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"Hey Guys,
So I know we are all feeling the effects of the low population numbers across all of our servers. The economy doesn't work right when there aren't enough consummers to keep the economy moving. PvP doesn't work when there aren't enough combatents to generate PvP zones and engage in them.
Worst of all, FLS loses money due to low subscription rates which lowers their funding to improving the game by hiring more developers / artists / programmers / etc.
Time to brainstorm ways to get the word out there and encourage more people to play PotBS. I suggest starting a grassroots movement. Talk to your friends. Talk to your neighbors. Tell them PotBS is a really fun game with good PvP and a great economy.
Also, MMORPG.com is a hub for potential MMO fans. Register on their forums and get the word out to the millions of players who are fed up with WoW / EQ2 swords and elves.
Lets get our server numbers up!
-Largo"
Heh this quote was taken from POTBS forums.
So I thought i'd help the guy out and post it for him. So here you go.
Comments
yes word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool but real Publicity & Promotion requires $$ investment of which there has been very little.
So far FLS has relied on the Sony Distributiom network & it's European partners which has not produced any real results.
There are also other changes & incentives needed to be made in-game before PVP becomes rewarding.
Population would go up if you could actually buy this game in the shops. Haven't seen it on a shelf since the first week of release in the UK.
Before anyone looks at increasing poulation numbers they should look at why initial subscobers leave.
Firstoff, the economy never did generate much in the line of buyers. One of the reasons was that the NPC drops made production irrelevant. I started a wine making operation to make fine wine needed to produce mastercraft quality ships. Production cost just over 600 DB per bottle, however, because of NPC drops, it was selling on the market for 100 DB per bottle. Same with gold, lignum vitae, or any other rare component needed to make mastercraft ships. The components were only rare if you manufactured them, they were not rare loot drops from NPCs. So, the economy really doesn't work very well.
Second, the war. It is absolutely irrelevant if your side loses a port. You can still manufacture at a lost port at a small penalty, you can still store your nation's ships there, you can still use the market, and if it was your port initially, you can still run missions there. The side that siezed the port still has no access to the ports missions.
Third, the war. On one server the first war has been won, just a little over 30 days after the game started. These wars should not be over every 30 days, the victory conditions should be such that the war will last a year, to a year and a half, at least. This just shows the server imbalance. So, if your side just got creamed in a little over 30 days, why stick around for the next war? Either go to a different server, or drop the game altogether. Now the winning side has even more supremacy for the second war. Whoopeee! Quite the challenge to win the second war in another 30 days. Expect to see the winners say, "Been there, done that" and leave also.
All in all, the game is fun, however the execution by FLS is very bad. They basically took a good idea and managed to screw it up. This game tries to be everything to everyone, but becomes actually nothing to no one. You have the grinding of WOW clones to gain skills, but can reach the level cap in about two weeks. You have crafting and the market, which are made irrelevant by loot drops. You have PvP within the red circles, which doesn't work as player base is not sustainable. You have a wargame for control of ports, but gaining/losing control has no effect on economy, mssions, or any tactical consideration.
It's as if somebody took all the elements that they thought were necessary for a successful MMORPG (WOW clone), put them into checksheet format, and when all the boxes had a checkmark next to them, went ahead and produced the game. And all this without any consideration of whether the mix worked, and was fun. Seems like all the MMORPGs lately are being produced are based on checklists, not playability.
Vanilla. They tried to do something different, by deciding to stick with vanilla.
Anybody who didn't expect population to drop sharply when it stopped being free to play after the first month really needs their head examined.
I would expect any major changes to be a long way off if at all, what population it has by then only time will tell.
People keep predicting the end is nigh for this game but you only have to look at the likes of Matrix Online which has about 5 people playing it and shows no sign of ending to learn that these games are a lot more resilient then people give them credit for.
Same issue here in Canada. The game isnt in like a single store that carries PC games.
If they were smart, they'd just go ahead and merge servers now. You're always going to take a publicity hit for doing it, so why not do it early and then have mroe time to recover.
Yes MxO which was bought by SOE because they wanted to make a super hero game... and were required to buy that dying/dead(mxo) game to get the license for it.
You do realize that unless SOE actually owns FLS/potbs. That FLS doesn't have a spider man sequel to hide their losses?
Sure you could point at AO surviving... but Funcom actually made money off some other games.
FLS isn't a company that if they are a true start up can survive that way. They need to retain "x" amount of subscribers.. to pay off whoever they secured financing from for development. I know they claim to be self funded but I find it hard to believe that they just pulled the 10's of millions needed out of their atm machine.
Then of course SOE is going charge something for hosting etc...
I'm just not sure how FLS is setup to survive with a low population this fast after launch.. while opening a new server in the Australia region.. when most servers have gone "green" already.
As someone else posted most things you need drop as loot... so having a production line can become irrelavant quickly. The cost to assemble some parts... if you actually figured it out some things you would sell at a loss (ship yards to me don't seem like something which actually makes money.. unless you use dropped loot for everything that you can).
So the crafting is screwed up.
Regardless of how the pvp'rs felt. Bypassing "intended" game mechanics to constantly put towns into contention... especially making sure the "red glow of doom(tm)" overlapped newbie areas.. then setting their level 50's outside to gank every level 5 that came out.. (mostly done by groups of 6 ..)
Wasn't going to build a community.
So ya I expected the population to drop like a lead airplane with no wings. Or to be more precise.. a helicopter after the "jesus bolt" let loose. You might have to google that one...
Anyway... I'd already seen it in UO. To the extent that you could I saw the same idiots in DAoC.
They already had started spamming out the "the care bears won" post a few days back on the Oforums.
Which is really odd.. what did the carebears win?
FLS made enough mistakes.
Its just every pvp game I see is ruined.. by the same (relatively small) bunch of morons. That then blame everyone else and cry that there is no decent pvp game.
That's just how I see it.
*edit*
oh and to something else I saw.
There were plenty of copies of potbs for sale at the local best buy. They were at the bottom of the shelf hidden by some other games. But Tabula Rasa.. (yes I tried that for a month *cough*) was taking up four shelves and very well displayed.
I have to respond to the claim that most things drop from NPC's. That is wildly untrue. Sure, some things for mastercraft ships do drop, but those ships need 1 or 2 of the resource. If you want to build a ship, most things are NOT dropped at all. Not by a long shot.
Let's just take the ship recipe for a basic merchantman, the Atlas Bark. I've been playing since pre-boarding, and usually hours per day, and am now at level 37. I've gotten a lot of drops.
Atlas Bark requires:
2 medium anchors -- never got an anchor drop, ever.
10 ballast -- never got one as a drop
5 wood tar -- never dropped for me
5 sulfur -- maybe got one drop
8 swivel guns -- I have gotten maybe 5 in the whole time
10 small cannons -- not dropped for me
5 ship provisions -- never dropped
1 medium hull -- never dropped
1 medium square rig -- never dropped
Ok, so as you can see, almost nothing has dropped to help with making the Atlas Bark. Now let's just look at what buildings you need to make all the stuff for the Bark:
carpenter, fishing lodge, forge, grain mill, hunting lodge, logging camp (fir), lumber mill, iron mine, sulfur mine, pasture, general plantation, sugar plantation, provisioner, granite quarry, rum distillery, medium shipyard, small shipyard, slaughterhouse, sugar refinery, tannery, tar distillery, textile mill, vineyard, weaponsmith, winery, woodcutter's camp.
As a player, you can have up to 10 buildings, not enough to even make all the stuff on your own. So those who say the economy is broken since everything drops, must not have played the game. Just to make a simple Atlas Bark (a level 19 merchant ship) requires 28 buildings. To make a level 50 Ship of the Line requires a LOT more stuff.
To convert a regular ship to a mastercraft version requires just a few more things: fine wine, fine cheese, some teak planks, and a few gold and silver ingots. It is true that these things drop sometimes, and since you only need 1 .. count 'em ... 1 fine wine, then there is not much of a market for it.
Just for fun, let's just take the medium hull and see what it needs:
1 medium keel -- never dropped
1 small keel -- never dropped
4 small frame timbers -- never dropped
12 small beams -- never dropped
30 oak planks -- a couple have dropped
12 oak strakes -- never dropped
4 small filling-frames -- never dropped
3 iron ship fittings -- never dropped
3 nails -- never dropped
3 small transoms -- never dropped
The bottom line is that it takes quite a bit to make even the most basic of ships, no one can do it on their own without a lot of rebuilding your structures, and almost none of the materials drop. The economy is alive and necessary, although the price fluctuations make it somewhat challenging to make money. As it should be!
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Reduce the cost of the client and drop the monthly rate to $10/mo may help out to gain more subscribers. I personally don't see $15/mo being viable as that means PotBS is in direct competition with WoW, Eve, etc.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
I quit the game 5 minutes ago after playing 3 hours.
If at all possible they should get out of their deal with SOE. I know several people who would give it a shot if they didn't have to worry about SOE swooping in and ruining the game. From what I've read SOE has really dropped the ball on getting boxes out to stores so this would be a perfect time to cut the cord.
I do not personally believe the "deal" with SOE has affected this game in any way.
Yes I played SWG.. Yes I hate the NGE. But to pretend I'm based somewhat in reality.. to me this isn't even relevant to the issues potbs has. (soe still has some of the more successful games in the mmo market. EQ1 and EQ2 have fairly large populations. So I guess i just don't see the SOE thing but yes I'd like to stab someone with a spork for the nge).
FLS has about 50% blame and the pvp community can share the rest.
That is of course my opinion.
As to the person making the statement of what doesn't drop...
My pirate strong hold.. that's what I call my warehouse. Get emptied every few days. What I'm not using in my careening camp I sell to a french player I know in real life. Who sells ships out of his ship yard for less than it would cost someone to make them (using the manufacturing lines to do it).
So ya I'd say things are a tad out of whack.
/shrug
This is not the first game that has offered PvP. Player 'styles' have been visible and well known for some time.
When you design a game you should look at the sort of game play you want and also look at what the game allows. Because if game mechanics allow players to play a certain way - they will.
The game designer is in a unique position in that by the decisions they make they can actually dictate how the game will be played.
Many of the current problems with the PvP "ganking" of PotBS were obvious reading the Developer Notes months ago.
The big issue with PvP as I see it is the Travel Map and the short travel times - combined with the fact that players can "make port" anywhere.
Unfortunately because of the way the game has been designed (the Travel Map) there is no easy solution.
"Fixing" the PvP problems might involve solutions which would make the PvE game tedious and difficult.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.