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Our new Avatar Combat Revision is now on the Testbed server for you to try out before it hits live. To celebrate, were holding a last-man-standing free-for-all brawl in our new Testbed PvP sandbox arena. You will be able to attack anyone, even players from your own nation! Its a Brawl For All!
The last player left alive will receive a unique title in the live game on a character of their choice. They will also receive an official Pirates of the Burning Sea t-shirt.
The event will start at 2pm PST / 10pm GMT this Sunday, December 14th. We will spend the first 60 minutes handing out levels and new AvCom weapons and outfitting, so you should be in the AvCom test room ready to go by 2.30pm. Dont forget that you will need to choose new skills before the event starts!
To access the AvCom test room, check on the docks of Marsh Harbour, Jenny Bay, Vera Cruz, and Charlesfort for a special NPC that will take you there.
Character transfers have been re-enabled for players who want to transfer between servers on a Sony Station account. The BigPond to Sony Station character migration system is still down while they continue to investigate technical issues, an update will come once they know more.
Pirates of the Burning Sea was nominated for an Innovation award in MMORPG.com's 2008 awards. They have also now been nominated for a Reader's Choice Award for Best New Game. POTBS is up against Age of Conan, Atlantica Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Warhammer Online.
Pirates of the Burning Sea has been nominated in the �Most Innovative Feature� category in this year�s MMORPG.com Reader�s Choice Awards for Ship Combat. Go vote!
Pirates of the Burning Sea and GamerDNA have teamed up to support Penny Arcade�s Childs Play Charity, a cause that has always been very important to them. If you check out their Child�s Play page on GamerDNA, you can take the Decades of Influence quiz to find out which era of gaming has most influenced you, and generate a badge that tells the world! You can also simply donate directly.
Join the 2DSC in celebrating their Flag and Sail of the Month contest winners! December�s theme, as befitting the season, was �Celebrate the Holidays.� They had several good entries to choose from this month, so good, both contests ended in a tie! So in the spirit of the holiday season, they're declaring four winners:
Paba & Draxonfly � Flag of the Month
PantaIna & Morgan Lacerda � Sail of the Month
Be sure to visit this thread to see the winning designs and learn how to pick up copies with which to spread holiday cheer!
MMORPG.com introduces a new category to their 2008 Reader's Choice Awards. This isn't a vote for your favourite game necessarily, rather a vote for the feature you felt added the most to the MMO genre in terms of gameplay, fun and future potential. Up for nomination:
� Council of Stellar Management (EVE)
� Combo Combat (Age of Conan)
� Public Quests (Warhammer Online)
� Ship Combat (Pirates of the Burning Sea)
Another big 'ole bloggin' update can be found on the PotBS official site today, this time talking about NPC abilities and avatar combat. Dig in!
The avatar combat revision gave ConCo a really good opportunity to give a bit of a makeover to what NPCs could do. In the previous version of avatar combat, much of the strategy came from reducing your enemies� balance to the point where you could damage their health. With that aspect gone, we wanted to figure out a way to keep avatar combat tactically interesting to players. What we ended up doing was grouping NPCs into different �archetypes�, each with their own unique moveset.
Invincible build 1.10: The Calm Before the Storm hit servers yesterda and continues to do so depending on your time zone. Release notes can be found here.
Important Note: We are upgrading our SOE servers, including Defiant, to 1.10 approximately 10 hours after we upgrade invincible. Character transfers from Invincible will not work while the servers are running different versions. Once our SOE servers have been brought online with 1.10, transfers will become active again.
Gotta love all of the PotBS updates that show up on the official site, here's one of the latest to chomp on! Aether writes the following:
We are aware that Rackham is currently experiencing issues related to port states, and we�ve recieved reports from our community of unusual PvP zones appearing on the open sea.
We are currently investigating the issues impacting Rackham, and we will keep you updated as we learn more.
We encourage our customers to share any information they may have related to this issue by filing a support ticket. You can do that by visiting this link.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, and we appreciate your patience as we work to remedy the issues.
In the latest PotBS Developer Log, BSHARP talks about making the female characters in the game less masculine.
The reason that this has been an issue is because of a choice, made long ago, to have only one skeleton shared between both men and women avatar models. The reasoning behind the choice was one of savings, both in the production pipeline and in the memory footprint of the game. With only one skeleton, we would only need one set of animations and not one for each skeleton�less work for animators on the back end and a smaller animation database in the game. The price for this savings was a compromise to have either masculine looking women (broad shoulders, no hips), feminine looking men, or blah looking both. We went for masculine looking women and while the character team did their best to feminize our broad-shouldered, slim-hipped women, they were never satisfied with the results.
You can see an image for an example of their latest work here, certainly looks like an improvement!
Now that server transfers have been enabled, we want to know (because we're nosey like that!) what your plans are! Vote in the new PotBS Poll so we know where you're going (if you're going) and can stalk you accordingly!
Aether informs the PotBS masses that server transfers are now enabled for Australian, European and North American customers. How do you transfer and how does it all work? Find out in the FLS transfer FAQ!
How many transfers do I get?
You can transfer all of your characters, 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.
FLS environment artist, Eric, has been working on updating versions of all their in-game towns to replace generic art that is currently in place at most ports. That means a unique town for every port in the game! The best part about this process is the speed in which they are creating these new towns. In each town redo they will be keeping the same nav mesh so the overall layout will be very similar to the previous town. This greatly speeds up the revamp process since it gives us a framework to quickly build upon. A developer log must read! Lots of purty example images have also been included.
There's a new PotBS Developer Log up and it's chock full of information on creating and maintaining items, nerfs and changes, plus flavors. There are also several images included for people that don't like to read! The new developer log also mentions that they are still looking for players to help test out the new AvCom.
Ut oh, a recent promotion allowing previous Pirates to return to the roost for a free 14-day trial was accidentally ended prematurely. Work is now going on behind the scenes with publishing partners to reactivate the promotion without interruption. You can read the full apology here.
Word down the Pirate Pipe is that there will be a delay to the 1.10 upgrade to allow customers to tranfer to the SOE servers. Here's the full scoop straight from the horse's mouth!
We recently announced that we will be allowing our Australian customers to transfer over to our SOE servers, and we will be unveiling that system imminently.
Our transfer system requires both the source and destination servers to be on the same version. That means that we will be delaying out our upgrade of the North American and European servers to 1.10 so that it does not prevent anyone from transferring their characters.
We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience caused by this. We are currently planning to upgrade all servers to 1.10 early next week.
Icon board staff and Moderators are not eligible to win but may participate just for the fun.
The contest will remain open for two weeks or until we have and 1st and 2nd place winner which ever happens first.
Please see the contest thread for the full details of the rules.
Icon and Graphics board, a community
While perusing our board, if you like what you see, feel free to stick around! The Icon and Graphics board is a fantastic community of artists and people sharing ideas, telling bad jokes and requesting artwork - not just for the Vault but their own guild�s or personal sites too!!
Have a request, general questions or just want some help figuring things out? Feel free to ask, we have a number of talented and knowledgeable people that will be willing to give you a hand.
We're looking for more artists!
If you happen to have a knack or talent for art of these sorts, and need some where to shine and show off, the Icon and Graphics board could be your match made in heaven.
We are currently looking for a few good artists to fill our staff and aid in our quest of beautifying the internet and making icons.
If you are interested in applying and helping out, you can find more information here
Please include a sample of your work. It needn�t be anything elaborate, it�s all about the basic know how with a touch of creativity for good measure.
You can contact me one of two ways, either via PM on the boards or send me an email.
A couple of days ago, Pirates of the Burning Sea lead designer Kevin Maginn aka �Isildur� published a devlog detailing a virtual overhaul of the avatar combat system in the game. Ever since PotBS launched in February, avatar combat (or �AvCom�) has been tagged as its weakest feature by most reviewers. Not surprising, considering that Pirates was originally designed as a purely ship combat game. So, here we are several months later and Isildur is talking about a total revamp to AvCom. Welcome news indeed, but we wanted more details and were lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with the man himself!
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