According to a recent developer's blog, the Invicible server will be shut down in January and a new server, Defiant, will be set up to to serve Australia's needs, with port battles scheduled for 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific, or 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. GMT.

Since we’ve changed the timing of the port battles, some players have found that the servers they play on have port battles scheduled outside of their playtime. Given that we’re opening up Defiant specifically to provide more options for port battles, we’re going to go all the way, and provide all players one (1) transfer to any server so that they can move to a server that better matches their playtime. The port battle times for each server are posted here.

This is all happening because their partnership with Bigpond will not be renewed. You can read the full details here or below.

MMO Portal has put together its 2009 MMO Calendar featuring autographed artwork from numerous games. The list includes Age of Conan, DC Universe Online, Dofus, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Guild Wars, Pirates of the Burning Sea, RuneScape, The Agency, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft.

All of the proceeds go directly to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which treats children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases.

Also, everyone who purchases a calendar will be entered to win one of 10 prizes for each game, including boxed copies, premium accounts, 30- and 60-day passes, closed beta accounts and more. More information can be found here.

Build 1.9: Your Just Rewards went live this morning. Since it is a milestone build, it contains about a month's worth of fixes and changes.

Main changes include:

• You can now change your clothes anywhere in port. See this thread for more info.
• Groupmates can no longer sit safely outside the red circle, artificially raising your Group Level. See this thread for more info.
• There are ship and skill adjustments, too, detailed below.

The full patch notes can be found here or after the jump.

CEO of Flying Labs Entertainment, Rusty Williams, has updated the Pirates of the Burning Sea community with a new devblog !

Right now what we’re most focused on is the new revamp of the avatar combat system. Ever since we shipped, we’ve been planning to go back and re-examine the sword fighting from first principals. Ship combat has had the advantage of being built, ripped apart, and rebuilt. Avatar combat has been going through the same process, and you can read more about it in Isildur’s dev log where he describes the thought process that went into building the new system.

He even mentions the word we've all been waiting for: Expansion!

The Pirates of the Burning Sea developers have been quite busy lately. They've posted blogs on fighting gold spam and the revisions to avatar combat, and announced the Big John's Bane event will be held on the Testbed tomorrow, Oct. 17, at 4 p.m. PST.

Check the links above for the full announcements, or keep reading below for the blog regarding avatar combat. It's incredibly in-depth and shows exactly how the devs go about fine-tuning elements of the game.

To summarize all of the announcements: they are focusing on blocking spammers and getting them out of the game quickly; avatar combat is being reworked from the ground up to open fights with "cool special moves" and use fewer skills in longer chains; and the players who are part of the fleet that sinks Big John will recieve a special title in the live game.