Player versus Player conflict is one of the cornerstones of Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the primary avenue for that is our Conquest system. We’re in the process of making some fairly major changes to the Conquest system. We wanted to take a moment and explain those changes, and the reasoning behind them. There are a handful of major areas I want to address: port defense, increased PvP zones, and PvP rewards.

The Noble Order of Toastmistresses is a relatively new organization dedicated to public speaking and social refinement. Members can be found in most any nation in Europe and most of the colonies, but they’ve only just entered the treacherous waters of the Burning Sea. Wouldn’t you want to celebrate surviving for a month in such a circumstance? Four Toastmistresses will each offer the same mission to players of their nation. In the British capital Port Royal look for the charming Miss Penelope Askham. Spanish Toastmistress Novia Vela calls San Juan home, while French players can raise a toast to Mlle. Carole Dubray in Pointe—Pitre. Even the piratical Brethren of the Coast can count a few Toastmistresses among them, including Desdemona Fabritzius of Tortuga.

One of the things we’re most proud of in Pirates of the Burning Sea is our ship to ship PvP. We feel that we have created a deep, enjoyable system for player versus player combat, with interesting and complex battle possibilities. Unfortunately our PvP has some fairly significant barriers to entry. The biggest of these is that you’re risking your ship every time you go out. While we like this risk, and the context and meaning it gives to our PvP, it’s a bit daunting, especially for new players. In light of that we’re adding a couple of new systems to help ease new players into the PvP experience: duels and skirmish battles.

So the first thing we're doing is that we are not resetting port ownership or conquest state on any port on any server.
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The second thing we're going to do is fix the port contention system. Over the past month we've been applying a series of bandaids to try to make what we have work. Things are better than they were (you now can't push a port all the way to contention with any time to defend), but the system is still fundamentally flawed. One of the things on our list for 1.3 is to fix those fundamental problems.

One of the areas we were most excited to start fixing up was the chat system. We know you’ve been struggling with its… idiosyncrasies… since launch, so it was our first priority. We still have a few more ideas for the future, but the improvements in the upcoming patch are really awesome:
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As I reflect on all of these improvements, I’m struck by the massive amount of work we’ve done in such a short time. We still have to test all of these new features thoroughly and smooth out some rough edges, but all of this work is pretty much done and ready for you.

We want players to explore together, strategize together, experience adversity together, and hopefully triumph together when they go into Bey’s Retreat. We want them to have fun together and come out the other side better players than they were before. Most of all, we want them to feel the exhilaration of accomplishing something difficult togethe

Theres a whole batch of captain skill changes in 1.2. Offhand, Id estimate half of the captain skills changed in one way or another. The vast majority of these changes are improvements to existing skills, and thus it impacts all careers.

We had the lucky chance to snag Admiral Elbow - or Jess Lebow, if you prefer - for a few minutes to ask him a few questions about the launch of Pirates of the Burning Sea and what kind of things we can expect for the future!

So pull up a chair, sit comfortably and enjoy the interview: