Build 1.10: The Calm Before the Storm is now live.

Major changes include:

• Variable Wind: The wind now changes direction during battle. The changes on the Open Sea are now less jarring. See below for details.
• Christmas content: There are several new characters and missions as well as carols being sung in Jenny Bay, Vera Cruz, Marsh Harbour, Charlesfort, Port Royal, San Juan, Tortuga, and Pointe-a-Pitre. This content will become available closer to the holiday and be turned off again after the holiday.

The full release notes can be found here or after the jump.

Pirates of the Burning Sea will soon have a unique town for every port in the game, according to Eric, an environmental artist.

Our current task for the environment team is to create updated versions of all our in-game towns to replace the generic re-used art that we currently have in place at most ports. That means a unique town for every port in the game!

Geometry and textures will be changed, and the towns will receive new lighting effects for different times of day. You can check out some before and after screenshots in Eric's blog post. The updates are quite impressive.

Isildur has posted a developer's blog outlining the team's mission statement of Pirates of the Burning Sea. While they created the statement months ago to outline the direction they're going with the game's design and development, they've never publicly shared it before. Well, here it is:

“Pirates of the Burning Sea is a competitive game in which players take the role of adventurers in a romanticized version of the Caribbean in the Age of Sail, and seek fame, fortune, and glory for themselves and their nations.”

Seems straightforward, right? Well, there's actually a lot of implications carried in that statement. Keep reading for Isildur's full analysis. They haven't completely fulfilled their mission statement yet, but it provides a blueprint for the future of the game.

There's an awesome event going on tomorrow evening on the test server for Pirates of the Burning Sea !

This event will take place on the Testbed on Sunday November 9th at 14:00 Pacific (10pm GMT). The auction houses will be seeded with many items and ships to help you on your hunt.

Whoever lands the final shot on the Dread Missionary will receive a bounty 10,000 doubloons on a character of their choosing. Anyone who assists will receive a bounty of 5,000 doubloons.

You can find the details of the storyline, and the details here.

According to a recent developer's blog, the Invicible server will be shut down in January and a new server, Defiant, will be set up to to serve Australia's needs, with port battles scheduled for 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific, or 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. GMT.

Since we’ve changed the timing of the port battles, some players have found that the servers they play on have port battles scheduled outside of their playtime. Given that we’re opening up Defiant specifically to provide more options for port battles, we’re going to go all the way, and provide all players one (1) transfer to any server so that they can move to a server that better matches their playtime. The port battle times for each server are posted here.

This is all happening because their partnership with Bigpond will not be renewed. You can read the full details here or below.

MMO Portal has put together its 2009 MMO Calendar featuring autographed artwork from numerous games. The list includes Age of Conan, DC Universe Online, Dofus, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Guild Wars, Pirates of the Burning Sea, RuneScape, The Agency, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft.

All of the proceeds go directly to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which treats children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases.

Also, everyone who purchases a calendar will be entered to win one of 10 prizes for each game, including boxed copies, premium accounts, 30- and 60-day passes, closed beta accounts and more. More information can be found here.

Build 1.9: Your Just Rewards went live this morning. Since it is a milestone build, it contains about a month's worth of fixes and changes.

Main changes include:

• You can now change your clothes anywhere in port. See this thread for more info.
• Groupmates can no longer sit safely outside the red circle, artificially raising your Group Level. See this thread for more info.
• There are ship and skill adjustments, too, detailed below.

The full patch notes can be found here or after the jump.

CEO of Flying Labs Entertainment, Rusty Williams, has updated the Pirates of the Burning Sea community with a new devblog !

Right now what we’re most focused on is the new revamp of the avatar combat system. Ever since we shipped, we’ve been planning to go back and re-examine the sword fighting from first principals. Ship combat has had the advantage of being built, ripped apart, and rebuilt. Avatar combat has been going through the same process, and you can read more about it in Isildur’s dev log where he describes the thought process that went into building the new system.

He even mentions the word we've all been waiting for: Expansion!

The Pirates of the Burning Sea developers have been quite busy lately. They've posted blogs on fighting gold spam and the revisions to avatar combat, and announced the Big John's Bane event will be held on the Testbed tomorrow, Oct. 17, at 4 p.m. PST.

Check the links above for the full announcements, or keep reading below for the blog regarding avatar combat. It's incredibly in-depth and shows exactly how the devs go about fine-tuning elements of the game.

To summarize all of the announcements: they are focusing on blocking spammers and getting them out of the game quickly; avatar combat is being reworked from the ground up to open fights with "cool special moves" and use fewer skills in longer chains; and the players who are part of the fleet that sinks Big John will recieve a special title in the live game.

Build 1.8: A Good Day to Die was published on the Invincible server at 3 p.m. PDT today and includes a month's worth of features and bug fixes.

The differences between 1.7.37.0 and 1.8.28.1 are numerous, but the major changes include the ability to move items between cargo holds all at once, the port battle schedule revision, new daily missions, and Intel 945/965 integrated chipset support. Also, fleets cannot attack each other if the difference between the strentgh of the groups is too great. This change is being implemented to decrease time-griefing.

The full release notes can be found here or below.