Patch 1.22 is scheduled to launch this week in Pirates of the Burning Sea, and it will begin the process of consolidating all players onto the Antigua and Roberts servers. Flying Lab Software will block the creation of new characters on Defiant, Rackham, and Blackbeard when the patch goes live, and players will then have five weeks to transfer their existing characters to one of the two remaining servers before the other realms are shut down.

For more information on the server consolidation, check out this Q&A on the official forums. You can read more about what to expect in patch 1.22 after the jump.

You’ve probably heard by now that, with next week’s 1.22 patch, we’ll be enabling transfers to help consolidate all characters on to the Antigua and Roberts servers. This change is coming very soon, so we thought we’d gather all the information and answer some of the questions we’ve seen in one place.

First, you probably want details of why we’re doing this and how transfers will work. Most of that important logistical information is posted here. The biggest question we’re still hearing is “When is this happening?” Well, the patch will go live next week. We will announce the scheduled downtime as usual.

Get Your Bearings

The first time you log in after you patch you’ll have to choose an active nation. Once you do this, you’re locked into that nation until the next map win. The transfer service will come online shortly after the patch goes live. You can get to the service by clicking on the “Account” tab above and choosing “Transfer Service” or you can follow this link.

If you currently play on Antigua or Roberts and plan to transfer characters from other servers over, we recommend you wait to log in until after your transfers are complete. Waiting will allow you to choose your active nation with all your characters present.

Once transfers are enabled, we expect there to be some turmoil while people get to know their new servers. Antigua and Roberts veterans, we hope you’ll be friendly to newcomers and welcome them. For those of you transferring, we know this is a tough change, but we think you’ll be happy once you see how much better the game is with higher populations. In acknowledgment of your heritage, we’ll be giving a title out to all transferring players: “Proud Veteran of [server]”.

Port Battle Times

To further accommodate some of our players moving from other servers, we’ll be extending the Port Battle time slot on Roberts to be one hour earlier. We’ll also be watching the peak play times on both servers to see if more PB slot adjustment is needed.

New Features

The other big news with this patch is that we’re also introducing two new features to the game: Active Nation Selection and National Player Faction. You can read the details of those systems in their original devlogs, but we have made a few changes in response to the feedback we got from players on the forums and Testbed.

For Active Nation Selection, you told us you thought 96 hours was too long for a cease fire period. As such, we’re not going to change the time between when the map is won and when it resets, but we are extending the time you can switch sides to 24 hours after the map reset. This means that you have a total of 72 hours after the map win to switch sides but Conquest won’t get held up any longer than it is now.

Another thing we should note that wasn’t in that original devlog: Characters not of a player’s active nation will not receive Conquest awards, since they will not have participated in the nation vs. nation conflict in that cycle.

Most of the feedback we received about National Player Faction focused on whether the system could be abused or not. We don’t think it will be, but we will keep a close eye on things to see if we need to make any adjustments. Together with our revised CS policies, we think you’ll start to see more civil and friendly behavior from the community, both in the game and here on the website. We hope you’ll continue to let us know how all of this impacts you personally.

That about covers it, really. Thank you for being patient as we get all these moving parts in step with each other. We think 1.22 is going to be the start of a very positive change in Pirates of the Burning Sea and we’re happy to have you along for the journey. See you on the open sea!