So we found another major performance issue, and cleared it up, and instantly our performance serverside went through the roof. this should clear up the rollbacks some of you experienced.

Please continue to file support tickets for any problems or rollbacks you encounter.

As noted, there have been some difficulties. Read the link for a suggested, temporary work-around while we finish a new patch that should help alleviate the login problems some customers are experiencing.

Meanwhile, I'll take the opportunity to remind some folks about our forum rules and expectations. In a very small nutshell: if you see a post that you think is very much off-base, it's better to report it than to reply in kind. Thanks for your cooperation on this matter.

Looking into it!

I know from past conversations with Taelorn, bow chasers do make a ship stand out -- if not visually. A small sloop with bow chasers is quite different from the balancing perspective than a small sloop without.

Also, you can always work up several riggings of the same ship and submit them for consideration. I can't guarantee we'll use all variations or that they'll turn out balanced the way you want, but variety is good! Again though, it's still highly recommended to post a side-on view of your initial rigging plan so the S. C. can check it. Adjustments are much, much easier before everything is all rigged up.

Ramming damage is not part of PotBS, and there are currently no plans to include it -- even for specific ships -- because it's too easily exploitable in the game environment.

We're all done! Thanks for your patience!

I'm applying a few configuration changes serverside and tweaking the database a bit. No patch though.

We're going to do rolling server restarts starting at around 12:15am PST. This is to apply some changes to prevent other servers from experiencing the kinds of issues Blackbeard had. GMs will announce in game!

Not surprisingly, I was hoping for the same thing.

The server list problem happened not because any single cluster was overloaded, but because there are a whole bunch of clusters under load. We didn't see the problem in open beta because there were only three servers at that point. Thankfully that should be taken care of now. (And in a way that will keep working for more servers than the 11 we're running now.)

The chat server crashes on Bonny were due to a very obscure bug that was tremendously unlikely. Of course when you throw enough people into the game even unlikely bugs happen. There was a character that crashed the chat server repeatedly whenever it was logged in. We've fixed the bug and the character, so hopefully that one is gone too.

The "out of idle zones" problem was actually the same as the "too many idle zones" problem. Some performance optimizations we made in open beta to get the servers handling more players introduced the problem. Every once in a while the cluster will go haywire and start killing the servers that spawn idle zones. When one of those servers is killed there is a big fight to see who will be in charge next, and during that fight lots of extra servers get started. At one point Blackbeard had 1400 idle zones (where 250 is the most it's ever supposed to have.) That kind of extra load messes with things. We've worked around the problem with a config change for now and have a code fix coming.

So it's been an interesting weekend so far. We had all the programmers in today working on these issues. I'm hoping Sunday will be far less interesting, but we'll call them in again if we have to.

Of course what I really hope is that we've fixed the servers and you're all in the game playing. That's more fun than being here on the forums reporting server outages.


Joe

Ow. Words cannot express my sadness that we've forced you to do that. We'll continue to look at the mission evaluations that come in, and tune appropriately. In the meantime, let me just say I appreciate how much you enjoy the overall game, and I hope you'll give the missions another chance after a few levels.