contention
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Storyboard: Community sites and what they can do
No MMO, to date, has a system to facilitate roleplayers interacting with one another outside of actual roleplaying. There are hubs you can haunt, there are things you can do, and there are addons in the games that support them, but at the end of the day, all you can do is throw your hat into the ring and hope against hope that no one is going to look at you strangely. Odds are good that you don't really want that experience outside of a high school dance and quite possibly not even then. So you need a way to know that you're getting in good with the roleplayers. In short, you need a community. I've been thinking of late about what community sites should be doing and what they actually can do. It's a point of contention because fostering a solid community relies strongly on having a central point of congregation, but trying to build a single community for an entire game's roleplayers is exceptionally difficult.
Port contention turn-ins in PotBS to be scaled down
Until now in Pirates of the Burning Sea, some clever folks have been able to cause a totally peaceful port to instantly become scheduled for a port battle, by saving up their contention turn-ins en masse and across characters, and handing them in all at once. Over at the official PotBS site, Isildur has drawn attention to the issue and said that changes are coming to prevent this from occurring in the future.You couldn't really call this tactic an exploit -- it's more just a smart use of the mechanics available in the game -- but it's obviously not how Flying Lab Software intended for the whole process to go down. The plan was to make the contention process a bit more steady so that the home nation could have a chance to defend and bring the unrest back down again, and possibly save a full-scale port battle from occurring, while also giving the traders a bigger role in defending their business interests. The first steps to prevent the current insta-port-battles should be introduced with build 1.2.
