Pirates of the Burning Sea endgame

Massively recently had a post about the PotBS endgame, but you should have noticed from the "press tour" in the title that what is reported there has nothing at all to do with the real endgame in PotBS. Pirates of the Burning Sea is primarily a PvP game, and the endgame is PvP. There are no raids for phat epics, or other ways to improve your character with equipment. You just make money or grind special royal marks to buy ships with, and then you sink those ships in PvP.

And this is exactly why I don't believe that Pirates of the Burning Sea will keep their players for a very long time. The purpose of the game is PvP, and PvP is a negative sum game. Negative sum because the winners gain less than the losers lose, so if you win one and lose one, you're worse off than before.

What also worries me a bit is that the making money and losing money in PvP part are split between different character classes. The freetrader class is great at making money, even large sums of it, but so bad in ship-to-ship combat that they should avoid any serious PvP action. The pirates, privateers and navy officers will do most of the PvP, but the players enjoying that kind of gameplay might not necessarily be inclined to play in the economic game as well, and so they will constantly be out of money. Now you can imagine a guild having both freetraders and navy officers, with the former financing the latter. But what exactly are the latter going to do for the former? In principle they could escort them, but I doubt that is going to be popular, escorting a freetrader while he brings cargo from A to B. Chances are that if he is escorted, he won't be attacked, so nothing will be happening on that trip, which can be mindnumbingly boring.

A division of labor could work if Pirates of the Burning Sea would have good guild tools, in which the contribution of everyone was somehow rewarded. Unfortunately the PotBS guild tools are very basic, on the same level as World of Warcraft. It is easy to imagine how freetraders in guilds will be paying for most of the ships, get very little recignition for that, and stop playing after a while. The best way to PvP is probably to have two characters, a navy officer and a freetrader, and run the freetrader as money-making alt.