Flying lab have recently been fiddling with contention and marks of victory to set the way contenton works to how they intended, and to prevent an exploit relating to marks of victory.
The removal of Marks from PVE missions has been particularly criticised by fans, which FLS responded to in the form of this post by Rev:
We removed MoVs from the PvE Conquest missions due to an unforeseen exploit that had to be addressed quickly. As usual, we do not discuss or explain exploits except to say that we've fixed them.
In v1.1, MoVs will be awarded from the Unrest Bundle turnin missions. We are discussing a number of options for MoVs and how we can award them safely without reopening the exploit.
The change we made last night had no effect on receiving MoVs from players. You receive MoVs from every player you defeat from whom you gain XP, and the number of MoVs you receive is based on the level of the player's ship.
FLS will be looking at why MoVs are not being awarded correctly from PvP action in this coming week.
The NY Times Say “Yarrr!”
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Friday, 01 February 2008
The difficult to pronounce Seth Schiesel of the New York times has written an article - in Thursday's edition - about Pirates of the Burning Sea!
That it is based in a semblance of reality is one of the most refreshing aspects of Pirates of the Burning Sea, the captivating new online game from Flying Lab Software that opened last week after six years in development.
It's a very well written article, and I advise you all to check it out by visiting this link!
More on 1.1 - Ship Combat
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Friday, 01 February 2008
Rev's posted another devlog about 1.1, this time about Ship Combat:
NPC ships had a hard time changing targets even when somebody was really pounding at them [...] We’ve made them smarter about who they should be angriest at, so now they’ll change targets in a way that better reflects where the real threat is.
[...] you could set up a Lancer Cutter to have a max range of 850y, which is just crazy. To address this, we slightly reduced how much outfitting can affect max range.
the Arcadia now has a gundeck of 11 9lb guns and a topdeck of 2 4lb guns[...] Many civilian ships were higher level than they really should have been and a couple were lower level[...] The Packet-Boat gained speed, cargo capacity, and target tracking bonuses, and also had its level increased. The Intrepid privateer refit gained two guns, since the refit isn’t supposed to have fewer guns than the base ship. And the Hellbrand West Indiaman got smaller guns, since we recently changed it from a large ship to a medium one.
Devlog: Customer Services, Post Launch
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Customer service is a very important thing when you're paying $15 a month for something. So Michelle "Misha" Williams' new devlog talking about how Flying Lab are going to be handling customer services after launch is quite interesting.<
But the biggest surprise, to me at least, was the gold sellers. We knew they would be there, but we didn’t foresee how cumbersome our reporting and banning systems would be for this purpose. Because the gold sellers have up to six characters per server on eleven servers, we get tons of reports from players that are essentially duplicates of each other. [....] We are definitely working to improve these tools and systems, both to make it easier for our players to file the reports and for us to process them.
Changes are A Coming
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
In what can only be seen as a response to many queries about the way port contention worked, Flying Lab have announced they are altering the way contention works by increasing the gains to contention and lengthening the time before the port battle. This means that ports will be easier to put into contention, and likely allows more players to gain points for potential participation in the final battle because it takes place a full day later. It seems that this will make it more likely for people who were not involved in putting the port into contention to get into the port battle; how societies that spend a lot of time participating in contention take this remainsto be seen.
Secondly, a new devlog talking about version 1.1 (promised next week) and the improvements promised for the open sea has been posted:
Verion 1.1 is here! This new version of Pirates of the Burning Sea is primarily a bug-fix build—but what a bug-fix build it is. I just ran a query on our bug database and found that this build includes the fixes for more than one thousand bugs. The vast majority of those are text and content bugs, most so small that they aren’t included in our patch notes or Misha’s head would explode when she writes them, but you’ll find small polish improvements throughout the game as well as stability and performance improvements.
Server Issues
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Saturday, 26 January 2008
Flying lab are working on a fix for login issue that is preventing some people from seeing the server list right away. They urge those affected to wait for the server list to load, rather than quitting and retrying.
Game time cards available.
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Friday, 25 January 2008
FLS have annoucend that game time cards are now available through the Sony Store, so folks without credit cards can play.
XPlay give PotBS four stars.
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Friday, 25 January 2008
G4TV's XPlay have reviewed Pirates of the Burning Sea giving it a solid four stars.
Maxim Give PotBS 5 Stars
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Friday, 25 January 2008
So we've found out why the rum's all gone. Maxim's Scott Jones drank it all..
Downtime for Update COMPLETE
Written by Robert "Xaphod" Goforth
Thursday, 24 January 2008
The PotBS servers are now live with 1.0.48.0, which was a patch to try and fix an issue with 8000 series nVidia cards. It doesn't do anything else.
