Pirates of the Burning Sea apparently had way too many load screens.
Isn’t that the truth. Sheesh!
The game would have had more staying power if they’d started with four servers to begin with. Their economic model is totally based on having a lot of people involved in PvP, something that can’t happen on deserted servers. I also understood the game to be a lot more Eve like than WoW like, in fact I can think of very little that the two (WoW and PotBS) games share. Really, it’s about the profit and the margins, not necessarily the numbers.
Also it hasn’t been definitive that people will only pay for one MMO; at $15 a month, that’s not a lot of money in most people’s budgets. The way WoW does PvP certainly doesn’t require a lot of time/dedication and I think it’s understood that a non-majority of WoW players are raiders, so that should leave enough time.
It does though take being right when you start; I think people’s tolerance for ‘growing pains’ is a lot less since WoW. And this is what I see as the major problem. Somehow these publishers think that people will give them some slack just because they are new, but why would people do that? As we’ve all seen/discussed, many of the problems with these games (the ones that lead to less people playing) were known in beta, but the game was forced out before it was ready, and then fails because of that. How many times does that have to happen before the publishers get it? I don’t know, but as long as you have a clean game like WoW to compare to, not many players are going to put up with a lot of crap as they pay for the game to be properly developed.
On Rackham, one of the more crowded servers, I always read complaints that the servers needed merged, there just weren’t enough people when they were so spread out.
This encourages me further to renew my subscription, since more will be going on and it’ll be easier to get involved with other players. Or to take their ships!
$15 isn’t much, but I think the sticking point is more psychological than a rational financial decision. Even if WoW cost $5 and there were two other MMOs that cost $5 that I also enjoyed playing I know that personally I’d still be hesitant to sign up for the other 2 over the long term because “I’m already paying for WoW”. Paying three different fees on a monthly basis for things that trip up a part of the brain that tells you they are somewhat redundant is an issue even if it doesn’t really make any sense when you think about it.
I think there’s more of a tolerance for this in niche games (like I’d assume POTBS should be). Eve Online was awful when it started but it was different enough that a few people stuck with it long enough for the devs to actually turn it into a playable game. Then you get good word of mouth and you’re one of the most successful indie MMOs out there. With something similar to WoW, yeah, there’s really no reason to play an unpolished version.
Got to admit, POTBS is a game where I really feel the one-server style of EVE would be ideal. Of course, it’s quite tricky when you don’t have systems you can just tack on like in EVE, but I really do miss that one-story-one-server approach. It means everyone you know playing can share in the same drama and excitement.
I was just popping in to say the same thing. Why did they bother with multiple servers anyway?
Anecdotally speaking, I used to have active WoW and EQ2 accounts, I cancelled my EQ2 account finally because I just couldn’t invest enough time in both. Unless you’re super casual, I think that’s the barrier. People only have so many hours of the day to play games.
For me the problem was that, unlike in Eve, there’s really nowhere to go to get away from the PvP if you’re burned out. Ports that are crucial to doing later missions or even the best OS grinding spots are often in the red. It’s not like there’s 0.0 and Empire. Everything’s Empire but occasionally big chunks of it, including Jita, turn into 0.0 for as long as people feel like carrying on there. I liked the feel of combats much more as they tend to be less frenetic and complex (and less laggy) - more of a natural feel to them. Ships functioned as they should and battles could be quite gorgeous.
Then again this isn’t a complaint I’ve heard from alot of folks. There seem to be PvEers who don’t like any PvP and so get bunged up about it when they’re inconvienced. There seem to be PvPers that just can’t get enough. Somewhere in the middle is me. PvP’s fun for a while but when I’m ready to do something else, I’m ready to do something else.
I think WoW has seriously turned off a lot of people to MMOs. Hear me out. My friend played WoW… a lot. He was totally addicted. He played it every day, night, etc. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he kept his job, his girlfriend didn’t dump him, or anything like that, but pretty much all he talked about during that time was World of Warcraft.
Eventually he quit cold turkey, and he will never, never, ever touch another MMO. It doesn’t matter how good they are, it doesn’t matter what they do over WoW, he just won’t play. I can’t believe he’s the only one. So if the MMO world is primarily composed of WoW players and ex-WoW burnouts… what do you have left? That roving bit of a few hundred thousand folks who bounce around and comprised the UO, then EQ, then DAoC, etc. population? It’s literally fighting for scraps.
This isn’t unique to WoW, I’ve heard plenty of the same stories, just substitute EQ or DAoC for Wow.
That’s a tricky issue. The static geography of the game means you can easily get overcrowding, leading to burnout as Brian mentions, or to not being able to get in on the action, since Port Battles are limited to 24 on a side. Plus you’d have a conflict between people wanting to try out other factions, and not wanting them to belong to multiple factions in the same game.
My gut feeling is that for one server to work, you’d have to have a fictional setting, with an extensible map, and move beyond the static 4 factions. This is the sort of game I’d truly like to see, but unfortunately PotBS doesn’t really seem cutout for one server.
I’ve found I’ve had no problem getting away from the action. I just show up when I feel like, push contention enough to get into port battles when I feel like, monkey around as a merchant when I feel like it, and other times pursue quests. This does take away from the immersion, but it’s easy to rationalize if you view events abstractly: while I’m questing, I simply suspend my disbelief, turn off Nation chat, and presume it happens during a lull in the action.
I’ve never yet had PvP forced on me, even though I run around PvP flagged and through red zones all the time, and have my primary production/market ports often in the red (good for business!). You just have to be careful, which isn’t hard: use stealth skills and open sea speed boosts, and always have an NPC target in mind for an easy escape and then invisibility. The NPC density is so high in red zones that it’s nigh impossible to get ganked if you don’t want to be.
Besides, I make so much more money than I spend, even after dumping hundreds of thousands into unrest bundles, and despite the lower base income of Pirates, that even were I to have all of my fully outfitted ships ganked in sequence I would barely notice.
On the other hand, I viscerally understand the draw of wanting to role play it as though it were real, like a simulation, but for me the gamey and abstract nature of the game makes it hard to truly get into in this fashion anyway.
Maybe merchanting can work like this but I hit a point where everywhere I wanted to go was in the red, not only for a couple of days, but serially. Perhaps being in a sneaky stealth sloop will work for smuggling goods but I would be skeptical that same sloop will get you through later missions. This coupled with being stuck on the wrong end of server pop distribution…well, just couldn’t deal with it anymore. My Society seems to be holding up better than I did with the situation, overall, but each week they seem to be shedding another player more than they recruit.
I’m actually, and I never thought I’d be saying this, back in Eve. My old SWG gang from VR times is planning ahead to next January/February to when they think we might see character avatars in the game. Lots of these folks like what they’ve read about Eve, but like me, had trouble with the lack of avatars in-game. So…I’m jumping back in early to relearn some stuff and train some skills. Maybe make some ISK.
I really liked the ship combat part of the game, and sometimes the swordplay was decent, but the missions all felt very cookie cutter and got pretty old after a while.
If they ever came out with a single player game that included the ship to ship combat I’d probably grab it in a heart beat, but I don’t see myself getting back into PotBS.
Yeah, as a singleplayer game - using that tech and with a more robust Pirates/Cutthroats model for PvE - I’d play. Be even better with fully rendered ships and recruitable NPC crewmen like in Pirates of the Caribbean (the singleplayer one by Akella/Bethesda).
A closer analogy, perhaps:
WoW is to traditional MMORPGs what D&D was to pen & paper RPGs in the 1980s. No company was able to compete against TSR directly in the elves-dragons-wizards genre; those that did hold their own had to offer something significantly different from what D&D provided (i.e., space opera a la GDW’s Traveller), harness the power of a licensed property or target some special segment of the audience which loathed TSR.
The developers posted a response over at Next Generation.
Haven’t tried it myself, was waiting for the boxed copy to drop to $15 or less. So is this goofy marketing spin, an honest answer, or both?
Well I think it was both. They fucked up by launching with too many servers, the title wasn’t as successful as they had anticipated, and they’re merging to fix gameplay issues. Merging servers is never a good sign, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the game is dead.