Pirates of the Burning Sea Interview

Interview

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Changes/Updates

XSR: What major changes have occurred since you launched PotBS just under 2 years ago, and how have they affected gameplay?

Flying Lab – fraxl: It’d be easier to tell you what hasn’t changed! We’ve put out new content patches every month since launch, so there have been a lot of additions, changes and improvements. Last time I checked, our release notes since launch were about 150 pages long.

To start, we added a new Pirate career (the Cutthroat) and a new fighting school (Brawling). Actually, the whole Swashbuckling system has been completely re-worked, with all the avatar-based content in the game updated to match. We’ve created three huge Epic Missions for groups to challenge themselves. We’ve added ship insurance, mission sharing, new tutorials, population bonuses, blockading and buy orders – the list goes on and on. The economy has been streamlined and the Auction House updated. We improved most of the UI, with still more to go. A slew of new town environments, port battle rooms and new ships have also been added. And I can’t leave out the Skirmish system, which lets people create their own risk-free, on-demand PvP battles. At the same time, we’ve constantly been fixing bugs and improving performance and stability in all areas of the game.

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Interpretation

XSR: Did these changes bring the game closer to your initial idea of the Pirates of the Burning Sea, or has your interpretation of what it should be changed over time?

Flying Lab – fraxl: The initial idea for PotBS was a long way from what we launched with. When we first began, there were no avatars and the ship combat model was (frustratingly) true-to-life. The graphics weren’t anywhere near as gorgeous as they are now and there wasn’t much at all in the way of content. Obviously, the game had already come a long way by the time we launched. Since then, we’ve had the pleasure to get a lot of feedback from our players as to what they want to do in the game and how they want to play. I’d say the changes we’ve made since launch reflect that pretty strongly. So yes, as the game has evolved our interpretation of what it is and what it can be has grown a lot too.

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Expansion

XSR: You’ve recently announced an official, free for subscribers expansion, "Power and Prestige" due for release early 2010. What features will this major update bring?

Flying Lab – fraxl: “Power & Prestige” is going to bring a long-awaited set of features we call Port Governance to the game. With this system, players will be able to leverage the influence they have with other players to be elected Governor of a port. Once in power, they will have a number of powers over the port, which I think Greg is going to outline in more detail later on.

Another major focus in “Power & Prestige” will be expanded Faction content. You’ll be able to improve your reputation with a number of different factions in the game, such as the Royal Society and the Sharktooth Raiders, through new, unique content. Once they like you enough, the factions will offer special items and content not otherwise available.

In addition to those two major points, you’ll see an improved Brawling school of fighting, in which you’ll be able to beat your foes with nothing but your bare hands (or special new fist-based weaponry). We’re also doing massive amounts of tuning to ship and avatar skills, ship stats and the economy.

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Port Governance

XSR: How will port governance as a feature, affect different aspects of the game?

Flying Lab – Lum: It’s a huge system, and it touches every part of the game in a lot of ways, most of which you’re going to have to wait and see. I will say that there will be some new PVE content that meshes with Port Governance in the form of randomized daily missions. You’ll also see changes in the ports themselves.

Port Governance will also add a lot of tactical significance to PvP and RvR because each port will be valued in different ways. Governors have a lot of power- they can upgrade the economic power of their port by reducing labor costs and adjusting tax rates. They can also influence how defensible (or not!) their port is in Port Battles.

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Military Upgrades

XSR: As a player of the game myself, one question I’d like answered in regards to Port Governance, is the military upgrades the governor can make to the town. Will these come in to play in defending from a hostile coup by societies or other players? Or will it affect Port Battles only?

Flying Lab – Lum: If other players or societies want to depose a Governor they have to have an Election, so the powers over a port’s defenses don’t help much in time of peace. If other nations try to conquer your port, however, then upgraded defenses will absolutely help you in the upcoming Port Battle. Still, the Governor’s best bet to stay in power is to keep on the good side of other players.

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Marketing

XSR: A new advertising campaign is something Flying Lab have been speaking about for a short while now, with the CEO ceremoniously announcing he’d handed the cheque to the agency in a news post. How does advertising for a game that’s been out for an extended period work? And will this campaign ramp up, the closer to the expansion release we get?

Flying Lab – Rhaegar: Marketing is a complex beast, and it’s something we’ve been working on constantly on various projects over the past year. The advertising campaign Rusty mentioned in connection with the famous cheque is a long term project that has involved a lot of market research and analysis and many iterations of ad ideas to work out what works and what doesn’t. It turns out that while a lot of ideas seems like they’ll be awesome and attract lots of people in theory, out in the wild they often don’t work so well. So research is the key, and we’ve learned a lot from the process.

Your question is actually very well timed since we’ve just finished a stage of testing, which means you should start to see PotBS ads on various websites over the coming few weeks. And yes, as the release of Power & Prestige draws closer you will see marketing in various forms – including advertising!

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Box Art

XSR: Will the game be re-released with new box art when the expansion is released?

Rhaegar: Power & Prestige will be released digitally, and will be a free download to existing subscribers, so no, there wont be a new physical box. The expansion will have its own distinctive branding though, and you’ll start to see some of that over the coming weeks and months as more details leak out, and marketing wheels begin to turn.

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Balance

XSR: One of the perceived difficult issues with running an MMO, is balancing the multitude of different players that take part in the online game. How does Flying Labs attempt to balance PVE players, with hardcore PVPers and the casual players that play a bit here and there?

Lum: We generally try to produce content and features for all player types, to varying degrees. PvP content is somewhat emergent; that is to say, PvPers create their own content simply by fighting each other. We try to keep this experience fresh by introducing new ships and adjusting each career’s skillset to match. These new ships also benefit PvE players because, of course, they end up with new toys to play with too.

We also spend a lot of time creating fantastic mission content for all players. We’ve just recently finished one of our massive, sprawling epic missions designed for groups of players called "Big Trouble in Tortuga," and it’s some of the best content we’ve ever created. Of course, we don’t neglect the casual players either – they can log on, play a few missions, kill NPCs on the Open Sea, play a quick Skirmish or produce and trade in our player-run economy. We really do have something for every kind of player.

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Live Events

XSR: One thing that some MMOs implement is live events. Does Flying Labs plan to implement this in any way in PotBS?

Rhaegar: Absolutely! We’ve experimented with Live Events in the past, and we also hold regular events on our test server to help hammer on new milestone builds before they go live. This has given us a good idea of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to live content in Potbs, so we’re now preparing to do events on the live servers more regularly and we’re very excited about it. That’s all I can say about that today, but you’ll be hearing some news about in-game events very soon, so keep your eye on burningsea.com!

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Thanks go to Flying Lab for conducting this interview with us.

NB. If you want to play this game for free, you can do so! If you’re in the military, you get 6 months free if you click here. If you’re not, don’t worry you can still get 30 days free by making clicking here and when asked, using the code "BoardingParty38" to extend the trial to 30 days.

This interview was syndicated on tech seed.

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