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.
Oh wow… that’s disappointing. I was thinking about upgrading to a Station Access subscription primarily to spend more time in POTBS. Now I’m not so sure I want to…
I was really excited about this game when I had read about it a few years ago, before SOE had picked it up. I was able to play the game for a bit because a friend gave me a free trial, and was really disappointed with the game. I couldn’t believe all that time had been spent on such a broken and bland game.
After sleeping on it, I feel a little bad about slagging the community so hard. After all it was a snapshot of one nation on one server during one particular hour… maybe it was a total aberration. But I just came away with such a bad taste in my mouth.
If I had a Station Access sub, I’d probably log in from time to time just to do a couple of PvE Naval Battles using default ships. I really do enjoy the naval combat. There’s enough “simulation” to make it feel pretty satisfying, and it looks really good. You load various kinds of shot to target sails, hull or crew, and the wind plays a big factor. Bow and stern armor is thinner than port and starboard so positioning is important. It isn’t seriously hardcore, but it certainly isn’t simple arcade button mashing, either.
Just wish the rest of the game was as interesting…
I had a lot of fun with this game in beta. You can go read posts on my old blog, and see how much I was stoked about. But it never evolved from its beta state, and I never really got into it post launch when so many others games looked more inviting. Even Tabula Rasa over Pirates.