Free player for Former Pirates of Burning Sea Players until Fr05 March 2010

[Ace Rimsey]

Who am I?
The last official Australian TOG society leader for Pirates of the Burning Sea.

What is Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS)?
PotBS is a massively multiplayer online role playing game covering "The Age of sail".

There are four factions, three national (British, French, Spanish) and one Pirate (Brethern).

You play the role of a level 1 sea captain starting with a small sloop at your National port (eg. French starter port is Charlesfort in the north west corner of the global map) and through missions earn experience and doubloons (ingame gold) to upgrade your weapons and ships as you solo or group with other naval captains. Eventually you will level up to a the maximum level cap of 50 character and be able to command the powerful First Rate Warships of your national navy (if you specialized as a Naval Officer).

Alternately, you could start a Freetrader character who pilots a merchant ship and manages production facilities to sell his goods at the various auction houses across the globe.

A career as a solo Pirate preying on unsuspecting fat, heavily ladden freetrader merchant ships plying the trade between the various ports is another career path.

Besides open sea skirmishes, there are also first person sword fighting as part of the many missions for your character.

Nation versus Nation (NvN) port battles to decide ownership of the Port. Port ownership confers cheaper access to goods and ships and more efficient economic structures.

This element of control of ports and the natural resources available to underpin the viability of the economy of your nation is key. Without control of particular mines and materials, the construction of ships necessary to defend your sea lanes becomes impossible.

Why Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS) was so attractive to Australian MMROPG players?

Initially, Pirates of the Burning Sea was launched in cooperation with Telstra Big Pond's Game Arena service.

The benefit of working with Telstra as Australia's largest ISP, gave FLS the market position and scale to provide PotBS to Australian gamers at australian dollar prices and a discount on monthly subscription fee.

Telstra also treated downloads and access as unmetered content, so the large client and constant patching wouldn't kill your monthly data quota.

At launch, Telstra would even post to you via snail mail the client on a DVD disk so you didn't have to wait for the download before you could install and patch it to the current version.

You could even buy game cards to play PotBS from Australian stores so you could play without giving them your credit card number. A guaranteed way to ensure they didn’t overbill you for when you decided to cancel playing.

Indeed, you could have walked in to any Telstra shop and asked to be given one for free over the counter.

Why did TOG stop playing Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS)?
As Australians are active during the time when the bulk of the other Northern hemisphere players are asleep the seas became emptier and emptier over time.

The game suffered from the chicken and egg syndrome.

This game is great fun when the sea lanes are busy and the auction houses are bustling with players.

Equally, it feels vaguely flat when the seas are empty and there are no people around.

The lack of people meant the economy was broken.

TOG was too small to maintain decent production chains to supply our members with the materials, ship outfitting (ship upgrades eg. better attack bonuses and armour) and our Traders were unable to make any money from supplying the Auction houses given how broken the economy was on the launch of the game back then.

Because the economy was broken, our traders left and hence we were left with little incentive to group and hence gradually let our subscriptions lapse and moved on to other games.

Eventually, the handful of remaining Australian TOG players left to join the last remaining French Society (TOG started as French on the server) Les Condamnes ("The Condemned") or LC for short who are Australian time zone basd gamers.

So the last Australian TOG playing as French continued with them until our subscriptions expired.

When Telstra and Flying Labs Software (FLS) decided to terminate their partnership, it was the final nail in the coffin.

The main negatives were:

• Data access was no longer unmetered.
• Monthly subscription had to be done in USD via Sony Online Entertainment (SOE).
• SOE was the biller and only took credit cards. Game cards not available for sale in Australian Game shops a the time. At the time, SOE was notorious for its slack overbilling practices.

What ’s happening now in Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS)?

Flying Labs Software will be consolidating its game servers down to two (Roberts and Antigua). All other servers will be shut down on Friday 05th March 2010.

As of today, former Telstra PotBS customers with characters on the former SOE Australian server – Defiant, will have the opportunity to transfer their existing characters over to either Roberts or Antigua and then play for free until Friday 05th March 2010. (they claim up to max 29 days of free play)

What I am proposing for former Telstra/Australian PotBS TOG players?


The bottom line is that free game play is only for up to 29 days, so restarting the society from scratch only for it to collapse when the free time ends is pointless waste of everyone's time.

Hence, I want to organize us to join Les Condemnes again as a group and slot immediately in to their production lines so we can get fast access to ships at cost price so we can maximize our gaming time for 29 days.

The LC French economy and production supply chains are established and efficient. LC have plans to allow the building of the best ships in the game and will be able to supply them at cost to members which will be vastly below auction house prices so you will be in a decent ship and sailing the high seas that much sooner.

All we need to do is agree to slot our basic structures (ie. Farms, Sawmills, Mines, etc.) in to the LC production chain and we get access to the good ships quickly.

We can coordinate this with Kev/Mowzer, the LC society leader in the lead up to all interested former TOG PotBS get ready to transfer and go “Live” during this free play period.

As former players you may have French chars at slightly below level 50, with a good active society like LC, we can mission group to level you quickly to the level cap so you can then use any non-class limited ship in the game for the remainder of the free play period.

Also, as they never stopped playing, they are very familiar with how the game has changed and which ship designs are "good" and competitive for Open sea duelling and Port Battles.

Go to the TOG Pirates of the Burning sea forum in the troll cave and sign up here if you are interested for one last sail on the burning seas.

http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/...rt-here-4.html

Post the name of your main ingame Character and confirm you are happy to dedicate your production facility (10 building slots) to help LC produce ships and in turn allow you to buy good ships at cost price.

(Note there are a handful of other TOG players currently playing on Blackbeard as part of the Spanish)

This posting is intended for lapsed Australian TOG PotBS players who played as French, not existing TOG PoTBS playing as Spanish on Blackbeard.

For those TOG Spaniards, LC have a Spanish Society on Roberts as well equipped with players who started or rerolled from French to Spanish when they moved to SOE.

[Ace Rimsey]

If you are a member of the US Military, Flying Labs Software (FLS) is offering a six month free trial of Pirates of the Burning Seas.

Pirates of the Burning Sea - Free Trial

You get a key which you can use to upgrade your new or existing Sony Online Pirates of the Burning sea subscription to have free access for six months.

In the fine print you need to be mindful that if you enter any billing information on to the account, the remainder of your free trial is automatically terminated.

So for you US Military TOG gamers, simply create a new account with the Sony Station Launcher and then don't key any billing information in.

The trial key they send you is also valid for any lapsed PotBS account too.

[Ace Rimsey]

For those TOG, curious about how PotBS works, the following link lets you download a 24MB PDF copy of the gaming manual which gives you a good overview of character creation and the early stages of the game.

http://www.burningsea.com/downloads/...tBS_Manual.pdf

Game Guide

Pirates of the Burning Sea Game Guide
Understanding Sailing

Players do not start off as expert sailors—they must practice and learn the finer points of sailing. This guide will explain just those points for players of all levels: from novice to expert.
Avatar Combat

Swashbuckling combat is faster-paced than ship combat, but still requires strategy. In this guide, we explain the basic mechanics and the skills available so you can plan your strategy.
Getting a New Ship

This guide is designed to show new players how to upgrade from their starting ship. Upgrading is necessary for a variety of reasons. New players will need to upgrade for a variety of reasons: complete basic missions, compete in ship combat with other players and NPCs (non-player characters), haul goods across the Caribbean, etc.
Conquest

The Conquest system is a core part of Pirates of the Burning Sea, touching every part of the game. Because of this, Conquest has many moving parts and special cases. In this guide we aim to explain the mechanics behind the Conquest system and how they work together.
The Economy

Pirates of the Burning Sea includes an in-depth, player-driven economy that players can use to generate income, purchase ship outfitting or ammunition, build ships and more.
Skirmish

The skirmish system lets you join or create customized land or sea battles with up to 48 players. Skirmish is truly risk free- ships sunk do not lose durability and avatars do not consume smelling salts. All you lose in a skirmish is the ammunition and consumables you used to crush your enemy.
Emotes List

Get a listing of all in-game emote animations.
User Manual

Download the Pirates of the Burning Sea User Manual (24 MB PDF document). A PDF viewer, such as Adobe Acrobat, is required to view this document.
The New Prima Guide

• Expert Strategy and Ship & Skill Recommendations on all Five Classes.
• Detailed walkthrough on the new Avatar Combat system.
• Economic tips, tricks and strategies to become wealthy.
• Conquest System explained and methods for conquering ports revealed.
• Daily Quests and Major Quests strategies included.
• Unlock code for a new exclusive in-game black iguana!

[Reoh]

Glad to see you have such a passion for the game mate, but I'm sorry to hear about the troubles. Sounds like you're going to see it off with a big bang though and thats a fine way to do things.

[fantomas]

I left the game while we were still on Invincible. Any idea if I can still transfer my char/account from bigpond? Or have I left my run too long? Am curious to see how the game has progressed from beta/early days. Have heard the quests have been improved.

[Ace Rimsey]

Originally Posted by fantomas

I left the game while we were still on Invincible. Any idea if I can still transfer my char/account from bigpond? Or have I left my run too long? Am curious to see how the game has progressed from beta/early days. Have heard the quests have been improved.

From what I heard, they are pretty good at fishing dormant characters from old servers. So no harm in contacting FLS Support and asking them if you could port your invincible toons to Roberts if you are interested in one last bash during this free play period before 05 March 2010.