UO lived, yay for them, but Trammel was still a PoS.

PotBS also has a problem those other games you mention (EVE and SB) do not face, namely, that the factions are based on pre-existing nations and that societies (guilds) are essentially meaningless in political terms. This adds another concern: faction imbalance. Britain benefits from both a strong naval tradition and a linguistic similarity to the core of the gaming population, and Pirates have this entire romantic/idealized aspect going for them, despite their lack of a conquest endgame. But who would want to play France or Spain, widely seen as the naval losers of history, no matter how much of a geographical advantage they might possess?

Not surprisingly, France and Spain have been shorthanded most of the time on every server.

Re: Whether or not PvP (or lack thereof) killed Ultima Online
It’s not that hard: PvP is good if it’s fun.
Oldschool Ultima Online’s PvP was fun for the players who were ganking eachother like this virtual world was nothing more than a massively multiplayer version of Quake, and sucked for all the rest.
That, my friend, is where I’d file my, “you’re deluding yourself unless you believe otherwise.”

I think EVE only got away with it because of the large, empty universe. The ability for the losers to go away and play somewhere else away from the big nasties. And the lack of competition in the genre of Space Games/Empire building. PotBS doesn’t have the size Eve does (neither does WW2OL or SB) of being able to go on the other side of the galaxy and rebuild your small kingdom away from the big empires. If BoB or Goonswarm or whoever ever got to the point of owning all the 0.0 space, we’d be talking about EvE in the same space as SB.

The big empty space of ‘corse has it’s own problems (it’s big, empty and boring to be). Give me the game of the size of EvE with the content to fill it for PvE and you have the game that will beat WoW. However, that game is probably going to be World of StarCraft which means we won’t see player kingdoms and empires like we do in EvE.

And EvE has it’s problems with empires too: you can’t be small. There’s no where a small group of players can set themselves up on the frontier of 0.0, they just get swatted by the big players. Adding some “terrain” where big expensive ships don’t work (much like mountains and forests do on earth for protecting small countries vs large ones) and that would help.

Although some revisionists, like Lum, deny it ever happened.

EvE succeeded even after faltering at launch (Though I’ve been playing since closed beta.) because they listened to their playerbase and engineered in-game events to coincide with actual macropolitical player trends which built-in a sense of the playerbase’s contribution to the game. The little contests like the riddle—>in-game monument bit is just one more way that they build the playerbase’s involvment with the game and allow them to leave their mark.

WAR’s ‘Living Guild’ system is going to be something similar to this, I think. It’ll give the players something to actually work towards that will be around as long as the servers are up and running. (6-10y?) It’s this immersion and sense of community that I think will be a staple in MMO’s from here on out. WoW, while arguably the biggest thing to hit the industry since the stamped circuit board, doesn’t have this and imo will be donating customers to the Mythic cause once word gets out for exactly this reason.

Basically, if more devs paid attention to the collective works of Mythic, we’d see a lot more MMO players than we do now… and the market is by no means even close to saturated. WAR’s success will serve as a bit of an industry litmus test, i think inasmuch as other devs will be watching the formulae at work. Every successive MMO picks up a little bit of those that came before, ‘Best Practices’ basically.

If we all knew then what we know now, AO/UO/DAoC/Etc wouldn’t have their spots carved out in history as pioneering MMO’s and we’d all (those of us reading brokentoys…) believe that WoW is the anti-MMO by now…

The status quo is nice and safe ground, but I’m glad to see WAR trying something different and potentially as ground breaking as anything that’s come before.

* crits you for 8,674 damage (ASCII)*
*Your eyes hop out of their sockets and go on strike*

Happy cannibalism dance incoming…

Both posts raise a question in my mind – I’ll post it up at f13.net in the MMO section so as not to derail this topic.

I wasn’t around during Pirates of the Burning Sea’s formative years. I just joined the game on release day, so I don’t know what happened during closed beta, but the prevailing impression of players seems to be that it was better way back then (perhaps for no other reason than because it was free).

Right now, the game is a mess, a sheer mess, and I could not avoid thinking, while reading Wanderer’s text on Shadowbane, that it was exactly what happened to PotBS. (This is probably gearing up to be another wall of text.)

At launch, the game didn’t have many bona fide bugs outside of a few minor annoyances, but it had extremely exploitable mechanics. While such exploits occurred on most of the servers, Blackbeard in particular, where I played (French faction), became notorious because of the widespread exploits made by the British faction. One particularly noteworthy exploit abused mechanics that allowed to use economic unrest supplies to bring a perfectly peaceful enemy port (zero unrest) to a battle (10,000 unrest points) in a matter of minutes. So all British players would gather at one port, drop their unrest supplies at exactly the same time, and even before the defending faction could do anything, the matter had escalated to the point where a port battle was inevitable. All the British needed to do was rinse and repeat, which they did.

It all came to a climax when they flipped three French ports in a matter of minutes, with three port battles to be fought concurrently. This was already bad enough, as the British were basically using their numerical advantage over the French, who could only defend one of the three ports. The problem was compounded because this particular case occurred right after the devs themselves had posted an entry saying this was an abuse of game mechanics, and right before the introduction of a patch that was supposed to solve the matter. The French faction took to the forums, only to be told by the devs that the two ports they lost as a result of the exploit would not be returned, on the grounds that “the port battles themselves were won honestly” — never mind that we could not fight three at once. I always thought that was akin to saying an election where one candidate posted goons with baseball bats before the polling station to only let in his supporters was valid, because nobody tampered with the ballot boxes themselves…

A good chunk of the French faction on Blackbeard left the game right there. Those who stayed, seeing there was no hope in fighting the omnipotent British juggernaut (who continued to concurrently flip two French ports at once, even without the instant zero-to-10,000 mechanic to help them, in full knowledge that the French could only defend one port at a time), turned against the weaker-still Spanish for some easy pickings. So on Blackbeard for a while, the pecking order was British-French-Spanish, with Pirates themselves fitting in no place in particular as they could not retain towns they captured and were basically irrelevant to the conquest game because of a point-counting disadvantage that would give them a nearly guaranteed second or third place; “nationals” themselves often saw no reason to fight them and thus just stopped defending their ports against them.

Fast-forward to the night of April 15th, when two-thirds of the game’s servers were quickly condemned to extinction (fittingly enough, this was also the night the Titanic went down with two-thirds of its passengers). With character transfers implemented for *all* servers (this turned out to be important later on), every surviving server, Blackbeard among them, attempts to recruit players from the doomed servers. In this task Blackbeard failed miserably, despite having a decent community that included three player newspapers for that server, precisely because the entire player body knew about the dominance and underhanded tactics our British faction. Worse still, the British made their own recruiting effort by vaunting the large number of ridiculously expensive ships of the line (ten million doubloons for a First Rate) they owned, which sent a message to every non-British player that transferring to Blackbeard was nothing short of a death wish, and to every British player on other servers that they would almost certainly be shut out of port battles, limited to 24 players on each side.

In the end, the bulk of the Blackbeard French faction, seeing how hopeless the situation was on the server, took advantage of the fact that character transfers were available to all players regardless of where they played and transferred out of Blackbeard to Rackham, my society among them. The ironic conclusion of this little story, not surprising perhaps given the circumstances, was that the major British societies on Blackbeard who had done all the bragging (also who were also singled out by the community for the exploits they used) also transferred to Rackham — the next day. Blackbeard never recovered from the dual exodus; in the meantime, the Rackham French then started winning the map, while British ranks in particular started to suffer numerous casualties against Conan and his fellow cimmerians.

Back on Blackbeard, the tiny French population that stayed behind was moribund and the British who remained found themselves impoverished and without leadership. Spain, formerly guaranteed to always finish in last place, started winning the map, until they got bored and started leaving the server and sometimes the game altogether. Then the Pirates, who were never supposed to be able to win a map under normal circumstances because of adverse game mechanics, steamrolled across the server.

So it’s very similar to what Wanderer was saying regarding Shadowbane: the PotBS devs put a system in place and the players ran with it. Except that Shadowbane was pretty clear as to what it wanted to be, while PotBS seems to be built on a series of compromises to attract both the PvE and PvP crowd. Even more troubling is that the devs have been sending very contradictory messages about what they wanted their own game to be.

In early March, when the issue of ganking was coming to the forefront, one of the devs posted this: “Open Sea PvP is a very low restriction PvP system. Characters can be attacked by virtually anyone, and they can most certainly be ganked. That’s the nature of the system, and we’re not changing that system. So we don’t want to hear any crying about it. War’s not fair. Open Sea PvP is war. Open Sea PvP is not fair. I recommend trying to figure out how to make it not fair in your favor.” In another thread from roughly the same time period, Flying Lab Software CEO Russell (“Rusty”) Williams commented that Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” (which everybody was merrily name-dropping at the time) “should be called the Art of the Gank”. The first quotation in particular has been mentioned by a few players who quit the game, and by some prospective players who decided to stay away.

Then there was that “no crying in the red circle” business, which apparently started as a tongue-in-cheek reference to hardcore players but which quickly became co-opted by them, all the while remaining in widespread use among the developers. Then in June, right after that seminal devlog entry on “Ambush gameplay” which boldly promised to make ganking go away, “no crying in the red circle” quickly faded away as far as the devs were concerned; it was even dropped from the masthead of PotBS producer Joe Ludwig’s blog. The only place where it remained widespread was in the forum signatures of some of the more hardcore players. But by then, it was too late.

And yet, amidst all of this, FLS lead designer Kevin “Isildur” Maginn had commented on this very blog (which is how I first encountered it) in July 2007 that: “The people who want to gank are waiting for the Next Big Failure to come along, to let them grief noobs for a few months before it shrivels up and dies. This is because every sane developer has learned this lesson: griefing and ganking doesn’t just lose you the $15/mo from the person who was griefed. It has a multiplicative effect, creating an environment in your game, and a reputation outside your game, and people tend to steer clear. ‘Play to Crush’ as a selling point and marketing slogan probably lost SB twice the players it ended up bringing them.”

When I first read that I could hardly believe it. Here was the lead designer of the game, six months before release, saying that ganking was bad and a sign that a game was in trouble as a result of bad design choices. Six months later, his fellow developers post on the game forums arguing that ganking is part of the game. Here he was, warning against hardcore slogans as selling points because they drove people away, while the dev team wrapped itself in the “no crying in the red circle” banner.

I hope Pirates of the Burning Sea survives and thrives as a game, but were it to die, I think that Isildur’s words should serve as a cautionary epitaph. I once cited this quotation on the PotBS forums, with a link to the appropriate blog page here (so Mr. Jennings, if you were wondering where all those page views on that older blog entry came from, here is your answer) in the hope that Isildur would comment. He did not respond directly, though his “Ambush Gameplay” devlog might be seen as an indirect confirmation of his earlier beliefs. All of this suggests either that FLS was and perhaps still is profoundly divided internally on what their game should be, or that they never had a serious or consistent vision for their game past a very distant and vague initial intent.

There used to be an unusual level of interaction between the FLS devs and the community in early months, but now it has more or less dried up. Nowadays, the only dev who seems to bother commenting on serious game issues, while being an intelligent fellow, happens to be a recent hire into the company (as in a few months after release), so it gives an impression that because he cannot be linked to the initial mess, he can “think outside the box” while being limited by what is in front of him and by whatever company politics might be at work around him. What is troubling is not that he might lack the general experience baggage within the company to be commenting on such matters, it’s that Isildur and the others — those who should be discussing core issues with the community — are essentially missing in action.

And in another respect, PotBS also echoes Shadowbane: Lowbies are useless. Just as guilds in SB avoided recruiting lowbies because they were seen as a liability, the port battles of PotBS (limited, as I mentioned above, to 24 players on each side) have become displays of elitism at its worst, not only level-based (a month after release, people who were not level 50 were already being asked to pass) but, more and more by the time I left (in June), wealth-based. Sooner or later, anyone who does not show up in an expensive ship of the line will be blamed for showing up at all.

Last I heard, PotBS was supposed to benefit from a new advertising campaign, but unfortunately if new players show up only to fall victim to six-ship ganksquads while being asked to pass on port battles until they’ve reached level 50 (a matter of two months or so) and then told to pass in favour of more experienced players, I fear FLS might just be wasting their money.

I’m wondering how that’s gonna work out, but hey, that’s what they get paid to fix.

(also, white wolf’s stroy and creative guys are now writing the meta-plot for Eve. WW was looking for a way to get an MMO or other Bloodlines good games with thier IP out there, and CCP was looking for people who knew how to write a story or two. This looks less one sided more and more, like whie wolf is actually going to be a partner instead of ‘goddamned ip goldmine’)