We’ve been waiting a long time to send Point-à-Pitre into the live game. The towns in our game are great, but we see so much more possibility in them. This is why we made Tortuga and Point-à-Pitre. Sometimes though, we let our enthusiasm for the cool things our art and content teams can do eclipse the best possible game design. When that happens we listen to our players and make changes based on their feedback, which is what we’re going to do now.

What we’ve heard from players about both towns and the feedback is pretty similar:

• Stuff you need to do is too far away from the coxswain.
• Too hard to find your way around—“mazelike” is the word, I think.
• It’s too big.
• Maps are hard to read because of all the stairs / 3D areas.
• Tunnels are repetitive and boring.

To address these issues, we’re going to do a number of things. First, we’re going to move important locations and NPCs in Point-à-Pitre to be closer to the coxswain and easier to get to. Check out the map below. Very soon, all of the places you’d need to go for missions, etc., will be within the yellow outline there. That should make it a lot faster and easier to navigate to what you need.

The rest of the town will be open for exploration, but you won’t be forced to go there. If you do, however, you might find some mysterious things happening in the future. You will definitely find a coxswain in at least three other locations in town, so if you do go wandering, you have a quick way to get back to your ship when you’re done.

That’s the fast fix for Point-à-Pitre, but it doesn’t address the core issue here. We need to give you, our players, a louder voice earlier in our room and city design process. The cities we’d built before Tortuga and Point-à-Pitre were on a vastly different scale. We didn’t test them very much with players because there wasn’t that much room for error. With these bigger, more complex cities, we see that we definitely need to have more consideration for the player experience.

You’ll be seeing another devlog from me pretty soon inviting players to participate in testbed server events. We planned this before the outcry against Point-à-Pitre, but we were waiting until closer to the first event to publicize it. The deal is that, each time we push a new patch to testbed, we’re going to have some tasks set up for you to test the new content. I’ll be collecting feedback about the new stuff and conveying it to the rest of the developers while there’s still time to make changes before going live. We’ve done this occasionally in the past, but now we’re going to be doing it for every single patch.

In addition to the testbed events, we’re changing the way we design avatar spaces. Since launch, ArtCo and ConCo have reorganized to help foster better communication between teams, which has already resulted in vast improvements. We’re also doing more comprehensive reviews of rooms during each step of their creation, including testing with real players. I’m really excited about getting our players involved with this stuff, so I hope lots of you volunteer when we make the call.