In a devlog titled “Enter the Skirmish,” FLS Snap spilled the beans on the long-anticipated feature of Pirates of the Burning Sea. The response on the forums so far has been as positive as one would expect after a year of waiting and the small detail that it’s not going into the live game until the Milestone patch after next hasn’t been a buzzkill at all. However, I’ve said before that I’m skeptical about how good this is going to be for the game, for a few different reasons. The first and foremost being that I’m afraid the presence of risk-free options for group PvP will have a significant negative impact on existing PvP and RvR activity.

Dedicated RvR players already complain that there isn’t enough reward for winning a map. For the nation winning a map round, all players level 21 and higher get three Citations of Conquest, which can be turned in for some okay stuff eventually. Players of all three losing nations get one Citation of Conquest. What’s more, the nation that comes in 4th place receives underdog tools for the next map – underdog tools are doubled experience gain and increased loot drops! The idea was to give players an incentive to re-roll to the disadvantaged nation and to help legitimate noobs joining that nation get up to participating in the end-game PvP/RvR, but some groups have been known to actively sabotage their own nation’s interest in an effort to come in last and enjoy the bonuses.

Open Sea PvP is and always has been a dangerous proposition. If you go out alone, you might run into a pack of 6 enemy players, and if just one of them is in a ship faster than yours you’re guaranteed to be sunk. Some groups run lighter, faster ships that allow them to better dictate the way a fight progresses, other groups roll in heavily armored, hard hitting ships that can make short work of lightweights of they can bring their guns to bear. Some players like to sail sub-Level 50 ships and just prey on merchant players in fat cargo ships. But whatever the means, PvP involves risk. When you enable your PvP flag or sail into a red circle on the map, you’re putting your ship, its permanent outfitting and your unsecured cargo at risk. And for all the tough talk, this game has a LOT of carebear-minded individuals.

Case in point, all of the big shot Naval Officers who fancied themselves unstoppable tough guys with their first rate ships of the line screamed in abject horror when FLS Lum announced that Lineship Structure Bundles on ships built with them would no longer be fully insured, dramatically increasing the risk of losing even one durability point on such ships. The way it had been before, you got so much insurance you could even profit from sinking under the right circumstances, so once a player grinded up the cash for one of these beasts, he would never be without one again unless he chose to be.

FLS has maintained that Skirmish won’t have a negative impact on the existing PvP game. They have held that it will be a great resource for players to help each other learn the game, speaking of society PvP training and Port Battle practice. But among the many things FLS is criticized for on boards like the forum at MMORPG.com is their apparent lack of insight into the average MMO gamer. MMO gamers rarely, if ever, use a game mechanic in the spirit in which it was intended. Before it was even accessible on Testbed, one player was already thinking of ways to make his own game out of Skirmish by starting a player-run Arena league using the Skirmish system – tell me, if these players are fighting pre-arranged Arena League matches in the Skirmish system and using their free time to practice for these matches with the Skirmish system, when will they find time to participate in Realm vs. Realm PvP in actual Port Battles or on the Open Sea in the red circles? The answer is simple: they won’t.

PotBS is a great game, and I really really hope I’m wrong about this… but given the relatively small size of the playerbase and the incredibly huge capacity of said playerbase to cry about anything involving risk, I find it very difficult to be optimistic.

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