Puzzle Pirates
One of my favorite online ways to waste spend my time is Puzzle Pirates. It’s a massively multiplayer online game, but is far different from your average MMORPG. In it, you are a pirate sailing the seas, taking money and other booty from brigands, barbarians, and merchants. Although possible to play alone, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to do well and make money at, and only possible once you’ve made (or bought, I’ll get to that later) enough money to afford your own ship and either become an officer in a crew, or made your own crew. Crews are the basic social unit of the game, being similar to guilds in many MMORPGs except that here they matter more.
As a new pirate, one can make a basic pittance and practice the puzzles around which the game resolves by taking jobs with the Navy. The Navy doesn’t fight anyone except in a mission that’s only available after you’ve gained some experience, so you just sail from island to island doing the basic shipboard puzzles. They resemble old-school 2d puzzle games, and in my opinion are all rather well made. Your success in a puzzle directly corresponds to how well the ship you’re on performs. Your previous experience and such matters little to the ability of the boat, it only lets you start at more advanced puzzle levels, thereby possibly allowing you (as long as you play well) to do better a little faster. All ratings are non-numeric, and are by descriptive words.
For each puzzle, you have two ratings: your Standing and your Experience. Standing is the one that matters more, showing savvy players how well you tend to score at a given puzzle. Experience is entirely a measure of time spent. All puzzles are rated, from shipboard puzzles like Sailing to gambling activities like Poker and Spades. The ratings are actually a competitive ladder internally, so it’s possible to go down as well as up on the scale.
The economy is pretty much entirely player run. There are a few shops maintained by the Oceanmasters, the in-game admins, but the vast majority of shops and trade is all done between players. It’s a very complex system, and would require more than one article just on the economy to fully explain. To put it simply though, it’s complex enough to be enjoyable, yet simple enough to be accessible.
Other than the basic Pillaging (going out on a ship and fighting other ships to make money), my favorite activity is being involved in Blockades. These are the high-end game, battles for which Flag (a Flag is an alliance of 1 or more Crews) controls a given island. They’re effectively big “capture the flag” games involving lots of ships. In a single blockade I’ve seen as many as 900 players participating at once. As a long-time player, I’ve been involved in just about everything one can be involved in in the game. I’ve been playing for about 2 years, and it always keeps my interest.
Although the game can be played free, someone has to pay money for most things you want to own… but it doesn’t have to be you, on Doubloon oceans. On these oceans, there’s 2 forms of currency, pieces of eight (the normal currency) and doubloons. Doubloons are brought into the game by someone spending real money on them, but can be traded on an exchange (or privately) for pieces of eight. As it is an exchange, the rates are determined entirely by players and supply and demand. There also exist Subscription oceans, on which there are no Doubloons but it costs $10 a month to have access to anything you’d normally have to spend Doubloons on (which are most of the items in the game, including ships).
Although it should be obvious, I love the game… and if you choose to look into it, say hi to me as Akerasi on Sage ocean (it’s a Doubloon ocean).
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