What do you want? The devs to share their scrum board?
This is a pretty big complex piece of software. My understanding is the dev team is quite small. I would also imagine there are ops issues that the players have very little visibility into unless things go horribly wrong. Some feature fixes are easy as tweaking parameters (penetration and such). Architectural features are much harder (revamping crafting) especially if you are trying to simultaneously support an active player base.
Honestly I could not care less about the grey/blue port UI. That is the LAST thing they should be worrying about.
Those numbers seem low. Are they for crafting grey ships?
I too am stuck building many Frigates trying to get a Inger BP. But on the whole I seem to get a BP on average every 3rd or 4th ship I craft, not every 20th.
BTW... If you're looking for a quality exceptional Frigate in Oak please let me know. I have a few around...
You make the traders AI, not the escorts. The player is sailing the escort.
Trader AI is easy, run like hell and your best wind angle. Escape ASAP.
I'm in my Trinco and I have two loaded Trader Snows controlled by AI.
I think you are missing the point. If you think the game will sell well in the US (outside of China the largest Video Game market in the world) if new users from the US log in for the first time and see their native land squished then you're in for a surprise.
The game needs a self balancing mechanism that where the better a faction is doing the harder it gets for that faction.
The ability to do live fire training with basically zero risk or cost?
The ability to teleport a half of a fleet to any outpost in seconds?
When you join pirates you get to keep everything (with an ounce of planning)?
I suspect that battle instance limits being based on number of ships and not BR is about keeping control of the number of database accesses per second. A cutter sailing around and fighting is probably hitting the databases nearly as hard as a first rate sailing around and fighting.