Ahoy everyone,

Have ye noticed it’s starting to get a little… chilly outside? As a matter of fact, too, it seems the leaves on the trees are starting to change into varying shades of colors. There’s red and orange… yellow too!

This can only mean one thing: Fall is soon to be here! And that means Hollowed Woods will soon return as well! How soon, mayhaps? Well, as soon as TONIGHT, September 15th @ 12AM Eastern Time!

But that’s not all we have to discuss today. With the 10th Anniversary of the closing of Pirates of the Caribbean Online rapidly approaching, the team has discussed various ideas for the vision of TLOPO’s future.

Looking Toward the Future

A major focus we’ve been working on has been increasing player engagement, satisfaction, and retention. We’ve achieved this by improving in-game rewards, balancing the game to be more entertaining and faster paced, adding countless quality of life changes, and overall game performance improvements.

Over the last year, we’ve seen an increase in account registrations and amount of time being spent playing the game. Last week alone we had almost 1,000 brand-new accounts registered and 40,000 hours played!

So, what exactly is our vision? We want to make the game be as vibrant as Pirates Online was during its best days many years ago. We’ve been spending a lot of time analyzing reviews of the game and initial playthroughs with the goal of identifying the most common issues new players come across.

One issue we have observed consistently is new players have a difficult time finding other players. We typically have 300 to 500 players concurrently online during the evening hours, with occasional spikes going higher. Last week there were 500 players online one evening, during this time we still observed that most brand-new players had a really hard time finding other online players in the game.

Phase 1: Ocean Consolidation

Starting tonight, we will be consolidating the amount of Oceans from 16 to 8. We have decided to make this change to concentrate the player base, making it easier for pirates to crew up and embark on different adventures together.

While many experienced players in the game have no difficulty navigating to different in-game Oceans, we’ve noticed that many new players either 1) do not realize multiple Oceans exist 2) do not fully understand what Oceans are 3) do not know how to navigate to other Oceans.

Lastly, while we will be beginning the consolidation of the servers this evening, we are still considering adjustments to the name list. We recognize that different pirates and guilds in the community may have deep attachments to the server they play on. We want to hear from you what servers we should keep and which we should remove. Leave a comment below sharing your opinion! Our current list is below.

To Be Kept:

1. Abassa
2. Andaba
3. Bequermo
4. Cortos
5. Exuma
6. Fragilles
7. Levanta
8. Valor

To Be Removed:

1. Aventurado
2. Barten
3. Cortola
4. Deseros
5. Juntos
6. Poderoso
7. Sabada
8. Tortos

Phase 2: Original Island Oceans and PvP Oceans

Over the nearly 10 years we have been working on TLOPO, two of the top feature requests we have received from the community have been…

    1) Add back the Original Islands.

    2) Add a PvP Island/Server.

We’re excited to announce we have been hard at work implementing both of these features and they are just about ready to ship. We have a little more work to do before we release them, but expect them to launch soon.

To accommodate the new Original Island server, we will be designating one of the existing 8 Oceans as an “OG Island Ocean”. When on this server, you will experience Pirates Online with the original island layout.

To accommodate for the new PvP Ocean, we will be adding back a 9th server. This server will be opt-in and will have clear signage that it is a friendly-fire enabled zone. Higher risk also means higher rewards.

We will have more details about what the PvP Server entails soon! Leave a comment below with any suggestions you have for this feature.

In Conclusion

With the 10th Anniversary of Pirates Online’s closure in the coming days, we would be remiss not to mention the Pirates Online Preservation Project. This project has an aim to preserve artifacts from both POTCO and TLOPO for generations of players to come.

If you happened to miss our previous announcement, be sure to go and explore the archives! Including never-before-seen Game Design Documents given to us by the original creator of Pirates of the Caribbean Online!

Fair winds, mates!
The Crew @ The Legend of Pirates Online