Profile: Vetarnias
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• • 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
• • Knowing your target market: Potbs is an economic game

  • The devlog entry you link to is one of the PotBS "classic moments", but the Massively article that followed it completely escaped me until now.

    I think that Isildur's mistake is the assumption that the money hoarded by trader types is completely removed from the economy. Some trader types contribute their earnings to the war effort -- unrest bundles, shipbuilding, etc.  As for others who don't spend it and are just content to hoard it (though I can't see what is fun in that), how could it be anything other than a sink, as though you were buying your goods from an NPC character?

    Because frankly, your options once you have money are:

    1) Spend it on military contribution.

    2) Do nothing with it.

    Might as well consider idle money as having been taken out of the economy; what might be dangerous is what would happen if non-military expenditures suddenly became possible (i.e. housing, etc.).  Inflation in such a context as Isildur mentions might be very possible if the same resources, in limited numbers, could be used for military purposes or civilian 'luxury' needs.  Then we could be talking about inflation, or rationing, this sort of thing.  But as there is no competition between 'essential' and 'luxury' at this stage, it's a rather moot point.  If suddenly every rich player could start spending money on oak paneling for the mansion, and that you needed common goods also used in shipbuilding to make it, such as nails and oak planks, then it would have an impact.

    What Isildur is basically saying, in a way, is that traders should be risking their ships to make the PotBS economic scheme workable, so as to contribute back some of the money into the economy -- but who would they buy their ship from, pray tell, if not themselves anyway?

    The non-economic player is penalized either way, because if the economic player loses a ship and has to buy a new one, true, he will be reinvesting some of his money into the economy.  But who will the money go to?  Not the PvP player who doesn't bother with the economy. It will go, again, to the economic players.

    The real problem is that the interdependence between the economic and the military isn't stressed enough.  Military players, failing the presence of a government to fund them as in real life, ought to depend on economic players for funding; and economic players ought to depend on military players for protection.  In PotBS, however, the two are distrustful of one another, and have completely different aims.  Economic players hate risk; military players, instead of trying to minimize this risk (as they would in real life, duty notwithstanding), actually want more -- well, when it's in their favour, needless to say -- because that's how they enjoy the game.  Economic players, if they bide their time, are in other words never dependent upon military players for protection, which in turn makes military players uninterested in the plight of traders, since they know the traders can just wait anyway.

    What would have been nice (if we disregard faction imbalance, which throws a steel bar into my nice little system as it does into everything else around the game), would have been a full PvP map -- which FLS never really considered anyway despite the pleas of players -- in which every item sold on the marketplace of a given country is taxed according to a certain percentage, withdrawn from the selling price posted by the trader, with the money given over at regular intervals to only one class -- the Naval Officer, who in turn must perform a certain amount of duties to collect his pay.  That's how it would work in real life: Government taxes business, and funds the fleet with the revenues. FTers would make their money from trade, and privateers in a similar fashion to pirates, with a bonus to cargo loot, something like that.

    The other advantage of a tax on sellers would now be that there would be a major disadvantage to selling your wares in a foreign port: Not only would you be taxed, perhaps even at a higher rate, but the money would directly go towards funding the other nation's Naval Officers....  In such a situation, traders would face a dilemma of which they prefer: personal enrichment, or avoiding funding the enemy.

    But the flaw of such a system is obvious when coupled with faction imbalance: Frenchmen selling in Bartica because that's where most of the demand is would find themselves funding the British war effort in doing so, regardless of how much money they themselves would make out of it -- while they would starve if they only sold in French ports.

  • Posted: 10/31/08 5:08 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea