The flag is definitely a step in the right direction

The sail could still use a little work. Before submitting you'll want to:

1) Clean up all the shading in the skull. (It might not be shading, but just artifacts from a bad scan... either way, it works better if the skull itself looks clean, unshaded, and untextured.)

2) Make your entire decal about 30-50% transparent (opacity 50-70%). That way the blacks won't be too pure (look here for color recommendations) and the decal will look more a part of the sail.

If you can achieve both of these objectives I think you'll have a fine decal ready for the game

PvP is a big, complex system that is heavily dependent on other big, complex systems to work. We did a huge amount of tuning in beta, but beta players just don't have the same level of investment in their characters that actual customers do, so they act differently. We've learned many things in the past two months that we didn't learn during beta, so we're dealing with them as quickly as we can.

1.3 is the first patch started after the game went live. For most of the team work on 1.2 began back in November when we froze the content for the gold master. That's why you didn't see a whole lot of top issues being dealt with in 1.2. Milestone 1.3 is full of things that are the direct result of feedback from you folks: improved PvP rewards, complete revamp of economic unrest turn-ins, complete revamp of turn-ins in general, etc.


Joe

We're working on the reward side of that equation. The idea is to make the reward greater than the risk so the break-even win ratio is less than 1:1. I don't know how MUCH less yet, but right now you have to win multiple fights for every loss to break even.

Trading MoVs to merchants so they can recover faction is just the beginning of this process. We're adding many, many rewards that MoVs can be traded for, some for PvPers, some for PvEers, and some for merchants. The idea is to turn marks of victory into a useful, flexible currency that enter the economy only through PvP. This will give pure PvP players something that other players WANT and are happy to trade their own valuables for.


Joe

Strange... it looks alright to me.

Best,
Aether

This Monday we will be unveiling the Pirates of the Burning Sea Buddy Key Program, which will allow customers with active accounts to invite two of your favorite people to join you on the Burning Sea with a 14 day trail - free!

Rhaegar will be providing download links and instructions for you to claim your two buddy keys on Monday, so keep your eyes on the headlines!

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether

We can't put up a manual patch, as we're not the ones who build it. The odds are we'd break something trying to fix it. Rest assured, we're going to be digging in to see what's going on and how we avoid this in the future.

We don't control the patcher, which means that we have to go through Bigpond support to get it fixed. I believe they're out for Easter, so I don't have a sense of how widespread the problem is. Reporting it to them will give them a better overview and will help them understand where the problems are so they can fix it.

Which I realize isn't much comfort if you're having problems getting it down, and can't play over the weekend. If you're pushing up against your limit, I'd recommend waiting until Monday your time so we can give you a better answer as to what's going on.

ETA is 1.4, which is about 2 months away.

http://potbs.wikia.com/wiki/A_Man_of_Wealth_and_Taste

Thought you might find this useful.

I think it's probably worse than that. I bet you still lose money if you win 75% of your fights.


Joe