Patch 1.2.2 will be deployed to Pirates of the Burning Seas this week according to an announcement made on the official POTBS website. The new patch will bring a number of new features to the game including Active Nation Selection and National Player Faction.

However, what is most notable about 1.2.2's imminent release is the fact that 1.2.2 will also merge the game's remaining servers, consolidating the playerbase onto the Roberts and Antigua servers.

The original announcement can be viewed here.

Come January 23rd, Flying Labs Studios will be celebrating Pirates of the Burning Sea's second anniversary since going live! The developers are inviting players to take part in the festivities by participating in PvP events against the devs themselves!

Visit the official Pirates of the Burning Sea website for more information on the game, including the 14 day free trial that is currently being offered!

Flying Lab Software are ready to test the waters with a new leaderboards system they've been working on. The leaderboards will allow players to view ranked statistics for a number of categories including: PvP, PvE, Economy, Skirmish, and Duels.

In addition to viewing the top players in each category, you'll also be able to view your own characters and see how they stack up against other players.

It's also important to note that the statistics being tracked only go back as far as March 2009, so keep that in mind!

Flying Lab is stressing that the system is only being offered as a preview at the moment, so you should expect to run into bugs.

Read the full announcement here.

Flying Lab Software has announced this year's Pirates of the Burning Sea holiday event: The Feast of Nicholas Noël! The event centers around the plight of Nicholas Noel whose yearly Junkanoo fest is in jeopardy due to the fact his rum has been stolen. In the event, players will either aid Nicholas against the pirates by protecting his rum shipments, or join forces with the evil Henrick Humbug to spoil the holiday festivities!

The event will run from Saturday, December 19th, to Sunday, December 20th. The event schedule is available below:

To take part in this event, simply make your way to Roseau and speak with Nicholas Noël at the following times:
Saturday, December 19th

• Roberts: 8pm GMT (3pm Eastern, Midday Pacific)
• Blackbeard: 11pm GMT (6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific)
• Rackham: 2am GMT (9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific)
• Antigua: 5am GMT (Midnight Eastern, 9pm Pacific)

Sunday, December 20th

• Defiant: 10am GMT (5am Eastern, 2am Pacific, 9pm AEDT)

Go here for the original announcement.

Military personnel that can verify their status through a .mil e-mail address will be able to partake in an interesting promotion announced by Flying Lab Software this week. The promotion offers six months of Pirates of the Burning Sea to military personnel, however, in order to continue playing after the free six months you will still have to purchase a copy of the game.

Current subscribers who are in the military will also be able to add an additional six months to their subscription time at no cost as part of this offer.

Further details on the promotion can be found here.

CEO Russell Williams and Associate Producer Janice Von Itter talk about how they're ramping up the political game in this free expansion to PotBS. Power and Prestige will let players become port governors.

To begin, governor powers will be divided into three areas: economic, cosmetic and tactical.

Economic powers include the ability to change tax rates, infrastructure rates and generally tweak the port’s economy for whatever purposes they want.

Cosmetic powers include the ability to set a tagline and make subtle little changes that leave the Governor’s own personal stamp on the place.

Tactical options include upgrades to defenses or port offensive capabilities that will make it harder – or maybe easier if treachery is afoot – for it to fall in battle with enemy nations.

Read it all here.

The folks at Flying Lab Studios are doing a lot of expanding lately! The company is adding more staff, and has also announced the first expansion for Pirates of the Burning Sea. The new expansion, "Power and Prestige", will allow players to take on the role of Port Governor, in what sounds like a bit of sim-style gaming, where players control the development of a port.

The expansion will be offered as a free download to all players and is set to release in Q2 2010. Until then, check out this interview over at ZAM for more details.

Flying Lab Software is doing more than just working on Pirates of the Burning Sea. In this interview with Russell Williams, the company's CEO, we learned what else they're up to, as well as what's in store for Pirates.

And then let us know what you think on the forums!

The latest developer journal out of Flying Lab Software looks at expressing the personality of a region through the characteristics and quality of the environment in Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Greetings and salutations from the environment team at Flying Lab Software! I’m Brad, the Lead Environment Artist.

My experience working with the entire Pirates of the Burning Sea team has been overwhelmingly positive and creative since I started here last year. It’s especially exciting being part of a crew that has made such spectacular looking environments within the world of PotBS. All of us are dedicated to producing a rich experience for each player within the game.

To help achieve this, we adhere to the national flavor that each town represents and create unique buildings to add to that flavor. We also employ the same approaches that other artists on our team use to give other aspects of the game personality.

Read more here.

The latest devlog from the folks at Flying Lab Software looks at efforts to get players out on the open ocean.

This is the first of two devlogs discussing the work we’ve done in 1.16 focusing on ways to give players more loot, more rewards for PvP, and more reasons to explore and fight on the Open Sea.

In this first devlog, I am going to outline three changes to the PvE side of the game. Next week I will talk about some complimentary PvP changes we’re also making.

Fleets

In general, fleets make up a small portion of the ships on the Open Sea – roughly 20%. These ships are also some of the most important; they’re more difficult than normal AI groups, they come with higher rewards and they’re one of the main ways that players generate Unrest on ports.

In 1.16, we’ve increased the rate at which fleets spawn in the Open Sea. They will make up a greater portion of all the ships on the OS, but changes in the spawn system are tough to spot unless you’re watching the Open Sea for a very long time.

Read more here.

The latest developer journal from the folks at Pirates of the Burning Seas looks at the addition of Role Play Rooms to the game.

Today I bring to you: Role Play Rooms! We’ve been listening a lot to our role-player community recently, and they have been asking for some spaces that they can use purely for RP events. As a result, in 1.16, you will have your very own locales to hang out in and talk the talk, or dance the dance. Look for one in your nation’s capital!

We decided to look for existing spaces that we could re-use for this purpose, as creating new rooms takes a lot of time, but we didn’t want the new RP spaces to look identical to existing rooms in the game. The challenge was working out how to make them look different without changing any of the room geometry or re-doing the lighting. Either of those tasks would increase the size of the patch significantly, which is something we try to avoid. Luckily for us, there is a neat feature in our game editor that allows us to swap out one texture for another while leaving the underlying room intact.

Read more here.

The latest developer journal from the folks at Pirates of the Burning Seas looks at improvements to the game's combat mechanics.

For 1.16, we’re making various improvements to the combat mechanics of the game. We are improving the underpowered brawling skill chain, changing the debuff stacking mechanic in ship combat and adjusting round shot damage. These changes should help smooth out some areas that are currently rough and prone to exploitation.
Brawling Update

1.16 includes a set of changes to the brawling skill line. The changes give brawling more damage output while making it easier to maintain combos. There are fewer attacks that consume combo points and more attacks that benefit from combo points. We expect there to be another step after this one.

Read more here.

The folks at Pirates of the Burning Sea have posted notice of changes to their customer support policies and the reasons behind these changes.

The last time we did a Customer Service devlog, Nutch mentioned some changes we were implementing to the CS department to improve communication and response times on support tickets. Those changes helped us clear a backlog of tickets and allowed us to respond to new support requests much more quickly. Since then, I’ve taken on the role of CS Manager here at FLS and with the guidance of Nutch and Misha, am carrying on what they started. I’d like to talk about a few recent changes we have made to further improve the level of customer support.

As you may be aware, our in-game GM support was originally outsourced to a company located on the East Coast of the US. While they were able to effectively monitor support tickets, there were sometimes communication challenges between our internal Customer Service team and theirs. This could sometimes lead to service requests taking too long to be resolved.

Read more here.

Flying Lab Software has announced that Build 1.15 of Pirates of the Burning Sea will go live on Thursday morning.

We will be upgrading our North American, European & Australian SOE live servers to build 1.15: Black Bart’s Gold during the usual maintenance window (1:30am-5:00am Pacific / 9.30am-1.00pm British Summer Time) on Thursday, May 28th.

We had originally planned to perform this update on Wednesday morning, however the deployment of the patch to the download servers was delayed. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This milestone update contains our long-awaited Skirmish system, the next chapter of the Black Flags and Dread Saints story arc, Treasure Hunts, some changes to loot in missions, and much more.

Read more here.

Flying Lab Software has posted the third volume of the Pirates of the Burning Sea podcast.

Time for another installment of the Pirates of the Burning Sea podcast!

In this episode, our CEO Rusty is joined by Lum (Game Designer), Deqlor (Content Designer) and guest host … me! Find out the answers to some of your questions about PotBS, as well as what’s going on behind the scenes at FLS.

Read more here.

The latest Dev Blog from Flying Lab Studios looks at the problems involved when players repeat missions in the middle of a story arc in Pirates of the Burning Sea.

When we create big mission arcs, we design them to be a fun, engaging, and most importantly, a linear experience. We want players to get a sense of story and to do something interesting. We also want to reward players who accomplish the goals for those missions. This changes when people farm missions, though. They’re participating in a kind of experience that’s not fun and not really what we had in mind when we put those missions in place.

Playing a mission over and over isn’t really the problem by itself, even though it isn’t what we originally intended. Even gaining a lot of money per hour by playing it over and over isn’t the problem.

Read more here.

FLS is looking for players to help test the new Point Battle feature for Skirmishes in Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Point Battles are the newest Skirmish feature, and we’re keen to point it out to you so that you can give us your pointed feedback.

Let’s get to the point: We’d like you to log on to the Testbed server at 4pm Pacific (Mignight BST) on Thursday, May 14th. The point of this event is to allow you to create and test your own Point Battles.

To help drive the point home, we’ll be handing out some points of our own: an arrow through your hat! This pointy clothing item will be handed out to a character on the live servers of your choice.

Read more here.

FLS has posted an overview of the Point Battle system in Pirates of the burning Sea, which is a variant rule set of a typical skirmish battle.

Point Battles

Skirmish was created to give you a way to try out battles and experiment in ways that can’t happen elsewhere in the game. In a normal skirmish, you can set restrictions on what is allowed in a match. This leads to everyone building to the limit of those restrictions. Why take a player in a sloop if the same slot can be filled by a high end frigate? That’s where point battles enter the picture.
What is a point battle?

Every battle in Pirates of the Burning Sea is restricted by the number of players. With the point battle option checked in skirmish, the limit switches from player count to player strength. The battle creator can set a point value for each side in a skirmish, and then players can fill up each side until they hit the point cap. This allows organized groups to arrange battles and find good configurations for a point cap. Sure, you can field a full group of SOLs with a high point cap, but then you might find yourself heavily outnumbered by a mixed fleet of cutters, frigates and maybe a flagship. Ever want to try an all-sloop versus all-SOL battle? Now you can.

Read more here.

Flying Lab Software has announced two new role-playing events in Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Deep within the dark, winding streets of Pointe-a-Pitre…

A spy is wandering in the shadows, preparing to meet their contact. This spy has sensitive information – maybe true, maybe false, maybe both – that will spark new and bloody tensions in the Caribbean if that information is passed along to its target.

Does this sound like an exciting adventure? You can read more about the latest role-play events in Pirates of the Burning Sea by visiting The Salty Sea Dog Inn!

There are two player-run events coming up, both on the Antigua server!

Thurs, April 30th you can come by the Empty Gibet in Tortuga for Rhum & Wench Night! Event starts at 8pm MST (7PM PST, 10 EST, 0200 GMT and 1200 AUS ST).

Friday, May 15th is “Spy vs Spy”! This is a role-playing variant on a “hide-and-seek” style event. The ‘spy’ will wander throughout Pointe-a-Pitre, and two teams of players will try to find that spy, racing against one another. More information, such as rules and prizes, will be forthcoming!

Read more here.