So, I’ll be submitting an article about this event to MMORPG.com which means I don’t want to go very deep into detail about it here. But I wanted to say that I did enjoy today’s AvCom Skirmish event on testbed. They had respawns enabled, so it wasn’t a one-and-done type of thing. It’s kind of a simplified reaction, but I was left with the feeling of a WoW battleground (Warsong Gulch, specifically), only without the magic missiles. The fact that it was all sword and gun made it seem more violent, somehow. But with it being an Everyone vs. Everyone free-for-all, it also ended up feeling a little button-mashy.

The GMs and Developers who were on-hand to play crocodiles (like The Great Crocgar who one would assume was played by FLS Rhaegar!) and, in the case of FLS fraxl, a great and fiery pumpkin were once again very involved and very entertaining making a generally fun experience even better just like they did in the Black Sails on the Horizon event. Good job, FLS. /tiphat

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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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Funny thing happened to me last night in PotBS. One of my society mates gave a call on Nation chat that he had tagged a 2nd Rate in the red just south of Irish Point (which is on the southern tip of Haiti). All I had nearby was a ‘Defiant’ Sleek 40-gun frigate fitted for speed, accuracy and a little bit of damage. But it didn’t seem like the bulk of the pirate nation was awake, so it was better than nothing. I was in Matthew Town, so it wouldn’t take me long to get to the fight. When I got there, the fight had been reinforced on both sides; the French now had the 2nd Rate, a Mercy, an Intrepid and a Tigre MC, rats had a Cursed Blade, Hercules Pirate refit, Trinidad and my Defiant Sleek.

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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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