Burning Sea resurgence?

I was over at the Pirates of the Burning Sea blog, wondering what they were up to these days, as I hadn't heard anything in a while. Turns out they planned it that way. In what was probably a very good move if you have the wherewithal to do it, they basically went underground while they fixed all the bugs and such, and are now (like, right now) going to start a new advertising campaign to bring people in. They're also hiring several of people, which is hopefully a good sign.

I have to say I found the game enjoyable, and that's impressive, given that it was the beta I was playing. I just didn't see it replacing WoW at the time, and I couldn't bring myself to do two subscriptions. And now I'm off gaming, for the most part - too much going on in RL. I really wish they didn't have the subscription model - I would love to be able to play some of these games more casually....

Pirate ambassadors

I really enjoy the idea of ambassadors, though perhaps not as PotBS has envisioned it. According to massively, a certain number of Australian players will be given a year free to help... I don't know, actually, what they're helping do. I originally thought the idea was to choose especially good players from elsewhere and have them play on the Australian servers, but that's not the case at all. It seems like it could work, if you needed to seed a new country, to have some well developed guilds and intense players already in-game - and I guess that's what they're doing here, but the whole thing seems to suffer from a 'chicken and egg' type problem to me, whereas I could see pulling in people from a place the game was already well underway to help a new area be more lively on day one. It also seems to fit the spirit of the game (though I haven't played since it went live, so I don't know if it fits the current spirit of the game or not...).

Pirates reviewed

Hooray! Apparently the NDA has been listed from Pirates of the Burning Sea (which I have been playing a little bit of during the stress tests). Tobold has posted a lengthy overview of the game to get you started.

MS SQL? Really?

I'm always interested in the way an MMO gets put together, and while I don't read a lot of dev blogs I will pop over if one has something particularly interesting to say. Thus I found myself at Joe Ludwig's blog reading the post how to make MS SQL cry like a baby. I will confess - I'm an open source fanatic, and when MySQL can't get the job done I turn to Oracle. So it came as more than a little bit of a surprise to me that Pirates of the Burning Sea was running Microsoft. I would have said it couldn't be done, but they are obviously out to prove me wrong.

If you have survived my tech talk, here's an article on crafting in PotBS to help you unwind. I've been following this aspect of the game with some interest - I really like the idea that everything in-game can be built, though it makes striking a balance even more important - how do you prevent someone (or a cartel) from cornering the market on a key good? Of course, maybe there's a military option I haven't heard about....

Pirates beta take 2

Oh boy - another stress test for Pirates of the Burning Sea. You can head over to fileplanet to register. I'm hoping my key from the first one will work. We'll see what happens.

More Pirates, but different

Tobold and others have pointed out that Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean MMO is out today. This is an interesting form of in-game advertising, in that the game itself is an advertisement. Like Stargate Worlds, I'm not sure whether the brand can support a game. On the other hand, if the game itself is good enough, the game could be self-sustaining, and thus drive additional products. I am personally attracted to this model because I hate the monthly fee model (or more precisely, I hate paying for things). I suspect, however, that the annoyance of other models would make me happy to pay a fee instead.