WOW set the bar to high, so every other new mmo will have to fight a lot for a place. Mass advertising and trial periods will have to be included, otherwise theres not even a small chance to succeed.
Also its convenient that the game is fun and offers enough content not to get boring fast.
When i say "to get boring fast" i don't just mean lack of features, the fact that what they include is just like every other mmo, usually the parts we want to skip, like dull quests about gathering pieces of crap from 50 monsters over and over, doesn't really help to sell a new game.
I speak for myself here but i believe this is a general feeling, after 3 years of WOW, i don´t want another game that will make me level a character for a month with repetitive quests, then having to do the same for every new character i create. That instantly puts me off from any MMO.
Try different things, make it so its not that boring, advertise it like crazy and offer the chance to trial it just to that point you feel you need to buy the game to experience the rest. Ppl will play the game when that happens.

WOW was a big success because it gathered all the good things from previous MMOs and made it work together just right, but even that gets boring.

Krumm

@masterdingo: I believe the tone was meant to be tongue-in-cheek...at least partially. Don't take it personally...unless the game fails, in which it's all your fault. ;)

Captain Impulse

Having played the beta, I was completely underwhelmed with the character creation and the basic gameplay. There was absolutely no way I was going to pay to play that game.

t0nt042

Even a game with Pirates has to be fun if it wants to get my subscription fee. PotBS just wasnt any fun for me.

Jusoon

[www.3dtotal.com]

Hey Luke,

Did you play this game? The way that you came at us was a bit abrasive. If I were interested in this game, I'd play it. Unfortunately, I can dedicate time to one MMO at a time, if any at all. I'll try out anything with a free trial, but will ignore anything without a free trial. If companies can't give me a taste, then I can't justify giving them a dollar.

masterdingo

It's their own damn fault. They knew from beta that sea travel times were outrageously long and perilous, and that basically forces out anyone who's not up for being bored out of their skulls from hours of dodging pirates.

The core gameplay is great, but they just went horribly wrong in design somewhere.

Erwos

The problem is that Flying Labs is that they built a beautiful game... with only two missions. They had the "ship combat" mission and the "walk around bein' sword-fightey" mission. That's it...

It was boring. Great idea! Awesome concept! Really boring game...

Werrick

@DrXym: Puzzle Pirates is unadulterated crack. D:

PotBS intrigued me at first but lacked the sparkle of something genuinely different - and without a trial to test it out, I'm certainly not investing in the game when there're so many like it available for free.

Achenar

I would sign up but there are no Ninjas, and we all know

Ninga > Pirate ;)

SAKY

DrXym

I refuse to play mmo...I don't have that time or dedication. I'll just stick with multiplayer games like warhawk. That's good enough for me. No mmo...stop making them!

nxp3

Why can't I be a parrot? I should be able to squawk and fly and crap on people. They should be able to shoot/stab/eat me.

If they'd let people be parrots, this would solve all their problems.

Islandkiwi

JocktheMotie

Just because a game has an awesome concept doesn't make the game itself good.

I tried the beta and it was just too much like every other MMO but with another skin. The ship combat was fun and economy model was interesting but it was just as much "work over fun" as everything else in the genre.

Vodun

Nothing will ever even come close to touching WOW in the MMO world, and its a shame, I'd love for there to be some reason to play something else. After the failure that was Exteel i'm starting to lose hope.

katboi

Maybe more people would play if it wasn't shiite? I tried it and found it lacking, then again I don't play any MMO's at the moment.

Morberis

@Channing: I'd know about it seeing as I am off duty and all ;)

ThatsMrOffDutyNinja

This is what happens to bad mmo's cashing in on the "Pirates" craze... I've played it and it was fun for a bit but paying a premium MMO price (at $15) Wasn't worht it for this game.

Kaizuden

You know instead of shutting down servers they could've given a 15day trial like most other MMOs do. With Pirates you have to buy it in order to just test it out, that put me off..

Glazun

@ThatsMrOffDutyNinja:
Yeah, this would never happen to a NINJA MMO. Of course, if a ninja mmo game did exist, you wouldn't know about it. =/
What a connundrum.

Channing

I already saw this game on clearance at Target the other day. Never a good sign.

Jay

It's way too much like Sid Meier's pirates except online.

nimagraven

How can this be? I just read an article on MSNBC that pirate attacks are up 20%!

[www.msnbc.msn.com]

Eltigro

I was waiting till they had a ninja MMO Luke. ^_^

ThatsMrOffDutyNinja

When they take a niche game like pirates in this time period and attempt to turn it into WoW, this is what you get.

recscue

I refuse to play MMO's untill there's a Nintendo MMO, I'm going to be waiting a long time.

Iceking5

Oh, I would love to play it. I just don't have the computer capable of doing so.

Lixie

Heres why:

- Non consensual PvP.[1]
- One class is overpowered (naval officier)

[1] PvP become "almost" unavoidable.

Tei

@Glazun: Thats precisely my problem with it. Also, there's the fact that when they had a beta and I got into it..it didn't run on my computer. I didn't bother tinkering with it to get it to work.

@cordsie: Agreed. That's how guild wars got popular. They took a lot of the elements of WoW and turned them COMPLETELY upside down (travel times, dependency on the best gear, and so on..) The next big seller will have to do the same..offer something that is a completely different experience. Also the graphics need to be pretty but not extremely dependent on video cards and on the fly rendering. A lot of games lately seem to rely more and more on the 3d modeling and less on the textures they put on the models and lower the system requirements. Examples: Tabula Rasa looked like crap on my computer. NWN 2 on the highest possible settings still looks like crap. Guild Wars and Lineage 2 look as beautiful on my INTEL "Graphics" laptop as they do on my gaming desktop. Too many people are buying computers with lots of space and next to no video card power. Making a game like Pirates of the Burning Sea, that will not run on this laptop but will run on my OLD gaming desktop which has half the processor and memory power, is like the game company saying "Hi, I want to shoot myself in the foot and alienate more than half the market from ever being able to play my product." Successful games like Guild Wars and WoW both go to great lengths to make their games as playable on as many systems as possible.

Ajh

I agree Cordsie.

I'd be happy to buy a game, have fun and then move on. All that pointless grinding to unlock other aspects of the game is just artificially prolonging the game.

Asbestos_Underwear

If you want a pirate MMO just go play puzzle pirates, it's free to play and download.

dsmx

You know, I had been very excited about this game until I actually got my hands on it. I mean, tactical ship-to-ship combat in a persistent world where nations are vying for port control? Sounds great!

The ship combat is great, but ends up being quite monotonous. Quite a few of the missions are just cut n' paste with names/places changed. That wouldn't be bad if you didn't run into them so often. Then you realize all of those "cool" tasks you hopped to accomplish can only really be done by large player organizations. Mix in an EVE-like economy system, and there's no reason for your average gamer to play.

Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't the next WoW, it's just another EVE. The difference being that both EVE and PotBS are boring on the 10-20minute scale, with the real fun lying in the metagames of economy and politics which few will put in the time to reach.

Siegeman

oops, "too" long*

masterdingo

@Luke Plunkett: Cool, I respect that. I find the fact that Eve hasn't grown more in popularity than it has to be more of a disappointment than this game not pulling the type of audience that WoW has. So far, some good MMOs haven't taken off due to bad marketing / low resources (i.e., Auto Assault, Eve) but this one isn't really worth getting behind. Eve got something right that I feel needs to be expounded upon... you still level up skills, even when you're not signed in. There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, and responsibilities that fill up at least 70 of the hours in that week. I would like to feel as though I accomplished something in a short period of time. That's probably where WoW / Guild Wars succeed and games like this and Lineage don't, it takes to long to feel as though you've accomplished something of worth. You can sign onto WoW with a new character and be level 5 within 15-20 minutes. In Guild Wars, you can either play through the main game, or take a fully leveled character of your design into PvP Arenas the moment that you sign in. Pirates are decent in concept, but boring in play. Even if you hit the more controversial side of pirating (raping, slave trading, murder of innocents, setting people adrift, kidnapping for ransom, shanghaiing for crew, etc) the actual life of a pirate was a boring day to day fight against scurvy. Games set in real history don't spark the imagination as deeply as games set in fantasy worlds, so games like this will continue to fail, even if their overall design is brilliant.

masterdingo

I tried it for a week. The ship combat and trade was promising and could have gone somewhere. The walk around parts were very, very bad. Boring (and buggy, and unpredictable) combat mechanics, endless repetition, and animations that looked like they were produced by a first year 'Intro to 3d Modelling' class.

The big killer was that in order to progress on the shippy side, you have to wade through hours of these stupid, pointless, mind-numbing swashbuckling missions. Completely killed any fun that the other side of the game might have been. It was like some noob MBA suddenly decided, two thirds of the way through the game's development, that they just needed to be 'more like WoW'.

Free advice to MMOG companies: If you want to be the next WoW, start by designing a game that is as dissimilar to WoW as you can make it. The next WoW has to be a game that is so unlike WoW that nobody will have seen it coming.

cordsie

@masterdingo: Uh, joking, just a little. Though, now you mention it, I did play it for a bit, thought it was OK for an MMO. I hate MMOs, though.

Luke Plunkett

Despite my hatred of elves, fairies & the like I could not get into the whole pirate thing. I think I am just done with MMO's for now.

Livid

@Captain Impulse: Sweet! I've always wanted to be the reason a sub-par game croaks. Look out, Halo 3, you're next! :P

masterdingo

Honestly, this game really just isn't that great. Also, Disney just launched Pirates of the Carribean offerring pretty much the same atmosphere as PotBS (if not the same gameplay).

Methusalah

I beta'd Pirates, and while, yes, they managed to make a pirate MMO, they also managed to make *a really Goddamned boring* pirate MMO. That part is important.

Phil

Frankly, the game just didn't seem worth paying for.

Rhys

@Tei: Unless something changed post launch, this is a crock. PVP is non consensual - IF you consensually enter a PVP zone. And considering how easy they are to spot..

That Lamer

Just because its an original attempt MMO doesn't mean its any good. There are numerous problems with the game, not to mention not a lot was heard about it.

Flawless101

I used to play MMOs and I used to love it. My first was Ultima Online. As I played and experienced all the MMO's, it's safe to say that all MMO's in the end are all the same game, with different skins.

I don't play MMo's anymore. I noticed the more I played them, the worst I got in every other game. I lost my nice twitch response for FPS, my thinking skill for RTS. So...6 month out of a MMO now and I'm rocking the score boards again.

Anyways, that was off topic. PotBS was nothing new in the genre. Sure it had pirates, but it was basically EVE on the ocean.

macr0planet

Yeah... beta was horrible. They had some neat ideas, but after a few days ship combat got stale, which was the only strength in the entire game. The rest of it sucked. It was a very watered down eve online with pirates. Its not the fault of gamers for not liking it. It's the fault of Flying labs for making a crappy game.

desterion

1. Just because it's Pirates doesn't mean it'll have our money. If the game sucks, it sucks.

2.Make it for Mac and then we'll talk. If it is available for Mac, then I blame their marketing dept for not being informative. If it's not, then yeah, good, they deserve it.

jonathan

@macr0planet:I think you can say the same thing about all FPS's and all RTS's the drawing power of MMO's is the open worlds, the community, and a game that doesn't end. PotBS will last as long as the pirate craze, just as City of Heroes will last as long as superheroes are popular. The only difference is superheroes are becoming a popular part of the mainstream. But anything can change

mtheumer

Asper

I was very interested in this game but I wasn't willing to invest in this game without being able to try it first. I waited patiently for them to have a free trial but I never noticed one. I had a WOW account for about two years because I got hooked during the trial period. I'm sure a lot of people have felt the same way. To me, not having a free trial just shows that they don't have enough confidence in their product that it can snag people with a small taste. It's a shame that this game didn't work out though because it did seem to have some good ideas that should have set it apart from the pack.

Munkey_Funk

I have an idea for a new Facebook.
Give me millions of dollars and 3 years to make it. We can take Facebook down.

Launch day:
Why isn't anyone signing up?

Sullyville

Count me in the crowd of people saying "I'd play it if there were a free trial".

I mean, $40 for the game, then $15 a month?!

I was willing to pay that for WoW, because it was developed by Blizzard, who, as we all know, have a terrific track record (Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft ... nuff said).

PaulMorel

Postdata:

Pirates vs Ninjas vs Aliens vs Robots

Tei

Was this even launched? Other than initial coverage of it's development announcement, I never really saw any news about it in the games press...

Phantom_Photon

@el_rezzo: That's rather bizarre, because PotBS was released in Aus by BigPond, IIRC.

That said, I'm subscribed to PotBS, and I love the game. There's just one thing missing - proper LFG/grouping mechanics. Just like in EvE. With people out in their ships most of the time and with only chat channels to go with and combat actually requiring focus (unless of course, you just suck or want to take ship damage unnecessarily), it's difficult to find a group and there's very little group content to begin with.

I believe the server merge is a good idea - no game should begin with 10+ servers unless it's been marketed and hyped to death and has a fuckton of preorders.

Conceptually the Avatar Combat system is brilliant, the problem isn't so much with the system than it is with the "feel" of it.

Ship combat is near-perfect.

Koztah

Horrible, horrible news!.

Pirates are cool, no cool pirates = global warming!

Tei

I still haven't seen Pirates on sale here in Australia. So this isn't my fault, I like pirates almost as much as ninjas so I would like a trial of this game to see if it's any good, if so I would prop pay for this

el_rezzo

I've been playing this for a good while now and I agree with a lot of points made in this thread. On the one hand, this game has terrible avatar combat - you just don't want to do it and at the most, it's OK. The interface is not great, they need to give societies better control over things (shared warehouses, etc) and there are a few annoying glitches that they could easily solve.

BUT! There is a great game in there if you give it time. PvP is the most fun I've ever had in any MMO with player skill being more important than your "phat lootz" (although part of the battle is indeed, choosing the right ship). The economy is really awesome, with ways to really have some fun with it - like a lot of people said, it is very Eve and that's a good thing.

Flying labs is changing a lot of stuff in its upcoming patches, including the ability to skirmish against your own nation and other much needed fixes.

This game is very PvP centered and if you hate it you're not going to like this. The whole point of Pirates being to take over the map (the carribean) and in order to do that you're going to have to beat some french chap over the head with your cannons. And you're going to have to have friends to do it with. I have yet to understand why people play MMO's as single player games, but in Pirates you're definitely not getting the full experience playing by yourself. A point was made that you won't get the really cool stuff without a society (meaning guild). Yes, that is true. The really big ships are a huge team effort to create but it is worth it when your society shows up with the biggest ship your enemies have ever seen and run for their lives.

It's a really great game if you give it a chance...

but I think that they're going to have to start giving out buddy keys if they don't want their game to die on them. Seriously, why they aren't doing that is unbeknown to me.

Play pirates! It's on sale at Target! You won't regret it.

(as an aside, if you have stairs in your house, we have a kickass society on the Rack and should hit us up for buddy keys)

looselybased52

Ummm, the game is average and it had no marketing whatsover. If you are making an MMO that is only average, and you don't have a marketing budget, then I hope you can get buy with only 50k subscribers.

Benstein

System_Zero

You know what, the game is awesome, I'm not going to lie, but it has one fatal and glaring flaw that will push virtually everyone away from it, the economic system. I decided not to play it because the economic system is just to much freaking work for a video game. It tries far to hard to simulate a real world economy. When I come home to play a game that's the last thing I want to think about. Seriously, only player driven shops, you have to sail to the port it's held to get your item, you don't know the price of what you are bidding on, you have to build every little piece of a ship (from the keel to the hammocks). . . it's just ridiculous. I'm sure some people enjoy that, but I'm not one of them.

Sir_Crocidile

I've spent countless hours of my life playing both FFXI and WoW, and thankfully I have gotten past them. The two problems I find with MMOs in general are:

-The people.
-The grind.

We spend our entire lives competing against other people for jobs, money, social status, tickets and many other things. I play video games to get out of this competitive mindset and just enjoy things as they are. However, by using MMOs as my escape, I never get out of the competitive mindset as I am now competing for gear, mobs, money, and parties/raids, generating even more stress rather than relieving it!

Hopefully after seeing Tabula Rasa and PotBS do not-so-well, most companies will stop looking at MMOs as a low-risk venture and start investing in other higher-risk projects. At least, one can hope.

psychobaka

This game had so much potental when it was first announced and I was extremly excited about it. Then I started playing in beta and found this game pretty much an MMO version of Sid Miers Pirates (which I love Sid Miers) however I wasnt will to shell out 15 bucks for something I could play on my Xbox.

Delusions

The games nothing special. The economic system was boring and buying was always frustrating for me at least. And the ship combat was alright for awhile but grew old when you just kept doing the same thing over and over again. I guess thats why I've hated all MMO's since I got off the SWG craze when the NGE hit.

Jomo7

It was painfully boring. The ship to ship combat was slightly entertaining but it gave the impression that there wasn't a great deal of depth to the ship to ship or man to man combat.

The quests were counter-intuitive and the game was ug-fuckin-ly.

The problem wasn't with the "pirate theme". The problem was that it was a sub-standard effort.

After the free month was over, I'm now using the cd as a coaster on my coffee table.

EndersGame

Yeah, the biggest issues I heard were pretty much how boring and buggy it still was. I had a few friends who played LOTRO actually switch over for a while, then they pretty much got hit by the PVPers who had leveled to 50 in almost a day and were just taking everyone out. The game then pretty much posted their plans for the future that would lean towards even more PVP areas and more PVP combat where whoever was ahead could slaughter all the lower level people and steal all their stuff. Thats not fun for a casual gamer, so all the friends I knew that were playing pretty much quit immediately. WoW at least gives you an option, Pirates did not and it's coming back to haunt them now.

Zakuen

uh, its because pirates of the burning sea isn't worth its price. The first 15 hours of the game are AWFUL because the learning curve is out of whack, it is very difficult to level your character and you die way too often, it lacks some of the useful features that other MMOs have, and overall anyone with something else better to play will give up on this game 10 hours in.

fenderfuel08

Frankly, I thought this was a good MMO, I was part of beta, but I never thought it was worth the $40 game price pluse $15 monthly fee. It's good, it just doesn't give enough yet. Eventually if enough people play it may have more for people to tinker with, but right now its not worth the price.

madbassman39

ohhello

C22DBlueKnightOne

@psychobaka: I agree. There is always someone in WoW that you know that always gets better gear than you do, always wins the need rolls against you, always has help from guild members to buy a mount and 50g items at the auction house while you're broke... all of that just makes me feel like crap when I play.

Thats why I stopped playing WoW and now play the ultimate stress reliever: Super Smash Bros Brawl!

fenderfuel08

@looselybased52: "BUT! There is a great game in there if you give it time."

I think this is the most telling statement in this discussion. Whatever else it is, PoTBS makes the mistake of hiding its best gameplay from new players and in making it only one of three dominant game modes.

This is exactly the opposite of the example of WoW. Part of WoW's success is that the game is an exercise in scaling. Blizz developed a core gameplay mechanic that is fun and fundamental and kept it the same from level one to the level cap. They then scaled it up iteratively in a variety ways as the player developed their skills. This makes the game very incremental and therefore approachable. It is also seamless: when the WoW player moves from land to the water, the core gameplay remains fundamentally the same. When a WoW player moves from PvE to PvP, the core gameplay remains fundamentally the same. What keeps peoples interest is the constant addition of variations to the core system, not utterly different systems.

What this does is capture the imagination of the new player. As soon as the new player logs out of Elwynn Forest for the first time, their first thought is "that was nice... I wonder what all the other zones look like." You've got them at that point, and then by continuing to develop the gameplay seamlessly, you keep them.

My experience with PotBS is that there is scalability in the various systems (ground melee, naval combat, economics) but that these systems are distinct and severable rather than unified. As a result, the player is continually affronted with having to learn the new systems, continually frameshifting their gameplay experience, and only getting to do the fun parts (naval battles) as a reward for all the boring pats. When they hit a steep learning curve like that they are going to feel that they've taken a second job instead of a game.

Now, the WoW model has its own drawbacks, namely repetition without enough difference. But from a business perspective, its much more favorable to have players drop a game after two years than never get into it at all.

Obiter

Closing servers this early in a MMO's lifetime isn't a good sign. Auto Assault should have been a lesson to everyone.

Dorgort

heres what the developers of burning sea have to realize. I am absolutely in love with this game, but I don't own it. Why? You can't just "make" an MMO and then charge WoW subscription prices coupled with a $50 game, if the game was like $5 a month I would probably own it.

Swizzler121

I tried playing the beta back in Jan-Feb. I ranked this game right up there with Dungeons and Dragons Online. Deleted it about 30 min later.

hungerfan

I'm not sick of elves and orcs. I'm sick of MMO's.

OtakuFille

I played MMOs. I got it out of my system in a couple of months. I can't believe people don't get bored with it already. Like andrewmedina said,

1. hit a button
2. go make a sammich

Eventually step 1 got phased out entirely. I'm having much more fun now.

liquidnumb

1) 11 Servers is ridiculous for a brand new MMO.

2) It's not our fault the game is shit.

JamesR87

@cordsie: APB?

they realize that what truly makes a game fun is its core mechanic, not necessarily its content (i mean it helps but without a fun mechanic at the core no one is going to sit throught it). Anyone still play CS:S? then you understand my point. i've been playing Counter-Strike (v1 and source) since 2001, any mmo's out there that can boast the same about its players other than UO?

just look at the core gameplay mechanics (for this example i'm using combat) of all the current mmo's. its a 2 step process.

1. hit a button
2. go make a sammich

andrewmedina

I played the beta, what turned me off was the wow 'level' up style. You go out to the ocean and get immedietly hit by a ship 4-5 levels above you and there is nothing you can do.
In my opinion minor specialties is the best way rather than one overbearing level. IE there should be 100 points in gunnery, ship handeling etc, like the old UO model with a few minor tweaks.

RedOne

I love how these devs scrape together an MMO that sucks dirty donkey dick and then go "w0t, we didn't make a fortune? But we had PIRATES!" after it flops, never pausing to consider that WoW succeeds not because of the subject matter or setting, but because it's a quality product from top to bottom.

unmarkedone

@andrewmedina:
I guess the ultimate argument of "mechanics over content" is SW: Galaxies. If a name was going to sell an MMO, it'd be Star Wars, but where is it these days? (I'm sure it lasted a bit longer than Pirates has, eheh, but still.)

braddie

I havent played this one, but i dont know what it offers that a free game like Voyage Century doesnt.

LordCiego

@braddie: yep, i sincerely wished that game was more fun.
i loved it, it was just too painful after a while though.

the content WAS amazing in my opinion. for the time it was definitely the best mmo out there content wise. the mechanics kinda blew though.

andrewmedina

I played PotBS for a while. I got bored real quick. There is just too much lacking in it social wise. It is just too difficult to socialize with other players which is the strong basis of most MMO's IMHO. What I mean is that if your walking around and you see someone else walking around and you want to socialize with them, they disappear into a zone and you have no idea where they went. And they are most likely gone by the time you send a message to them like "Hi!" they are gone by then or chances are they dont even see it because all messages appear in a message window. Although alot of people are apposed to chat bubbles, I think chat bubbles would have help this game immensely when it comes to interaction.

ZerkWerk

I never bothered to pick it up because it seemed like Eve with a pirate skin. I'd rather fly past a moon than on the ocean : )

SapphireC

While I am slightly biased with a dislike towards the grind and job like work of most MMOs, I must admit the Pirate idea would be fun if implemented well.
It's a shame WoW is so big, it's a great game and it's amazing what it has achieved. But it takes up all the market, leaving less room for other MMOs with good ideas, which this could of had.
But you try getting people to quit their level 70 Paladins they worked for for a Level 1 smelly Pirate.

Silus

I absolutly love this game and the entire community involved with this game. The port battles are amazing, but I love truely love the PvP red circles. Every night I get home from work and fight pirates and nationals like crazy.

Honestly, if you haven't tried this game you are missing out, especially if you love PvP.

lojo

I tried it out. It was lame. Really piss poor graphics and terrible tutorial. Yeah, maybe it's fun after spending a week learning how to play but neither the time nor patience for that. I was left really disappointed. My idea of playing a pirate just isn't what this game delivered. I hope someone makes a better Pirate MMO.

Justo84