Is this for real? Seriously? We dont have time for this, were trying to make a game here.

[We'd] been planning to end the Open Beta this Sunday the 23rd. But we’ve heard from so many players who want t play over the holidays that we’ve changed our minds.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea Open Beta will now run until the morning of January 1st, 2008! That gives everyone one more week to play the game, see what we’re doing, and check out the very latest improvements and changes.

Our art and content teams are working now on the first free content update, coming in March. This includes a stunning new capital city for France, new missions, new repeatable group instances, and much more.

...the overall effect were looking at is that refit ships will be competitive to, but not necessarily superior to, other ships at their level. Given that they use the refit package as a major part of their cost, and that cost is no longer an economic one, theyre generally less expensive in raw doubloon costs, making them viable alternatives for a pure PvP player. PvE players will still be able to get them through their career mission rewards and the Conquest missions, but they wont have them shoved down their throats and can choose from the same Marks of Victory reward items as desired.

One of the areas with the most room for improvement has been the balancing of our Swashbuckling skills. Many skills were clearly better, or worse, than other skills of a similar cost. There were clearly right and wrong choices of skills, independent of your desired play style, and we wanted to reduce that. Obviously some skills will always be better for some play styles, but we wanted to make the choices a bit more interesting. Weve made numerous small changes in this department, too many to list here, but there are a few big picture changes I want to call out specifically.

Patch notes are now not subject to any NDA.. so here they are:

This build includes some very important tuning changes to Ships of the Line and to swashbuckling. Some more performance and stability fixes are included, as are new town voice effects recorded with actual foreign-language speakers! The latest drop of localized text is also included.

...But if you and your group can keep the fort alive and firing, and can coordinate your own ships, skills, consumables, and tactics, you can triumph. And when that boss ship goes down, he drops some great loot you won’t find anywhere else. Since you can play Red Tide as often as you like, you can keep getting better and better at it until you’ve scored all the loot you can carry. The new Red Tide is a blast. It’s the first of a new series of missions we’re working on that will be very hard, replayable group content spread across the level curve. Red Tide is a simple example that you can play in about 20-30 minutes, and it’s only level 6 so the training wheels are definitely still on.

A couple of Developer Logs have been posted on the official site, the first about retuning ship speeds on the Open Sea - making fast ships slower but leaving slow ships alone.

We’re going to be changing [the OS travel speed] by adjusting the speed scale in an upcoming patch. Right now, the slowest ship in our game is 45 knots, while the fastest is currently 75 knots. The change will adjust the speed of our fastest ships down to 66 knots, but will have no effect on the slower ships. Most frigates are seeing a speed change of 0%-4%, while the most highly impacted small ship is seeing a reduction of 10% (with one outlier, the ‘Halifax’ Mastercraft Schooner, reduced by 12%).

The second is about Ships of the Line, and how FLS are tuning the method by which they are obtained to make them rarer.

What were doing is making SOLs much more expensive to construct. While the actual doubloon cost to execute the recipes will be larger, the more important factor is that making them will now consume far more economic goods. The goods used to produce an SOL will not just be high-end specialty items, either; low-level players who only dabble in the economy will still be able to make goods that are needed to build an SOL. This means societies will have directed activities for newbies to perform, so they can all pull together to pursue this goal....

This means that SOLs will be very attractive targets to other nations in a port battle, since destroying an SOL may actually inflict more economic damage than taking the port itself. This in turn means that nations will only bring out their high-end SOLs for port battles of great strategic significance, and rely on the fourth-rate workhorse SOLs for most battles.