Being a Place Matters

A number of bloggers, including myself, have ragged on Age of Conan for the extensive use of zoning and instancing. Too much use of these design elements leaves you with the feeling of the “world” being merely a series of rooms connected by jumps rather than the impression of a contiguous world. In a word, it doesn’t feel like a “place.”

I got waylaid this (U.S. 3-day holiday) weekend by a last minute work project and got almost no decent gaming in, but I made time to soak up some of the Mars Phoenix mission events. Being a total space dork, how could I not? One of my earliest memories was watching Neil Armstrong step on to the surface of the Moon.

The images returned of the Moon returned by the Apollo program transformed the Moon in people’s consciousness from being effectively a 2d small floating disk to a bona fide three dimensional world of its own. As Carl Sagan would say, the Moon became a “place.” A place where we could imagine that we could go and explore and see ourselves walking over a distant horizon.

A similar transformation occurred in 1976 when the Viking missions successfully landed on Mars and began returning pictures like these:

I’d been to places like that. I could see myself in that landscape and wanted more than anything to sprint off toward the horizon to see what was over that next ridge or hill. For me Mars became a “place”. Even though the Viking landers were totally stationary, they managed to convey the impression of a complete new world. Not bad with just a few static images.

Seeing the latest today from the Mars HIRISE observer, those feelings are rekindled. This is my new favorite picture (the first of a spacecraft in the process of landing on another world). Click for the full width shot. Its really breathtaking.

With images like this, Mars is more than a place. More importantly, space travel and planetary exploration is made more real in our minds. We’ve seen the NASA animations about how these landings are supposed to look, but we’ve never seen them happening until now. I can almost see the lander drifting across the Martian landscape in its last few minutes of descent not unlike so many other similar images or scenes we’ve actually witnessed back here on Earth. Its like we were there.

No human has yet visited Mars, so these images in effect create merely a virtual Mars in our collective minds (like the virtual Moon). With each new mission and new set of images brought back, the impression is created that Mars as a world has become larger and more unbounded. Its an illusion, but a compelling one.

To create a compelling game world, for me at least, the designers have to similarly stitch together their resources to create that illusion. Simply having zoning doesn’t mean that’s broken. In EQ, zoning, while a necessary evil, didn’t seem to break the illusion of a continuous world. A few seams, maybe, but if you’ve ever stitched a few side by side vacation snapshots together to create a panorama, you know that the resultant composite image says so much more than the individual ones that the borders between pictures don’t really matter. They match up, there’s a small hiccup going from one to another, but leaving from the left of one, you enter from the right of the next.

Even with zoning, EQ was able to create that sense of place which persists into EQ2. Likewise, environments like WoW and LotRO’s seamless outdoor worlds are indeed places in my mind. I never got that impression from games like PotBS and certainly didn’t from AoC. I felt boxed in like there was no horizon over which to travel. Neither in my mind’s eye, nor in the game did I ever get that same feeling I get just by looking at those few pictures from Mars.

Shipwreck on the Burning Sea

I’ve given up.

After quite a bit of hand wringing, I decided not to renew my subscription to Pirates of the Burning Sea when my initial 30-day subscription runs out. I mentioned in an earlier post that the best that we bloggers can do when giving impressions of a game is to answer the question “Am I willing to make a $50 bet that it wont suck later?”

As to the first part of the question, despite some misgivings, I was willing to make the bet. I definitely think the bet was worth it. I think the jury is still out on the second part of the question. And to be fair, the second part relates to an individual’s own preferences.

I think we need indie studios producing indie games that are different and innovative. This is good.

I also think that we need to put our money where our mouths are and also vote for quality. While I think FLS has done a great job with certain aspects of the game such as ship combat (which is excellent IMHO), other aspects are still kinda rough. No, not Vanguard rough by any means (not even in the same league), but frustrating enough in these days of $50-a-box and $15-a-month to get in the way of the fun at least for me.

Likewise, there are still a number of core features that are subject to a bit more than tweaking or balancing. Ultimately, the more you explore a game, the more you run into the impacts design decisions have on gameplay (highly zoned or instanced play, etc.). When the goal posts are still moving, however, its tough to decide whether to stick it out.

Keen and Tobold have several excellent posts analyzing the nature of the RvR-based PvP and the in-game economy and some of the challenges FLS (and players) faces in that regard. Some of these continue to be the subject of not so minor tweaking. I still have hope for the game and plan on checking back in a while, but right now, I feel like I’m paying for a beta. A very good beta, but a beta nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I think a few more months with a large closed beta population could have greatly benefited the game in terms of the minor polish issues (UI functionality, mission bugs and tuning, etc. ) as well as having a real opportunity to address game play mechanics (port contention, alt and society interaction, the economy, population/faction balancing mechanics, gank squad PvP, etc.) that are the major source of my frustration right now.

Some of this stems from the unique difficulties in creating a PvP-focused game. Because each encounter among live players is unique, PvP will test every boundary of play mechanics and mercilessly punish faults. It seems that in an RvR game which has persistent effects, these can be multiplied and accelerated (e.g., “accelerated” port flipping). If a PvE quest has a bug or exploit, it may be frustrating, but its hardly a show stopper unless it completely bottlenecks progression. Most PvE players wont care if an encounter has a problem that amounts to an “I Win” button, but such a problem would be utterly game breaking in a PvP game.

Not so in PvP. Every PvP encounter has a winner and a loser, and with a not insubstantial loss penalty, the amount of time invested in acquiring skills, materials and equipment may be simply too high a price to pay when unintended consequences flow from bugs and exploits. So the RvR PvP of PotBS faces unique challenges to accommodate the needs of its ultimate playerbase, but for now, I’m going to sit it out until the dust settles. When it does, hopefully it will be a game I’ll want to play and pay for.

Pirates of the Burning Sea Underway

Pirates of the Burning Sea went live yesterday after a few weeks of limited pre-boarding. I did the pre-order for PotBS after open beta. I also did the pre-order period for LotRO which resulted in a very smooth launch for that game– in part because the economy got a jump start and the number of players impacting the starting areas on release day was reduced resulting in a less lagtastic experience. Turns out it was a very good idea.

With LotRO, I pre-ordered from a large online retailer. I ordered two copies of that game through them. Long story short, it was a cluster. They only made one pre-order code available, its was buried in their site without instructions on how to retrieve, etc. Then, when release came around, they said they’d send the retail box (with activation code) something like 2 weeks after release… After a few phone calls and some huffing and puffing, I got my two activation keys before release and the boxes actually arrived the day of release.

Fortunately, Turbine planned ahead and gave a grace period so that pre-order peeps could continue to play while their retail boxes got delivered. So while dealing with the retailer was frustrating, getting in and continuing to play the game was never an issue. Unfortunately, FLS didn’t make the same choice much to the consternation of many players.

Still, I vowed never to do either the electronic download or online order experience again. So for PotBS, I went with Fry’s. The evil you know versus the evil you don’t know. I bought the pre-order there, dutifully saving my receipt. I went there yesterday at lunch accompanied by my preorder box with receipt and found the retail box. With a relative minimum of explaining how a pre-order purchase works to the retailer selling it(!), I walked out of the store with the retail box.

Since I had to finish work that day, I checked in to see what was happening in the forums. I know, I know, but it was a slow day. Lots of peeps reporting difficulties and frustration getting activated for the game. Lots of issues seemed to surround the the company we love to hate (SOE) and the activation/registration process. My unscientific survey seems to validate my approach. Direct download and/or online retail customers seemed to be having the most problems.

Still there were probably some true SOE-induced issues– like not recognizing game cards as a form of payment upon activation and requiring a credit card to be entered. Likewise, misunderstandings that a credit card is required even though the first 30 days subscription is included with the box. For some, at least, the whole tin foil hat credit card over the computer/internet thing is a religious issue.

So with some trepidation, I left work hoping that I might actually get in game on release day. I went home. I opened the box. I found the activation key. I launched the game. It asked for my activation key through SOE’s account management page, entered it without dashes (don’t know if it mattered), put in payment information, looped back and entered my “Landing Party Key” (which allows me to continue to claim pre-order rewards on any new characters– needed dashes this time), put in my super secret open beta reward key and launched the game. The retail box also ships with a Buddy Key to rope your friends in. Not sure if online/direct download offers the same thing.

And a few seconds later, I was in game. Start to finish– about 10 minutes. Of course I’m on Guadeloupe which is apparently slightly less populated than Pluto, but there were no crashes, no lag and wonder of wonders, the /whocount was showing that the French population was rising (huzzah!). After reading the forums, you’d think it was the Anarchy Online Launch, Part II. For me at least, this was painless. Yes, a little needlessly cumbersome, but generally painless. Kudos to FLS on a painless launch for this sailor.

I dropped into Tampa and noticed right away that the only spot of contention on the map was New Orleans. The Spanish which appear to be the largest contingent on our server, had obviously coordinated their efforts and were creating massive gobs of unrest around N.O. I popped over to see what the fuss was about and nearly got sunk by my own in attention as the PvP zone expanded. This carebear has a few things to learn about PvP… Full contention by about 10 p.m. U.S. West Coast time. Yikes! Even more frightening was the number of level 27-28 Spanish trolling off the coast. Someone’s been very busy.

So rather than risk my hard earned ship in a gank fest, I decided I’d just spend some time harrassing Spanish shipping outside Havana and getting a bit of fighting experience in my new ship. I managed to bring port contention in Havana up to a total of 5 (10,000 required to trigger a full PvP zone) all by my lonesome. Heh, go me, that’s sticking it to the man. All in all, I’ve got to echo Keen’s sentiments that having port contention turned back on really adds back the excitement that the pre-order game was lacking. Looking forward to hooking up with my society mates and doing a little hunting.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Things you wish you knew…

There’s a good thread going over in the PotBS forums called Things i wish i would have known earlier…. [Edit:  This list in the forums keeps growing and getting better organized, so check back on it from time to time.] Like a lot of smaller games (especially early on), there is still a fair amount of really useful info that is still in the playerbase “lore” category rather than in a tutorial or in-game help or even on some of the fan sites (cheating! :P).

Some of these can really make your life in PotBS more interesting. Check it out and kudos to Caithleen for getting it started and to the other contributors noted below. It continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Here are a few so far:

1. The ^ key toggles the firing arcs and wind indicator (standard keybindings)

2. When you click on the border of your minimap, a “small pointing hand” will appear and the ship will automatically turn to get in line with the direction of the “small pointing hand” on the border.

3. While the description says stoneshot is awfull, it is a nice hybrid ammo, try it out.

4. With CTRL-left click you can set athings to autofire on your hotbar. You could e.g. drag Fire the cannons and Boarding to your hotbar and let them automatically trigger if they are available.
[This works in avatar combat as well. I use it to autofire my prep attacks, then launch specials as the situation dictates. Caution, just because boarding is lit up doesn't mean you really want to if the % chance is low or the enemy's crew is still high...]

5. Need more smelling salts ? A twink leveled up to lvl 5 will have about 35 of them.

6. The position in the opensea combat instance is relative to the position the ships had on the open sea before engaging. The wind direction is copied as well.

7. You can shoot at a ship without selecting it as target, simply right klick a ship you’re capable of firing at. (Ideal if you have one ship targeted the one side, autofire enabled fire with right-clicks on ships on the other side).
[Really helpful in those furballs where tabbing among targets sets the camera swinging wildly]

8. Boarded ships allways leave a derelict, so boarding will yield you more ships to salvage. But : Ships with “Minor”, “Fallback” or “Mission” can’t be salvaged, sink them right away!

9. The Auctionhouse in potbs is different, it’s a blind bid system. You should always check the partial order option and try to buy a bit lower then the average listed price. An excellent guide on that topic by bonham can be found here (http://burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46)
[Great tip on partials. Some folks dump small quantities for a song to unload them]

10. You can use older ships (no more used) as storage or to port around. Just talk to the harbourmaster and you can drag&drop into/from the ships storage. Select a ship in a different port and switch to be teleported there. Remember all your personal equipment (Buildingsdeeds) ports with you as well.
[Three more warehouse slots...]
11. As a pirate, be careful when you use a ship that is for a single class only (like Freetrader Cargo ships). The invalid ship tag means : You can be attacked PvP because the ship is invalid for you!

12. When your ship is sunk, unsecured cargo is lost. You get free warehouses in some of the ports. you should store your unsecured loot there every now and then.

Secured Cargo : Ammo (Crates are NOT secured, unpack them if you don’t plan to sell them), general outfittings, your personal inventory, consumable repairs.

13. Pirates can’t capture Ships higher their own level.

14. Theres a lvl 15 skill on the general trainer : “diplomacy” allows you to read what other nations say in Area chat. Important : Don’t use area chat for critical informations like fleet strength - they can read it with diplomacy.
[The general trainer is located in your nation's capital.]
[Edit: Skills available from the General Trainer skills require at least level 15 and cost 1 Captain Skill point.]

15. You can zoom the minimap with the mouse wheel, but you’ll have to place the mousepointer in the center while doing so.

16. Private tell format is rather weird, so i’ll put it in my list too : “/tell firstname lastname, Text” Don’t miss on the “,” since it tells the game, where the name stops (Antonio de la Sol,)
[Double left clicking on a player's name in chat also starts a private tell, backspace to reply to a tell. I know... I know...]

17. Marks of Victory (PvP Rewardvoucher) can be farmed PvE by doing the missions from the rebel agent or garnision commander.

18. [Hans] At level 12 your fallback halifax or La Belle gets automatically replaced by a better fallback ship for free. Well, only if you don’t own any other ships.

19. [Hans] The economy tutorial gives a nice reward for completing it, a ship deed for a Chase Marie, which you can use or you can sell to the junk dealer for *unknown* dubloons.

20. [toehorse] There are advanced versions of the focus skills sailing, gunnery, and manuevering sold on the general trainer for 1 captain point. These skills provide larger bonuses and penalties than the ones you start with.
[The general trainer is located in your nation's capital.]

21. [NefariousCoal] When you are sunk, it subtracts 1 from your ship’s Durability rating. When you are out of Durability, it is gone. You can increase the durability rating of your ship by dragging & dropping another deed of the same ship type onto your ship at the Harbor Master (while you still have at least 1 Dura left).

22. [CutlassJack] Clicking on someones name thats spoken in the Chat window automatically sets up a private tell without having to type their name out correctly.

23. [CutlassJack] To reply to a tell, simply hit the ‘Backspace’ key and it fills in the information for you.

24. [CutlassJack] Every 5 levels visit any Class Trainer to recieve special career missions. Do these missions right away because they often yield special rewards and abilities. The next quest wont be offered until you complete the ones before it. So dont ignore them!

25. [Gillain] Watch the icons on your loaded guns. Half-grey-circle = “Target out of Range” and a quarter-circle (like a pie wedge) means target in range but not in the gun’s firing arc.

26. [CutlassJack] Pirates often cant figure out how to get their ‘Scavenge’ skill because they didnt listen to the last bit of advice [#24, about doing the career missions]. You need to finish the previous class quests first (lvl 5 one)

27. [Jakkin] If you hold down ALT and click on a battery that is more than half loaded you can fire a half strength broadside.
[Great when in close action and the difference between a successful boarding or taking another broadside is your reload time.]

Good stuff. Enjoy.

A Commendation for Noobness

Ah, the promise of a new world to explore. Even after doing the beta of a game, there is still something different about it when it goes live, when it “counts.” One neat and at the same time frustrating aspect of a new game world is the excitement of discovery– whether its a new cool area you’ve never seen or even the mundane aspects of “how things work” in the new world.

Most of this blush wears off when a game matures as so much knowledge is absorbed in teh interwebs. The game changes. Its becomes not so much about how things work but simply how to get to the good stuff quickly which can be its own kind of fun.

If you’ve ever leveled an alt you know what I mean. The second time through can be fun but its a different kind of fun. Like watching a rerun of a movie you enjoyed. You wont be surprised by a plot twist, but you begin to see different aspects of it and enjoy it nonetheless.

Of course, the first toon through a new world takes some knocks and makes some inevitable if-I’d-only-known wrong turns. The first time through is more like puzzle play almost.

Well, puzzle play continues for me in PotBS as I re-learned the difference between “pennants” and “commendations” last night. I knew this at one point but obviously forgot.

The non-pirates or “Nationals” in PotBS don’t get to actually capture and keep the ships they defeat in battle. Thats what pirates do. Instead the nationals only get to collect either a pennant or a commendation from vessels they defeat. In theory, they are all in service to the crown, so off the ship goes for the good of the realm and, aside from the loot you keep, you earn one of these rewards which you can turn in later for good stuff. More on that in a minute.

At level five, all three careers, Naval Officer, Freetrader and Privateer get a skill called Claim Prize which allows one to loot these reward marks from defeated ships. For Naval Officers, it yields a commendation. For Freetraders and Privateers, it gives you a pennant. Pennants and commendations are turned in for very different things. PotBS Wiki has a fair summary here. Note the French turn in in Point-a-Pitre in the Antilles.

That is unless, you are a Privateer and you specced your career points to get the skill “Grease the Wheel.” Grease the Wheel lets a Privateer get commendations instead of pennants. As far as I know, Freetraders are still stuck with pennants only, and Naval Officers commendations. Correct me if I’m wrong please.

Of course, I had it in my head that 25 of something got you a Bermuda Sloop, the first non-civilian upgrade ship. As a Privateer, I was tooling around running missions and taking advantage of any NPCs that I thought I could beat and although I had already bought a Bermuda Sloop on the auction house, I thought, hey, the economy is young, there are few ships on the market, I’ll just go collect my Bermuda Sloop deed and resell it.

So off I go on the long sail from Florida down to Point-a-Pitre when to my horror I realize that the 25 pennants I’ve been collecting can’t be turned in for a Bermuda Sloop. As a matter of fact, it takes 120 pennants just for a Dolphyn Ketch (a modest merchant vessel). A little research on teh interwebs (cheating :P) revealed that I in fact needed commendations and to get them I needed the Grease the Wheel skill.

So, how to respec? Well, apparently junk merchants (in the auction houses) sell career respecs for a modest 10k DB. Ouch. Or, I could turn in 10 pennants for one (hurray!). So out of the dark of despair came a glimmer of hope– I respecced the skill, picked up some other building materials to start my economy, left a ship in the capital so I could teleport back when needed and sailed with my tail only somewhat between my legs back to Tampa to call it a night. So two steps forward, one step back, but thats the fun and frustration of life in the new world.