mdlake.net

A couple weeks ago, I reported gleefully on my intention to gouge the Caribbean zinc market in the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. I did not know then whether it would work, but considered it worth a try.

Well, it didn’t work. Players were not willing to buy my zinc ore at grossly inflated prices, despite the fact that I was (and remain) the only person selling zinc in the region. In itself, that’s okay. If people were willing to pay that much, chances are some other supplier would already be in that market, and it’s certain that others would enter shortly after seeing me succeed, quickly driving down the price. After all, I’d hoped to feed off of foolish, desperate, or lazy players who hadn’t done their market homework; the absence of such players could be considered a good sign.

Sadly, my scheme didn’t collapse from an absence of foolish buyers, but from an absence of buyers entirely. Nobody bought my zinc ore at modest markups, either, and hardly anyone touched it at cost. And that is a very worrying sign indeed.

See, every MMO depends on a certain basic minimum of players. More is always better—if the population outgrows the server’s processing power, the host company can afford a new server to which players can emigrate. Small can be good, too, if it fosters intimacy, but until and unless an MMO population crosses a certain tipping point, it cannot sustain the community which is the raison d’etre of online games in the first place. Players can log in only to find a half dozen people online, and those unwilling or unable or simply unwelcome to play together. If server population is too low, it can be hard to find a circle of like-minded friends to form a guild. If server population is really low, it can be hard to find someone to play with at all. “Anybody want to go questing anywhere? Send me a personal message. I’m up for anything” is more a cry of desperation than eagerness, and if all the querent gets in reply is silence or a few grunts about level discrepancy, the game is in trouble. Just as people join popular games, whether to play with friends who are already on or simply to see what the excitement is about, people abandon games that have to struggle to reach critical mass. It’s a vicious cycle.

All this is true of any MMO. PotBS is more prone than some titles (notably WoW) to the problems caused by a low population, for two big reasons. First, this is an economic game. If pirates are to have something to prey on, players need to be encouraged to act as prey on occasion, and so they are: the players produce (almost) all their own equipment, and the production trees are robust, so they need to trade a lot. Also, while you can earn cash by hunting other ships, the real money lies in production and sale. Sadly, when too few players are available to pursue all the branches of those robust production trees, the economy grinds to a halt: critical goods are absent, prices swing wildly from lack of liquidity, and buyers and sellers both refuse balanced prices in anticipation of an advantageous swing. If you can’t be sure anyone will buy your rigging at a reasonable price, or if you can’t find a hemp supplier, you stop making rigging altogether. Things fall apart.

The other exacerbating factor is that the military portion of the game rewards high populations. A few skillful and dedicated players can make their mark, certainly, but victory goes to the nation with the most players—even if they can’t win in battle. The power of smugglers (part of the incentive to produce and ship goods) requires no skill and outweighs the power of fighting ships to decide a battle, so the side with the most wins. On my server, and on most servers, the French are the underdogs. Although some players will always be attracted to the losing side, most players like to win, and win easily (not that they’ll admit it), so national imbalances operate on a vicious cycle, too: players on the losing side get discouraged and quit, or even change flags, which throws the balance of power even further.

Maybe things are better for the Spanish and British camps, but I’m in the French camp of the Antigua server, and I see players bleeding away from a population that can’t support itself as it is. And if the French vanish, apart from a few stubborn whipping-boys, how long can a game predicated on a three-cornered struggle survive, even for the winners? At login, a chart lists the dozen or so active servers and the faction populations currently playing on each server: low, medium, or high. The pirates and Brits reach “high” populations on the most active servers, but only during peak hours; most servers don’t reach “high” population levels ever. The French population on my server only hit “medium” for the first time a few days ago—but not because players joined. Rather, the developers redefined population density, cutting the scale in half, so if it took 200 players to reach “medium” population before, it now takes only 100. Such phony image management, without real changes to back it up, is a bad omen, no matter how you slice it. Even the winning sides seem to be slipping, though it’s hard to be sure.

PotBS is a new launch, and going through some reasonable and expected teething problems, but it’s got a good engine. The sea battles are engrossing, and the economy is rich, even moreso than Eve Online and Star Wars Galaxies, or so I’m told. Nonetheless, the game is in trouble simply out of a failure to attract players. I dread it becoming a textbook example of a product that fails despite itself. I’ll keep you posted.