We will be upgrading our live servers to build 1.5.46.0 during the usual maintenance window (1:30am-4:00am Pacific / 9.30am-11.30am British Summer Time) on Tuesday, July 1st.

You can find information on the exciting changes in 1.5, including our new epic mission Fortaleza da Luz, in our Developer Logs section.

We appreciate your patience, and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new patch.

On the cross teaming front our wonderful Aether has posted Flying Lab's policy on Cross Teaming and Selling Durability!

While players are welcome to have as many accounts as they wish, people with multiple accounts are not allowed to have characters of differing nations on the same server. If a player is found in violation of this policy, they will be forced to either move or delete the character in violation. Repeat offenders will be subject to further disciplinary action, up to and including permanent suspension of their Pirates of the Burning Sea accounts.

There's, obviously, more where that came from!  So everyone get some sleep while the servers are down tomorrow, and enjoy the patch!

I spend most of my day dealing with support incidents along those lines. Everyone has a good reason why their particular claim is worthy. On the one hand, we should reimburse anything anyone wants. It’s a matter of customer goodwill. If you’re frustrated and angry and feel cheated, then we have a very undesirable situation on our hands. Our goal is NEVER to make you feel cheated. Certainly you should expect some loss – it’s a game: you win some, you lose some. But loss and cheated are different and cheated isn’t an experience you should have in the game.

It's a great look at the circumstances CSR's deal with in every game, when a loss of some sort is petitioned. Read on for the rest!

Making videos from screen captured content can seem daunting at first. But, with a little practice you can be throwing together great videos of your moments in game. It doesn’t take expensive editing programs or courses in video editing. There are easy to use tools that are free, come with your computers media package or are inexpensive should you wish to purchase. This guide will help you with how to utilize basic software and some tips in planning your game video.

First things first… you need an idea! It can be tempting to just take a bunch of screen captured video and edit together a video. But a little planning can go a long ways and save you hours of time in the end. Form an idea of what you want to create. Write it down and try and create a storyboard.

Once you get your video made, we'd love to see it!  Head over to our PotBS forums and post a link!

Help Us Test Fortaleza da Luz on Sunday!

06.18.08 by Rhaegar

You may have read our recent devlogs about the upcoming level 50 epic mission called Fortaleza da Luz.

This mission is now live on Testbed, and we’d like to hear your feedback on it! To that end, we’ve organized a Testbed event on Sunday, June 22nd between 3pm and 6pm Pacific (6pm 9pm Eastern, 10pm 1am GMT).

Click here to find out how to take part!

/ Rhaegar

Rusty asked me what we think about ganking. Ganking has a long and difficult history within our design and development process, so it’s a hard question to answer with a simple ‘we hate it’ or ‘we love it.’

The term I’ve preferred to use is ‘ambush gameplay’, which sounds nicer and has different implications for the user experience. In the earliest days of the Pirates design, one of the scenarios we envisioned and tried to support was the lone pirate or group of pirates catching an unwary merchant by surprise, defeating him, and looting him before reinforcements could arrive. That’s ambush gameplay—rewarding for the pirates, disheartening for the lone merchant. In some theoretical world before we actually started building the game, it made sense. You’d sail out from port, hoping to avoid danger, but there would be a sail on the horizon. Was it a friend or an enemy? Before anyone could come to save you, the sail would turn out to belong to a pirate, and you’d be fighting for your life.

Read on for more!

Pirates of the Burning Sea 's biggest patch yet is now live!

Main Changes:

• Buccaneer class: All characters are receiving a forced respec and a free respec token. In order to balance Pirates, we needed to create another class for them. They now have Cutthroat (what we're calling the class we've had all along) and Buccaneer. Then we revamped skills on all classes. The logic and general overview is covered in several Devlogs by Taelorn (Cutthroat, Buccaneer, Privateer, Freetrader, Naval Officer ). More details can also be seen below. 
• Unrest Supply: The intended effect of this system is to pace the rate at which unrest is generated by turn-ins, and to ensure that everyone has time to respond to economic moves by their enemies. There's always a fixed, known amount of unrest at stake in each period, and you can tell at a glance how much of that your nation is going to get. You can also tell how much your enemies are going to get, and plan accordingly. When you visit the Rebel Agent or Garrison Commander, you'll see a brand new UI. Through this UI, you'll be able to turn in specific items, including unrest bundles, to contribute to your nation's efforts in the port. Every six hours, at fixed times, a set quantity of each item is consumed, and the port generates a fixed quantity of unrest. You can't always make turn-ins, though. Economic-driven unrest only works up to a point, after which the battle has to move out onto the waves. Neither the attackers nor the defenders can continue making turn-ins past the Pirate PvP stage. Isildur will be posting a Devlog on this soon where he'll go into more detail.
• New ships: Our creative and talented players have provided us with new ships. We've added four to the game in this build. Details below.
• Buddy Key Restrictions: Now, when you're logged in with a free account, there are certain limitations on your characters. For example, free accounts: 
• • Can't talk in Nation chat or Area chat (but still can in local and emote)
  • Can't send /tells unless the target is a friend or is in the same group or society. Can reply to tells.
  • Can group.
  • Can PvP
  • Can't earn credit for landmark unrest. They can still contribute to landmark unrest, the just don't get any personal unrest points and thus will never get a landmark battle invite.
  • Can participate in player-to-player trades.
  • Can't list items for sale in the Auction House and can have only one warehouse.
  • Only have access to two structure slots and cannot use certain structure deeds.
  • Are capped at level 12.

There's lots more patch notes where that came from, so read on the for full list!

The deployment of patch 1.4 has been postponed until tomorrow morning (Thursday, May 29th). The downtime will take place between 1:30am and 3:30am Pacific Time. During this window, Pirates of the Burning Sea game servers will be unavailable while we upgrade to 1.4.

You can find information on the changes in 1.4, including some in-depth discussion of skill changes, by reading our Developer Logs.

You’ll want to keep an eye on the Important Announcements Forum for regular updates on our progress throughout Wednesday morning’s downtime.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.

The best of luck to all of us PotBSers out here come tomorrow!

Have at least one level 50 character in Pirates of the Burning Sea? Then lend your time to helping to test a new mission!

In the early 1500s, the Knights of Christ established a grand bastion in the Caribbean and named it Fortaleza da Luz: “The Fortress of God’s Light”. Several years later, when Portuguese missionaries victualed there, they found the fortress in ruins; its denizens were nowhere to be found.

Over two centuries have passed, and something stirs once again within the walls of Fortaleza da Luz…

You can be the first to see this new epic mission content!

We are inviting active Pirates of the Burning Sea customers with at least one level 50 character to join us in our Seattle offices to participate in a series of playtests. These playtests will allow us to gather feedback on our new epic mission, Fortaleza da Luz. In addition to seeing brand new swashbuckling content, players will get some Pirates of the Burning Sea swag and a free dinner out of the deal. Sound interesting?

Sessions will take place in Seattle from 6:45 – 9:15pm on the following evenings:
Thursday May 29
Tuesday June 2
Friday June 6

Local players with at least one level 50 character should email usabilitylab@flyinglab.com to volunteer. Please tell us your Station account name and which session(s) youd like to volunteer for in your email.

Dust of those weapons and sharpen your dueling skills; Pirates of the Burning Sea is preparing for a pvp tournament on their test server this Saturday,

In an effort to help us test PvP in the upcoming 1.4 build, a member of the community has organized a tournament on the Testbed server this Saturday!

We were so inspired by Kashka_Coolwater’s efforts that we’ve decided to add to the fun by donating some prizes. The overall winner of the event will receive the following:

•  256MB RADEON X1650XT Video Card
•  Pirates of the Burning Sea Map
•  Pirates of the Burning Sea 30-Day Game Card
•  Pirates of the Burning Sea •  Soundtrack and In-game Items (Parrot & Weapon)
•  Pirates of the Burning Sea T-shirt

Second, third, fourth fifth and sixth place runners up will also all receive swag, so your chances of grabbing a prize are high!

The tournament will take place from 10am Pacific time on Saturday, May 24th. FLS staffers will be on hand, and we’re expecting it to be a lot of fun.

To find out all the details of this event, click here.

It’s been just shy of a week since we turned on the new user content system in a “live, but testing” mode, and we’re now ready to call the system just plain “live”.

Why “but testing”?—because we knew there would be quite a bit of tuning to ensure that items were moving through the system in exactly the way we wanted to, we started out with somewhat conservative values. We weren’t exactly sure how people would respond to the voting process, after all—especially in terms of volume. Would people vote just enough times to get a posting credit, then post their item; or would they vote like crazed madmen? The thresholds at which items get moved through the system are quite different depending on where actual usage patterns fell.