It was a combination of things. I think the biggest is that the primary focus of the “high-end” game was flag warfare and island control, and by 2005 this had become stagnant. Most of the islands on Midnight were controlled, very few new ones were opening, and the alliances were large and static enough that nothing very surprising could happen.
There was a general resource glut where everyone had so many ships and supplies stockpiled that the only way to win an island held by anyone with decent backing was to wear them down via a series of blockades – and even then, the fact that the defender could simply choose to make things non-sinking meant that ships were never a depleted resource.
A number of flags had popped up – Scallywag Syndicate, Notorious Fandango, Black Sheep Brigade, Superlemon Krakatoa, a few others – which tried to shake this up, but upsetting the apple cart really annoys the apple vendors. There was a notable shift in the mindset of a number of the big players in the game thanks to these efforts, but on the whole the resistance to change from established forces was too much.
This was compounded by a number of other factors – the universal wallet made the economy much more homogenous than it should have been, and various islands lost their strategic economic importance. The appearance of “whisking potions” which allowed you to instantly warp between archipelagos only exacerbated this.
Islands by this point had become so over-populated that even if you managed to win an island (which, mind you, was now just like every other island economically) you were unlikely to be able to build much on it – and trying to raze everything so you could start from scratch drew massive amounts of ill will from the merchant set.
There were still missing crafting puzzles, there were long-standing issues with blockades, there were problems with managing pillages that made sea battling become tiresome when the level of maturity in the player base began to decrease. There were solutions raised to fix all of these – but instead, the focus was on cranking out houses and pets and other toys and opening doubloon islands.
The amount of tolerance towards hijinks and acts of, erm, being piratey went down. One of the most infamous players in the game was banned for metagaming the system too much. (Not breaking any established rules – just using their arrangement to try to wear down island owning flags in spite of the existing, ossification-promoting structure). Pillage payouts were changed so that the ability to punitively remove the pay of pirates who abandoned in battle or otherwise misbehaved was dramatically cut back, making pillaging even less rewarding than before.
And suggestions about fixing these things (making blockades automatically sinking, allowing any war to be forced to sinking if enough flags declared war on a flag which was trying to keep from being sunk, granting governors the ability to completely raze any island they wanted, and so on) were dismissed because most of them were too hostile to casual players who just wanted to puzzle lazily, furnish a house, and buy a tiger to carry around.
Add in the growing influx of much younger players, and you have a reducing pool of mature players trying to shake up a stagnant system in a world which is rapidly becoming much more hostile to aggressive play and has more or less destroyed the long-term promise of hot pirate on pirate action… and you removed the interest of anyone who liked the game for its grander schemes and ability to, you know, roleplay a pirate.
…
I could go on, but I need to get ready for work and this is ranty enough. I don’t want it to sound like I blame OOO for the way the game developed. I’m sure it made sound financial sense, and it seems to have benefitted them in the long run. But in so doing, they dismantled a very promising structure that I’ve seen in no MOO short of Eve Online, and turned their backs on some of their longest-playing (and biggest-paying) members in order to court the lowest common denominator. And that can’t help but make people just a little bitter. :)
I’m still thankful for the fun times I had and the friends I made, many of whom I still keep in touch with. And yes: OOO have incredible customer service and none of this takes that away from them at all.
That answer your question any?
(VPeric: I remember Wlada, although I think I became a “name” after you’d stopped playing quite so much. I was Rummykins, much to the eternal amusement of everyone who found out I was a vicious warmonger and not a drunken gnome.)
