The reactions have been interesting. Taking a game design challenge and attempting a solution by making that challenge a function of the marketplace instead of a function of a game system is a fun idea and we are very interested to see where it goes once v1.1 goes live next week.

If all those people dump their MoVs on the market, the price will crash.

If they all somehow work together to sell MoVs slowly over time, they could make a lot of doubloons.

That won't happen. There are too many players with MoVs and enough of them will get greedy. I expect the price for MoVs to start high, crash, and then climb back up once they are being earned entirely through PvP and unrest bundles.

Except that they will not be profitable if Marks earned through PvP are cheaper than marks earned through unrest bundles. Gold farmers optimize to make the greatest return on the least investment, as do players. If they lose doubloons on unrest bundles, they will pursue more profitable ways to make money.

Really, I expect the way gold farmers are racking up cash in our game is by repeatedly leveling characters from 1 to 20 or so just by playing missions and earning mission gold rewards. They can teach their drones to follow a script to accomplish that over and over again, 24/7, regardless of what the state of the economy is on any given server. They will optimize for the path of least resistance and sell the most highly demanded good, which will be doubloons.

If gold farmers actually use the economy to make doubloons, that's the best case scenario. That means they are making money by participating in the economy instead of just creating wealth from thin air by playing missions. We will always ban gold farmers whenever we can, but given the choice, we would rather have them making the gold they sell via economic play instead of adding new money to the world.

Yesterday we fixed the bug that prevented Marks from dropping from PvP kills, which is how we intended them to be earned. We tested that fix today and will be releasing it in v1.1 coming next week.

This bug will be fixed for good in v1.1, which is coming next week.

Pirates gain 3 points every time they take a port; nationals only gain points the first time they take a port. This allows pirates to win without forcing a major, critical battle. Eventually, to win, nationals will have to attack enemies where they're strong. Pirates never have to; they can focus on less important (and thus less aggressively defended) ports and still force a victory.

In order to get you problems resolved and help us fix serious bugs it is important to provide certain forms of information to determine what is going on.


Reproduction Steps

If the problem is reproducible give us a detailed step by step description of how to make the problem happen. If it isn't clear how to reproduce the problem then a clear description of what was happening is still helpful (i.e. if you were in boarding combat, or on the open sea and could not move).


Environment

Relevant details on where the problem happens:

- Operating System
- Software firewalls in use
- Network hardware in use (Routers, switches, etc)
- Does the problem happen in ports, open sea, ship combat, etc.
- Video card drivers


Game Client Logs:

The logs are named PotBS_xxxxx.txt where xxxxx is a positive number. Newer logs are logs with bigger numbers in the filename unless you delete previous logs.

For WinXP and Server 2003:

DRIVENAME\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\log

For Vista:

DRIVENAME\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\log


DxDiag Hardware Information

To generate a DxDiag.txtfile run dxdiag from the Start->Run or Vista search. Click the "Save all information..." button to save the file on your machine.


Launch Pad Logs

The log created when the Launchpad starts up is called LaunchPad.log. This log can be found at:

DRIVENAME\Program Files\Sony\Station\LaunchPad

The log created when the Launchpad patches the game is called POTBSPatch.log. This log can be found where you installed the game. The default path for the disk/digital download installers should be:

DRIVENAME\Program Files\Flying Lab Software\Pirates of the Burning Sea


Crash Dumps

Crash dumps tell us a lot about the state of the game before it crashed. There are a number of ways to get a crash dump. Recently we added a feature to the client that saves a crash dump when the game crashes. This is currently only available in Testbed. To turn on crash dump logging create a file called pirates_local.ini in your Testbed folder and add the following lines:

[CommandLine]
handleCrash=true

When you crash the dump will be created...

For WinXP and Server 2003:

DRIVENAME\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\log

For Vista:

DRIVENAME\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\log


The non-testbed method of how to get a crash dump is described in Support KB Article 112.

We've been running devlogs on what's coming in v1.1, which is only days away from release now. As soon as v1.1 is on the live servers, we'll be starting devlogs on what's coming in v1.2. As to your list...

1) We have no further changes coming to MoVs. Given that the new system isn't even live yet, it is way premature to revamp it. We're going to give it time and see how it goes.

2) Agreed, and we have a plan to address this in v1.3.

3) We need to review and expand the MoV rewards first, but we will get to the commendations/pennants eventually.

4) Society warehouses are indeed a popular request, but there are some very major drawbacks to doing them in terms of what they would do to the auction house economy. We are not pursuing them in v1.2 or v1.3.

MoVs will be worth around 3K if no one earns them from PvP.

Skilled players who earn MoVs from PvP could drop the market value of MoVs well below 3K.

We'll see!

There is supernatural content in Somerset, but you can't find it just by sailing there.