Tonight was the PotBS Dev Chat over at MMORPG.com. I usually never attend these things because most of the time it’s questions that either can’t be answered so they dance around or questions that have already been answered a thousand times over.

Tonight though was different. I felt the need to attend and ask some questions because PotBS is at a pivotal moment. Right now their game is unique and trying to make waves in a very big, very stagnant, body of MMO water. I was pleasantly surprised with most of the questions asked tonight and the answers, although broad as always, were decent. Most importantly one of my questions gets answered… sorta.

Here’s a sampling of the best questions asked at tonight’s chat.

Keen.1 asks, “Will anything be done to ensure balanced populations? For example Spanish on Rackham outnumber most nations 2 to 1.”

<[FLS]isildur> Heh. We just had a design review meeting right before this chat about population balance tools we’re working on. The short answer is ‘yes’; the longer answer is that we’ve got some fairly complex plans for addressing server balance without being punitive, and we also believe that (as the Spanish experience in Beta demonstrated) a well-organized and dedicated nation can still win, even with lower population.

[BWITRG]Chocolat_Cream.1 asks, “Are you considering creating a PVP only server in the future ( automatic pvp flag ) ?”

<[FLS]isildur> We’ve talked about it. It’s actually more complex than you might think, because of how we’ve integrated PvP throughout our other systems. So *if* we see that the demand exists to support a server like that, we’ll consider moving forward with the work to address those design issues.

Dievas.1 asks, “Can you provide any insight as to the end-game content, both PvE and PvP? What sort of content is being pushed as a priority?”

<[FLS]isildur> There’s a lot of exciting endgame stuff coming. Right now we’re working on an extremely complex and difficult encounter — what we’ve been calling a ‘ship dungeon’ internally — as a prototype for future high-end content. So you’ll see very challenging PvE gameplay at the high end as we move forward. I hesitate to say ‘raids’ because a lot of people have negative associations with that term, but we think of this as our version of ‘raid’ content. Additionally, we’ve got plans for many more varied and goal-oriented PvP encounters — Rusty mentioned the Skirmish system earlier, and that’s a major and important element of this plan, but we’re also discussing variations on the port conquest battles, particularly for pirate raids. As well, we have major economic endgame content coming down the pipe, including plans for allowing players and guilds to govern ports, and player-owned social spaces such as housing, taverns, estates, and so forth.

As you can see it was a pretty good chat and for the most part worth the read.

Read More for the rest of the Dev Chat. It’s a long one. (more…)

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