Originally posted by octa  

I'm tired of people mislabeling good team work as a "gank squad" in this game.  If you could be attacked on the open sea by anybody then yes, a pack of 6 guys going around and picking on people would be appropriately called a gank squad.  But in the red?  How is focused PvP with an objective ganking?  They are either preventing a port flip or trying to cause a port flip.  The most effective way to do that is in a group!  Why aren't people getting this? 

What should do they do, just allow the lone ship into port to potentially reduce/raise unrest?

Oh, this is real funny......

It's good teamwork for six level 50 Spanish to sit outside New Orleans and sink level 12 French players coming into port to complete a quest. Or for six level 50 Spanish and six level 50 pirates to sit in the Cayo red circle sinking French noobs as they come around the Florida peninsula. Yea, right, I know, your counter excuse is that France must have been the most populous nation and the Spanish/pirates allied to counter the French numerical superiourity. And it took a "team" of six for each of them to handle each level 12 French noob. The French were just that good. Yea, right.......

Ever question the designer's cognitive power to include level 50 6v1 against a level 12 as an in game feature?

Originally posted by Gyrus

Okay - you took what you wanted from my post and ignored the rest?

The fact is that the travel times / speeds in this game make the distances very small.

This is a naval game set in the age of sail.  One of the best defenses naval forces have always had at sea is the difficulty of finding them!

Yet in PotBS you can see for 210 miles.  That is far more than was really possible.  There is no night cycle either - so you cannot even slip in and out under the cover of darkness.

"Teamwork" at the time the game is set would have involved naval vessels patrolling.  But we do not see this in PotBS simply because it is not necessary.  The way PotBS works, if you get caught by one ship other ships from hundreds of miles away (geographically) can rush to, and join, the battle.

I have no objection to players working as a fleet where appropriate.  I also have no objection to players working toward an objective.  I 'get' that.
What I don't get is a game mechanic that makes this the only way to play.

All good points and I agree that those additions would make things better.  My only beef was the label of "gank squad" for teams of 6 people PvPing in the red.  It's a silly label for a group of players playing the game with the mechanics given to them. 

Originally posted by olddaddy

Oh, this is real funny......

It's good teamwork for six level 50 Spanish to sit outside New Orleans and sink level 12 French players coming into port to complete a quest. Or for six level 50 Spanish and six level 50 pirates to sit in the Cayo red circle sinking French noobs as they come around the Florida peninsula. Yea, right, I know, your counter excuse is that France must have been the most populous nation and the Spanish/pirates allied to counter the French numerical superiourity. And it took a "team" of six for each of them to handle each level 12 French noob. The French were just that good. Yea, right.......

Ever question the designer's cognitive power to include level 50 6v1 against a level 12 as an in game feature?

 

You are ignoring the fact that the red zone has an objective and one player can do a lot to reduce or raise unrest.  I'm sorry for the level 12 guy stuck in that situation, I really am.  But he has a simple choice: avoid the red.  So he can't turn in his quest alone?  OK, ask for help on Nation.  People, for some reason, don't bother getting into the social and political aspects of the game when it can be considered a good chunk of the "content" in any PvP MMO.  I would even go far as to say that the devs made red areas on low level islands to force players into getting involved with their Nation.  Instead the PvE players just want to do their quests, it's tragic.

Originally posted by octa

Originally posted by olddaddy

Oh, this is real funny......

It's good teamwork for six level 50 Spanish to sit outside New Orleans and sink level 12 French players coming into port to complete a quest. Or for six level 50 Spanish and six level 50 pirates to sit in the Cayo red circle sinking French noobs as they come around the Florida peninsula. Yea, right, I know, your counter excuse is that France must have been the most populous nation and the Spanish/pirates allied to counter the French numerical superiourity. And it took a "team" of six for each of them to handle each level 12 French noob. The French were just that good. Yea, right.......

Ever question the designer's cognitive power to include level 50 6v1 against a level 12 as an in game feature?

 

You are ignoring the fact that the red zone has an objective and one player can do a lot to reduce or raise unrest.  I'm sorry for the level 12 guy stuck in that situation, I really am.  But he has a simple choice: avoid the red.  So he can't turn in his quest alone?  OK, ask for help on Nation.  People, for some reason, don't bother getting into the social and political aspects of the game when it can be considered a good chunk of the "content" in any PvP MMO.  I would even go far as to say that the devs made red areas on low level islands to force players into getting involved with their Nation.  Instead the PvE players just want to do their quests, it's tragic. 

Look at the cape of Florida chokepoint and the New Orleans chokepoint. There is no way to avoid the red if New Orleans/Biloxi or Cayo/Tampa is in the red. And you ignore the fact that multiple nations have 6 player "teams" sitting in the red, without engaging each other. These "teams" were there for the gank.

Want to know why it happens to France? Because on the vast majority of servers the French have the weakest populations. That takes your social and political aspect of the game right down the toilet. I know, many an evening I sat on patrol in the Gulf of Mexico as my society assignment protecting our noobs so they could run their missions and play the game. When 6 level 50s showed up, I warned our noobs and  summoned reinforcements from the Antilles, which is the zone level 50s should be playing in. Anything less, I summoned our Cayo and Florida cape patrols. We had to deal with this ganking shit every single night, and they always sailed off when they saw the odds even up. We'd "escort" the Spanish right back to Cuba, or the pirates right back to the Atlantic, because we couldn't engage them

Ever hear of the marketing strategy, "no crying in the red circle", "make it unfair to your advantage". That is exactly what players did.

PvE players, you mean the guys that ran the quest series. Oh, I get it, you're a badass PvP player, and never did a single quest for experience or coin. You just went out from day one and PvP'd your way to level 50.

Got a surprise for you bubba, someone running a quest series, or grinding NPCs for loot, is not just a PvE player.

You are trying to make silly excuses for a game that the designers didn't know what it wanted to be. Red circles were unnecessary for PvP, they actually restrict PvP. Had they made it open PvP, with about a three mile visability range, and no hydrofoil speedboats, they would have spread the map and created alot of room for PvE players to hide, as well as more smaller PvP battles. Instead, they chose stealth sails and speedboats to balance off PvP. Then they added "can't sink me" invulnerability. All they needed was to add orcs and elves to the magic system, because Gandalf on the quarterdeck could nerf the other sides firepower, reload rate, and speed.

But they didn't. They created red circles around choke point ports for players to run the gauntlet. And those red circles protected the gankers by preventing the reinforcement of the loan gankee. They created the "team tactic" where one player sits outside the port in the red, or with his PvP flag up, while 5 of his buddies sit in the unfriendly nation's port waiting for his voice command to zone, join, and gank. They created a mechanism for the British to flagrantly sail into French waters without having to be challenged by any French warships outside a red circle, and than called it PvP. They didn't need red circles, and they didn't need combat instances. Fail.

You also ignore the fact that it is faster and more efficient to economic spike a port into the red, rather than sit outside it for a few hours and sink NPCs or noobs. And don't even bring up the FLS rule change, I was in Tampa when the pirates decided to econ spike it AFTER the rule change. We fought it by econ spiking back, and dropped the numbers down as fast as they popped them up. Waiting and fighing ships is inefficient.

This was never a real PvP game. It was never a PvE game. It was never a historical Carribean Age of Sail game, it was never a fantasy magic game, and it definately was never an Avcom game. This was a bit of everything thrown in, shaken, not stirred, then poured out into a monthly subscription rate. It tried to be everything to everyone, and wound up being nothing to no one. This was flawed game design pure and simple. And no matter what you say, it shows. Now, go back to Antigua server and hunt down noobs.

The problem With PotBS is that its too much of a SIM in a mythical era.

Its difficult to build a game in a mythic era as the tiem seting for the game, without any fantasy or more inclined into a story of treasures and civilizations.

Its a good sim thou but after doing the pvp port battles and one or more lines of quests its the same there after.

Building, crafting and materials was something interesting but made too complicated to atrack a more wider audience.

It was made for grouwn ups who loved sims and not for kids.

In most part thats what I think went wrong with an excellent idea of a game.

I enjoy it a lot but it became boring and some of us don't like mindless here to there time in order to kill time in a game.

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Im curious in people opinions on why this game didn't really take off?

I see alot of negativity directed towards the game as well, why is that?

Level based grind fest and PvP is basically high level gank-a-thon. Not Fun!

Originally posted by Taljinn

 They didn't listen to there beta testers! 

Agree 100%.

While not all of my fellow beta testers agreed with many of the issues that I railed against many did and where drowned out by a dedicated core group of people who had FLS's ear and just had no clue how things would be received in live.  Nothing is better evidence of this wrongheaded ideal and the disconnect between what they thought was good but had no chance of live success than the whole 'no crying in the red circle' thing.

Originally posted by AgtSmith

Originally posted by Taljinn

 They didn't listen to there beta testers! 

 

Agree 100%.

 

While not all of my fellow beta testers agreed with many of the issues that I railed against many did and where drowned out by a dedicated core group of people who had FLS's ear and just had no clue how things would be received in live.  Nothing is better evidence of this wrongheaded ideal and the disconnect between what they thought was good but had no chance of live success than the whole 'no crying in the red circle' thing.

Still, we must not discount the actions of the developers themselves, who did far more than just pay lip service to their player core, by adopting "no crying in the red circle" for themselves.  DrewC's infamous "unfair in your favor" quote, Rusty's "art of the gank", Aether's avatar, the masthead of then-FLS producer Joe -- these all gave an impression, rightly or wrongly, that the company didn't care and didn't want to hear about any criticism of its choices.

Then they clung to it for four months, until around the time Isildur's "Ambush Gameplay" devlog came out.  By that time, it was too late.

Actually, I think FLS did stay true to their core - that is the problem.  Their core had ideas and wants that where never going to fly in the marketplace.  I remember bringing these things up at various times through the closed beta and getting shouted down by a very vocal core few when it was terribly obvious that once live came around the broader playerbase would hate it.  'No crying in the red circle' was part of it but the economy was also part of it as I new there was no way in hell enough players would be enough into the economy to afford the ship loss penalties which would play badly with the 'no crying in the red circle' stuff as well. 

All in all FLS just did a bad job of reading what the broader customer base would want and listened too much to the 'fanboy' types saying PotBS could do no wrong.

Originally posted by AgtSmith

Actually, I think FLS did stay true to their core - that is the problem.  Their core had ideas and wants that where never going to fly in the marketplace.  I remember bringing these things up at various times through the closed beta and getting shouted down by a very vocal core few when it was terribly obvious that once live came around the broader playerbase would hate it.  'No crying in the red circle' was part of it but the economy was also part of it as I new there was no way in hell enough players would be enough into the economy to afford the ship loss penalties which would play badly with the 'no crying in the red circle' stuff as well. 

 

All in all FLS just did a bad job of reading what the broader customer base would want and listened too much to the 'fanboy' types saying PotBS could do no wrong.

Yeah, and where are those Fanbois now?  Are they supporting FLS and the game they wanted with their $$$?

BTW - Hi SwBgHz!  nice to see you again.

Originally posted by Gyrus

Originally posted by AgtSmith

Actually, I think FLS did stay true to their core - that is the problem.  Their core had ideas and wants that where never going to fly in the marketplace.  I remember bringing these things up at various times through the closed beta and getting shouted down by a very vocal core few when it was terribly obvious that once live came around the broader playerbase would hate it.  'No crying in the red circle' was part of it but the economy was also part of it as I new there was no way in hell enough players would be enough into the economy to afford the ship loss penalties which would play badly with the 'no crying in the red circle' stuff as well. 

 

All in all FLS just did a bad job of reading what the broader customer base would want and listened too much to the 'fanboy' types saying PotBS could do no wrong.

Yeah, and where are those Fanbois now?  Are they supporting FLS and the game they wanted with their $$$?

Most of the people who were cheering for "No crying in the red circle" have moved on to other games. They just couldn't find enough victims to gank since the population was so low.