YAR!
This week they lifted the NDA for a game I’ve been watching for at least a few years now and also happily beta testing. I <3 betas. The following is some insider information. But I must warn you, its a complicated game with a larger learning curve than say WoW. It's my honest opinions and while it doesn't look so great with the amount of bad stuff, the good stuff outweighs all current games out there for me.
Be that as it may, it's definitely not a game for everyone. It's is not a EQ/WoW clone (which is a nice change) so people who like those types of games are generally frustrated with POTBS. It's in open beta right now and I highly suggest trying it out. For more information go to the website at burningsea.com
I already have my preorder box ready to jump start the economy on Jan 7th.
Player Driven Economy:
Good:
1. Everything you can buy from NPCs are absolute shit. Ships, cannon ammo, hull patches, ect. So that means 90% of the stuff you’ll need will be made from other players.
2. Gone are the days of carpal tunnel craft grinding only to find that no one will purchase your goods because better loot drops in 12 hour raids. Once you have enough money to build a structure and all the items needed, nothing else needs to be done.
3. A player that only logs in for 10min a day can produce the same amount of stuff as a powergamer online for 12 hours a day. Each item takes labour hours to use and those are based on real time hours. 24 hours real time = 24 hours of labour hours. What this means is that people who are not especially interested in the economy can still play a role and make extra cash by producing raw materials and/or first tier manufactured items extrem
4. That may not sound like enough for the power crafters out there, but a bigger point is trading. Go to a port that sells oak at 10db and sail it to another that people will buy it for 20db. Why doesn’t everyone do it? Because shipbuilders need a shit load of a lot of stuff and are too busy or lazy.
5. It’s bloody extensive. One of the main differences between POTBS and every other bloody game out there is that you can only make a few things. You are limited to 10 plots which is not enough to make everything you’d need to build a ship. The best way to be efficiant is to find one thing you want to make and deal with that.
6. If your products aren’t selling you can easily switch to something new or ride it out til other people give up and switch. Actually its just best to start off the game selling things like oak, iron or any building materials. They sell quickly and are easy to figure out. Then once you have a decent amount of DBs hanging around and understand what’s going on a bit better you can switch to ship building materials like sails, hulls and cannons.
7. Blind Auction house. You can read an indepth dev post about it here. Basically.. in most games you go to the AH and see a long list of of the different people selling the same items for different prices. One of the biggest issues with that is when you go to sell something, you’ll end up putting it up at just a bit lower. Then the next person does the same and it devolves into a pricewar. In POTBS, you’d have a problem with that mainly because of the mass amount of items for sale. On a typical day, I’d sell out all my granite which is around 200 or so units. That’d be a lot to sort through.
So when you go to the AH you’ll see different listings for the ports, how many are up for sale, and the going rate. If you are selling you can throw your’s up for less if there are many other sellers or more if there are few sellers. As a buyer you see the same thing then offer up a price: going rate, lower or higher depending on what you think other’s are selling it at.
There have been a lot of complaints on the beta forums since I started because most new people get frustrated and don’t see the point. They are usually pissed because it takes a bit longer to find the cheapest price and figure that since they do it everyone else does also. That is completly incorrect. I’d sell my granite at 5db lower then the the usual going price in Havana (Spanish main shipbuilding port). It took 52db to produce 10 blocks of granite and people would actually buy them for 100db per. Most of the time, people would pay the 100db anyways, which means I’d get the first sale and what they paid for it.
They also complain that it doesn’t stop pricing wars, which I find incorrect also. I bought a lot of goods in other ports with my freetrader toon and found that usually I couldn’t get a much better deal than that of the going rate. Once supply got more than the demand at that port, the price would go down. That is what’s supposed to happen!
8. Very little of production is level dependant. There are a few things that you need higher levels for and of course the ships get better with higher levels, but I never got my freetrader higher than lvl 16 in the entire time I was in beta. This is partly due to the fact that the FT class sucks at fighting which means its a pain in the ass to level (more on that later) and because I hate grinding missions. If you’ve got the cash, you can build most things and be level 5 - which is what you are after you finish the econ tutorial. I dig this because I can go slow with that class and lvl up my privateer alt for pvp. FTs shouldn’t be fighting in port contention if they want to be able to buy from other nations.
9. Everyone can see all the auction houses in the region but FreeTraders can take a skill for seeing all of them. This makes it super easy to buy low in one port and sell it high in another.
Bad:
1. Too easy to make many early mistakes. Making the first tier of manufactured goods is bloody easy but once you get into items that need more than 2 buildings it’s very difficult to sort out how many of which type to build. As I said before every item uses a different amount of labour hours so many times you need more of 1 building to be efficient. This is a large problem because no where in game does it tell you have many labour hours it takes to make something until you spend quite a bit of cash to build it. While it is easy to change around the buildings, it’s bloody expensive. In my first go at it I ran out of cash fast with absurd amounts of labour hours left in some buildings and not enough in others.
2. There needs to be a second intro (optional) tutorial then what they have now. A few weeks ago they had a stress test and then let them into closed beta when it was done. I ended up helping a lot of people who did the tutorial and jumped in feet first into ship building with no real idea how intensive it is. The optional part is for those of us who understand it well already and are needed to jump start the economy when the servers open. It should be a quest that starts you on the first line of materials: iron, oak, granite, leather, limestone, ect. You choose one of the items, it gives you the deeds and materials. This is because the econ tutorial starts you off with gravel and common wood which is bloody useless and worthless. Personally, I think this would be a good kickstart to the economy because those items are in very high demand.
While I like the freeform production process and don’t miss the carpal tunnel inducing craft grind of useless items, I really believe there needs to be some sort of middle ground. For instance, in my favourite crafting game - A Tale In the Desert - has the best middle ground I’ve ever seen. What happens is that you can make many different things but to get more advanced stuff you need to unlock it at the University. So the community takes a bunch of materials to the University and then they can learn how to make say.. a brick laying machine. In POTBS this system wouldn’t work because you need ships a lot earlier but there has to be something more than the current way to fully understand the economy.
3. The expansive scope can become an issue. For 1 it seems like everyone just wants to make the end product of ships. What that means is you end up with no way of obtaining the less cool items. Secondly, if a nation doesn’t have enough people or enough interested in producing that nation becomes nerfed in every other part of the game. Especially PvP. It’s a very delicate balance which was an issue with beta and could very well happen again. For example: When I first got into beta, the Brits were the powerhouse. This was due to a large population imbalance with very few people on the other sides. Then after a server wipe the Spanish side became heavy handed. Both times it was no contest who was going to win. In each case the economy was booming on the “good” side and nonexistant on the “bad” sides.
4. Guild production teams. It’s great for the guild itself but bad for the low end producers and people who are not in a large production line. Typically what happens is everyone is dedicated to making 1 or 2 types of items and sell to the other members at cost or a small markup. While this is quite typical in every game it’s not usually that big of an issue. What happens is that the people on the low end barely have any cash and the shipbuilders are swimming in it. A 20% profit of 10db (oak logs) is a lot less than a 20,000db ship. Granted you can make more of the cheaper ones and sell in bulk, but it’s still not a lot to get by on.
As apparant in the early stages of beta right after a wipe, guild production teams keep needed goods off the AH. They say this is because other nations can purchase it. But I think is way too over protective, let them come buy it so you have more money to buy or make stuff. But it sure is a big fucking nightmare being in a smaller guild or solo and trying to get a bloody ship other than the crap civis.
5. Pirates capture ships so they have a shit economy. I know it makes sense, but I really wanted to play a pirate! YAR!!
Combat:
Good:
1. Ship combat is bloody amazing. It takes skill and tactics. It makes it really fun in my opinion.
2. Levels don’t mean nearly as much as skill and type of ship.
Bad:
1. AvCom (avatar compat) sucks. I mean really sucks. They admitted it sucked before then they “fixed” it. Now it sucks and takes longer to kill people. Obviously they spent so much time making ship combat rock the socks off of everything else out there that they ran out of cool. Many times boarding the other ship is the best way to destroy your enemy. So you spend loads of time getting into the right postion, take out their sails so they are moving slow, and get close enough to grapple the ship. What happens after that? You do a sucky boarding combat. Really a let down.
PvP:
1. Woot! Finally a game with pvp for a bloody reason. I <3 Pvp. Yes I'm a dork. I'm really tired of "end game" being 12 hour raids (which I loathe even a 1 hour raid) and slapping pointless pvp on at the end. In PotBS you have port contention. Everyone starts with around the same number of ports and then work to take away others. What you do is kill the npc ships on the open sea who are sailing around the port. Once you gather enough points, the port goes into pirate pvp. That means pirates can come and attack any national player and vice versa. You continue to kill nps ships and then the port goes into full on pvp. The pvp area is marked in red on the map so you know where to go or where to aviod. You continue to gather points until to get the final battle which happens 24 hours later.
There are MANY reasons to take ports. Economic reasons - take the important ship building ports from your enemies to cripple their economy! Stratigic reasons - capture minor ports near the big ports to knock the area around the big port into pvp. Or capture those minor ports so your nations freetraders and stock up the AH with supplies.
2. You can flag yourself as pvp at all times. So sailing on the open sea is just a bit more dangerous :P
3. What fun would it be if one nation constantly held every port? Bloody boring I'd say. So once a nation captures enough ports the map will reset with everyone getting free stuff.
4. Port contention only lasts for a few days or so (usually) so if you aren't big into pvp you can aviod those ports until it's all over.
Classes:
Freetrader:
1. They can make expensive advanced structures which produce more than anyone else.
2. Can see all Auction houses
3. Can get a skill called tax evasion. To produce in other nations ports it’ll cost you tax each time you make something. This skill reduces that amount.
4. You start out on good standing with all nations so you can trade with all nations.
5. You get huge ass cargo ships to carry materials.
6. You suck at combat. I mean really suck. FTs have so many econ skills that you don’t have enough points to get combat skills. Plus the combat ones really suck compared to everyone else.
7. You can’t and shouldn’t pvp. Well you “can” but you suck in fighting. However, if you do engage in contention you’ll loose faction points. Not enough faction points in a nation means you can’t see the AH. You can gain it back, but you have to fight npc enemies of that nation which reduces faction from another nation. Plus you suck.
8. Needs better smuggling skills. Pirates and Privateers get great escape skills but FTs are pretty much sitting ducks. What I do is buy a super fast smaller ship, take speed skills and buy speed outfitting. Very few people can catch me. I also typically have a large hauler and a fighting ship for missions.
9. XP is mostly fighting. BLEH! You suck at fighting but it’s the only way to level up. OK.. you do have FT missions where you have to make/buy a crap ton of items, take them to a port then take them to another port. The money reward is only if you’d made them in a port your nation controls and the xp is far far far too small. You’d get more doing an early mission to destroy 4 ships.
10. Every class (I think) gets repair skills to use while in combat. FTs suck the most and they are the only ones who need sometimes expensive materials to use them.
11. You can have “experts.” You can buy these or “produce” (lol) them using a recuritment office. They cost a lot of materials but do help when needed.
Navy:
1. I’ve never played this class but they get the best ships of the game.
2. I hear they aren’t very good during low levels but higher levels they are better.
Privateer:
1. Think of yourself as a pirate but working for a nation. They are a lot like pirates skill wise but have the benifits of a good economy.
2. I have and will have a privateer for pvp fun :P But I haven’t had much time to play this one.
Pirates:
1. Little to no economy.
2. Can capture ships. This has a 2 hour cool down and the ship you get has only 1 durability. Meaning you loose a battle and you loose your ship. Hunting for the right ships is just too annoying for me.
General Game Play:
Good:
1. I get to say “Yar!”
2. Monkeys!
3. Ship battles are fun and even more so when friends are there.
Bad:
1. Like all MMOs, things aren’t finished. While it is in better shape right now then WoW was on release day, there are a few issues. The worst issue that has plauged all of beta (that I saw) wasn’t fixed the last time I played. Sometimes when you load into an area the avatars do not load. That’s npcs, group members, player avs, and even yourself. This is highly annoying when you are looking for/turning in quests and even worse when doing a swashbuckling mission. It seems to happen less if you wait to move until everyone has loaded but sometimes they just don’t. When that happens the only thing you can do is restart the game.
2. I hate loading screens. This sometimes is a game killer for me and I don’t know how long I’ll last with the game just because of this. You enter the tavern -> loading screen. You enter the shop -> loading screen. Start a mission -> all are instanced and you get a loading screen. BLEH!
3. You can’t jump. You can only run down specific paths. Highly annoying.
4. Last but not least, there is something just wrong with the game. I can’t put my finger on it exactally but it’s not connecting the way a game should. Some people say its because of the loading screens and immersion. Some say it is because the missions are too repetitive. I really can’t tell you what it is. Sometimes I really want to play, but no where near like I am when starting a game, and sometimes I just get bored. For a long time in beta all I did was log in to do some production and log out right afterwards. I thought it was because I was pretty much playing alone and it’s very possible that is still the case. While I did get some people in to beta, they didn’t play very much.
it’s gotton. Ok. I have to leave for the airport in 3 hours. It’s all a bit nutty. 2:30am and I even spelled my name incorrect (typed real instead of reel) on the notecard for fashcon and my update group notices. That’s how mental it is. 
