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.

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So a while ago, some pirates were grinding to create unrest at Bartica for a port flip. Now, Bartica is home to some important natural resources, it’s true, but it’s also heavily involved in many of the beginner missions for the British players. In other words, it’s a noob port. And since pirates don’t KEEP ports we capture for longer than three days, there’s no point in pirates conducting a port flip on a town like that… unless you consider noobganking reason enough to go through the effort of PvE grinding for three or four hours to make a port flip happen.

So I teased them. One of them seemed to get really emotional about it, so I drew it out, had a good laugh at their expense about how Bartica is a terrible zone, they should flip Grenville and Cayo de Marquis instead, this went on for at least half an hour. During this time, one of them made a crack about how I was probably a Brit’s alt and that I was probably sailing around in a pink failboat. In fact, I wasn’t. But this gave me an idea.

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As the title says, really. I’ve spent the bulk of my time this week job hunting without success; in a desperation bid I even went sniffing around at the local fast-food joints hoping to at least find something to tide me over. At one place, I was told they had too many people already and that nearly everyone was being cut to 2 days/week – that’s not even 20 hours!

My leisure time has been spent levelling a couple of nationals on Pirates of the Burning Sea’s Blackbeard server, mainly just to get a sense of that side of the game. My main character remains Stephen MacKenna, though – yarr!

I’m considering the 5-day EVE-Online Free Trial offer CCP e-mailed me the other day, sort of a ‘winback’ effort I guess. It talked about all the changes that came with Quantum Rise and offered me 5 free days with my existing account. I planned to resub for a few months after the new year (probably in February or March), but I might at least use the 5 days… haven’t decided yet.

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I love it how so many people in the MMO gaming community seem to think that they know the magic solution that every game should have in its design to make it the omgbestestevar game on the internet.

Sure, we all have our preferences. Each of us likes some aspects of every game and dislikes others; each of us has our opinions (for example, I’m not thrilled about the Skirmish system and I believe it will have detrimental effects on existing PvP in Pirates of the Burning Sea). But, the next time you should find yourself getting ready to say something about how stupid the developers of [insert game title here] are for doing or not doing [insert change implementation here], ask yourself this question:

Where is the MMO that YOU developed, got published and are supporting with personal investments bolstered by contributions from other investors and subscription fees. Don’t have one? Okay, well how about the one you have in BETA? No? Oh…

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