PotBS pre-order period

Keen and Graev have a good post on the Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-order period, remarking on the obvious danger of getting bored if you are in a PvP game where PvP is disabled for the moment. They also recommend leveling up by hunting high-level ships in a group in the open sea. Unfortunately that advice isn't all that great for freetraders, because if you sink the wrong ships, your reputation with the other nations goes down. That doesn't matter for other classes, but for a freetrader that can critically damage his ability to trade with other nations. Thus joining a group with other classes, who don't care and aren't selective in what they attack is not a good idea as a freetrader.

Unlike other games, the pre-order period for Pirates of the Burning Sea is more than a marketing ploy, it serves an important design purpose: building up the player-based economy. The game started with some seeded goods, and the first couple of days of the economy were pretty chaotic. For example my granite business: granite was seeded at 15, the seeded goods quickly were out, granite prices skyrocketed to 300, lots of people built granite quarries, and the price collapsed to around 40. Might fall further, might rebound, I got out of that business now anyway. The point is that this was done mostly by players who already had beta experience. By the time the less experienced players enter on January 22, the economy should have stabilized. And there should be lots of ships, outfitting, ammo, and consumables available. The pre-order players do get some advantage of making money and 20 levels earlier, but port contention PvP is reserved for the retail version.

And yes, building up the economy can be boring. After destroying my granite quarries, I moved my production to Yucatan. Which is quite far away, 20 minutes or so of travel. I had to go back and forth several times to transport stuff. And on many of these trips *absolutely nothing happened*. Sometimes you get attacked by NPC pirates, in which case it is very easy to run away, but if you are afk you lose your ship and cargo. Thus you are forced to watch your game while traveling large distances, which is extremely boring. I ended up using my new wide-screen monitor to run PotBS in a small window, while using the rest of the screen to surf the internet and blog. Building up the economy can be a hard slog. For most people the real fun only begins on the 22nd.