Update: Group Strength Removal (Legacy)

Among the initial settings the game loads was an ancient "Camera Height" value, which dated back to the earliest days of the game. While this value could be changed via a special GM-only debugging command, for Players, the default camera height was simply not adjustable. In Vision's opinion, the original FLS Camera Height setting was somewhat high, and it resulted in the player's view always being elevated. It did not allow for good screenshots, and if the Player tried to zoom in, it only gave a view of the top of the head.

In this update, the Camera Height has been changed to be more eye-level with the characters. The zoom path still keeps the high view when pulled back at maximum zoom, but allows for a more in-the-world level of interaction when at middle-zoom levels. Full-body, eye-level screenshots can now be captured, and the world is just a bit more immersive when your view is down at the characters' level.

For new installations, this will be the default that it will start out with. For existing installations, you can find a new "Camera Height" Slider under your Graphics Preferences. Adjust it to where it feels best for you!

Many items which were formerly not tradable or salable on the Auction House can now be traded and/or sold, including:

●  All Writs
●  All Bonus Doubloon Books
●  All Bonus Experience Books
●  All Bonus Faction Books
●  All Bonus Loot Books
●  Level 50 Advances

Go through your inventory and see what is suddenly marketable!

Several items have been removed from Treasure Aisle on Legacy. The reason for this was that since Legacy requires a Subscription to access (and the Subscription provides all of these Account Upgrades), not only are the items and upgrades redundant, but their presence in Treasure Aisle could lead to Players accidentally purchasing them without needing to. The items removed include:

●  Dock Slots
●  Econ Slots
●  Ship Insurance
●  Ship Storage
●  Career Respec
●  Swashbuckling Respec
●  Society Charter

A 4K UHD video short has been made to promote the Burning Sea! It can be viewed by clicking on the following link:

PotBS Trailer (2023)

Two ships are being adjusted in this Build. Specifically, the ships and the changes to them are as follows:

●  Arcadia Mastercraft: Ship Level is increasing from 44 to 45
●  Defiant Mastercraft: Combat Level is increasing from 40 to 50

One of the classic problems experienced by Captains upon the Burning Sea involved the struggle over Port Battle Timers. Much gnashing of teeth and wails of dismay were often heard when a Port Battle wound up being scheduled at some ungodly hour of the morning. While some grim-faced Captains turned out of bed at those hours, responding to the call of their alarm clocks, swilling coffee, hoping that they would be one of the chosen to receive an invitation, most did not -- and so "off-hour" Flips became a way to not only win the resulting Port Battles more easily (because few enemies would turn up in defense), but also a major bone of contention.

The reason for multiple Live servers was largely to ensure an equitable spread of Port Battle timers. So, you had (for example) an EU Server and an NA Server, each with separate Port Battle windows to match the "prime time" of their respective populations. This did not really solve the problem of Battles at the edges of that window, unfortunately. Some Players always got left out.                      

With the emergence of Legacy, the problem of having only a single-server, single-port-battle-window but a truly global population rapidly manifested. Many players were unwilling to participate in Port Battles that were scheduled to happen in the wee hours of the morning (their time), and so were effectively denied the ability to participate in RvR content.

In an initial attempt at addressing this, Vision manually set the Port Battle hours for Legacy to be centered upon the greatest population online at the time (which happened to be EU-centric). This did not serve to make the edges of that 12-hour window any more appealing, and that is where the FLS system automatically preferred to schedule Off-Hour Port Battles... in the "first available" slot. This classic flaw proved just as irritating to Players on Legacy as it did in the original v2.10 Build from FLS.

Rather than follow the original FLS model and create multiple Legacy Servers (each aimed at servicing the needs of a different Time Zone), Vision's Design and Engineering teams set to work to try and devise a more equitable solution than the original Port Battle Scheduling system designed by FLS.

It has taken a while to be finalized, but this new system is finally ready for release -- a brand-new Port Battle Scheduler that not only continually adjusts the overall Port Battle window to remain centered upon the highest point of the daily population curve (which ensures the greatest number of Port Battles will be available to the largest number of players), but also schedules Battles to take place at optimal times when set against that population. It also ensures that Battle times partly relate to Flip times, so canny Captains can still try to make Port Battle schedules a little awkward for their opponents.

We recognize the new system is not perfect, for although the largest population will be able to engage deeply, there will always be smaller populations who are in distant Time Zones and will be unable to participate in RvR as strongly as the primary population. However, looking at the numbers, we feel that so long as there are a reasonable number of flips taking place, populations at the edges should still be able to participate in more Port Battles than under the original FLS Port Battle Scheduling System.                     

More detail on exactly how the Port Battle Scheduler works will be made available in the #announcements Channel of the official Game Discord Server, as well as in the Dev Blog section of the Game Web Site.

Update: Faster Downloads, Faster Updates

Pirates of the Burning Sea uses a third-party tool called PATCH as part of its installation / upgrade system. Back when we switched over to using it (and moved away from the classic FLS/Portalus era BitRaider tool), there were complaints from users at far distant locations (those with high latency) that they were seeing very poor download speeds. These download speeds were the result of PATCH only utilizing a single download channel. The greater the latency between the downloader and the Datacenter, the slower that single data channel would effectively be.

Working with MHLabs, the creator of the tool, we helped get a multi-threaded "slice download" system built into PATCH, which splits all files to be sent into slices, and sends them out over multiple download channels, to be reassembled on the receiving side. While the speed of each individual channel may be less than the best possible speed of a Player's connection, the use of many of them at the same time ensures that Players can wring the last drop of download speed out of their connection. As our CDN has its own 10 Gbps network feed, Players can usually fully saturate their own personal downlink when installing (or upgrading) the game.

A future version of PATCH (the Enterprise version) will allow us to include both LEGACY and LIVE server builds within a single Launcher. Players will be able to be install, update and launch various Builds right from a single Launcher. We are hoping to be able to roll this newer version out around September or October of 2023 (if PATCH Enterprise is ready by then).                   

In this current release, PATCH has been upgraded to use 32 download threads. Both LIVE and LEGACY are now using it. Enjoy!

Update: Improved Network Performance

From the outset, the game's network performance was something that Vision wanted to improve, but tearing apart the game and building an entirely new, modern network layer utilizing encapsulated UDP over TCP (to eliminate head-of-line blocking latency concerns and increase reliability) simply wasn't feasible from a labor perspective. As an alternative, we experimented with many different tweaks, from various congestion controls to utilizing different peering fabrics. We even set up new edge networks for the game servers on dedicated 10 Gbps fiber links. But although each of these elements created some minor improvement, the core problem derived from UDP did not change. I.e., once the packets left our network they were subject to all the whims, whiles and petty vicissitudes of the Internet. Any bad hop or packet loss on the route between our Datacenter and a Player would often mean trouble.

To explain why this was, the network layer of Pirates of the Burning Sea was crafted by programmers in an era that had far less internet traffic than is seen today (a mere 6.5 Petabytes per month in 2007 versus nearly 400 Exabytes per month today), far fewer hops and transits, and one in which the conventional wisdom was to utilize UDP to reduce latency.

FLS's desire for less latency (and their choice to use UDP) was driven by the fact that many aspects of the game perform best on low-latency connections. Veteran players know this all too well -- players located closer to the Servers have historically always enjoyed an edge over those dealing with higher latency.

This difference was most apparent in FLS's highly-latency-sensitive Avatar Combat (AvCom) system, which had people lagging and rubberbanding around the ship during boarding actions if their latency was above a certain level. Also, at times Players with not just high latency, but also those on poor internet connections with packet loss (aka in "rough seas") would find themselves unable to raise sail, fire their guns or even move on the Open Sea, not to mention getting unexpectedly disconnected.

The game seemed to grow even more sensitive on the network side of things over the passing years, but this was actually due to the decline in quality of the Internet over time as opposed to back in 2007-2008. Today there are many more substandard hops out there, a lot more problems, and a whole lot more traffic. Using connectionless, unreliable UDP datagrams for the game's network traffic would rarely be a current choice for any modern game that expected to have players all over the world like the Burning Sea does.

As was mentioned above, UDP does have some benefits, but in our application, faster routing and lower latency are the ones FLS was aiming for. But because UDP is a "fire and forget" / "best effort" protocol, if UDP packets aren't making it to their destination, the sending computer doesn't know about it, and so doesn't re-send them. This has been the core problem.

Because of this in-built limitation, UDP is inherently an "unreliable" protocol, and relies on the internet to ensure blind delivery of its packets to their destinations. This is not the case with TCP, which tracks every packet and resends any missing ones. While this adds some latency due to the required acknowledgement of each packet [and potential retransmission of missing ones] plus also being occasionally subject to things like fragmentation, head-of-the-line blocking, etc., etc., overall TCP's reliability when it comes to getting packets where they belong across the Internet carries over very well within the game. Things like rubberbanding, non-responsive sailing controls, stuttering AvCom, and disconnections become vanishingly rare when using TCP instead of UDP.

After months of trying to improve things from an infrastructure perspective, we eventually chose to abandon UDP entirely -- essentially, forcing the game to use TCP instead of UDP. The change was initially offered as a temporary .ini file for public testing on the official Game Discord Server. It was met with solid reviews, and solved a lot of Player issues. Following several months of public testing, these network changes have been added to the main Game Client in this update. Now, both LIVE and LEGACY use only TCP -- never UDP. The game experience is notably improved when playing from a poor connection.

Update: The Return of Antigua

The Live Server Antigua suffered database corruption late last year and was taken offline for repair. However, after doing so it was discovered that the [rather-expensive] backup system that we had built for it, which backed up the Server every 15 minutes, had stopped functioning properly for Antigua at some point in the intervening months, had not sent out any alerts and no one had noticed. Only when we pulled down the latest backup was it seen that Antigua's backup data was months out of date. (Roberts' were fine, btw)

This was very much an all-hands-on-deck moment, as Engineering went through our options with a fine-toothed comb.

We did not want to perform a massive roll-back of such a duration, so after much internal discussion we decided to undertake a fairly major operation -- attempting to rebuild the months of missing data using reference data from a different database. The process was greatly complicated by the fact that data in the main database used by Intrinsic Alchemy stores its data in binary blobs, rather than a more straightforward and easy-to-access manner.

Worse yet, Antigua's database issue had happened at the worst possible time, when the Engineering Team's hands were already full to overflowing getting Legacy ready for launch. As a result, we had to decide whether to postpone the launch of Legacy while we worked on Antigua, or to postpone getting Antigua back online while we focused all of our efforts on launching Legacy.

Although it was very much a rock-and-a-hard-place type of choice, because Legacy had already been delayed more than once, it was reluctantly decided that we would have to postpone starting the work on Antigua until after Legacy was online and stable. We wanted to have Legacy out in time for Christmas, and working on Antigua first would necessitate pushing back Legacy's planned launch into the New Year. So the issue of Antigua was temporarily shelved, and all efforts were put on Legacy.

Legacy launched at Christmas as planned and promised, to great fanfare. But there were issues -- almost no launch goes perfectly, and Legacy was no exception. Quite a few months passed following the Launch until we had managed to get things stable -- there were plenty of problems at the start. Networking. Load Levels. Crashes. Disconnections. But one by one, the vast bulk of these issues were solved. Legacy and Roberts were eventually running smoothly, and players were not getting disconnected, crashing or having most of the major issues that were seen at the outset... although there were (and still are) a number of outstanding issues, such as the Open Sea Battle Marker clickability bug, the 6-vs-6 bug, etc., etc. that had arisen during our upgrade of the game's Visual Studio Libraries to VS2019. But as things were mostly stable, despite the above-mentioned bugs still present, we deemed the time was right to turn our efforts over to the repair of Antigua, and to get back to the outstanding Legacy bugs once Antigua was online again.

Work began on the repair, and as Engineering expected, it was slow and tedious, soaking up weeks and weeks of time. Even progress on this current update was drastically slowed by it. Periodically, all work also had to stop to address urgent issues on Legacy.

But with all of that behind us, we are now almost at the point where Antigua will reopen. The vast majority of Accounts on Antigua did not lose anything, and will be found exactly as they were upon logging in. But despite best efforts, not all of the damaged data could be recovered -- particularly, some of the newest Accounts that had been created were damaged, and some of the most-recent activity was lost. Even some Auction House data needed to be restored using the last backup.

We have a list of all affected / damaged Accounts. We will be sending each Player from those Accounts an e-mail explaining that their Account was damaged, and providing them with a compensation package to help them rapidly recover from the loss. That e-mail will go out the day after Antigua appears once again in the Server List, a few days after this Update goes live (and this Newsletter goes out).

Also, the backup system has been repaired and is working properly now -- with new safeguards in place, to ensure any issue with it will be immediately brought to Engineering's attention.

Please note that there have been some changes on Antigua to accommodate its extended downtime. These mainly involve the extension of all Auction House Listings and an alteration of the time allowed for an unsold item being given to the Poor if not picked up.

Consequently, we hope that the reopening of Antigua will go well, but Customer Support will be standing by to assist if there are any issues, concerns or questions.

Currently, Antigua is visible in the Server Directory in Offline Mode. Once the final work is completed by Engineering, Antigua will transition to Locked Mode, and will remain there while Customer Support completes a full functionality sweep of the Server. At that point Engineering will return Antigua as a valid target for BSN Purchases in the BSN Store and the doors will be opened for Players at an appointed hour, which will be announced in advance on the official Game Discord Server.

Update: The Legacy Server

The latest big event for PotBS was the launch of the long-awaited LEGACY Server. This fresh-start Server opened its doors just before Christmas on December 23, and what a great Christmas present it was! Holding vast appeal for Veteran players, Legacy proved very popular, and many long-lost players returned to play the game they loved -- the classic PotBS experience that only Legacy can provide.

LEGACY is an earlier version of PotBS, based on v2.10 of the game (the build where Society Warehouses were introduced). It features a more classic array and diversity of ships, skills, ship stats, tactics, economy pipelines and much more. Yet at the same time, Legacy has been updated to take advantage of Vision's recent modern enhancements, such as the Automatic Chat Translation System, in which the game's Chat is automatically translated back-and-forth between Captains into the various Game languages. So, if your Game language is set to English, and another Player's game is set to Spanish (or German, etc), each Player will see the Chat in their own language, and can freely speak back and forth with one another. As PotBS is played globally, the Automatic Chat Translation System has shown ever-increasing value.

Although the Live Servers (v2.17) remain Free-to-Play, the Legacy Server (v2.10) requires a Subscription to access. The presence of the Subscription grants benefits to the entire Account, including both the Live and Legacy Servers. An Active Subscription provides the following benefits (across all Servers) while active:

●  6 Character Slots per Nation
●  10 Economy Slots per Account
●  5 Ship Slots per Character
●  Dry Dock (100 Ship Storage Slots per Character)
●  Insurance compensation for every ship lost
●  Epic Missions Unlocked
●  Society Creation without Charter
●  +10% Increased XP Gain
●  +10% Increased Loot Chance
●  +10% Increased Faction Gain
●  +20% Discount on Purchases made with Burning Sea Points

Ongoing 2023 Tech Refresh

Following the release of Legacy and as part of Vision's tech refresh for 2023, several additional servers joined the PotBS Cluster to support ongoing development. The first of these was a Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd with two Gold-class 2.7 GHz 18-Core CPUs, 768 GB of RAM, Dual Redundant Hot-Swap Power Supplies, dual 10G XFP Fiber Network Ports, dual 40G InfiniBand Network Ports and a total of 28 (24+4) dual-port 12G SAS SSD in its internal RAID Arrays. The second (and third) servers were Dell R640s, each with two 3.0 GHz Xeon Gold CPUs, Dual Redundant Hot-Swap Power Supplies, dual 10G XFP Fiber Network Ports, dual 40G InfiniBand Network Ports and two dedicated high-speed edge Network Interfaces.

The next (and last) four servers of 2023 scheduled to be configured and added to the Vision Cluster are two Dell PowerEdge R830, with four Intel E5-4667 18-Core Intel Xeon CPUs, 1.5 TB of RAM and sixteen 12G SAS SSD in their internal RAID Arrays, along with two more Dell PowerEdge R740xd, with 24 dual-port 12G SAS SSDs apiece. Once that is done (they have been sitting on the side and waiting now for a few months while we have been busy with other tasks), the stage will be set for our rolling server upgrade, as well as our back-end network upgrade, which will take us from 40 Gbps (QSFP+) up to 100 Gbps (QSFP28). This upgrade will more than double the maximum possible throughput of each Server when sending data over the Internal Network.

All of the puzzle pieces for that upgrade are also on hand (100 Gbps QSFP28 Switch, 100 Gbps Network Cards, QSFP28 Cables, etc), but the two upgrades represent a pretty solid chunk of work, and so have been pushed back a few times already. Several weeks of focused effort will be required, as the first stage is a rolling upgrade of all the servers in the cluster.

What this means is that one by one, each major server in the Vision Cluster will first have all of its workload shifted to other servers. Then, after being emptied out and shut down, the server will be disconnected and extracted from the rack before being taken to a work area. Opened up, it will have a new QSFP28 100 Gbps Network card installed, as well as all of its existing SSD Drives replaced, a new Dell BOSS M.2 RAID-1 Boot Card installed, all Firmware updated, then configured from the ground up with a newer Hypervisor version before being slotted back in the rack, connected back up to all of Vision's networks (including the new 100 Gbps network) and -- after re-integration and several rounds of testing -- it will have its original workload restored. Once all of the Servers have been upgraded and the 100 Gbps Network has been fully tested, our internal traffic will be moved onto the new, faster network.

All of these ongoing changes help us to deliver an ever-better experience to our Players, both here in 2023 and beyond.
                               

Update: The Bounty Hunter System!

Fifteen years ago, when Pirates of the Burning Sea was first released by FLS and published by Sony, it had some bugs in its code. Some of these were obvious, and easy enough to fix over time. Some were less obvious, and a few of those were found (and exploited) by unscrupulous Players, causing a huge amount of damage to the living game economy before they were found and fixed.

The chaos wreaked by these sorts of things was significant over the early years of the game. The Engineers at FLS, Portalus and even now at Vision, all worked to rapidly fix such bugs as soon as they were uncovered. But since they are not obvious, a common challenge across all of the teams has been to find the bugs in the first place! Just when they thought they'd closed them all, another would turn up that had existed from the earliest days of the game.

At the start of 2023, Vision announced a new system of recruiting the assistance of the Players themselves to help find and close these kinds of bugs. Called the Bounty Hunter System, it is a program which directly rewards Players for reporting exploitable bugs.

To participate, Players who have knowledge of an exploitable bug simply need to write up a clear set of instructions on what the exploit does and exactly how it is performed, then e-mail it in to Pirates@VisionOnlineGames.com. Our Testing Team will first work to duplicate the exploit -- and, if it is found to be valid, the reporting Player will be gifted a lavish set of awards -- which can include BSN, Special Props, Ships, Rare Items, special Titles and much more, all based on how critical the reported bug was.

Remember -- bounty rewards are given out on a first-come, first-served basis -- this means that the first person to report a particular exploitable bug will be the one to win the bounty for it! So, if you know of any exploitable bugs, don't wait -- become a Bounty Hunter, write in to us about them and let us get cracking on fixing them!

Update: Customer Support Remains Open Seven Days a Week

Vision Customer Support is still available seven days a week, due to the added coverage provided by GM Red Jaq rejoining the Customer Support Team. In addition to helping out on the Customer Support side of things, Red is also in the game regularly as a GM.

                 

Legacy and the Subscription System

While the Live Servers (Roberts & Antigua) are both Free-to-Play, the Legacy Server requires a Subscription to play.

The Subscription System is accessed on the Game Web Site, https://burningsea.com. To access the site, you will need either an existing Account or to create a new, free Account. Once you log in, and are taken to your Account Dashboard, in the top right quadrant you will see your Subscription Details (shown below), such as if your Subscription is Active or not, and how many days remain in your current Subscription. To get started, simply click the "Subscribe Now" Button, shown below:

Clicking this will take you to the Game Store, where you can choose the length of your Subscription. Players can select a simple one-month Subscription, or can elect to purchase larger recurring subscriptions and take advantage of Discounts. Currently, the price for the three recurring Subscription plans are as follows:

1 Month (30 Days): $7 USD per Month
6 Months (180 Days): $6 USD per Month (14% Discount)
12 Months (364 Days): $5 USD per Month (29% Discount)

Subscriptions do not automatically renew. You would need to come back and pick up an additional Subscription at some point, when your plan finally runs out of days.

After Subscribing, the next step is to Download and Install the Legacy Client below!

How to Download and Install the Legacy Client

At this point in time the Legacy Server requires a separate Installation than the Live Servers (Antigua & Roberts). When you install Legacy, it will create its own Desktop Icons, separate and distinct from those of the Live Servers.

To download and install Legacy, simply follow these steps:

STEP 1: Go to the Game Web Site at https://burningsea.com and log in to your Account.

STEP 2: Click the DOWNLOAD Button at the top right once you are logged in.

STEP 3: Click on the Legacy Server Download button to download the Legacy Installer!

STEP 4: Run the Installer and let the Legacy Launcher download and install the Legacy Client.

STEP 5: Run the Legacy Launcher in the future from the new icon on your Desktop!

Be aware that when you are running the Live Server Client (v2.17), you will not see the Legacy Server in the list of Servers! Similarly, when you are running the Legacy Server Client (v2.10), you will not see the Live Servers. You must Download and Install the Legacy Client in order to see and access the Legacy Server!