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• • What did PotBS do wrong?

  • An update: Today's interesting debate on the PotBS official forums concerns the situation of the Australian server, Invincible.

    One poster playing on Invincible made this comment:

    "Hmm, I don't know whether I should come in with the "I told you so" rhetoric or not....

    We told you not to go with Telstra/Bipond...but you ignored it..."

    To which Rusty replied:

    "People come in with that whole "I told you so" thing in all sorts of inappropriate moments. This is an appropriate moment, though I wish it weren't."

    The most forthright admission in a few months by a member of the FLS team.

    Link: http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39307 .  The relevant comments can be found on page 5.

    Still, Rusty's position merely shifts the blame on Telstra/Bigpond for not pulling their weight in this matter.  I wish an Australian player (Gyrus?) could give us more details of how much visibility the game had in Australia.  Nonetheless, Rusty's comment is refreshing in that it directly admits that the Australian server is not doing well at all (though there have been oblique remarks to this effect for a few months).

    Furthermore, it begs the question.  If the Australian server is faring badly with all factions at "Light", what does that mean for the four other servers, since they are all at "Light" even in prime time?  (This is according to ArmEagle's site, which updates activity levels every 10 minutes.)

    Even the Antigua-Our-Last-Hope of recent months has activity levels impossible to distinguish from the others.

    Will Sony be blamed then?  Or will FLS consider that the game's own flaws might be responsible?

  • Posted: 10/11/08 5:05 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • Why not just copy EVE?

  • Originally posted by iceman00
    

    How about because Eve can get INSANELY boring?  let me travel around hours to get to where I need to be, sometimes even longer than that.  Lets play a game where a dev is in the pocketbook of players!  Sign me up!  There's also the fact that, deserved or not, EvE players are known as the snobs of the MMO world.  Some of that is deserving, some isn't.

    The same with the "wait for skills" concept.  In theory, its nice.  It doesn't reward power-grinding and you can't really "powerlevel."  Yet at the same time there isn't a terrible amount of effort put in to advancing your guy.  Just click a skill, wait a few days.  Sometimes you might want something a little sooner, but really don't have an option for that.

    I played EvE for two months and got bored out of my mind.  Now EvE does things that work, no doubt about that.  They are also a lot more polished than a game like POTBS.  What I attribute that to is the guts of CCP to stick to their vision despite the constant whining and complaining of some players.  You knew where EvE was going, you knew it was "hardcore", etc.  Eventually that built a very loyal customer base.  It ain't a game for carebears.  Now when people play that game, they know what they are getting into.  FLS wasn't sure what they wanted to do with POTBS.  They are trying to make changes midway through the game that are fundamentally related to what their vision (if they even have one!) is.

     

    Yes, I too heard about EvE players being the snobs of the MMO world.  I also heard it was completely useless to play the game on a single account. 

    What surprises me with EvE is the long-term success of the game.  I would have thought that after the initial carving of the political map, every loser would have headed out the door in search of something else to play where they would stand a chance.

    If you're trying to convince me to start playing a game five years after launch, you'll have to work overtime to convince me that I can achieve anything in it without running into the usual suspects who have had a few years' head start.  But EvE is a classic example of a game which doesn't even bother to try to convince me -- and I'm just supposed to start playing only to get a kick  in the teeth on a regular basis?

    Shadowbane was like that.  Look how it did.  Darkfall is headed in the same direction -- just reading their forums is enough to discourage you about the game.  These are games which offer everything to large guilds, and nothing to casual or unaffiliated players like myself.  No wonder I'm tempted to pass.

  • Posted: 10/03/08 9:45 PM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • What did PotBS do wrong?

  • Originally posted by Gyrus
    

    Originally posted by Gyrus
    

    Interestingly, I had a little look at Warhammer lately...

    They also don't seem to have implemented any sort of population balance (Remember this is also an RvR game?)

    I could be wrong about that - because I didn't get much of a look - but if they don't have any balancers we will be able to move much of this thread there in about 6 months.

     

     

    I'm quoting myself here because I was wrong... I said six months.

    In fact: TWO WEEKS.

    Look here
    http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=124161

    Oh and look at who showed up there too?  Kazamx (post # 129)
    The reply to Kazamx's post (post 130 from Holo) should make you all laugh.
    "well lets hope people realise that there is no fun in ninja'ing everything at 5am and get bored pretty quick."

     

     

     

    So, if any Developer ever reads this I just wanna say:

    When designing a RvR / PvP game design some kind of Pop balance in FIRST - not as an afterthought.
    If you can't think of a way to introduce some kind of balance then forget RvR and PvP and design a PvE game instead.

     

    About Warhammer: I saw that coming, even though I wasn't affected myself when I played there.  My cancelling the game and uninstalling it mostly had to do with Warhammer being even less stable on my computer than Age of Conan was.  There was no community to speak of in the game, and the community outside of it was all about cheerleading and dismissing any complaint, such as that Warhammer Alliance website.

    Looks like the varnish is wearing off already, though.  I was pretty sure that faction imbalance would catch up with it if left unchecked, as well as its lack of depth.  It's a very superficial game once you get to know it.  What I don't understand is why the WAR cheerleaders on the PotBS forums (remember them?), many of whom had made it into the WAR beta, couldn't see this or chose to disregard it.  Now I'm expecting them to get whiny any moment now.

    But Mythic must be blamed for not predicting it.  My attention, for instance, was directed to this Road to War promotional game by Mythic, which ran from early August to early September.  There were probably multiple entries on both sides to get an edge, but the final numbers tell you all you need to know:

    Total Order players: 41,423.

    Total Destruction players: 57,708.

    Still, you're going to get plenty of comments like those in that Warhammer Alliance thread: "So you think Order loses Altdorf because of career imbalance?! You know, the easiest thing to do when losing, is to blame the game and the developers. I pity you."  I remember another comment saying that if Order was overwhelmed by enemy numbers, it just needed to "play smarter" -- as though Destruction couldn't do anything similar.  Try as it may, Luxembourg is never going to be a superpower, and it has nothing to do with lack of ability. 

    It's true, however, that there is place for improvement in the quality of the PvP.  For the record, I have never been a fan of solo PvP, which in this game is exceedingly simplistic.  Yet I've seen many PvPers having no grasp of group PvP (see the threads on being surprised that "kiting doesn't work", "running in circles is useless", etc) just rushing into battle as they have been used to doing.  I usually play tanks, but this time I decided on a ranged character (engineer), and I couldn't count the number of times I ended up fighting in a melee one-on-one against a superior foe, while another player just next to me ignored the monster I was fighting (and losing against) in melee and just rushed well ahead to kill another, never mind that I have often assisted other melee fighters in their own fights.  In one ideal setup, we had one engineer (me), a priest, and a melee fighter, and we completed a public quest just between the three of us.  But under normal circumstances, never underestimate the selfishness of the PvP player who wants to pad up his tome of knowledge.

    The question, however, is how you're going to make sure faction imbalance doesn't happen.  First you have complete might-is-right laissez-faire in the manner of Shadowbane, which failed.  Then you have the map resets and underdog tools of PotBS, which failed.  Then you have the Warhammer approach of rigid factions and no depth whatsoever.  I think the game will be a failure, but it will remain to be seen how much could be blamed on faction imbalance.

  • Posted: 10/03/08 7:52 PM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • Honey, I murdered the economy!

  • Originally posted by Rommie10-284
    

    I think, from this game and WAR, that companies will/should start looking at betas in a different light.  The conventional wisdom has been that Beta players are not a representative sample of the playerbase, so you have to take their "wisdom" with a grain of salt.

    But for the past two major game releases, this one and WAR's, the concerns given by the beta players have been spot-on for release.  Both games ignored/dismissed those concerns and are now paying for it - Pirates big-time and WAR on the way (a 2-sided PvP game where the numbers aren't close to equal) if they don't act.

    I think these games have enough history behind them that the people who beta have spread out among the general population, and they *are* representative samples now.  If they tell you that X isn't going to go well at release, it's time to listen, not ignore them because things "will go differently with more players"

    This is a very good point, but in the case of PotBS the mistake the developers did in beta (I wasn't in it, so I'm forced to rely on second-hand evidence) was not that they didn't listen to their beta players, but that they listened to the wrong group, which ended up advocating "no crying in the red circle".  But that's old history now.

    I tend to think, however, that beta players are not your average player.  When I saw Warhammer Online go into "guild beta" I knew exactly which type of player they wanted to have -- those "elite gamers" who belonged to near-professional guilds playing almost every new release.  Darkfall, if it releases this year as promised, was, if I recall correctly, looking for the exact same people for its own beta.  If you're a casual player, you're not expected to fit into the game (which doesn't bode well for Darkfall); Warhammer, for all its faults, didn't have that problem, considering that guilds are essentially powerless (as in PotBS).  But by putting the emphasis on PvP-heavy guilds, they have perhaps led to putting PvE and the economy (which is just completely absent) on the backseat.

    I understand that those non-disclosure agreements are meant to be taken seriously, but those beta application forms ask more information of you than if you were trying to apply to the secret service, including your entire gaming history aside from real essentials like a copy of your dxdiag.  If your entire MMO experience has been World of Warcraft, what are the chances of you making it in?  They probably hate you before they've even known you.

    To go back to your discussion, however, concerns of beta players should be paid attention to, especially those who are critical of the game.  The fact that they don't like certain elements of your game does not mean that they want to drag it into a different direction than what you wanted to do.  Sure there are players who won't be satisfied until you make the game a carbon copy of UO/WoW/EVE, whatever.  But there are many who just want your game to succeed as you have intended it to be but they can't feel they can't rubberstamp everything you do.  They probably are the most helpful beta testers around.

  • Posted: 9/26/08 10:06 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea
• • A shame, really ...

  • Oh, and on another note, here is today's (well, last week's, actually, but I only discovered it today) example of fluffy gaming journalism:

    An interview with Kevin "Isildur" Maginn over at Allakhazam:

    http://www.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=15069

    I understand that it's pretty much necessary to deliver something to publish and that if you start prodding around and coming up with uncomfortable stuff the doors then close on you, but still, wouldn't it be nice if for once an interviewer didn't pull his punches?

  • Posted: 9/26/08 8:01 AM
    Pirates of the Burning Sea