Pirates of the Burning Sea is Live!

We are now live! As of now, you need an Activation Key to play. Your Activation Key is included in your retail box.

If you purchased the game via digital download from SOE’s Station Store, you will not receive an Activation Key and instead your account is automatically enabled to play.

If you purchased the game via digital download from another store, you will receive your Activation Key in email this morning circa our launch time. If you have not received your Activation Key from a digital download purchase, please contact a customer service representative from the store where you made your purchase.

If you do have an Activation Key, you will be prompted to enter it when you first log in to the game. You can also do this on the web by visiting your SOE Station account page and entering it there.

If you have a Landing Party Key because you bought the special preorder retail box, this is an optional key and is not required to play. The Landing Party Key enables all characters you create to use /claim to retrieve your parrot & swords preorder bonus items. Characters who already used /claim during the preboarding period keep their parrot & swords even without using the Landing Party key. If you need to apply your Landing Party key, do so at the same SOE Station account page where you entered your Activation Key.

If you purchased a Prima Strategy Guide for Pirates of the Burning Sea (either the PDF ebook or the printed book), you can now apply the Red Parrot Key that was included with your guide. Just enter it on your SOE Station account page and then use /claim in game to get your parrot.

Finally, if you were a member of our Open Beta program, you can now claim your exclusive flag & sail emblems! To get your key code for this special reward, make sure you are logged in to our website (check the upper right corner of this page to see) and then visit this page to receive your key and read the instructions there for redeeming it. If you are not logged in, that link will redirect you back to our home page so you can log in. Every player who logged into the game during Open Beta is eligible for this offer.

Thanks for your patience and welcome to the Burning Sea!

Battles at Sea

With the wind at your back and the enemy in sight, you give the order and a dozen cannons roar. Whirling spheres of iron arc across the sky and collide with the foreign ship, sending splinters flying and men screaming in fear at the hell you’ve unleashed. Then you turn swiftly to starboard, target the escort craft, and do it again. But these two aren’t alone. Their allies come from behind, and if you turn to engage them you’ll be upwind where your sails go slack and your speed falls away. The cannons thunder. Victory is in doubt. It’s up to you: your captain’s tactics and your skill as a player. Can you keep your ship afloat or are you headed for a watery grave?

Ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea is fast and tactical. Your angle to the wind, your speed, and the relative motion of your target all are critical to success or failure. You aren’t just mashing buttons in some twitch contest. You’re scanning the battlefield, watching the wind, and trying to think ahead thirty, sixty, ninety seconds. It’s like playing chess with guns, reacting in the moment while planning your next move.

Through smart use of skills, items, and tactics you can turn the tables on your opponent. Each career – Naval Officer, Freetrader, and Privateer – has several dozen captaincy skills for you to choose from. As you rise in rank you’ll be able to command many different kinds of ships and make use of advanced equipment. While in port you can adjust your ship’s performance, tuning it the way you would a racing car. All of these tools are at your fingertips, and in the right combinations you can deliver devastation to your foes.

Ship combat is fast, tactical, and challenging. It’s never the same fight twice.

Release Notes for 1.0.44.0

Welcome to Pirates of the Burning Sea!

Prima’s strategy guide for Pirates of the Burning Sea is now available as a PDF ebook for just $13.49, including a key code for a parrot item that will be valid after our retail launch on 1/22.

Build 1.0.44.0 is now live. See below for notes on what this build includes.

If your character gets stuck and you need urgent GM assistance, please file a request for help on our support site and use the Incident Type, “Unable to leave mission/zone”. Our GMs are watching for those reports and will come help you very quickly.

Release Notes for 1.0.44.0

Highlights:

• Stability: This patch includes several client graphics fixes that will improve performance, remove glitches for some ATI video cards, and stop crashes. We also fixed a crash in the sound manager and several server crashes.
• Sound Fixes: We fixed a client bug many of you encountered where your framerate in towns would slow down temporarily while music was playing. This is now gone. If you turned your Music volume slider down to avoid this problem, turn it back up again!
• Low-level mission revamp: The Open Beta taught us that there were too many missions in the low-level towns and that they were even lower level than they should be. We have made many changes here so that the number and level of missions better matches your leveling rate. This change means you will have missions closer to your level more often. That means the missions will be less boring (fewer “minor” ships!) and will also give better XP and doubloon rewards because they’ll be higher level. Details are below.
• Black Point: We also fixed the problem with ship deed turn-in at Black Point.

Known Issues:

• We’re still working on the problem where folks can get stuck on an infinite Loading screen when trying to port to a different ship via the Harbor Master.
• Black Heart, Black Powder: Often your NPC ally will refuse to follow you after you interact. This breaks the mission. You may want to hold off on taking this mission for now.

Differences between 1.0.35.0 and 1.0.44.0 include but aren’t limited to:

Ships / Combat:

• Black Point has a Harbor Master now. You can now use the deed you turned in there.
• The ‘Pommern’ Frigate and all variants are now named the ‘Hercules’ Frigate instead. This is purely a name change and no stats were altered. The modeler of the ship requested that we use this name and we were happy to comply.

Swashbuckling:

• Whenever you block an attack, you now lose 4 Balance points. This has no real effect on combat, but it does resolve an exploit where you could stack Block and Balance buffs and actually become invulnerable. This slight Balance penalty is enough to resolve that exploit.
• Lead From the Front & Improved Lead From the Front: These skills weren’t buffing NPC allies as they should. Fixed that.
• Revive: If you were playing avatar combat in a group and someone Revived you after were defeated, enemy NPCs would ignore you once you came back from the dead. Now they agro on you as they should.

Missions:

• Black Heart, Black Powder: Fixed a bug that would prevent you from leaving the mission.
• Low-level mission revamp: We had a LOT of missions in the starting town of each nation (Jenny Bay, Vera Cruz, Charlesfort, and Marsh Harbour). This was kind of cool, but it also meant that if you played every mission in the first town you could leave as level 11, which meant much of the mission content in the low-level towns would then be trivial and, frankly, boring. To improve this, we have removed several missions from the first town. These missions are now gone from the game:
  
  Atonement
  
  Big Cargo
  
  The Captain-Cook
  
  Good Riddance
  
  No Loitering
  
  The Roving Eye
  
  Scout and About
  
  Sea of Souls
  
  Thinner Than Water
  
  If you already have any of these missions on your characters, you will still have them and can finish them as usual. But they will no longer be offered by mission patrons.
• Low-level mission revamp part 2: The levels of missions in the second and third towns were too low. Very quickly, you could be level 12 but still be playing level 4-6 missions. This meant too many low-level missions were boringly simple and you were frequently fighting “(minor)” ships, which are incredibly weak and can’t be captured or claimed for pennants and commendations. We have done two things to improve the low-level mission experience in the second and third towns.
• • We have adjusted mission levels throughout the second and third towns to keep better pace with your level as you play. This means the missions will be more challenging, and you will pretty much stop seeing “(minor)” ships once you get to the second town and beyond. In addition, since the missions are higher level they will give you better XP and doubloon rewards.
    
    The second town used to have missions that were mostly levels 4-6. They are now mostly levels 7-9. This affects Rosignol (British), Barilla (Spanish), Fort Caroline (French), and Morgan’s Bluff (Pirate).
    
    The third town used to have missions that were mostly levels 6-7. They are now mostly levels 10-12. This affects Georgetown (British), Villa Hermosa (Spanish), St. Augustine (French), and Harbour Island (Pirate).
  • As you may have noticed, most missions are reused for all four nations with different characters, text, and enemies. Because we had a surplus of missions in the second and third towns, we have removed some missions from some nations. That means if you play a different nation later on, you will find missions you haven’t seen before.
    
    Second Town (Rosignol (British), Barilla (Spanish), Fort Caroline (French), and Morgan’s Bluff (Pirate))
  • • The Bettor Man: Now British and Spanish only.
    • Bon Appetit: Now French only.
    • Booty, Booty, Booty: Now French only.
    • Bring Him Back Alive: Now Spanish and Pirate only.
    • Damning Evidence: Now British only.
    • Escort Service: Now French only.
    • Important Discovery: Now British only.
    • A Matter of Honor: Now Spanish and French only.
    • No Respect: Now British only.
    • Out for a Limb: Now Spanish only.
    • Physic: Now Spanish only.
    • Proving Grounds: Now Spanish and Pirate only.
    • A Regular Customer: Now French only.
    • The Sage of Ale: Now Pirate only.
    • Suspicious Activity: Now British only.

Third Town (Georgetown (British), Villa Hermosa (Spanish), St. Augustine (French), and Harbour Island (Pirate))

• Back Ordered: Now British, French, and Pirate only.
• Dead of Night: Now British, French, and Pirate only.
• Dirty Dealings: Now Spanish only.
• An Eagerly Awaited Guest: Now Spanish only.
• Free Samples: Now British, French, and Pirate only.
• Looking for Trouble: Now Spanish and French only.
• Meet the Father: Now Spanish only.
• A New Business Partner: Now Spanish only.
• Not in My Port: Now Spanish only.
• Pay Day: Now Spanish only.
• The Perilous Road: Now British, French, and Pirate only.
• A Proposed Merger: Now Spanish only.
• 
  
  Rival Company: Now Spanish only.
• Running Late: Now British only.
• The Searcher: Now Spanish only.
• Fort St. Catherine: Now French only.
• Submit or Die: Now British and Pirate only.
• Trying Dutchmen: Now British, French, and Pirate only.
• Tying the Noose: Now British and Pirate only.
• Under the Black Flag: Now Spanish and French only.
• Un Viejo Convoy Grande: Now British only.
• West by West India: Now British, French, and Pirate only.

If you already have any of these missions on your characters but they are no longer valid for your nation, you will still have them on your list and you can finish them as usual. But they will no longer be offered by mission patrons.

Economy:

• Fixed the bug that caused Brits who took the Economy Tutorial out of Bartica to end up with a warehouse in Les Hattes, much to their surprise.
• Fixed a bug that prevented searching the Auction House in any language other than English. You can now search for auction items in the language you’re using to play the game.
• During the end of beta event, players spammed the Offer button in the auction house, causing transactions to stall and get screwed up. This won’t happen anymore.
• ‘Renard’ Chasse-Maree: Fixed a bug in the pricing for the Junk Merchant/Fence.
• Polacre: Fixed a bug in the pricing for the Junk Merchant/Fence.
• Ballast: Fixed a bug in the pricing for the Junk Merchant/Fence.

Stability / Performance:

• Made a graphics performance fix. Stopped rendering stuff every frame that didn’t need to be rendered nearly that often.
• Fixed a memory leak in the texture memory manager.
• Players with lower-end ATI cards encountered horrible visual problems in the game. We fixed most of these issues in the launch build, but now we’ve fixed some more. If the game ever looks like The Matrix to you, we think we’ve solved that problem.
• Fixed a crash that would occur if you changed your graphics preferences (particularly your texture slider), and then talked to the Harbor Master to look at your Dry Dock UI.
• Fixed a crash that occurred in boarding combat just after both the enemy captain and the player had been killed (in that order), and before the player respawned. This is what sending those crash reports to Microsoft buys you: This has been reported by a Beta tester but we couldn’t figure out the repro. But once we got the crash dumps from Microsoft, we could tell what was going on and fix it.
• Made a fix to the sound manager to clear sound buffer cache. This might prevent a game crash we’ve seen if you stayed in the same place for a while when there were a lot of sounds, such as Tortuga.
  
  
• Added some logging to help track down a game crash we can’t figure out.
• If you get an error about needing to open a port range in your router, you’ll now be shown the correct ports (7010-7100) in the popup window. We recently changed the range to try to work around connectivity issues on college campuses and the like.
• Fixed a zone server crash that could occur if players landed in the room not on the nav mesh.
• Fixed a zone server crash that could occur if you leveled up just as you died.
• Fixed a zone server crash that we saw numerous times over two days during Open Beta but not before or since. We don’t know what caused it, but it shouldn’t happen again.

UI / Art / Sound:

• Adjusted the names of the EU servers to show their languages.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the Chat tab titles from being localized.
• Fixed a problem with how NPC names can show up in localized versions.
• Your framerate would die if you were hearing town intro music while standing near an NPC musician who was also playing music. Fixed this bug.

Misc:

• Removed text we thought might offend the ESRB.
• Integrated new localized text from SOE.

POTBS Patch Notes: Build 1.0.22.0

A new patch for the open beta for PotBS was released last weekend. There are tons of changes that have been made which is a great thing to hear for the beta community.

This patch includes a lot of great stuff. Highlights include improvements in server lag in towns and in boarding combat, improvements to the invisible-avatar problem, the revamped version of the Red Tide level 6 group mission, many many mission and text bug fixes, the latest foreign-language translations, and a lot more.

We slowed the port conquest unrest rate to what we thought was appropriate due to the higher server population. Then we found out we did it wrong and it was way too slow. It's set correctly now. Among other things, this means that the unrest missions (such as delivering gunpowder to the rebel agent) now contribute significant amounts of unrest, as intended.

Known issues:

Surrendering in PvP puts the "Recently Killed" effect on you. It shouldn't.

We had to wipe your keybindings in this build. If you'd set keybindings other than the defaults, you'll need to set them up again. But now you can set them separately for each language.

We did some work to make battle markers color coded based on whether you could enter them, whether they had groupmates, etc. but we're not done yet. Ignore the coloring in this build and continue to rely on the old solution of mousing over them to see what the text says. We are still working on getting this cleaned up so it's easy to see at a glance the status of all nearby battle markers.

Differences between 1.0.17.0 and 1.0.22.0 include but aren't limited to:

Missions:

The tutorial was trying to set the firing arcs and wind indicator on or off as needed, which didn't work reliably since those preferences are preserved across all characters and servers. We stopped trying to do this so you can use your own settings in the tutorial.

There was a lengthy pause in the tutorial when you clicked the ship in distress before you'd end up in the captain's cabin. We fixed this pause so the transition happens right away.

Sometimes, NPCs in missions would have no names. We fixed this.

PvE Pirate Bounty missions offered no rewards. Fixed that.

Changed the rewards for the Magistrate Commendation missions. They now give out refit packages and a low-rank writ instead of all types of writs.

No Loitering: Tweaked your allies so they'll actually attack your enemies instead of standing around annoyed w/ them.

Increased the level of the opponents in the Fighting School mission chains to make them a little more challenging.

Drake's Ghost: Fixed the magistrate so he advances the mission properly.

Las Ferias de Portobelo: This mission is no longer repeatable. It shouldn't have been to start with.

Like a Cure for Chocolate: It wasn't possible to complete this mission. Fixed that.

The Out-of-Towners: If you failed the encounter, the mission would cancel itself. Fixed that.

Patients Zero: Anastas Danre had no sword and so was unable to attack. Fixed that.

Seventeen Bones: There was no entrance to the encounter. Fixed that.

Shoorai's Antipathy: There was no entrance to the encounter. Fixed that.

The Gunner's Mate: Muenda Audoire had no weapon and so couldn't attack. Fixed that.

30 Royal Encomiums: This Freetrader mission was offering a nonexistent item as a reward. Fixed that.

Citation of Conquest: This mission was awarding the wrong writ. Fixed that.

Red Tide! This level 6 group mission has been revamped and is now a repeatable group instance that should need four players to play effectively. It now includes both avatar and ship combat. You can play it as often as you want and the boss ship at the end of the fight drops a variety of loot only available in Red Tide. We hope you enjoy this first taste of our new repeatable group content and let us know if it's too easy!

Ship bounty missions could sometimes fail to progress if you killed more than the required number of a target, and would also display erroneous messages like Killed 4 of 2 Ships. They now work correctly.

Some ship bounty missions would accept avatar kills. We fixed this so they only accept ship kills.

Past the Point of Subtlety: This roleplaying story arc mission had a bug where if you boarded an enemy ship, the fire ship you were escorting would stop following you. We fixed that bug so the fireship does follow you as intended even if you do board an enemy ship. We also adjusted its goal position so the AI has an easier time getting there. We believe this mission should now play as it should.

A Man of Wealth and Taste: If you left in the middle of the mission, it could break your ability to play it at all. We've fixed this bug.

A Riot Is an Ugly Thing: Joachim Dequoy wasn't fighting because he had no sword. Fixed that.

End of the Millennium: Blasco le Vallon wasn't fighting because he had no sword. Fixed that.

Tortuga has two taverns, an indoor one and an outdoor one. Missions that referenced a tavern in Tortuga needed to be updated to use the right ones. Fixed that.

Does He Not Bleed: It was possible to kill the Thief of Pride, breaking the mission. Fixed that.

40 Royal Encomiums: Now requires you to turn in 40 Royal Encomiums instead of 30.

Cleaned up many places in many missions where there was code instead of text. Keep these bug reports coming.

Lady Arsenault: If you died without smelling salts you had to wait 5 minutes to give up. Fixed that.

Ship Combat:

Recently we adjusted the colors of ship names in the UI to make them more legible. This had the side effect of applying the same color change to the ship icons in the minimap, where it was very hard to distinguish the colors. We have broken out those color values into their own set and have now adjusted the minimap ship icon colors to be distinct.

The PvP Flag once again protects you from NPC agro in the Open Sea. When we did this before it blocked agro even in ship combat, which was really bad. It now works as intended.

Evade Aggression: This skill now works better at reducing agro from Open Sea NPCs.

Tweaked ad hoc spawn distances to reduce the likelihood of spawning in gun range.

When a groupmate in the Open Sea enters an ad hoc, we now automatically pull in other groupmates who are within 10 miles. We turned this feature off for a few weeks while we fixed some issues. Now that things are better, we're turning this feature back on again. After launch, we will be adding an option to join or decline nearby ad hocs involving a groupmate, but we believe this feature is now working well enough for launch.

Now that auto-join is enabled so that you automatically get pulled into ad hocs with your group members, we're dropping the ad hoc join window back down to 60 seconds.

Whenever you enter the Open Sea, you will now be unable to attack another player for 60 seconds while the new "Preparing Ship" effect is active. We did this to solve an unfortunate PvP tactic where one player would sit outside a port to draw other players into a battle, while his groupmates stood on the dock in town ready to jump into the OS and join the battle as soon as it was underway. This hid their true numbers and made for easy ganking. This tactic won't work anymore.

Vaporing: This skill was only lasting about 5 seconds, which wasn't long enough. Now it lasts 30 seconds as it should.

Swashbuckling:

Attack Target: This now-free skill was being given out at level 10 instead of level 1, which was an error. Now all new characters start with this skill, which you can use to order your NPC allies to attack the selected target.

'Provision Allies: Boarding' had no apparent effect and was lost when it shouldn't have been. Better now.

We optimized server traffic in Boarding combat and Fort combat. This should improve avatar motion lag in boarding combat and make it more responsive. How'd we do?

During avatar combat, we record data on what's happening. We tweaked this data collection so it doesn't cause as much of a performance hit on the zone server when lots of fighting is going on. This should improve avatar motion lag during boarding combat.

All players start with a free finishing move such as Cleave, Run Through, and Dagger to the Gut, but these finishing moves have been underpowered and weren't necessarily worth building up the initiative for. We've increased the minimum damage these moves inflict (from 10-20 damage to 15-20 damage) and reduced their balance cost by 10.

All three swashbuckling schools have a variety of passive skills that buff your attributes. We want passive skills to be worth the points you spend to buy them, so we have tuned their bonuses to be roughly equivalent to a level 50 piece of avatar outfitting. Almost all passive skills were affected by this improvement and you should find them to be more worthwhile.

Avatar items that gave balance increases were overpowered. Their balance buffs have been decreased by about 1/3rd overall, although the adjustments do vary per item. We also made some miscellaneous tweaks to better balance these items.

Throw Sand: We've reduced this skill's duration to 6 seconds.

Improved Flash Powder: We've reduced this skill's duration to 3 seconds. These two skills are meant to provide a brief respite for a harried captain so you can activate a defensive skill, back away quickly to use bandages to remove a Bleed effect, or use a consumable item.

Economy:

It wasn't possible to receive the recipe for the Halifax, preventing creation of Mastercraft versions of it. Fixed that.

A player in the open beta created a new listing in an auction house, but it vanished and the items were lost. Thanks to his bug report and screenshot, we tracked down the incident in the logs and discovered that in some cases of database disruption a transaction could be lost instead of queued for recording. We fixed this issue.

Economy Tutorial: If you left after building something and returned later, you might be unable to continue the tutorial. Fixed that so it works as it should.

Economy Tutorial: If you started this tutorial immediately after making a new character, you wouldn't have enough money to do everything required. We now make sure you earn enough within the economy tutorial to continue without finding money elsewhere.

Economy Tutorial: We no longer require you to wait around for your labor in order to finish.

Recipe tooltips were hard to read due to font colors. Fixed that.

The Mastercraft Halifax Schooner wasn't constructable. Now it is.

Art / UI / Sound:

Several NPCs had invisible clothing items (i.e. missing forearms or coats). Fixed these NPCs.

Delivery mission UI text now has readable colors.

Increased the width of the Interact UI to better accommodate foreign translations.

Replaced a bunch of placeholder ("TD") icons with actual icons.

Added a bit more color into the character/ship pictures in the Character Info UI.

Help Window link colors were changed to mirror the Interact UI colors.

When you dragged a skill or item from your toolbar, you saw a piece of text that made no sense. Now we show you the actual name of the thing you are dragging.

We recently made a code change that enabled you to hear many sound effects that were formerly being suppressed. (This was because nearby sounds were still being allowed to play even though their effective volume was 0 due to distance, so they used up sound slots that new and louder sounds couldn't use.) That change in turn meant that all looping sounds would restart the moment you reentered their radius, so you'd hear the beginning of the same sound effect repeatedly as you ran around. Now we keep track of where the loop was when we stopped playing it and resume it at the appropriate time later on. This will enable you to hear many more and diverse sounds.

It was possible to use the lock feature in Character Customization to create empty torsos or horrible interpenetrations of clothing bits. Fixed that, although there are still some other cases we are working on.

The male Seafarer coat was invisible once you were in game. Fixed that.

We made some improvements on the invisibile-avatar problem many of you are reporting. It's not fixed, but we've made some progress. Let us know how it goes.

Expanded the Loot UI a bit to accommodate foreign language translations.

Tweaked the Options UI a bit to accommodate foreign language translations.

Performance / Stability:

In towns with lots of avatars, you would get frequent frame rate drops. We made a performance improvement on the client that should make this better.

We made some improvements on the invisible-avatars problem. It is definitely still happening but we think it will happen less often. This is still a top-priority issue and work is ongoing, but we'd love to know how this first step goes.

Fixed some client crashes that could occur if you zoned while owning the wrong item.

Sometimes a bunch of players will get a meaningless loading screen again and again and again without actually going anywhere. While we still don't understand how this issue gets started, we have figured out how to prevent the symptoms from affecting anyone. You shouldn't see this recurring loading screen anymore.

When servers couldn't talk to each other for some reason, they gave up trying too quickly. We made some configuration changes to be more patient.

Fixed yet another zone server crash on shutdown. While you can't see those, there is some risk of data loss when they occur so we dig into each one we see just in case.

Fixed a database cache-server crash and a dispatch server crash that happened when they lost connection to serverdir. This was the cause of the short-term data rollback that happened last weekend and now it's fixed.

Fixed a login server problem that was caused by bad cache server behavior. We're so glad to have you guys pounding our servers this is great stuff you're enabling us to find.

Fixed a rare client crash that could occur if you had outfitting in your toolbars and tried to zone at just the wrong time.

Fixed a rare mission server crash that could occur if you somehow managed to get connected to the game twice. We're also working on preventing that getting-connected-twice thing. We think it's caused by something going wrong the first time you try and us never releasing the zombie that resulted.

Fixed a mission server crash that GMs could cause by trying to appear neutral. Also changed things so they can no longer do the thing that was causing the crash in the first place.

In some cases a player could have two characters logged in at the same time due to a bug. When this happened, the mission server would crash. We fixed this.

Adjusted load balancing on the server clusters so we don't put too many server processes on one machine.

Rollback fix! In some circumstances, the database cache server could crash and lose any changes that had not yet been written to the database. We fixed this crash. This was the source of the recent data loss/rollbacks you may have experienced.

We made a change that should improve server lag and stability in towns. When players are in towns we're frequently checking nearby NPCs to see if they have missions you can take and other things. With large numbers of players, the requests become enormous. These requests were going through the connection servers, which handle all player network traffic, and the connection servers could therefore become overloaded with these NPC requests. We now send those requests directly to the mission server, bypassing the connection servers. This should have a big impact on server lag in towns. (Note that this has no impact on framerate in towns, which is affected by hardware performance and how many avatars are being drawn.)

Made a global optimization to all of our network traffic. Every single packet we transmit is now smaller and more efficient. While the change is very small, we transmit these packets by the thousands every second. This change should provide improved network performance and reduce server lag.

Fixed some rare zone server crashes.

Misc:

Added the word Captain in front of your name in Character Creation so you'd be less tempted to make that your first name. We refer to you as "Captain " all the time in the game, so players who tried to call themselves "Captain Franks" would be referred to as "Captain Captain Franks". That's bad so we try to make it clear up front that you don't need to do that.

In theory, we now have limited macro support. You can create a text file with the extension .do in the Pirates folder under your My Documents folder. In that file, list slash commands like /wave and /say Ahoy! on separate lines. In game, /do and those commands will be run. You can make as many files as you like and each one is essentially its own macro. Note that there's no pause between them so that if you list multiple emotes in a row (or any command that results in an animation being played), you likely won't see all animations because they'll trounce each other.

Keybindings are now language specific. In this way, you can have one set of shortcuts in English and another set in another language. In order to implement this, however, we had to wipe your keybindings so you'll need to re-create them.

Our mouselook speed preference was broken. It was too slow for many people and there was no good way for you to fix it yourself. Should be better now.

Increased the interact radius on ports. You can now enter ports from a distance of 8 miles.

Added a few foreign words to the profanity filter. We have more to add...

Whew! It's been a busy week here and the work continues. Thanks for playing in the open beta!

Update Log!!

Welcome to Pirates of the Burning Sea!

Prima Publishing’s Official Game Guide is now available for immediate download as a PDF ebook for $14.99! Sample chapter (The Economy) also available for free preview.

Testbed is live with build 1.0.43.0. If you’d like to try out the next patch before everyone else, check this out.

Known Issues: See Release Notes below. Also, we’re aware that two server names show up as code. They work fine; just their names show up incorrectly.

Tip of the day: If you get stuck in a mission or room, log a Support request with Issue Type set to Unable to leave mission / zone. Wait in game. A GM will come rescue you soon.

When’s the next patch? If all goes well, we’ll upgrade the live clusters with 1.0.4x.0 early the week of 1/14.

---

Release Notes for 1.0.35.0

Welcome to the first Preboarding Party patch! If you were playing up through the end of the Open Beta, this patch has several changes you haven’t seen.

Some of you who have shared-memory video cards such as Turbocache or Hypermemory have been unable to play. These cards have less than 128MB of RAM but they share RAM with the CPU and so should meet our min spec. We have made a change that should let you play. Please try it and see.

You can now turn in Marks of Victory to get refit ship items. These are available from the same NPCs who have always handed out rewards for Marks of Victory.

We’ve also made more server fixes, particularly to fix the bug that was taking the clusters down every 12 hours or so.

And we’ve made a few more tuning changes to both ship and avatar combat.

Known Issues:

• Port Contention is disabled until we have the retail launch on January 22, so players dont show up that day to discover theyve already lost their first war. You can still PVP by talking to the Port Captain in any port and accepting the PvP Flag mission.
• The level cap is 21 until January 22.
• Certain older ATI cards are still experiencing graphical issues even after the fix that improved the situation for most. We’re still investigating and expect to release a fix soon.
• A new crash, potentially caused by a memory leak, was apparently introduced in a recent build. We believe we’ve fixed one or part of one in the next build (1.0.40.0) but keep sending those reports to Microsoft when prompted. That’ll help us track this down and fix it as quickly as possible.

Differences between 1.0.29.2 and 1.0.35.0 include but aren’t limited to:

Ships / Combat:

• Tweaked the range at which group-mates auto-join an ad hoc battle. They should spawn a little closer.
• Ship combat difficulty was ramping up around level 12, which meant it was way too easy for way too long. Changed this to make it ramp up a little around level 8. NPC spawns in this 8-12 range will be slightly harder.
• Made NPC ships a little bit more dangerous by increasing their damage and accuracy by around 3-5%. (Please note that NPCs already have substantial penalties to their damage and accuracy. This change actually lessens their penalties slightly; their damage and accuracy are still well below that of a player in the same ship. It’s more of a lessened nerf than a buff.)
• Increased the required levels on the refit ships so they are closer to their true level, but still slightly below. This means refit ships are slightly more powerful than their level, but are no longer massively more powerful for their level.
• Changed the sizes of several ships: Dolphyn Ketch: Medium -> Small, Postillionen: Large -> Medium, Curieuse Snow: Medium -> Small, van Hoorn: Medium -> Small, and Dromedary West Indiaman: Large -> Medium. We’ve wanted to do this for a while but had to wait for a database wipe.
• Expedition: Increased armor/structure.
• Arrow: Increased armor/structure.
• Myrmidon Refits: Reduced structure/armor, increased mast integrity.

Swashbuckling Combat:

• Decreased the duration of the close-combat effect by almost half. This will cause players to exit close combat more quickly when they are not being attacked. This change makes it easier to stun some enemies, back away to get out of close combat, and then use a healing skill to remove the Bleed effect and regain some HP.
• First Aid, Advanced First Aid: Added a 10 point instant-heal effect to all of the self-targeting medical skills, so that you heal 10 points immediately upon use and then gain the normal healing over time. In tandem with the above change, this should let you get out of close combat just long enough to regain 10 HP before the enemies unstun and come at you again.
• Improved Flash Powder: Increased the duration slightly (from 3 seconds to 4 seconds) and added a 10-second offense debuff to it. Your enemies will be stunned longer and have a harder time hitting you.
• Fixed some log spam caused by a typo in a skill definition.

UI:

• Tweaked the Quick Reference UI (both ship and avatar) to better accommodate localized text.
• Tweaked the Keybind UI to better accommodate localized text.
• Moved some drop-downs in Preferences UI around a bit in order to better accommodate localized text.

Sound:

• Another music mix pass. More work is needed, but you can hear the music better now.
• Added more nationalized crowd sounds in more lively town areas.
• Attempted to fix a ton of log spam reporting problems with sound files. This may not be entirely fixed yet, though. (QA can still make it happen sometimes.)

Performance / Stability:

• We now try to let you bypass the VRAM check. We still warn you that the game may not run but this may enable folks with Turbocache or Hypermemory cards to run the game.
• On low-end machines, if you turned shadows off, graphics looked HORRIBLE! Better now.
• We have a primary server that manages all the other servers (like the mission server and the zone servers). We’d turned him into a serial killer and he was taking the cluster down about every 12 hours. Fixed?
• Fixed a race condition in communications between the cache server and the mission server that could cause mission status on your character to get a little borked while zoning in missions on rare occasions.
• Fixed a cache server crash that could occur if it took too long to write your data. That was bad. Luckily, we only hit it a few times and most of those were during automation runs.
• We think we’ve fixed a rare cache server crash on shutdown. By the time it’s shutting down, cache server should have written all your character data already but we figured we’d fix the crash, you know, just in case.
• Fixed a rare zone server crash.

Misc:

• Fixed a bug that enabled you to repeat some missions when you shouldn’t. Pressing X to talk to the NPC wasn’t triggering everything correctly but clicking on the NPC to talk to them did.
• Added additional Mark of Victory turn-in missions to get refits.
• When we rolled the Smoking Shed into the Slaughterhouse, we didn’t move the free recipes from the Smoking Shed to the Slaughterhouse. A sharp-eyed, economy-minded beta tester caught this and we’ve fixed it.
• Integrated more localized text from SOE.

What is Testbed and how do I play?

What is Testbed?

Before we push a new patch out to the live servers that many 1000's of people are playing on, we first like to let a smaller subset of people test it. Obviously, we test it internally, but players are a creative lot and sometimes find things we missed. Also, y'all have a wider variety of hardware than we do. So Testbed is the cluster we push a new build to first. We let whoever wants to put it through its paces for a day or two then, if nothing horrible is reported, we push it out to the live servers.



Note that I said nothing horrible. We will sometimes push it even with known issues if we believe the overall package is better than what's currently out there. Another end-result of Testbed testing is a more complete list of Known Issues in the Release Notes.



How do I participate?

Ever notice that Test Server button at the bottom of LaunchPad? If you click that, I'll copy your Pirates folder to a subfolder underneath it called TestServer. Then it'll run TestServer's LaunchPad and look for patches. (This is MUCH faster than downloading the entire game all over again.)



Once it's done, you can drag TestPotBS.exe to your desktop to use as a shortcut for accessing Testbed directly. You can always just go through the normal launcher, though, and click that Test Server button.



Testbed will almost always be the only server to choose from because the only servers shown are the ones with the same version as you've got.



What do I get for participating?

- The chance to see new content or new features before the general populace.

- The chance to try out different nations and play-styles than your usual character(s).

- Our eternal gratitude for helping us ensure a solid patch release.



Will my character be moved to another cluster?

No. Your character on a live cluster won't be moved to Testbed. The first time you log in to Testbed, you'll be starting from scratch. And your character on Testbed won't be moved to a live cluster.



We try not to wipe any of our game databases ever but technical issues may force us to wipe Testbed periodically. So you run the risk even of losing your character and all its progress when you play on Testbed. But it's a fun adventure recommended by many a Beta tester.

PotBS Overview

PotBS Overview The year is 1720 and the New World is on fire. England, France, and Spain have unleashed their forces on the Caribbean. Naval officers captain massive warships through bloody engagements at sea. Freetraders charge through blockades and smuggle the war material needed to conquer the enemy’s ports. Privateers raid enemy shipping, looting ships of their treasure and rival nations of their glory. Through it all sail the Pirates. Bloody, bold, and resolute, they serve no flag and heed no king. They live free, fight hard, and obey only fate. In Pirates of the Burning Sea you choose your destiny. Blistering Naval Combat Maneuver your ship in real time, turning one way to unleash a broadside and then cutting back to guard your damaged armor. Drop sails and heave to while your opponent sails forward so you can fire at his vulnerable stern. Work together with your friends to choose your targets and your aim points: small, fast ships can swoop in close to rake the enemy crew with swivel guns while your bruisers blast chain shot at the enemy sails. Once you’ve crippled his ability to move, send in a boarding ship laden with armed men to grapple, board, and seize the prize. Ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea has all the action, intensity, and tactical gameplay of a single-player game. Speed, direction, and facing all matter, and you fire and sail in realtime. As captain of your own ship you balance your crew, sails, armor, guns, and maneuverability, making snap decisions while planning what’s going to happen in thirty seconds. It’s a white-knuckle experience, whether against determined NPCs or wily players. Savage Swashbuckling Our swashbuckling system is something you’ve never seen in an MMO before. Hundreds of handmade animations capture every bold gesture in three fighting styles. Whether you go for traditional Fencing, or the dual-wielding showmanship known as Florentine, or the treachery of Dirty Fighting, your very stance will display your chosen mastery and your every move will be distinct. Every combat skill is uniquely animated with corresponding responses and fighting is fast and fluid. Keep your Balance high and you can parry attacks; build up your Initiative to unleash powerful finishing moves; and if desperation strikes, you can whip out a pistol for a devastating attack. Our cinematic adventures pit you against hordes of enemies, cutting your way through the thugs who stand between you and the enemy you’re here to duel. You’ll have to make fast use of skills and tactics to beat the toughest swordsmen in the Burning Sea! PvP-Conquerable World The Caribbean of 1720 is home to many dozens of ports belonging to the three great powers: Britain, France, and Spain. Each port is a valuable source of goods, equipment, and mission patrons. Players use PvE missions to destabilize a port, making it eligible for conquest by their nation. With enough players keeping up the pressure, the conquest mode begins and the ocean for many leagues around the port becomes an open PvP environment. This unlocks new PvE missions to smuggle in supplies, destroy fortifications, and tilt the odds in your favor. Scheduled PvP battles culminate in a final conflict to either save the port or conquer it. Every day, each nation receives victory points on the basis of its port holdings. The first nation to reach the goal is declared the victor, and celebrations and awards ensue. Then treaties are signed, ports revert to their original sides, and a new round of conflict begins. Sophisticated Missions Our mission system gives you a starring role in your own epic. Each player accumulates a personal supporting cast of NPCs, including old enemies, new friends, lost loves, and treacherous allies. No two players have the same cast, and their stories will take them to different places and fight in different battles. And since each NPC can have multiple roles, the pirate who is your arch-nemesis may be the good friend and ally of an enemy player. Your long-lost cousin may turn out to be your best friend’s sweetheart – or a treacherous spy! We bring the plot twists and the bold adventure of classic adventure fiction to life every time you play. Ship battles aren’t just spawn camps. Our AI personalities and dynamic goals ensure that no two battles are alike. Unexpected reinforcements, nighttime stealth missions, and secondary objectives mean you get gameplay as intricate as any handcrafted single-player game level. Dramatic Avatars You don’t have to look like everyone else. Our avatars are built with sixteen customizable slots. Choose hair, faces, footwear, hands, coats, hats, belts, jewelry, and much more, selecting from a library of parts and textures and assigning the colors you want. Most games with customizable avatars use flat gray textures that are then customized with flat, featureless colors. Our full-color customizable textures mean we start with gorgeous, photographic color and then apply your custom shades selectively, preserving details such as gold buttons, fabric coarseness, or bloodstains while still allowing for tremendous creative freedom. And of course, you can choose from the eyepatches, hook hands, and peg legs that every pirate craves. Action For Every Play Style Whether your interest is in ship combat, piracy, commercial trading, or adventure, you have a role to play, and all your adventures take place in a dramatic world of conflict and change. A dynamic commodities market provides opportunity for clever traders to turn coin, navy missions throw you into the thick of combat, and pirates have ample targets for plunder. Our strategic gameplay keeps the world in flux, offering ample opportunities for both PvE missions and PvP battles & ambushes to affect the ongoing struggle. The Caribbean of 1720 is a world at war, and all players can take part on their own terms. Whether you want to join a major port conquest battle, pursue smuggling missions to help your side in secret, or organize your guildmates to bolster a port’s defenses in the face of enemy plotting, your efforts are meaningful and the stakes are high!