Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

I think people are pleasantly surprised at how much is in the 1.2 update. We have a major/minor release strategy, shooting for releases each 4-6 weeks, and 1.2 was the major release. Bey’s Retreat, a new, epic, very customized encounter for groups has gotten rave reviews, and people like the new missions in general and especially all of the improvements to the user interface. And we’ve really improved a lot of fundamental pieces of the game, all the way from how people group to how they are positioned at the beginning of a fight. They’re relatively small changes, but they have a huge impact.

At the same time, we’re putting in some changes to how Ports move into contention that will help PvE players reach ports that they have missions in. Currently, some ports are such high value that they stay in contention almost indefinitely. The new changes will fix that, so that PvP moves around the map, creating more interesting challenges for the PvP players and allowing PvE players to get at their missions safely.

1.3 is going to Testbed today, and it has huge changes for the PvP system. The goal is for players who want to PvP to focus on PvP, without having to play as many PvE missions to afford their ship losses. It also has a new structure called the Exchange shop which will refine the turn in process and enable us to react faster with tuning changes. And it also introduces Dueling, which is the harbinger of our Player Skirmish system, which will appear in 1.5. That will allow players to create custom fights for one another that will even let you break our size limitation, so you can have epic fleet battles between guilds.

They’ll still be in the Caribbean (though we’ve started talking about other areas) but the 1.4 patch is nicknamed the Patch of Pirate Love. We have some big changes coming for pirate players, both with cool content rewards (such as the new Pillaging system) and a big new change that we haven’t announced yet.

1.4 also has a lot of improvements for everyone. We have the first revamp of how avatar combat works, we have the new supernatural epic mission, improvements to port contention, and more.

Everyone knows that people play differently in beta than in release, but it’s surprising just how different those playstyles are. It’s required us to rethink systems all the way from PvP, to the economy, to something as fundamental as appropriate concurrency.

What we really didn’t foresee was how easily players took advantage of turn-ins to move a port into contention (what we call econobombs), or play the system to keep ports in contention indefinitely. This has bad implications for PvE players. We’ve always intended for reasonably careful PvE players to be able to avoid PvP, but that’s currently not the case. We have the real fix starting to come in 1.3, and the rest of it will appear in 1.4.

Game data export is a balancing act between giving players as much data as possible so that they can take part in the game while on the web, but without compromising the fun or the privacy of the players logged into the game. We're starting with exposing macroscopic game variables like port unrest state and server victory status because they are easy starting points, but we do want to start exposing more specific data. The next step will be exporting more PvP information like landmark battle state such as who got invited, how they died or won, and associated PvP leader boards. We also would like to expose online tools for societies starting with society info directory. Beyond that, we're thinking about exposing economic state like volume of goods sold, cargo type information, etc. At some point we would also like to expose character and ship stats that players can opt in to sharing. But this is all flexible. More than anything, we want to hear what you want to see exported because ultimately you are the ones that will use the data we export.

The biggest change is coming in right now (with 1.3) which is correct incentives for PvP. The second biggest change is a gob of bug fixes and general polish. The third change is a massive UI overhaul (which is still ongoing). The fourth change is the new content that we’re building which moves away from the template system we’ve used before and goes all hand crafted.

Beyond that, we have a lot more improvements planned, including shallows, which will promote more equal fights in the PvP while retaining the open aspect of the world, Player Governed Ports, which is the elder game for the Freetraders, the first stage of the avatar combat revamp, the Player Skirmish system, and so on.

Basically, if you thought that a) the game needed more polish, b) you wanted more balanced PvP fights, c) you wanted to avoid PvP, but found you couldn’t, or c) you were sick of the chat UI, then we’re addressing your issues.

Also, Bey’s Retreat is just super cool!

The current raiding system (or what we call Epic missions) is exemplified by Bey’s Retreat, which is a test to see what we can do. It lets you take on a really, really tough challenge that gives you a number of ways to solve it, and cool things to discover on the way. It’s designed for a group of six, so that you don’t have to wait to get a huge group together, but we’re also going to create content for a larger scale.

The next Epic mission will be an assault on a huge fortress occupied by supernatural forces. It’s very, very cool stuff.

Balancing bug fixing versus new features. When there’s a significant problem with the game, you have to stop and fix it *now*. When you’re developing, you can focus entirely on a new feature and continue cranking on it until you get it done, and then go off and pick off some bugs. As we roll out updates, we continue to kill high priority bugs, so the interruptions become less frequent.

The Boarding Party, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a team of Pirates of the Burning Sea players who represent the top echelon of our community. The program allows for people who have special interests in particular game features to provide feedback directly to members of our development team.

We’ve hosted several gatherings for our Boarding Party members, including events like PAX and GenCon, and we are planning even more opportunities for that group throughout the summer.

Deciding whether to roll out a partial fix to a systematic problem, or do the full implementation fix. For example, with PvP, it works, but there are some aspects of it (the ability to move a port instantaneously into contention) that we weren’t happy with. We had a new design to address the problems, but rolled out some partial fixes that the players quickly steamrolled over. It’s hard to tell whether you should spend more time, but on the definitive fix, or a less time on a fix that may not solve the problem.

If you could improve one thing about Pirates of the Burning Sea, what would it be? Let us know on the forums!