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Ships, Ship Capture, and Ship Loss

10.05.05 by isildur

Rusty came to me with a directive. “I want pirates to be able to capture any ship in the game.”

Up to that point, I’d sort of envisioned pirates as having a limited selection of ships, and a somewhat larger selection of ships they could only obtain by capture. I’d specifically planned for pirates to never be able to capture a ship of the line, though, so Rusty’s directive came as a surprise.

As a result, I had to do a lot of rethinking of the ways in which ships are acquired and lost, in order to accommodate pirates sailing 64-gun ships around. This turned out to be a good thing, as a lot of the interesting consequences of the revised system allow us to do things we didn’t think were feasible before.

So how do you get a new ship? It’s our goal, eventually, to have player-operated shipyards. Until we can spend the time on that system, we’ve implemented a Ship Deed system, where you can purchase a deed that, when used, adds a ship to your dock.

Let’s back up and talk about docks for a moment. Every character has a number of berths in a dock available; each berth holds one ship (of any size). The number of berths available can be expanded, but there’s a fairly small cap on total berths any character can ever have.

The dock is an abstract concept; that is, berths are not necessarily tied to any specific port. Not every port will provide access to the dock, but if you berth a ship in St. John’s, you’ll have access to it in Port Royale.

So back to Ship Deeds. When you use a ship deed, it adds the specified ship to an empty berth in your dock; obviously, if you have no empty berths, you can’t use the deed, and will need to sell one of your ships off before you can acquire the new ship.

Before you can purchase a Deed, though, you must be certified to captain that type of ship; you gain these certifications as you reach higher ranks. Without the certification, you can’t command the ship, no matter how you acquire it. This is relevant to pirates, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Each career has a list of valid ships. ‘Valid’ is perhaps the wrong word, though it made sense in the context of the design; a better word might be ‘automatic’. When you sink while sailing a valid ship, you reappear (as we’ve described) in the nearest friendly port in the same ship. However, if you’re sunk while sailing a ship that’s not valid, you lose that ship, all its cargo, and all its outfitting. When you return to the nearest friendly port, you’re put back in the most recently berthed valid ship you own.

The validity system was originally intended to allow pirates to captain any ship they were able to seize, and for which they were high enough rank to have the certification. A pirate doesn’t have the 64-gun ship of the line on his list of valid ships. He can captain it, but as soon as he’s sunk, that ship is gone forever, and if he wants another one, he’ll need to go out and capture it, and he’ll have to do that in a smaller, less powerful ship.

As I was thinking about it, though, I realized that the validity system was more broadly applicable. I’ve been concerned about the thought of navy players doing suicidal ‘zerg’ attacks in large, expensive warships. I didn’t want ‘suicide’ to become a standard tool in the tactical toolkit. At the same time, we don’t like the idea of dumping people back into their starter ships every time they’re sunk. Then I realized: there’s no reason that the validity system couldn’t be applied to many different careers and ships.

The Navy could have large, powerful warships – the heavy frigate, the 50-gun, the 64-gun – but those ships wouldn’t be flagged as ‘valid’ for them. If a Navy captain lost a 50-gun ship, he wouldn’t get it back. He’d have to replace it, replace any outfitting on it, replace any cargo he was carrying. If the cost of those ships is appallingly high, someone who saved and scrimped to afford one would be very, very defensive of it. Suicide would not be a casual option. At the same time, though, a player could have a smaller ship – a reliable, reasonably powerful ship such as a medium frigate – to which he could always return, no matter how devastating the loss of the huge warship might seem. No-one would be forced back to square one by ship loss.

To get back to pirates for a moment, though: I remained concerned about pirates keeping a private armada of naval warships in storage, ready to pull out if a previous one should happen to be lost. The obvious solution is to restrict players to only one invalid ship at a time, total – including both the currently captained ship, as well as the berthed ships. This prevents the fleet-of-warships problem, but I still had a terrifying vision of a pirate armada of 64-gun ships of the line hanging around in PvE areas, dominating all nearby AI ships and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Part of the goal of the system was to ensure that pirates couldn’t keep such a massive ship forever; eventually they’d be sunk and lose it.

Then it occurred to me – and I should point out that this is not implemented yet, so there’s still a chance it won’t make the final cut – that a pirate in a naval warship should be a massive target. Everyone should be gunning for that pirate. So why not make him a PvP target? Thus, as designed, any pirate sailing a captured invalid ship is attackable anywhere in the world. This doesn’t mean the pirate can attack people in PvE areas. It means that anyone else can initiate PvP combat against him, though. The British Navy can assemble a massive fleet, chase the pirate in the warship, and blow him out of the water for daring to steal His Majesty’s property. And, of course, when sunk the pirate in the invalid ship loses that ship permanently, and must go capture another one.

So there you have it. In a nutshell, the more powerful the ship, the more likely it is to be on the list of ships you’ll lose when you’re sunk. And if you’re a pirate, and you steal a warship, you should be ready to have every single Naval Officer in every other nation see you as a big juicy PvP target.

Missions and you, a brief introduction

11.09.05 by Bert

Hi all, I’m Bert Harvey, one of the mission designers on Pirates of the Burning Sea. I come to Flying Lab from Monolith Production’s The Matrix Online, where I worked on the test team, designed missions, and wrote articles for the MxO webpage under the handle errorcode. Being one of the new guys (read – low man on the totem pole) and having some experience writing web articles, I was asked to give a brief overview of our mission system and talk about just what Pirates of the Burning Sea is going to offer players hungry for PvE adventures.

First, let me start off by saying the mission design tool is, simply put, amazing. From a designer stand-point it’s a wonderfully robust and flexible tool that lets me practically get away with anything my imagination (or rum-induced hallucinations) can come up with. We have a very talented dev staff to thank for this wonderful tool and now it falls to the mission design staff to use it for good.

Now, you may wonder how this matters to you. It does, trust me. If you’ve ever played a game and gotten frustrated because every mission seemed to be “same old, same old”, then you probably ran into a mission design team hampered with a limited or difficult mission tool. They could be the most amazingly brilliant folks on earth, but if they don’t have a tool that lets them actually be creative, they’re stuck. The mission team on Pirates is fortunate in that we have great tools to work with while creating our missions for your enjoyment.

Now, saying all that, let’s talk about the missions themselves. Generally speaking, all missions will come from one of our varied and colorful cast of characters inhabiting any one of our numerous ports. The mission I’ll use as my example here is given by a naval officer and starts with the NPC displaying the mission to the player. The mission is named Rum Runners. When the player clicks on the mission they are interested in, the NPC fills them in on some details regarding the mission. Rum Runners is a straightforward blockade mission, where the player is tasked with helping the local navy stop smugglers from making landfall and avoiding the local tariffs. The NPC also mentions payment for the mission, which is sure to be a large motivating factor for many players.

If they choose to accept the mission the player is then told where to go to intercept the smugglers. Should the player want to review the details of the mission, there is a mission window they can call up. This window displays both a quick summary of what the player needs to accomplish right now as well as a longer, more detailed summary of the mission they are on. We never leave the player guessing as to what to do next.

With destination in hand, the player sails in the navigation zone to the small harbor they are tasked with defending. They enter the instanced mission zone and arrive alongside naval allies, then are assigned a patrol route that takes them across the mouth of the bay. Before walking the line gets dull, smugglers show up and engage the blockade. Now it falls to the player to help stop the smugglers from reaching their destination. The player can attempt to disable and board them or blow them out of the water; the navy is happy with either outcome.

The player maneuvers back and forth, tacking for position to bring their guns to bear on the smugglers while the NPC naval ships engage a pair of surprise reinforcements that arrive on the smugglers’ side. When the smoke of combat clears and the player sails victorious they now need to head back to the naval officer who gave them the mission and see about a little matter of payment for a day’s hard work.

And that, my fine friends, is just the smallest of small inklings of what our missions have in store. Maybe I’ll be able to post again with details on a more complex and involved mission to whet your collective whistles.

Till then . . .

Bert Harvey

The Player-Owned Economy

03.29.06 by isildur

One of the things we’ve never been entirely satisfied with has been our economy. Our original plan called for a complex supply and demand model based on the nature and size of every port. While this model was sophisticated and interesting, it suffered from one minor and one major flaw. The minor flaw was that players were not as involved in the process as we would have liked; much of the activity of the economy happened ‘off-stage’. The major flaw was that the system would require a small army of designers and several years to create all the content, and then the whole thing would still need tuning. For a small company, this was not an option.

So we wrote an economy that, at the time, I called the ‘Simple Economy’. It was a very basic supply and demand model; the more of a good you supplied to a port, the less it wanted that good; the more of a good you bought from a port, the less of that good they would sell you. The goods were meaningless, just period labels slapped on an array of dynamic numbers. Nobody wanted ‘sugar’ for any particular reason; they just generically demanded it across the Caribbean. The benefit of this system was that it was easy to put into place, and could be globally tuned. The drawback, of course, is that it was boring. Even as I was writing it, I was planning the next step up.

I called that next step the ‘Player-Owned Economy’. Confession time: I’m a die-hard libertarian. I looked at attempts to manage and control game economies, saw them failing, and thought ‘duh, of course they fail. You can’t make a planned economy work.’ Games are pretty far from real life, of course, which means it isn’t as simple as tossing a bunch of resources into the world and letting people sort it out, but there were still many applicable lessons to be taken.

The basic principles of the economy, then, came down to three things. One: Players, not game systems, should determine the value of an object. Items should be worth what players are willing to pay for them, not worth what A_Bag_Merchant_01 is willing to pay for them. Two: All players should be participants in the economy. This is inevitably true anyway; I just wanted to make it explicit. If you want goods, with only a few exceptions you buy them from another player. Every item in the world, again with a few exceptions, is in the world because another player made it—from wood planks to ships of the line, from loaves of bread to architectural plans. (And everything I just mentioned is actually in the current version of the game, and can be produced by players.) Three: PvP should determine control of vital resources, and strongly impact the economy, but in a way that does not destroy the mercantile gameplay of a PvE merchant. If a foreign power takes over your home port, I want you to still be able to play, but I want you to be sending strongly-worded letters to your local uberguild, demanding they retake the port.

Informing all these design goals was a negative: No crafting grind. So many games fall down when they put together an economy because they strive for an unrealistic goal: they try to limit the number of people acting as economic participants, typically by making it dull and shockingly unprofitable to participate in their economies. This approach fails to see the bigger picture: in the real world, we’re all participants. Why doesn’t the real world economy fall apart? The answer is specialization. You can only do so many things in a day; you have to focus on a few things to do well, and rely on other people for the things you can’t do. I decided it was a problem of scale: if I can cut down trees, drag them to a mill, saw them into planks, then draw up plans for a shipyard, use the planks to build the shipyard, and use the leftovers to build a ship… the scale is too broad. One person couldn’t do all that. I needed a way to break these out into separate tasks, so that I could cut down the trees OR saw them into planks OR draw up plans OR build a ship. I needed a way to get people to cooperate, but in the same kind of convenient impersonal way we cooperate in the real world.

Having set the stage, I’ll briefly outline how the economy actually works. Every player has a finite number of lots—right now that number is 10, but it might be larger or smaller in the final release. Lots are an abstraction of how much property you can own, and are tracked on an account-wide basis. They’re not tied to any specific port, but instead represent a global amount of real estate you can own and manage.

Players build structures in their lots. Structures are things like logging camps, mines, and plantations; they also include things like forges, lumber mills, weavers, and shipyards. Most structures use 1 lot, but some huge structures, like the largest shipyards, can use 2 or more. Structures are located in specific ports—if you build an iron mine in Tampico, your mine is actually located in Tampico. To use it, you have to be in Tampico.

Structures can’t be built unless some basic requirements are met. First, you have to be well-liked enough by the nation that owns the port that they’ll allow you to build there. You don’t have to be allied with them, or even very friendly, but you can’t be hated. The British Navy isn’t going to be operating tobacco plantations in pirate-controlled ports, for instance. Second, you have to own a warehouse in the port. Warehouses are a special kind of structure that does nothing except provide local storage space, and allow you to build additional structures. Third, you have to have the materials on-hand to construct the building—they typically require various types of wood, stone, gravel, and other raw materials. Finally, the port has to have the proper resources for the structure you’re building.

What that means is that you can’t build a logging camp to harvest oak trees if the island doesn’t have oak as a resource. You can’t build a sugar plantation on an infertile island, and you can’t mine gold from an island with no gold deposits. (My favorite: you can’t collect cochineal beetles without the proper soil for raising prickly pear cacti.)

Once you’ve got a structure, you next need a recipe. Recipes are simple descriptions of how one or more things are turned into one or more other things, how long that takes, and how much it costs. For instance, I might have a recipe that has an input of one unit of iron, and an output of 100 units of nails; it takes one hour to complete, and costs 100 doubloons to execute. Recipes can be used in any structure of the correct type; a recipe to saw oak into ship timbers can be used in any lumber mill, as can a recipe to saw the same oak logs into planks.

It’s not a whole lot of fun to sit and wait for an hour after you use a recipe to collect your goods, though. What’s more, that penalizes players who can’t log on every hour to use their recipes. Instead, we use the concept of stored labor to represent time expenditure. If a recipe requires an hour of labor to complete, we don’t make you wait an hour. In fact, you get the output of the recipe immediately; it shows up in your warehouse as soon as you click the button. At the same time, it consumes 3600 seconds of stored labor from the structure. If the structure doesn’t have 3600 seconds saved up, though, the recipe can’t be used there.

Stored labor accumulates at a rate of 1 second per real-world second passing; you can store a maximum of 72 hours of labor in each structure. This means if you can’t play for a few days, you won’t fall behind in the economic game. You’ll come back to buildings that are full to capacity with labor, and ready to work. It also means you don’t have to babysit your structures when you log on. You can go out adventuring and sailing, and you won’t be losing any labor on your structures; it’s saved up for when you return.

Structures aren’t free, though. To keep one operating, you have to pay upkeep, which takes the form of both doubloons and goods. This upkeep is paid in week-long blocks, although you can pay as much as you like in advance. It’s not the end of the world if you fail to pay your upkeep, though; it just shuts down your structure temporarily, until you pay again. This means you can let structures you’re not using currently go ‘offline’ with no penalty and no real cost.

I may be a libertarian, but the governments of the period weren’t. We don’t have permadeath, so the only real certainty in our game is taxes. Taxes are determined between the port’s owning nation and your nation. If they’re the same—you’re English in an English port—the tax rate is likely to be low. If you’re English in a Spanish port, the tax rate is likely to be high. If (somehow) you’re a pirate in a Spanish port, the tax rate may be crippling. This tax is paid on every recipe you use, every time you use it. If a recipe costs 100 doubloons to use, and you’re paying 10 percent taxes, you’ll pay 110 doubloons. The rates are adjustable for every combination of nations—we can decide that the French particularly hate the Spanish, and tax them at 50 percent. Ports that are friendly to your nation are going to make you more efficient; ports that hate your nation are going to make you less efficient.

Thus far, we’ve talked about all the items in the game in purely abstract terms. When I say 100 ‘units’ of wood, though, I’m talking about 100 tons of wood. Moving that around isn’t something you do through email attachments. Some ship has to load that wood up, haul it to a destination, and unload it. This process is handled through two related systems: the auction house and the local market. The auction house functions much as you might expect from other games; the actual model for it is the Auction House from Final Fantasy XI. There are a small number of these, located in large (and unconquerable) capital ports. Currently I’m planning for 2 per nation, one pirate auction house, and one Dutch auction house. Each auction house’s prices will float independent of the others.

More immediately interesting, though, is the local market. It’s like a small, limited auction house in every port in the game. As a producer in a port, you can offer goods out of your warehouse for sale at whatever price you like per unit, or place a buy order to purchase an item at whatever price you’re willing to pay per unit. As a trader, you can visit ports, fulfilling buy orders and buying the products of the local merchants. From the perspective of, say, a logging baron—someone purely interested in felling oak trees for sale—this allows you to dump all your goods in a convenient and accessible place, and let traders do the work of buying and transporting them. After all, you may be generating thousands of tons of wood, and moving that around is not really the gameplay you’re looking for. From the perspective of a trader, this allows you to travel the Caribbean, learning the local prices for goods and looking for asymmetries, where someone is selling for less than a buy order you know about. From the perspective of a player who just wants to buy some cannons and kick butt, the local markets can be ignored; traders will deliver the goods you need to the major auction houses, where you can buy it. There’s a markup, of course, but that’s the price paid for convenience.

Before I go into the implications of the system, I’ll give you a few examples. I should note that while these examples are derived from actual content that’s in the game right now, they’re subject to change without notice, as we tinker and tune.

Adam, a Spaniard, owns the deed to an Iron Mine. He places it in Port-of-Spain, on the coast of South America—a region he spends most of his gameplay time in. He’s already built a Warehouse there, so he has storage available. To build this mine requires 20 units of Granite, 60 units of Common Wood, 40 units of Oak (for structural support), and 20 units of Iron (for the tools, carts, and so forth). This is all pretty abstract, but makes the process of building a structure not utterly horrific (when I wrote it originally, it was far less abstract, and almost unusable). Adam’s already purchased these goods and moved them laboriously from around the region to his warehouse. He could have just bought them all at the large regional auction house, but he’s trying to save some money. The mine takes 1 hour to construct, so he starts the construction and goes off to do some missions. The time requirement is to prevent large Societies from being able to build an instantaneous production line when a port is threatened by enemies.

Adam’s mine is completed, and he returns to start mining. He owns a single recipe, ‘Iron Mining’. It uses 1 hour of stored labor, costs 400 doubloons, and produces one unit of Iron Ore. The mine starts out with a single stored hour, but Adam took a break for lunch, so he currently has 4 hours stored up. He uses the recipe four times, consuming all his stored labor and 1600 doubloons, and puts his ore on the local market at a price of 600 doubloons per unit of ore. He knows this is the going rate because he’s checked the region for other prices. In fact, the high margin is why he got into the iron business; the demand for iron is far higher than the current supply.

Beth owns a Forge. She mostly processes ore for other people; while she owns a single iron mine, it’s not her main business. She sees Adam’s units of iron ore go up, and realizes Adam hasn’t seen the prices of ore today, which have risen by almost 50 doubloons. She quickly buys his ore before he changes the price; since her forge is in the same port, Port-of-Spain, the iron is delivered immediately into her warehouse. If she’d been one port over, she would have had to transport the iron herself. 4 units isn’t much to transport, but she usually operates in bulk, which is why she placed her Forge in a port that has iron deposits. She wants to use her recipe, ‘Iron Smelting’, which consumes 2 units of Ore and one unit of Limestone—but Port-of-Spain has no limestone. The closest Limestone is in the port of Santa Marta. She could place a buy order in Port-of-Spain, but she doesn’t want to wait, so she sails to Santa Marta and buys four units of Limestone. Santa Marta is currently a PvP zone, so she has to dodge an English patrol, but for a cargo this small she’s taken her fastest ship, a schooner. She bought four units just so she wouldn’t have to make another trip immediately if more ore showed up.

Back in port, Beth smelts Adam’s iron ore into a total of two Iron Ingots. She has no immediate need for them, so she puts them up on the local market for 1700 doubloons each. This is a little high, but she knows that the shipwrights of the region buy in bulk to make all the nails and fittings they need for the demands of the major Spanish Societies operating in the area. They’ll sell at 1700; it just may take a few hours. She logs off.

Chris is a trader, sailing a massive merchant galleon with his hired escort, a privateer named Diana. Chris arrives in Port-of-Spain and buys all the available iron ingots, a total of 300 units. He knows Port-of-Spain has iron as a resource, and regularly sweeps the port of all its iron ingots. He’s paying a premium, 1800 per unit, but he wants everything available. His hold full, he and Diana sail off towards the auction house of Havana—the center of the Spanish mercantile world. Everyone who needs goods comes to Havana first, so the current price of the (relatively scarce) iron ingots is 2000 doubloons in Havana. Chris has 300 units of iron, but has to pay off a pirate along the way; he gives the pirate 20 ingots, and the pirate wisely accepts, knowing he may not be able to beat Diana’s small but powerful cutter. Chris lists his remaining 280 units of iron in Havana at 2000. This costs him a 200 doubloon listing fee, but he’s confident they’ll sell, and generate a 18800 doubloon profit.

Eric, a weaponsmith for a major Society, needs iron badly, for shot and cannons. He checks Havana’s auction house, decides he can’t wait any longer, and buys 500 units of iron for 2000 doubloons each—including Chris’s iron. He passes the iron out to his Society-mates, and they convoy it back to their home port. There aren’t any good nearby sources of iron in the hotly-contested region in which they live, but there are plenty of gold mines and sugar plantations, so they’re able to afford to import iron. Eric owns 5 Weaponsmithies, and his Society demands chain shot. Lots and lots of chain shot. His recipe costs 200 doubloons to execute, requires 1 unit of iron, and uses 2 hours of stored labor. He’s been waiting for iron prices to drop, so his structures have almost 20 hours of stored labor. He uses it all up, in 5 parallel runs—45 executions of the recipe total, for 22,500 units of chain shot. He delivers 10,000 of them to his Society’s Quartermaster, and puts the rest up for sale on the local market. His enemies, the dastardly French Society Les Francophones, may also buy them there, but he’s priced them so high that the profits will easily pay for the 10,000 he’s given to his Society for free. If the French want to put money in his Society’s pockets, it’s fine by him.

Let’s look at the implications of the system. First, and most obviously: it’s large and complex enough to let you find a niche for yourself, doing whatever you want to do. In our example, everyone is pretty specialized, but you could just as easily diversify, owning structures in multiple ports, or owning a larger slice of the production chain yourself. You could own a few mines, a forge, and your own weaponsmithy, and produce deeply discounted ammunition and cannon. Or you could specialize even further, making only a single recipe in vast quantities to take over the market for that item.

It means that player skill is rewarded—in this case, the player skill of learning the market, learning where goods are expensive and where they’re cheap, and why. A trader who just buys low and sells high will make decent money; a trader who can anticipate an upcoming war between two Societies, and buy up all kinds of critical supplies so he can relist them when their prices rise will become fabulously wealthy. Flexibility and agility, as well as knowledge and instinct, will all play a role in manipulating and responding to the market.

It means that taking over a port is more than just scoring a point in a big game of port-football. Ports have resources, and if you can seize them, you can exclude your enemies—or at least make their production facilities too expensive to compete effectively in the market. If you can grab a local source of iron, or of oak, you can install your own Society members in production facilities and generate vast quantities of cheap goods for your own use. And if you’re a merchant, keeping your taxes low provides an excellent reason to fund your friendly local PvP Society to defend the port where all your structures live.

It means that there aren’t artificial pressures on you when you decide what to build. If you make items, you’re making them for a market price determined solely by other players. There’s a reason for every item; when items sell, it’s because someone needs them. Conversely, everything you need comes from other players. You may not be able to get that great consumable item, or that great piece of outfitting, because it may not be profitable enough for anyone to list one.

It means that pirates have real impact on the world. If a pirate seizes the cargo of a player merchant, that cargo is a total loss to the merchant—and may resurface in a different nation’s market entirely. A concerted effort by pirates could turn the tide against a nation relying on cargo being delivered through a PvP+ area. It means that blockades evolve naturally; if you can field enough ships, and sink incoming player merchants, you can deny goods to your enemies. And piracy keeps wealth moving around the economy, as any merchant might lose his precious cargo of rare goods, allowing some unscrupulous trader to buy them from the pirate auction house.

It rewards players at every level of the economy. If all you want to do is make a little money on the side, you can produce and sell simple goods like wood and gravel, and make a profit from their sales to players higher up in the production chain. If you want to be a full-on producer merchant, you can generate goods in volume, and market them to your fellow players. And if your whole Society wants to be an economic powerhouse, you can organize and assign economic roles so that the Society can, assembly-line style, produce cannons, ammunition, or ships entirely in-Society.

It gives adventurers a distinct advantage in trading and producing gameplay. Adventurers have the easiest time being liked by other nations and factions, so they have the most possible markets from which to choose when looking for goods at decent prices. Adventurers can move goods that are common in English territory to Spanish territory, where they’re rare. Adventurers can build structures in ports of other nations, where important resources are located, and move the products of those resources out to friendly territory, while dutifully paying their taxes to their foreign landlords.

It removes any concept of grinding for crafting skill. In ship combat, we don’t make you fire each gun; you’re playing the captain, and your crew handles the moment-to-moment tasks. In the economy, we do the same: you’re the owner. Your employees and foremen handle the moment-to-moment tasks. You don’t have to pour molten iron into a mold; you just tell your foreman ‘Make me a cannon’ and he implements your orders.

To wrap up, I’ll give you a sense of the scale of the economy. Here are a pair of recipes that are currently available in the game. One of them produces a tiny little ship hull—something like a small schooner. The other produces a hull for a 50-gun ship of the line.

Construct Small Scout Hull
Cost: 5000 doubloons
Labor: 24 hours
Inputs
Keel, Small (1)
Stem (1)
Frame Timber, Small (2)
Beam, Small (6)
Planks, Oak (10)
Strakes, Oak (6)
Filling-frame, Small (2)
Iron Fittings (1)
Nails (1)
Transom, Small (1)
Outputs
Scout Hull, Small (1)

Construct Huge Dreadnought Hull
Cost: 115000 doubloons
Labor: 72 hours
Inputs
Keel, Large (2)
Stem (2)
Frame Timber, Large (15)
Frame Timber, Small (2)
Transom, Large (10)
Beam, Large (80)
Beam, Small (10)
Planks, Oak (130)
Strakes, Oak (74)
Filling-frame, Large (42)
Filling-frame, Small (2)
Iron Fittings (24)
Nails (23)
Transom, Small (4)
Outputs
Dreadnought Hull, Huge (1)

To give you some idea of what these quantities mean, the estimate for the minimum possible price for the larger hulls is 330,000 doubloons—that’s assuming no markup, no taxes, and perfect efficiency. The minimum possible time in which it could be constructed is a little more than 3 days, assuming everything is set up, in the right ports, and ready to go before the process begins. And that’s just the hull; it doesn’t include the masts, rigging, sails—not to mention the guns, ammunition, and provisions. All told, a 50-gun ship of the line could be more than 2 million doubloons to create. But at the other end, a small, one-man operation could easily generate a nice, healthy profit creating supplies for that same ship.

It’s probably obvious, but I’m really excited about this system. It makes me happy as an MMO player, because I love crafting but hate crafting grinds. It makes me happy as a free-market wonk, because it puts the system complexity where it belongs: on the interactions of the players. And it makes me really, really happy as a designer, because it’s built on very simple concepts, so it’s easy to tune, easy to expand, and easy to conceptualize. If I want to add a new item, or a new structure, or a new recipe, or a new resource, it’s trivial to do so. In fact, it takes longer for the artists to create the artwork for a new item than it does for me to add it to the game.

I’ve been enthusiastic about the beta testers seeing other features before, but the last week or so since the economy actually made it into our internal builds have felt like the buildup to Christmas when I was 10 years old. I hope that you’ll enjoy using it as much as I’ve enjoyed designing it.

Death, Ships and the Economy

06.29.06 by isildur

After we decided to green-light the player-driven economy, we had some decisions to make about how it would impact and change the other systems. It’s big, and its tendrils stretch throughout the game, touching almost everything. In most cases, this is pretty minor stuff, quick decisions that we can make on the spot and move on. It’s not a tough call to say, for instance, that players will be making the different types of ammunition; it’s not hard to plan out which towns need auction houses.

And then there are the ships. There’s capturing them, there’s building them, there’s losing them. Our original plan, where certain ships were lost when sunk, made a lot of sense in a world where the ships were supplied by the game at a fixed cost. It didn’t make as much sense in a world where every ship represented an enormous investment by player manufacturers and shipwrights. Even worse were the consequences for pirate ship capture; any ship could be duplicated endlessly among pirates, at no cost to anyone and with no real penalties. This isn’t scary in a world where ships are easy to come by, but under the new economy it’s unacceptable.

It was no better in the other direction, either. Without any kind of real penalty for being sunk or captured, ships would only ever leave the game world if their owners scuttled them. Shipwrights wouldn’t be rewarded for their tremendous efforts, and new players seeking to become shipwrights would never be able to break into the market, due to lack of demand. Once you had your ‘ideal’ ships, you’d be set for life, as long as those ships weren’t the kind you lost on death. And, given the resources required to build ships, why would anyone use any other kind of ship?

So back to the drawing board—or the spec review, in our case—we went. What emerged from our discussions was a much simpler solution than the original concept of valid ships. When you’re sunk, or you’re defeated through a boarding action, you’re still returned to the nearest friendly port, ship intact, just as before. However, your ship loses one point of Durability.

Every ship has a number of Durability points attached to it. For many ships, this number is quite large; your first few ships, when you’re just starting out, will likely have dozens of Durability points. For higher-end, more powerful ships, the number is smaller. We’re still discussing just how much smaller, and we’ll be tuning those numbers extensively once we’ve released the system to the beta testers, but my ballpark guess is less than 10, and for the very powerful ships of the line, less than 5.

When your ship loses a point of durability, that point is lost for good. When your ship loses its last point of Durability, the ship is destroyed, and you’re sent back to port to take command of one of your other ships. If you’ve lost all your ships, you’re provided with a ‘basic’ ship that’s roughly appropriate to your current rank, but less effective than any of the available player-crafted ships appropriate to your rank. This basic ship has one point of Durability.

This system also covers piracy more consistently. When a pirate captures a ship, the loser suffers a point of Durability loss, as usual; the pirate now has command of a ship with one point of Durability. We’re discussing options for giving high-rank pirates the ability to capture more than one point of Durability at a time, but generally pirates will be able to seize any ship, and sail it around until they lose it.

We’re retaining the concept of the ‘invalid’ ship (although I’m racking my brain trying to think of a better term than that), but in a more limited sense. Only the high-end naval line ships will be ‘invalid’, and all that will mean is that pirates sailing them will be vulnerable to PvP worldwide. Whether or not you lose a ship on being sunk is a function of the ship’s Durability, not your pirate affiliation. And we’re not talking about half the ships in the game; we’re talking about the small handful of very powerful, rare warships.

Another system that warranted a hard look after the economy plan was put into action was the drydock. In the original conception of the drydock, you could take command of any ship you owned from any port in the world. In the simple economy, we had a clear distinction between ‘commodities’, or things you simply sold, and ‘outfitting’, or things you used. To prevent the obvious exploit of moving commodities across the world by switching ships, we took away all your commodities when you switched ships. It was a pain to switch from merchant hauling to fighting, since you had to clear out all your cargo each time, but the alternative was to allow massive price manipulation by playing musical ships.

In the new economy, though, we can’t distinguish between commodities and outfitting. Anything can be sold at a profit. Nothing is useless; everything has a purpose somewhere in the economy. In that world, if we take away everything you could sell at a profit, we’d be stripping your ship bare every time you docked; if we didn’t take everything away, you could make a killing teleporting a big hulking merchantman from one auction house to the next, by sailing your tiny, fast schooner.

We talked about this for a while, and then we came to the obvious solution: We gave ships persistent locations. That means that when you put in at Tampa, and switch from your schooner to your brig, your schooner is still in Tampa. When you arrive in New Orleans, you can’t switch back to it. If you want to use your schooner, you’ve got to go back to Tampa.

This means we don’t have to do a thing to your cargo. We just leave it in your ship’s hold, where you can retrieve it later. It means we don’t have to consider whether you’re moving an item in order to sell it, or moving it in order to use it. It also means that ships themselves are at risk on the open sea; if you want to use your brand new super warship on a mission that requires you to sail through dangerous parts of the open sea to get there, you can’t just teleport your ship to a port next to the mission.

However, one of my personal pet peeves is when games make me do boring travel so that I can play with my friends. What if I’m a merchant operating out of the Windward Islands, and I’ve got a hold that’s absolutely stuffed with oak that my guild needs at its shipyard, pronto, and then my friends log on and say ‘Hey, we want to go try that mission in the Gulf of Mexico again’? Should I have to sail my big hulking merchant ship to the Gulf coast where I’ve left my frigate? They’re waiting for me, and it could take me a very long time to sail a cargo ship that far.

We’ve got a number of ideas for solving this problem, but here’s what we’re doing for our first attempt: When you’re in port, talking to the harbor master, you can see all your ships throughout the Caribbean. You can pick any ship, even one not in your current location, and you’ll be teleported to the port where that ship is located, and put in command of it, leaving your previous ship behind. You can’t bring anything with you, as all your cargo stays with the ship; it’s just you, your clothes, and your winning smile.

This means you can go out on missions with your friends off the coast of Cuba, and when you’re done fighting for the evening, you can put in at Havana and jump back to your merchant ship in Trinidad, or your cutter you keep in Barilla for helping out new players. You aren’t penalized with long travel times for being interested in both the economy and the combat missions.

We’re not completely convinced we’ve thought of all the possible problems with the teleport-to-ship mechanic, so we’re going to inflict it on our beta testers for a while and see what shakes loose; we’ve got backup plans. Assuming it doesn’t explode in our faces, I’m pretty happy with the gameplay options it will provide, and the economic problems it will solve.

We still needed to think about differentiating cargo types, though. Rusty’s newest piracy mandate is: “Pirates need to be able to loot ships in PvP.” The other side of that issue, of course, is that it’s a terrible game experience to go out in your ship with your amazing quest-reward outfitting that you won from a very difficult mission, and then some pirate comes along and takes it from you. This led us to think about cargo that could be stolen versus cargo that couldn’t. We decided to distinguish between ‘secured’ goods, that aren’t lootable and aren’t lost on death, and ‘unsecured’ goods, which are lootable and go to the bottom when you lose your ship.

Secured goods are special pieces of outfitting, high-end mission rewards, your user content customization items, and so forth. Unsecured goods are nearly everything else. We’re still discussing where to draw the line in outfitting; some of us favor making all outfitting secured, and others only want mission rewards to be secured. Again, we’re going to inflict it on the beta testers and see what they think, and then make the decision.

This puts serious risk into mercantile activities, gives pirates the incentive to board and loot merchants, and gives navies a reason to patrol and keep their waters safe. It also makes surrender more attractive as an option, because losing part of your cargo is certainly better than losing it all if you’re sunk.

So, between the new Durability mechanic, the notion of unsecured cargo, and the persistent ship locations, we’re ironing out the biggest wrinkle in the new economy. Ships will become commodities themselves, merchant commodities will become a much more fluid system, and ship construction will be the ultimate crafting for the master merchant.

just in case you are going to do any more devlogs, id say it might be better to start at the most recent, and then just don't show the ones that arent good anymore because of more recent changes(like the ships), might just make it easyer to find something on the game without having to look through the whole tread

What is the Career Story Arc?

10.16.06 by GavinIrby

In Pirates of the Burning Sea, there’s going to be numerous ways to get your character to level cap: Solo missions, group missions, career missions, legendary missions, epic missions… The list goes on. One of the paths that I’m particularly excited about is what we’re calling the Career Story Arc. This is a story line designed for solo play that your character can follow all the way up to level 50. It consists of missions that focus on role-playing, character development, and plot. Since our mission system allows for dialogue trees and branching story lines, we want to make the most of these great features to give the player a better role-playing experience. Two of the common failings of current MMORPG’s is the lack of a coherent, compelling story line and the ability to give players a sense that they are important. Typically, a MMO player is made to feel like a peon in a horde of hi-level characters rather than a hero with an important role to play in world events. Pirates of the Burning Sea is going to change that with the Career Story Arc.

I’ve been asked to write a little bit about the process of writing and implementing these missions so our players can get a glimpse of what is going on “behind the scenes,” so to speak. Since I don’t want to give away too much about the story itself and spoil any of the surprises, I’m mostly going to discuss my own writing process and the things I hope to accomplish with the Career Story Arc.

My background is in academia, rather than creative writing, and so my process is maybe atypical for a content developer (Luckily, our team has some very talented novelists to act as my editors). I start with hermeneutics (meaning, the interpretation of texts), which is in many ways, the mirror image of the writing process. It may seem strange, at first, to call video games “texts,” but they actually conform very well to contemporary hermeneutic theory.

A very common and popular idea is that a text’s meaning is not dependent upon the author’s intention; instead, it’s meaning is recreated over and over again each time it is read. Put another way, a text’s meaning is as much dependent upon the interpretation of its audience as it is upon the author’s intention. This idea isn’t a big stretch for a gamer, who takes it for granted that his/her choices have a meaningful effect on the game’s outcome. If we think of a game as a “text,” then we can take it one step further and consider the act of playing that game as “interpretation.” I try to keep this in mind while designing the Career Story Arc because I want to give the player as much interpretive power as possible.

The scope and number of meaningful choices a player is given to make is directly related to this interpretive power. I call it the “horizon of meaning.” With the Career Story Arc, I’m not necessarily trying to create the broadest horizon, however. Rather than create missions that give players the most choices, I want to create missions that give players the most interesting ones. One of our main goals is to make the player feel like s/he is at the center of the conflict, rather than on the periphery. In the Career Story Arc, I’m hoping to accomplish this by placing the player’s character in the middle of a brewing international conflict that could embroil all of Europe in war. In addition, the player will have to make decisions without the benefit of clear light/dark side divisions. I’ve always felt that these overly simplistic moral dichotomies cheapened the decision making process, anyway. My hope is let players feel like they are actually engaging in an act of interpretation rather than just toggling switches.

Since my mentors have all been products of the 70’s, I’ve been thoroughly brainwashed to think of interpretation according to a theory known as “deconstruction.” In a nutshell, this refers to a very close reading of the text with the aim of exposing its fundamental assumptions, and showing them to be fluid, mutable, mental constructs (If what I just wrote sounds like a bunch of bullshit, I recommend this Onion article on the subject, which is both hilarious and a surprisingly good summary of the theory). When developing a story, I work in the opposite direction. I start with the most basic assumptions and set up oppositions as a creative tool. For example, in mid-level towns I designed missions around an opposition between expression and security, resulting in stories about a town that is “under siege.” This manifests not only in the literal sense of being attacked by another nation, but as a town that feels its social values are being undermined. In the story, it’s the people that see the expression/security opposition as fixed and eternal that get into trouble.

These binary oppositions are also a good source of thematic material. For me, themes form the core of the creative process and I tend to start with them before anything else. Using one or more thematic elements, I try to flesh out a story through a process of recursion, repeating them at different levels and in different contexts.

The reason I think that themes are so important is that they supply the author with what I see as the most necessary element of good writing – having something to say (Which is not as obvious as it sounds). When I say an author should have something to say, I don’t mean that it has to “teach” you anything. There’s nothing more annoying than writing with the conscious effort to educate or enlighten someone (I’m looking at you, spirituality section). I’m suggesting that writing should be discursive without being didactic. In other words, it should begin discussion, not end it.

With the goal of creating discussion, I tend to favor themes based on provocative oppositions (For example, freedom of expression vs. security). Admittedly, I like to do this for sake of pushing people’s buttons as much as anything (Yes, the “Sea Dog Slayer” missions are mine. Suck it, PETA!). But I also have a legitimate reason for consciously being provocative. My interest in theme comes from the study of myths (I was a religion student), and one thing that I have noticed is that heroic characters often make questionable or controversial choices – Achilles’ treatment of Hector’s corpse in the Iliad, Rama’s distrust of his wife Sita in the Ramayana, etc. These choices then become “hotspots” for discussion, inspiring no end of criticism and apology. What is interesting about heroes making controversial choices is that they demand interpretation. When your favorite character does something you find morally repugnant, you can’t help but try and find justification for it. Was it for the greater good? Was the character duped in some way? In mythology, it is sometimes easy to dismiss these controversies as products of a bygone age with a different moral compass, but I think that’s a mistake. Myths are designed to inspire criticism, commentary, and apology, and as modern myth-makers, game developers would be remiss not to do the same.

A provocative theme in the Career Story Arc is the complexity of cross-cultural relationships. The player is often going to find him/herself at the center of these relationships, and have to navigate the treacherous waters of misrecognition and prejudice. Colonial society in the 18th century Caribbean is a rich backdrop for this discussion and I’m lucky to have all the depth that history can provide while at the same time having the freedom to take the kind of liberties that good story-telling requires. Some plot elements will be particular to the colonial period. Others will foreshadow current events. One of my favorite literary devices is to treat contemporary social conflicts metaphorically and in a different context. To do this, I will be introducing a very cosmopolitan cast of characters and hope players will enjoy the surprising twists and turns the plot will take.

I’ve had a great time working on this, and can’t wait to start putting it into the game. As things come together, I’ll be sure and keep you updated on its progress. In the meantime, let’s continue this discussion in the forums. That way I can address specific questions and concerns you might have.

Our beta testers found that using emotes in the Open Sea would crash the game. Our internal testers thought, “Why would anyone try to emote in the Open Sea?” Turns out it’s fun to have your entire crew dance a jig after you win a battle.

Swashbuckling Part 1: Defenses and Combat Pools

06.20.07 by DrewC

Since we added the Swashbuckling Combat System we’ve talked a fair bit about the high concept for the system: a cinematic, fast paced, sword fighting system. Today I’m going to talk about the details of our implementation of that system.

The Swashbuckling System is built around Defenses, Combat Pools, and Skills. There are three defenses: Block, Dodge, and Parry; three Combat Pools: Health, Initiative, and Balance, and a huge number of Skills (more than 200 at this point). All three of these systems working together produce our Swashbuckling System. Today I’m going to talk about the Defenses and Combat Pools, and I’ll talk more about skills in part two.

When we designed the Swashbuckling System, we decided to make the basic defenses automatic. We feel there is too much uncertainty with regard to player connection speeds and reaction times to try and create a system where players are responsible for blocking every incoming blow. As a result, we give all characters a chance to first Parry, then Block, and finally to Dodge each incoming attack. Each of these defense types is equally effective in that they reduce the damage of an incoming attack to 0; however, they have secondary effects which make them significantly different.

Parry is the first line of defense, and the best result for the defender. If the defender Parries an attack he gains 5 Balance and 5 Initiative, and the attacker loses 10 Balance. The disadvantage of parry is that there are many types of attacks that bypass it, most notably attacks that target the Balance pool.

Block is the next defense, and the most neutral of the defenses. Block has no secondary side effects; it simply stops the incoming damage. There are a handful of attacks that cannot be blocked, most notably gunshots, but most attacks can be successfully blocked.

The final defense is Dodge. Dodge is the defense of last resort, and as such it is not a great result for the defender. If the defender dodges an incoming attack he loses 16 Balance. The upside of Dodge is that it works against virtually every attack.

Combat Pools are an abstract representation of your character’s status. The first, and most critical, combat Pool is Health. Your character’s Health is an abstraction of how much of a beating he can take and keep on fighting. It functions like hit points do in most games: as long as you have some left you’re ok. When your character reaches 0 he’s defeated; until that point he’s 100% combat effective. We talked about more complicated systems of declining effectiveness as you take damage, but ultimately decided that this was not an interesting place in the system to add complications.

There are two important things to note with regard to the Health Combat Pool. First, from a story perspective, your character is not actually killed when his health reaches 0. Swashbuckling is a cinematic system; in the movies nobody actually dies unless they’re scripted to do so. In your story, your character doesn’t die unless you script it to happen (by deleting your character). Until you make that choice your character is simply defeated, knocked out, captured, ransomed—you get the idea.

Second, while your Health may increase slightly through skill acquisition, you don’t experience the dramatic increase in hit points you see in many games. You will have roughly the same number of hit points at level 1 as you have at level 50. We did this as part of our efforts to allow players of disparate levels to effectively fight against each other.

The second Combat Pool is Initiative. Initiative represents your character’s momentum in the combat. Your character’s Initiative starts at 0 and increases during combat through the use of skills. Other skills, including many of the more powerful skills, require that you spend Initiative in order to activate them. Initiative decays over time, both in and out of combat, so you have to use it or lose it. There are a variety of skills and items you can acquire to reduce the rate of decay, but you cannot eliminate it entirely.

The final Combat Pool is Balance. Balance is the most commonly misunderstood of the Combat Pools. Your character’s Balance Pool is an overall representation of his defense. Mechanically your character’s chance to Block, Parry, or Dodge an incoming attack is scaled based on his balance. If he has zero Balance his defenses are reduced to their minimum (about 10% of their normal value). If he has 120 Balance his defenses are increased above their normal value (about 107% of their normal values, although the exact amount will be tuned as beta testing continues).

A character with full Balance is very hard, perhaps even impossible, to hit. So to be successful an attacker first needs to reduce his opponents Balance. To do this he uses skills, called Preparatory Attacks, designed to attack Balance directly. Balance regenerates quickly both in and out of combat (8 Balance per second for a starting character), so after reducing his opponent’s Balance the attacker will have only a fairly brief window to launch his attacks.

That covers the basics of Combat Pools and Automatic Defenses. Next time, I’ll talk about the different Fighting Schools and Skill Types.

Now that they've done a write-up on ship combat and are doing this one on hand-to-hand, they need to do a nice two-parter on the crafting system

Now where would you have heard that?

/whistles innocently

Very long one here, The Economy:

The largest recipe is constructing a ship of the line. It takes 72 hours. But consider: It's constructed from a hull, a rig, and some miscellaneous other pieces. Each of the hull and rig also take a long time -- I'm at home, so I don't have my spreadsheets, but I believe it's around 48 hours for each. And they're both built out of components that take a while to produce. You also need guns -- a LOT of guns -- and they also take quite a while to produce.

I have a tool that calculates the minimum time to produce an item based on perfectly efficient structure management. Ships of the line are slow to build.

Now that I have access to my economy tools again, I can tell you: if you have an unlimited number of structures all working at perfect efficiency, and you're somehow able to instantly teleport items from where they're produced to where they're consumed, you can build a 104 gun ship of the line in 108.5 hours.

Teams Alpha, Beta and Delta:
•Navy Commander – The leader of the group sails a First Rate Ship of the Line with skills focused on survival. I didn’t want the commanders dying because they needed to lead the groups.
•Navy Flagship – The second First Rate in each group, with skills focused on weakening the enemy.
•Navy Escort (2) – These captains sail Second Rate Ships of the Line and serve as escorts – providing maneuverability support, defense and serving as the backbone of the fleet.
•Privateer Escort – Sailing a Heavy Frigate, the Privateers had a critical role. Whenever the Commander issued an attack order, the Privateer needed to light up the target with a signal flare. The flare made it easier for the rest of the group to spot and attack the right target.
•Freetrader Support – The three main groups had a Freetrader sailing a Galleon to provide support in the form of group buffs.