Ay Carumba.    Still dealing with the new system at work, which occupies almost all my thinking time, leaving me little energy to blog.

Over the last week, I got into POTBS a few times and slapped some pirates around.    My boy, it turns out, loves the game.    (My daughter could care less)    I get him sitting in my lap and we talk about naughty pirates and he even calls them “scurvy dogs” in his best 4-year-old pirate voice.

Launch day I headed over to the station store, bought the game and got all my codes entered in.    Logged in and got patched, and was ready to play.      It went amazingly smooth - kudos Flying Labs !    And, for whatever reason, I had no energy to actually sit down and play.

I found myself instead returning to an awesome strategy single-player game, Hearts of Iron II Doomsday.      This is just the kind of thing, with immense detail and scope, that I loved messing with when I had the time for such things.    Apparently, it’s also good when I only have a little time - it has this handy feature that no MMO has managed to install.    It’s called the “Pause” button.

So until I’m bored with planting the German flag wherever I can, Pirates seems to be on hold.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is very, very good so far.

Angus McSwag, British naval officer, is currently level 11 and chasing various pirates around the safer areas. Upgraded his starter ship to a Dolphyn Ketch, giving much more firepower and a visually larger ship. It’s a bit harder to fight - the thing is so big it makes seeing the enemy harder.

Finished up all the quests in the Jenny Bay newb area, and am graduating to the starter area of greater Guyana. There are several ports in the area meant for newer players, with restricted/less/none (something like that) PVP action, which is great for this carebear. I moved on to Rossignol port and began working the quests available there.

Ian McSwag, level 8 freetrader, is a different story. I’m in a different place mentally right now due to incredible difficulty and pressure at work. I don’t have a lot in me to figure out “the economy” of the game. I have managed to determine a few things.

There are a large group (?30) of raw materials in the game, as contrasted with the ?15 different items at 8 tiers in Everquest. All but two of these materials require a building that costs at least 200 doubloons / week in order to produce; in EQ2 your only constraint is time gathering and luck picking up rares.     Oh, and a gold mine costs something like 1200 doubloons / week (!).

Most of the materials can be created at around a dozen items with stored labor per day which should translate to around 84 items at various prices starting at floor of maybe 6 doubloons. Average is probably around 8.

If you can sell all of that, that’s a decent income supplying raw material. There were thousands of each material for sale for the most part, leaving me wondering if nobody is actually buying the stuff. And 200 doubloons is, roughly, the loot gathered from sinking a pirate.

So which would you rather do ? Take risks with your money, hope for big returns, and make some raw material stations (which have substantial capital costs in addition to maintenance) in the hope of getting 700ish doubloons…………… or do you want to sink four pirates ?

The choice is clear for me.

Have I said how much fun blowing up pirates is yet ? What a blast to maneuver, deal with the wind, and try and sink two pirates at about my level. Takes forever, but it’s doable. I really love this game.

One other item of note - dealing with the auctioneer.

I bought the Dolphyn Ketch after poring over the available ships for sale. I had a whole bunch of gold, and apparently there isn’t that much that my cheapskate self can do with it other than invest in something that should make me more money and doesn’t go down in value - unless you get yourself sunk. EQ2 (back in the early days), I was always worried about box costs, repair costs and paying my rent; that’s simply not present in this game so far. So, why not. Let’s buy a better ship.

Each ship was going for 13000 doubloons according to the broker. Last price paid, going back several days, with the averages for the various areas being roughly the same thing. Like any cheapskate, I knew I had to underbid, the only question was by how much. So I put in 12000 doubloons.

And I bought it.

How completely disappointing. I overbid for the thing - quite possibly, immensely. Every other commodity I’ve tried to buy, like repair kits, I haven’t been able to get at the “going price”, and I started bidding for most of those at one doubloon. This one, however, might have had a really low price and I missed out on it. So my very first auction purchase I “got screwed” on.

Now, you might ask how I got screwed. I got the price I bid for it. But I could have gotten it at a lower price. Nothing annoys me more than paying too much for something. I would sit and watch the broker in EQ2 for weeks before making a purchase, to say nothing of the time spent looking for the supremely high-cost items. The system here discourages you from doing that, given the mysterious “last price paid” and the lack of other information.

Lesson learned. The business game in Pirates is very much a PvP affair; it’s actually possible to really gank someone hard and I might have been ganked right there. Sure feels like it.

12,000 doubloons is sixty pirates. Time to start sinking them again.

Yaaarrrr !     Last night I took a break from work stress long enough to log into Pirates for the first time.     I had previously looked at the list of server names, noted a lack of consensus among the blogger community about where to play, and decided to just pick Bonny as my server.     Bonny - An auld Scottish word meaning beautiful or great.     Couldn’t pass that one up really.

I created a British Freetrader, figuring that one thing I really want to get into is the economic game, and also realizing that with a level 21 cap until the “final go-live” I don’t want to be hitting the cap and getting discouraged ala my LOTRO experience.

Still, last night was just spent doing a few of the easy newb missions and reaching level 5.     First mission I did was one of my favorites from beta - you need to find three crates of rum for the bartender in Jenny Bay.     You enter the instance and there’s a bunch of pirates floating about grabbing the rum - ie, not aggro.     Once I grabbed my first cask, they decided to come after me in earnest.

Tacking back and forth, dodging pirate cannonballs, and taking down around eight level one pirates was an absolute blast!     I sank a couple of them, some of them abandoned ship and got out of the fight, knocked down masts on two others, and grappled most of them and boarded each ship.      I haven’t quite got it down yet, but I think I get a bunch of doubloons if I board, versus just sinking another ship.

The boarding combat is a bit crazy - I spent time mashing buttons, trying to get whatever pirate I was targeted on off balance and ready for a finishing stroke.    The combat works by this initiative and balance concept - the other guy starts off with a colored circle around his feet, green, and various things that you and he do will change the color to yellow and finally red, with some shades in between.    When he’s down to a sufficiently bad color, you let him have it with damaging attacks and down he goes.

But like I said, I mostly mashed buttons.   I don’t have a lot of skills but I practiced a bit with them, trying to knock the guys down in initiative, but found them falling down dead instead.     Heh - that works too.

Finished up maybe five missions and ended at level 5.     Ready to start the economy tutorial.     Sitting pretty in my newb ship with maybe 1,000 doubloons and looking forward to exploring the game thoroughly.

So that meant…….. time to decide what to do about subscriptions.     I cancelled my EQ2 subscription after a moment of thought.     I’m just not going to lock myself into $30 / month subs with Station Access; I’ll subscribe to whatever game is striking my fancy, singly, instead, for a mere $15.     Cancelling was not an ordeal - just hit the button, and it’s done.    No required questionaire about “Why are you leaving” this time, just a password confirmation.

Too bad.    The idea of Station Access is a good one, given the number of titles Sony owns now and has put under one billing umbrella.   The cost is just waaaayyy too high, and it has increased an incredible 50% or so since its introduction.

The only gaming I managed last night was patching Pirates of the Burning Sea. I’ll have time to log in tonight I hope.

So I’ve been checking out gaming for my kids, as my daughter begins to seem more interested in playing computer games. (My boy ? Pfffft. Hot Wheels and Playhouse Disney FTW !) She is a horse fanatic, so I’ve been dabbling in the pony possibilities out there and hit a few interesting things.

I got this one off of a Google mail ad. Howrse is apparently all about raising a horse. Not just the raising of it, but also training it, getting it to run races, and also running your own breeding farm and employing others to keep it going.

It works by limiting time spent in a particular day; as the real life days pass, you get another “Howrse-day” to play through the game; each day is two months of game time. I haven’t yet shown my daughter - will she like it ? Not sure, but it’s the closest thing I got to a horse game.

We got her Bella Sara cards for Christmas, and she likes that. I misunderstood what it was - I’m thinking it’s a collectible card game ala Magic and Yu Gi Oh. But the Bella Sara cards don’t have a serious game involved, they are mostly used for collecting something that actually exists in meatspace, along with the code #’s printed on each one.

All you have to do is go to the website, put in the code, and you can care for your virtual horse online. Check out the three bars they have to manage. She has a whole stable of these things, complete with cutsey music and “positive messages”.

Webkinz, which I tried to get her interested in, requires purchasing a $15 stuffed horse and she just didn’t want another horse. “Can I buy more Bella Sara cards instead ?”

It’s an interesting world out there for my kids, with the games they put out for them to enjoy, and it’s *very* strange being a little girl’s dad and trying out these things.

Have you ever had *all* the responsibility for something difficult ?   The only thing that could make things worse would be, also having *No* control or ability to work on the difficult task.

Yeah, that’s where I’m at with my ERP project.

Seven days into the new system, we didn’t test, and now we’re late with the interface and all the back-office tasks that I need to get done.    God help me.

I’m terrified about the whole thing.     So instead of thinking of something fun today (Pirates of the Burning Sea is going LIVE!) I get to sit at my desk and wait for the hammer to drop.

I had to imagine up a metaphor for the whole thing.    It’s a bit crude, but it’s very apt.

The new ERP system is, a person taking a dump.      The interface I’m waiting for is the shit.   What else can you call it ?   We didn’t bother to test, and all anybody is worried about is what goes on in that ERP system.    My part is looked down on because it’s not as important, which led to it not getting tested at all.

I need to keep the person from getting constipated - that is, keep the shit from getting stuck before it gets out of the new system.     There are many possible problems with the data that could happen; I don’t expect any of them to, but I shouldn’t have to be worrying about this at go live - that’s why you are supposed to TEST !       Any constipation is a big, dangerous roadblock that’s going to hurt a lot.

I have to get the shit into my system, the accounting system, which is the toilet bowl.    Talk about apt - who cares about the accounting other than those damned accountants ?   Screw em, let them clean up the mess after *my important system* gets its thing done. And my biggest personal role is as the toilet paper, cleaning up after whatever happens with the interface and making everything look SHINY and CLEAN.

Am I able to share these concerns with the project team ?   No.    We have a strange phenomenon going on, whereby if you are working on getting the system to function, and you don’t say that everything is fine, you are a *troublemaker* and get branded accordingly.    So I have to keep my mouth shut.     And really, who talks about taking a shit anyway ?    That’s gross, just do it and be quiet pal.

So I’m a little stressed.  The worst part is the waiting, which is why I’m posting this.    God, it feels good to at least get that talked about, even if only in a blog post.

Tezcatlipocca : 25% XP. Guildies cheered me up with words of encouragement about the blog tonight. Which got me motivated to go back out and knock more quests down.

First one I worked on required killing Taskmaster Orthiss. Now, this is an iksar near Dalnir’s wheel, and she has two watchmen nearby her that aggro if you just walk up and start hacking. Death #1. If you try to clear the nearby watchmen, you have to time it so wandering patrols don’t catch you in the act of slapping them around. Death #2.

You also respawn all the way back down at the end of the river, and need to take care that as you run back, no matter how fast you are, you have to watch out in case they repop as you are trying to clear one or the other. Death #3. Remember, too, that while timing the repops you also have to time the patrols. You didn’t forget that did you ? Death #4.

The crowning insult is the sudden and random attack by my pet ghost dog, deciding he could take out three watchmen, and when he’s wrong he gets me killed, #5. Sheesh. This is one expensive quest to finish. But ultimately managed to take out the taskmaster.

Next I had to kill the Cookie Monster. There’s an iksar at the Wheel who dumps the old food in a garbage pile, which apparently spawned a monster. The Sesame Street allusion is pretty funny for me, at least. I did discover that a blue ^^ is too hard for me to fight alone - Death #6. Fortunately for me, there was a group that showed up and decided to fight the thing, and I got in on it for the kill.

And didn’t get an update.

The Cookie Monster drops an ornate chest, with something gross inside that’s tagged as being required for the lunchpail quest.    The tag is wrong - the “discarded food” is actually needed for Cookie’s Monster.     We killed the thing several times because everybody kept rolling on the food (Hey, it must be valuable right?    It’s in an Ornate Chest!), and finally when I got the food I got my update.

Afterward we crawled through a canyon on the far side of Sebilis, until the group broke up.   I finished up the night by killing skeletons and destroying supplies for sokokar trainers before logging off.

The stress of the new ERP system go-live has sucked all my enthusiasm out, and left it in ashes on the floor.     I don’t feel much like writing, or playing either.    Having a big day with the live system on Sunday the 6th.     God but I hope the thing actually works; the worst part is, it’s not tested.     The good news is, if it doesn’t work there should be time to fix it.

Tezcatlipocca has managed to ding 77, and moved up to #11 on the server with  2,001 quests.     Two thousand!    That’s an amazing milestone to have reached.    He’s very close to reaching #10 as well.

Camaxtli : Ding 30 weaponsmith. This, I knew I could accomplish with 700 carbonites banked. I moved all the T3 harvests to my only remaining tradeskiller Ometochtli for eventual work on levelling to 30.

But the whole project took a lot out of me. My armorer will come later. I think, if the EQ2 team has some smarts, they would switch to a Vanguard type system where if you simply want to level up, your raws are provided for you. You select a work order or rush order, and once you get the order from the desk, all the raws needed are provided to you. Because really, it’s not that much fun to harvest as strenuously as I did.

Even worse, there’s no guarantee I’m done .

Tezcatlipocca : 42% XP or so. I continued to ping-pong between factions and help everybody continue to hate each other inside of the Kunzar Jungle.

Is this what a good character should really be doing ? I entered the city of Jinsk, my best friends in the jungle, and started killing civilians and sentries just to satisfy the quest requirements for the Renegades. Ugh.

Took on the four KJ writs available.     Only certain stonegazers qualified - those next to the shackle monks.      Only certain chokidai qualified - the ones high up on a ridge that I would never have found without the EQ2maps dot.     It was a bit strange, especially since other quests would allow you to update on the very same mobs.

On the one hand, I help out the renegades by killing Jinsk citizens, and on the other, I kill all of his sentries then tell him to get lost.    It’s a bit weird to be threatening an NPC one minute and the next be his best buddy.    The good news is, it’s not boring, it’s interesting, even if on one level it makes no sense.

Won some faction, lost some, and continued the quest to get more and more faction with everybody, but it got really late.

Quest update : 1,976 quests.      (That was a good year)    This should put me at #11 on the server if the other guy has added very few quests - he has 1,949.

Wow !    Saylah from Mystic Worlds has been playing a fair amount in the Pirates beta and posted some very detailed thoughts about the game.     I find myself pretty much in agreement with her, except my playstyle tends to let me rate the game higher.

Then none other than Flying Labs CEO Russ Williams pipes in and posts some very detailed comments and thoughts about her impressions and what it is that he’s trying to accomplish.

This game keeps looking better and better.     For once, all that time ago when I picked this one for future play, I seem to have picked a winner.     The cutting comment comes from Russ who tells us what they really needed to get working -  we picked sailing combat, Organic PvP, and the Economy as our star systems. Those have to be great.

• Sailing Combat - Check.    This is a total blast.    There’s an exciting mix here of personal player skill and tactics, along with equipment and hardware, that kept me blasting ships over and over and over.     Are you too low level ?    Keep the other guy in the dead area of the wind and knock him down slowly.    Need a little extra punch ?   Use the varied ammunition to kill the crew, take out the sails, or for extra sinking power.
• Organic PvP - All reports are this works well.    I haven’t participated, but I might at some point.    What can I say, I’m a carebear.    Still, I might be able to help draw ports into contention which would be my contribution to the larger game, and I’m looking forward to that idea; you do that via NPC battles.
• Economy - Warning……. I remain worried that they simply made it too complicated and give too little information to the player.     This will be a big draw once I start playing for real, figuring this whole thing out, and taking the advice of others to play a free trader for money, and a pirate/naval officer for combat.

The key dates are getting closer - 1/7/2008 for pre-order play to begin; 1/22/2008 for final go live.     I just wish I had time to play EQ2 and Pirates at the same time !

It’s amazing how spending hours harvesting can make you want to scream like Captain Kirk.

I also managed to get a good idea of the worth of the various nodes.

1. Ores - Grab every one as quickly as possible.
2. Shinies - You never know what useful thing will come up.
3. Roots - You use lots of em and they sell well.
4. Logs - Surprisingly sellable, and useful in small amounts.
5. Dens - The pelts come in handy.
6. Bushes - Feeding time Duggin !
7. Windswepts - just ignore the useless things.

It also gives you a perspective on the difficulties faced by the devs in “fixing” harvesting.

At release -

“Augghhh ! There’s nothing but fish nodes left! We don’t want any fish!”

Devs separate the fish node spawns from the “land” spawns.

Soon afterwards -

“Auggghhh ! There’s nothing but fungus nodes ! Only alkies use em - get rid of them !”

Devs remove fungus nodes from the game.

Recently -

“Auggghhh ! There’s nothing but bushes and dens left ! We don’t want food !”

Devs add the Duggin quest.

One carbonite and 6 useless stone nodes.

Today -

MrrX : “Augggghh! There’s nothing but stupid windswept stones left !”

You know, I don’t think they can actually win that battle.

When it was all said and done, I managed to gather 700 carbonite before the day was up, along with multiple piles of related harvests. None of the rest of them matter really, compared to the value of carbonite.