised, and polled by one of the official dev's regarding PotBS bringing SoE into the mix, as a publisher. Testers were furious, demanded that SoE be ignored. Developers responded that SoE would have nothing to do with the game, only the publishing and advertising of the game. Still fans were upset, and asked that the dev's not make the mistake of bringing SoE to the table, who has killed every MMO they have touched. SoE came to the table with one of their shell company names... Then in the middle of beta, devs said they were goign to open beta early, and would be releasing and publishing game on the recommendations of their publisher ASAP.
Strike Two!
Im am from Australia. Some might think, what has that got to do with anything, well i will tell you. All servers are opened, game is released, pick a server you want to start playing on. WRONG, it you live in australia, you get the choise of the Australian servers ONLY. No one else can play on our servers, we cant play on theirs, all alone in this little server of our own.
Testers in Australia are pissed, hit the beta forums in protest. Ask why, how, what can be done to fix. Dev's came back at first defending their actions. At first blaming their publisher and a game stores, saying that because an agreement could not be made before release, everyone missed out.
People started supporting the australian players, when they were getting the wrong boxes, recieving australian copies, or not recieving copies at all. Uproar on the forums. Instead of the publisher (SoE) or the developer stepping in and solving the issue. all went quiet. The forums were a riot and the admins, devs all went quiet.
A few days later, the forums were deleted, new ones were in place, and anyone complaining on the first original forums was banned from their foums.
Strike Three!
So in summary, they dont care, dont listen. nothing was going to change, money money money. I dont get their companies and their short sightednes. Now they will be hard pressed to ever release a successful MMO, and as for SoE, has just reinforced my thoughts on them. To say the least, after being igrnored, deleted, banned and refused an international copy like the rest of the world, i did not buy a copy on release, and let the game store keep my beta deposit.
Eve Trial <- Try 14 days of Eve for FREE
Im against SOE