Pirates of the Burning Sea : All About Skirmishing

         I’m pleased to have the opportunity to introduce a long-awaited feature that will be going live in patch 1.14: the skirmish system! This is the first completely new major game system we’ve introduced since launch, and we’re giving it extra Testbed exposure. You’ll be able to try out skirmish on Testbed as early as the 1.13 release coming out this week. There’s still a lot of polish work going into the system, so what you see on Testbed will change before it goes live. We’ll be giving you more information on Testbed skirmish events in the near future.

         Skirmish has been at the top of our major feature wishlist for a long time, and we introduced duels shortly after launch as the first step towards the complete system. I’ve been leading the development side of the implementation. Full time work began on skirmish behind the scenes while the Avatar Combat revision was in the spotlight, which gave us time to get the big pieces of the system in place before we began expanding the Skirmish Strike Team. The strike team’s currently focused on the last-mile effort on filling in the gaps and polishing it up into a smooth and exciting experience that’s going to be heaps of fun for lots of players. We’ve been running massive company-wide battles twice a week in addition to daily strike team matches. Once we started running the playtests, we quickly found that everyone would be five minutes late if we called a brief meeting before a match ended. Those five minutes provided just enough time for everyone to finish killing each other before the meeting.