PotBS yarrr

[friznit]

Anyone playing this? Able to give a quick summary on what it's all about and what it's like?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I'd be interested to know if it's still as fucked as it was in the beta.

[Dog Pants]

PCG reviewed it this month. It got 72%. In short, the swordfighting was painfully shit, the characters all look the same, the servers are instanced by language, so are all one sided (English server has all English side, French server has everyone playing French, etc), but the ship combat is very good. Oh, and not enough parrots and pirate talk.

I think if they fixed the swordfighting it could be okay from the sounds of it. Especially if you could get custom logos to put on your sails. You all know what I'm thinking. And parrots.

[Hehulk]

Sword fighting is over stated. Vast majority of combat is small groups of ships (6 v 6) or occasionally port battles (24 v 24).

[Anhamgrimmar]

I did play the open beta, and i tried a mates account to see what it was like when it went 'live', but theres been many many patches since then.


I like the way the economy works (No single player making billions of IS....er.....dubloons), ship to ship combat is fantastic, avatar combat much much less fantastic (But not as sucktacular as it was during the beta), and the PVP is quite good.


I can only compare it to eve, as i've never really put enough time into COH/COV, so heres anhams patented COMPARE-O-TRON:

Ship to Ship combat:
PotBS takes it. Eve can be good, but at the end of the day its just maintain range, push buttan, recieve killmail. In PotBS you've got to gauge the wind, as well as firing arcs (And pushing buttans, obviously.) If you can get inside a larger ships turning circle, you can choose where to hit him for the most damage (Or to mitigate the damage he will do to you) Also cooldown (Cycle times) on repair items (Planks for the hull, canvas for sails, rum for the crew, guns for....well...guns) are long enough to ensure its not a case of sitting there in your BS tanking the tiny ships shooting you. eventually you will go down, unless you get lucky and hammer the ickle ships. Plus the fights tend to be at close range, so you can see the enemy crew getting pinged of his ship as you volley him with grape.

Avatar Combat:
Eve almost takes it . AvCom in pirates really is that bad. It can be a laugh at times, and obviously youve got all the emotions you could ask for. except /me bums obviously. But its redicularly laggy, and mostly its hammer attack buttons until enemy is dead.

PVP:
I dont know which games version of PVP i prefer, purely cause i dont do enough of it in either game However i do like the whole 'contention' mechanic. If i spend all week killing 'your' NPCs, that sail out of your port, then eventually the pirates will start to turn up (as you obviously cant police your home waters.) If this goes on for long enough, one of the other nations will decide to attack your port. or even the pirates themselves will attack it! If one faction takes most of the ports in the game, then YAAAAAY! moneys. and the 4 powers sign a treaty, all ports return to their original owner, and away we go again.

Setting/Storyline/Flavour
Pirates. I dunno about everyone else, but pirates of the <s>caribbean</s> Burning sea are better than pirates of new eden. Or miners of new eden.....

Economy/Manufacturing:
PotBS. without a shadow of a doubt. Much simpler, but it also horses you to work together to make big ships (You've got a limit of 10 economic structures per account per server, and it needs more than that for a ship production line.)

I surpose its a question of which game you played in the '80s/'90s. If you played Elite/Frontier, and were crying out for a multiplayer version, then EVEs for you. If you spent more time playing sid meiers pirates!, then its PotBS for you. NB: i havent played PotBS for about 2 months, so i dunno what state the avatar combat is in now.


If you went out doors, instead of wasting your formative years playing vidyagaems, then GTFO of here, and go play http://www.wolfquest.org/ or sommat, ya damn hippy

[Hehulk]

Ship to Ship combat:
PotBS takes it. Eve can be good, but at the end of the day its just maintain range, push buttan, recieve killmail. In PotBS you've got to gauge the wind, as well as firing arcs (And pushing buttans, obviously.) If you can get inside a larger ships turning circle, you can choose where to hit him for the most damage (Or to mitigate the damage he will do to you) Also cooldown (Cycle times) on repair items (Planks for the hull, canvas for sails, rum for the crew, guns for....well...guns) are long enough to ensure its not a case of sitting there in your BS tanking the tiny ships shooting you. eventually you will go down, unless you get lucky and hammer the ickle ships. Plus the fights tend to be at close range, so you can see the enemy crew getting pinged of his ship as you volley him with grape.

Just because I can't see eve compared to some and not put my two pence in, here's my two pence

Guaging the wind, and firing arcs as I understand it can fairly easily be compated to angular and transversal velocity in eve. Small ships getting inside the firezone of bigger ones is far more easily compared to tracking on turrets, and those rep modules in eve have cycle time instead of cooldown.

Ammo, POTBS seems fairly unique on. Can't draw any direct comparison to eve there because it's all either hit and miss and deal damage if you hit, where POTBS is hit or miss, and do different kinds of effects as well as damage which allows for far more tactical use of ammo over everyone load long range, or everyone load short range.

Economy seems like something you could just as easily abuse multiple accounts for, same as eve, however I know very little about how complicated the process might be to make those nice shiny 1st rate ships of the line and for all I know you need 50 manufacturing slots to make the materials and build one.

[friznit]

/casts magic wand


PotBS is going F2P on Monday apparently. My ArmA2 lolClan seems to be interested in getting a gang going (some of them played before and have old characters and monies). I think the plan is to be Spanish cos every other fucker is English. Not sure which server yet though.

Anyone up for giving it a shot?

[TheJockGit]

...what the fuck is it??

[Pnut]

[friznit]

Read Anham's post above. It's a pirate MMO which never really reached enough numbers to be good. Also, given you have three sides - Brits, Frogs and Dagos - you can imagine how it got a bit imbalanced cos every fucker wanted to be British.

[Dog Pants]

I'm happy to give this a go for a few fridays if there's interest.

[friznit]

Been playing this quite a bit along with the chaps from my ArmA2 lolclan. In a nod to 5punk I have a fully CGA ship - pink sales, magenta hull and cyan trimmings. My avatar is also outrageously faaabulous, just like my avatar here.

It's actually quite a lot of fun when you zoom around with a fleet of 6 frigates wtfpwning everything you see.

[shot2bits]

oh yeah i meant to look at this again but forgot, whats the F2P model like?

[eRabbit]

My avatar is also outrageously faaabulous, just like my avatar here.

Twat.

[friznit]

oh yeah i meant to look at this again but forgot, whats the F2P model like?

Actually surprisingly unobtrusive. You can play perfectly well on F2P all the way through, but are limited on things like the number of ships you actually own (though since you only sail one at a time that's not an issue). Since you get full membership permanently after a single month's sub, most people fork out a tenner and avoid all the microtransaction gunk. You get a few added benefits for keeping up the sub, but not enough to be worth it long term.

I doubt it'll be a 'sitter', but it's amusing enough for a while and apparently the end game can be a lot of fun (mass pvp battles to take over ports)