According to the Pirates of the Burning Sea Web site , the Port Battle Timeslots for the Antigua and Rackham servers have been adjusted. This change comes after the developers collected feedback from players and evaluated their own data. They would still like more fan feedback, which can be given here .

Here's the battle schedule for each server:

Antigua: 7 a.m. - 9 p.m. PST (3 p.m. - 5 a.m. GMT)
Blackbeard: 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. PST (5 p.m. - 5 a.m. GMT)
Rackham: 7 a.m. - 9 p.m. PST (3 p.m. - 5 a.m. GMT)
Roberts: 3 a.m. - 3 p.m. PST (11 a.m. - 11 p.m. GMT)

From the PotBS team :

"Pirates of the Burning Sea is the official video game of International Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19^th ). Yarr, it be true. To commemorate this auspicious day, Flying Lab Software has created special missions and secret booty just for the occasion. Until September 26^th 2008, players can log in to Pirates of the Burning Sea and party with the grog-swillin', booty-plundering founders of the day, Cap'n Slappy and Ol' Chumbucket. These rum-swiggin' salts will be taking their rightful place in the Burning Sea as they hand out missions and teach everyone a thing or two about getting booty.

Join the crew to party and talk piratical talk!

Quick Pirate Reference Guide:

To prepare you for the day, here is a quick reference guide of pirate terms and sayings.

Pirate Saying: Translation:

Arrrr! Interject as much as possible!

Ahoy! Hello!

Booty Treasure

We all know that off peak battles can ruin your day, and be hard to accept after weeks of hard work.  PotBS Lead Designer Kevin 'Isildur' Maginn has written a devlog that takes a look at how new scheduling will effect nightflips.

Let's talk about the way that port battles are scheduled. The current system is that when a port reaches the required amount of unrest, the battle for control of that port is scheduled for 24 hours later. The intent of this system is that the battle takes place during the play hours of the people who force the port into contention. When it was designed, the idea was that ports would enter the contention phase ‘organically', as a result of nearby PvP activity.

That isn't, however, the way ports enter contention in the live game; they are intentionally forced by motivated attackers. This leads to the unfortunate side effect of allowing sufficiently motivated players to cause battles to be scheduled in off-peak hours, when few defenders will be able to respond to the threat. This is borderline griefing; it's not really against the rules, but it's certainly not a positive game experience for the targets.

If you want to give the PotBS team your feedback, head to this thread !

Flying Lab Software has announced a new producer for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Congratulations, Michelle Williams, and good luck!

Flying Lab Software's Michelle 'Misha' Williams announced her new role as Producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea this eve. Our heartiest of congratulations accompany her in this, her latest endeavor! A brief intro to the unanticipated (yet quite welcomed) news follows.

Read the rest of the post here .

No, the two don't have anything to do with one another, I just thought I'd economize posting!  Pixels are in short demand around here sometimes.

Pirates of the Burning Sea will be updating to 1.5 tomorrow morning, so be warned matey!

We will be upgrading our live servers to build 1.5.46.0 during the usual maintenance window (1:30am-4:00am Pacific / 9.30am-11.30am British Summer Time) on Tuesday, July 1st.

You can find information on the exciting changes in 1.5, including our new epic mission Fortaleza da Luz, in our Developer Logs section.

We appreciate your patience, and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new patch.

On the cross teaming front our wonderful Aether has posted Flying Lab's policy on Cross Teaming and Selling Durability!

While players are welcome to have as many accounts as they wish, people with multiple accounts are not allowed to have characters of differing nations on the same server. If a player is found in violation of this policy, they will be forced to either move or delete the character in violation. Repeat offenders will be subject to further disciplinary action, up to and including permanent suspension of their Pirates of the Burning Sea accounts.

There's, obviously, more where that came from!  So everyone get some sleep while the servers are down tomorrow, and enjoy the patch!

We've all lost an item in an MMO and petitioned, knowing that if someone could just look at the circumstances surrounding the incident we'd get it back. PotBS players have the same problem, and Misha has a look at what happens when they get a request like this.

I spend most of my day dealing with support incidents along those lines. Everyone has a good reason why their particular claim is worthy. On the one hand, we should reimburse anything anyone wants. It’s a matter of customer goodwill. If you’re frustrated and angry and feel cheated, then we have a very undesirable situation on our hands. Our goal is NEVER to make you feel cheated. Certainly you should expect some loss – it’s a game: you win some, you lose some. But loss and cheated are different and cheated isn’t an experience you should have in the game.

It's a great look at the circumstances CSR's deal with in every game, when a loss of some sort is petitioned. Read on for the rest!

We've all been there!!  You get sent a link to a video that just amazes you, and you want to make one too!  But where to start, and how to proceed can be daunting tasks.  GM Yardarm from Pirates of the Burning Sea has posted a great guide to a few different ways you can accomplish a lasting memorial to your game for all to share in!

Making videos from screen captured content can seem daunting at first. But, with a little practice you can be throwing together great videos of your moments in game. It doesn’t take expensive editing programs or courses in video editing. There are easy to use tools that are free, come with your computers media package or are inexpensive should you wish to purchase. This guide will help you with how to utilize basic software and some tips in planning your game video.

First things first… you need an idea! It can be tempting to just take a bunch of screen captured video and edit together a video. But a little planning can go a long ways and save you hours of time in the end. Form an idea of what you want to create. Write it down and try and create a storyboard.

Once you get your video made, we'd love to see it!  Head over to our PotBS forums and post a link!

Help the folks over at PotBS test a new level 50 mission this Sunday. Now's your chance to give back to the game you love!

Help Us Test Fortaleza da Luz on Sunday!

06.18.08 by Rhaegar

You may have read our recent devlogs about the upcoming level 50 epic mission called Fortaleza da Luz.

This mission is now live on Testbed, and we’d like to hear your feedback on it! To that end, we’ve organized a Testbed event on Sunday, June 22nd between 3pm and 6pm Pacific (6pm 9pm Eastern, 10pm 1am GMT).

Click here to find out how to take part!

/ Rhaegar

Check out details here.

How do the Pirates of the Burning Sea devs feel about ganking?

Rusty asked me what we think about ganking. Ganking has a long and difficult history within our design and development process, so it’s a hard question to answer with a simple ‘we hate it’ or ‘we love it.’

The term I’ve preferred to use is ‘ambush gameplay’, which sounds nicer and has different implications for the user experience. In the earliest days of the Pirates design, one of the scenarios we envisioned and tried to support was the lone pirate or group of pirates catching an unwary merchant by surprise, defeating him, and looting him before reinforcements could arrive. That’s ambush gameplay—rewarding for the pirates, disheartening for the lone merchant. In some theoretical world before we actually started building the game, it made sense. You’d sail out from port, hoping to avoid danger, but there would be a sail on the horizon. Was it a friend or an enemy? Before anyone could come to save you, the sail would turn out to belong to a pirate, and you’d be fighting for your life.

Read on for more!

Pirates of the Burning Sea has updated their devlog to introduce things that are coming in 1.1!

Since our soft launch on January 7th, we have released several patches to fix critical issues. Crashes, memory leaks, and server stability have all seen significant improvements in the last three weeks. But we’ve only been rolling out the most urgent fixes to you, while testing continued on many, many more improvements and corrections.

While this build is mostly about bug fixes, it does include a handful of features and tuning changes to make the game better. In this series of devlogs I’m going to cover the highlights of what’s in v1.1.

The post includes many of the fixes.  If you're looking for more game news we're happy to present a post launch interview with Jess Lebow as well as our CES coverage of PotBS!