They're not broken. They are deliberately set to 1 because we do not currently have a way to prevent players from completing that mission on many characters and turning them in all at once, thus 'bombing' the port into contention instantly.

Those missions originally generated more contention and we had to reduce that contention value to 1 because of this exploit. In 1.5, instead of unrest, those missions will award a token that can be turned in as part of the economic unrest turn in. Hopefully, we will have additional ways to use those tokens to generate unrest.

First off, to clarify:

Economic unrest turn-ins that are queued for pickup are still picked up, and still generate unrest, even if you can no longer make economic turn-ins because of the PvP state of the port. So if you queue up 24 hours worth of turn-ins, and then the port is pushed above 5k, the turn-ins are still picked up at their appointed time, the same unrest is generated, and you still receive the contention points.

Now to address the main points of this thread:

Economic unrest turn-ins are not intended to be the primary means of unrest generation. They're meant to be a supplement, a bonus. We don't want every port to have a full unrest queue all the time. We want it to be expensive and challenging to fill a turn in queue. We also want to give the defenders a chance to respond to those queued turn-ins with turn-ins of their own.

That said, I am prepared to believe that the cost per unrest point is too high now, and we'll look at adjusting those.

We're also aware that the unrest generation missions are simply not useful right now, and we intend to change that. In 1.5 those missions will award a token that can be turned in as part of the economic Unrest turn-ins. I'm also looking into the possibility of creating an alternate way to turn those tokens in that would not allow for unrest bombing.

It sure is Woodrowwilson. Fraxl will be dropping you a line via email shortly, keep your eyes on your inbox!

Best,
Aether

We are gearing up to share a long-term vision for Pirates of the Burning Sea, to include an in-depth look at our development cycle, three milestones in advance.

Additionally, we will have a larger discussion with our community as to the direction that Pirates of the Burning Sea PvP is taking. This discussion will address the concerns raised in this thread directly.

While I don't have an exact date for deployment, I can tell you that we are building those Devlogs now to deploy shortly.

In the meantime, I'd like to remind everyone that if you are looking for constructive responses, you are going to need to provide constructive criticism. You can be upset, you can be disappointed, you just cannot be abusive.

Best,
Aether

Newbie port protection was a stopgap measure, largely intended to address the unpleasantness of getting ganked at level 5 on your first trip out to the Open Sea. I've talked in devlogs about how I'm shifting focus away from the extreme-risk model of PvP, and as we make that transition, we're also going to be able to move away from artificial restrictions like newbie port protection.

We always want the conflict in newbie regions to be somewhat lower intensity than conflict in the Antilles, but not to the point where conflict simply doesn't exist at all. Contestable ports are contestable ports, whether they're in the Antilles or in Florida, and should be conquerable regardless of their 'newbie' status. I just don't want them being conquered accidentally.

We've got a number of solutions -- both in internal builds and in implementation for 1.5 and 1.6 -- that will continue to drive down the individual risk of PvP while allowing more strategic gameplay. We've revised the balance of spawns in the Open Sea to provide nationally-appropriate targets for attackers and defenders, and we're working right now to make taking and holding a port more interesting and appealing. Joe will likely have more to say on that in the future; I don't want to steal his thunder.

Ultimately, the conflict we face is between the needs of endgame PvP play and the needs of new players. If we over-emphasize the former, we drive new players away. An ideal solution would introduce new players to PvP in a non-threatening way, so they can get past the 'victim' stage without a lot of hardship and move on to the 'participant' stage. To a large degree, we're spending the entire 1.6 milestone on just that -- how do we make new players participants rather than victims?

Newbie port protection is, thus, a pretty crude tool we're using in the interim while we address these fundamental issues of risk and newbie experience.

I'm afraid I'm not in a position to be as thoroughly helpful as usual right now, but I merged your two threads into one. Now you can work up all your flag and sail ideas right here!

Two quick pointers, which I'm hoping others can help flesh out as I'm in a rush right now:

* Check the tutorials sticky for tips on anti-aliasing

* Remember that you can color your decal in-game. It's better to use white and apply color with the ship customisation tools, than to use blacks that are too pure for in-game use.

Basic idea is good though, and I think just a few tweaks will get it ready for the game

I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you folks know that this thread has been forwarded to the appropriate staff for review and comment.

Best,
Aether

Mat sat silently at his computer.
Tap, tap, tap tap, he typed away at his computer, waiting for his coffee to speed up his system.
"Morning Tom" he said. silence
"Hey" poke poke, he leaned over and punched Tom in the ear.
RAAARRRRHH Tom's body peeled away and was replaced by an enormous tentacle.
"Oh NO The KRAKEN !!!" Mat was able to think before his brain was squashed into oblivion.

See Answer 112 for info on how to report that crash and get help dealing with it. Thanks.

Folks-

SOE had some troubles getting the patch distributed, and they are still not completely done. So we're going to be moving this to the normal outage time between 1:30am and 3:30am on thursday morning, Pacific time.

We'll definitely be rescheduling port battles scheduled for that time frame.