We batched up some particularly large bug fixes, such as those for music and art, into this patch.

This download will be bigger than previous patches but we’re hoping you’ll agree that it’s worth it, with all the bug fixes we’ve included.

Some highlights are as follows:

• New logout system that particularly improves logout in the Open Sea. Read this devlog for details.
• Unrest supply bundles finally work. We’ve added the turn-in missions for these so you can produce them and hand them in to generate unrest on an enemy port. Read this other devlog from Rev on Conquest and PvP improvements.
• Rare pirate gang spawns are now twice as frequent as before, so those bounty missions won’t be so hard.
• We fixed the bug that would cause an NPC you attacked in the Open Sea to spawn a different kind of ship when the battle started.
• We shut up the Auctioneer!

Known Issues:

• Sometimes when you enter a ship combat room from the Open Sea, you’ll see the model of a nearby town in there. You can sail through it – it shouldn’t cause a problem. But it shouldn’t be there. We’re working to fix this.
• We have multiple reports of some players crashing entering Campeche, Rosignol, and Puerto Cabezas. Some players have no problem at all. If you’re a player experiencing this problem, please continue to send your crash reports to Microsoft – we’re looking into it.
• If you are a Freetrader, doing a partial delivery in “Offers They Can’t Refuse” will cause you to lose items. Only turn in the items when you have all of them to turn in at once. If you already have this mission and can’t complete it, cancel it and re-take it. If we have more info, we’ll update this thread.
• It’s not possible to use the Harbor Master to transport to a ship stored in Black Point.
• This patch is a few hundred megabytes in size. It’s going to take longer to download than previous patches.

Differences between 1.0.48.4 and 1.1.54.0 include but aren’t limited to:

Character Creation / Customization:

• Some combinations of items and colors in character creation had a bug that prevented you from starting to play. When this happened, the game displayed a message box reading “Error_Generic”. We have fixed the issues that caused this error and also changed the error to say something helpful should it happen again.
• The front of Female Vest (Merchant) is no longer invisible.
• Fixed LOD problems with the Female Coat (Elegant) and Female Vest (Frilled).
• Fixed males going bald in places at some LODs.
• Fixed several places where the wrong vests or shirts were coupled with certain coats and such.
• Some jackets had a Fleur-de-lis design even though the jackets could be worn by British and Spanish characters. Fixed that.
• We had limited the Level 45 privateer “Patriot” coat to Spanish players only while we solved some bugs with the other versions. We’ve fixed those other bugs so have made that coat available to the other nations. If you are level 45 or more and you’ve completed the necessary career missions, you’re welcome to head back to the Tailor Shop and try out that coat – you will automatically have it if you’ve completed the mission.
• Cleaned up some texture problems with female coats. Also fixed gaps that allowed you to see into the hollow insides of avatars wearing these coats.
• Corrected problems with the female frilly shirt.
• There was a bug in one of the male shirts that caused duplicate entries to appear in the list of choices. No more duplicate entries.
• One of the male heads, when bald, had lines down the back. Fixed that.
• Fixed several more clothing interpenetration issues.

Ships / Combat:

• Many players have not realized that some of your cargo is lost when you sink. This is because we never told them, so we’ve made some UI changes to make it clearer that unsecured cargo is lost when you sink. We added an explanation to the tooltips of these items, and also an overlay to their icons that, when you hover over it, gives a further explanation of unsecured cargo.
• Ship tuning: Added a small amount of target tracking to light guns.
• Ship tuning: Made small adjustments to target tracking, mainly on the mid to upper range ships. Most noticeable on the Raa.
• Ship tuning: Added a bit of max range accuracy to all guns
• Ship tuning: Added a small amount of mid-range accuracy to mid-heavy guns
• Ship tuning: Reduced small/medium ship defense slightly.
• Ship tuning: Added a little bit of damage reduction to large, huge and colossal ships.
• Ship tuning: Slightly reduced the relative motion accuracy penalty. Slightly extended the range at which we start applying relative motion penalties.
• Ship tuning: Decreased the defense of the Mastercraft La Belle, it was higher than intended.
• Ship tuning: Reduced the damage reduction of some ships (such as the Cruizer) that were set too high due to having their size reduced recently.
• Ship tuning: Increased the defense for third rate and above line ships.
• Ship tuning: Slightly increased the defense for some mid-range and high-end ships.
• Ship tuning: Slightly increased the crew damage reduction based on the amount of crew you have remaining compared to your total crew.
• Arcadia: This ship was supposed to have two gun decks. Fixed that.
• Packet Boat: Buffed the speed, cargo capacity and target tracking, and increased its level. Reduced its close haul speed to 72.5% (this makes it keep the same close haul speed as it had before the speed buff).
• Intrepid: Added two guns to the privateer refit so that it wouldn’t have less guns than the base ship.
• Hellbrand West Indiaman: Reduced the weight of the guns since it was recently changed to a medium ship instead of a large.
• Raft, Smack, Capricieux: Added some low resolution models to improve performance when they’re far from your camera.
• Changed the levels of a few civilian ships to more appropriately match the levels of the player-made versions. This change only affects the civilian versions. Ketch: 9 -> 8, Curieuse: 15 -> 14, Xebec: 16 -> 17, Packetboat: 17 -> 16, Lexington: 20 -> 18, Cerberus: 28 -> 29, Dromedary: 23 -> 22, Mignone: 43 -> 40.
• The Medway Longboat was level 5, but it was supposed to be level 1. Fixed.
• Fixed the bug that caused the crows nest to remain after masts were destroyed.
• Rowboat: Fixed several graphical bugs with the model.
• There was an elite status effect that had a generic icon. It has a better icon now.
• Made it so that NPC ships will switch targets as soon as an enemy gets more hate than the NPC’s current target. It used to be that an enemy had to get 10% more hate than the current target before the NPC would switch targets. That wasn’t a bad setting for avatar combat, but it made killing NPC ships too easy.
• Made it so that AIs won’t surrender unless they’ve been attacked in the last 3 seconds. Players have complained about AIs surrendering out of the blue, not in response to any recent attack.
• Rare pirate gang spawns were very hard to find. We’ve now doubled the chance of encountering one in a multi-ship ad hoc. These are the rare spawns targeted by the bounty missions, so they’ll be easier to find now.

Skills / Outfitting:

• Fixed a bug that let you activate skills you shouldn’t have been able to activate.
• Slightly reduced the amount of max range on outfitting.
• Significantly reduced the amount of max range on Long Guns, lessened the reload penalty and added an accuracy bonus.
• Increased the level requirements on long guns. Added a new equip category – Long Guns – for permanent gun outfitting that gives + range.
• Huge Lightweight Guns: These had an absolute effect where all other outfitting like them had a relative effect. Changed to a relative effect.
• Superior Grapples and Ladders stats shown in Tooltip and Character UI (which equipped) now match. Similarly for several other outfitting items which were using relative values instead of absolute values.
• St. Elmo’s Masts Modifications: Fixed a bug that caused the icons to change when moved.

Open Sea:

• Some pirate players who stole career-restricted ships were then confused when they were flagged for PvP. We clarified the text of the tooltip on the Invalid Ship PvP effect. It now says, “This stolen ship is flagged for PvP and can be attacked anywhere on the open sea. The (Captured) versions of all career-restricted ships are invalid.”
• Fixed the problem where you attacked a group of NPCs on the Open Sea and then, in battle, you found a different mix of ships. This was a code bug encountered by many players and we’re glad to have solved it.
• The Ad Hoc Invisibility effect is applied to your ship when you return to the Open Sea from an ad hoc battle. It temporarily prevents you from being seen by enemies, but it also made the enemies invisible to you. That latter part was a bug and we’ve now fixed it. You can see your enemies, but they can’t see you.
• Now if you try to quit or log out on the Open Sea, you will get a 30-second countdown. If you wait out the countdown, you will then log out safely. Otherwise your ship will be left in the Open Sea until the 30 seconds are up, and will be vulnerable to attack. This countdown should now clarify when it is and isn’t safe to log out.
• Many other changes to logout are also in this build. Please see this devlog for details.

Swashbuckling:

• If you respeced your fighting school and neglected to equip an appropriate weapon, you could end up unable to fight. We’ve now removed the fighting school requirements on all weapons. In this way, you won’t be able to use the special skills from your fighting school with the wrong weapon but you will at least be able to use Beat and Strike. We have more improvements planned but this is a start.
• It was possible to use command skills on NPCs only in a few boarding encounters. Those skills are supposed to be an integral aspect of Boarding Combat so we’ve made them work in all boarding encounters.
• Made some changes we believe will improve the problem with teleporting during avatar combat, particularly avatar combat in forts.
• You can no longer use Swashbuckling skills while sailing.
• Reduced boss balance regen slightly at low levels.
• Vicious Lunge now causes a bleed effect instead of a hamstrung effect. Should have been this way all along.
• All pistol attacks now lock you in place for 1.5 seconds. You have to stand still for a bit to take aim.
• Because of recent changes to how Initiative works, some swashbuckling skills that affected initiative stopped working correctly. We changed Intensity, Aggression, and Expert’s Initiative from giving you initiative over time to giving slightly more initiative immediately instead. Edited tooltips to reflect this.
• Ranged attack skills have a minimum 15 second cooldown. This is now visible in the tooltips.
• Unclaimed swashbuckling loot is no longer “lost at sea.” Cuz that doesn’t usually make sense.
• Master’s Rapier: Removed a duplicate balance damage entry on this item.
• Solingen: Corrected spelling.
• Vicious Thrust: Fixed the name in its tooltip.
• Fencing: Off-Hand Shot: Cleaned up the animation a bit.

Missions:

• Added an info service on career trainers to let players know how often they can expect career missions.
• European Trader Missions: We had a bug that prevented you from taking these missions if you were “celebrated” by the appropriate faction instead of simply “loved.” Fixed that.
• Some mission text was being truncated in localized versions because the buffer used for displaying it was too small. Increased that buffer so you can see all the mission text.
• There were about 30 missions that said they offered rewards but didn’t. Fixed them.
• Some enemies in the Tutorial were flying the wrong flag. Fixed that.
• Completed our low-level mission difficulty adjustment pass with some changes to the fourth and fifth towns you play missions in. This included adjusting the levels of some of the missions and removing some missions from some nations to enhance replayability. This concludes this mission difficulty pass and as with the first round, this only affects missions below level 15.
• Cleaned up text in dozens of missions. Places where NPCs let stuff slip they shouldn’t have or had code instead of text for instructions or the like – we’ve fixed a bunch of those.
• Fixed a bug that caused some players to get stuck in Grand Turk with no Longboat Coxswain to return them to their ship.
• Fixed a bug with the Poleacre Refit that prevented completion of the Xebec Refit mission.
• The Piper Gets Paid: Cleaned up some inconsistent text.
• Meet the Father: A couple of the NPCs were positioned strangely. Fixed that.
• Past the Point of Subtlety: Moved the goal of the Fire Ship in this mission. There were a lot of complaints in the forums that it wasn’t reaching its target and causing the mission to fail. We also set the smuggler’s cave to night-time to match the ship room.
• Just In Time: Put the enemy in minor ships and gave them shaky morale. This should make the mission a bit more doable.
• Black Heart, Black Powder: Fixed a bug that prevented the NPC from following you.
• Love Torn Asunder: Clarified the location of the pirate camp.
• Agent in Jeopardy: This mission was reportedly too difficult. Tweaked it. Should be better now.
• Breaking the Spell: Fixed the destination line which was code instead of text.
• Still Waters: Moved the magistrate off the floor. He’s important enough to sit properly in a chair.
• The Finer Things: Half the servants were British when they should’ve been French. Fixed that. Also, they no longer show up on the map as they’re not NPCs you need to interact with. And conversing servants now have sound.
• Chasing the Money: Freed Pirates were walking up to the door, standing inside each other, and waiting. Now they actually leave (despawn).
• Blackbeard’s Wreck: Corrected the encounter objective.
• Battle of Grand Turk: It was possible to leave early, breaking the mission. Fixed that.
• Holy Cargo: Fixed a bug that prevented claiming the derelict in this mission and a few others.
• Prize Denied: If you boarded the enemy instead of sinking him, the text of the mission made no sense. Fixed that.
• A Warm Greeting: Your allies are no longer generic.
• A Well-Found Ship: Was giving the wrong mission rewards. Fixed that.

Economy:

• Turtling Bay was missing the Harbor resource (to go along with its Deep Harbor). Added it.
• Bermuda Trader’s Sloop: Added the recipe to the master ships book.
• Captured ‘Tigre’ Frigate deeds did not have “(Captured)” in the item name. This made the careening camp recipes appear buggy when they weren’t. Fixed that.
• Large Hull: This freetrader advanced recipe had not been updated to include labor cost reductions and the ability to execute it in a medium shipyard instead of a large shipyard. Updated the recipe.

PvP / Contention:

• It was possible in a port battle for defenders to hide in town while attackers were locked out for 30 minutes. Fixed that. Defenders can’t use that door for 30 minutes just like attackers.
• Removed a mission that let you exchange Marks of Victory for Royal Commendations. We still let you exchange Marks of Victory for Commendations, just not Royal Commendations.
• Marks of Victory are now tradable.
• Marks of Victory weren’t being rewarded for sinking other players. Fixed that. You should now get 1 for sinking a level 10-19 ship, 2 for a level 20-29 ship, and so on up to 5 for sinking a level 50 ship. Note it’s the ship level that matters, not the level of the player sailing her.
• The Unrest Supply bundles you’ve been producing are finally useful! You can turn them in for Unrest points just like the other Conquest missions.
• We removed Marks of Victory from some of the Conquest missions and decreased the number rewarded by some other Conquest missions, since they were too easy to get too fast.
• Added a 30-second cooldown timer to the Rebel Agent missions to help stabilize unrest gains achieved that way. We have code fixes for this as well and once we are confident that we’ve solved the issue where players can spam turnins to force contention, we will remove the timers on the missions.
• If players got port unrest just up over the limit to flip the port and then didn’t attack for a few minutes before we calculated whether it was time to flip the port, the unrest decay would be such that the port wouldn’t flip. And the players would need to try again to increase unrest and wait for us to calculate again. (We calculate about once every 10 minutes right now, but that’s tunable.) We’ve moved the unrest decay calculation to occur AFTER the “should we flip the port?” calculation to help with that issue.
• We’ve changed the timer for Port Contention Battles to start the battle 46 hours after the port is flipped instead of 48 hours.
• If a Port Contention battle was supposed to be fought while the mission server was down (or if the mission server crashed during the battle), the port and its contention would end up in a wonky state. Fixed most of that. If a battle is supposed to occur when the server is down, it gets rescheduled for 24 hours later.
• If the zone server that is hosting a Port Contention battle goes down, it restarts on its own as it should. However, the mission server knows the battle already started and doesn’t try to restart it. End result: The players can’t get back into the battle and the defender wins by default. Fixed that. Now the mission server knows to reset the battle to the lobby state so players can enter.

Art:

• Improved the run animation. It’s been making TTobey nuts that this change didn’t make it into the launch build and that retail customers saw the old run.
• When you level up, your character gets a sparkly particle effect (as well as saluting or dancing a jig or whatever) that lasts a few seconds. It’s magic!
• Open Sea: Cleaned up a fort between Les Hettes and Cayenne that had sunk into the sea.
• Open Sea: Cleaned up an invisible barrier near New Orleans – ships should be able to follow the shoreline now. Similarly near Sabanqui.
• Open Sea: Cleaned up the area near Oranjestad so that ships can’t sail through the port.
• Open Sea: Fixed the land around St. Augustine so that you can no longer sail there. You’re not supposed to be able to sail on land in this game.
• Open Sea: Iguana had no floating name in the sky. Fixed that.
• Open Sea: Fixed the land around Somer’s Island so that you can’t sail on the land.
• Cleaned up some graphics artifacts on floaty names in the Open Sea like Baritca.
• Boulders near Jacob’s Clock are no longer floating above the beach.
• Cleaned up some grass and rock texture problems in the Open Sea.
• Santa Catalina was sinking. Fixed that.
• Fixed a missing texture on the church in Tortuga on the Open Sea.
• Corrected several other graphical issues in the Open Sea.
• Belize: Fixed the magistrate not being lined up right with his desk.
• Biloxi: The magistrate has aged a bit.
• Carbaneras: It was too dark to see. Lightened the town a bit.
• Campeche: The soldiers are no longer clones.
• Charlesfort: The Freetrader and Privateer trainers were leaning on thin air. Fixed that.
• Georgetown: Removed a guy whose name was code. He wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.
• Georgetown: Fixed two NPCs that got in each other’s way.
• Grand Turk: Cleaned up the nav mesh in places where players walked above the ground or in the ground. Everyone should walk on the ground.
• Jenny Bay: Fixed some graphical issues like a wall missing from a building.
• Jenny Bay: An NPC had a seam on the back of his head. Fixed that.
• Marsh Harbour: There was an NPC sawing the ground. Fixed that.
• Marsh Harbour: Removed the duplicate pacing lady in the shop.
• Marsh Harbour: Fixed several graphical issues including holes in the world.
• Matthew Town: Fixed an NPC who was leaning on nothing.
• Nassau: Changed from night to day.
• Port Royal: Fixed fencers who weren’t fencing.
• Port Royal: Improved the splats of the tomatoes thrown by the monkey.
• Port Royal: Fixed some NPCs who were interpenetrating crates and sacks.
• Port Royal: Cleaned up several seams and interpenetrations between items.
• Riding Rock: Removed a carpenter who was trying to work where it was too dark to see what he was doing. He could’ve sawed off his hand. Safety first!
• Rosignol: NPC was fishing without a pole. Fixed that.
• Ruddy Cove: Sent a guard outside the Town Boss’ office on vacation. She was working too hard.
• Tampa: When Pirates own the town, there’s no longer a Dutchman standing in a chair in the magistrate’s office. He was in the way.
• Tortuga is a night town, but wasn’t set up that way in data files. This caused problems with interior rooms, which defaulted to daytime. Fixed that.
• Tortuga: There were 3 ladies standing in the same spot. Fixed that.
• Tortuga: We made several other art fixes as well.
• Our art director made a pass through all the rooms and made some technical fixes. This should improve textures and lighting in several places.
• We changed the restriction on your camera in avatar space so you can now see higher into the sky. BSharp thinks this makes the game prettier and less claustrophobic. Misha predicts this will enable you to find more graphical bugs. ;)
• The Spanish and British level 45 privateer coat designs were wrong. Fixed that.
• Fixed problems with NPC body parts intersecting other body parts. For example, some NPCs’ hands were in their legs (instead of resting on their legs).
• Female soldiers didn’t have guns. They’re now fully armed and dangerous.
• Fixed the animation bug that caused the fisherman’s pole to intersect his body as he cast the line.
• Added some contest-winner flags and sails we’d previously missed.
• Fixed graphical issues with prisoners in hanging cages.
• Moved some magistrates off the floor into chairs as would be fitting their station.
• You can no longer move your camera through the ceiling in the Admiralty Office.
• In several towns such as Belize and Bartica, put some bartenders in their proper place and made some taverns a little more lively.
• Fixed an NPC in some taverns with his leg stuck in a barrel.
• Some singing drunks were playing the wrong animations. Fixed that.
• The Tailor Shop now has its own sign on the door.
• Lightened several night-time rooms so it’s easier to see.
• Defend the Town: Fixed some flames that were hanging out in mid-air.
• NPCs were occasionally getting stuck in inlets in the map used by “A Captain in Chains” and other missions. Smoothed out the coast so this should happen less.
• Cleaned up the /boggle emote a bit so hands don’t penetrate hats so much.
• Updated our logo on the Loading… screens.

UI:

• Quick Reference Guides: Revamped, improved to fix layout problems among other things.
• Added more info to the Avatar Controls help UI.
• Ship Controls Window: Made the names of controls and the help for them consistent.
• Help UI: Tweaked to better accommodate ship stats.
• Cleaned up and added some text to Help also.
• Local Map: Improved the window’s texture.
• Character List UI: Expanded to accommodate localized text.
• Economy UI: Changed the way the Economy UI works to better accommodates long deed names.
• Economy UI: Fixed the bug where the tax rate was truncated.
• Economy UI: Tweaked the text color for better legibility.
• Economy UI: Room for text on icons was increased to accommodate localized text. It’s still pretty cramped but better than it was.
• Shop UI: Now can handle 5-digit quantities.
• Shop UI: Increased the width of the tabs to accommodate localized text.
• Fixed the truncation of your speed in the compass.
• Loot UI: Fixed truncation of long loot names.
• Loot UI: Widened to accommodate localized text. However, you can resize this UI smaller if you want.
• Group Loot UI: Cleaned up some graphics problems including improving font color.
• Skill Shop UI: Expanded to accommodate localized text.
• Preferences UI: Tweaked the colors of the controls to better match the rest of the game.
• Preferences UI: Expanded the UI and one of the buttons there in order to accommodate localized text.
• Preferences UI: Widened a Sound Preference tooltip to accommodate localized text.
• Expanded the width of the town list in the World Map to fix the town with the longest name.
• Tweaked the tooltip text on the World Map to make it more legible.
• Fixed some career skill tooltips that were code instead of text.
• Added some tooltips here and there. Reworded some other tooltips for clarity.
• Fixed the text that shows when you /drink.
• Fixed the text in some emotes to improve grammar.

Sound:

• Fixed footstep sounds in the Mansion.
• Decreased the repetitiveness of the prisoner’s declarations of innocence in the Magistrate’s Office in Marsh Harbour. He was annoying!
• Muted the Auctioneer in all shops so he’s not blathering on all the time.

Stability / Performance:

• Sometimes, the data files used to play the game can be corrupted during the download, causing odd problems. We now check them on launch to see if they are corrupted and if so, pop up a message box that you need to run a Full Scan in LaunchPad to fix them.
• Fixed a bug that trapped some players on an infinite Loading… screen.
• If you had a very large Society and many members were actively zoning around, your client would pause or stutter every time. This is probably to blame for many seemingly random pauses and stutters among Society players. Fixed that. There’s still an efficiency change we need to make when they’re logging in and out a lot, but it’s much better than it was.
• If you happened to mouse over something that would show a tooltip just as you were trying to zone, you might crash. Fixed that.
• Improved a lag spike that could occur when trying to load new avatars into view.
• Fixed a graphics memory leak allocating an avatar image.
• Plugged another graphics memory leak. We were making copies of cannons for each ship with a different number of cannons on it, and then leaking them.
• Fixed a memory leak in the Open Sea zone server that was leading to crashes. Besides fixing the cause of the crash, we’ve also set up a mechanism for predicting that sort of problem so if we ever cause another issue like this, we’ll be able to deal with it without crashing. Those of you who have experienced the Open Sea server going down, this fix is for you!
• Made a change to the way we unload textures. Works more cleanly now.
• Fixed a crash that could occur if the texture manager freed a texture incorrectly.
• In an attempt to improve the flashing ocean problem some NVIDIA cards were having, we had made a hacky change while waiting for NVIDIA’s driver fix. Now that they’ve supplied us with updated drivers, we’ve removed that hack.
• Fixed a crash on shutdown that a few players experienced when they had been prompted to fill out a survey.
• Fixed another problem that could cause the game to crash on shutdown. Nothing bad was happening (no data loss), but still crashes are no good so we like to fix them.
• Fixed a crash that could occur in the Login server if we tried to shut it down just as someone was logging in. It didn’t happen on the live servers more than a time or two and nothing bad happened as a result (no data loss) but crashes are bad so we fixed it.

Misc:

• The only way to successfully launch PotBS is via LaunchPad. However, our exe lives on your hard drive. If you double click that by mistake, you see an empty server list and it’s not clear what you did wrong. Now, it pops up an error instead, explaining that you need to run LaunchPad.
• We were logging an ERROR to your log file when nothing bad actually happened. It was confusing our efforts to figure out what was really going on. Cleaned that up.
• Vista was asking some people whether the game needed to be elevated to be run. It doesn’t. So we now tell Vista that. (You do have to be Admin to install and patch, however.)
• Somers Isle is now Somerset.
• Added some additional words to the profanity filter.
• Added some additional names to the reserved names list.
• Fixed log spam that could occur if the game was running behind the Windows login screen.
• Removed some art files from the build that aren’t used. This helped shrink the patch size a little bit.
• We made a change to the way we process art files so that they don’t all have to change when we push a new build with art fixes. This should decrease the size of future patches.

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