Our RIFT guild has moved from Faemist to Seastone.
The Purge is now playing Rift on the PvP server, "Faemist". We are on the Guardian side.
Verdict:
So far, so good.
I upgraded the forum software. If anything goes wrong, it is Ulfen's fault. If you don't like the look of the board, go here and adjust your "Style":
Click here
The current look is the one closest to the old look, but some of the other ones are neat. The old Purge graphic kinda clashes but oh well (incidentally, if anyone wants to make new Purge graphics, it's easy for me to add them to the templates now -- every style has its own logo so if you make one, let me know what style it's for).
Let me know if anything is screwed up. There may be more things to adjust.
Actually it looks like HTML codes are no longer supported, which means TABLE and EMBED are not working. Apparently there's a way I can create a BBcode for this, which means someone else has probably already done it and I just need to copy theirs. I'll look into it later. Old messages with EMBED and TABLE tags are just broken for now.
Among the new things you can do now is file attachments.
This will also allow me to do some better grouping of forums and sub-forums, to reduce clutter.
Yes, I know the front page of the website is broken. It ate the blogging software. I'll look into that later.
Last night some random Order guy contacted me about taking over a keep. Since Order had zero keeps, nobody could get their T2 stuff.
We ended up with a pretty good collection of people between Purge, PvP and whatever that guy rounded up and took the first keep without much of a fight (I don't think there were any players there).
The main group went off to sack another keep and I decided to hang around and play defense. We had, I think, 4 Purge stay behind along with a few puggies.
It only took about 5 minutes for the first Destruction guys to start trickling in. By about 15 minutes it was a sea of red outside the door and I sent the raid organizer a tell that he'd better come back if we wanted to hold this keep at all.
It worked out pretty well. Right about the time we got the message that the door was about to give way, the Order raid showed up and cleared everyone out. Boiling oil, cannons and a handful of defenders managed to hold off the Destruction zerg just long enough for reinforcements to arrive!
Then the reinforcements left.
About 5 minutes later the entire enemy horde showed back up, finished off the door and took over the keep... No reinforcements for us this time as the Order raid had apparently moved to another zone to take more keeps.
So it looks like we'll have plenty of competition out there. You can surprise Destruction and sack a keep before the defenders realize you're doing it but it doesn't take long for them to show up with hordes of people.
The Purge is joining the Ungrim server on the Order side for Warhammer.
Come on out and join us in taking over the world and crushing the forces of Destruction!
Alternatively, come on out and join the forces of Destruction so we can send you home, cryin' for your mama!
Or someone's mama, anyway.
Looks like the call is for The Purge to play on the TYRANNY server for Age of Conan. That's a PvP ruleset server.
I didn't do the pre-order in time, so I won't be on there myself until official release or the day after.
Sailing Guide:
http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106
PotBS Wiki:
http://potbs.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page (updated)
Antigua forums:
http://www.burningsea.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=50
My early assessment:
This game is Sid Meier's "Pirates!" fleshed out to MMO status.
It's pretty good. Not really blow-your-socks-off good, but good. I only had one problem all night, and that was the game booting me out of character selection either because I spent too long picking out the right type of beard and shade of boot or because the login server burped during my 15 minutes of deciding how cool I should look. Character building isn't quite as complex as City of Heroes, but it's close.
Ship to Ship Combat
This is more arcadish than Sea Dogs but I think it's much better than EVE's ship to ship combat.
EVE's combat was based heavily on your character's skill selection and your weapon and device loadout. 1v1 combat really didn't have many tactical elements to it. You had shields, armor and hull but it was really just one big hit point bar, modified in various ways by various devices and the main input you had as a player was picking targets, maintaining the proper range, managing your energy levels and hitting "fire".
POTBS ship combat has a lot more tactics to it --
Your ship has separate armor on 4 sides (front, back, left, right) and a crunchy hull center. As you lose armor on one side, you'll do well to turn and present a different side to your attacker.
Your crew can modify three aspects of your ship's behavior: gunnery/offense, speed and maneuverability/defense. You start with three skills that let you choose to temporarily improve one of these behaviors at the expense of the other two. As you level up, you'll get more skills to further modify ship behavior (such as +defense, faster reloading, faster speeds when going downwind, etc).
Your ship has 4 vital statistics in addition to armor and hull: sails, crew count, morale and guns.
The health of your sails impacts how fast you can go. Crew count seems to just impact how well you can do when boarded but I'm not sure if it might also impact the efficiency of your ship (it did in Sea Dogs). "Morale" just seems to be like "Action Points" that you spend to do certain special abilities. "Guns" doesn't seem to come into it much but apparently you can lose guns during combat, which I imagine tends to put a damper on things.
You also have different types of shot to choose from, similar to Sea Dogs: cannonballs are good against the hull and armor, chain(*) is good against sails and grape shot(*) is good for killing enemy crew. (* - not necessarily what they're named in the game)
And then you have to factor in ship characteristics. Also like Sea Dogs, different ships behave in different ways and go faster at different wind angles depending on the type of ship.
Unlike Sea Dogs, you don't really "aim" or worry about sea swells. Your guns have firing arcs and you just have to get your target into your firing arc and fire. This is really the only reason I say it's more arcadish than Sea Dogs.
Still, with all of the various vital statistics and taking into account things like wind, it seems plenty interesting and I can only imagine that a 5v5 naval battle would be crazy good.
When fighting the NPCs, they aren't especially inventive or good at ship combat, but then, they'll frequently be bigger (or more numerous) than you so that's not to say it can't be challenging.
Hand to Hand Combat
This part of the game is fairly simplistic. It reminds me strongly of City of Heroes.
One of the things you can do in ship combat is pull up and board the enemy ship, which starts a melee battle on the top deck between you and your crew versus the enemy captain and his crew.
It seems sadly simplistic in that all you really need to do is kill the enemy captain to win, so even though it's basically a big brawl, you mostly seem to want to pick out the enemy captain, tell your NPC crew to target him and try to drop him as fast as possible. In PvP, I suspect you're going to want to load up on "tank" skills.
There are also quests/missions that have you fight on foot and there again I think you'll feel aspects of City of Heroes. The combat isn't as smooth as WOW, there is no auto-attack and the moves you can do are mildly interesting but not overly exciting. The hand to hand combat isn't "bad", it's just nothing special and doesn't seem as well fleshed out as the ship to ship combat.
You have 3 stats to manage: health, initiative and balance. Initiative is basically like warrior "rage". Certain moves build it up and certain moves spend it. Balance seems to be a modifier to your defense. Certain attacks you do will lower your balance or lower the target's balance and the lower your balance is the easier it is to hit you. There is some potential here but so far it hasn't seemed all that interesting. I suspect it's more fun to watch combat than it is to play it, but I wouldn't know because I spend most of my time watching my bars and my timers.
Melee combat, you might say, is like a little fun meta-game they tossed in for variety. It's not really the focus of the game.
Skill Progression
Skill progression reminds me somewhat of Star Wars Galaxies. There doesn't appear to be a "level 50 skill". Instead, there are a great number of short skill lines with, I think, 5 skills in them each. You get 1 melee skill every other level and 1 class skill every other level so I think by the time you're level 20 you can have mastered 2 skill lines. Or you can have the first skill in 10 different lines.
It's kind of like SWG where you could choose to go straight down "Rifleman" or you could split your skills between Rifleman and Swordsman and in the end you're going to have to get more than one skill tree anyway because you have way more skill points than any one skill tree can absorb.
Point being, someone that's higher level than you isn't going to have "Fireball Level 50" while you have "Fireball Level 46". Rather, he'll have greater diversity with more low-level skills than you do (because they're all "low level skills", it's really just a question of how many of them you have).
Loot
Loot does exist in the game and here I think it's borrowing a bit from EVE. Individually, it doesn't look like things get that much more powerful that quickly. I'm looking at a sword 15 levels above me that appears to do like 2 more damage than my current sword, but has a bonus to parry. I see that bigger ships have a lot more guns (and bigger guns) but they're also less maneuverable and easier to hit.
I suspect, though, that like EVE, it's a lot of small bonuses that add up to a big difference, but it will never be as bad as a level 70 vs a Level 40 in WOW.
Teams/Classes/skills
There are 4 teams, 4 classes and 3 melee disciplines.
The 4 teams are British, French, Spanish and Pirate.
The 4 classes are "Pirate", which is the only class for the Pirate team and is not available to the other teams, "Naval Officer", "Privateer" and "Merchant" and I don't know any more about them than I read in the character generation screen since I went straight to pirate.
The 3 melee disciplines are basically fighting styles that I don't know much about. I started with "Dirty Fighting" which is a mix of cutlass and gun. I have no idea what the various reasons might be to choose various styles. I think one of the other styles is like fencing and the other a sword-and-dagger style.
Game World and PvP
I'm not entirely sure how all this works, but it seems to again borrow from Sid Meier's "Pirates!" and fleshes it out a bit.
The 4 teams (or maybe just 3, I'm not really sure about pirates) compete for control of ports.
The world is basically PvE, but once a port has been destabilized you apparently fight over it in PvP.
You can also flag yourself for PvP at a port. I did so and was surprised to see that when you flag yourself for PvP, it increases your speed on the open sea and makes NPC ships not agro you. So there's actually a small perk for going PvP (unlike EQ, which gave you a significant punishment for going PvP). I didn't see any other PvP players while I roamed around, however, I'm not actually sure how to identify them (maybe their icon will be red) and I'm so low level, it's probable that I'm the only one foolish enough to flag myself for PvP at level 5.
Open sea combat is "instanced". Like "Pirates!", the open sea is sort of like another meta-game of driving your toy ship around the map in a very simplistic way. Other toy ships are roaming around doing whatever. If you aren't PvP flagged, you'll have to deal with NPC pirates, pirate hunters and warring factions attacking you.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how PvP flagging works with teams. Can a flagged British player fight another British player? I sort of imagine that PvP is "team based" for everyone except pirates who I would think would be in more of a "FFA" situation. Not sure.
ANYway, when ships get into a fight on the open sea, you see them as a red circle with ships swimming around the circle. You cannot join the battle unless someone in the battle wants you to. There's a "Launch Flare" ability that opens up the battle to anyone on your team, I think.
Other Stuff
So apparently you can conquer towns and this is the big strategy game.
There's also some kind of economic strategy game going on that I don't know anything about. I'm not sure if pirates can do the economic strategy game since my "Economy" button was like, "yay economy" and didn't otherwise seem to do anything. Maybe that's a game element intended for the 3 nations and their merchant classes.
Crafting seems to be into the game bigtime, though I don't really know much about it. I found a recipe book. Apparently I can make sails now if I really want to.
There are also, apparently, player owned structures. I saw that you could buy deeds for various building types so I'm guessing you can build up player run towns? I have no idea.
The game is heavily quest based, but I don't see why you couldn't just roam around the open sea and blast enemies to bits. Just from eyeballing it, I suspect that level progression via "random blasting" is roughly equivalent to questing. Quests give you stories, rewards and XP but they also have you pounding your feet back and forth across these towns so in the end it might be close to 50/50 as to whether it's faster to quest or just blow shit up.
The only thing that's really kind of tiresome is the "loading" screen, which you will see about 100 times in your first day. You load to get to the open sea, you load into ship battles, you load when you board the enemy ship, you load to get back to your ship, you load to re-enter the open sea, you load to get back to town, you load to enter the store and load again to leave it. It never takes long but it certainly feels like a slap in the face coming from a nearly seamless game like WOW.
Conclusion, or something
If you liked Sid Meier's "Pirates!" and Sea Dogs, you'll probably like this. It doesn't seem like a super serious "omg lets go slay teh dragonz and get teh l00tz" type MMO. It's also not trying to be a simulator. It's more like a City of Heroes type game that's trying to have fun with a very specific theme and is not really making any effort to conform to modern MMO standards.
I look in my crystal ball and see myself probably playing this as my MMO of choice until Warhammer comes out at which time I will probably quit and never look back. Unless Warhammer sucks.