Welcome Back!

A lot has happened since we launched, so we’ve listed some of the more exciting changes below:

• Skirmish: Risk-free PvP battles on land and at sea! Join or create customized land or sea battles with up to 48 players with no national restrictions. Click here to find out more.
• Avatar Combat: We’ve completely revamped our Avatar Combat, including skills, animations and NPC behavior. Click here to find out all the details.
• Ship Combat: We’ve revamped all ship combat skill trees to improve balance between careers and to introduce new features. We’ve also improved ad hoc battles to decrease ganking and fixed reinforcement spawn locations.
• Missions: New tutorials, daily missions, treasure map missions and the Black Flags Dread Saints saga await you. We’ve also added epic group missions for mid and high-level players – you won’t want to try these alone!
• Economy: We’ve streamlined production lines, consolidated structures and simplified recipes. We also increased labor from structures and the hold capacity of cargo ships, making it easier for you to be an economic powerhouse.
• Ship Insurance: When a ship sinks, a player now receives an insurance payment that covers much of the value of the ship and the equipped outfitting.
• Conquest: We’ve clarified the UI for determining which ports are in contention and made it easier to create red zones. You can also blockade ports to help force them into contention and you get more and better rewards when fighting for your Nation. Take a look here and here for more details.
• Blockading: Groups of attacking players with their PvP flag enabled will generate unrest every second they blockade a port, until they move or are attacked.
• Port Battles: Each server has a set window during which Port Battles are scheduled. You can see the times for each server here. Once a port battle ends, that port is protected from contention for 96 hours.
• Population Bonuses: If you create a character loyal to a low-population nation, you’ll receive double XP and a 30% chance for bonus loot.
• Careers: We’ve split the Pirate career into Cutthroat and Buccaneer, making it easier for you to play the kind of Pirate you prefer. If you were a Pirate, you’re now a Cutthroat, but feel free to give the Buccaneer career a try!
• Ships: We’ve added lots of new ships, including the Archelon, Bahamut, El Dragon, La Diligente, Leviathan, Alymer, Poseidon, Vengeance and others. Many of these were created by players!
• Open Sea: We’ve improved graphics and performance. NPCs spawn more intelligently, particularly when ports are in contention, to make it easier to find the NPCs you want to sink for missions or conquest.
• UI: We’ve improved much of the UI—most notably Chat. You can have chat bubbles if you like, and we’ve improved the chat channels.
• Stability/Performance: We’ve fixed loads of memory leaks, graphics issues and crashes.
• More! Many, many other improvements and bug fixes, including improved camera, keyboard controls and preference settings.

And every month or so, Flying Lab adds new features, eradicates bugs and balances existing features even more!

Looking for more information on previous builds? Release notes for each build can be found here. You can also find dev logs and other information about recent and proposed changes by checking out the PotBS News Center and the Test Server Forum.