PotBS: So Long Guadaloupe and Hola to Populated Servers

I haven't accessed my account in like...urm...forever since I haven't felt the need, but it is a little sad to know that my poor little server is finally bidding adios to ze world. According to the recently released MMOGChart, PotBS only had 65K subscribers anyhow (and mostly from Sony All Access Passes) so I'm not that surprised since even at its peak back when I was playing, Guadaloupe (one of the more populated less populated servers) just wasn't as happening as Blackbeard, Roberts, Rackham and Antigua....

Anyhoo, read more here:

Character Transfers are Now Live!

04.14.08 by Aether

On Tuesday, April 15th, from 1:30a Pacific Time, there will be a brief, rolling outage in order to enable server transfers for your characters. [note: this outage is now complete]

When Pirates of the Burning Sea launched on January 22nd, we introduced our customers to 11 new game servers. Through feedback from our players and evaluation of our server populations, it has become clear that key game features require populations of higher density in order to function at optimum levels. When you take into account both the disparity in player time zones and the delayed launch of our title in some countries, we were spreading our overall population too thin. Also, in more recent builds, we were able to improve our server technology to allow for an even larger population than we were originally equipped to handle.

Providing our customers with the best game play experience is our first priority. Condensing our populations will lead to a richer, more vibrant game play experience for all involved, and our customers whole-heartedly agree. The character transfer option will not be available to our Australian customers on the Invincible server.

How is this going to work?

Tomorrow morning, during our usual maintenance period (1:30a Pacific), we will be restarting the servers in order to activate a configuration change. Each server will likely be down for only a half hour [note: this outage is now complete]
. When the servers are back up, you will be able to follow the instructions at this link to move characters from one server to another.

What servers can I transfer to?

Players will be able to transfer their characters to any of the following servers:

• Roberts
• Blackbeard
• Rackham
• Antigua

At the same time that character transfers are activated on Tuesday morning, we will be disabling the creation of new characters on the following servers:

• Bonny
• Guadeloupe
• Kidd
• Morgan
• Bellamy
• Bonnet
• Hornigold

How many transfers do I get?

You can transfer as many characters as you have but each character can only be moved once. We highly recommend you discuss your plans with your society and group mates before moving your characters. You do not have to transfer all of your characters to the same server; however you will still be limited to characters of one nation per server. You can transfer characters to Roberts, Blackbeard, Rackham, or Antigua. You are also welcome to transfer characters between Roberts, Blackbeard Rackham or Antigua, if you like.

What happens when I transfer a character?

When you initiate a transfer, most of your character’s data will be transferred to the new server. Information that will be transferred includes approved User Content, purchased User Content, character level, inventory (including economic items, mission rewards, and server victory rewards), money, ships, mission progress, skills and outfitting. They will keep the same structures in the same port. Any items a transferred character has listed in the Auction House will appear in the same port as an expired listing and will need to be re-listed.

There are a few pieces of character information that will not move with a character. Both the Friend and Ignore lists will be empty after the copy. The character will not be in a society on their new server. Personal unrest or contention points the character has earned will be cleared as well. It is important that these specific data points not carry over, in order to make certain that they not disrupt the destination server’s data.

Important: On the server the character is being transferred from,the character will be deleted and their auction listings expired.

This whole process generally takes a minute or two. You can begin playing your character on your new server as soon as the process reports it has completed.

What happens to my society?

In addition to resetting your friends list, if you are a Society Leader, transferring your character to a new server will reset your Society list as well. In order to assist Society Leaders with the task of keeping track of Society members, we have created the /dumpsocietyinfo command. Society Leaders using this command will create a file containing a list of your Society members titled societyinfo.csv,which can be found in the Pirates of the Burning Sea directory in your My Documents folder.

How long will I have to transfer my characters?

You will have over a month to decide which server you would like to transfer to and activate the transfer. It is important to us that our community is able to discuss the logistics of relocating their characters.

We want to allow societies some time to weigh their options and for everyone to evaluate their options in order to find the server that us the best fit. At the end of that transition time, Bonny, Guadeloupe, Kidd, Morgan, Bellamy, Bonnet, and Hornigold will be disabled until such time as there is a need for more servers.

Additional questions and concerns can be shared by joining in the discussion on our forums at this link.

Best,
Aether

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PotBS: Trial Keys Available (Steal Them From A Friend)

I let my account expire after...urm...getting bored, but if you know folks who forgot to cancel theirs, now's your chance to try out the game for 14 days:

Invite some Friends to Play PotBS, Monday!

03.21.08 by Aether

This Monday we will be unveiling the Pirates of the Burning Sea Buddy Key Program, which will allow customers with active accounts to invite three of your favorite people to join you on the Burning Sea for a 14 day trial – free!

The three keys will be generated just for you, and can be used at any time. The trial doesn’t start until the keys are entered, and they don’t expire until they’ve been activated.

Rhaegar will be providing download links and instructions for you to claim your three buddy keys on Monday, so keep your eyes on the headlines!

Enjoy, won’t you?
Aether

Me, I might just pick up "Rainbow 6: Vegas 2" for the PC up instead.

PotBS: What to Expect In the Near Future (Patch 1.2)

Other than the stupid Froggies getting a grandiose make over to their town (THEY GET MIMES GODDAMMIT), here are a few other things going on soon...including some mini "raid" content. It's good to see they're adding more shit since all we've been doing is ganging up on level 50 NPCs and taking their precious precious bootays. (The port battles actually don't interest me that much since I'm a lazy Patriot and...urm...well, COD4 keeps distracting me.)

Oh, and I picked up a FREE in game sexy heart pendant courtesy of Gamerzines. It looks sexah nestled against my freckled ass boobies.

New Devlog: Hello Again!

02.20.08 by Joe

Although I’ve been on Pirates of the Burning Sea since before it had a name, and have posted lots of dev logs and many replies in the forums, I don’t think most of you have heard of me. John Scott Tynes (aka “Rev”) is going to work on other things, and I’m stepping into the role of Producer on Pirates, so I wanted to re-introduce myself and talk a little about what’s coming up in the next few weeks.

To start things off, we have a new hire! John Zipperer joins us as a new client and tools programmer. His years as a programmer on Guild Wars at ArenaNet will be a real asset to the Pirates of the Burning Sea team. John will be working on a new art pipeline in order to greatly increase the rate at which our artists can get new environments into the game, and I’m excited to have him here.

The other big news is the 1.2 patch. This is our first major content patch and it is so chock full of good stuff that we have to spread it out across a series of Devlogs that you’ll see throughout the next week. To kick things off I wanted to give you an overview of what’s coming up.

One of the biggest new features in 1.2 is the new French Capitol. Pointe-a-Pitre has been reborn with an entirely new look. This includes a bunch of new mission content to match the new town, tailored to match Point-a-Pitre’s new look. I saw the town lit and textured for the first time over the weekend and it looks amazing. Just wait ‘til you see the screenshots.

We have a couple open sea upgrades on the way. The first and most important of these is that placement in battles off the open sea has been changed to put reinforcements in a more reasonable position, so you shouldn’t ever end up spawning on the far side of an island miles away from your group. We know that has been really frustrating and we rewrote the spawn code from scratch to make this work the way it should. We’ve also added a prompt to ask you if you want to join in when a group mate enters a battle. This will make it much more difficult for a single ship to tie up a group of players, since you can opt whether or not to join. We also made it so NPCs return to the open sea if they survive their battle with a player, so you can’t just snag NPCs and then run away in order to deny them to the enemy. And we’ve upgraded the UI for ports in the open sea so you get more information about towns you’re sailing by.

New tutorials have been added so that a player’s introduction to the game will be tailored to the nation of their choice. We also have new tutorial missions to teach Pirates to use the Capture Ship skill and the Careening Camp, as well as a tutorial to teach all nations how to use the Claim Prize/Scavenge skills. We hope these will ease the learning curve for new players while leaving the game just as sophisticated and interesting for our advanced players. (And as an added bonus it should help to reduce the frequency with which somebody asks “How do I capture a ship?” in Pirate nation chat.)

Five of our pirate NPC gangs are getting a visual upgrade for their crewmen. You will start to notice unique outfits for them in boarding and land missions. We are also adding some new NPC loot that give you missions. This should make loot a little less predictable and give you surprise opportunities for adventure.

We’ve had a strike team working on improving the UI for chat and the social window. The Unsecured Cargo icons in 1.1 were the first thing you saw from them, but they have much more coming in 1.2 including chat bubbles, floaty names over everyone’s heads, and much more. I’ll leave the details to Fraxl’s upcoming devlog, but there is lots of good stuff in there and it will make a certain segment of our community Very, Very Happy.

The last big new feature in 1.2 is Bey’s Retreat. Bey’s Retreat is a mission that will take a full group of experienced players 4-6 hours to complete. This is the first of many epic missions that our Content Team is working on. If you’ve played Red Tide, you’ve gotten a peek at the kind of gameplay we’re working on these days, but Bey’s Retreat is much, much bigger and cooler. You may have heard a bit about it from the playtesters we’ve had in here over the past month, and if you didn’t, you’ll hear quite a bit about it this week.

We also have a number of open issues that we’re tracking. The biggest fix in the pipeline is a change to prevent turn-ins from pushing a port all the way into contention. That build will go live early next week. Also on the list of things we’re looking at are avatar combat improvements, more rewards for PvP, and lag. For lag in particular there should be some significant improvements in 1.2. In addition we’re making a ton of improvements to the flogger that you won’t see, but that will allow us to do a better job of keeping up with customer support requests.

All of these changes are in addition to the tons of bug fixes and minor features in the patch. If all goes according to plan you will be able to check out the new build on the Testbed server the first week in March and play it on the live servers a short time later. As I said before, many of these changes are big enough to warrant Devlogs of their own, so keep an eye out for those to read all the juicy details. I can’t wait to get this build into your hands so you can start checking out all the new stuff. :)

Your new producer,
Joe Ludwig
8 year FLS veteran and former Director of Development

PotBS: Just A Wittle Sexiness

For you face!! (And mine.)

I gots me a new ship (the Alexander 4th Rate), and it's dead sexy! It may be boxy like a VW and it's just as safe!

And here's my ass. Yup, I don't know who the douchebag is on the back, but it's tacky tacky tacky. Still, when an ass has 4 DR, tacky goes to sexy.

PotBS: New Patch Notes

Can be found here!

http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10623

It's hella' long, but what irks me the most is that my vocabulary has been further limited thanks to this:

• Added some additional words to the profanity filter.

Boo!! Bad Flying Labs!

PotBS: Who's your Pirate Valentine?

I know mine won't be Tom Brady. *snurf*

Who's your Pirate Valentine?

02.04.08 by Rhaegar

In just 10 days it will be Valentine’s Day. In the past you might have marked this most joyful of days by taking your loved one out for dinner. Perhaps you bought them a charming bunch of flowers and a box of exquisite Belgian chocolates.

This year, you dont need to do any of that! We at Flying Lab Software understand that sometimes you want to give the special person in your life something unique, something breathtaking. Behold the “ARRR You My Valentine?” Facebook application!

This application lets you send a selection of Pirates of the Burning Sea themed cards to your friends and loved ones. What more could they want?

Enjoy. Wont you?

/ Rhaegar

Pirates of the Burning Meooowww?

For some reason, my kitty loves this game:

Good thing it's not during COD4!

PotBS: Alligator Activist!

I love alligators and crocs. So while leveling outside of Port Royale today, what did I come across but a dead croc!! BoOoooOO!! You bastard Brits!! How dare you!! So my buddy took a picture of my angry (but boobalicious) avatar:

GRRR!! Oh, and we got our sails today:

I made my lion orange later on because I didn't want to be a cowardly yerrow lion.

PotBS: The Battle (?) for New Orleans

Yesterday, Spain managed to flip New Orleans, so tonight (this morning) at 2 AM my time, the battle for New Orleans began. For those who don't know, this is a real quick break down of the process of port taking in "Pirates."

1. --Attack ships belonging to the nation of the port you want to take within a 5o mile radius of the port to earn unrest. (You can increase unrest without fighting as well by turning in unrest supplies to the rebel agent in that port.)
2. --Increase unrest to 5000 and then the area becomes a Pirate PVP zone meaning that any pirates are free to attack you, and you them in that area.
3. --Increase unrest to 8000 and the area becomes a free for all zone. Sorry to those French we ganked, but...yeah, you really shouldn't be hanging around a PVP zone if you don't want to PVP.
   
4. --Increase unrest to 10000 and the port is considered "flipped," and you win the right to challenge the port and its nation's champions to claim it for your nation.
5. --24 hours after the unrest hits 10000, a port battle is held where if everyone shows up, it's 25 v 25 of your nation's finest in a boat slug fest. (You need to have contributed to the flipping of the port or earned contention points after it was flipped by continuing to torment the ships around the port.
   

But it's late and and I'm hella' tired now, so let's away to the pictures. 15 minutes before the port battle, if you have contention points, you are issued an invite to fight for your country. Accept and you're whisked away to the war room:

After a brief discussion in the war room to discuss tactics, we all zone into battle attempting to keep a line. If you can read the really really small print, you'll notice it says, "Destroy all the ships 0/2." Yes, two French people showed up to defend. Hurray. We had 23 attacking. Apparently the people on line didn't have contention points but...urm...yeah, not like they couldn't have picked up one to participate. But anyhoo...

In our case, only 2 French people showed up and they went and hid in town instead of fighting (and can you really blame them given the odds?) Normally, you'd fight the French ships to the death but since there weren't any...we had to wait 30 minutes to get into the port for a swashbuckling match versus their level 50 NPCs. Here we be on the docks:

Lots of pistols go off and lots of dead NPCs:

After killing the 4 lieutenants who each have 1000 HPs, you face the Commander who had 3000 HPs to spare:

And then...every does a stupid jig or something stupid and POW, New Orleans is ours.

Okay, time for bed. Most likely none of this made sense, but oh well.

The Pirates Launch is Here!

And I made a new Free Trader to celebrate based on my obsession of late, Miss Macross herself, Lynn Minmay. I tried to base her outfit on her "Do You Remember Love," concert outfit.

Unfortunately, all the women in this game are kinda'...manly. This was like, the softest look I could get on the damn Asian face. The other one was "Dragon Lady," variant with really frightning Da Nang Hooker make up.

As for the SOE launch, it was delayed by two hours ish I hear (I logged in late), but otherwise went pretty smooth (with exception of people who bought the game through the Sony Station Shop.) Right now on Guadeloupe there's not a lot of people on at all though...as in...less than usual? At least Roberts is moderate all across the boards.

Whelp, back to loot!

PotBS: Launch Day is a Coming!!

And my stupid ass will surely be there on Guadeloupe (Spain). Anyone else?

January 22nd: PotBS Launch Day!

01.18.08 by Aether

At 9:00a Pacific Time on Tuesday, January 22nd, Pirates of the Burning Sea will officially launch for our North American and European customers. The transition requires us to put our servers into an administrative mode for testing and quality assurance, beginning Monday, January 21st at 6:00p Pacific Time. As of that time you will be unable to play until we resume service the next morning.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea game servers will then return to service at 9:00a on Tuesday, January 22nd, allowing Pirates of the Burning Sea Pre-Boarding Party customers to apply their Landing Party Key and their Prima Strategy Guide Parrot Key. (The Landing Party Key simply allows Pre-Boarding Party customers to continue to /claim their Pre-Boarding Party Items on any new characters they create. Characters who have already used /claim will keep their preorder items regardless of whether you use your Landing Party Key. It is important to note that if you do not apply your Landing Party Key, any new characters you create after launch will not have access to the Pre-Order Bonuses.)

Important Note:
While our Pre-Boarding Party customers will retain all of their progress to date, including any characters created and all inventory collected, they will be required to apply the 20-digit Game Key from inside the Pirates of the Burning Sea Retail Box to continue playing. That key can be applied by visiting this link after 9:00a Pacific Time on Tuesday, January 22nd and cannot be applied until then: Activation Code Link

Flying Lab Software staff will be on hand to answer your questions throughout our launch process. Customers are encouraged to contact us using our customer support site, or by visiting this link in our forums.

See you on the Burning Sea!
Aether

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PotBS: Some Pre-Boarding Screenies

Today a few of us from "La Sangre" went out for some group looting (4 vs 2 50 Oliphants? WIN!) I think we got into more trouble trying to plow/intercept/ram one another for their dericious pennants/commendations. Anyhow, good times. But we gotsa eat first!

The home base Havana (sans asses):


On the sea:


Havana + the best looking broadside this side of the Caribbean (hint: the chick):

PotBS: Boarding Party Rep is in the House!

Well, I had sort of forgotten I was part of it but urm...I remembered and that's what counts! So, if you anyone has questions regarding "Pirates of the Burning Sea" from Flying Labs, then feel free to ask away.

I was being mean in Nation Chat but now I promise I'll be nice...r?

p.s. While I was typing this a commercial showing Bob Sapp on fuckin' "Pros vs Joes" came on. If you've never seen this show, it pits a bunch of former athletes (and not just like useless fools, but real names like Jerry Rice or Alexei Lalas) against a bunch of normal "Monday Morning Quarterback" type guys who "think" they just might be better than those Pros. Owned much?

PotBS: Subscription Plan Revealed

Here it is! I'll probably do the month by month though as...you know...that "OTHER" game is coming out March 25th. XD

Announcing PotBS Monthly Subscription Fees!

01.09.08 by Aether

The Pirates of the Burning Sea monthly subscription fees are as follows:

1 month subscription: $14.99
3 month subscription: $41.99
6 month subscription: $77.99
12 month subscription: $143

The digital and retail pre-order programs for Pirates of the Burning Sea are still underway, and you can find more information on that by visiting this link.

Enjoy, won’t you?
Aether

Discuss This Article

Crappy Flag For My Face!

So I guess when I wasn't looking our society flag (La Sangre de la Patria) got approved.

Here it be!


And it's oddly textured because that's how they wanted it to look...dirty and used (like me!? NO!) Although as I'm playing a Naval officer, having a dirty ass flag is kinda...lame.

2 days in and we're busily getting all our warehouses/factories ready to produce some sexy ass ships. But don't worry Call of Duty! I'll be back to you soon my love!

Oh yeah, and don't forget to check this page to see when more beta keys for Frontlines are being handed out.

PotBS: Pre-Boarding Info!

Just one more day! Time to set my alarm clock so I can finish up the last of my work load and play!

Preboarding & Key Code FAQ

01.05.08 by Rev

We’re getting a lot of questions about the Preboarding Party, which starts Monday. If you purchase a preorder of the game, you get a key code that allows you to start playing Monday, January 7th, at 10am Pacific time.

Here is a short FAQ addressing many common questions. We will keep updating this as needed.

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La la la. Finish that work up by 10 AM PST, 1/7/08!!

Pre-Boarding Party Update!

01.02.08 by Aether

Pirates of the Burning Sea Pre-Boarding Party keys can be applied to your accounts starting at 10am Pacific Time on Monday, January 7th. Those of you with a beta client install can simply patch as normal—you do not need to reinstall.

If you don’t have the beta installed, a download page will be available at the same 10am time for you to download from.

Best,
Aether

I'm way ahead of schedule so far! Yippee! Come to me sexy ship. Come to Butthead.

PotBS: End of Beta Event (Day 2)

So yesterday we got our ONE MILLION doubloons and all that shit to try out some new boats which today, we were meant to wreck in all out PvP (I use the term loosely as it was pretty much all out gankage on every nation's part.)

This is the only pic of the event I got since...eventually we all lagged out, got disconnected or had our graphics cards explode. Like, for real:


Anyhoo, basically, we were supposed to follow some drunken ass GM (Don Juan de Ubilla) from Vera Cruz to Havana to Tortuga. Our allies were to be the Frenchies this day, but of course, as soon as we made it to Havana, the French show up and ATTACK US. Awesome. So we dispatch those morons and continue onward to Tortuga.

At this point, there are like a gazillion ships on the screen and my Crysis GFX card overloads...again. One of our group members gets lost, one gets DC'd and the other two are in a battle. And then the Brits (which out number us at least 3 to 1) attack. One of us gets hit by 4 guys, and lucky me I get a privateer and 2 ship of the lines. I almost had the privateer but she runs off and is much much faster than my big ship. I almost take out the other SOL but alas, it's just too much bombardment. But at least I got down fighting! RAWR!

Meanwhile, everyone in the group is separated or dead. HURRAY!

AND OMG, BLACKBEARD GETS SUNK! ...Not that I care since I have no idea where I am anymore. And what he has to do with the event, I have no clue.

Fast forward to 20 minutes later, the group regroups, one of us gets ganked again 3 vs 1 and disconnects. And Don Juan gets sunk. And I my group is now all lime green................

Yeah, so super crappy event, but I still dig the game.

I won't lie though, there was so much lag (I didn't experience this--just the graphics card over load), and gankage going on that folks decided not to buy the game because of the event.

And then there was a lot of EQII cock suckers saying how much better EQII was to a pirate game and the required SOE bashing.

And now, I'm gonna' go play COD4.

WOOOT!

PotBS: Dericious Screenies of End of Beta Event (Day 1)

Here are a couple screenies from the End of Beta Event. I was a fool and bought an "Invincible 1st Rate," but then switched to a "Trinity 2nd Rate," for better (snort giggle) maneuverability. But first there's one of us Spaniards dispatching of an SOL in our early 30s. XD


Here's the Invincible. 112 guns for your face!! The sound of 'em all going off is magical. *purr*


And here is one of me burning down some British ships. WAHOO!!


Then tonight! The PVP begins!

Ahh! 1 MILLION DOUBLOOOONNS!!

I'm going to swim in my doubloons like Scrooge McDuck.

End of Beta: Level Cap, Free Money, and Auction Seeding!

---

With the release of build 1.0.29.2, we have removed the level cap from the game so you can level to 50. We have also placed a very large number of items in many auction houses, including XP books you can use to level up quickly and thousands of ship deeds. When you log in, you will also receive ONE MILLION DOUBLOONS.

The ship deeds are priced so that you can't just buy all of them. You will need to choose carefully what to spend your enormous stacks of money on.

While we believe there are enough ship deeds in enough auction houses to satisfy everyone, we know some of you remember the end of closed beta event where we ran out. If this turns out to be a serious issue this time, we will resupply the auction houses as needed. However, we believe the combination of the million doubloons, the many ports that are seeded, and the pricing on the ship deeds will work pretty well.

The auction houses with the goodies are in these ports:

Starting towns:

Charlesfort
Jenny Bay
Marsh Harbour
Vera Cruz

Capitals:

Port Royal
Tortuga
San Juan
Pointe-a-Pitre

Other towns:

Barilla
Bartica
Belize
Biloxi
Campeche
Cat Island
Cayo de Marquis
Grenville
La Isabelle
Les Hattes
Maracaibo
New Orleans
Oranjestad
Orleans
Pensacola
Port-of-Spain
Rosignol
Sisal
St. Rose's Bay
Tampa
Tampico
Whitby