What a fifteen year old pirate MMO taught us about our own game

We just finished a long research pass across two games that have almost nothing in common except that both have been running for over a decade with real players in them.

The Legend of the Pirates Online is a volunteer-run recreation of a Disney MMO that shut down in 2013. It is free, it refuses donations, and it has been quietly maintained for years by people who are not being paid. GTA Online is the opposite of all of that in every respect.

Both have survived contact with actual humans for a very long time, which is the only qualification we cared about. Here is what came out of it.

The thing that changed our design

Our design document says, in plain language, that there is no power progression. Everybody has the same guns and the same hulls, forever. That is lifted from Sea of Thieves, where it was the most hated feature at launch and turned out to be the reason the game is still alive.

The problem with that rule is obvious: if nobody gets stronger, what exactly is the point of playing for a hundred hours?

Both games answered it the same way, independently, and neither answer is obvious.

In the pirate MMO, you cannot loot a top-tier item unless your skill in that specific weapon is within about five levels of the item’s requirement. Being higher level does not make you better at fighting for the item. It makes you eligible to roll for it at all. Players proved this the hard way: a group of them deliberately capped one skill to make a specific legendary mathematically impossible to find, and none of them has ever found it. It works every time.

GTA Online goes to rank 8000 and weapon damage is flat. The shooting stat affects recoil, reload speed, accuracy and how much ammo you can carry, and it does not touch damage at all. Rank controls which gun you are allowed to buy, never how hard it hits. And over ten years the trend has gone the other way, with things that used to be rank-locked getting unlocked.

So: progression is access, not power. A new crew and a veteran crew in Dead Water will carry the same weapons and drive the same hulls. What differs is which cargo a fence will show them, which contracts they are allowed to see, and which ports will let them tie up. Combat stays flat. The economy carries the whole thing.

We did not invent that. We found two games doing it and copied their homework.

The mistake we were about to make

Here is the finding that actually stopped us.

The pirate MMO has guilds. It has had guilds for fifteen years. Guilds are where the entire social life of that game happens, and by every account they are the reason it still has players at all.

And they are connected to absolutely nothing. No guild wars, no territory, no guild score, no guild rewards, no guild-only content. In the game’s own guides, guilds appear exactly once: as a source of bodies you can ask for help.

You can see what that costs, because they publish their match history. Across more than 38,000 recorded player-versus-player matches, the two team modes that need six or more coordinated players account for 3.3% of everything ever played. The mode that needs two people and no coordination is 90%. Their flagship team map recorded zero matches in the 27 days we looked at.

Those team modes are not bad. We read the design, and the capture mechanic is genuinely clever. They are dying of coordination cost, in a game with roughly 145 people online at a time across nine servers, where getting six of them into the same match at the same moment is a job somebody has to do, and no system exists to do it.

We were about to build gang wars. Scheduled ones, with player minimums.

So we are not doing that

The gang layer in Dead Water is being designed so that every part of it works when exactly one person is online. Shared vaults, contracts posted between crews, reputation that accrues at gang scale, influence at a port that builds up and decays whether or not anybody is watching. Nobody has to show up at eight o’clock on a Tuesday for any of it to function.

The synchronous stuff, fleets meeting fleets, is filed under “if the population ever justifies it,” which it may well not.

There is a related finding worth the same attention. In that same game, the thing that reliably pulls thirty to fifty players onto a single ship is not a scheduled mode. It is a rare random monster that appears with no warning, has no minimum player count, no queue and no lockout, and drops something worth having. Players coordinate it themselves, on Discord, partly by exploiting a bug that lets them overfill boats.

The lesson is not subtle. A crowd shows up for a prize and a closing window, not for a calendar invite.

Two smaller things we are stealing outright

A damage over time formula. Fire in that game ticks for a flat amount plus a percentage of the target’s current health, so it decays as the target weakens. It is dangerous when you set something healthy on fire and nearly harmless as a finisher, which means it threatens without stealing kills, and it balances itself across wildly different health pools with no per-target tuning. That is going straight into our engine fires.

How GTA prices danger. When you sell contraband in a lobby full of other players, the game pays you an extra 2.5% per player, up to 50%. It does not force you into the dangerous lobby. It puts a price on it and lets you decide. Nobody who gets robbed on a big sale was victimised by the system, they took the bet themselves.

That is the whole design philosophy for our contraband flags, and it took a decade of someone else’s live tuning to arrive at.

What we could not find out

Plenty. Neither game publishes its drop rates, so every percentage in that part of our research is players with spreadsheets counting things by hand. GTA’s payouts get retuned without patch notes, so half the numbers on the internet about it are quietly stale. And the single largest economy rebalance in GTA Online’s history was announced in a tweet and appears in no patch note anywhere.

The structures we found are solid. The numbers are a starting point and we are treating them that way.