Patch Note:0.28.69.00

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This is a milestone update so it includes about a month’s worth of changes since the last build. We have one more milestone update before launch.

[edit] Things you can’t see

Some things I haven’t mentioned in previous Release Notes because they’re occurring in the background and you really can’t see the effects but they’re important and if you can see them, we may have done something wrong.
We’ve integrated SOE’s localization code. We had to change several things to make this work including the way we store the names used when you hit “Random Name” during Character Creation and the way missions use MadLibs. I don’t know exactly when we’ll have French, German, and Spanish Beta but we will…
Also, we’ve been working on the code to make those special pre-order items actually work in-game.

[edit] Things you can see

Some of the highlights of this build are listed here. More info about each of these is given in the sections below.

We had to wipe your preferences so that the font improvements we made would take. (Otherwise, you’d have invalid options that might crash you or cause other problems.) We’re hoping the game is more legible overall now, but there is one more big round of improvements coming in build 1.0.x.x.
Freetraders and Pirates will receive a career respec due to changes made to their chains. This means when you log in with a character of those careers, they will lose all their career skills and regain all their career skill points. Then you’ll need to go buy up your skills again.
Looking for group! You can type /lfg to flag yourself. You can search for people who have the LFG flag by opening the Social window and clicking the button to search for LFG people.
Improvements to Swashbuckling combat. There’s one more round of fixes in 1.0.x.x. that will add patrols to many missions and a few other things. But the version in this build is pretty close to what we’ll be shipping with, so your feedback is useful.
Improvements to Landmark Battles based on Beta feedback - some bug fixes, some new features.
Several changes to our servers as a result of the Stress Test and other research. We’re hoping to use this build for the next Stress Test.

[edit] Known Issues

We thought we fixed it so NPCs on the Open Sea wouldn't aggro you for a couple minutes after you zoned (or until you moved). However, it's not working if the NPC is basically camping your spawn point. So you can still get chain aggro and ganked multiple times in a row without being able to move. We're working on it...
Partial surrender results in the loss of all unsecured cargo. If you offer 25% and it's accepted, you should only lose 25%. We'll fix that soon.

[edit] Character Creation/Customization

We think we’ve fixed the bald women. Which is good because I’m tired of playing a male character. Now if only I could gender-change instead of starting a new character…
Caucasian faces should now be the same color as their chests.
Fixed discoloration on several female hands.
Kenosuna tweaked the color palettes for clothes. There should be fewer neon options now.
Fixed some belt/pants interpenetrations.
Fixed interpenetrations between female neck items (like the bow tie) and shirts.
Many other fixes to clothing interpenetrations and wonkiness.

[edit] Tutorial/Missions

It was possible to retry the Tutorial in a group. Fixed that.
Added/rearranged missions to help lead you from Midland to Highland. Folks were finishing the midland missions and then confused about where to go next.
ConCo re-leveled some missions to fill in sparse areas in the progression. It used to be that doing all missions would get you to a certain level and you may want to PvE or PvP or such to continue to level before you could access the next round of missions. This should no longer be necessary.
The National Refit rewards for lvl 25 and 45 missions were missing. Privateers now get refits and Freetraders get a gob of cash at 25 and 45 to make up for their lack of refits. (We’ll likely give Freetraders refits a bit later on.)
Added contest winner missions: Long ago we asked fans to submit ideas for missions. The winning ideas have been made into missions and are now in the game! You’ll find “Honest Dishonesty” in Port Royal, “Hunting the Coyote” in Sisal, and “Unforeseen Cargo” in New Orleans.
Added the last of the Prisoner missions finally.
You now have 5 minutes, by default, to decide whether to revive or exit the encounter when you are defeated in avatar combat. You also have 5 minutes to click "Return to Port" in the event you are defeated in ship combat, before you are automatically returned to port.
When the FMU is too far away to be seen on the compass, there’s now an indicator at the edge of the compass showing which direction it is. We’ve had similar functionality for targets for quite some time. It’s nice to finally have it for mission goals as well.
Now you have to slow to a stop to get any crate or inspect any ship in those missions where crates and ship inspections occur.
When you get near crates or ships and use the 'X' key, it now allows you to try again after you've failed. (Before, you had to click it with the mouse after unsuccessfully trying to get it with 'X'). Also now it's more obvious when you failed to get the crate/ship.
In missions where your NPC ally needs to be protected, he shows the protect (shield) floaty icon instead of the ambiguous arrow.
Escorting NPC avatars looked funny. Made them move a little smarter.
Many missions in St. Rose's Bay have player facing into door when entering a room. Fixed the ones we found. Please log any you find.
In “Who Robs the Robbers,” you ally will actually attack now as opposed to just looking threatening.
Using group buffs in “Important Discovery” didn’t work because the ships you were protecting weren’t allies. Fixed that.
The ally you’re supposed to escort in “A Proposed Merger” should behave a little more intelligently now.
The enemy ships in “Pressing Your Luck” were firing on each other. Fixed that. No more civil war among the Bloody Arms.
You should now be able to enter the mission “Quiet Plans”
“A Fly on the Wall” is more challenging now. Fixed several other problems with it too, including missing strings and typos. Similarly for “Big Wreckage”
Fixed several bugs in “Punishing Initiative”
“Masts for Mayhem” is no longer repeatable.
If you cancelled “Keep Your Enemies Close” after the Captain’s Quarters stage, you couldn’t get to that stage if you re-took the mission. Fixed that and several other problems.
You should now be able to complete “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan”
After “It Takes a Hero,” the door to the Admiralty Office was moving across town. Fixed that.
The enemy captain in “Holy Cargo!” now calls reinforcements when he needs them.
Convoy ships in “Pepper's Pride” now start out damaged. And are of the appropriate faction.
Leaving “Agent of Fortune” would dump you in the wrong port and cancel the mission. Fixed that.
You can start “Burden of Truth” now.
“The Golden Parachute” now rewards a unique ship deed from John Law.

[edit] Ship Combat

We’ve increased the size of some of the ad hoc rooms so that you have more room to fight. Many more ad hoc room changes coming in build 1.0.x.x.
We had NPCs sailing much lower level ships and you were getting XP based on the captain’s level, not on the level of the ship. Fixed that in most cases.
Removed the skill Defense 1 from the Freetrader Escape chain. Repel Grapples 1 is now the first skill in the chain.
Moved the skill Deter Pursuit from the Freetrader Ship Mastery chain to the Escape chain. It's now the 5th skill in that chain.
Added a new skill, Hold Together, to the beginning of the Ship Mastery chain. It is a skill-based repair for Freetraders that consumes 5 units of Oak Planks and 5 units of Canvas, and has slightly more repair than the comparable Navy skill. It does not, however, repair structure - only armor and sails.
Removed the 'Emergency Turn' skill, and replaced it with a new skill, 'Rum Ration'. This skill is a short duration buff (5m) that increases reload rate, turn rate, acceleration, and maximum morale. It consumes 1 unit of Rum. Note that because pirates also had the Emergency Turn skill, this change affects both Freetraders and Pirates.
We now transfer all your secured, unequipped cargo to your new ship after you capture it. This fixes the problem with “Take Command of Ship” where you’d land on the new ship with no ammo.
Players now leave behind a derelict when using Abandon Ship. This is kind of a scary change, so keep an eye out for weirdness when respawning to the nearest friendly port.
Fallback/Default ships are now restricted in several ways: A) If you’re in a fallback ship, you can’t attack any players in the Open Sea. B) You also can’t join any PvP battle markers. C) You cannot gain any XP from PvP. D) If a player attacks a player in a fallback ship on the Open Sea and defeats them, he doesn’t gain any XP from doing so.
Removed auto join for group Ad Hoc battles. If you get attacked on the Open Sea, your groupmates won’t automatically be pulled in with you. Increased the join window for Ad Hoc battle markers from 60 seconds to 90 seconds and increased the join window for Call for Help from 60 seconds to 1000 seconds to make it easier for you to get reinforcements from groupmates or others.
Ad Hocs are now limited to 12 ships per side.
Heavy round shot now has its own icon.

[edit] Swashbuckling Combat

We’ve significantly revised our avatar combat encounters. Many encounters now include patrols and respawning NPCs and will hopefully feel a little less static. We’ve also tried to make the encounters a bit less linear, and generally more interesting. Please let us know what you think.
PvP Dueling Practice! The bartenders in these ports now offer you a group mission called “Dueling Practice”: Santa Catalina, Cape de Vela, Pensacola, Jacob’s Clock, Port Royal, San Juan, Pointe-à-Pitre, and Tortuga. In this mission, your group can try team-based swashbuckling PvP against each other. Bring a full group and you can divide up into teams however you wish once you’re in the mission. Note that the bartenders only offer this mission to players of the same nation as the bartender. Dying in this mission doesn’t penalize you but any consumable items you use will indeed be gone. This is just for PvP testing purposes so please use it to test out swashbuckling PvP.
Fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash if you died during a boarding action. This was a sadly common crash and several beta testers had stopped boarding entirely because they’d crash every time they tried. Give it another go - it should be more stable now.
The Boarding Reinforcements button should now disable when you have a full wave or no remaining waves to summon.
Changed "Try Again" to "Revive" in the avatar combat respawn pop-up dialogue.
Added floating balance damage for balance loss to dodge and offensive balance loss to parry.
We now display a floating damage number for the balance damage prep attacks do.
Scoundrel’s loop debuff wasn’t being properly applied.
Several effects now cancel when you die. It's goofy to keep bleeding after you die, so we're going to stop that.
Now, in swashbuckling combat, when you use a skill that triggers a special effect, an alert sound is played for the target (if they did not already have the effect), and your sword trails change from white to red.
Made a pass at bringing skills more into balance with each other. This is only a first step, more work will have to be done here.
Added passive skill "Rapid Balance Recovery." This skill increases your balance regen by 6 outside of Close Combat. In addition to this, DrewC slightly reduced the natural balance regen rate of all players. The net result is that you will regenerate balance much faster when there is not a hostile target within 6 yards of you, but slightly more slowly when there is.
Revive type skills work in combat, but no longer work in close combat. Same for bandage skills. Also changed Combat Medicine from revive to heal target in close combat. Also the bandage effect is removed by taking damage or losing balance.
The Gambit skill reduced all allies’ hate in a 10 yard radius. It was supposed to reduce the players hate from all enemies within 10 yards instead. Fixed that.
Taunt was adding hate for whoever your target was attacking. Now it adds hate for you as it should.
Compound Riposte was completely overpowered so DrewC set a 12-second cooldown on it, decreased the offense bonus, and removed the damage bonus. He also increased the effect of the debuff it applies and added a medium bleed to it.
Meanwhile, the Riposte skill wasn’t as effective as it could be. DrewC added a balance restoration component as well as a 6-second cooldown, and decreased the bonus to hit and damage bonus.
Implemented random balance damage from prep attacks. Previously prep attacks did a fixed amount of balance damage if they were successful. Now they do a random amount of balance damage that can be modified by the skill, weapons and outfitting, and effects on the character.
Set the balance loss from finishing moves to pop up as balance damage.
Tuned crowd control skills. All crowd control skills got slightly less effective. Area effect crowd control skills got a lot less effective. Single target crowd control skills now have a limited effect against Lieutenants. They will incapacitate Lieutenants for half the time they incapacitate grunts, up to 10 seconds maximum. Area effect crowd control skills do not do this.
NPCs are now only given one weapon, appropriate for their level, rather than every weapon appropriate for all levels below theirs.
When you had an implied target (but hadn’t specifically clicked an enemy to target) in swashbuckling, their initiative wasn’t shown correctly in their healthbar. Fixed that.
It was possible to damage an NPC and have him not aggro you (like if he wasn’t the primary target of a grenade for example). Now any NPC you damage should aggro you.
When you kill an NPC in avatar combat, we run a check to see if there are any more hostile targets nearby before removing the InCombat effect. DrewC reduced the range we check from 30 to 12. This should lead to less instances of players being trapped in combat while trying to complete a mission.
Dutch ships had Pirate crew fighting in boarding combat. Now they have Dutch crew.
Nerfed NPC-only weapons slightly.
Updated all of our avatar skill tooltips to include more, and more accurate information.

[edit] Nation vs. Nation/Port Conquest

Landmark unrest was decaying much more slowly than it should. Fixed that.
Landmark battle invites weren’t being closed when the battle was cancelled or completed. This could make you think you accepted when you actually didn’t. Fixed that.
Added an NPC to each Ready Room with info services about each of the special Conquest Bonuses unlocked. These info services have requirements on them so that they *only* show if the relevant Bonuses have been earned by that Defender nation or Attacker nation. (Meaning that if the Attacker has earned 0-999 contention points, a "no bonus earned" info service is shown, or if the Attacker nation has earned 3100 contention points, an info service mentioning the Fort Lieutenant debuff and both extra door openings will be shown. Same goes for the Defender and whatever they've earned.)
We now have three additional landmark battle rooms and a night variant for each. That's a total of 8 different rooms you may land end for the ship combat portion.
Fixed the bug in Landmark Battles where a disconnected player still had to be killed. It’s hard to kill a disconnected player so they no longer count toward the number of enemies you have to defeat to win.
Fixed the tooltip on Conquest Citations. It stated they’re only given to victors. More are given to victors, but even losers get some.
Fixed the bug that prevented building in your nation’s town after a port had been seized and then returned to its original owner. Folks were getting errors trying to build that their faction wasn’t sufficient. Since they were the same nation as the port, faction shouldn’t matter.

[edit] Economy

Cleaned up some confusing text in the Economy Tutorial.
Updated the Auctioneer’s Info Service. He was giving outdated and inaccurate info.
Our solution to an auction money dupe caused by failed bids was to briefly debit your bid amount, then give it right back to you if your bid fails. This caused the money amount on your client to update twice, once with the debit and once with the restoration. Repeated bid spams would keep reducing your available money until you stopped, and then your money would replenish. This was scary and confusing so we fixed it to not be visible to the player.
Isildur made Royal Commendations drop starting at level 45, instead of 50. He also increased the drop rate of all high-end commendations at level 50 (not the chance of a commendation dropping, but the chance that a dropped commendation will be high-level).
The Trinity Second Rate was in the reward pool with the Third Rates. Taelorn moved it to the Second Rate reward pool, which means it now requires more commendations.

[edit] Open Sea

Isildur extensively revised faction reputation changes for killing ships in the Open Sea.
No kill generates more than 4 rep changes, and most generate only 3.
You never lose rep with any faction except the one the ship actually belongs to.
All ship kills (with one exception) generate a total -0.25 rep change - that is, the sum of all rep changes for any kill is always -0.25.
All factions have at least one other faction they'd like to see you kill, so it's always possible to gain rep by killing someone for any given faction.
Generally, the number of ships to kill to recover from any given ship kill's rep loss is 2. For example, if you start at rep -1000 with BrNavy, and you kill a level 50 BrNavy ship, you will drop to -1050 rep. Killing two level 50 SpNavy ships will return your BrNavy rep to -1000.
Here’s the exception mentioned earlier: All evil pirate gangs are now hated by someone. For the most part, this is the national navy of the region they operate out of. For instance, the Drakesmen are hated by the British Navy. Killing evil pirates is always a net positive rep change; there is no drawback to killing them. They're a way to recover from bad faction rep for any given faction. Evil pirate rep changes come in four magnitudes: 0.1, for the weaker noob gang; 0.2 for the stronger noob gang; 0.25 for the midland gang; and 0.5 for the highland gang. In addition, highland gangs also have rep changes for their enemy's trade union and trade company, at 0.25 and 0.1, respectively.
Isildur also removed reputation changes for any faction that does not appear on the Open Sea. If they don't have ships, they don't care who you're killing. The exception is the academic factions; he’s set up faction rep for the Inquisition, the Academie, and the Royal Society... purely for his own amusement. The scientists hate the Inquisition, and vice versa. It will probably never matter, but he’ll be entertained.
Evil pirate gangs (Hijos Verdaderos, Confrerie Libere, Merrymen, Lost Ironsides, and Varyags) now roam the coasts of highland.
Added level 40 and 50 trade company ships to highland areas in the Open Sea.
Set battle markers to a visibility range of ~120 miles (down from ~240 miles) in an attempt to clear some of the clutter they cause.
Reduced the size of battle markers.
Reduced the duration of the Dereliction effect from 3 days to 1 hour.
Voluntary PvP flagging now boosts your OS speed by 5.
Reduced the duration of the Recently Killed effect from 1 hour to 30 minutes. Players with the recently killed flag do not provide experience or generated loot.
You should now be able to get into Pointe-a-Pitre from the Open Sea.
Santa Clara was partially under water in the Open Sea. Fixed that.
There was an invisible island in the Bahamas. Removed it.
Removed an island in the Antilles that could trap larger ships.
The port model for Maracaibo was in the wrong place in the Open Sea. Fixed that.
Fixed a seam in the Open Sea near Bluefields.

[edit] Graphics

We changed the way the Max Visible Avatars slider works. Now regardless of the slider, you will always see group mates, mission/service NPCs, anyone who targets you, and anyone who can attack you.
We think we’ve fixed most of the Freetrader Trainers leaning against thin air. Let us know if you see any more, though.
Added Captain Slappy and Ole Chumbucket (founders of Talk Like a Pirate Day) to Marsh Harbour.
We have a whole long list of improvements to the fact that the motion of our ships as they sink is one of the less polished looking aspects of our game. We fixed one: sinking ships no longer stop on a dime. The rest will likely wait until after R1.
Added a bilge pump to the Large Galleon – no more water in the hold.
Fixed a crash related to Vista video driver compatibility and Anti-Aliasing. We hope. One beta tester in particular reported that setting AA to anything above ~75% quality results in a crash. We were never able to reliably repro exactly what he was seeing but we’re hoping this change fixes that problem.
BSharp worked his magic in several rooms. Several skies are better, lighting is better, etc.

[edit] UI

We now fire onClick on mouse down instead of mouse up. This is how Windows does it. This fixes the problem where you could click, hold, move the mouse off the item, release, and leave the button/tab/skill in a funky state.
Chat Window: Corrected the offending orange text and brightened the background paper.
Fixed the problem with the Character Info dialog not showing the title font correctly.
Fixed a bug that caused scrolling in Help not to work.

[edit] Sound

Added sounds to many UI actions (like button clicks)
Female combatants should no longer sound like males during a fight.
More sounds and more liveliness added to more towns and rooms.
Upped the max number of simultaneous voices to 64 (from 32). This should fix problems like sometimes being able to hear the musicians in town playing and sometimes not. They had music but sometimes it was suppressed because of the limit.

[edit] Servers

During swashbuckling combat, spamming skills could get you kicked as a hacker and then you wouldn’t be able to log back in for up to 20 minutes. Made a partial fix to that problem. Between that fix and other changes to AvCom, we’re hoping the problem is basically gone. We’ll see how common it is now and decide from there how much more work to throw at it.
If a player was in group of two and they were the player who owned the active mission, they got leaked when they left the group. Fixed that.
Fixed a character leak Brendan found when trying to figure out why the Mission Server loses its mind sometimes. This problem was occurring when a player failed to zone and then failed to land in their ultimate fallback zone. Added some more logging to help track down why that might happen.
We think we've also fixed the problem where the Mission server or Login server loses its mind sometimes. We'll see...
Attempted perf fixes for processing messages on the servers.
The Open Sea’s zone server will now clear all hot spots and battle markers when the mission server disconnects. This should prevent battle markers from leaking on the Open Sea and stuck invisible hot spots if the mission server is unstable.
Attempted to fix a zone server crash we saw during the stress test. Since we’re not quite sure how the player got into the situation that caused the crash, we’re not sure we’ve entirely fixed it. But it should be better than it was.
Fixed a zone server crash that GMs could cause by trying to come to the rescue.
During the stress test, the load cap was leaking a bit. For example, if we set the limit to 600 players, we’d often find we had 623 players logged in or some such. Not a huge deal, but a bit disconcerting. Fixed it.
During the stress test, players complained that the estimated time remaining in the queue was crazy inaccurate. There’s just no good way to guess how much longer you’re going to have to wait so no more guessing. We show you where you are in the queue (25 out of 32 or such), but we don’t pretend to be able to predict how long it will be before you can log in.
The stress test taught us that our server directory doesn’t scale well. Made some steps to fix that in preparation for the next stress test.

[edit] Misc

Looking for Group! Give /lfg a whirl and let us know what you think. Also there’s a tab in the Social UI that shows people who are LFG.
The French Town Crier talked about British Noobland. He’s now more aware of his immediate surroundings.
Removed the extra auctioneer from the shop in Campeche.
Made Respecs no Trade
I’m not sure why every time we add a new animal to the game, we make it a Pirate. Someone in ConCo’s idea of a joke, maybe. In any case, the crocodile joins his chicken cousins as a “citizen,” not a Pirate.
The pigg manager now ignores non-pigg files hanging out in the piggs folder. This may help some of the situations where folks with temporary files were crashing trying to load the game.
Fixed a crash that could occur when looking at inventory that included problematic User Content.
Closed a security hole that may have enabled folks to hack clients. We never had any reason to believe anyone had done this but they can’t now.
Server Status button added to the login screen. So if you can’t login and wonder what the heck is happening, click this button to see current MOTD that you probably didn’t read in the launcher.