How did EVE avoid Shadowbane's and POTBS' problems?

[Slayerik]

IMO, Darniaq is talking about the Economist CCP hired for EvE.

And seriously, I'm not even a crafting or PVE or 'any of that shit' kinda guy and there is something about having such an in-depth market that keeps me intrigued. Over the yarrs I have learned the value of items, what they do, the quickest way to offload them, safest way to transport them...all from being on the nefarious side of things.

There is so much I still don't understand about the research, invention, manufacturing, exploration, production, trading side of things...it is really what bring it in common with UO to me (though obviously UO was way simpler). The guys that did all the trading, GM crafting, resource gathering, etc were able to do so because of the PVP guys like me. It is the coexistance of both in a SOMETIMES hostile environment that seems to mesh it all. The other part is item loot...but if I start talking about that I'll be berated and called names so I will avoid it this time around.

[Drugstore Space Cowboy]

The other part is item loot...but if I start talking about that I'll be berated and called names so I will avoid it this time around.

No, please continue.

[Vetarnias]

To the OP: I finally found that discussion you were referring to on the Broken Toys blog.  I hope it's not too late to comment.

I think my post on that blog fully explained a few of the shortcomings of Pirates of the Burning Sea, but I realized afterwards that I had left other areas untouched (as I figured it was already longer than enough).

(First, a caveat: Though I have heard plenty about EvE and its major scandals, I have never played it, though the comments in this thread are very enlightening as to the origin of its appeal.  But I don't think I'll be subscribing to that game any time soon, if such things as scamming are seen as perfectly acceptable in it.  Besides, joining a five-year-old game is a bit futile if having a head start is all that matters.)

There is one thing about Pirates of the Burning Sea that I think summarizes it all: I remember reading a comment on another forum that said the game looked like it was released in 1999, which is quite accurate, but I prefer to say that it feels very much like a board game, with each faction starting out in roughly their corner of the map, with wild liberties taken as to historical/geographical accuracy to develop a certain approach to strategy.  As an example, Cayenne, which was and still is a French port in real life, was, in the game, eventually given to the British as a starting city during beta because it lies right next to British strongholds and reportedly always immediately fell to them.  In an even more ludicrous case, rivers were supposedly valuable resources (as they could increase production, though the increase was so insignificant as to be worthless, especially in a game where everyone is a crafter), so the developers decided that people would want to fight over them and restricted them to the Antilles, meaning that not a single continental city -- New Orleans among them -- had a river in the game.

On top of that, the goal of the game, just like an old game of Risk with an earlier cutoff, was for every faction trying to accumulate enough points to "win the map", after which everything returns to status quo ante bellum.  Those who play MMO's for the "persistent world" aspect are bound to be disappointed by such mechanics, really.  How much appeal is there in a RvR game where the map is reset every 6 weeks to 2 months on average, and all cities returned to their original owners, as soon as one faction reaches the maximum number of points?

I do recall that this idea of map resets was originally designed to avoid a scenario where one faction would take over a server early on and leave the political map lopsided beyond the possibility of correction, rendering the conquest game meaningless (as Wanderer noted, Shadowbane is a typical example).  But the corollary was by necessity that nothing obtained by said victory should confer too much of an advantage upon the victor for the next round, so the rewards (better outfittings, etc) were essentially meaningless by design, although even that turned out to be too much in the long term.

As my initial post on that other blog tried to explain, the developers were also facing a major problem with faction imbalance, with Britain and Pirates getting the bulk of players, and Spain and France being condemned to perennial loser status.  To be honest, I don't think they could have done much to correct it, as it was pretty much caused by real-life identification with Britain (for its linguistic affinities as well as its strong naval tradition) and Pirates (for all that romanticized aspect of the life).  Yet they did have some solutions in mind. For months before release, they were talking about underdog tools (more XP / loot / reduction of defensive unrest for the losers), to help the weaker/underpopulated nations get on their feet, but they only added them to the game a couple of months after it went live.  Then, unintended consequences being par for the course in this game, the underdog tools had the most pernicious effect, in a "Brewster's Millions" moment, of seeing factions which could not ever hope of winning the map aim instead for last place in order to get the most effective underdog tools for the next round.  Then the devs realized they had gone too far and slashed them, but it didn't change much to the game, as they were essentially meaningless at every stage of their existence.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the best source of revenue in the game was known as "mission farming".  Normally, missions were a one-time-only affair (with a few exceptions): You accepted the mission, you carried it out, and you came back for your reward.  But here, there was more money to be made by farming the ships in the mission over and over again than in coming back for your reward, so a few select missions (such as "Woes of Santo Domingo"; that it was widely known as "Woes" should give you an idea of how popular that method was) were accepted, deliberately failed (for example, by not protecting a designated NPC vessel) while sinking enemy ships, cancelled and accepted again.  This was PotBS's idea of grinding, frowned upon by developers, who would have had players grinding on the open sea instead of in missions, but everybody used it.  While the game seemed empty in most towns, the docks of Santo Domingo, a Spanish backwater of otherwise little importance, were swarming with players.

Which brings me to the question of the economy.  The amount of grinding in the game was phenomenal (I tired of it just after reaching level 45), but the economy was always moribund.  I left the game in June, but I probably stopped caring about the economy, which had been my main attraction, around the end of May, when the economic climate became one of both rampant inflation and depression.  I sold goods at outrageous prices, but at one point they just stopped selling, despite being the cheapest across the ocean and being heavily used in shipbuilding.  I remember reading a spot-on analysis of the economic perils of PotBS over at Terra Nova, which pretty much described what happened: Because the business model did not require players to actually craft items on their own time (they would just need to erect a structure, and then their "workers", a predetermined amount of labour, would do the rest), the most successful societies started producing all of what they needed internally, with no need at all for the market, because it was the cheapest and most reliable way of maintaining a shipbuilding operation.  This more or less doomed the economic players in the game -- that is to say, those who had not been driven away after a few months of being treated like second-class players because they had very little interest in PvP.

Another main problem with the economy was that it was entirely fueled by shipbuilding.  It was the only thing to which the economic model catered, and was completely dependent on ship loss to keep it going, never mind that it was completely unrealistic for the trading patterns of that time period (even with slavery wisely left out).  This had the unfortunate result of making the economy completely subordinate to PvP, and at one point the lead designer even admitted that: "The truth about the economy is that only a third of it is implemented. As originally designed, money entered from ship kills, and exited through three sinks. We only implemented one of those sinks: ship loss. The other two – port governance and social spaces – were postponed. They’re on the schedule, but won’t show up for quite a while. In the meantime, the economy is entirely balanced on one solitary leg, instead of the tripod it was supposed to have."  Not that it mattered much, because everybody was broke anyway unless they went grinding to replace lost ships, but it gives you an idea as to how finished the game was when they released.  (It took them five months to add insurance into the game!)  And as the next paragraph will make clear, the economy did not offer much justification to engage in the RvR struggle, since you really didn't lose much politically if a port flipped to the enemy, but you, the player, had to personally incur steep losses if you happened to be the loser, giving the result that, in the words of another player, it's "a PvP game where most people do everything they can to avoid PvP".

I don't know how it works out in EvE, but PotBS had major divisions between the economic and PvP players, although most PvP players also had some economic production going, out of necessity.  I cannot remember how many times I read that economic players would prefer having a port given over to a more powerful enemy than see it constantly put inside a PvP zone.  After all, with the proper reputation level (which all players of the Freetrader class started out with anyway), the only thing that would change with ownership would be the taxation rate, going from 5% to 40% -- and the latter number could be cut in half with the Tax Evasion skill. For most items, basically everything except the largest ships, the tax increase was so small as to be insignificant.  This just gives you an idea of the divided loyalties affecting the game.  By my reckoning, the economic players were among the first major group to leave the game -- they just weren't needed, not to mention that the old "Port Royale" game, with its automated supply and demand, had more depth.

I'm not going to delve into the subject of constant class tweaking, buff this, nerf that (and not just minor changes but complete overhauls), except to say that it really showed that the developers had been remiss in the quality assurance department.  They kept on adding ships into the game well past the point where everyone stopped caring because almost all ships, short of a few favourite choices (such as the inevitable lineships for port battles), had been discredited as viable PvP choices.  I talked about how lowbies were essentially useless in the game, and much of it had to do with the ships they could use.  The best choice of ship a level 20ish player could make, for example, would typically feature 8- to 10-pounders, while a level-50 with a ship of the line would have 20-pounders or more, not to mention better armour and several skills, making a fight between them completely lopsided.  In combat, lower-level players would be unable to do more than a slight dent into the level 50 hull, all the while being in the Level 50's range long before they could fire a shot. Port battles thus became the exclusive domain of the level 50's.

So many other things I could write about.  Just a few of them in passing:

--The map, which takes 45 minutes or so to cross from one end to another, which makes logistical planning completely superfluous. With a larger map, maybe long-distance traders would have had a purpose, but no, here I could produce goods and post them in Bartica in 25 minutes, perhaps less with favourable winds.  Even port battle invitations were valid wherever you were on the ocean.  You could be in Mexico and immediately be whisked to a port battle in Guyana the next.

--The silliness of red circles as the only PvP zones.  The entire map is theoretically non-PvP unless an unrest circle springs up around a town, which means that it's actually safer to sail far from land instead of hugging the coast; does that make sense to you? Furthermore, is it logical that one circle encompasses not only the town being targeted but also three other very peaceful towns on your side?  Limiting the PvP in an already tiny map just concentrated every act of PvP within a very restricted area easy to avoid, which most people did unless they actively wanted to PvP.

--The complete lack of interaction with the world (port governance has been promised, but has yet to be introduced).  Economic domination is impossible.  Societies have no political power whatsoever.  If you were to ask me why EvE players stayed away, regardless of their performance in PvP, I suspect this has much to do with it.

--The restrictions of PvP.  Running aground by mistake is impossible -- you just bounce off.  Entering a battle in which your own side is being attacked is impossible unless you are part of a pre-made group with the ship in battle, and within the first 30 seconds of the encounter.  I can understand that this was done to prevent ganking, which was prevalent enough, but if a four-frigate French squadron passes by a lonely sloop getting attacked by British privateers, couldn't they and wouldn't they generally come to the rescue? In this game, they just can't. Friendly fire is impossible, much less attacking your own side, so the general tactic for griefing a player on your own side is to join in a group with him, pin him down in battle, and let enemy captains fire at him.  This complete lack of methods for fighting your own side makes me think that "port governance", if they ever bring it in, will not amount to much, as it is (1) if that earlier quote is to be believed, a money pit in a game where everyone already grinds for revenue (Shadowbane at least gave you the satisfaction of running your town as you saw fit) and (2) a potential source of division among players on the same side.  I know that the French on Blackbeard were divided between those who wanted to attack the British and those who chose the easy path against the Spanish, and that the Rackham British reportedly had the "Eastern" and "Western" British (depending on where they had their shipbuilding operation) who did not care about one another.  Introducing port governance in a game where you can't fight your own side is just too unrealistic.

--Other restrictions, on the number of ships you could own (first four, then five), or the impossibility of "re-deeding" or transferring a ship to another player, probably out of a desire to stimulate economic activity.  So if your society collectively funded a 10-million-doubloon First Rate, and that the player sailing it decided to quit the game, it went out with him and was lost forever.  If you wanted to get a new ship with all your slots full, you had to trash one.

--Skills that resembled so many magic spells.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for "debuff" skills, whereby your opponent is made more incompetent, and stealth that made a ship completely invisible on the map.  Also of note: the highly realistic notion of stackable skills.

--Cookie-cutter missions, well-written but essentially following the same four or five patterns.

--And yes, the complete absence of a cohesive vision.  It attempted to please to PvE, PvP and economic players, and in the end satisfied neither category.  The PvE players felt bothered by PvP players, PvP players felt limited in what they could do (they would have had the entire map FFA PvP if it had been left to them, and had it been so it might have worked), and the economic players were very quickly made redundant (in some cases, they were actually asked to serve as wealthy victims in red circles).  You should take a look at the PotBS forums on occasion, and look up some of the more "hardcore" societies' position on the game.  Some of them actually take pride in driving "unworthy" players from the game, along with all the "carebears" who thought PvE was an appropriate gamestyle; in one post, a hardcore player just said he'd prefer to play with only 100 like-minded players.  I'm wondering what the developers think when they read that.  I hope they see, as I do, little wings being pinned to dollar bills.  Oh, and now, said hardcore societies are proudly announcing they're going to Warhammer and that PotBS is dying.  Well, it is dying, I have been saying so for a few months; but it is quite self-serving for them to make such an observation at this point, as the game started dying when "no crying in the red circle" was still the mantra of the day.

So, in a nutshell: Major faction imbalances that made the result of RvR a no-brainer; lack of impact of RvR upon the world, culminating in map resets; exploits, such as night-time port flips or economic unrest bombing that required no PvP, and unintended consequences of game mechanics; lack of interaction with the world; dead economy due to in-society production; compromises on the core nature of the game; lack of a collective risk regardless of outcome despite a huge individual risk for taking part.

I hope that clarified a few of my earlier points.  And sorry for the new wall of text.

[Fordel]

That dude's first post has more words in it, then like, all of my posts ever here.

[Ingmar]

That dude's first post has more words in it, then like, all of my posts ever here.

And more interesting content too!

Seriously, it is worth reading if you want to know the issues POTBS has, I saw most of the same ones although I didn't stick with it nearly as long.

[schild]

Too Long, Did not Read. Original topic question was flawed to begin with.

[Soln]

awesome essay

[Reg]

Too Long, Did not Read. Original topic question was flawed to begin with.

Don't worry. Nobody expects a 77 year old New York Jew who doesn't know how to use a computer to have an attention span long enough to read an essay like that. The constant ups and downs to urinate would make that almost impossible.

[Endie]

That might have been good.  I dunno.  I'll never find out. vOv

[Comstar]

A very thoughtful summing up of PotBS. Thanks!

[UnSub]

Yes Vetarnias, a very interesting post.

[naum]

There is one thing about Pirates of the Burning Sea that I think summarizes it all: I remember reading a comment on another forum that said the game looked like it was released in 1999, which is quite accurate, but I prefer to say that it feels very much like a board game, with each faction starting out in roughly their corner of the map, with wild liberties taken as to historical/geographical accuracy to develop a certain approach to strategy.  As an example, Cayenne, which was and still is a French port in real life, was, in the game, eventually given to the British as a starting city during beta because it lies right next to British strongholds and reportedly always immediately fell to them.  In an even more ludicrous case, rivers were supposedly valuable resources (as they could increase production, though the increase was so insignificant as to be worthless, especially in a game where everyone is a crafter), so the developers decided that people would want to fight over them and restricted them to the Antilles, meaning that not a single continental city -- New Orleans among them -- had a river in the game.

…

Glad I took a pass on this game.

Sounds like a lot of unfulfilled promise, some great ideas, but a poorly thought-out game model (or execution of the implementation). And then having to jury rig the model to even more ludicrous extents because of the short-sighted (or incomplete implementation) gaffes…

[taolurker]

Veta's post was very comprehensive, but left out my two main complaints with Pirates, the total crap UI and the changes to the PvP system every 2 weeks. Much of the rest of what he posted bothered me, but honestly the grind present, the PvP exploits and changes, plus not fixing glaring problems (like the UI) were what really caused people to leave. The ship balance, economy, and graphics, along with parts of PotBS that didn't synch with history, were not reasons people stopped playing.

I talked about how lowbies were essentially useless in the game, and much of it had to do with the ships they could use.  The best choice of ship a level 20ish player could make, for example, would typically feature 8- to 10-pounders, while a level-50 with a ship of the line would have 20-pounders or more, not to mention better armour and several skills, making a fight between them completely lopsided.  In combat, lower-level players would be unable to do more than a slight dent into the level 50 hull, all the while being in the Level 50's range long before they could fire a shot. Port battles thus became the exclusive domain of the level 50's.

The lowbies were not completely useless, especially in making the PvP areas appear (contention points), but in PvP there was little that could be done when low levels faced off against a higher level (or multiple higher levels). There was a recent patch that made smaller ships harder to hit though, and this had made tiny ships too powerful, even against lineships. Some high level players I knew were taking out Mastercraft Cutters as a group, and were destroying level 50 lineships with ease. It wasn't hard to power level, if you sailed with a higher level in a lower level ship, but as you progress in levels the ships get progressively expensive and the gold grind is where most people burn out.

I never had any issues with the graphical look of the game, or with the actual combat mechanics, but the majority of broken things has made it a very hollow experience (even more so with the dwindling populations). I never wanted to get a 12 million doubloon ship anyway though. The main complaints from former members of my society who left was either: the grind, the PvP issues, or the lack of things like a workable UI, shared warehousing for guilds, and people!

Glad I took a pass on this game.

Sounds like a lot of unfulfilled promise, some great ideas, but a poorly thought-out game model (or execution of the implementation). And then having to jury rig the model to even more ludicrous extents because of the short-sighted (or incomplete implementation) gaffes…

It's definitely not the ship fighting MMO game that it set out to be, but I still enjoy the combat, an occasional PvP skirmish or duel (just added finally), and still log in every once in a while. The national PvP battles are getting more and more lopsided as the population dwindles though, and I can't say that it's easy to participate in defending your nation when there aren't enough people to attend port battles. The only nations that ever have higher than "light" populations, regardless of server, are the Pirates and England, so Spain and France are pretty screwed.

If you wanted a free trial Naum (or anyone else) I still have a couple of buddy keys available, to at least see all the shortcomings and mis-steps of what was a halfway decent Age of Sail combat simulator. PM me if interested.

[ffc]

*snip snip*

Why SB failed for me:
* Buggy as shit
* Stupid as shit pvp tactics worked too well.  - Stacking

Buggy in terms of stability, mechanics, and exploits.  Stacking was the cherry on top.

[MahrinSkel]

From a design POV, my takeaway from PotBS is that combat clouds still suck (many of the things being bitched about have been around since The Realm, didn't get any better with The Matrix, and this just confirms the pattern), pre-defined sides always degenerate into one winning side and depopulated punching bags (3 sides is the ideal number for putting that off as long as possible), and you can't have a capital-intensive PvP game without a lot of scale and a single world.  Explicitly separating trade, manufacture, and combat characters into classes doesn't seem to work too well, either.

--Dave

[UnSub]

Where EVE appears to have got it right and POTBS got it wrong is by pre-setting sides. In EVE, your corp is a side and you can switch (in theory), form alliances, etc. In POTBS, once you pick a side, that's it, you are locked in to the fortunes of that side forever. Sucks to be you if you choose the Spanish side.

And yes about combat clouds - for a long time I thought they were a good idea, but playing MxO destroyed my belief on that.

[Fordel]

I never played PoTBS, but from what I've read in this thread, it seems the issue is once again, scale. One side can actually 'win' in PoTBS. The economy is too narrow. The population on servers is so small the imbalances can be crippling. etc.


EVE doesn't solve these issues as much as it just powers straight through them with sheer size.

[Vetarnias]

Where EVE appears to have got it right and POTBS got it wrong is by pre-setting sides. In EVE, your corp is a side and you can switch (in theory), form alliances, etc. In POTBS, once you pick a side, that's it, you are locked in to the fortunes of that side forever. Sucks to be you if you choose the Spanish side.

Exactly.  If PotBS societies could get together and create some sort of foreign policy, it could work, but the game system makes such dealings impossible.  Let us assume that the British create a PvP zone around a French port, and that the most influential French societies have an alliance with the Spanish. All the Spanish can do to help is jump in the PvP zone and attack British players.  The Spanish cannot attack British NPC's to reduce unrest, as the French could, and regardless of which type of British ships the Spanish fight, NPC or player, it garners points for Spain, not France.  So the Spanish are condemned to fighting British players just to keep them busy while the French attack British NPC's.  France and Spain could not enter a battle together to fight the British (so forget Trafalgar), because all battles have to be one faction against another.

Becoming a turncoat was not an option, so the entire "Privateer" class was a misnomer (not that classes actually mattered; the first question asked about the "Freetrader" class was inevitably, "How good is it at PvP?", never mind economic advantages).  Many a privateer in real life would have no qualms about attacking their fellow nationals if a foreign crown offered a lucrative letter of marque, and in the absence of such documents would often turn pirate.  It further limited roleplay; if you wanted to play a Scotsman loyal to the exiled Stuarts who only lived to see the British Navy sunk until they were restored to the throne, you could not choose the British side then attack your own vessels while being handsomely paid by France. As you could only attack British vessels if you were a member of another faction, you had to roll on the French side while calling yourself Angus MacTavish.  Such refined treachery being impossible, the idea of false flags, which I would have loved to see in this game, was completely out of the picture.  No, instead every ship, its nationality and its owner were clearly identified just by clicking on them.  So you could not even attack a player without knowing whether he was a fearsome PvPer or just some stray merchant.  In a WWII context, that would be tantamount to giving the captain of a U-boat clear knowledge of what ship is a British destroyer, and which is a freighter camouflaged as such.

Pre-setting sides in this case was also a mistake, actually made worse because unlike EvE or other games, naming sides after real-life nations (with pirates thrown in out of necessity) just added an element of real-life identification, which the developers should have seen coming.  France is not only seen as a military loser, but as arrogant and having not much of a naval tradition.  Spain used to be a naval power, but the defeat of the Armada put an end to that, and Trafalgar proved it again.  That's the equivalent of creating one noticeably weaker class in PvP and then wondering why nobody picks it.  Roleplayers might, only to be constantly defeated in combat by people who don't care how many "n00b" and "lolz" they can drop in a conversation.  All factions, however, being equal in PotBS, you often saw some players who liked a challenge pick France or Spain knowing that they would be underpopulated.  In fact the Spanish on the Antigua server were famous for their ability in battle to such an extent that by the second map reset, they decided the game was becoming too easy and decided to take a break to let somebody else win. 

That worked for a time.  But with declining numbers, it had become impossible for smaller factions to even reach critical mass in port battles.  If you had 200 Spanish players to 1000 British players, it was still possible to hold your own in PvP if you knew what you were doing and find 24 players to fill port battles, but when you dropped to 50 Spanish to 250 British, with only 15 Spanish players capable of playing at the time of a port battle, you could do nothing to defend yourself.  Then the possibility of abuse became immense.  After the first round of server transfers, several North Americans joined the designated European server, Roberts (even though it's in Seattle like the rest of them).  Then they started timing their port flips so that port battles could take place in their prime time, which happens to be in the middle of the night in Europe.  It's one of the major scandals on the official forums these days, and despite having been privy to this complaint for months, the devs are still regarding it as something rather inconsequential.

But there were other tactics as well which didn't even go towards winning the map.  At one point, the French faction on one of the now-closed servers decided that getting enough points to win the map was so counterproductive that they just decided to take over all enemy deep water harbours (the only ports where lineships could be built) and sit on them, making no further effort whatsoever towards winning the map.  Crippling the opponents to force them to quit the game, instead of winning a pointless map, had become their priority. 

Another common tactic, in PvP, was for a player to take a speedboat (a lightweight and fragile but uncatchable model like a Hermes Sleek Packet-boat) and attack heavier enemy player ships like frigates.  The purpose was not to win the encounter, but to prevent the other player from exiting the instance.  As there was a two-minute timer during which a ship had to avoid damage before the player could exit the instance, the speedboat captain would constantly sail ahead of the slower vessel, turn to fire broadsides at the bow, turn and continue firing every once in a while, knowing full well that the frigate player could never catch him or get away from him if the speedboat captain knew anything about navigation.  The general idea being that while you kept that player busy, your side could go on grinding contention or gank the rest of his group.  Even in so-called ideal "gank groups", the general idea was to take five heavy ships and one speedboat tackler, whose job would be to prevent enemy ships from exiting the instance.

End result of several months of exploits and limited game mechanics: The players are now taking to the forums, asking for a second round of character transfers; and even though FLS is still going to maintain four servers at present, the players have taken it upon themselves to transfer to one or two servers.

But enough about PotBS.  I'm curious as to how EvE manages with its own factions and PvP. 

[Merusk]

But enough about PotBS.  I'm curious as to how EvE manages with its own factions and PvP. 

Factions are irrelevant in EvE PvP.  0.0 is unaffected by the Empire stuff, and you can have Amarr aligned with Minmatar, Gallente and Caldari within the same corp all flying each other's 'racial' ships.

The only 'factions' are whatever the players decide they are.  One day you're aligned with a corp in a common endavour, the next you may be shooting the snot out of them because that's the direction your corp directors decided to go.

[Mrbloodworth]

Speaking of privateers and factions. Pirates of the Caribbean Online just added them, to facilitate PvP.

[Venkman]

(3 sides is the ideal number for putting that off as long as possible)

Better to not force the faction split at all. For one, there'll always be players who ignorantly land on the perennially losing side. For another, forcing players to make the choice has generally coincided with preventing them from changing their side. That's really never fun, and only has worked when the actual amount of interaction between the arbitrary factions (whether two, three, four or more) is funneled into narrow engagement opportunities that specifically don't affect the faction at large.

Eve got it right by not overtly forcing NPC factions down peoples' throats (though I haven't kept up with the new Factions stuff). Players created their own sides and then took over their own space. Yes, there were periods when "one faction" could control a good chunk of the game. But this gets right back to the other requirement for a Eve-like game:

Uniserver. You need that size of a galaxy, that many people in the same one, and that much of a 24/7 game to allow for the ebb and flow of alliances and interests. When I played there were two multi-thousand-player alliances that dominated half or more of the galaxy. My Corp had some part of that and our Alliance had a bigger part. But I as the player and the few folks I traveled with weren't affect by it if we chose not to be. Because there were so many people. Because there was so much space.

Arbitrary factions, small server populations and the inevitably small percentage of people that want to engage in truly immersive land-owning PvP all create contradictions in a game trying to appeal to more than the SB crowd. That is my impression of where PotBS went wrong. They did the wrong things to try and make it have more appeal than the original design ever would have had, but in the process lost the core that would have sustained them if the development resources were scaled to match them.

[Hellinar]

They did the wrong things to try and make it have more appeal than the original design ever would have had, but in the process lost the core that would have sustained them if the development resources were scaled to match them.

One thing EVE did right was to choose a world that is inherently easier to create than the standard MMOG. EVE instances (star systems) are pretty simple graphically. Slap up a skybox and few round planets and you are done. Just add ship models.

NPC (ship) movement in EVE is Newtonian mechanics, which computers do really, really well. Compare that to moving a Mob over rough terrain with a bunch of collidable objects in the way. Computers do that really badly.

If PotBS had stuck with “EVE at sea”, they would have had these advantages too. They even got the players to build their ship models for free. Having a ship as an avatar loses something in immersion, but it is easy for a computer to make it move realistically. A much better resource match for an indie game than the land world they tacked on. 

[eldaec]

Better to not force the faction split at all

Forcing the split means you always know who the enemy is.

And it means there is always a number of ubers on 'your' side.

This is a big part of what makes the RvR concept work for people who are not confident in a full on eve/sb environment. So much so that EVE recently introduced a lowbie RvR mechanic for lowsec.

But for end games intentionally aimed at the hard core like eve and sb, I completely agree with you.

NPC (ship) movement in EVE is Newtonian mechanics

No it isn't.

[Drugstore Space Cowboy]

Better to not force the faction split at all

Forcing the split means you always know who the enemy is.

And it means there is always a number of ubers on 'your' side.

This is a big part of what makes the RvR concept work for people who are not confident in a full on eve/sb environment. So much so that EVE recently introduced a lowbie RvR mechanic for lowsec.

No, there are plenty of enemies on your side, in the form of griefers, market competition, and assholes in general. You just can't attack them.

NPC (ship) movement in EVE is Newtonian mechanics

No it isn't.

Yeah, ship mechanics are pretty non-Newtonian, otherwise you could accelerate to infinite speed in a vacuum rather than having a cap.

[slog]

so LOL I cancelled my WoW sub this week and I"m not in the WAR beta yet so I figured I'd login to SB.

All my old toons were gone.  I was faced with a character creation screen where I needed to select traits, stats, class, runes blah blah. A million ways to perma screw up your character as a newbie.  I can't believe I ever dealt with all this template crap before.

I LOL'd (IRL), turned it off, and fired up TF2. 

[Vetarnias]

so LOL I cancelled my WoW sub this week and I"m not in the WAR beta yet so I figured I'd login to SB.

All my old toons were gone.  I was faced with a character creation screen where I needed to select traits, stats, class, runes blah blah. A million ways to perma screw up your character as a newbie.  I can't believe I ever dealt with all this template crap before.

I LOL'd (IRL), turned it off, and fired up TF2. 

Yep, Shadowbane had server wipes a few months ago.  I wonder if it solved anything, or if the game is still a lopsided exercise in futility.