Contents 1 Audio 2 Transcript 2.1 Society Tools 2.2 Referral Program 2.3 Fishing 2.4 Questions from the Forums 2.4.1 Ship Balance 2.4.2 Griefing 2.5 Rusty Time! 3 Related Pages

In this episode I am joined by MrTheTooth, Hesh, Armadillo, Captain Howdy, MrNutty, Deqlor, FlyingShark, and Rusty to discuss Fishing, our upcoming referral program, griefing, ship tuning, and society tools.

Audio

Episode 14—Released April 2011

Transcript

Tom: "Welcome to the latest edition of the Pirates of the Burning Sea podcast. I'm Tom Atkinson-Edwards, AKA Rhaegar. With me today, we have Niklas"

Niklas: "AKA MrTheTooth"

Tom: "Matt"

Matt: "AKA Hesh"

Tom: "Shannon"

Shannon: "AKA FlyingShark"

Tom: "Declan"

Declan: "AKA Deqlor"

Tom: "Jason"

Jason: "AKA MrNutty"

Tom: "Brien"

Brien: "Yarrrr! AKA Armadillo"

Tom: "Simon"

Simon: "AKA Captain Howdy"

Tom: "And last but not least, Rusty"

Rusty: "AKA Rusty"

Society Tools

Tom: "To start off, today we're going to talk a bit about society tools. I say we—it will mostly be our designers Jason, Declan, and Simon. We have a few new people on the podcast this installment, so why don't you tell us what you do here Matt."

Matt: "I am a designer for Pirates."

Tom: "Okay. Brien?"

Brien: "I am also a designer for Pirates."

Tom: "Simon isn't actually new but this time he is. . ."

Simon: "I've been around for a while, but I just moved into Systems Design with Nutty on Pirates."

Declan: "You may know Matt & Brien from their work on the Mardi Gras event mission content, and from the recent content we did in Fort de France, and from the Anniversary content.

They've been busy for a while writing up missions and putting people into the world for the game, but they've got some good stuff coming up now too."

Matt: "Indeed. Hope you've enjoyed it."

Niklas: "Let's move on to a question by Paul_kingtiger where he says 'Tell us more about society tools!'"

Jason: "So a big challenge with the society tools is figuring how we're going to get all of these new features into the existing UI.

If you guys have opened your society window at all lately, you notice that there are a lot of buttons and a lot of functionality and a lot of different things to do there. If we're adding warehouses and the society wallet, that's just more things to cram into that UI.

So what we're doing internally is going through a number of revisions where we cannibalize other windows so we can make room for a log where we put more functions on the right-click menu. So instead of clicking on a guy and having to figure out where in the menu to find stuff it's all right there.

And we want to push all that stuff out as soon as possible, but it makes a lot more sense to give you complete features where you can make a new role, define a name for that role, give them access to the warehouse, give them access to a certain amount of doubloons per day, and roll that out all as something that you get to play with and upgrade your society into."

Simon: "The idea is that you could give specific members of your society distinct roles, kind of a job for them. And as leaders, maintain control over who has what responsibilities, but not have that all be your job. Certain people could promote or demote or assign new roles themselves. You could assign someone as Treasurer who would handle the society money. All things basically to allow you to set up a support network of people you look up to in your society."

Jason: "That you trust!"

Simon: "I was trying to avoid saying that."

Declan: "I don't think we should understate the importance of trusting your society mates."

Simon: "Hopefully everyone in your society that you would consider giving any of these roles to, you would trust! Because allowing a Treasurer to control your finances means you're really allowing them to.

A leader would still be able to remove those privileges in the future, but as long as that person has that role, you're giving them power over that area. Which frees you up to not worry about that or have someone else take over that if you can't, you know, spend the time and at any point. . ."

Rusty: "I often just want to let somebody just control all my money—lets me sleep at night—worry-free existence."

Simon: "Let me know—I'll help you out with that."

Jason: "The biggest thing behind the whole reworking of societies and how those things go is just giving players the option to customize—the power to customize. Right now you just have the three roles of Leader, Agent, and Member, but now you can expand what Agent means and add more people at that middle level—configure what they can do."

Declan: "Why call it Agent? You don't have to call it Agent"

Jason: "Yeah and all of those have custom names."

Rusty: "Oh, that's cool."

Jason: "So rename the ones you have, create new ones with custom names. We are giving you the power to make smart decisions."

Simon: "Can I be Grand Pubah?"

Declan: "We're giving you the power to make decisions. It's up to you to make them smart."

Referral Program

Tom: "Okay, so now we're going to talk a bit about a referral program that we're working on. I've been responsible for implementing the web side of this, which is how you will refer people. There will be a page on the website where you fill-in your friend's details and it sends them an email asking them to come try out the game."

Declan: "So what do we get if our friend comes out and tries out the game?"

Shannon: "For the first friend you refer, you get a very nice title indicating that you're BFFs, because you've presumably invited your best friend to join you in the game. Beyond that, we have a tiered system of rewards if you refer people who buy Burning Sea Notes from the shop from us.

So you start off getting a small Burning Sea Point reward and then if you refer more and more people, you get bigger and bigger rewards as you move up the tiers. And we even plan to expand that in the future if people really like the program to a point where you might get a percentage of what they spend.

We're still debating how exactly to implement it. But it's a very robust program; it's not just a nice title, although that's a really good way to start out."

Tom: "So it's worth pointing out that you will also get a reward if they become a Captain's Club member, so they don't just have to buy Notes on the Treasure Aisle."

Niklas: "So this is available to free players, Captain's Club members, everyone can refer friends?"

Tom: "Absolutely."

Declan: "All I got to do is send my friend an email and they download the game, they start playing the game, they buy some captain's club points and suddenly I get points?"

Tom: "They buy some Burning Sea Notes and then you get some points."

Declan: "Oops. Wow, not a good day for me."

Rusty: "Is there any limit to the number of friends you can invite?"

Tom: "There is no limit, no. Invite as many people as you know and just, yeah, people you don't know as well. . ."

Rusty: "What title do you give?"

Tom: "We don't want to encourage people to spam. Yeah, you get a title for inviting someone but they also get a title."

Rusty: "See what I'm thinking of is 'Casual acquaintance #29'"

Jason: "Do I have to spend any points or any money myself to get involved in the referral program?"

Tom: "No, no it's open everyone. It doesn't matter what you've spent, whether you've ever used Treasure Aisle at all."

Rusty: "If somebody is a friend of mine and I send them . . . I go through this process with them, are they going to be redirected to some sort of landing page that tells them about the game? Or are they just going to get an email note?"

Tom: "They will get an email note with a link to the landing page which then tells them about the game, tells them how to download the game and that's all they need to do. So it's a very straightforward process."

Brien: "If I want to refer somebody, how would I . . . what channels would I use to do that . . . where would I get a link from. . .?"

Tom: "So, to refer someone, we do it by email so you need to know their email address."

Rusty: "But I guess the question is 'Can you do this from inside the game?'"

Tom: "Oh no, no. It's a page on the website because our website is set up to send emails and track this sort of thing. You fill out a form on the website with their email address, their name, and if you want to put a personalized message in there saying 'Hey, you know, this is real. This isn't spam.' Then you do that and then you click send, and it sends them an invitation."

Niklas: "So part of the point is that we know players are doing this already. They're already referring their friends so we want to give you something for referring your friends. Keep doing what you're doing but now we're going to give you some rewards for it."

Shannon: "It's a much more structured program than. . . and you will actually get something and you can actually see if they went 'oh yeah, I tried it out. . .' and then they didn't actually try it out. So you can go yell at them to quit lying to you. We enforce honesty."

Fishing

Tom: "Okay so the next big thing we have to talk about is a new feature to the game which is fishing. Now you'll have read a little bit about that from a devlog from Misha. We have Matt & Brien here who built the system to explain what it's all about. So, want to kick us off, Matt?"

Matt: "Right on. I started playing MMOs back in ‘99 and always enjoyed fishing in whatever game I was playing at the time. Whether it be fishing or any kind of gambling mini-games, anything that basically I could kill time with while not doing other things either raiding or grouping/killing—doing something I didn't really have to think about, but at the same time the results from doing the activity had use to it and you gained achievements or they could be used to trade for other things.

So with that, playing Pirates for a little bit over three years now, I always wanted something to do within port whether it be, if I'm done just managing my warehouse or just talking or just waiting for a port battle. Developing a system that had depth and a reason and incentive to keep doing it, creating rewards for that, achievements, and creating a foundation that could be built on in future milestones, was something that we were really shooting for.

And in doing that, we had to try to balance how much we wanted to get done within the first few milestones of release, what we were going to offer to sell in Treasure Aisle, and how many rewards we were going to offer in the exchange shop that we're going to have via the fishmonger.

So that's pretty much what the entire system is consisting of so far. It's basically, you'll have around four fishing holes per port across nine regions. So there's nine regions, but in every port within that region, you'll be able to fish at."

Rusty: "What does a fishing hole look like?"

Matt: "It's basically a little rippling particle effect in the water."

Rusty: "So you'll see those as you're walking around the port and everybody. . . it's all in the persistent area?"

Matt: "It's all in the persistent area and it'll show up on your mini-map as well. Creating models to show that you've achieved something because we're going to have several different types of rarities of fish. The rarest being the trophies, can be used by the players and kept in their inventory and used to play an animation showing off whatever fish you caught for whatever region you caught it in and. . ."

Niklas: "Nice."

Matt: "So but also giving it a depth of strategy because our game is not simple for the players. . . keeping all of that and going at and attacking the way the system was going to be developed around that was a big achievement for us but we think we've hit it pretty hard."

Brien: "One of the important things that we're keeping in the forefront of our minds when working on this system is that it's going to be in the persistent zones; it's going to be in every port so everybody can see it and interact with it and look at it—so it has to feel like it's a part of the port. It has to feel like it's a natural activity that you can do that fits in with the other elements of the game. So that's a big part of the work is making sure that that is kept in mind."

Niklas: "Seems like something pretty new."

Brien: "Yeah, it is. It's kind of a new element that really complements the other things that. . . you know if you're doing economy. . . waiting for labor hours to accumulate or a structure to get built, you can just click on a fishing hole if you've got your rod equipped and some bait or lure on it."

Rusty: "What is the structure of the game? So when you're fishing, you're using bait. . .?"

Brien: "You're using a rod and either a bait or a lure. You cast into the water at these fishing holes where the ripples are. You kind of have a chance based on what kind of baits and lures you're using and what kind of rod you're using on what kind of fish you catch. What your chance of success is in catching fish and it's also based in the different regions—each region will have different fish that you can catch"

Matt: "And different regional baits and lures."

Brien: "For catching fish, you can take them to the new fishmonger guy in every port and he'll have an exchange shop for you. Also you can get your tackle from him and then he offers an exchange shop for when you catch fish."

Matt: "His original tackle will only be just kind of a basic baits & lures. They're not really going to really have any bonuses. The bonuses are going to come from the Fishing section of Treasure Aisle. And they will also be for specific regions, so there's a reason and incentive to use the different baits & lures within those given regions. It will increase not only your success in catching something per cast, but also does have a result in the quality or the rarity of the fish that you catch. So hopefully we've got it designed in a way that it will give the players something to kind of experiment with and to try out different combinations and stuff."

Brien: "And also the quality of the fish is also reflected in the exchange shop with the different kind of items that you can get there. You'll be able to get some brand new consumables, new outfitting items, customization items, titles, all the good stuff that you'd expect from a fun exchange shop that is robust and touches different areas of the game."

Matt: "For somebody with OCD kind of like me, I promise you that it will be worth it. Because as we've gone through the design process, I've literally just sat there, didn't realize 20 minutes had passed of me just sitting there and fishing and catching something and like 'what am I going to catch next? What am I going to catch next? What am I going to catch next?'"

Brien: "He's not lying."

Matt: "I'm not. I mean like 'Oh snap! I got a rare!'"

Brien: "I sit right next to him so I know."

Matt: "This is our baby and it will be interesting, and it will be something that we can realistically create new content for it in a pretty good timeframe."

Niklas: "So, are you planning to expand this later?"

Matt: "Absolutely."

Brien: "Plenty of room for expanding with new baits and lures, new rods, even new fish which can then be implemented with new exchange shop items down the road, new missions, that kind of thing."

Matt: "Shark week!"

Brien: "Shark week!"

Matt: "That is all!"

Brien: "When 2.5 hits Testbed, you'll be able to get a taste of what the system's going to feel like. It's going to have some placeholder stuff so you'll have to use your imagination in some areas, but the mechanics are going to be there. You'll go to any of the starter towns where you find the AvCom Usher and you just click on him and he'll offer you to go to either a temporary Jenny Bay or a temporary Charlesfort where you can fish in those places. And then for 2.6 we're hoping to have the full thing all the way in."

Jason: "So the idea being that we can let you guys play with it, try it out, tell us."

Matt: "All the RMT rods, lures, and everything will be sold through the fishmonger for Testbed."

Declan: "It'll be up there for a whole milestone for testing, right?"

Matt: "Exactly. The exchange shop items are placeholders, guys. They will not be what they are."

Jason: "We want those things to be a little bit of a surprise."

Matt: "We do definitely want those to be a surprise. And there is going to be some other tackle that we haven't really disclosed yet because we are still finding out some design issues with them. Some more items other than baits and lures."

Declan: "While it will be up there with a truncated exchange shop for a full milestone of testing, as we get closer to release, we will have the full exchange shop with all the appropriate items to give the players enough time to test them and provide feedback on them. We're not just going to spring this on you."

Brien: "No, when 2.6 is on Testbed, I envision having everything pretty much where it's going to be and just ready for players to test and try out."

Rusty: "I don't suppose there's any leaderboard tracking of this?"

Matt: "There will be leaderboard tracking for fishing. In terms of the competitive aspect of fishing, we have every intention on having the either number of fish caught or the total weight being a leaderboard stat that we track on our page. I know that, as a player, I would want that because, once again, OCD. . . But I'm not at liberty to say if it's going out in M6 or M7 but. . ."

Brien: "2.6"

Matt: "2.6, yeah, 2.6.blah blah blah, yeah. So hopefully that will. . ."

Rusty: "But no specific dates?"

Matt: "No specific dates, but I promise you that will be coming."

Questions from the Forums

Ship Balance

Tom: "So now we have a few questions from our forums. We'll kick off with a question from Mud who is asking 'What are our plans on ship and career balance?' I think that is a question for MrNutty."

Jason: "So that was actually one of my big tasks this milestone was to come up with a plan for how we're going to do this. Hit as many areas as possible and see if we can take the information that we have and create better information out of it and influence the game in a good way.

So what I have checked in right now that is going to be coming out next milestone are some changes to some of the ships that people are really complaining about not only on the forums, but in our survey results.

MrTheTooth sent out that survey that had a whole bunch of ship and skill and career questions in it and I've been going over those results to see what areas need to be hit. What I'm doing right now is hitting the top end of ships and when you guys see those changes, I think that will expose a lot more problems with ships and other things that need to be brought up or brought down a little bit.

But once we hit the major problem areas, we'll have a more accurate picture."

Rusty: "When do you expect those changes to be in the game and playable?"

Jason: "Those are 2.5 changes so as soon as that's live. After that, we'll obviously collect more data and my plan for next milestone is to take the skill data that we've been gathering and see based on the survey, see based on what people are complaining about, see based on what people are actually picking up in the game. . ."

Rusty: "So that's pretty interesting. So on the survey results, like, we're actually seeing definitive trends out of people with that? Because I know like all the time we ask 'What's the most powerful class in the game? What's the most powerful this, that, and the other?' And it's always, 'The one I'm not playing!' And it ranges across all the classes so, you know, that tells us it's balanced. . ."

Matt: "That's true with every MMO, though, I mean there's always going to be. . ."

Rusty: "Well, yeah, yeah, sure but the idea is it sounds like there were actually some specific things that people generally agree were unbalanced that needed to be addressed."

Jason: "So what we did from there is I worked with MrTheTooth so that we could find different ways to ask similar questions and get better information out of them. So this past survey was a lot more personal.

It was: 'What do you feel effective in? What do you feel ineffective against? What do you actually defeat? What do you actually lose against?' And those made a couple of interesting trends, not so much in the questions themselves of 'Yes, everyone agrees this is unbalanced' except for maybe the Macedon.

It had interesting trends of like the avatar fighting schools where people say that Dirty Fighting and Brawling are really overpowered, but the skills that people are actually using and the places that people are going still evens out into Fencing and Florentine. So even though people feel they're overpowered or think that way, the ones that they end up going back and playing and that we can gather other in-game data off of suggest that people actually feel a bit more balanced about it.

The same thing is going down with ships, the same thing is going down with career classes. So we can look at a lot of those personal questions and some of the non-personal questions that we've asked previously and see if players' projection of other people maps up with how they play the game personally. And that has helped identify, probably not every area but a lot of key areas to work on.

And it's definitely going to be an ongoing process because I'd hate to landslide the game one direction and then have all that previous data not be valuable. If we change it a bit right now then we can work off of some other previous information that we had along with how that change affected the game and then keep going in a more positive direction."

Rusty: "So when you try to balance, do you try, like, you know, you've got X amount of data that's leaning towards like, let's say, +8 on this number – I'm obviously taking a very abstracted. So: +8 on this number. Do you go to +8 or do you go to +4 and then assume you're going to come back in the next milestone and see how that +4 worked out and then go the remaining 4 points you were expecting to go later?

Do you intentionally try to make minimal incremental things to try not to over-swing or is it better just to go straight to the value that you think is the right value initially?"

Jason: "Especially with ships, it's not so much this one value that I'm going to change the whole amount or half the amount, it's more I can solve a maneuverability problem by changing acceleration, turning acceleration, deceleration, all these different values. So for the ships that I'm hitting this milestone, there's only like 3 – 8 changes per ship. So I focus on a few key areas, see if that solves the problem, play it internally a bit and see 'yes, this feels different than the previous state of the game.'

And now I want to turn those changes in specific areas over to players and see if that alleviates the problem. If it doesn't, then we need to look at other areas and if it does or possibly pushes it too far then we can see well maybe did we hit too much."

Rusty: "Okay, just curious."

Griefing

Tom: "So, moving on, we have several questions on the forums about our recent reaction to complaints of griefing in blockading. So Nutty's also going to talk about that."

Jason: "So you guys did see that I posted a little bit about my take on the situation on the forums. I want to come back to this a bit because you guys obviously want to see action or have us come around understanding-wise to where you're coming from. And so in order to do that, I want to tell you guys where we come from with making policies or making game mechanics changes in relation to griefing.

The primary thing that we're thinking about when we do those things is the protection of players in the game—make sure that their game experience is not deteriorated as much as possible and protection of the integrity of the game—making sure that, if we have CS intervene with every PvP fight that goes on, that it's not you playing the game, it's you playing CS.

So we want to make sure that the game still stands up to how players are playing. So how we have to think about those policies is that, in a state where a player wants to cause grief to another player, goes in, does something that upsets that other player and that player files a ticket, it's really easy for CS to see that that's obvious abuse of the game or of the mechanics, depending on the situation. So we have policies per situations that allow CS to investigate in that manner.

When it's someone who is playing the game by blockading and they want to reduce unrest in an area and there's someone that just wants to disrupt them from reducing unrest in the area, those are both legitimate goals. And if that person goes in and does something that upsets the blockading player, we can't really fault any of those guys or punish them because they're just trying to play the game and accomplish objectives that we want them to try and accomplish.

So the two options we have to deal with that are really vague policies that allow us to go in, investigate the situation that doesn't have as much information and make a judgment call on a case by case basis. And we know how much everybody loves vague policies – which is NOT AT ALL.

And our other option is to look at the game mechanics and see why are those game mechanics that we want people to engage in causing bad game experiences or causing grief. That option is obviously better, but is a lot slower than policies up front so we have to consider both options.

The thing that I want you guys to know going forward is that we are taking your forum complaints, we're taking your threads seriously, we're taking your feedback seriously—we want to improve the game and improve your experience. But we also want make sure that we aren't punishing people for playing the game normally."

Rusty Time!

Tom: "Do you have a Rusty Time? Do you want to talk about hiring?"

Rusty: "Sure! The biggest thing that is going on here besides the improvements that we're making to Pirates is we have two big new projects that are in the works and we're hiring up for people to staff them. So if you go to www.flyinglab.com/jobs, you will find a webpage that is advertising our jobs. We're hiring, I guess, around 8 or 9 people. So we really do need particularly designers and developers, so if you or someone you know is looking for a position of working for an MMO company, we are certainly hiring in the Seattle area so please send us those résumés.

Other than that, I guess we're excited about a new Retail Pack that we'll be putting out through digital download means. And that'll be a good way for someone who has never gotten into the game to start off with some cool bennies and some good points—it'll be relatively inexpensively priced.

We're excited about that along with all the new programs we've talked about today, particularly the referral program is something I've personally been excited about for. . . at least a year now, I've wanted to do a referral program."

Tom: "Well, we've been working on it for about a half a year."

Rusty: "And it's not like mine was the lone voice in the wilderness and everybody said 'referral program?!' Everybody's wanted to do this. But, you know, player governed ports came first, but now that we've got a lot of that out, we get to take our time to do things that are a little bit more fun and just flesh out the game and a little bit more off the beaten track like Fishing. So we're all pretty excited about it."

Jason: "You just promised to get the referral program done and give me society tools so we said okay."

Rusty: "Okay!"

Tom: "And that's the end of the Pirates of the Burning Sea podcast."

Niklas: "See you on the Burning Seas."

DISCLAIMER: Misha does NOT like to work in the yard. She just doesn't hate it like Rusty does. ;)

Related Pages

Related Pages
Discussed Pages	Treasure Aisle | Fishing for a Complement
Ask FLS!	Episode Fourteen | Episode Thirteen | Episode Twelve | Episode Eleven | Episode Ten | Episode Nine | Episode Eight | Episode Seven | Episode Six | Episode Five | Episode Four | Episode Three | Episode Two | Episode One
Older Podcasts	2005 MMO Radio Interview with John Scott Tynes | 2006 MMO Radio E3 Interview with Troy 'Aether' Hewitt | 2006 E3 MMO Radio Interview with FLS Development Staff
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