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.

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This is a milestone update so there are about a month's worth of changes/fixes.

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.

Release Notes for 1.9.32.0 are here.

Known Issues:

• Auction House: The font used for Total Price is too dark, making it unreadable. We hope to fix this in a future release.
• The firing arcs shown in the Local Map are not necessarily to scale. We're aware of this and working on a fix.

Differences between 1.9.32.0 and 1.10.30.0 include but aren't limited to:

Ships / Outfitting:

• Heavy Hercules: Turning Acceleration 10 -> 9.

Ship Combat / Skills:

• Using Take Command on a sinking ship could have bad consequences. Fixed - you can no longer Take Command when a ship is doomed.
• Run them Down can no longer be used against other players unless they're in a PvP zone or flagged for PvP.
• Buccaneer Crime Network: Now provides +5% doubloon loot. Freetrader Trade Connections: Now provides +5% doubloon loot. Navy Military Communication: Accuracy 3 -> 2, Added 2 Target Tracking.
• Sailing faster than 25 knots no longer continues to accumulate accuracy penalties. Relative motion accuracy penalties are now capped at 10%.

Swashbuckling:

• Boarding encounters should now match the time of day of the ship encounter they started from.

Missions:

• The Broadsheet Peddler is of no help to low level players at this point. However, it didn't say that - he said he'd happily help you and then didn't. Now he's clearer about his role.
• Tutorial: Claim Prize: If you had Skilled Negotiator, you couldn't complete this tutorial. Fixed.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Ships sometimes sailed into town. Literally. Fixed.
• Calling on the Magistrate: If you were French, this pointed you to the wrong magistrate. Fixed.
• Spirits of the Caribbean: This mission wasn't supposed to be repeatable. Fixed.
• Mysterious Bounty: The destinations weren't always correct. Fixed.
• Smuggler's Dragnet: Sent you to the wrong NPC for turn-in. Now correctly directs you at Kirk.
• If you used a Smuggler's Tunnel in Tortuga, it would often break mission doors. Fixed that.
• The Finer Things: Servant writing with a pen in a ledger now has a pen and a ledger.
• Signed in Blood: It wasn't possible to complete this mission. Fixed.
• Battle of Grand Turk: If you played your cards right, it was possible for a dead Ismail to join the fight. Fixed.
• Stop and Go: Is now a group mission. It makes more sense now.
• Henry Harris, I Presume?: If you sunk Henry instead of boarding him, you could get trapped in the mission. Fixed.
• Most Dangerous Ingredient: The mission couldn't be completed. Fixed.
• Pardon Me!: The ship cabin appeared to be on the moon. It now exists in a more appropriate environment.

Economy:

• Fixed a few ship deed icons that had the wrong color for the type of ship they were.

Open Sea:

• Smoothed out the wind changes in the Open Sea. Now the wind drifts around with relative changes that are usually 30 degrees or less. Sometimes the wind resets back to coming from the east. Overall, this should be smoother and less chaotic than the old OS wind.
• The Fleet Strength radius was too large. Halved it.
• Ad hoc battles now have random wind fluctuations over time. The wind direction changes are most often within 15 or 30 degrees, but a larger change can be up to 60 degrees. There is no change to the wind's strength.
• In 1.9, we broke the strings for currents. Fixed.

PvP / Port Contention:

• If you flagged yourself for PvP then attacked someone, you'd lose your PvP flag when the effect you gained in combat wore off. Re-ordered the priorities of these effects so the one doesn't incorrectly cancel the other.
• Sometimes a port would skip Martial Law after a Port Battle and we'd have to manually set the state on the server. Fixed.

Art / Sound:

• Tweaked female shoulders a bit (and how animations play) to make them look more feminine.
• Fixed a ton of places in the game where the time of day of a room didn't match the time of day of the room you just came from.
• Charlesfort: The Freetrader Trainer was a Navy Officer. Now he's a Freetrader.
• Leogane: Several seagulls were sitting around in thin air. Now they sit on more solid objects or they've been removed entirely.
• Oranjestad: The bartender is friendlier now. And there's now a Junk Merchant in town.
• In 1.9 ship wake flickers got worse. They should be better now.
• Added sound effects to the crocodiles in Tortuga.
• In order to incorporate our Christmas music, we changed the sound code a bit. You should notice no change but let us know if we broke anything.

UI:

• Made a subtle change that may make it more likely for a new player to choose an underpopulated nation as their own.
• You can no longer change clothes while shopping or talking to the Longboat Coxswain.
• Updated on-line help about changing clothes to reflect the new Customize Outfit option added in 1.9.
• Some ship deeds had the wrong background color. Should be: green = merchant, blue = scout, red = warship. Fixed the ones we know about. If you find others, let us know.
• We had a bug where using Alt-Enter to go from full-screen to windowed mode would generate some wonky graphics. Fixed.

Stability / Performance:

• Improved the performance of drawing the compass and the local map.
• Fixed a crash reported through Microsoft (when asked, it's always a good idea to send crash data to Microsoft - do fix bugs as a result) that could occur when changing your Preferences. We were never able to reproduce the bug but received enough data to identify what code was crashing and fix it.

Misc:

• Made some changes that will enable us to make more reliably smaller patches. (In previous builds, a problem in a particular type of file prevented us from reliably predicting how much changing that file would affect the patch size. Now, we know and the answer will be "not as much as previous builds.") Sadly, one result is that the game will take an extra 30Mb on your hard drive.
• Sending a /tell in Russian added some extraneous characters to the name that had to be deleted in order for the /tell to work. Fixed.
• More translations and localization bug fixes from SOE.