Tagged News: pirates of the burning sea

The Privateer gets a work over in the v1.4 patch in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Devs have taken the time to detail all the changes to this class:

One of the common complaints about Privateers is that they have skill options they want to take, but they are forced to invest in paths they dislike to get a specific skill. Sanctioned Piracy is the usual culprit. Now, Sanctioned Piracy is a free skill that Privateers receive at level 15. Weve also done some restructuring and adjustments to make more chains viable.

In the process, we removed the following skills from Privateers: Grease the Wheels, All or Nothing Shot 1, No Quarter, Stealth 1, Hide Crew, Maneuver 1 and Defense 1. Here are some of the new Privateer skills to replace the old ones:

Sturdy Rigging - Tier 3 Agility: Provides a passive boost to mast integrity. ~12.5% mast integrity
Agile Tactician - Tier 4 Agility: A group buff similar to Battle Doctrine. 1% resist, turn, damage, accel
Jugular - Tier 5 Agility: This is a major debuff that can only be used if your target is in a bigger ship class than you. It reduces DR, acceleration, reload rate and a small amount of accuracy. It gets more effective with each hit that lands. ~-20% +2% DR, -15% +1.5% accel, -10% + 1% reload. Max 15 hits.
Ride the Wind - Tier 3 Battle: A passive boost to target tracking and OS speed. ~5 tracking, ~5% OS speed
Concentrated Fire - Tier 4 Career: An attack that deals bonus damage and ignores a portion of the targets DR. ~35% damage, ignores ~40% DR
Hired Crew - Tier 5 Deception: Gives a passive boost to max crew. ~15%

Other skill changes have also been implemented so check out the article at the link above.

PotBS devs have posted the second in an ongoing six-part series of articles discussing changes to be implemented in patch v1.4. Focusing on naval officers this time around, here's what will be forthcoming:

Welcome to the second of six devlogs about the 1.4 skill revamp. If you havent already seen the first devlog, you may want to read about some of the general changes here. Keep in mind that the details contained here are subject to change based on feedback and ongoing internal testing, and the final result will almost certainly differ from this devlog.

Removing all of the tiered skills has major ramifications for Navy because they have so many in 1.3. All of these skills are going the way of the dodo: Requisition Berth, Defender 1, Desperate Shot 1, For God & Country 1, Perfect Discipline, Fortress 1, Thundering Broadside 1, Speed Increase 1, Reload Discipline 1 and Military Intelligence 1.

Check out the rest after the jump.

PotBS has announced a new 'harassment policy' that goes into effect immediately. It's one thing to play a rude, revolting, disgusting, harassing pirate but it's a whole 'nother thing to BE a real life idiot:

Recently, we've participated in several discussions asking us to clarify our policies on harassment, or griefing, and how that policy is enforced both on our forums, and in our game world. In a perfect world, we could distill the expectations we have of our customers to one simple statement: "Don't be a jerk".

Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as that.

So, we've created the following document that outlines our expectations as it relates to customer behavior. Please note that these policies are in effect both immediately and retroactively. Reports of harassment will be taken seriously, and violators risk permanent removal from Pirates of the Burning Sea.

But wait! Before you read on, there are some things every player needs to remember when filing support tickets. First, when providing information on a negative experience youve had in game, whether it be a bug or a case of harassment, you must be sure you are providing as much information as possible.

Find out what information is needed by clicking below.

Underdog Tools have been adjusted via the latest patch. Devs have posted an explanation of changes and reasons behind those changes.

This is a quick devlog about the current state of the underdog tools and how they've changed with today's patch. Due to how we control these tools, this is a new part of the 1.3 release. Although it's short, we're using a devlog to hit as wide of an audience as possible.

With character transfers live, we've condensed our population down to fewer servers. This drastically changed the landscape on many of those servers, effectively nullifying a portion of the server's conquest history. As a result, the underdog tools are no longer an appropriate representation of the situation on a given server. They're also less important when there's a critical mass of players on a server, because they do not have to overcome the same hurdles.

Check out the rest after the jump.

Several important announcements hit the 'net today at the official site today:

• Server Downtime on 4-30-08: We've identified the cause of both the server selection and dueling bugs found in this morning's build, and we will be pushing a patch during our normal maintenance window (1:30a - 3:30a Pacific) on Wednesday morning to remedy those issues.
• Temporary Suspension of Character Transfers: We have had reports from a handful of customers experiencing complications related the character transfer process. In an effort to mitigate the potential for any additional problems, we are temporarily suspending this service.

  We anticipate re-enabling the character transfer service in the very near future, and we will keep you updated as we learn more.

• Patch Notes for v1.3.30.0: Weighing in at 700Mb, it's a whopper!

Check out the patch notes after the jump.

RPG Vault is featuring a 'wrap report' with PotBS developers about their successes and failures and lessons learned since the game's debut in January. Here's a snippet:

Players behaved very, very differently from beta, both in the percentage of time they spent on the game, and in the places where they spent their time, which meant our numbers were dramatically off. In an interconnected game like Pirates, that's a real problem. We've spent the last milestone working on this, and are getting ready to roll out a solution.

Gold spammers. We figured they wouldn't be such a problem for us because the design of our economy means generating gold requires playing the economy for real, which doesn't break it. But what about the spam in national chat... the endless, constant spam? Oh yeah, that. We've wound up spending an undue amount of customer support time banning gold spammers, and code support to minimize their effect. Honestly, I'd rather just pay protection money; it'd be cheaper than what we're spending trying to deal with it.

There's tons more to read so check it out at the link above.

This week, Flying Lab Software announced the closure of seven of their 11 game servers for Pirates of the Burning Sea in order to achieve a more optimal number of players on the remaining servers. We want to know:

Has server under-/over-population ever hurt your enjoyment of an MMO?

From my experience, a low server population has as many advantages as disadvantages. What do you think?

Earlier this week, Pirates of the Burning Sea announced they were merging their 11 servers down to 4. Obviously, this rung some alarm bells in the community, so we tracked down Flying Lab Software CEO Russell Williams to find out the real deal in this exclusive interview.

"Companies are so afraid of any negative publicity that they basically wait until the game is on life support," said Williams. "People are always nervous about change, but the fact is the game has so many interrelated systems that the game really does function better when there is a higher density of people."

Read it all on the next page!

Ten Ton Hammer editors sat down with the Pirates of the Burning Sea development team for a post mortem discussion of the latest patch and the future of PotBS:

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that there are several big patches out of the gate, what's next for the game? Where will players be sailing next in Patch 1.4?

They'll still be in the Caribbean (though we've started talking about other areas) but the 1.4 patch is nicknamed the Patch of Pirate Love. We have some big changes coming for pirate players, both with cool content rewards (such as the new Pillaging system) and a big new change that we haven't announced yet.

1.4 also has a lot of improvements for everyone. We have the first revamp of how avatar combat works, we have the new supernatural epic mission, improvements to port contention, and more.

Check it out at TTH.

PotBS lead world designer Cory J. Herndon is the featured target of an interview at Game Daily News. Herndon gives a lot of background to the game and discusses the historical research that was involved:

GDN: Was there a lot of historical research required for POTBS, and did that research affect things like storylines, characters and even gameplay?

CJH: Yes, yes, yes, and yes. All of us have done at least some research and reading on the time period, of course, though our focus was often pretty specialized. Developers working on making the ships function realistically needed to focus on the nuts and bolts of the Age of Sail. Content designers and writers do a lot of historical research--you'll find a lot of non-fiction titles like Cordingly's Under the Black Flag, Johnson's General History of Pirates, Zacks' The Pirate Hunter, and Cawthorne's History of Pirates (not to be confused with the Johnson book, which was published in the 1700s) lying around ConCo (the content department where all the missions in the game are built, written, and designed). Many of us also read a lot of pirate and nautical fiction. In addition to classics like Sabatini's Captain Blood, I've read and enjoyed the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin series as well as the Hornblower books, but right now I'm devouring Dudley Pope's work. His Lord Ramage novels are great, swashbuckling Napoleonic fiction, and his Ned Yorke books do the same thing for the Age of Piracy in the Caribbean.

There's lots more interesting stuff to read so be sure to check it out.