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Pirates of the Burning Sea - my slant on things
kiliarien
Member Posts: 2
Hi All,
The newly released Potbs is fun - but not for long.
I decided to play a pirate (and got it on pre-release), which is the best for quick fun, you can steal ships not buy them and lark about the place.
Unfortunately at this stage of this game I'd avoid it. Of course PvP is very limited as not many people are higher levels and everyone is scared about losing their ship, which take some effort to get.
Ship combat is fun (the best aspect of the game), and economy really brings its rewards, try that if you like buliding up your empire.
Personal melee PvE is quite rubbish - it's hard, and if you lose on many missions you need to revive yourself which requires smelling salts - which you can't buy and have to be made. I'm one of the higher players on the server I'm on atm (Bellamy) so it's not like I'm a lowbie being bitter, I'm just stating fact.
Larger PvP battles take a while, essentially you need to be building up contention points as the game calls them, and you need to have 8-10 people building them up for a couple of hours to even have a chance of starting that sort of battle so don't expect quick large battles.
The SOE platform system works nicely and I haven't had any problems with that, lower end PC's might find this a struggle though.
As stated above - give this game some time to mature - maybe a couple of months at least. I still don't see (as a PvP player myself) any long term interest.
Hope this helps a few who are undecided.
Comments
Yeah, there's always the obligatory "wait six months" caveat, but my largest concern (and one of yours), melee combat, is not getting enough attention from Flying Labs. Or they're keeping hush about it, since it's the most denigrated aspect of POTBS.
The newest updates are looking to tweak more of the ship-on-ship combat -- but that element of the game is already freaking excellent, everyone agrees. Yes, there's always room for improvement, yadda yadda, but Flying Labs really (reallyreallyreally) needs to give hand-to-hand combat a real talkin' to. The serious sitdown, life-changing type of discussion. Because hand-to-hand combat is not a small or ignorable portion of the game. It's not something you can just skip if you don't want to do it. It's integral to the entire experience.
I totally agree with you, hardly any time has been spent on the melee system which leaves the whole swashbuckling experience disjointed and rather frustrating - sometimes in the same quest you can take on 5 NPC's and best them all, the next time one of them can kill you without being even scratched. It lacks consistency.
As noted though - the ship fights are awesome
The rest of the game just doesn't live up to that aspect
I agree about the mellee system, but I have to say as a big fan of PVP and having played pretty much all of them (UO, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, DaoC, EQ, EQ2, WOW etc....) I am very hooked on this game and the pvp, and contention battles.
I feel this game has the potential to be a huge success and will definately be around to see how it turns out.
But I hope they work on the stupid land battles/system.
I'm starting to sound like a fanboy but oh well. Anyway, stop saying stuff like "uh devs dont care about avatar combat they never mention it blabla". They are working on it, for one. And as for second, avatar combat before wasn't even planned to be in game. There you go. So, if you don't have patience, if this is such a big deal for you, then wait until they improve avatar combat. I perfectly understand that, and that's all fine.
The reason this game seems interesting o me is: good and interesting ship battles and economy. The other reason is: great potential. Now, this last thing can look silly, but I've seen a lot of games that had okayish core, but there was almost no room for upgrades. PotBS on the other hand has okayish core already, but it's such a great core that they can easily make tons and tons of upgrades, supported by current game world. Avatar combat can turn out to be great, I have already seen people in the forum saying they didn't like it at first but now like it. After patches go out, things could drastically change for the better (of course, they can stay at potential). Game world is also interesting, and potentially upgradable in tons of ways.
This is just my oppinion of course.
I hope everyone here realizes that missions in this game are fully optional, and that its actually faster to level out in the open sea than do missions. I agree that avcom is a weakness in this game, but its not a requirement and quite skippable.
There's a thread going on the Missions forums called "Why did that crank up the difficulty", or to that effect, that tells of adjustments needing to be made on at least one mission. Just In Time would be that mission. Basically it's 3 level 16 Xebec ships piloted by level 10 NPCs which make no sense to me.
That is just one mission that need adjusting and I'm sure there are more.
Some of us like doing the missions for loot, money, and the sense of having an objective that takes the mind off grinding repeatably.
AC2 Player RIP Final Death Jan 31st 2017
Refugee of Auberean
Refugee of Dereth
Well I agree that the money is good, but the loot is better out in the OS. Plus the repetition in missions makes them feel as grindy as the OS (if youre solo that is). I have much more fun getting a full group and going out to chase treasure convoys and such
I meant more for the unique items that can pop up in missions. Well at least some appear unique in my up to level 28 voyage so far. If not unique they can be at least somewhat interesting.
I'm in a duo most of the time and only solo when the missions force me to.
Edit: You are right in that open sea hunting can be fun also though.
AC2 Player RIP Final Death Jan 31st 2017
Refugee of Auberean
Refugee of Dereth
The PvP is instanced though isnt it? Like, if i have a friend whose getting attacked by another shipe they get instanced so i cant go find him and help. Am i right or did i just hear rumors?
The PvP is instanced though isnt it? Like, if i have a friend whose getting attacked by another shipe they get instanced so i cant go find him and help. Am i right or did i just hear rumors?
No, that is wrong. If you get attacked in a PvP zone, your team-mates have a window of time to join, something like a couple of minutes. Also, once you come out of a PvP battle, you are invisible for a certain time; and we frequently set up one of the team as bait, usually in a fast ship, and then once he gets the attack, we all come and jump in. Lots of fun------------
2025: 48 years on the Net.
so you only have a short amount of time to help out before being instanced?
Yes. As long as you stay close you should have no problems.
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If youre in a pvp zone and in a group, you simply sail close together. So if any of your party get attacked, you all auto join the same battle.
I agree the game needs a bit of time, but one can still have fun right now. My key worry is the economy. Many ppl say here and elsewhere that it is interesting and excellent. Maybe it has some excellence in theory, but the performance of the economy so far is not good. I am on a mid-level server for population (Bonny, sometimes hits medium pop, but not often) in a guild with over 130 members (125 seems to be the threshold on Bonny to go from light to moderate pop) and our guild has dominated the port battles so far.
I mention the guild because one of the main functions of a guild is to operate outside the economy. The group gets together, gets everyone in line so everything is produced in guild, and everyone tries to buy only amongst the guild. This lowers demand in the economy at large, which is in recession on most servers; certainly it is on Bonny.
The second problem with the economy is that Freetraders are not given enough benefits compared to the other professions relative to the economy. So everyone is dabbling at least in the economy. There seems to be no good way to stop this because one simply makes a FT alt, takes it to lvl 7 and you are off to the races as a trader. You thus play a combat toon and a economy toon. Thus there tends to be oversupply in the marketplace and prices are beginning to get fairly close to cost for many items.
Someone above mentioned the fear of losing your ship. The economic woes make this more painful because you don't have the money to easily replace it. There are a number of ways to make a lot of cash, but these involve significant grinding (making a toon, running an hour or so blasting thru early quests, rinse and repeat) and semi-exploiting (running same quest over and over). You have to work at losing your ship but it does put a damper on freely pvp'ing away, especially during the learning curve.
Others in forums elsewhere have discussed these concepts in great detail so i just give a crude summary here.
If youre in a pvp zone and in a group, you simply sail close together. So if any of your party get attacked, you all auto join the same battle.
In a PvP zone, you can also send off a flare and that will open up the battle for more to come in.
------------
2025: 48 years on the Net.
Flares are pve only and don’t work for pvp and you have just 60 seconds to join a battle not a couple of minutes.
Just wait until you cap as I have and realise that the ONLY end game content is in port contention, or repeatedly killing the same dumb ai on the os over and over and over. Btw to beat the "omfg you capped already" idiots to the punch, potbs is made so that players cap quickly there is no journey in this game. It has been designed from the ground up around port contention, which means if you play a pirate you are shit out of luck. Against similarly levelled nationals playing in mixed groups, pirates get soundly beat due to the array of stackable group and individual buffs that nationals have and pirates don't.
Far too much of the game is instanced leaving the game world feeling disjointed; I dock in port (instance) go to the town boss for a mission (instance) and return to the town(instance) go to the shop to sell junk loot (another instance). I leave the shop and back to town(instance again) talk to the coxswain to access my new mission (another bloody instance) I defeat the escorts and have to board the marked ship (another instance). FFS give me a break, each and every instance separated by a loading screen, they can’t even manage a smooth transition from one zone server to another.
Bah enough already, for what its worth in just one week server population at peak on Roberts has dropped from very heavy for Pirates British and Spain last week Saturday peak time, to heavy this week. That’s at least 300 players gone from a server population of around 1200 across those nations. ONE QUARTER of last weeks population didn’t bother logging in this week on the second most popular server, a staggering rate of growth for a game just launched
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Regards Hexcaliber
The PvP is instanced though isnt it? Like, if i have a friend whose getting attacked by another shipe they get instanced so i cant go find him and help. Am i right or did i just hear rumors?
No, that is wrong. If you get attacked in a PvP zone, your team-mates have a window of time to join, something like a couple of minutes. Also, once you come out of a PvP battle, you are invisible for a certain time; and we frequently set up one of the team as bait, usually in a fast ship, and then once he gets the attack, we all come and jump in. Lots of funThat group ganking crap is actually pretty weak. I saw several griefers repeatedly camping a couple places in the narrows just for the fun of /pwning noobs. If that's fun for you, fine. But several of those people actually quit, because of both the mechanic that allows it and the players that enjoy doing it.
For one, it was a reason for me to not actually subscribe, I played out the last 2 weeks of someones acct that quit, and saw this all over the place. And no, it didn't happen to me.
Between that stuff, the jacked up economy, the poor avatar combat, the invisible walls and instanced everything, it was enough to get me to not pay/play. Same game as it was in beta. Glad I didn't have to pay the $50.
The PvP is instanced though isnt it? Like, if i have a friend whose getting attacked by another shipe they get instanced so i cant go find him and help. Am i right or did i just hear rumors?
No, that is wrong. If you get attacked in a PvP zone, your team-mates have a window of time to join, something like a couple of minutes. Also, once you come out of a PvP battle, you are invisible for a certain time; and we frequently set up one of the team as bait, usually in a fast ship, and then once he gets the attack, we all come and jump in. Lots of funThat group ganking crap is actually pretty weak. I saw several griefers repeatedly camping a couple places in the narrows just for the fun of /pwning noobs. If that's fun for you, fine. But several of those people actually quit, because of both the mechanic that allows it and the players that enjoy doing it.
For one, it was a reason for me to not actually subscribe, I played out the last 2 weeks of someones acct that quit, and saw this all over the place. And no, it didn't happen to me.
Between that stuff, the jacked up economy, the poor avatar combat, the invisible walls and instanced everything, it was enough to get me to not pay/play. Same game as it was in beta. Glad I didn't have to pay the $50.
Amen to that... I thought just like you, its somewhat fun to sail here and there, althought the combat is shallow, boring and easy it may be fun to customize the looks of the pirates and play a little of this flash game PvP... however I would not pay 50 bucks for it...
Most single player games have a very little "play area", you are in a house, or a ship, rooms etc. You finish one room and then you load to next.
MMORPG, are most of the time like real life. Big areas where you can run around and explore with your friends or alone. It's something people like. No need to load, just run around.
Here in this game you can't do a simple thing like jump, swim or go outside the town and explore. Only thing that gives you more space are the open sea area.
Most of the time the game must load into a instance and the MMORPG freedom is gone. It starts to feel like a normal single player game that you play for some hours then you go look for a new game.
Thats the problem with this game. It's not a MMORPG.
Played:
From Earth & Beyond, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa (Beta), EvE Online, City of Villians, Atlantica Online, Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, PlanetSide, RF Online, Second Life, Fallen Earth.