Known issues[]
- You should add the following lines to your pirates_local.ini. If you don't, you will be spammed with warnings when you launch the game. These are harmless, just annoying and mildly alarming.
[Logger]
Props=none
AvatarAnimation=none
- We have just replaced all the ship combats in all missions. We haven't tested them yet. We are in the process of testing and fixing them, and don't need you to log bugs at this time. It is possible that, if you're in the middle of a mission chain with an existing character, you won't be able to continue correctly. Almost all missions in the game have been revamped but they have not been tested. Further revamping is in progress. Do not log other than the most egregious mission bugs until I tell you. On the other hand, they are a lot more fun now!
- Factions are kinda sorta almost working. You don't have to run and hide from them, but don't log bugs yet either. Rev estimates a week and a half for a build against which you can log bugs.
- Attempts by the game to hold a Landmark Battle will crash the mission server so we have set the timer on Landmark Battles (RvR events) to cause them not to happen during beta. Feel free to keep throwing ports into contention but understand that you absolutely will not receive an invite to the Landmark Battle until sometime after we update the build again.
The top 10 best things about this build[]
10. You can emote using /emote and ; but you can no longer emote using :. This means you *can* smile at someone via :). You can't, however, wink at them.
9. Ships now travel faster in the Open Sea.
8. Port names should now show up in tooltips in the radar/compass. This has been true in the local map for a while but now it's true in the radar/compass too.
7. We now sorta have a "Next" state on toolbar buttons. If you click a button where the action isn't available (e.g. if you try to use a skill but the cool-down time hasn't run out), you'll get a dotted line around the button to indicate that it will take that action as soon as it's available. However, if you click something else before then, the "Next" state is moved to the new thing you just clicked. This is currently using Dev Art which is generally agreed to be craptacular. Art Art will be forthcoming eventually.
6. Boarding AIs weren't using chain shot. Now they're less stupid.
5. Fixed performance problems with particles so we're able to turn them back on. They may not be better than they were the last time you saw them, but they're better than they were while we had them turned off.
4. Used to be that if failed a mission and you were still filling out the survey when you returned to town, you'd crash. Fixed that. Apologies to those of you who found this bug by being good beta citizens.
3. Lots of economy changes/tuning. Details below. Now, when you're testing the economy, you're testing something that vaguely resembles what we hope to ship and your feedback will help us tune it. (Previously, tuning feedback was sometimes meaningless because of the work we'd done to undermine the player-based economy for the sake of easy testing.)
2. Improvements have been made to the Help system for the economy. There are still quite a few bugs in this new system and it hasn't been through QA, but it should basically work and be way the heck better than the complete lack of info you had before. You can reach the Help menu from the Options menu, or by right-clicking any inventory item, recipe, commodity item, deed, etc., and asking for more information. FYI, a new and improved UI is on the way but is not yet available in this build.
And the best change of all:
1. Cat Island, Vera Cruz, St. Rose's Bay, and the various taverns should no longer crash the game. You can now retrieve your lost toons and wear skirts with impunity.
Economy[]
Many changes designed to make your testing more realistic. We are very excited for you to pound on the economy now. Even if you're not a merchant, buying things from merchants helps us a great deal. And indeed, you'll have little choice but to start using the auction houses because the shops have been nerfed. :)
- The ATM mission has been removed from Aurelia. If you want cash, you're gonna have to do missions or sell stuff you've made for a profit. (In the previous build we made missions give a lot more money, however.)
- The bootstrap shop has been nerfed and the remaining items should now be 20x the price of making them yourself.
- Outfitting shops now only carry basic repair consumables, some small outfitting, and Round and Langridge shot. If you want better stuff, you'll need to make it or buy it from auctions or players.
- Ship shops now only carry ships up to the Cutter.
- The shady shop has been removed from Guanica.
- Obsolete shops were removed.
- Regional auction houses now require faction standing of at least -25 with the appropriate trade faction instead of requiring national citizenship. The Pirate regional auction house is tied to the Smuggler faction. Local auction houses are still tied to citizenship.
- The list limit in regional auction houses has been bumped up to 20.
- Reduced execution cost of recipes by 70%.
- Tweaked the quantities for several recipes to give them more reasonable unit costs.
- Killed some obsolete recipes.
- Gave some recipes new icons.
- Fixed a bug with a ship recipe that was missing a requirement.
- Made all ships require multiples of small ship provision bundles and changed provision recipes to output only small bundles.
- Added Husbandry architecture research. Isildur says, "oops!"
- Added Gravel Pit, Woodcutter's Camp, and Excavate Gravel. These will be used by the economy tutorial. When there is such a thing.
- Structure reset time has been set to 0 as a temporary fix until we get the new Economy UI done.
- Some loot tables were revised.
Missions[]
All the missions have had their guts ripped out and replaced. To a certain extent, work continues on that - more changes are coming. These have not been through QA so I imagine many are broken. Since we're still in-progress, we don't really care. We'll fix them as we're making the next round of changes. So play and enjoy the new old missions, but don't log bugs until I tell you.
- There are now European Trader missions available in Port Royal, Point-a-Pitre, and San Juan. <-- Note to Marion: Some are Dutch! :D These missions are actually part of the economy, as they allow you to essentially convert colonial goods into European goods. Merchants should definitely check them out because they are pretty important to the overall economy.
- Too many fixes to mention including fixing the previously highly exploitable "Here's Your Lumber, Jack" mission so that it can only be repeated once/week.
- Buncha tutorial fixes. We have a massive tutorial revamp scheduled for a later milestone but some of the simpler problems should be fixed now.
- Mission rewards are now set per the mission's level, not per your level. No more getting 800 XP at level 40 from a level 4 mission. Unless we meant for you to and you get a ton more than that if you complete it at level 4. :)
UI[]
- Clicking on the radar/compass border to set your heading has had some tweaks to make motion smoother.
- Port tooltip should now show your personal conquest total.
- We had a bug where, if you put an equippable item in your toolbar and then zoned, you'd crash. We fixed that.
- Mouselook strafing has been fixed.
- Some more button attract work has been done. Do you like?
- Progress bar animations have been hooked up. Do you like them?
- Used to be that, if you minimized the game while in the character selection screen, the Enter World button would hide in a corner when you restored. Now it returns to its rightful place.
- We changed the red re-charge timer on skill icons to black and made it uncover instead of cover so that you can see more of the icon the closer the skill is to being able to be used again. They also flash when they become available.
- We had a bug where skills were lit in your toolbar (appearing to be ready for use) when they shouldn't have been. Fixed that.
Art/Sound[]
- In many towns, the dock is too high above the water for the longboat and folks have trouble even finding the longboat, much less clicking on it. In an attempt to improve the situation, Rev has added a coxswain near the end of the dock in Marsh Harbour and Tortuga and you click on him instead of clicking on the longboat. What do you think of this? Is that more comprehensible than the signpost was? Easier to click on than the longboat?
- Buncha fixes to towns that look like Marsh Harbour.
- Fixed a buncha bugs in towns that look like Jenny Bay.
- Towns that look like Golden Lake have had some bugs fixed.
- Bug fixes have been made to the Couronne and Bark
- Various fixes to trees and their lighting.
- Emotes have been mucked w/ quite a bit in the process of adding emotes for avatar combat, and the entire database has been reprocessed multiple times.
Misc[]
- Log files are now called potbs_<whatever>.txt instead of client_<whatever>.txt
- We finally got avatars to stay dead when they die. Now we've killed their shadows too. We're getting so close to letting you play with this but not yet…