Doing the French Mistake
I may have made a boo-boo.
We’re a few days into the Pirates of the Burning Seas game. Upon creating your first character, you must choose from four factions: British, French, Spanish, or the unaligned pirates. Strangely, although you may create more than one character, and they may follow different professions, they must all belong to the same faction. So your first character is a heavy commitment. You can scrap all characters’ collective progress and start from scratch at any time, but that decision gets ever costlier as time passes.
The three national factions have nothing to choose between them in any technical sense. On a contrarian impulse, I went with the French. Here’s why:
World of Warcraft has been my only MMO experience to date. WoW has only two factions, the Alliance and the Horde. You can play any of five (once four) races from either side, and you can play characters on both sides of the fence if you like, and some do, but most players find themselves gravitating to one or two characters in a single faction. The Alliance is considerably more popular than the Horde, despite little material difference between the two.
The big difference is a reflexive, and largely unjustified, sense that the races of the Alliance are the “good guys,” while Hordies are the “bad guys.” To some degree, this reflects a background stemming from the original Warcraft game, in which orcs were the aggressors (albeit unwillingly) and humans the more-or-less noble defenders. But mostly, it’s a matter of looks: Alliance races are largely attractive, or at least cute, while the bulk of the Horde looks monstrous.
The beauty gap has a couple ramifications. One is that casual players, the ones who just play one or two nights a week, tend to favor the Alliance, swelling their ranks. More surprisingly, the kind of immature, power-hungry twit, often in early adolescence, who plagues online play also tends to favor the Alliance, although the particularly evil-looking undead on the Horde side attracts its share, too. Twerps pollute both sides of the game, but the twerp index is much higher on the Alliance side.
By contrast, the Horde tends to attract the serious gamer, the ones who like the challenge of being outnumbered and/or relish the sense of distinguishing themselves from the crowd. The fractionally higher niceness quotient breeds fractionally more cooperative behavior, a reputation which is mildly self-reinforcing.
The difference really made itself felt once PvP battlegrounds opened up, and the battlegrounds permitted fixed and equal teams. The numerous Alliance players found themselves competing for the opportunity to participate, while the outnumbered Horde players never had to wait for an opening to the battlegrounds. The Horde, therefore, got a lot more practice in the early days, and continued to benefit from greater exposure to the same teammates, and a chance to get used to other Hordies’ tactics.
The overall impact of this difference in players and experience gave the Horde a reputation for being a close-knit cadre of skilled players, while the Alliance got a reputation as losers. This was not a rigid rule by any means! The Horde had twerps, too, though they did less damage to their own side. The Alliance had dedicated players, but these found themselves more dispersed and less able to hook up into their own disciplined cadre.
Although I dabbled with several low-level characters to decide what I most enjoyed, I eventually settled into a gnomish mage, which put me on the Alliance side. That was fine. I was a casual player myself, and never expected to belong to an elite cadre in any case, but I did vaguely envy the grass on the other side of the fence.
As I said, WoW has been my only MMO experience to date, so I naturally imagined PotBS might be something like it. I correctly reasoned that the Brits would be the most popular faction, fuelled by the historical success of Britain, their romantic attitude toward piracy, and a US predisposition to Britain. Likewise, I correctly predicted a low French turnout. So—why not?—I went French, hoping to reproduce the Horde’s greater cohesion, and I dragged my friends, equally indifferent to nationality, along with me.
That may have been a mistake.
WoW is a very static game; the quests and territory remain in place in perpetuity. PotBS, by contrast, is meant to be fluid, and far more responsive to broad movements of PvP play. After all, if you want pirates, you need something for the pirates to prey upon. That, in turn, means you need to provide reasons for players to ship goods from point A to point B. A lot. And PotBS is designed to reward players for organized pressure on the ports which produce all those goods. At the beginning of the game, the Caribbean world is divided roughly in thirds between Britain, Spain, and France, with a very few pirate ports tossed into the mix. Extended military pressure can change ports from one nation’s control to another, with economic benefits for the ruling power in the form of lower taxes on goods bought or booty sold in a friendly port.
In short, WoW protected the outnumbered Horde from the outsized Alliance; PotBS does no such thing for its disadvantaged nations. In short order, the numerous Limeys will begin seizing French ports, squeezing us into a smaller and smaller base of natural resources. This could suck.