As we previously reported, Build 1.11: The Clash of Steel is now live, and it brought with to the game the massive revision to avatar combat.

To celebrate, The Pirates of the Burning Sea team is hosting a screenshot contest throughout the month. All you have to do is post your best images in this thread and you could win a unique forum title and three free months of game time. Two runners up will also get PotBS T-shirts.

Winners will be selected every Friday in January, so start amassing your screenshot collection so you have a lot to choose from for your weekly submissions.

Build 1.11: The Clash of Steel went live this morning, and it's a big one! This update includes the Avatar Combat revision, which completely changes how you fight with enemies. As the developers put it, "Avatar Combat is now flashier and more exciting-looking as well as easier to learn and more fun to play." If you're unfamiliar with the AvCom upgrades, Lead Game Designer Kevin "Isildur" Maginn wrote a developer's blog on the topic in October, and it's a good place to start.

Once you're caught up, check out this page of guides and notes to help you through the change. The AvCom revamp has completely overhauled all skills, so there's numerous links to help you plan your character's fighting styles. There's also a Swashbuckling overview that summarizes all of the changes.

Of course, Build 1.11 contains other updates, too, including new Swashbuckling dailies. You can read the full patch notes here or below.

NPCs have received a massive overhaul as part of the revision to avatar combat. Basically, almost all NPCs in the game now belong to one of six archetype groups: Defenders, damagers, duelists, supporters, brutes and gunners.

In the previous avatar combat system, most NPCs didn’t really do anything interesting. They just attacked you with a basic strike skill over and over. That was something we really wanted to change with the new system; now, NPCs will debuff you, combo you, set up big finishers, support their allies, and do a lot of other cool stuff as well.

The main archetype groups, which focus on things like parrying, damage and ranged attacks, are also divided into a number of sub-archetypes to further differentiate NPCs from one another. You can read all about it here or below.

Build 1.10: The Calm Before the Storm is now live.

Major changes include:

• Variable Wind: The wind now changes direction during battle. The changes on the Open Sea are now less jarring. See below for details.
• Christmas content: There are several new characters and missions as well as carols being sung in Jenny Bay, Vera Cruz, Marsh Harbour, Charlesfort, Port Royal, San Juan, Tortuga, and Pointe-a-Pitre. This content will become available closer to the holiday and be turned off again after the holiday.

The full release notes can be found here or after the jump.

Pirates of the Burning Sea will soon have a unique town for every port in the game, according to Eric, an environmental artist.

Our current task for the environment team is to create updated versions of all our in-game towns to replace the generic re-used art that we currently have in place at most ports. That means a unique town for every port in the game!

Geometry and textures will be changed, and the towns will receive new lighting effects for different times of day. You can check out some before and after screenshots in Eric's blog post. The updates are quite impressive.

Isildur has posted a developer's blog outlining the team's mission statement of Pirates of the Burning Sea. While they created the statement months ago to outline the direction they're going with the game's design and development, they've never publicly shared it before. Well, here it is:

“Pirates of the Burning Sea is a competitive game in which players take the role of adventurers in a romanticized version of the Caribbean in the Age of Sail, and seek fame, fortune, and glory for themselves and their nations.”

Seems straightforward, right? Well, there's actually a lot of implications carried in that statement. Keep reading for Isildur's full analysis. They haven't completely fulfilled their mission statement yet, but it provides a blueprint for the future of the game.

There's an awesome event going on tomorrow evening on the test server for Pirates of the Burning Sea !

This event will take place on the Testbed on Sunday November 9th at 14:00 Pacific (10pm GMT). The auction houses will be seeded with many items and ships to help you on your hunt.

Whoever lands the final shot on the Dread Missionary will receive a bounty 10,000 doubloons on a character of their choosing. Anyone who assists will receive a bounty of 5,000 doubloons.

You can find the details of the storyline, and the details here.

According to a recent developer's blog, the Invicible server will be shut down in January and a new server, Defiant, will be set up to to serve Australia's needs, with port battles scheduled for 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific, or 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. GMT.

Since we’ve changed the timing of the port battles, some players have found that the servers they play on have port battles scheduled outside of their playtime. Given that we’re opening up Defiant specifically to provide more options for port battles, we’re going to go all the way, and provide all players one (1) transfer to any server so that they can move to a server that better matches their playtime. The port battle times for each server are posted here.

This is all happening because their partnership with Bigpond will not be renewed. You can read the full details here or below.

Build 1.9: Your Just Rewards went live this morning. Since it is a milestone build, it contains about a month's worth of fixes and changes.

Main changes include:

• You can now change your clothes anywhere in port. See this thread for more info.
• Groupmates can no longer sit safely outside the red circle, artificially raising your Group Level. See this thread for more info.
• There are ship and skill adjustments, too, detailed below.

The full patch notes can be found here or after the jump.

CEO of Flying Labs Entertainment, Rusty Williams, has updated the Pirates of the Burning Sea community with a new devblog !

Right now what we’re most focused on is the new revamp of the avatar combat system. Ever since we shipped, we’ve been planning to go back and re-examine the sword fighting from first principals. Ship combat has had the advantage of being built, ripped apart, and rebuilt. Avatar combat has been going through the same process, and you can read more about it in Isildur’s dev log where he describes the thought process that went into building the new system.

He even mentions the word we've all been waiting for: Expansion!