You're mine, Stubs!!! :-) Consider we had a significant bug fix/tuning patch before the first month, and a big content patch in a few weeks. We have a lot of changes coming on a fairly frequent basis, and by the time Warhammer (and therefore the new WoW expansion) comes out, we'll have addressed many of these problems and given you a lot of new game play.

Specifically, the numbers for players who are not resubscribing. We had a range that we estimated, and they fell within the range.

What would surprise me is if the forums were filled with people not complaining. People typically don't come to the forums to praise a game, they come to the forums to complain. That's not to say that there aren't valid complaints (the biggest being that we didn't consider what unbalanced pops would do to servers on the low end), but it's just after month one. There are going to be tuning problems in a game that actually tries to have a real economy that has an impact upon the warfare.

What's a bit sad is that I spend a lot of extra time trying to read past the hyperbole and the "I know a big guild that's leaving if my pet issue isn't fixed!" to try and get a sense of what the problems are. Which generally results in me paying special attention to a cadre of users (who would die if they knew I actually tracked them specifically, because they're often the biggest complainers) and new players who come in and simply state their problem.

The first part of the fix was to prevent the port from going into port contention. I didn't think the fix had gone in (I thought it was on testbed and going in soon), but I'm not entirely sure.

The larger scale fix that we talked about today requires a different mechanism rather than just affecting the timers on the missions. The various quick fixes have ways of getting around them, so we're looking for the real fix so that ports move towards contention at the correct rate.That's what we're designing right now.

Actually, one thing we're sure about is the forum hand wringing doesn't particularly register with new users. Consistent sails means someone out there is telling their friends to buy, and I'm pretty sure it's not our stupendous marketing machine. :-)

The exploit that was fixed was pushing it all the way to a port contention battle being scheduled. It didn't slow down going into Pirate PvP at all.

For the two hundredth time, we're working towards more PvP. But we're also not rolling out fixes and tuning changes every ten minutes. 1.2 has a bunch of tuning changes, and incorporates more as we find problems (such as little warning when you're in a port that's in PvP).

Just to state the obvious:

I'll be sitting in a design meeting complaining about something. "Why can't we just X, Y, and Z? How hard is that?"

Sometimes, it turns out that it's not really that hard. And sometimes, something that's relatively simple is much harder than it appears because its design incorporates a whole bunch of stuff I never realized. So you never really know until you ask, and sometimes they still get it wrong (a fix estimated at a week turns out to take a half a day, and vice versa). But there is never a time you can just assume what a code change will require, no matter how reasonable it seems, unless you're aware of how it was built.

Not that I let that stop me from saying how we should fix it in these meetings! :-)

You'll be able to submit content under an account linked to an active Bigpond subscription and have it show up in game.

We're also working on a system that will allow transferring approved content from one account to another (Station to Bigpond, Station to Station, etc.), but we don't have any specific announcements on that front (other than "it's definitely going to happen").

The Athena and Minerva both have bow chasers.

Split out of the Appeals thread, which is only for your own rejected flags and sails.

For issues like this, please file a support request.

Patch is serverside only.