fls
Latest
Pirates of the Burning Sea is ready to be boarded by all beta testers again
There was a mishap on the PotBS mizzenmasts earlier today as thousands of beta tester's under the stress test and open beta flags walked the planks and could not login leaving them to flee to Booty Bay. Admiral, Horatio Loreblower reports they do have a suspect in custody, and he almost died ten times in the process when capturing said prisoner while his officers looked on dumbfounded.. The Royal Navy said shortly after Loreblower's victory party that the man responsible is Jolly Roger, and will set trial for interfering with the Early Beta at Sea Treaty. When asked for comment, Roger's parrot who went to law school released this statement: "Yohoho. Ye' scurvy Beta dogs plundarrr all my epic loots. I do it agen if I could, even with SOE on my syde!" I'm out of control; however, all beta accounts have been reinstated, and we don't know how many parrots Jolly Roger used to pull this off, but everything is fixed. Thank you, and please enjoy the rest of the beta while you can. The beta ends the morning on January 1, better get a move on! If you missed out on our earlier PotBS coverage, we got all sorts: crafting, missions, press tour, galleries, and the news mound. If you haven't played PotBS in awhile I recommend giving it another chance. The Developers have been hard at work, polishing the game, fixing it, getting it ready for its big launch come January 22nd. If you have never played PotBS go here to get a key and download the open beta client at no cost. If you pre-order the game you get early access to the game by two whole weeks too. It gets better, as with most betas, the end of beta events are coming. Lots of scurvy high-sea plundering end of beta shenanigans are planned to take place any day now.
PotBS updated once more, build 1.0.25.0 live to open beta
Whew. Just a couple of days ago, Pirates of the Burning Sea was updated to build 1.0.22.0, but build 1.0.25.0 has already gone live. This revision includes the planned changes to Ships of the Line, bringing them closer to how they were originally intended to be.Also in 1.0.25.0, swashbuckling has been tuned quite a lot, and some new voice acting from foreign speakers has gone in. The invisible avatar problem hasn't been fully resolved yet, but we're promised some more progress when the next patch is released.Once again, this is but a small portion of all the changes in the patch, and the full list is pasted after the break.
PotBS updated to build 1.0.22.0, patch notes released
The weekend saw Pirates of the Burning Sea updated to build 1.0.22.0, and those in the open beta will have been playing under this build for a few days now. The official website has now released the patch notes for this build, and from looking at the list, a heck of a lot of things have been updated.There are a lot of performance and stability fixes, including a reduction in lag in certain areas, improvements to a problem that causes invisible avatars, and a change to the unrest rate in missions that deal with unrest. Also, the revamped Red Tide mission (which was discussed in a developer journal last week) has been implemented with this build.The above is just a tiny taste of what has changed from 1.0.17.0 to 1.0.22.0, so for the complete patch notes, hit the jump.
Pirates of the Burning Sea developer journal: It's Good to Group
John Scott Tynes, producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea, has posted a developer journal about grouping at PotBS Vault. He discusses the first group mission found in the game, Red Tide, and the process that his team went through to make improvements to this first taste of banding together with your seafarin' chums.The motivation behind tweaking Red Tide, even though Tynes said it was still good before, was to encourage players to group more, give them a memorable experience in the game early on, and to help people learn to play. He mentions that it is possible to get to the level cap without grouping, so it is necessary to show people the fun and rewards that partying can yield.You can read more about the evolution of Red Tide and Tynes' thoughts on grouping at the developer journal, and if you still need to get in to the open beta to give the mission a try, the updates on this post may be of some use.
Reminder: Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta has already begun for Fileplanet users, others very soon [updated]
Update 1: Reader Errantdreams pointed out that the open beta was available for closed beta testers and paying Founders Club members of Fileplanet since December 3rd.Update 2: Some digging on the forums has led to the discovery that you can get your free beta key right now from Eurogamer.net. Hurry over to get yours!Last week Flying Lab Software lifted the NDA on Pirates of the Burning Sea, and dished out some open beta details. As of the 7th of December, the open beta for PotBS has been available for Fileplanet subscribers.We also learned that the open beta proper is supposed to begin four days after the short Fileplanet-exclusive access period. This should mean that everyone else will be able to sail the Burning Seas on December the 11th, or very soon now. In a matter of hours you may be beginning your nautical adventure. The thing is, the original news story from the PotBS site also states that the full open beta will begin "within a week" of the Fileplanet stage -- so hopefully the more specific "four days" is the one they stick to.If you are in fact a Fileplanet subscriber then you could already have been playing, and you can visit Fileplanet's PotBS beta page to salvage what is left of your headstart. If not, the PotBS homepage is probably where you want to be, crossing your fingers and hoping that you'll be joining the other scurvy dogs soon.
Tales from the Pirates of the Burning Sea endgame press tour
We at Massively have been watching the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta for quite a while, but this week, Sony emailed us with an offer to go where we'd never gone before: the endgame. So yesterday morning, I strapped on my cutlass, adjusted my tricorner, and logged in and joined the "FLS Leisure Tours" group to check out a press tour of the Pirates open beta.While lots of people have gone through the early game a few times already (and you can right now in the open beta), I was very interested to see what FLS had in store for us at later levels. Read on to see where the folks from Flying Labs teleported us to, and just a taste of what players can expect to see in the PotBS endgame.%Gallery-11461%
A booming economy (and a lack of PvP) in the PotBS beta
The Pirates of the Burning Sea NDA lifted the other day when the beta went open, and so lots of bloggers are posting their own impressions of the game (we at Massively got to post ours a while back, but hey, we're cool like that). Tobold, though, has an interesting post up about a favorite subject of mine in the game: the economy and crafting system. Once again, you can read my thoughts in the crafting writeup from a while back, but Tobold says something I hadn't considered-- that it is extremely easy to raise a fortune in PotBS.Or is it? Tobold says you can make a lot of money just by using your stored labor (which stores up in real-time-- my favorite innovation in the game), and right now, that's true. But having played the beta for a while, my prediction is that prices in starter and close-to-starter ports will drop pretty sharply after the game comes out. Right now, PvP is still in its infancy in the game (either because people are still learning how to do it, or because pirates haven't geared up yet to the point where they can really crush newbies). I was able to sail around the world to trade without any trouble at all. But in the live game, it'll become that much more dangerous to travel across the seas, and that will push the system to where FLS wants it: with PvP and the economy as two sides of the same paper.Right now, it's easy to make a ton of money because money is moving fast around the world. When the game comes out, and the real pirates make their way to the open seas, the economy will fall much more into the pattern that FLS is trying to get it in: goods at home will be bought and sold cheaply, and to make the real production and trading money, you'll have to travel through dangerous waters and survive to sell at the other side.
Lead designer of Pirates of the Burning Sea Q & A interview
The Warcry Network recently had a chance to ask Pirates of the Burning Sea lead designer Kevin Maginn a round of questions about the upcoming Jack-Sparrow-simulator. The interviewer poses queries about launching with both land and ship aspects already in-game (as opposed to a game like EVE which is only now looking to add land-based play), system requirements for the masses, the beta and stress test processes, population balancing and the user interface.Of most interest is the question on populations, regarding the different factions in the game. Players can choose to be English, Spanish, French, or the swashbucklin' Pirate. Maginn notes that, during various phases of the beta, the numbers have remained roughly the same -- 35% choose Pirates, nearly as many choose the English, and then the French and Spanish each take 15%. On this he says, "we are working on some population balancing tools, with two goals: make the game more fair if your nation is underpopulated, and make underpopulated nations more appealing, particularly to large PvP guilds". If the incentives for one race are good enough, it might swing the population the other way entirely. We'll have to wait and see what countermeasures will be employed before the game releases, as the difference in numbers so far sounds fairly staggering.
