The work goes in parallel. You'll be happy to know that I shot down an idea today that would have made things a little easier for some of the nationals at the expense of delaying this.

The required fixes have been rolled out, Quality Assurance has put things through the paces, and I personally have been in-game and seen flags and sails working as intended. We think we've nailed this one down for real this time!

Here's what you need to do to resume enjoying your User Content:

1) Log out of the game;

2) If you saw "no smoking signs" the last time you were in-game and haven't cleared out your User Content folder, delete the contents of:

* (under Windows XP: ) [Drive]:/Documents and Settings/[Username]/My Documents/Pirates of the Burning Sea/user content/

* (under Windows Vista: ) [Drive]:/Users/[Username]/Documents/Pirates of the Burning Sea/user content/

3) Restart the game and check your User Content.

4) You should see all, or at very least most, of the User Content in-game now. There may be a handful of flags and sails still experiencing their own, unique issues. If any of yours still shows up as a red "No" symbol, please file a support request for your missing content. Post your support ticket number to this thread; we'll see if we can coax your content back out of hiding.

NOTE: This fix is only applicable those enjoying the game via SOE accounts. For our BigPond users in Australia, you'll have to wait until your next patch is available, some time in the next few days. Keep an eye on this thread for updates to our Australian servers.

Thanks for your patience and assistance in tracking down this issue -- having the support ticket numbers in this thread helped maximise the amount of testing we could do.

Now, get to the seas and fly your flags proudly, me hearties!

It's an interesting idea, though I'm wary of it. Because the pirates only hold it for three days (and should be increasing unrest in the area, which is interesting unto itself) we can stuff more special game content into this area without running much risk of unbalancing things.

I'm always off schedule because I wind up on special business issues. So I expect I'll get booted out of the group (I think....gulp!) once we're in the swing of things.

It's a good point. We could probably provide something just as cool for the nationals to take a pirate port as we do for the pirates. But since nationals already have reasonable incentive, we're going to start with the pillaging.

Hmm, maybe the minor tuning changes are in this milestone. I've only recently started reintegrating into the company after always being out of the office, so I'm a bit out of touch with things.

This one is a much better fit.

No, we're not announcing those changes yet. We have some tuning changes going in 1.4 that will help Pirates compete more effectively in NvN, and a huge change that will have you guys buzzing for quite some time, and will function as a road map for future changes in the future. It'll probably be a month before we announce it (1.3 is the next on the hit parade of dev logs).

Boo! I hate reading through a big block of text that I just read to get to the new stuff. But I'm happy to go with how people like it. I'll put up a survey about this.

You'll get lots of good and valuable loot, but it's not intended to be part of the economic production system.