Mardi Gras is March 8th this year. Celebrate on the Burning Sea with new mission content and a peacock follow pet! See below for more details.

Release Notes for Testbed build 2.2.85.0 are here.

Differences between 2.2.85.0 and 2.3.39.0 include but aren’t limited to:

Treasure Aisle:

• We had a bug in the way we requested a Station Cash purchase from SOE that could cause difficulties for non-US players. The work-around has been to buy Station Cash directly from SOE and then use Station Cash to buy Burning Sea Notes. Now non-US players should be able to buy Notes in game using a credit card.
• A few Premium accounts were showing up as Free to Play. Fixed.
• We’ve added a Level 50 version of Bey’s Retreat for sale. Bey’s Retreat is a level 25 group mission. The one in Treasure Aisle is level 50 with updated combat and rewards.
• Check out the new bullfrog shoulder pet and the new monkey shoulder pet for sale in Treasure Aisle!
• You have a hat, why shouldn’t your pet? You can now purchase a shoulder monkey with a pirate hat!
• For a limited time only, to celebrate Mardi Gras, a peacock follow pet is available. As are Mardi Gras masks, a hat, and a vest.
• If you missed out on our 3rd Anniversary celebration, you can still acquire the coat from Treasure Aisle. Also, if you wanted one or two bits of the clothing pack from our 2nd Anniversary but didn’t feel like shelling out for the whole thing, we’ve made the individual items available for purchase separately.
• The $20 and $50 Notes bundles are pretty darn popular so we’ve added a $100 Notes bundle.
• Some folks play longer than 2 hours at a time. Rather than having to purchase multiple buffs and remembering to refresh them, we’ve added 4-hour and 8-hour versions of the XP, Loot, Faction, and Doubloon buffs.
• Career & Swashbuckling Respecs have been removed from the Trainer shops and added to the Treasure Aisle for purchase. You can still acquire them by going to the Commendation Exchange Shop in your nation’s capital.
• We’ve added slot bundles for character, structure, and ship slots. You can now buy one slot at a time or buy them all at once.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the fulfilling of Buy Orders with Burning Sea Notes and other RMT items.

Ship Combat / Skills:

• Commissioned Allies can’t be members of a group so weren’t able to use group buffs to help out. Now they can buff players during battle as another player would.
• Fixed an exploit that would enable Commissioned Allies to be summoned during PvP.

Swashbuckling:

• We’ve added a new command skill: Save for Last. Target an enemy and use this skill to tell your commandable allies to attack other enemies first. This skill should be added automatically to your skill list at level 2 or higher.
• Recover Guard (Fencing): The tooltip had code instead of English text. Fixed.

Missions:

• Join the Mardi Gras celebration by entering Mardi Gras Bayou between Biloxi and New Orleans. You can visit the Mysterious Harlequin in starter towns and capitals for more information. :)
• Hollow Man: If you had a follow pet, you couldn’t complete this mission. Fixed.
• The Sea Dog Slayer (French): The mission sent you to the wrong guy for completion. Fixed.
• Empty Shadow: If you went chasing after Pierre before untying Nadine, you could end up stuck. Fixed.
• The Finer Things: Once you completed the mission, the place where you turned it in still said “The Finer Things” even though that mission is no longer available. Fixed. The place shows up on the map because there are still missions to be found there. This fix isn’t retroactive – if you’re like me and have already done the mission, you still see the old text on the map.
• Children of an Angry God: If you had a follow pet, you couldn’t complete this mission. Fixed.
• Turnabout is Fair Play: If you demasted the flagship, it was impossible to complete the mission. Fixed by making it unattackable once it starts for the cave.
• Codifying Blasphemy: The icon on the local map for turning in this mission never appeared. Fixed. This change could affect a number of missions. Let us know if you see duplicate tooltip entries or other issues when you hover over things in the local map or compass.

Economy:

• There was a bug in the Auction House that caused it to list Lieutenant Commissions as a category. Fixed.

PvP / Port Contention:

• When we added new Port Battle rooms, we made it more likely they’d be the ones you’d land in. However, the new rooms have been around long enough, it’s time to re-balance the list. Now each room has an equal chance of being the room you have a Port Battle in.
• If we had an outage during the 72 hours after a map win, changing nations would be prevented after the outage as if it had been too long since the map win. Fixed.

Art / Sound:

• Kerrilyn’s skirt was poking through the barrel off the dock at Jenny Bay. Fixed. The skirt remains inside the barrel now. She’s got enough to do without worrying about that.
• Soft Feathers for female hats looked terrible with most hats. They’ve been moved to the side so they look better with a wider variety of hats.
• The follow monkey tended to lose an eye when playing dead. Fixed.
• Added a little variety to the Loading… screens.
• Golden Lake: With high infrastructure, NPC were standing up to their ankles in carpet. Fixed.

UI:

• Moved the Close button on the Captain’s Club ad so free players with low screen resolutions can close it.
• Added a Feedback button to the Options menu. Now you can give us feedback while you’re thinking about it during the game by pressing Esc and then clicking on Feedback to bring up the survey.
• If you are a Captain’s Club member and the Login server rebooted, you could end up seeing the UI that says you’re a free player and encourages you to subscribe. We made that less likely to occur.
• We converted TGAs for the UI to PNGs. This saves about 100M of disk space for you and makes it less likely that our artists will break the UI like they did with the first 2.2 build to Testbed. Let us know if you see any graphical issues with the cursor, chat, or other UI elements.
• There was a bug in the port info UI that caused it to sometimes show up with code instead of text and also not show valid numbers. Fixed.

Stability / Performance:

• Fixed an exploit that could enable F2P accounts to receive extra econ slots and such for free.
• Fixed a rare zone server crash by minimizing chances of a race condition. Let us know if you see any performance issues, particularly with animations and graphical effects.
• Fixed a rare zone server crash that was caused by you zoning before your Lt. Comm was ready.
• Fixed a very rare zone server crash that was caused by surrendering to a group leader when they weren’t in the zone.
• Fixed a crash in the authentication server that could have caused new players to lose Burning Sea Points.
• Fixed a very rare mission server crash.
• Fixed a game crash that could occur if we were trying to update your UI when all you could see was a Loading… screen. We don’t need to update your UI if you can’t see it so we no longer try.
• Fixed one cause of the Out of Memory error. Also added additional logging in an attempt to find and fix other causes.

Misc:

• Updated translations from SOE.
• We updated some Alchemy bits. You should see no difference – this was only to improve our build process.