2 New Devlogs
Grogbeard and Misha have each posted a new Devlog on the Pirates of The Burning Sea site. Grogbeard once again gives everyone some more insight on his philosophy about the MMO genre. Misha talks about her recent round of combat testing.
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06/10/2004
Findar
The Case for a Cast of Thousands
It’s been a couple of weeks of devilish details, and rather than trouble you with dry tales of fixing cargo bugs, implementing small testing tools, tweaking boarding combat, etc., Rev has asked me to regale you with some more of my ramblings in the realm of MMO philosophy.
In fact, what follows is actually an adaptation of the predecessor to The Case for Player versus Player, the topic of my previous Dev Log. Upon reading this you may note that it transitions nicely to a discussion of the Macro PvP game. Without further ado…
The Case for a Cast of Thousands
The revenue model associated with Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO’s) has acquired the attention of many folks, especially large companies eager to tap into the monthly income of a large subscription base. However, certain game designs do not lend themselves to an MMO model, mainly for the following reasons: the game offers nothing more than a multiplayer game experience, without justification for a monthly subscription fee. There is the perception that any kind of social environment will justify an MMO, but chat rooms and multi-play modes on single player games already do that.
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Combat Testing
Between planned breakages and unplanned breakages, we hadn't done much play-testing lately. We finally set one up last week. Heidi, Augustus, Rusty, Jeff, and Isildur as Coast Guard were to pounce on Joe and I as pirates. (Now, does that sound fair to you?) ;-) Joe & I saw them coming and ran. This was one of the most boring play-tests ever. (The most boring was when Robespierre, Isildur, and I were pirates lying in wait behind an island near a known shipping line for a convoy of merchants sailing past escorted by only one Navy ship. Apparently, they sailed right past us and we never saw them.) Anyway, Heidi was in our flight path (we were surrounded but least heavily guarded to the west, which gave us favorable wind and only Heidi as a threat) but she got very few shots off. Rusty managed to get close enough to me that he would've disabled my sails and arrested me except he got distracted by a phone call from Richard King, enabling us to get away. Lesson learned: the Coast Guard around here needs better organization, leadership, and discipline. ;-) Not much learned about firing chain at sails nor even about the relative speeds of sloops vs. cutters, which was part of the point of the exercise.
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