Wherein Flying Lab Software Lead Designer Kevin 'isildur' Maginn unveils the focused effort that has gone into revamping avatar combat (AvCom) for Pirates of the Burning Sea. For a quite good read (as ever!), the entire article is linked for yer clicking pleasure below. Herewith, his closing thoughts:

"...I’ve always said that our avatar combat was a good foundation on which to build. With this overhaul, I’m actively enthusiastic about what we’ve built on that foundation. I find myself concocting reasons to ‘test’ the avatar combat, often for much longer than it really takes to test anything. I’m having a great time with the new stuff, and I believe you will too."
Avatar Combat Revision

• You can now select dead PC avatars (so you can revive them in battle).
• There's now a Broadsheet Peddler in mid-level towns who tells you about mid-level missions you may have missed.
• Unhealthy Competition: Your enemy wasn't much of a challenge. They're smarter now and at least try to win.
• Quarantine: When you returned to town, there were two Dutch soldiers acting strangely. Now there's only one and he's a bit more sane.
• 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.
• Moved some chickens from the air to the ground. Chickens should not stand around in thin air.
• Nation Chat is now global. It used to be limited by distance but can now be heard across the map.

Flag and Sail of the Month Contests! by Aether
Marion and the 2D Steering Committee are excited to announce the Flag and Sail of the Month contests!
For our first round of contests, the theme is “Dia de los Muertos” or Day of the Dead.

Winners will be selected by FLS and the 2DSC, and announced on Saturday, November 1, 2008. The winning flag and sail will then be made available to everyone in the Ship Customization Vendor, located in your faction’s Capital. To start us off, the winning flag and sail will be available for purchase (just as if you made it yourself) for three months. Up to two Runners-Up will also be selected, which will be available for two months (1st Runners-Up) and one month (2nd Runners-Up), at FLS’s discretion.

For information on the flag contest, click here!
For information on the sail contest, click here!

Testbed Event: Big John's Bane by Rhaegar

The Merrymen say they are noble thieves, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Their enemies say they are bloodthirsty murderers who toss a few coins to the destitute to excuse their own crimes. Of late a Merryman captain known only as Big John has raided a string of convoys and collected much booty. Big John himself has appeared in many of the Caribbean's poorest settlements, handing out silver and goods to the poor. Rumor has it that this represents but a small part of his treasure, however. The hold of Big John's ship is said to be stuffed full of treasure and now the Merryman finds himself pursued; the three European powers of the Caribbean have long sought to capture him, and now the Brethren have grown weary of his antics which draw unwanted attention to piracy. Who will capture his ship and become Big John's Bane?

This event will take place on the Testbed on Friday October 17th at 16:00 Pacific (Midnight British Summer Time). The auction houses will be seeded with many items and ships to help you on your hunt. Players who are part of the fleet that sinks Big John will receive a special title in the live game! Good luck!

Warning: Back up your prefs.xml file (found in \My Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\) before logging in to Testbed. Playing with 1.9 and then 1.8 will wipe your preferences.

Charting a New Course by Chris Pramas
Just about two years ago I joined Flying Lab as a world designer. I came out of the tabletop game industry, having worked on pen and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The format was a little different but the goal of producing great games with compelling stories was the same.

The content team had a pretty lofty goal back then: 1,000 playable missions at launch. It was even more ambitious when you consider that the avatar combat system was still in development when I joined FLS. We were creating swashbuckling missions back then with these placeholders that said “avatar combat here.”...

The Stratics' IRC Pirates of the Burning Sea House of Commons Devchat was fun as well as informative tonight - as per usual! The Flying Lab Software guests in attendance for this House of Commons included CEO Russell "Rusty" Williams, Producer Michelle "Misha" Williams, Lead Designer Kevin "isildur" Maginn, Game Designer David "Taelorn" Hunt, Director of Community Relations Troy "Aether" Hewitt, Community Specialist Tom "Rhaegar" Atkinson-Edwards, and Community Intern David "Daeke" Bass. They covered a variety of topics (including new avatar combat, anticipated epic missions, the Hercules graphic, hints of impending Privateer goodness, and more) and the time flew by swiftly.

Huge thanks to everyone whom participated, for a quite enjoyable eve. :-)

To read the entire transcript, pray visit this link.

Pirates of the Burning Sea Stratics and Stratics IRC are happy to bring you another great House of Commons with the Pirates of the Burning Sea crew! Please join us this Wednesday, September 24th at 4pm PDT/7pm EDT for a great hour of questions and answers with our friends from FLS.

Scheduled guests for this House of Commons are CEO Russell "Rusty" Williams, Producer Michelle "Misha" Williams, Lead Designer Kevin "isildur" Maginn, Game Designer David "Taelorn" Hunt, Director of Community Relations Troy "Aether" Hewitt, and Community Specialist Tom "Rhaegar" Atkinson-Edwards.

You can connect to one of our IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client or you can visit our downloads section to choose a client. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or choose a server listed below that is closest to you:

• stratics.frws.com USA - Colorado 6667 6668 7000
• irc.glowfish.de EU - Germany 6667 6668
• stratics.afraidyet.net USA - Texas 6667 6668
• irc.gamers-irc.org USA - Colorado 6667 6668 7000

Once connected, join the #straticshoc channel and you'll be able to submit your questions to the assigned question taker. You can also join us any time in #burningsea on Stratics IRC for general chat about Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Help Us Test 5 Sided Battles This Sunday!
We’ve just enabled 5 sided battles on Testbed for testing, and we’d like your help to put them through their paces!

This Sunday at 3pm Pacific / 11pm British Summer time an FLS team captain will be online for each of the four nations to organize groups and lead them into battle! Simply log on with your favourite character and watch for system messages for further instructions. Team captains will also be leveling people and providing doubloons for you to spend in the Auction Houses.

We will also be watching the Testbed forums for your feedback after the event, and will be picking three random contributors for a prize of a 30 day timecard. See you then!

Data Service API Update
We’ve updated our Data Service API to support additional servers.

The update provides the following:
Server status support for Russian and Testbed servers.
Landmark and RvR state for Invincible (Australia), Russia, and Testbed servers.
Default values for PvP Range and Full PvP Range are given as their actual values, rather than as ‘0’.
You can read more about our Data Service API here.

Cargo Manager: Ever want to move everything from the hold of one ship to the hold of another and get bored dragging/dropping each item/stack? Now you can multi-select everything and move it all at once! As we enabled that ability, we added some other nifty features as well. Check it out by clicking a new button in any UI where items can be to bring up the Cargo Manager UI.
PvP Fleet Strength: We now calculate the strength of your group vs. the strength of the group you're attacking and we don't let you attack if the difference is too great. This is intended to decrease time-griefing. See below for more info.
Port Battle Schedule Revision: Port Battles can now only be scheduled during certain hours on each server. Read more info about the planning of this feature in Isildur's devlog.
New daily missions: In 1.7, we introduced repeatable missions for high level players. In this build, we've added some for mid-level players.
Broadsheet Peddler: There is now a dude hanging out in Bridgetown and other highland towns who can direct you to missions you may have missed in your journeys.
Intel 945/965 integrated chipset support: Previously, if you tried to launch the game on hardware that had all the features the game needed except software vertex shading instead of hardware vertex shading, you'd get an error and the game would fail to launch. We've changed the game to support software vertex processing. Now when you launch the game, you are warned that performance may not be fantastic (these are still somewhat poor video cards for our needs). If it works sufficiently well for you, fantastic. If not, log a bug with details and we'll try to improve the performance in a future release.

My Life at FLS by Daeke
Who doesn’t want to work in gaming these days? It’s a huge industry, there’s always plenty of room for growth, and it’s just plain fun. Sitting around, playing games all day? Sounds like what I do anyway, so why not get a job doing it? Well, probably because it’s not all fun and games. Just mostly fun and games.

This summer, I got invited to join the Flying Lab team as the Community Intern. The internship was an opportunity both to learn more about community management (i.e. follow Aether around on a daily basis) as well as learn about each individual team and what they do. I mean, obviously ArtCo does the artwork, but what does that actually mean? How much work goes into designing a town? (Answer: A lot.)...

Getting Ready for Talk Like a Pirate Day - by Robert "Apache" Howarth
Pirates of the Burning Sea, official game of Talk Like a Pirate Day, has big plans for Sept. 19th:

For those of you who have been fans of Flying Lab Software, you’ll no doubt remember that Pirates of the Burning Sea is the official video game of International Talk Like A Pirate Day. There’s no better way to celebrate this auspicious holiday than to log in and party with the grog-swilling, boot-plundering founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket.
Last year Flying Lab Software teamed up with the creators of this glorious holiday to talk about what they could do to commemorate the event. One thing led to another and the two International Symbols of Pirates Having a Good Time are thus now immortalized in the game. Every year around September 19th you’ll find Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket handing out missions throughout the Caribbean for all players.

Customer Service by Nutch
When Pirates of the Burning Sea launched back on January 22nd 2008, and in the various beta programs leading up to that, it fell to Misha to create a Customer Service Department from scratch. Along with putting together the team itself she had to design the various processes and procedures that were necessary for the team to be effective. That entailed configuring the tools to use, hiring in house CSRs, partnering with East Coast and European external GM companies, as well as the design and communication of the processes and procedures. It was a huge unenviable task, but she got it done with flying colors in a time of total mayhem. Fast forward a bit to this past July when she transferred over to the producer position and I took over the Customer Service department. Well, since that time I’ve been getting up to speed on the processes, and now it’s time to...

Danger on the Testbed Seas!
As you’ve probably already noticed, we’ve just pushed milestone 1.8 to Testbed. This milestone contains lots of fun new features and content for you to try out, and we’re very interested in hearing your feedback while the build is still on Testbed. To make testing these out even more fun, we’ve decided to add an element of danger. This Sunday, at 3pm Pacific (11pm British Summer Time), we will be putting a full-PVP zone around every conquerable port on Testbed.

Do you dare set sail in such conditions? Can you evade or defeat all who stand in your path? Can you complete the Talk Like a Pirate Day missions without getting sunk by other players? To assist you, we will in Port Royal an hour before the seas turn red to hand out money and levels. Visit the docks from 2pm Pacific (10pm British Summer Time), so you’ll have plenty of cash to buy everything you need from the Auction houses.

We will also be watching the Testbed forums for your feedback after the event, and will be picking three random contributors for a prize of a 30 day timecard. We look forward to seeing you (sink) on Sunday!

It's Not the Destination, it's the Journey by Rusty
A few months after release, and after we’d taken care of the initial fires, we sat down and took stock of where we were, and where we wanted to go. It’s always an interesting process doing this, because you get so wrapped up in what you’re building that you lose sight of the other possibilities. Once you’ve launched and have had some time to let things settle, you get a much wider perspective...

Flying Lab shows off Pirates of the Burning Sea at PAX 08 by Mark Rollins
Flying Lab, the developers of the MMO pirate game Pirates of the Burning Sea, had essentially the same demo of PotBS that they had at last year’s PAX (2007). If you haven’t played this game yet, then you really should...

...The big selling point of PotBS is the ship-to-ship fighting with cannons. This is done from a birds-eye view and the player must work with the wind in order to get within firing range of the enemy. The effects of the water looked incredible as it rippled just like the real ocean. Someone at Flying Lab deserves a raise...
Read on for the entire article!

Five-Sided PvP Battles by Taelorn
We’re wrapping up the recent open sea battle revamp with another big change – battle markers are going to open up to all sides. That means there’s the potential for up to five sides in a battle (the four player sides and neutral NPCs). This doesn't apply to PvE-flagged encounters, but it does apply to battle markers with NPCs that are inside hotspots...

Character Copies to Testbed: LIVE! by Rhaegar
With the deployment of build 1.7.37.0 to the live servers, our Testbed and live server build versions are now in synch! This means that players can copy a character directly to Testbed by visiting this link!

We strongly urge you to copy your characters over now so that you can use your live characters to participate in the events we have planned for when 1.8 hits testbed in the very near future.

Community Spotlight: Hello Toshiro! by Aether
Today we take a moment to recognize one of our most talented flag designers, and all around kooky guy, Toshiro!

In addition to being a merciless thorn in my community manager side, Toshiro has been a long time member of the Pirates of the Burning Sea community. As a leader in our 2D Steering Committee, he’s been an amazingly active and important contributor to our user content program.

Toshi has a lot more to share, and you can read all about his thoughts on being a part of the Pirates of the Burning Sea community by clicking this link! So congratulations Toshiro, thanks for everything you do!

1.7 Hits Invincible Thursday Morning by Rhaegar

We will be publishing build 1.7: Black Sails at Dawn to the Invincible server on Thursday, September 4th at 8:00am AEST.

Release notes for 1.7.37.0 can be found here.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: PAX Interview with Chris Pramas

This year's PAX was a huge success, and so was the booth that housed the swashbucklin crew of Pirates of the Burning Sea. The crowds got deep and all stations were booked for a glipse at what Flying Lab Software has been up to with the last several patches...and the crowds were pleased. Pirates of the Burning Sea has gained some great additions over the last several months, so we pulled Chris Pramas, Creative director of flying lab software, aside to see what else could be in the works. There are alot of great things being considered from the Dev team, so if you missed this year's PAX, have a look at what changes have been made to Pirates, and what could be coming your way...

Pray read on for the entire interview!

Pirates at PAX! by Aether

Pirates of the Burning Sea had one of our most successful shows ever at PAX ‘08! With a talented group of players and Flying Lab Staff on hand to walk folks through the demo (many