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.

Release Notes for 1.8.28.1, the previous build, can be found here.

Differences between 1.8.28.1 and 1.9.31.1 include but aren't limited to:

Ships / Outfitting:

• Achilles: 6x7lb guns -> 10x7lb guns
• Corsairs Guns: Couldn't be equipped. If you were in town, they wanted you on your ship. If you were on your ship, they told you to be in town. Fixed.
• Captured 'Monarch' Indiaman stats were different than non-captured. Fixed.
• Experimental Sights: It wasn't possible to equip this. Fixed.

Ship Combat / Skills:

• If you fire a Flare in a PvE battle, anyone from your nation should be able to come help you.
• We introduced a bug in 1.8 that gave 100% of a player's unsecured cargo to you for sinking them. It now correctly gives 80% for sinking, 100% for boarding.
• Unclaimed Group loot disappeared if the group disbanded. Now it's automatically given to the last group member.
• It was possible to activate Final Defense if you were already doomed. This caused confusion when players thought they were sunk when they shouldn't have been. Truth was, they were sunk but didn't realize it when they activated the skill. Now you can't activate the skill if it's too late.
• Resistance is now capped at 50%
• Defense is now capped at 75.
• Increased the damage of all types of cannons by 2

Buccaneer:

• Bloody Minds: Crew Penalty 20% -> 25%

Cutthroat:

• Cut Lines: Grappling Defense 35 -> 25
• To the Last Man: Tooltip was code, not text. Fixed.

Privateer:

• Concentrated Fire: Ignore Damage Reduction 35% -> 50%
• Rapid Reload: Reset Timer 5min -> 4min 

Freetrader:

• Hasty Fire: Crew resistance -20% -> -40% 
• Optimal Rigging: Running Speed 2% -> 1%
• Repel Grapples: Grappling Defense 35 -> 25
• Career: Running Speed 4% -> 3%
• Experts: Now have a shared 5 minute cooldown.

Swashbuckling:

• You can now select dead PC avatars (so you can revive them in battle).
• During AvCom, you'd put your sword away after defeating each enemy only to have to draw it again to fight the next enemy. Fixed so that you only put your sword away when there are no more enemies to fight.
• Filigreed Royal Navy Rapier now has a melee attack bonus instead of a ranged attack bonus.

Missions:

• We were sometimes losing track of the glowing missions destinations on the local map. Fixed that.
• French Tutorial: There was a timing issue you could hit if you had lots of lag between your client and our server. Fixed. (We think only the Russians hit this but, hey, might as well fix it for all.)
• Like a Captain Scorned: NPCs weren't heading to the escape point. Re-arranged/fixed.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: The Bilge Rats are more likely to surrender now. Also, if you cancelled while in the mansion, you were trapped. Now you can use the Exit Encounter button to leave. 
• Red Tide: Fixed a bug that caused NPC allies not to follow the pilot boat.
• Commendable Action: Used the Magistrate's Office instead of the Town Boss' Office for the last bit. Fixed.
• Increased the turn-in XP for midland and highland dailies to match a normal mission of the same level.
• Catching a Break: The difficulty rating on this mission was too high for Pirates. It's now in line with the other nations.
• Hospitality (and others): It was possible for a groupmate to unlock these before you should be able to access them. Fixed.
• The Blackmailer: Had no XP reward. Fixed.
• Offers They Can't Refuse: Fixed a door you had to use X to exit. Now it highlights properly and you have the option to click to exit.
• Riding High: The encounter used by this mission required you to kill 9 ships but didn't give you 9 ships in a timely fashion. Fixed. This change affects a few other missions also.
• Smuggler Dragnet: Was directing you to the wrong NPC at the end. Now correctly directs you to Prosper Kirk.
• Caribbean Queen: It was possible for one member to get stuck in the room with Lilya when doing this mission in a group. Should be more difficult to cause problems in the mission now.
• The Finer Things: In this mission, you captured a frigate but in the next, it mysteriously changed to a galleon. Now it's a galleon in both missions.
• Certain missions accepted from William Kidd in Dovecote were problematic - if you finished other missions, you wouldn't be able to finish these. This was due to there being two Williams Kidd's and both handing out the same missions. Now each hands out only the missions he should. If you have accepted one of these problematic missions and can't complete it, cancel and re-take it. What we've done is make it less likely for you to have that problem.
• There's now a Broadsheet Peddler in mid-level towns who tells you about mid-level missions you may have missed.
• Fixed a bug that let you take daily missions one too many times.
• Unhealthy Competition: Your enemy wasn't much of a challenge. They're smarter now and at least try to win.
• Burning Bridges: If your ally sunk Bridges, it didn't count and you were unable to complete the mission. Fixed.
• The Big Surprise: Completing this now blocks you from accepting Turn the Tables. It didn't make any sense for you to be able to access that mission after the surprise.
• An Invitation from Serafina: Serafina's office is now sunlit since it's day time in San Juan.
• Best Laid Plans/Battle of Grand Turk: If you make poor choices when you assign your troops in Best Laid Plans, Grand Turk will be really difficult. We've added an opportunity to change your choices. Also, if you fail to Save Sara, Save Isaac, or Save Ismail, the other objectives go inactive and you're allowed to exit.
• Quarantine: When you returned to town, there were to Dutch soldiers acting strangely. Now there's only one and he's a bit more sane.
• The Company Man: Required you to sail into the wind to reach the fort which was annoying. Fixed.
• Hulk Smash: The camp exits and map placers are removed once you've disrupted a camp so that you don't mistakenly disrupt the same one twice.
• Bait and Switch: This mission was a bit too difficult. Changed the ship you use to make it more manageable. Also, this mission used to dump you in Port Royal when you finished. Fixed.
• Sleight of Salvage: Mission text didn't warn you that you were going up against a fort. Clearer now.
• The Most Dangerous Ingredient: Fixed some issues that caused strange behavior at the end.
• Quell the Riot: Didn't give a reward for completion. Fixed.
• There's Always a Catch: Was directing you to speak to Decroix. Now correctly directs you to speak to Acan.

Economy:

• In M7, Lum moved all the ships in the Tiny Ship Construction book onto the Fishing Lodge as defaults.  He left the Tiny Ships book in for two milestones to allow players with existing Fishing Lodges a chance to find the book. When M9 goes live, this book won't be available anymore, since it's redundant.
• De Re Metallica: Changed the description of the book so the recipes it contains make more sense.
• Agamemnon Bark: Changed the recipe to use a Minor Hulk instead of a Major Hulk.
• Hercules (Pirate) Recipe: Lineship Bundles 2 -> 3
• Hercules (Mastercraft) Recipe: Lineship Bundles 8 -> 6
• European Trader: You should get a better deal if you have Celebrated status. Now you do.
• Added some commendation exchanges to the Freetrader exchange shop.  This allows Freetraders to trade 1 high level commendation for one lower level commendation.
• Reduced the Mark of Victory/Trade costs for almost all refits. Most MoV based refits now cost half as many marks.
• Insurance: Marks of Victory are now valued at 500 doubloons (450 payout)
• Insurance: Marks of Trade are now valued at 250 doubloons (225 payout)

PvP / Port Contention:

• You now get a kill tag on your opponent when you join an ad hoc so they can't bail out and deprive you of booty.
• When we changed the ad hoc rules, we only changed the spawn locations in two encounters. We turned the others off while testing these new rules and ensuring the spawns were correct. Now that we're happy with the locations of the spawns, we've changed them in all previous ad hoc encounter rooms and turned those rooms back on to again provide more variety in battle settings.
• Fixed a bug in personal contention rewards so that only group members actually involved in a kill get points for the kill. It should now work the same as XP.
• If a Port Battle was rescheduled (due to server outage or conflict with other Port Battle), it could be scheduled outside the valid slots. Fixed that.
• If we have to manually reschedule a Port Battle, steps are now taken to ensure another Port Battle isn't automatically scheduled too close to the same time.  

Art / Sound:

• Females could have top hats but males couldn't. Fixed.
• Bridgetown: You had to use X to enter the Company Office. Fixed.
• New Orleans: Marcel Bellefleur's head and hat changed at certain LODs. Fixed.
• Oranjestad: There was no Port Captain. Now there is a proper Dutch guy as there should be.
• Couronne: Fixed the low-LOD stern.
• Moved some chickens from the air to the ground. Chickens should not stand around in thin air.

UI:

• Modified the MOTD on the Server Select UI to fit more info.
• Added button near Character paper doll to enter tailor. Bringing up the tailor dialog now hides other dialogs.
• We now display where you got your clothing in the UI to make it clearer what has been enabled by missions and such.
• Removed the close button in the upper right of the Tailor UI. Now you have to accept or cancel your changes, making it less likely that you exit the process before you intended.
• Tailorshop Camera: When you customize your character now, you have better views of your feet, torso and head.
• Cargo Manager: It's now possible to click the item name to check/uncheck the selection.
• It was possible to receive duplicate Titles. No harm done; it just looked silly. Fixed that.
• Help: There were quite a number of pages missing because of a formatting issue in the XML. We've changed the formatting used to make it more difficult for us to break the Help system.

Stability / Performance:

• Discovered some issues with ship wakes that made them way more resource-expensive than they should have been. Fixed. This may improve your performance on the Open Sea.
• Made a tweak that might improve performance in Tortuga. There's more to be done there.
• We made another performance fix that has the potential to prevent you seeing NPCs you should be able to see in town. If you detect a problem, please let us know!
• Some NPCs in town were switching their outfitting around when they shouldn't. Stopped that and performance may improve as a result.
• Fixed a crash that could occur if you pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del.
• It was possible to time trading and dying just right such that you crashed the zone server. Fixed that.
• Fixed a zone server crash that could occur if an enemy you had a kill tag on left the encounter without sinking.
• Fixed a mission server crash that could occur when reinforcements tried to join.

Misc:

• Nation Chat is now global. It used to be limited by distance but can now be heard across the map.
• Additional translations from SOE.