Yeah, I'm sad we didn't have it in for release. A lot of my pirate love had to be postponed because we had to get the core systems right. With 1.2 and the fixes for 1.3 going in (and a big addition to Pirates not covered here for 1.4), we're starting to get a handle on that and can start putting in more flavor and big game systems for Pirates and the other careers.

Many of the ideas here will be several milestones away. For this particular one, I'm shooting for the first three towns for pillaging to be in for 1.4.

Requests for votes can go in this thread. If you'd like feedback, try posting a design before submitting.

UPDATE: We're receiving reports of images not rendering fully or at all in different browsers when viewing User Content (and in fact experiencing it for ourselves). We're aware of the issue and working on a solution. I'll update when more information is available, though note, that is likely not to happen until some time tomorrow.

Meanwhile, refreshing the page will usually help coax more pixels to show up on it.

We've spruced up the Development forums and added some additional discussion areas that focus on ideas- your ideas, our ideas and ideas that have made it into our future milestones. Here's a breakdown of the new forum areas and how they should be used:

Community Suggestions
You'll recognize the posts in this area, as they used to live in the "Ideas for the Future" forum. The Community Suggestions forum is a place for our community to discuss, collaborate on and refine new and interesting ideas for Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Use this forum to test out your ideas against the other great minds of our community. These can be design suggestion, game features, mission content- you name it! The best and brightest ideas, as chosen by Flying Lab Software staffers, will then take the spotlight in our new forum area we call "In Concept".

In Concept
This is truly the Red Circle of the brainstorm forums. While fans will be able to post to new threads created in the In Concept forum, All of the threads in this forum area will be either created by us based on ideas from the Community Suggestions area, or new game features that are currently under review by the Pirates of the Burning Sea development team for inclusion in the game world. While we invite discussion and debate within the In Concept forum area, only members of the Flying Lab Software development team will have the power to accept or pass on the ideas presented.

It is important to note that while many ideas may make it to this level in the consideration process, not all the ideas presented in this forum will see the light of day. Remember, if an idea isn't chosen to move on to the next round: There’s no crying in the red circle. However, if an idea does make it to the next round, then it moves on to the Milestone Discussion forum area.

Milestone Discussion
Flying Lab Software plans our new game features and changes many months in advance, publishing these changes like chapters in a book, or as we call them, Milestones. This forum area not only gives our fans a look into the future of Pirates of the Burning Sea, but gives them a chance to weigh in on the changes to come. Not all features may be published in the Milestone Discussion area, and we will reserve the right to hold back plotline spoilers, exploit tools and other information as we see fit. Our Milestones are always published to Testbed before they go live, so naturally we evolve into the Testbed discussion area.

Testbed Discussion
This forum area is devoted to discussing the Milestones that have been published to the test server, known as Testbed. Testbed is where our combined ideas come to life, where players can actually touch and feel the ideas that have made it through the development process, and the Testserver Discussion forum and share their individual approval (or disdain, as the case may be) of the new game features and changes to be introduced in the latest patch. This is the last stop on the journey before our combined ideas become reality on the live game servers.

And that's not all, folks!
Flying Lab Software has had a long history of listening to our community, and we believe these new forum areas can only improve the communication between the Pirates of the Burning Sea community and the Flying Lab Software development team. We're excited to work with our community to grow this new initiative into the future, and we'll depend on you to keep things interesting.

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether & Co

While reading the forums, I recently came across a post that asked what we were doing about the role of Pirates in the Nation vs. Nation conflict. While I’ve had an idea of what we were going to do, it had been pushed out for release, and didn’t have a place on the schedule. Boo hoo! But as I articulated my plan, we realized that the resources we’d need were, in fact, free. Well, mostly. I still had to steal a few people, but if you read on, I think you’ll agree it’s worth it!

The problem we currently have is that Pirates don’t have sufficient incentive for port conquest. They only hold a port for three days, which means that there’s no economic incentive, and so there’s no direction as to why they take Port A vs. Port B. Plus, they’re at a disadvantage to the other nations in their raw ability to take a port. The latter we’re going to address around M4, which has been dubbed the Milestone of Pirate Love, but the former is what I’m addressing here.

First, Pirates don’t occupy a port like the namby pamby members of the other nations. They pillage it. They arrive, they cause terror, they plunder the place, and then they leave.

In short, they act like Pirates.

With that in mind, here’s what we’re up to:

First, when Pirates take a port, we’re going to replace the environment. If it was in daytime, it’ll be night, there’ll be flaming barrels (the better to share a drink over), and the town will be in disarray from the Pirates.

Second, we’ll be replacing all the characters and the animations. There will be Pirates ransacking the town, townspeople trying to run and hide their valuables, and all sorts of cool set piece moments custom to that town.

Third, when the player arrives, you’ll find a huge pirate on the end of the dock surrounded by treasure with a sign that simply says “Mine”. When you talk to him, he’ll have many opportunities for you to go terrorize the town, such as chasing townspeople with your sword, picking out hostages to ransom, fighting your way past other pirates to take the town treasury, and so on. These aren’t Errol Flynn-style missions, they’re cutthroat, Blackbeard-style missions. They’re all custom to the town, and there’ll be something for everyone level 15 and up. And you’ll get lots of cool loot from them!

Finally, there will be mission threads that will point you to towns that you have to pillage in order to activate them, so you’ll have targets to take that will open up all sorts of new, cool, custom missions. This gives Pirates a reason to attack Port A over Port B. Eventually, we intend to build out pillage states for all the valid towns in the game.

To do all this work, we’ve organized a strike team, composed of TTobey, Anna, Greg, Jodi, and myself. I expect that I’ll get the boot as soon as we get in the swing of things, but I’ll be sticking around to make sure that we start off right and that the team gets the resources it needs. Plus, after all my travelling and illness, it’s nice to actually have a part in the development of the game!

Click me.

Best,
Aether

I don't think that we are likely to create a skill like this.

While I'm a big fan of world PvP, we deliberately set up a situation where you must opt in to that PvP, by either flagging yourself for PvP, or by entering a red circle.

Second, we have deliberately made the it that case that everywhere you can attack another player, they can attack you back. This skill would creation a situation where that is not the case, and we are unlikely to allow that to happen.

/throws away the key

One of my major concerns right now is working out how, exactly, we are going to ensure that every contestable port has access to a sufficient number of high level NPCs of every faction to manipulate contention around that port.

The first thing we’re doing to address this problem is spawning ships closer to the port that calls them. This work is not done yet, so I’m not prepared to say it will solve the problem, but it’s a good first step. We hope that this will more than double the number of ships arriving at any given port at any given moment. The down side is that there will be a decrease in the number of ships traveling long distances between ports, but we feel this is an acceptable tradeoff.

The second thing we’re doing is going in and hammering on the actual tables that choose which ship to spawn. This is a significant task, there are a lot of tables, and multiple levels of depth for each table. There are three big changes I want to make to these tables. First I’m going to make sure that when a port has moved into the Unrest or Contention stages that it has an equal chance of calling for ships from the attacking nation and the defending nation, and very little chance of calling anything else. This will not guarantee an equal number of ships of each nation. First because it’s a weighted random table, so there’s an element of chance, and second because nearby ports will be calling their own ships which will be calling different tables based on who owns them, and who is attacking them. Despite this, it should greatly improve the overall contention situation.

The second thing I want to do is even out the chances of calling merchants of the different nations to each port. Currently every port has a chance of calling for ships of every nation, but they are weighted quite heavily to call ships of their own nation. While we will continue that weighting to a degree, I want to increase the chance that they will call merchants of other nations.

Finally I want to add big convoys full of high level ships to the spawn tables for each port. These convoys will be non-aggressive, so they don’t stomp on lower level players, but for groups of players trying to manipulate contention at that port, they should provide a big balloon full of contention. These convoys will run both during contention, and while the port has no unrest. If a port doesn’t naturally see a large number of ships of a particular nation in the area, it will still see occasional convoys that generate a large amount of contention.

I believe that these three changes will solve the problems of not enough NPCs to properly manipulate contention. What do you think? Do you think these changes will help? Is there another change you’d like to see made? Keep in mind that one of the reasons we’re making these specific changes is that they fit the resources we have available (that is to say, I can make virtually all of these changes personally, they require little or no programmer time), so we can get them out to you quickly. While we definitely want to hear your ideas and feedback, there are things we’re not going to be able to do simply from a resource perspective.


P.S. Wooo first post in a new forum.