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Pirates to get more RvR love from Flying Lab Software
Pirates are always the underdogs in MMOs, aren't they? That seems to be the case in Pirates of the Burning Sea, where the Pirate nation has been at a disadvantage with the game's Conquest system. While their ports can't be controlled (permanently) by another nation, they're likewise unable to keep the ports they conquer. The latest devlog from Flying Lab's Lum is titled Pirates and Conquest and addresses this disparity between the Pirate nation and all other nations in the game. One solution they plan to implement is increasing the four points that Pirates gain by capturing a port to five. Lum explains, "Currently, Pirates get four points every time they Raid a port, while Nationals get 10. This means that for a Pirate to keep pace with Nationals, they have to win three port battles in order to get the same amount of points. Since every nation can only attack three ports at a time, this means that Pirates would always have to have their maximum amount of attacking ports at all times, and then they have to win all of those battles." Ouch. However, by increasing their capture points to five, Pirates will only have to win two battles and won't need to maintain constant port attacks to stay on par with other nations.
PotBS to have semi-weekly service downtimes
The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has announced that, to help with some ongoing issues, all servers will be subject to a regularly scheduled service downtime. This downtime will occur twice a week, and should only be a server restart, meaning you can log back on and resume looting and plundering within about 20 minutes if all goes well.So far, we know that the downtimes will take place on Tuesdays and Fridays at 8:30AM GMT for North American and European servers -- times for the Australian server will be listed shortly. It has been said that the restarts can be moved around a bit to accommodate Port Battles, which is a very nice touch and shows quite a level of involvement from Flying Lab Software on a server-specific basis. They hope that the regular restart situation will be temporary, but it's good to see that they will try to soften the blow in the meantime.
Port contention turn-ins in PotBS to be scaled down
Until now in Pirates of the Burning Sea, some clever folks have been able to cause a totally peaceful port to instantly become scheduled for a port battle, by saving up their contention turn-ins en masse and across characters, and handing them in all at once. Over at the official PotBS site, Isildur has drawn attention to the issue and said that changes are coming to prevent this from occurring in the future.You couldn't really call this tactic an exploit -- it's more just a smart use of the mechanics available in the game -- but it's obviously not how Flying Lab Software intended for the whole process to go down. The plan was to make the contention process a bit more steady so that the home nation could have a chance to defend and bring the unrest back down again, and possibly save a full-scale port battle from occurring, while also giving the traders a bigger role in defending their business interests. The first steps to prevent the current insta-port-battles should be introduced with build 1.2.
