Pirates of the Burning Sea: Single captain looking for first mate to "bury treasure"

http://www.burningsea.com/page/home

This game went free to play last month. I picked it up last week after the DCUO beta ended, since that got me to make a station account. I had played the pirates beta a couple years ago and thought it was too grindy and unpolished.

Now, several closed and merged servers later, it's... only slightly better. I have not run out of easy quests to do, though it has trouble directing you to the appropriate town sometimes. Ship combat is still unique for an MMO, but it tends to make fights long and boring half the time. Swashbuckling hasn't changed much, it's still unoriginal but functional.

Free play restrictions are actually kind of harsh, but isn't going to hamper your ability to reach cap. It will stop you from having more than two ships at a time, which hampers your flexibility in port battles. You won't be able to participate in the larger aspects of the economy, as you're limited to two economy slots total. The good news is, you can pay for one month and cancel, which will give you everything for a month and let you keep everything afterwards except premium mission access (which isn't a problem).

So far, I've gotten a spanish navy officer to 23 with some poopsocking. It's been an adequite distraction, but I don't intend to keep playing it for long. I'm kind of curious if anyone else has given this a shot?

I'm not sure why people aren't flocking to this title, after your positive and affirming description of its current state.

Blizzard didn't make it.

I like Pirates of The Carribean Online better. (also Free to play)

I played that during beta, it was fairly 'meh' mixed with a bit of "oh cool I saw that guy in the movie". Have things improved much?

Also, anyone trying out ToonTown these days while we're on a Disney kick?

Now, I have to try it out again, if only because I fall under the "old farts who once gave us money" category.

I downloaded PotBS, transferred one of my characters from the defunct Rackham server, and started playing.

I must have lasted five minutes. Seems that the graphical requirements have been ramped up since I was playing, as I still have the same antique computer and don't recall having had to wait two minutes between zones for the game to load. When put in a situation where quick action is required, I'm expecting the game to become practically unplayable.

Still, I had the time to catch one of these little mistakes I just love pointing out. Nice flags, for a game set in 1720:

A new update was added the other day. The spanish capital looks nice now.

More importantly, they fucked over end-game rewards for free players. The rewards you get for your nation conquering the map have been reworked, so that free players get one "citation of conquest" when their nation wins and none when they lose. Premium members (former subscribers) get the normal amount of three on a win and one on a loss. Captains club members (paid subs) get 6 on a win and 2 on a loss. In addition, they raised the price of conquest rewards.

This was implemented without most people's knowledge.

I wonder what the hell they're thinking. They're not really embracing ftp players as a revenue source, but treating them more like they're on extended free trials.

What am I missing in that picture?

Apparrently the tiny flags in that screenshot were not used by France until 1790. Some people apparently get worked up over these things.

Now I see them. Should have said super tiny.

In continuing tradition of changing shit without telling anyone, all career respec items are no longer purchased with the in-game currency. They are now $10 each.

This is actually getting people angry. It was a very popular and often used item. The change wasn't in the patch notes (edit: meant to say testbed notes, live notes has them, obviously it was something they didn't want to mention until the last minute) and there's no damage control from any PR people so far.

This assumes that they have a PR department.

Out of curiosity, I went over to the PotBS forums, and I came across this:

Proof enough that the Roper culture is alive and well, even without Roper.

Didn't we decide as a community, long ago, that Ninjas>Pirates, and thus you're a girly-man cock gobbling communist if you play pirate games? I mean, am I going senile here or are you panty-waists just saying to hell with it and donning your virtual pantaloons, social zeitgeist be damned?

Look, only homos like pirates. I can't be more frank than that.

I played it for a bit a while back and while I loved the naval combat I was left kinda cold by the on land based portion. Grimmy , who was working for SOE at the time, told me thats because it was put in after the fact and it kinda showed.

Yeah, "avatar combat" was always something of a running gag among old-timers. They managed to revamp it completely, despite most people saying that it was so bad as to be irredeemable, to the complete indifference of players who were expecting something more meaningful, like port governance.

And yet more fun from the PotBS factory:

Staffer attempts to drum up support for PotBS in an online poll; players deliberately vote against it, in favour of a game they never heard of.

Or, the romantic way of putting it:

One last recent piece of good news: on friday night, the antigua server suffered some zone crashing problems happening in port battles. They didn't have a fix ready, so they manually adjusted all port battles to occur after the weekend. Basically meant an ocean full of pvp zones and nothing to do about it.

Looking back over PotBS I still wonder (from time to time) if it isn't partly an experiment to see what players like / will tolerate / will pay for?

PotBS is a heavily instanced 'Graphical lobby game' IMHO. In many ways very similar to the idea of "The Agency" - and I can't help wonder if S.O.E.'s observations of the 'success' (??) of PotBS might have influenced their decision to axe that game?

Couple of interesting updates on this title -

Firstly - it seems that some disgruntled players have started a "revolution" on the FLS boards
http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=84801

A lot of the issue appears to be complaints about bad moderation on the FLS boards.
Anyway - it would seem that the players have managed to achieve something of a 'win'

"We've also come to the conclusion that the automated PMs aren't particularly useful in their current state so I just disabled them." - Rhaegar FLS Staff http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1148404&postcount=110

An interesting side note to this however is that around the time all this was going on there appears to have been increased moderation with regard to FLS on MMORPG.com.
Nothing definite - but it does seem that from time to time MMORPG.com does tend to shut down any discussion that questions or criticizes certain developers.
FLS has definitely pulled strings at MMORPG.com before.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/312369/Revolution.html

And interestingly the same moderator who locked the thread above also posted in this thread
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/312714/Pirates-of-the-Burning-Sea-A-Peek-at-v25.html

The story by an MMORPG.com Staffer (SBFord) reads:
New laws have forced SOE to charge taxes on certain transactions, depending on where you live (particularly if you live in WA or TX). So they need the zip code of your billing address to be associated with your payment source. You may have already noticed changes in other SOE games or when interacting with your Station Account on the web.

The changes to the purchase process were somewhat extensive on the back end and took up a lot of DevCo’s time this milestone. We also had to make some slight UI changes to display tax information.
- SBFord~MMORPG.com

So... what is the article about?
Well... apparently not taxes...
"Please don't hijack the thread with tax talk. Stay on topic. ..." - Amana~MMORPG.com

???

My questions are;
What NEW tax?
Why haven't we heard about this from Blizzard or Turbine - or a raft of others?

Some posters suggested that it was a Sales Tax that has been in place for some time?
Well, if that is the case, FLS & SOE have been getting it wrong for some time?

Just when I stop paying attention to a game, something has to erupt.

I went through the "Revolution!" thread on MMORPG.com, and two things attracted my attention. The first was this excerpt from a POTBS forum post subsequently deleted:

What kind of people have invaded that game since it went F2P, I do not know. But apparently the bane of the early months -- ganking -- is back in full force. Incurable design, probably. But now it moved into harassment; I wish I knew more about this.

Then there is this:

So, if I get this straight: FLS accidentally released notes, which a random poster reprinted on MMORPG.com. Then FLS went to MMORPG.com and, like the good ol' boys that they are, MMORPG.com not only acquiesced to the request, but also divulged the poster's IP, who was finally banned.

What. The. Hell.

You know what is the only case where such convoluted logic applies, but never without a shitstorm of controversy? The Official Secrets Act. You don't know what is an official secret (because it's secret!) until you spread it; then it's your fault, even if it was officially released by mistake. But Wikileaks makes it impossible to put even that genie back in the bottle nowadays.

What is more worrying is MMORPG.com's compliance with this request. Pulling down the notes, okay, if they want it; but giving out the poster's IP address? Smacks of invasion of privacy. I never really trusted that site, and that's all the evidence I need. Trolls are tolerated, provided they're on the good side of things, and moderators are really looking for reasons to lock down everything.

Not some random poster GB / DJXeon - FLS's biggest promoter. I won't call him a Fanboi because he is / was a realist and could see the bad with the good. But he really worked hard promoting this game - which is why he reposted the stuff in the first place - he thought he was helping them by promoting the game!

They {MMORPG.com} did something similar to me {don't think they gave away my IP...but who knows?} also to FLS.
And again, FLS got the wrong end of the stick in that case too.

Yes, I know GB/DJXeon/Nelson. He's a fan of the age of sail, and I wasn't surprised to find out he was a Game Assistant in Uncharted Waters Online until he resigned maybe a fortnight ago (though he played Dutch, which really surprised me). Reality got the better of him there too.

But yes, the game's problems in many cases appear to be due to 'design issues' (in game) and community issues (out of game).

Fanboi Flaming (with mod support) was always an issue there - they even tried this tactic on MMORPG.com.

How not to manage a game community.

By looking at what GB/Nelson is doing with Uncharted Waters Online these days, I'm very tempted to appoint him "honourary fanboi". He always seems to operate on a level of self-delusion that prevents him from confronting the sad reality that game designers/publishers don't give a damn what he thinks and wants, even if he instinctively knows it.

You know, I still feel nostalgic for POTBS, from time to time. It was killed by server merges smashing together different cultures and power blocs, but before that happened, by god we Pirates had a good run. We actually almost managed the impossible, and were on track to winning the world game, before the server was shut down and merged. (At least, I believe they shut it down just before we were due to win,I may be misremembering) Despite the fact that Pirates lost their points when the towns they sacked reverted back to the ownership of their original nations, we were so damned good and so persistent that we kept taking those ports, kept winning those naval battles. I was Edward Greymane, and I was there when we broke the English line, sailing straight through the fire of their bigger, deadlier ships in order to separate and encircle them with our smaller, more mobile wolfpacks, bringing them down with weight of fire on all sides, or closing to join in hand to hand combat on the bridges of their ships, stealing their mighty vessels out from under them. It was damned thrilling, figuring out a way to break their line of battle and defeat the best naval tactics of the century.

It was a short lived thing - our command culture and tightly knit groups didn't survive the transfer to Blackbeard - but it will always remain one of my favorite gaming experiences.

Are you talking about the first round of mergers, sometime in April 2008? You transferred to Blackbeard, which doesn't exist anymore, so I suspect this must be.

I was on Blackbeard and transferred to Rackham because the entire French nation did so, as it was tired of being a pushover. Big deal. The British steamroller did exactly the same the next day. (Yes, FLS decided it was a good idea to let people from surviving servers transfer to elsewhere as well.) Rackham had a completely different culture, more aggressive, more trash-talking, and I despised it; I left when Age of Conan came out, but I had mostly stopped playing even before my subscription expired. I came back later, but didn't stick around. I posted something at the time about it.

I am indeed talking about our first round of mergers. Hell, we've probably exchanged broadsides at some point - your name sounds familiar. And, yeah - I left for Age of Conan as well.

Flying Lab Software is leaving SOE.

http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=271324

The game will be no longer available through SOE on January 31st.

The plan so far is, you will need to aquire a migration code and link it to a Portalus Games account to preserve your game account (note: you can't make a portalus account yet, just sign up for email). Otherwise, it's getting wiped.

Despite being 11 days into January, migration codes are still not available.

I'm fully expecting a crash and burn.

I loved PotBS, but it was the game that made me decide that MMOs were not for me. When I was waking up at 5AM to participate in a port battle, I realized that my actual life was much more important that skyping with a bunch of trash-talking dudes. I love games, I don't love games that let other people decide when I have to play them. Yeah I could skip all of that, but the raids on the newb towns and port battles were what the game was all about. The PvE was fun, but grindy and ultimately easy. The PvP was fun, but required way too much commitment to make it fun for me. I logged on one day, spent several hours trying to get a PvP group going, tried PvP soloing for a bit, and then quit the game for good.

You can aquire your migration code by logging in through here.

You can't do anything with it yet. It's for those who need a code now, but won't be able to apply it until after the 31st.

Forgot to make the all important post that migrations are available, and also today is the last day to get a code.

I miss having enough time for PotBS. Ship combat is probably my favorite MMO combat system.

I actually really liked this game. Just felt it got too grindy. It would probably be in my top 5 MMOs of all time.

Yeah, I was looking through some port battle reports I wrote and a few posts in the Good Fights thread on Antigua. Nostalgia.

I have one of the Age of Sail games, too, which also scratches a sort of naval combat itch, but someone needs to update it and make it easier to control. Then I'd be happy.

This was a great game when it worked, but tedious as hell most of the time. Naval battles against other players were hard to come by, difficult to find anything close outside of Port Battles, and Port Battles would often be at crazy hours implicitly asking one to forego other obligations. Blowing up AI ships was fun to an extent, but became repetitive.

I always wanted to like it, but everytime I went back was disappointed. A simple mechanism to arrange 6 vs. 6 ship battles or something would have been great.

There was that the last time I was back—a skirmish lobby you could pop into.

Oh hey! A bunch of questions:
- Did people use it enough you could readily find matches?
- How did they balance it?
- If you lost your ship was the effect permanent, same as when you're normally playing?
- Did it have any effect on the leadup to port battles?

1. Not really, but some gabble in nation chat was usually sufficient to get one together. It used to be only 6v6, I thought, but apparently it's now up to 24v24 (good luck finding 47 other people willing to have a go, though).
2. They didn't, really. One level 50 player and ship was the same as any other, and that's still how it is (I think). Lower-level players counted for less points.
3. No. Not even consumables or ammunition are permanently used in skirmishes.
4. Not the slightest.