We’re preparing to change the business model of Pirates of the Burning Sea from subscription to free-to-play (hence forth to be known as F2P). This is the culmination of a decision that was made back at the end of last year, and I’m thrilled to finally be able to announce it. It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and we’ve put in a lot of planning and work to make this a seamless transition. We’re very excited about this direction for a number of reasons.

First, it reduces the barrier of entry for new players to come in and try the game. Experience has shown us that players who try the game tend to stick with the game, so we want to remove any impediment for a player to try the game. Free trials are great, but the knowledge that there’s a required subscription makes potential players think in terms of commitment—”do I want to be paying every month for the long term” rather than “will I have fun with it tonight?” The first question is hard for any product, but we feel really good about the answer to the second.

- Ethic

Pirates of the Burning Sea Goes Free to Play is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

If you are going to take something, Massively, at least give the originator some credit. Asking for permission first is also a nice idea.

- Ethic

Credit Where Credit Is Due is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

FLS has been the single best development team to test for, in all the years that I have been playing and testing online games. They bleed for their game, and approach their work as a parent would a child, rather than as an objective employee on a project that generates a paycheck but no personal pride. They respond quickly to their testers, share insight, problems, and generally appreciated the work we were doing, and *gasp* played the game along side us.

Because of that genuine love for their player-base and their game, I am confident that FLS will eventually fix the issues that I have with Pirates, but I question whether they can do it before the initial media bump and trial periods will turn off a number of potential subscribers…

When I first read about Pirates of the Burning Sea, a number of years ago I was inspired that a company was going to delve into uncharted waters, and give us something new. To me, that was the biggest draw to their title, and what kept me coming back for more information. Ship combat, player economy, RvR… they knew what they wanted to be, and they accomplished their vision and then some. However, someone along the way looked into the MMO space, saw the numbers that the traditional quest based, avatar hack and slash games were putting up, and decided they had to have that to be competitive… If you’ve read the post NDA reviews this week, you know how that turned out. Instead of FLS being evaluated on how well they designed ‘their style’ of game, they opened the floodgates of comparisons to games such as Warcraft, EverQuest II and LotRO, because they chose to emulate the avatar quest model. FLS created a great game in ‘their style’ but a terrible game in the Warcraft style. In an attempt to broaden their appeal, they delayed their release for years and served only to add mediocrity to their overall design.

A famous developer quote during beta was “We know Avatar Combat sucks in this build. We are in the process of squeezing the suck out of it.” While humorous, at the stage of beta we were in, build 25 or 26 I think, having a major game-play element of your overall design suck, is a harbinger of big problems. FLS should have read the writing on the wall, and either extended development further, or scrapped the feature all together. To go into a Stress Test phase with those types of problems is marketing suicide.

Another issue that jumped out at me right away, and never was addressed was the state of the User Interface. When FLS entered development, this type of UI might have been acceptable in some circles, but by the time they entered later test phases, Warcraft had long since made a UI of that nature simply unacceptable for a major game design. We constantly complained about this and received feedback along the lines of ‘we know, but its hard coded and very difficult to address.’ Blizzard approached their UI from an Open Source type perspective. They created a very basic design, but left the door open for others to finish their design for them. Why this was not implimented in recent titles like LotRO and Pirates is just a tragic mystery to me. Pirates should never have gone gold with the UI in the state it was.

A prime example of just how terrible the UI is, is their /who functionality. When you type /who, every single person in your nation is scrolled down through your chat box. When nations had 20-50 people online, this was tedious and annoying, but sort of manageable. After Stress Test II, I /who’d and there were so many names, that the chat box wouldn’t allow me to scroll back past the K’s. Umm.. WTF?

Guild tools are terrible. You can’t tell what class or level that your guild mates are. There is no advanced functionality for guild management. These are basic, minimum spec type items that every single MMO user expects from their game. When they are missing or FUBAR like the /who function, you have major, major problems.

Before I was allowed into the Beta, I was amazed that FLS was advertising ‘over 1000 quests at launch.’ I was impressed that they had been so ambitious and actually pulled it off, because that many quests is time consuming and eats up a lot of development man-hours… in theory. What FLS did was use a content generator, make a small number of quests (maybe 25-50ish?) and Copy/Paste the quest over and over, trusting that their very detailed quest text would be enough diversity for their players.

Of course we all know that the vast majority of MMO players click through quest text, and get annoyed when 150 missions are ‘enter the exact same jungle and save the exact same NPC, whose name is slightly different.’ It is so amazingly terrible, that a Naval Officer gets a noob quest to go save Redbeard lets say, while the Pirate gets the exact same quest but to save Blackbeard (actual NPC names are forgotten, but its close to that) I am not exaggerating when I say the newbie experience for all four nations is IDENTICAL… to the last quest. Not to mention that the towns and cities are nearly exact copies of one another with only a handful of different designs pasted over and over.

Ten years ago, these flaws might have been acceptable, and the fun elements of the game would carry it, but in the current MMO market, a basic standard has been established, and anything less just won’t do. Caring about your game isn’t always enough. Do I think they will address these issues? Yes, absolutely. Will they recover from the flaws? To some extent they will, and I hope that over time their game evolves into the niche success of a game like EVE.

~Cyndre

*As an aside, I find it amusing that a reader would suggest that I have some shady motive for the posts I write. Keep in mind that first and foremost, Kill Ten Rats is a player’s opinion site on the games we play. For many different reasons, Ethic has attracted a broad readership throughout the years, and each and every one of us feels a journalistic obligation to those readers. Are we ‘the news’? No, but we make a personal commitment to call it like it is, pull no punches, and ultimatly relay the honest truth as we see it. If you want glowing reviews of mediocre games, I hear GameSpot is the site for you…

More PotBS Thoughts is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I am not going to give a run down of the game-play or mechanics in my observations, as Tobold, Keen and others in the blogosphere have fairly in depth looks at the game. My thoughts on Pirates after these messages…

Pirates of the Burning Sea is an amazing game conceptually, and very fun to play certain aspects. It is genuinely unique in many ways, and provides the subscriber a great deal of variety of game-play. At the same time, I couldn’t help but thinking that the execution of the design was some what flawed.

I started in Beta and played a bit with Ethic, and my first comments to him were along the lines of “What the hell is this crap!?” We tried a few quests, leveled a bit, and I eventually drifted back to WoW and on to LotRO and largely left my beta account lie dormant for a few months because the game was really tedious and poorly designed at the introduction levels.

During a major gaming lull after I cancelled LotRO, I picked up Pirates again, and joined a PvP society called Corte de la Sangre, in the Spanish nation. As one of the premier national societies I was quickly assisted with all of the basic necessities, and shown some of the finer points of the game. I was put into a ship building chain that was quite successful, and learned to really love and enjoy the game for its strengths.

I quickly leveled to 50 on my Privateer and spent basically every spare minute of my time flipping ports, PvPing with my society and national fleet and stealth solo PvPing, which is a talent skill specific to Privateers and Pirates.

I was thoroughly enjoying myself, but try as I may, I still couldn’t ignore the fact that the graphics are largely marginal with the exception of the Open Sea, Avatar combat seems like something that could have been a hit on the Atari, and the PvE game is repetitive, tedious and uninspired. You enjoy the game despite these drawbacks, but they certainly weigh heavily on my overall impressions. The thought of leveling an alt is up there with giving myself a lobotomy with a soup spoon.

Even so, I was all set to pre-order two copies for myself and my wife, grind my way past the terrible game-play to get to the very fun PvP, so I asked internally for a beta account for my wife, was granted one and she tried it…

BIG FLOP!

She hated it. Her first impression of the game, after 20 minutes was, “I miss WoW.” So we are back in Azeroth and passing on this game.

Some problems I see for Pirates in the future, is the lack of end-game, national balance, 1-20 quest diversity and subscriber attrition as a result. I made numerous posts warning FLS that without major early game revisions, people would play levels 1-10 and then go back to [insert trendy MMO here]. They would never even experience the amazingly creative and well designed player economy, the exciting and well designed Open Sea and port battle PvP, the fantastic nationalism that develops as a result of those conflicts… They would experience third rate MMO game mechanics, UI functionality and quest depth and wonder how they got swindled into throwing away $50.00 for the box.

If you like the concept, are looking for something new, and have some degree of patience while they fix the problems, I strongly recommend you buy Pirates and give it a shot. For all its flaws, I would have bought it if it had registered well on the Wifeometer. I enjoyed my time in Beta and know that the game *can* be great if FLS stays committed to the updates as they did during beta, and maintains the openness and love for their game that was their strongest trait up until now.

~Cyndre

Pirates of the Burning Sea is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Disclaimer: Picture from early beta; approved color pallet has changed.

- Ethic

Great Moments in Pirate History is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

It be a piratey good thing. Arr!

- Ethic

More Pirates! is a post from: Kill Ten Rats