Build 1.17: Eye of the Storm is now live on Pirates of the Burning Sea servers. As we've reported, you can now place buy orders in the Auction House; ship storing and mission sharing features have been added; and a new combat mechanic called Cannon Resistance Penetration was introduced. New level 50 ships were also added for each class.

You can read the full patch notes below. They were released in this thread discussing 1.17 on the official forums.

This is a new milestone build and represents about a month's worth of changes. Some of the biggest changes you'll notice include:

• Cannon Resistance Penetration: Cannons may now penetrate Armor and Structure damage resistance. See Lum's devlog for details.
• New Ships: We've taken the ships you've been testing out on Testbed Live. See Lum's devlog for details.
• Mission Sharing: If another player is eligible and standing near you in town or sailing near you on the Open Sea, you can share a mission you have with them, saving them the trouble of having to go accept the mission and enabling you both to receive credit for having completed it. See fraxl's devlog for more details about this and Ship Storage.
• Ship Storage: Now you can store up to 100 ships (without inventory) in your nation's capital. Use these ships to practice a wider variety of tactics in Skirmish or just to clear a slot in your Dock Yard without having to scuttle a perfectly good ship.
• Buy Orders: Can't find what you need in the Auction House? Place a Buy Order to announce what you're shopping for and willing to pay. See Lum's devlog for details.

Differences between 1.16.62.0 and 1.17.50.0 include but aren't limited to:
Ships / Outfitting:

• The 'Bloody Dagger' Refit Frigate, a Cutthroat only variant of the Defiant. Available for 45 Marks of Victory.
• The 'Hyperion' Refit Frigate, a Buccaneer only variant of the Poseidon. Available for 60 Marks of Victory.
• The 'Macedon' Hunter's Fourth Rate, a Navy only variant of the Alexander. Available for 35 Marks of Victory.
• The 'Khan' Flute, a Freetrader only variant of the Sultan. Available for 50 Marks of Trade.
• The 'Vengeance' Privateer Frigate, a 1 LSB Privateer only variant of the Minerva.
• Cannon Resistance Penetration: Cannons 7lb or larger will now ignore a portion of the target's armor and structure resistance. 16lb or larger cannons ignore a larger portion. Cannons 26lb or larger ignore even more. At the same time, we've reduced all cannon damage by 3.
• Bar Shot: Changed sail damage from a range of 54%-75% to a range of 49%-70%.

Ship Combat / Skills:

• Previously, if you didn't have sufficient ammo in a stack for a full volley, you'd be told you were out of that type of ammo and basic round shot would be loaded instead. Now, if you have another stack of that same sort of ammo, we start pulling from that other stack. Also, we will fire a partial volley of that type of shot if you don't have a full volley before using basic round.
• If you had modifications that changed your reload speed, that wasn't represented correctly in the tooltip on the Combat UI. Fixed.
• Improved the House of Solomon Relic effect on an NPC.

Swashbuckling:

• Sprinting characters could "pop," appearing to teleport. Fixed.

Missions:

• It was possible to get stuck on an infinite Loading screen if you get sunk in a Skirmish that you entered from the wrong place or completed certain missions in certain ways. Fixed.
• We've updated some missions to prevent you from leaving if there's loot in the loot box. We need to do this to more missions but we've done the most important ones.
• NPCs who exist only in avatar spaces (town or missions) don't need the Strike Colors skill. So they no longer have it.
• Tutorial (Spanish): Corrected some wonkiness with NPC placement and animations. For example, the guy loading the cannon is now near the cannon.
• A Proposed Merger: The ally you're supposed to be escorting can behave strangely, raising and lowering sails or turning at odd times. We've improved his behavior.
• Speedy Delivery to Jaqueme: Halved the amount of inspected goods required for completion.
• Days Adrift: Faction of the raft has been changed from "Remap this string."
• Man with a Mission: We've had reports that this is impossible to complete, although we haven't been able to reproduce the problem. We've made a change that we hope will fix the issue.
• Magnificent Escorts: Forts are placed better than they were before.
• Unforeseen Cargo: If you happened to move during the conversation between Remi and Enfre, the Interact UI would be closed which was annoying. Fixed for this and many other missions.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Was just about impossible. Improved by making Stroh last longer in the fight.
• Masts for Mayhem: Trees disappeared when you clicked on them. Fixed.
• Bey's Retreat: The bosses have been tuned to be more appropriate for level 25 players during swashbuckling combat.
• Get Thee Behind Me, Satan: The third wave of enemies has always positioned itself strangely. We've improved that.
• Kill the Frog Brothers: Fixed a bug that prevented entering the mission.
• Motherly Love: If you did missions in a certain order, it would become impossible to complete this one. Fixed.
• The Matthew Town Run: The sails rewarded had a bright red design and couldn't be changed as they should. Fixed.
• Milk Run: This should have been marked as a Group mission from the start as the allies you're supposed to protect are spread out too far for one person to be particularly effective. Fixed.
• Caveat Emptor: The cabin door didn't work correctly. Fixed.
• A Fort Too Far (and missions like it): The ship combat was too easy because the NPCs didn't put up much of a fight. Should be more challenging now.
• When the Saints Come Marching In: Tuned the fleet a bit to improve performance.
• Port Royal or Bust (and missions like it): Larger NPCs would turn away from the lighthouses instead of toward them. Fixed.
• Pay Dirt: When you couldn't yet use the longboat, we didn't tell you that much less why not. Fixed.
• Fortaleza da Luz: Fixed a bug where Ortiz didn't always give everyone spirit traps even though he claimed he did. Also, some townsfolk who attacked you looked really weird doing so. Removed them.
• Fracture Point: You shouldn't have been able to board the whalebone ship. Fixed.
• The Grand Alliance: If you fail the mission, you no longer have to wait until you're out of combat to leave.
• Star Chamber missions: Fixed confusion with Duboc's name.
• Pit Fight: Added an audience. We've also re-enabled this mission without the annoying chat spam.

Economy:

• Buy Orders: The Auction UI has been changed. Where you used to view items for sale, you can now also view lists of items desired. The tab where you list items for sale has been reformatted. A new tab for placing Buy Orders has been added. If a Buy Order you place is filled, the items become available to you for pickup similar to buying an item at auction when you're not in the same town.
• Fixed a bug that prevented you from picking up expired auction items in ports where you had insufficient reputation. We fixed this by removing requirements from entering the Auction House but then setting requirements for listing items and making offers. We updated the tooltips to clarify.
• Made it clearer in the Auction UI which listings are local and which are at remote ports.
• You can now sort by certain columns in the Auction UI.
• Fixed a bug that could cause you to lose items if you tried to put too many in your warehouse.
• Level 50 Refit ships that had less than 20k Insurance payout were increased. Any level 50 Refit ships that were already paying over 20k already were left alone.

Open Sea:

• Tuned loot for fleets, slightly decreasing the chance for dropping elite loot.

PvP / Port Contention:

• At times, after boarding combat, if the attacker abandoned ship, the defender received no loot. Fixed.
• If a port battle was forfeited, the correct notifications didn't always happen. Fixed.
• Skirmish: You can now right-click on player names to get a context menu. This makes it easier to send /tells and other tasks.
• Skirmish: We've added a new room for large Avatar fights called St. Pierre. Enjoy!
• Skirmish: There's now notification when players join and leave the lobby and also when a player is kicked.
• Skirmish: When a side respawns, we show a HUD for all players letting them know.
• Skirmish: The lobby owner can now make someone else the lobby owner.
• Skirmish: It was possible to join while in a mission. Fixed.
• Corrected the location of the infinity symbol in the UI when you created a skirmish with unlimited respawns.

Art / Sound:

• Captain Kidd no longer sits hunched over, clipping into his couch. Now he stands proudly like the leader of a powerful faction should.
• BSharp lightened some of the night rooms including some towns, a ship deck, and some ship combat rooms. Now, those of us with less than top-of-the line monitors can see more than our own heads and a few random torches in these rooms. These towns and other spaces look much better and are easy to navigate.
• West End, Spanish Town, Orleans, Nassau, Puerta de Plata: When Pirates take the ports, the pillaging begins.
• Fort de France (and towns that look like it): There was an area between two buildings where you couldn't walk, though you should have been able to. Fixed. Also fixed some other graphical issues in the town.
• Some hurdy gurdy players now have guitar players joining them in a duet. Enjoy!

UI:

• Improved the look of the ship thumbnail shown in your Dockyard and Character UI. This isn't a complete fix and we know of a bug where it starts looking fuzzy again, but it should be better than it was.
• If you set the World Map to show unrest then logged out/in, the checkbox would still be checked but the wrong data would be shown. Fixed.
• Corrected the error you get when you try to invite a 7th person to your group.
• We added a Policies button to the Options menu, giving easy access to our stated Policies.

Stability / Performance:

• Brady made some optimizations to sound management and pathing that should slightly improve performance in town.
• He also made some optimizations to the UI code.
• Fixed a game crash that could occur when teleporting from one ship to another.
• Fixed a game crash that could occur when attempting to view the Auction House.
• Fixed a game crash that could occur when attempting to trade.
• Fixed a rare game crash that could occur when sinking due to the sounds played.
• Fixed a rare game crash that occurred for a few people when turning in missions.
• We may have fixed a rare game crash that could occur when running recipes.
• Fixed a game crash that could occur when creating a skirmish.
• Fixed a login server crash the GMs could cause if they timed things just right.