PotBS - Question.

[WayAbvPar]

I haven't been home since Monday morning, so I have been tough to find I should be on tonight though.

[LK]

I highly recommend that anyone is considering this game do fuck all but level up to 50 before engaging in anything else.  The other areas of the game feel extremely weak compared to what I imagine is a good PvP game at the higher level.  Plus, if you're not 50 and in a group, you're fodder anyway.

[Samwise]

I highly recommend that anyone is considering this game do fuck all but level up to 50 before engaging in anything else.

I was considering this game...   

[LK]

I'm having a real tough time with various aspects of the game.  A lot of stuff is pretty fucked up.  The only enjoyment I can foresee is group PvP.  The rest is grind, bad design, or a whole lot of time spent doing nothing (sailing).  NPCs only serve as a deterrent to slow you down if you aren't fighting them in Open Sea.  Swashbuckling is about as deep as a kiddy pool with NPCs, and you need to be 50 and with friends to compete in PvP.  Don't get me started on the overly complicated and fucked up economy.  I like how EVE boiled components for things down to various ores that was increasingly harder to get.  This is not true in this game.  It is a mess.

I'm sure others can contest but this is my perspective.

[WayAbvPar]

I think today's patch will be a watershed moment. If it fixes enough of the existing issues, the game will keep chugging along. If it doesn't, it is going to die a lonely, agonizing death.

[Slyfeind]

I really wanted to stick with this game, like, forevar. It just doesn't have enough over-arching content to keep me interested. Too much enjoyment relies on me sitting here in my computer chair, pretending I'm a sailor, instead of finding the fun in the game itself. The world is gorgeous, the stories are engrossing, and the RvR has a lot of great ideas to it. Fortunately the level grind is short enough that you can get to the end-game in a couple weeks of solid play. I just can't bear sailing into the wind for much longer. (Woooo metaphor.) Too much of the game feels like the devs went there from Matrix Online, after it left Seattle, and said "No really! These systems can work!" Either that, or trying to be different just to say it's different.

What would I like to see changed? Remove sailing into the wind; it's irritating half the time, and wouldn't be missed. Make combat More Like WoW, and get rid of the weird pseudo-MxO Interlocking thing. Let us jump and fall off things; the ports are small enough that the bugs would be easy to find. Simplify the auction system so the economy can be tweaked more easily. Not so much instancing; it's annoying to have to wait through a loading screen just to go from one room to another, in the same damn house.

I hope it stays afloat. I'd love to see how it's going six months from now.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I give up too. It's not just the deep dark abyss of badness that's hidden under a thin crust of promise, but that the devs are sweetly clueless. They're not malevolent troglodytes like some other MMOG-fuckups I could name, they really want the best, but they don't even seem to have read up on the MMOG basics. There was one forum thread where Isildur (or maybe it was Rusty, I forget) popped in and said, "Well, we maybe could adjust the rate of dB drops, but we can't fiddle with the rate of commodity production under any circumstances." I was honestly wondering if he thought that it was impossible to do that, or just had made a fixed decision that this was something they'd never tamper with. That's like a dev in a conventional Diku-design saying, "Well, I'm sorry if the Monk class is ridiculously overpowered: we don't tamper with class abilities that we set up at launch".

The game has a great sail combat engine. That's about where the unambiguously good stuff stops. The avatar customization is ok, even if avatar movement and combat are awful. The mission text is kind of fun to read, and there's a decent variety of variations on the basic mission objectives for the first 15-20 levels or so.

The economy is basically a huge mass of fakery, and most of the die-hard players are too dumb to understand how screwed-up it really is. FLS certainly doesn't seem to understand it. They think that if it *looks* like Port Royale in terms of the types of commodities and production chains, it'll be as complicated and interesting as Port Royale. Wrong-o.

The PvP model is messed up in a zillion ways.

I can stick with something that looks like it has promise. But I don't see this group of developers having the abilities or the resources to even recognize the right direction, let alone move towards it.

[Pennilenko]

But I don't see this group of developers having the abilities or the resources to even recognize the right direction, let alone move towards it.

But riding that wave while staying on the board is the fun part.