User Rating

7.71

Recent Headlines for Pirates of the Burning Sea

Off-Peak Port Battle Solutions

By Keith Cross on Aug 08, 2008

Flying Lab Software has posted a new dev journal explaining how they are planning on dealing with the problem of off peak port battles.

Let’s talk about the way that port battles are scheduled. The current system is that when a port reaches the required amount of unrest, the battle for control of that port is scheduled for 24 hours later. The intent of this system is that the battle takes place during the play hours of the people who force the port into contention. When it was designed, the idea was that ports would enter the contention phase ‘organically’, as a result of nearby PvP activity.

That isn’t, however, the way ports enter contention in the live game; they are intentionally forced by motivated attackers. This leads to the unfortunate side effect of allowing sufficiently motivated players to cause battles to be scheduled in off-peak hours, when few defenders will be able to respond to the threat. This is borderline griefing; it’s not really against the rules, but it’s certainly not a positive game experience for the targets.

Let’s clarify before we continue, though: there are two separate problems here, and we’re only going to try to address one of them. The first problem is, as I’ve described above, that attackers willing to stay up late can cause a port battle to happen during a server’s low-population time of day. The second problem is that our servers have an international player population, and what’s primetime for our North American players is the middle of the night for our European players. We’re not going to try to solve the latter problem, although we will attempt to alleviate it somewhat.