Stratics PotBS Dev Chat… Rusty answers my question here!

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dancearoundthequestionThe Stratics House of Commons dev chat with the PotBS team was tonight. I decided to attend this chat for the same reason I went to the last; I’m really trying to get a grasp of the direction PotBS is going to take over the next few months. I’m in limbo right now. On one hand the game is enjoyable and I like it. On the other hand I don’t outright love the game and feel unsure if it’s worth the long term investment with WAR and AoC coming at us in just a few months. Anyway, on to the chat.

I decided not to cut and paste the entire chat since tonight’s was even more repetitive with questions like “How much will it cost” and “will there be expansion?”… *sigh*. I picked the questions that I felt had the most merit. On what scale did I judge them? My own, and happy to admit it. My own question was answered tonight but I feel slightly perturbed that it was danced around completely. *UPDATE: Rusty answered my question in the comments. Thanks Rusty!* My Question and their Answer:

*Keen* In the pre-launch party we have seen the majority of the servers showing “light”. Do you anticipate even growth across the servers? If some servers remain low pop will you merge servers or take other actions to ensure active gameplay?

[FLS]Rusty: Server growth – Yes, you generally get a significant bump from the release of the retail box. MMO companies have a well established formula for taking your initial numbers (such as pre-orders) and extrapolating your launch population from that. Our server deployment was based on those multiples, and so far, we’re right on track.

Come on. I KNOW that and anyone out there with an inkling of experience over the past decade in MMOs will know that. My fault for giving them the ‘out’ with the first half of the question, but why couldn’t I get an answer to the server merges? Probably because, to many, it’s a loaded question. Merges can be good but within the first weeks or month of launch it can be PR suicide. Rusty, if you’re out there, can you take a moment and alleviate my concerns? If most of the servers remain low pop will you merge them (or take some other action) to allow everyone the enjoyment of a busy and alive Caribbean?

All hope wasn’t lost after my question was dodged. Another valiant soul answered the call to ask a very similar question not unlike the one I asked the other night:

*daderp* Are there plans to offer incentives for joining low population sides on specific servers? As it stands some sides are outnumbered upwards of 5 to 1 and there is no incentive to join such sides.

[FLS]isildur: Yes. There are both systematic incentives coming, related to making underdog nations less vulnerable to PvP conquest, and individual incentives to make playing a character in an underdog nation more interesting. I don’t believe it’s possible to actually make your server populations truly balanced; the real task is to make sure the game is fun for people in any nation, regardless of population.

Okay, that’s a little better. I see they have thought about their meeting and were prepared for the question this time. I wrote a blog post about this recently and it seems that they see server balance the same way I do.

The remaining questions offer up either new information or clarification. Read more for the rest.

*daderp* While we have been told that there are plans for more instanced, controllable PVP such as the player skirmish system and the society battles, are there any plans in the works for more sporadic PVP systems or can we expect the skirmish and society PVP systems to be general direction the game will take?

[FLS]isildur: World PvP is still the primary focus of most of the game’s systems. The Skirmish system is really just intended to get players who are interested in a ‘fair’, competitive fight together to show who’s the best and baddest. The real rewards for PvP all come from actual in-world battle. We’re planning to expand the number of different types of port final battles available, and have a number of other PvP-centric features in design.

*LeonKeyh* You guys have mentioned player governed ports. Can you go into some of the details that you guys are throwing around or have planned?

[FLS]isildur: The basic idea of port governance is that you can accumulate influence in a port, and use that influence to seize control, or support someone else’s bid to seize control. The governor has a lot of powers, including the ability to adjust tax rates and build infrastructure, but it’s a precarious position, and has a lot of attached responsibility. If you’re not popular, you make too many enemies, you don’t see to the port’s defense… you get toppled.

*beans* How long does it take for a port to revert back to the original nation?

[FLS]isildur: Only pirate-controlled ports revert over time. Otherwise, if you take a port, it’s yours till one nation wins a world victory. We’re expecting that to take about a month or so; a well-organized nation could make it happen sooner, and a well-organized defense could make it take longer. Pirate ports that are captured revert back to being dens of piracy after three days; similarly, ports that pirates raid re-establish law and order after three days. World victories are serious, major events; there are lots of rewards for winning one, and you get to dance on the fallen bodies of your enemies, and so forth. However, just as in real history, after the battles are over the heads of Europe meet and everything is more or less shuffled back the way it was before the war.

*Jenna* Any word on Player Housing for PotB?

[FLS]Rusty: We don’t have plans at this time for traditional player housing. The goal of player housing is to show off your cool loot, and in most games, itÂ’s a little creepy (“hey, come back to my house, IÂ’ve got something to show you”). What we’re doing instead is a Captain’s Cabin, where you’ll have your cool stuff on display, and we have some gameplay moments where the players will collect before a big battle in the group leader’s Captain’s Cabin. It’ll be a really fun way of working in that experience into the general game flow. Later on, we are interestedin providing Guild Housing, which is a subject all its own.

[FLS]isildur: My belief is that players don’t want ‘housing’ in the sense of ‘a place to sleep and keep the rain off’ — what I’ve always wanted in games is a social space, a place where I can hang out with people and do interesting things. That’s the impetus behind the idea of the guild hall, and it extends to a variety of different social spaces we want players to be able to build and operate: taverns, theaters, mansions, and so forth. So in the sense that ‘housing’ = ‘an interesting place to hang out with other players’, yes.

*Sardus* Question: Have the DEVs considered multi boarding combat? E.g. can more than two people participate in boarding combat? Right now people seem to be also exploiting that 1 minute of invulnerability you get when you first load in. What has been looked into?

[FLS]isildur: Yes, we have. It was a fundamental part of the earliest design of the boarding system. It got cut. It will return. As to the issues with the invulnerability timer, that’s something we continue to tinker with — and by ‘that’ I mean ‘all the various invulnerability timers in the game’, any one of which can potentially lead to trouble.

  • Sorry about that. I thought the second part of the question was if the first part has a more dour answer. And you wouldn’t believe the number of people who don’t know about the bump from retail! πŸ™‚

    Anyyway, to address your question in specific terms is kind of difficult, because it’s more like an ER question. Very specific, and very contextual. For example, we’d have to consider degree and trajectory:

    Degree – How light is “too” light? We have our vision of it, but we’ve mostly focused on how heavy is too heavy (stress testing and whatnot). If it’s so light that the experience is unenjoyable, we need to change it.

    Trajectory – Are we growing the population, or is it reducing? If the former, we might keep light servers around because they’re filling up. If the latter, we’d need to make changes.

    For the extremes, it’s pretty obvious (server merges, or frantic calls to Dell for more boxes). But for reasonable situations, I really can’t give a blanket answer.

  • I have a habit of looking too far down the road and that leads to these ER questions. Thanks for coming here and clarifying. πŸ™‚

    That’s all I really wanted to know; just that some thought had been put into the possible trajectories (nice terminology) that servers could take. Just the fact that you acknowledge server merges are an obvious solution in an extreme situation makes me more at ease. Many devs will never even consider them as an option.

    I can sleep easy now. πŸ˜›

    Thanks again Rusty. Appreciate it. πŸ™‚