deepfred
21st January 2008, 02:51 PM
Just a write up as an active player on how the "pre-boarding" went, how the game is shaping up, and my own personal experiences.
They are shutting down the servers at 6pm PST tonight to get ready for the launch patch. Official live starts tomorrow morning, earlyish.
The possibility the game is going to see large numbers of new players tomorrow is low, however some veterans of the beta may do so, given they understand how limited the pre-boarding was likely to be with a level cap of 21 and Port Contention disabled. The PotBS economy essentially exists on Port Contention and PvP, so with those things limited, and the level 21 level cap meaning only the earliest tier boats can be used -veterans of the game would understand there's little to do before launch that can't be done fairly quickly after.
I'm not holding my breath, but that's not to say there isn't a fair sized community in the game as is. The two most populous servers are Blackbeard, and Roberts (the English EU server). The two most populous factions are the Pirates and the British, with Spain following Britain and France being the lonely faction few seem interested in.
I play primarily on Blackbeard Spain, however I also have a Pirate on a less populated server (Morgan), and even there, there are quite a few people, of most factions.
The game has stabalized greatly since the beginning of the pre-boarding a few weeks ago. There have only been two client-side patches, but those and some server-side changes have made huge strides in stabilizing the game. Unlike the beginning of the pre-boarding, the game I played for some time yesterday is definately ready for launch, while it will still see quite a bit of refinement in gameplay over the coming weeks.
The developer community has been active and sensible on the boards, and while their /petition system is a bit annoying (as it's web-based, out of game), the GMs have been dealing with any major glitches reasonably well.
Being in a Society (guild) with many beta veterans, I'm getting a solid understanding of what to expect as the game goes live, in terms of everything from port contention to the economy.
The thing to understand about PotBS vs other MMOs is that the economy is entirely based on the realm vs realm dynamic, and isn't really there to make anyone rich (which isn't to say some people won't get rich). The incentive in most other economies is to corner the market on certain high quality goods and get rich selling the most of those goods. In PotBS, the focus is on facilitating your own faction's ability to gear up and dominate PvP and realm control of the world (thus reducing your own risk and costs), and so societies do not exist to make money, but rather, focus on making their own costs as cheap as possible, with the knock on effect being to lower the costs for everyone else in their own faction.
This is a reasonably important distinction to make as many people come to the game thinking they want to be a rich ship builder on their own - only to find out they have no hope of competing with the likes of a society's ship building efforts. For example, within a week of the preboarding, my society on Blackbeard was making 6 medium frigates a day, the costs of which would stagger any solo player of any faction throughout the entire 3 weeks of pre-boarding.
If you understand this and work with it, instead of against it - the economy is extremely rewarding in that you find niches for yourself (in or out of a society), and can put your economic resources to use in a manner that doesn't get in the way of doing missions, grouping, PvPing. A good freetrader can have fun with the wheeling and dealing by working up their factions with other nations and finding bargains their own nation lacks, effectively importing goods their nation lacks for tidy profits.
The crafting in this game is superb in that there really is no "process" where you mindlessly click through a routine to manufacture something. Instead you buy structures which then accrue hours of labor over time (reasonably quickly), which can then be used in combination with materials and money to manufacture goods with a single button click. If you have an iron mine for example, and the mine has 16 hours labor waiting, you can mine 16 hours with of iron ore by simply typing in 16 and clicking "Build it" (assuming you have the 240 doubloons per hour that activity would cost). The resulting 10 ore per hour would immediately drop into your warehouse, which you can then use to refine into ingots, sell on the open market (the Auction House, or AH), or put in one of your ship's hulls and transport to somewhere else it is needed for trade.
The class structure of the game is relatively different as far as MMOs go. There are 4 classes to the game, Pirate, Naval Officer, Privateer and Freetrader. They are all fairly unique and server different purposes, however they are mostly interchangeable in a grouped situation, and it's not surprising to see a Freetrader doignt hings in combat you would think only a Naval Officer would and vice-versa.
Each class has many different skill that can be trained in a lifetime, however the limited number of skill points used to train those skills, means you can have two level 50s of the same class who have entirely different skill sets.
Finally there is a separate swashbucking class, that anyone can choose from (the different professions default to certain swashbuckling skills, but by level 5 all can choose to respec to a different swashbuckling class if desired, so it's really wide open). Fencing (default for Naval Officers), Florentine (default for Freetraders), and Dirty Fighting (default for Pirates & Privateers) are the three styles. While each have certain nuances, they all effectively have the same core abilities, eg being able to use a limited use pistol.
Pirates are the unique class in that they can only be played in the Pirate faction (no playing a Pirate in Spain), have the widest array of combat abilities, but also are the only class able to capture other ships. While a captured ship is just as good as any other type, it's durability is limited to a single point, so losing a captured ship means it's gone forever. WIth the abililty to capture a new one however, this makes losing ships less of a concern for pirates - and ultimately means they have far less risk in PvP than a national will. No other classes can play for the pirate faction either.
For the national factions, there are the remaining three classes.
Naval Officers tend to have abilities aimed at faster reload rates, basic buffs and debuffs, and have a line of skills called Escort that let them buff the group during battle in flexible ways. Their claim to fame is their abililty in the end game to use Ships of Line (SOLs) which are the biggest gun platforms available.
Freetraders are very limited in combat abilities, and instead tend to focus on speed and manueverability in and out of combat, as well as eventually have the ability to train a number of trade and economic abilities, eg being able to see the entire world's offering on the market from any auction house, instead of just their own local region, or indeed, being able to set up production facilities in an enemy's port (at a much higher cost, but still able to do so where other classes of the nation can't). They get a line of group buffs, but these are limited and only one can be used at a time (eg defense vs speed, can't use both at the same time).
Finally, Privateers are a combat oriented class with some unique abilities, primarily the ability to intiate PvP combat in pirate contested waters (which a pirate too can do). The skill Sanctioned Piracy allows the privateer to do this, and for national PvP groups, this will be an important ability to have - just one member of a group needs the ability to initiate the combat, where the rest of the group can then join in. Privateers get some great debuffs and combat-oriented abilities as well.
Instead of capturing ships, nationals can "claim" defeated ships which then reward them with either pennants or commendations (based on their class) which can then be turned in for rewards at their Capitols, eg ships or other gear. Primarily though, nationals will be buying their ships from other players - which can be reasonably expensive and thus make losing a ship in combat painful. Player made ships (and some rewarded ships) however do have added "durability", eg 3 or 5 durability points, which essentially equals one "life" per point. When a ship with 3 durability points is lost in combat, the ship and player are returned to the nearest port but now with 2 durability instead of 3. You can add durability to a ship by applying a ship deed of the same quality/type. An example of this might be to buy two level 8 Bermuda Sloop Ship deeds, and use one to create the ship, while using the other to double the ships' starting durability from 5 to 10.
Obviously, once you get into to bigger and much higher level ships, this gets very expensive. Whereas for the pirate, all they need do is go attack another NPC on the Open Sea, defeat the ship they want and capture it - which can be a very fast operation for a seasoned player.
Port contention is all about making areas safe for your own faction to near and work from - in some cases it can be crucial for your own nation's ability to produce entire lines of goods. For example, wine is a product that requires a port with grapes, and is a much needed product for building larger ships (part of the provisions component ships require). By default, no Spanish ports have grapes, and so it will be a priority for the Spanish faction to capture a harbor with grapes as soon as possible.
Grapes could still be harvested by Spanish freetraders in foreign ports, but at considerable risk (by travelling through contested waters) and cost (excessive tax rates by foreign governments).
You contest a port by building up thousands of points doing various things, from missions via the rebel agent in that port, to other types of missions. If the target port fails to meet the pressure your faction puts on it, it will ultimately go into true contention whereby a large scale battle will take place to determine if the port flips faction or not. There are variances by faction on what exactly happens after a port has been flipped, but you can see how this plays into the larger realm vs realm game.
Alternatively, the PvP game is commonplace and very popular - people band together in groups of 6 and sail contested waters in the hopes of finding rival faction players looking for a fight and battle it out. While it can be painful to lose your ship, there are ways to be prepared so that you don't lose everything you own - making sure you have enough durability, and aren't carrying a lot of valuable goods, or in the case of the pirate, knowing that if you do lose your ship, capturing another is a simple matter of minutes vs an NPC to achieve.
The PvE game is much more extensive than I had thought from open beta - there are thousands of missions that do very different things ultimately (my initial reaction was that they were very limited), and it turns out one of the funnest parts of the game is to do missions in a full or even partial group. These can range from swashbucking your way into a fortress and defeating a group of enemies by hand, to joinging an armada of friendly NPCs in assaulting an enemy force just as large in full scale ship to ship combat.
Every 5 levels each class has special missions given by their trainers that usually result in some special rewards, from unique clothing items (which can then be worn via the Tailor Shop), to unique class abilities, eg a short-term invulnerability that Naval Offficers get at level 20.
The game is more than playable casually, the pace of levelling is brisk, but the game is definately more fun in a society. Playing solo, I would recommend a pirate, as the class is much more independent economically and more capable combat-wise. Playing a national is much mroe rewarding in a society however, as you don't find yourself in comeptition economically with your faction, but rather as a contributor to it, with large benefits (eg extremely inexpensive ships and upgrades, as well as players willing to help you transport goods, etc).
Grouping is insanely fun, and while the community is still learning how to do this somewhat (the in -game tools for grouping aren't as obvious as they should be, however the devs are clear that they are working hard on this issue), but personally I find the most fun to be had in doing hard missions (ship combat or swashbuckling) with full groups.
In closing... I started playing this game on a whim - and after not being overly impressed with it in open beta and expecting the worst. However, I'm surprised by how much I've really come to enjoy it and am defaintely looking forward to the real thing on Tuesday. I'm lucky to be in possibly the largest Spanish society on Blackbeard, with many of the members being beta veterans who also have a very clear picture on what they want to accomplish and how to accomplish it (these are closed beta vets who have seen level 50 before).
It's not going to be for everyone, and while it's somewhat reminiscent of other games (see: EvE online), it is really quite unique as a game and occupies a very fun universe. The game isn't 100% polished like a WoW, but it's not going to be a horrible launch, the game is essenitally quite solid, with plenty of content, with PvP, RvR and PvE all being solid aspects. A few months of tweaking and improvements and the game will be more than ready for primetime, and getting started now instead of after that won't make much of a difference.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how large the community might get or not get. Fortunately, even now, with a moderately sized community, the game has more than enough players to be fun.
I don't expect anyone here will be playing, but if you ever do consider it, feel free to ask me any questions: I'll try hard not to be too biased in my replies.
They are shutting down the servers at 6pm PST tonight to get ready for the launch patch. Official live starts tomorrow morning, earlyish.
The possibility the game is going to see large numbers of new players tomorrow is low, however some veterans of the beta may do so, given they understand how limited the pre-boarding was likely to be with a level cap of 21 and Port Contention disabled. The PotBS economy essentially exists on Port Contention and PvP, so with those things limited, and the level 21 level cap meaning only the earliest tier boats can be used -veterans of the game would understand there's little to do before launch that can't be done fairly quickly after.
I'm not holding my breath, but that's not to say there isn't a fair sized community in the game as is. The two most populous servers are Blackbeard, and Roberts (the English EU server). The two most populous factions are the Pirates and the British, with Spain following Britain and France being the lonely faction few seem interested in.
I play primarily on Blackbeard Spain, however I also have a Pirate on a less populated server (Morgan), and even there, there are quite a few people, of most factions.
The game has stabalized greatly since the beginning of the pre-boarding a few weeks ago. There have only been two client-side patches, but those and some server-side changes have made huge strides in stabilizing the game. Unlike the beginning of the pre-boarding, the game I played for some time yesterday is definately ready for launch, while it will still see quite a bit of refinement in gameplay over the coming weeks.
The developer community has been active and sensible on the boards, and while their /petition system is a bit annoying (as it's web-based, out of game), the GMs have been dealing with any major glitches reasonably well.
Being in a Society (guild) with many beta veterans, I'm getting a solid understanding of what to expect as the game goes live, in terms of everything from port contention to the economy.
The thing to understand about PotBS vs other MMOs is that the economy is entirely based on the realm vs realm dynamic, and isn't really there to make anyone rich (which isn't to say some people won't get rich). The incentive in most other economies is to corner the market on certain high quality goods and get rich selling the most of those goods. In PotBS, the focus is on facilitating your own faction's ability to gear up and dominate PvP and realm control of the world (thus reducing your own risk and costs), and so societies do not exist to make money, but rather, focus on making their own costs as cheap as possible, with the knock on effect being to lower the costs for everyone else in their own faction.
This is a reasonably important distinction to make as many people come to the game thinking they want to be a rich ship builder on their own - only to find out they have no hope of competing with the likes of a society's ship building efforts. For example, within a week of the preboarding, my society on Blackbeard was making 6 medium frigates a day, the costs of which would stagger any solo player of any faction throughout the entire 3 weeks of pre-boarding.
If you understand this and work with it, instead of against it - the economy is extremely rewarding in that you find niches for yourself (in or out of a society), and can put your economic resources to use in a manner that doesn't get in the way of doing missions, grouping, PvPing. A good freetrader can have fun with the wheeling and dealing by working up their factions with other nations and finding bargains their own nation lacks, effectively importing goods their nation lacks for tidy profits.
The crafting in this game is superb in that there really is no "process" where you mindlessly click through a routine to manufacture something. Instead you buy structures which then accrue hours of labor over time (reasonably quickly), which can then be used in combination with materials and money to manufacture goods with a single button click. If you have an iron mine for example, and the mine has 16 hours labor waiting, you can mine 16 hours with of iron ore by simply typing in 16 and clicking "Build it" (assuming you have the 240 doubloons per hour that activity would cost). The resulting 10 ore per hour would immediately drop into your warehouse, which you can then use to refine into ingots, sell on the open market (the Auction House, or AH), or put in one of your ship's hulls and transport to somewhere else it is needed for trade.
The class structure of the game is relatively different as far as MMOs go. There are 4 classes to the game, Pirate, Naval Officer, Privateer and Freetrader. They are all fairly unique and server different purposes, however they are mostly interchangeable in a grouped situation, and it's not surprising to see a Freetrader doignt hings in combat you would think only a Naval Officer would and vice-versa.
Each class has many different skill that can be trained in a lifetime, however the limited number of skill points used to train those skills, means you can have two level 50s of the same class who have entirely different skill sets.
Finally there is a separate swashbucking class, that anyone can choose from (the different professions default to certain swashbuckling skills, but by level 5 all can choose to respec to a different swashbuckling class if desired, so it's really wide open). Fencing (default for Naval Officers), Florentine (default for Freetraders), and Dirty Fighting (default for Pirates & Privateers) are the three styles. While each have certain nuances, they all effectively have the same core abilities, eg being able to use a limited use pistol.
Pirates are the unique class in that they can only be played in the Pirate faction (no playing a Pirate in Spain), have the widest array of combat abilities, but also are the only class able to capture other ships. While a captured ship is just as good as any other type, it's durability is limited to a single point, so losing a captured ship means it's gone forever. WIth the abililty to capture a new one however, this makes losing ships less of a concern for pirates - and ultimately means they have far less risk in PvP than a national will. No other classes can play for the pirate faction either.
For the national factions, there are the remaining three classes.
Naval Officers tend to have abilities aimed at faster reload rates, basic buffs and debuffs, and have a line of skills called Escort that let them buff the group during battle in flexible ways. Their claim to fame is their abililty in the end game to use Ships of Line (SOLs) which are the biggest gun platforms available.
Freetraders are very limited in combat abilities, and instead tend to focus on speed and manueverability in and out of combat, as well as eventually have the ability to train a number of trade and economic abilities, eg being able to see the entire world's offering on the market from any auction house, instead of just their own local region, or indeed, being able to set up production facilities in an enemy's port (at a much higher cost, but still able to do so where other classes of the nation can't). They get a line of group buffs, but these are limited and only one can be used at a time (eg defense vs speed, can't use both at the same time).
Finally, Privateers are a combat oriented class with some unique abilities, primarily the ability to intiate PvP combat in pirate contested waters (which a pirate too can do). The skill Sanctioned Piracy allows the privateer to do this, and for national PvP groups, this will be an important ability to have - just one member of a group needs the ability to initiate the combat, where the rest of the group can then join in. Privateers get some great debuffs and combat-oriented abilities as well.
Instead of capturing ships, nationals can "claim" defeated ships which then reward them with either pennants or commendations (based on their class) which can then be turned in for rewards at their Capitols, eg ships or other gear. Primarily though, nationals will be buying their ships from other players - which can be reasonably expensive and thus make losing a ship in combat painful. Player made ships (and some rewarded ships) however do have added "durability", eg 3 or 5 durability points, which essentially equals one "life" per point. When a ship with 3 durability points is lost in combat, the ship and player are returned to the nearest port but now with 2 durability instead of 3. You can add durability to a ship by applying a ship deed of the same quality/type. An example of this might be to buy two level 8 Bermuda Sloop Ship deeds, and use one to create the ship, while using the other to double the ships' starting durability from 5 to 10.
Obviously, once you get into to bigger and much higher level ships, this gets very expensive. Whereas for the pirate, all they need do is go attack another NPC on the Open Sea, defeat the ship they want and capture it - which can be a very fast operation for a seasoned player.
Port contention is all about making areas safe for your own faction to near and work from - in some cases it can be crucial for your own nation's ability to produce entire lines of goods. For example, wine is a product that requires a port with grapes, and is a much needed product for building larger ships (part of the provisions component ships require). By default, no Spanish ports have grapes, and so it will be a priority for the Spanish faction to capture a harbor with grapes as soon as possible.
Grapes could still be harvested by Spanish freetraders in foreign ports, but at considerable risk (by travelling through contested waters) and cost (excessive tax rates by foreign governments).
You contest a port by building up thousands of points doing various things, from missions via the rebel agent in that port, to other types of missions. If the target port fails to meet the pressure your faction puts on it, it will ultimately go into true contention whereby a large scale battle will take place to determine if the port flips faction or not. There are variances by faction on what exactly happens after a port has been flipped, but you can see how this plays into the larger realm vs realm game.
Alternatively, the PvP game is commonplace and very popular - people band together in groups of 6 and sail contested waters in the hopes of finding rival faction players looking for a fight and battle it out. While it can be painful to lose your ship, there are ways to be prepared so that you don't lose everything you own - making sure you have enough durability, and aren't carrying a lot of valuable goods, or in the case of the pirate, knowing that if you do lose your ship, capturing another is a simple matter of minutes vs an NPC to achieve.
The PvE game is much more extensive than I had thought from open beta - there are thousands of missions that do very different things ultimately (my initial reaction was that they were very limited), and it turns out one of the funnest parts of the game is to do missions in a full or even partial group. These can range from swashbucking your way into a fortress and defeating a group of enemies by hand, to joinging an armada of friendly NPCs in assaulting an enemy force just as large in full scale ship to ship combat.
Every 5 levels each class has special missions given by their trainers that usually result in some special rewards, from unique clothing items (which can then be worn via the Tailor Shop), to unique class abilities, eg a short-term invulnerability that Naval Offficers get at level 20.
The game is more than playable casually, the pace of levelling is brisk, but the game is definately more fun in a society. Playing solo, I would recommend a pirate, as the class is much more independent economically and more capable combat-wise. Playing a national is much mroe rewarding in a society however, as you don't find yourself in comeptition economically with your faction, but rather as a contributor to it, with large benefits (eg extremely inexpensive ships and upgrades, as well as players willing to help you transport goods, etc).
Grouping is insanely fun, and while the community is still learning how to do this somewhat (the in -game tools for grouping aren't as obvious as they should be, however the devs are clear that they are working hard on this issue), but personally I find the most fun to be had in doing hard missions (ship combat or swashbuckling) with full groups.
In closing... I started playing this game on a whim - and after not being overly impressed with it in open beta and expecting the worst. However, I'm surprised by how much I've really come to enjoy it and am defaintely looking forward to the real thing on Tuesday. I'm lucky to be in possibly the largest Spanish society on Blackbeard, with many of the members being beta veterans who also have a very clear picture on what they want to accomplish and how to accomplish it (these are closed beta vets who have seen level 50 before).
It's not going to be for everyone, and while it's somewhat reminiscent of other games (see: EvE online), it is really quite unique as a game and occupies a very fun universe. The game isn't 100% polished like a WoW, but it's not going to be a horrible launch, the game is essenitally quite solid, with plenty of content, with PvP, RvR and PvE all being solid aspects. A few months of tweaking and improvements and the game will be more than ready for primetime, and getting started now instead of after that won't make much of a difference.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how large the community might get or not get. Fortunately, even now, with a moderately sized community, the game has more than enough players to be fun.
I don't expect anyone here will be playing, but if you ever do consider it, feel free to ask me any questions: I'll try hard not to be too biased in my replies.