Profile: Vetarnias
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• • What did PotBS do wrong?

  • I have sort of given up on PotBS, especially now that the only thing they can brag about is how they are tweaking the female avatars to make them more... well... feminine.

    I wouldn't complain about redoing them if they looked like the East German Olympic swimming team, but even then it would have been a complete waste of resources. Okay, okay, I know that the graphic artists can't do heavy designing stuff, but I think the level of dissatisfaction with the game is such nowadays that the avatar tweaks would have been more palatable to what's left of the PotBS community if FLS hadn't published a lengthy devlog puff piece about it.

    I still hope that the developers will be able to turn their game around, but at this stage I have to say that if PotBS can make it to next summer and outlast "Tabula Rasa", that will be quite an accomplishment in itself.   Problem is, NCSoft has other properties to survive.  FLS?  Unless they have an ace up their sleeve, not so much.  Their only other property is their 7-year-old "Rails Across America", which in itself isn't bad but was graphically outdated even in its days.

    My guess is that if FLS makes an announcement, it will be in January, at the one-year mark.

    Also a very interesting blog entry I came across recently: http://spiritofrevolution.com/mmorpg/pirates-of-the-empty-sea/ .  So it would seem that even the apologists are backtracking these days.

    In a way, this makes me sad for FLS. Early on, they were misled by a very rowdy part of their community, but after they realized their mistake, they never fully lived up to it.

    I was recently convinced to try out WoW (but not the WotLK expansion, which I was told is completely useless before level 55), and in that game, I already know what are its strengths and weaknesses, and what Blizzard tried to do with their game, without reading a single line about it.  PotBS, on the other hand, never lived up to its potential in the best areas (ship combat, atmosphere), while everything else was painfully deficient.  The rest was the developers' own doing, with that "no crying in the red circle" stuff.

    I'd try it out again, but I'm not sure that there is much to be returning to.

  • Posted: 11/30/08 9:05 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • Knowing your target market: Potbs is an economic game

  • Yeah, I had the same reaction, really, though I'm not affected by this (and wouldn't be anyway if I still played the game).

    And the talk of adding Defiant.... The four SOE servers are at Light all the time, and they think a NEW server is going to fare better?  Just take the worst off of servers (any but Antigua, from what I'm reading) and make it the new Aussie home by offering a new round of transfers to other players there. 

    Or if you're really intent on adding a new server, just offer everyone on other servers to transfer the characters of their choice there and shut down the existing four.  One server is probably all that the current PotBS membership could fill these days.

  • Posted: 11/10/08 7:56 PM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • The devs think the players don't matter.

  • Originally posted by mrprogguy
    

    Originally posted by obamaphony
    

    That's why this game went down in flames and will never be good again.

     

    They added magic and ruined the beautiful base thay established; a base of realistic ship combat was turned into WOW on the ocean.

    Typical and the very reason this game is finished.

    If I ran the company I'd fire these selfish developers and hire people who understand players and gaming.

     

    
     

    I think you're blaming the wrong group.  It matters not whether or not the developers (the coders, the artists, the scripters) understand players or gaming.  It matters if the designers understand players and gaming.

    It would be nice if players and gamers understood the difference.

    This game is a weird case, actually.  The lead designer did show some signs of understanding gamers' mentality -- just type in "next big failure" and "isildur" and you should get all the evidence you need.  But they don't show any sign of having followed through on that.  Blame DrewC and Rusty mostly for giving us "no crying in the red circle" then putting meat around it.  And blame Isildur for having retreated from public life ever since the game went live.

    To Gyrus: Oh yeah, I saw the latest Rusty quote.  If I were an Aussie, I'd probably have enough of those "by the end of the week" by now, considering how Rusty has been sprinkling those over the forums for two months at least.

  • Posted: 11/04/08 9:50 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • The devs think the players don't matter.

  • I've been reading the forums.

    Milestone 10 isn't exactly well received by the community.

    Sorry to say, but I think the end is in sight, especially if they continue in this direction.

    A few months left, I'd say.  They could make it to a year, but not much beyond that.

  • Posted: 11/04/08 3:22 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • I was on here when the game first went live but left shortly after

  • Are we at least agreed that as far as PotBS goes, avatar combat is the last thing that needed to be addressed in a game like this?

    Sure, it's bad, but that's like saying the lettering on a CD is bad: It is of no real importance and just offers a distraction from what really matters.  As I posted in the other thread, AvCom is arguably one of the weakest points of the game, but it's also one of the most inconsequential. 

    In other words, it doesn't break the game by itself.  It's just, if you'll excuse the film analogy, the mike popping up at the top of the screen in a very bad film.  You'd gladly overlook it if something else were worthwhile.

  • Posted: 11/01/08 12:32 PM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea