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The truth about PotBS and Portalus

A must-read before you get your credit card out for these people.

As a disclaimer, I welcome any legal action to silence or sue me. Truth is a defence.

This page is a direct response to the mass banning of a huge amount of the active population. I'm perfectly willing to delete the entire contents of this page if the bans are lifted or at least made semi-permanent. Enclosed on this site is the information endlessly censored from the forums and documented effects of decisions the dev team has made with no regard for the people who willingly financially support them and pay their wages. There is no way of negotiating with people who do not communicate via their support system. There is no way of appealing on their forums since they delete your posts and ban your forum account, to ensure the remainder of their community continues to live in a bubble until it's their turn to quit or be victimised. This site is not slander, it's the last resort of somebody who has lost well over $1,000 worth of ingame matter in an incident I am not guilty of and I want to steer the game's population into avoiding the same loss utilising the only means that I can.


A history lesson:

PotBS was formerly owned by FLS. Around a year ago, FLS put the 2.11 patch live. Hundreds of people signed a petition to prevent this patch. That's almost everybody who actively played the game. This patch when it went live did two things. Firstly, it added in the pay-2-win series of rates. I don't begrudge this, they have to make money. The second thing it did which the community did begrudge, is it nerfed every other ingame boat to the point where it is barely usable. Until this, PotBS was quite possibly the best PvP game ever created. There were 34 4th rates and frigates ranging in affordability, all perfectly balanced. The 3rd rates were costly but not overpowered. Having cash gave you options in variety but little to no advantage. This facilitated amazing PvP combat. In addition to nerfing all of these boats so that only two boats from each class were usable, in an attempt to force people to buy the pay-2-win boats which cost frightful amounts of money, affordable PvP ended, and at least 80-90% of the population quit. The open sea died overnight. Around 5% of those who quit returned within the year. This same patch also altered the class skillsets removing skills from the Naval Officer and the Cutthroat which facilitated closing distance. The entire designed system of tactics simply turned into a who-can-get-the-most-range competition since whoever charges, loses. The PvP combat, while still competitive and enjoyable, is now a shell of its former self, and the game's population and skill level reflects this.

What's interesting to note however, is shortly after the release of the 2.11 patch, Sony binned FLS and FLS disbanded. Some of the FLS dev team that had perpetrated this mess then formed Portalus and took control over the game's development. Largely by forum censoring and a fair amount of misrepresentation, they attempted to convince the community they were here to fix the game and communicate with people. They did this because they recognised the mess they had created, yet didn't live up to their promises. A year later, we have more pay-to-win options available on treasure isle. The only combat viable ships all require recipes bought with real money. Instead of fixing the game back into its former self, they've added in virtual scratchcards in the form of chests and keys, removed complexity from all forms of combat, made the game more pay-2-win than ever and made no attempt to fix any of the issues the community has been begging for since beta. The terrible avcom system is untouched, the samey missions and grind to 50 which make most people quit before they get to be part of the endgame is still the same.


Customer service:

FLS were famed for their lack of customer service. Within the community it spent years as a running joke. However, FLS were never invasive in action they took against players and were always fair when it came to dealing with problems. Under FLS, things like account sharing were just overlooked, and they only focused on dealing with actual issues like modstacking/crossteaming/duping. Portalus knew this and learnt from it. They will communicate with the public, albeit only when it suits them. Since portalus took over, forum censorship has gone mad because they're afraid people talking about their game will actually stop people from joining. Rather than addressing the cause, why not just censor the people? Furthermore, a vast number of bans have swept across the game taking with it a huge portion of paying customers who have supported the game for countless years. Not one of these bans have been because any individual has engaged in any abusive activity, and they make no sense to the community, with as usual, no explanation. The dev team has spent more time wrongly policing their game in the last year than they have fixing the problems they've caused.

The goal:

I want to see the accounts of Amphore, Archer, Baltasar Cisneros, Blasco, Crestsilver, Denise Aller, Malcolm, Sea Fighter and everybody else affected, plus all of their countless alts banned for seemingly no reason to be unbanned or at least the ban made not permanent. Until then or forever, this site will stand in the hope that people consider anything they buy in your game for real money seriously, and realise they can log in one day to find out it disappeared unjustly. It's bad when you log in and find what you paid for has been nerfed and you have to pay for something else to keep enjoying the game. This situation however, is simply insane. I can only assume since I've been banned while innocent I'm not the only one. I want to finish this saying that I wish Portalus well, but all I wish is that those people who sign up for their game and experience this same treatment do not have to. Consider this when you get your credit card out, do you want to support it?



TheTruthAboutPortalus@gmail.com