And we've taken 1.2.67.0 to the live servers. Thanks for your help, as always!

The final SOE update server is now activated with the patch. Everyone should now be able to patch properly.

If your download cancels or you get a corrupt file, please do a full scan and then try again.

The game servers are back online. 1.2.67.0 is up!

And unacceptable. We're working hard to clear the backlog. Many, many apologies for the delays!
Some of the computer-generated yakyak has info we want you to have. I do wish it showed up at the bottom, though, below the more useful (in theory) response from the GM.

Fixed the MOTD. Thanks.

The deployment window has been extended to 7.30am. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

SOE are still in the process of deploying the patch to their patch servers. Some people are already able to patch, while some aren't.

Let's keep the criticism about us and not about each other, eh? And while we're at it, let's keep it civil.

I hear the patch is around 830mb.

I have just heard from the Ops team that we are now projecting downtime until 5:30 am.
Every delay pains us, and we certainly accept your constructive criticism. As soon as we know more, we'll update you.

On Tuesday morning, March 18th from 1:30a to 3:30a Pacific Time, Pirates of the Burning Sea game servers will be unavailable while we move Build 1.2.67.0 from Testbed to Live.


You will find additional information on the contents of Build 1.2.67.0 by visiting this link.


EDIT: The deployment window has been extended to 4.30am. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

My apologies if this comes out somewhat garbled, but I just had the softest cat in the world snuggle up into my lap and now I can't reach the keyboard to type, so I'm trying out Vista's speech recognition capability for the first time.

We were actually talking about this just the other day. I think that if we had postponed the game until now, this build would not be nearly as good. People play very different in the beta as opposed to release, and all we knew this to be the case, we didn't realize how misleading it could be. There's also a psychological element of releasing that makes it possible to look back over the project with a fresh mind. This was particularly useful when it came to UI design, where we realize there was an organizational problem to our process that had to be fixed before we could start delivering on the quality of UI that we were shooting for.

So how do I like vista's speech recognition? It's surprisingly useful! I only had to make about six corrections in all of this text, and it kept my hands free so I could spend more time petting my cat who's now gently snoring in my lap.

We don't have any plans for significant reduction in any departments. Of course, there's normal turn over at the end of a project for people who've been planning to move out of state, move onto other projects, etc, but were staying because they wanted to ship pirates. In terms of growth, we're growing development and design, two of our most understaffed departments. One of our most recent hires was a new developer who was one of the guys who built the engine for Guild Wars. Very smart cookie, and working on art support tools and engine tuning.

One of our strengths is that we didn't have infinite funding. If you doubled our budget, I'd give you a better game. If you tripled it, we'd have a mess on our hands with no ship date. Constraint brings focus and discipline. But one of the weaknesses about our approach is that we built everything out just as much as we needed to, and then went immediately to the next task. That has value, but we would have gotten a much better use of our resources by dedicating a much bigger effort to tools development. Our art team labors under tools that are great for the MMO industry, but woefully limited for where they really should be. So they waste a lot of time and have resource constraints that we should have been able to avoid. We're rectifying that now, as well as starting to make some significant optimizations in the engine and in the assets.

Oh, and a new designer joined us as well.