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A shame, really ...
whpsh
Member Posts: 199
... I walk by this game at the stores and just have to shake my head.
The problem isn't with the game, it was with FLS believing people would play within the spirit of the TOS, not the literal meaning. Can? and Should? are two entirely different questions to the majority of MMO players. But now FLS is having to restructure their entire game because of the players that think the questions are the same.
The game crashed for me when the herds were let in for open beta and I didn't make it past the first month after that.
The entire feeling of the game changed from a duel of gentlemen to thugs slugging it out in the mud.
My last day came when I did fairly decent against two pirates (still lost though). Refit my ship to leave ... had to fight them again. Refit my ship to leave ... lost again. Tried in the starter ship ... again, thanks.
And the apparent collapse of the server population proves a lot of points at the cost of a potentially great game. Most specifically that nobody likes a ganker.
In order to fix this game, FLS needs to:
1) Allow an inroad for new players. There needs to be some kind of ability comparison between groups such that 6 lvl 50s can't squash a new character. The best solution would be to force a tax that if the 50s intercept the newb, she could chose to fight, try to run or pay a percentage of the overall cargo value. Paying allows for a very brief non-attackable status. It currently takes way too long to become more of a help than a hindrance. The longer the time line, the greater the chance of being annoyed before you're able to defend yourself.
2) Reduce the number of PvP ports to five. One for each nation and one "general" one. Control of all five results in a production bonus or something but doesn't reset the server. How defeatist is it to win and have to start over.
3) Remove Pirates as a playable faction. I didn't find a single Pirate that didn't use their "race" as an excuse to gank. The other option would be to keep pirates, but make their faction Perma-death.
Right now, FLS has pointed her ship into a maelstrom.
a- You must PvP or leave.
b- If you PvP, you gank or lose.
c- If you lose, you can no longer PvP. See a.
d- If you gank, everyone you kill can't PvP. See a.
I've heard all the "No crying in the Red Zone" but that always comes from the Gank Herd. And the "Go play a carebear game then!" I've heard that too, and I have. But so has most of the player base, and with it, our money.
It's like that movie, Pitch Black, with the monsters that killed everything and eventually had to eat each other. And the poor people that want to try it are like the crew crash landing. Not embraced, but fed upon.
Comments
In that movie the people didn't know about the creatures inhabiting the planet. In POTBS people know its main focus is PvP and they still whine.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
Come give WAR a try. Mythic has years of experience dealing with this problem. Nothing lightens my mood more that to see an enemy player enter a zone where they would be ganking and see them turn into a Chicken (with 1hp).
Do stay away from the Open servers though. They are put into place so that the sociopaths and the gankers will have a pace to go. I doubt if more than one or two of those will remain after the first month or two. Play Core or Core RP for the best experience.
Good Hunting
Although it may be a little early in the game to call it... Mythic have made a basic mistake.
No RvR side balance - in much the same way as PotBS had none.
They have a "side cap". As predicted, all this appears to be doing is annoying people and forcing people to change servers. It's not a solution.
They - like FLS - thought the 'nice' Beta players were an indicator of general population behaviour after launch.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
Although it may be a little early in the game to call it... Mythic have made a basic mistake.
No RvR side balance - in much the same way as PotBS had none.
They have a "side cap". As predicted, all this appears to be doing is annoying people and forcing people to change servers. It's not a solution.
They - like FLS - thought the 'nice' Beta players were an indicator of general population behaviour after launch.
Still, WAR should be able to avoid the real-life identification problem which made the French and Spanish so unpopular in PotBS, as long as the two sides are nominally equally competent at PvP. How many people playing evil baddies in MMO's are genuine serial killers?
WAR's problem, I think, is that they have way too many servers. 30 for North America? 6 for Oceania? Isn't it a tad overly ambitious? Reminds me of Age of Conan, which actually added many servers a week after release, only to see those deserted when people didn't renew.
It doesn't matter who or what people associate with in real life when it comes to a horribly balanced RvR MMO.
I play WWIIoL and the Axis are totally overpopped right now (and usually are). Many of the people who play Axis in that game have Allied associations - but it's cool to be the baddies.
That leads to imbalance as the kids who only like to win join the side which is "rolling".
All RvR games have this issue - human nature. The solutions have to be designed into the game from the very beginning - not as an afterthought.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
It doesn't matter who or what people associate with in real life when it comes to a horribly balanced RvR MMO.
I play WWIIoL and the Axis are totally overpopped right now (and usually are). Many of the people who play Axis in that game have Allied associations - but it's cool to be the baddies.
That leads to imbalance as the kids who only like to win join the side which is "rolling".
All RvR games have this issue - human nature. The solutions have to be designed into the game from the very beginning - not as an afterthought.
I didn't know that WW2OL had such unbalanced factions, nor that the Axis would be more popular (though in hindsight, I can see why).
Still, in the case of PotBS, it was something which several players saw coming from the start. Some societies were openly saying they went French or Spanish because they knew it would offer them a greater challenge, as the herd would go for British or Pirates.
If the players themselves saw this would be taking place, did the developers notice? And what did they do? Even in beta apparently the British were vastly more popular than other factions.
Still, that problem of faction imbalance you mention can happen in any RvR game, either with pre-formed sides (PotBS) or strictly guild-based (Shadowbane being a classic example). At this stage, what worries me more than the simple question of faction imbalance is that of ready-made large guilds and assorted cronies rising to dominate a server. Since these guilds were created long ago, it makes the actual struggle for power within the new game in question completely moot, as the matter had been settled long in advance.
An equally interesting question, and closer to your point, is how to reconcile a persistent world with mechanisms for avoiding political stagnation. PotBS's method of resetting ports is not only unsatisfactory, it changed very little as every new round was an equally predictable affair.
It doesn't matter who or what people associate with in real life when it comes to a horribly balanced RvR MMO.
I play WWIIoL and the Axis are totally overpopped right now (and usually are). Many of the people who play Axis in that game have Allied associations - but it's cool to be the baddies.
That leads to imbalance as the kids who only like to win join the side which is "rolling".
All RvR games have this issue - human nature. The solutions have to be designed into the game from the very beginning - not as an afterthought.
I will have to second that. In my experience balance doesn't happen in the same way the players don't police themselves. After all, there is a school of thought claiming that without restrictions of the laws and punitive powers of the state the civilization would be impossible.
I gave PotBS a real try and was excited in the first week becuase the idea seemed really great. The RvR imbalances and whatnot did not bother me at first because it varied on servers but they merged a lot of servers together and instantly they all had the same trends everyone's been talking about. That wasn't the only problem I had with the game though. It was the lack of scenery and repetition of mission types. It was almost as if they didnt even really try to have any content outside of the PVP. Anyhow with all the repetition I was extremely bored with it after a month and just didn't renew. I'm kind of in between MMO's at the moment, I have my trusty lifetime account at LotRO which is fun but I'm looking for something new.
Today I went to my local game store to purchase a copy of another MMO which shall remain nameless.
There were two copies of PotBS on the shelf, price tags yellowed by the passage of time. The two copies were already there when I bought Age of Conan at that store four months ago, and have probably been on that shelf since release in January.
Not an exceptional number of copies -- just two. Yet they remain unsold. While it is true that the game might have had some major distribution issues early on (thank you very much, SOE), the game is still out there. So in this case, you cannot blame the population problems on the game being inaccessible. It's there allright. It just doesn't sell.
Maybe a new advertising campaign will help, but as much as I want PotBS to succeed, if they continue on making every patch a step back from the last one, it's all going to be in vain.
Most people I know (that played before) would not play Pirates of the BS if it were F2P. Myself included. Hell, the Disney F2P pirate MMO is much more successful and fun than this game ever was, and it's DISNEY ffs.
How bad is that?
i played this pos religiously for a month then i decided it had absolutely NOTHING to offer in the way of entertainment and got my accts banned on purpose by cussin out gm's.
What's sad is we warned FLS of this problem during Beta.
It's not so much that PotBS is a BAD game... it's got a lot of potential. But the problem is that it's such a small world with no way for the lower end players to avoid being slaughtered by higher end players if they, god forbid, HAVE to go through a PVP zone in order to do something (like complete a quest, etc). Higher level chars I don't have much sympathy for. At higher levels it's not exactly hard to recover from a PVP death.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
Come give WAR a try. Mythic has years of experience dealing with this problem. Nothing lightens my mood more that to see an enemy player enter a zone where they would be ganking and see them turn into a Chicken (with 1hp).
Do stay away from the Open servers though. They are put into place so that the sociopaths and the gankers will have a pace to go. I doubt if more than one or two of those will remain after the first month or two. Play Core or Core RP for the best experience.
Good Hunting
I have my share of critique in WAR, but I agree fully with this. WAR has shown how to organize PVP properly, so that you can make meaningful PVP right away and not only when you grinded yourself to endgame. But since humans learn very slow, I am sure another dozen MMOs will make the PVP wrong even now, and we will have years of angry debates with people shouting "go back to WAR if you dont like our PVP". You may say about WAR what you like, but they made the best, well rounded PVP ever. Period.
Now a wise man learns from others. Better a good copy cat than badly made by yourself I say.
The PvP in WAR may be fine - but what about the RvR?
I stand by my earlier comment - only now (post release) there seem to be an awful lot of threads about RvR (im)balance?
The PvP in PotBS is actually quite good too - if it is one on one.
But players don't like being outnumbered all the time. Once or twice is okay. But when they are paying a sub to get ganked and zerged every single day it gets very old very fast.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
I stand by my earlier comment
As well you should. Because you're right.
I'm lucky enough in that so far my server is pretty full on both sides (I'm North American, but I play on the Oceanic server Darklands because of my crazy schedule). Destruction always has a queue, but based on experience, Order is very close to full itself. If things keep up like this, I'm not expecting population imbalance to create a problem on my server.
Still, there are plenty of other servers where this is an issue, where Destuction gets High while order remains at Med. Some have hinted that the makers of the game actually made Destruction more appealing, even more so by failing to include a human "tank" on the Order Side (the planned class of Knight of the Blazing Sun was ditched because of time constraints).
I don't know if you're playing WAR yourself, but I think it's going, as you said, to get old very quickly, perhaps less so for the "zerg" side. Not because of ganking or faction imbalance, but because there are no stakes whatsoever, apart from impersonal structures belonging to "Order" or "Destruction". It's like a fantasy battle simulation on a large scale, but you don't risk anything yourself.
On this count, PotBS got it doubly wrong. You faced very high personal stakes (your ship) to secure some inconsequential objectives (port flips, capped by a map reset later). Ultimately -- when faction imbalance was added into the mix, making the RvR a lost cause for three sides -- it became PvP for PvP's sake, with a price tag. But at least PotBS tried to make it meaningful; I haven't seen any indication of that in WAR.
so in short pirates are jsut for pvp goers?
To their credit, they tried to make it wider in appeal; but they went after so many demographics that they ended up pleasing none. The end result can be seen on the PotBS forums, even though that itself is beginning to dry up.
Oh, and incidentally, today's interesting thread over there:
http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41602
>>What does drive Lvl50 ships? Steam turbines?
What do they fire? Canonballs, or Harpoons?
And specially... what is supposed to do a Lvl25 who is engaged by a Lvl 50 in a PvP area? Is there a way to just say, "hey, take my ship, I don't really need it, and take my bloody subscription too as I'm not going to pay it again?"
Let's put it clear. Big ships are slow. Smaller ships are faster*. And a light frigate should outrun any heavier ship anytime of day. Being ninja boarded by a fat fat guy who begun 500 yards behind you is a NO-NO.
Or should be. Certainly now I don't feel like paying 40 euros for getting a game and then pay 14 euros a month for playing that game, when this investment ends with my character sailing a Lvl1 corvette after three weeks of gameplay and a bad encounter with a cowardly thug.<<
This from a player who started playing the game this month. What hope is there to revive the game if the "community" continues to play whack-a-mole with every newcomer? (You can almost hear the old players' excuses from here. Jack Simple wrote many a whine on such a theme)
L2P?
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
L2P?
Well, not as succinct as that, though it's pretty much the essence of it.
In detail, here are the arguments I'm expecting to see:
1) "Better that he knows about loss in red circles now than at level 50 when there is more risk involved", a.k.a. ganking as a public service. Some pirates will ask for surrender, but if that poor newbie was like me when I started, he didn't know how to surrender anyway.
2) "That newbie could be an alt carrying brass fittings." That's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you ask me, since I think that many of those using this excuse have been doing exactly that themselves. So, sure, it exists all right.
3) And that old favourite of mine: "May I suggest not sailing into the red circle if you don't want to risk getting sunk?" Which is exactly how one of the replies in the thread put it and that I pasted here verbatim. This thinking about red circles lost the subscription of most exclusively PvE players in the game. Yet they're still going at it.
Reading that, I'm thinking that even though I cancelled Warhammer, I'm not going to return to PotBS if that thinking is still prevalent.
Oh, and on another note, here is today's (well, last week's, actually, but I only discovered it today) example of fluffy gaming journalism:
An interview with Kevin "Isildur" Maginn over at Allakhazam:
http://www.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=15069
I understand that it's pretty much necessary to deliver something to publish and that if you start prodding around and coming up with uncomfortable stuff the doors then close on you, but still, wouldn't it be nice if for once an interviewer didn't pull his punches?
Hey, I was impressed.
He's revamping the avatar combat and believes that his players will be happy with it.
So, there's two people left, not one, like we all suspected. They doubled the number of subscribers.
Things are looking up.
It would have been so different if they had created "zones" based on levels. The zones would control who can PvP, and what kind of products and missions are there. If you are a level 25, and you hang out in the level 25'ish zone, you should not be able to be ganked by lvl 50's. Also, the missions for a lvl 25 don't take you into lvl 50 zones.
The ultimate would be that resources that are needed to make high-end objects, should only be found in high-end zones. That way, if you want to be a lvl 25 and go into the lvl 50 zone to get/make some high-end product, you are subject to being ganked. Stay in your lvl 25 zone, and you can get attacked by other 25's, and you cannot make the high-end products.
This is the EvE model, and it works. Newbies can stay in high-sec space, gather low-level mats, and not get ganked by masses of high level players. Go into low-sec space, or 0.0, and you can be killed by anyone, but you can mine better stuff. If EvE had no concept of "security" zones, then it would have failed for the same reasons PoTBS is suffering, IMHO.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Hey, I was impressed.
He's revamping the avatar combat and believes that his players will be happy with it.
So, there's two people left, not one, like we all suspected. They doubled the number of subscribers.
Things are looking up.
really? until when? i already deleted my character here...so im not really aware after i quitted. trying to download this once again.
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