So as threatened, I patched my client and headed back to the Burning Seas.
The avatar combat still looks terrible. The actual combat system seems interesting on paper (I’d forgotten all about it) but it just feels so clunky and broken… blech. The naval combat is still pretty fun and interesting, but I had forgotten how long a battle can take (15 minutes, easily). At sea, the game is breathtakingly gorgeous and I’d forgotten all about that, too.
But what really surprised me was the community. I knew I’d be lost so I logged in as a level 3 pirate on the Blackbeard server (all my characters were on closed servers so I had to move them all first). Now granted, pirate faction + Blackbeard server is probably the worse combo I could have picked but.. wow. Close your eyes and imagine how terrible an MMO community can be. Got that mental image? OK, it was worse than that. I logged into hearing one person with a big mouth being attacked by a dozen others in the “nation” chat channel, with insults about his genitals, bathroom habits, parents, etc, etc. Every immature, moronic insult you can imagine, they were using on this guy (who was giving as good as he got, to be sure).
I did end up talking to one person after I asked if, in fact, the game has just devolved to talking shit at each other. This person offered me a helping hand and told me that the economic game was “broken” so players mostly traded directly.
So let’s see:
1) Avatar combat: still awful
2) Ship combat: still fun
3) Community: Wretched, awful, terrible, vile, disgusting, horrible
4) Economic game: apparently broken
Yeah, I’ll be playing this a lot. /sarcasm I might actually try another faction on another server, and I do thank the single decent soul in the Pirate Nation channel on Blackbeard and very much hope I just caught the game on a bad day, for his/her sake.
I really wish someone could take the naval combat game out of Pirates of the Burning Seas and put it into something better, because that really is fun (assuming you have the time to put into it). And I readily grant that I’m being terribly unfair saying all these mean things about the community based on an hour spent in it.
But I can’t help but think its time for this one to be put to bed.