Agh! Next time file attachment, please. :-)

Oh, and that sucks. I'm sorry you're having those problems.

I downloaded it at home in a half hour, but i have a really fast connection.

I know SOE's been looking into downloading problems, and made some fixes, but they're obviously not helping you. We'll continue to keep on them. The other big fix is that we've made a change to the engine so that patches will get a lot smaller as time goes on.

Thanks for the report! We're currently on it, but as a temporary bandaid, could you try reducing anti-aliasing a little and see if that helps? It fixes it for some machines, but not all.

does the game put up a warning about UDP traffic when you log on?

Boarding combat needs to load quickly because you're still in combat, which is why we limit it to a pre-set number of sets, rather than customized ones for each ship.

Quite right. There's a whole world of predictive numbers that estimate first months sales versus other statistics, and part of that is always a significant bump when the real box goes on store shelves. The servers are deployed based on that, and we're currently tracking right on the nose. But as political pollsters will tell you, you never know until the votes come in. :-)

Speaking as the guy who's regularly hoist by his petard in exactly this kind of situation, let me point out that a lot of people who up to play a cool pirate game, with other people, and man it'll be fun! Unless you've been around MMOs before, "research" isn't something you're thinking about doing when you sit down to go.

Reasonable people miss information all the time, which is why it's good to play adventure games in pairs. What's obvious to one person is inscrutinable or missed by the next.

Hi guys,

I'm sorry we didn't manage to communicate the server setup to you. We currently don't have an effective way of translating over your characters. While it's something we'd like to do in the future, it's a ways off, and not something you should be waiting for here.

This seems to be a common reaction, so let me go ahead and address a few related issues:

1) It is our responsibility to make the game work on your card.
2) When Heidi suggested some older drivers, that was a stop gap fix for the problem. It is not a solution to the problem.
3) It is not your responsibility to play on testbed to guarantee the game will work for you. Nonetheless, it's nice when people do, so we can see the game on a wide configuration of hardware.
4) Heidi and crew are working long hours on it every day. It's our number 1 priority to fix.