Raf Van Boom

My feelings are not hurt easily, after all I have been playing NA for a while with all its trolls and toxic characters, with an abrasive person right at the top of the dev team too I'm also not arguing anything, I read the article and thought I'd share. I do think you made a solid game, I wouldn't have sunk many hours into it if it wasn't. The only gripe I really had was the low north american population.

a square rigged ship cannot achieve that kind of heel as it cannot get anywhere close to the wind. 50-60 deg. is all they can. The USS Niagara will capsize at 30 deg heel, a study was done - you can read that here

So wind shadow... Sailing in a line was a thing and with this new mechanic it seems to be impossible to achieve, I think there is a missing link there somewhere. Maybe the effect is too strong?

Could you make the licornes/edinorogs randomly explode every few shots, to keep up with the realism?

Does that mean we get true sailing profiles for these ships as well, something like 90 deg wind angle at most? Weighing anchor under sail? Raising anchor under sail? All those cool maneuvers those ships could do. I mean this is not yacht racing really - cool video

Will you make it so that patrol zones are not affected by the karma system? It would make sense if that were the case I think.

I really like this, I believe this will have good impact on the game's population.

Let's say you have a strong group of people who do nothing but play NA 24 hours a day, and win every single port battle no matter what. Getting the Russians out of the gulf would take roughly what 7-8 months? 115 ports, let's say 2 days between PBs to acquire flags and move supplies. Of course RvR is stale. Also, port upgrades, doing RvR is a bad idea to being with, you lose your upgraded port and what? Regrind all that crap? Uhh, I don't think your idea will have many takers.

The wolves desperately try to convince the sheep to come play victim in the service of the simulation, well, the sheep ain't stupid. https://www.amazon.com/Postmortems-Selected-Essays-Raph-Koster/dp/0996793747

People have been saying the game is dying ever since I started playing it (well I played during sea trials, the population was exploding then). But the truth of the matter is this game is way better with a lot of people playing it - I don't know how to make it more popular especially in North America. North American player base is quite low unfortunately. I know what I would like - more PvP encounters with varied groups of people. Will cheaper ships/upgrades help with that? Maybe, the redoubtable DLC definitely helped, so did the ability to capture any rate of ship in the OW so maybe that's the best direction then? I think that the cost of upgrades, super woods and everything that forces more grind causes PvP to decline and should be reduced so that we may get more weekend warriors etc.

Can you do this instead? Ask the owner clan to pay 10,000 doubloons, IF not paid, then schedule the PvE port battle. It seems like a good compromise.

They can stay rare, the distribution system is bad and promotes macro usage, just like the contract system is bad (also promotes macro usage). Trader ships is the simplest to implement and I'm sure there are more interesting ways to do this also that will require the player to actually play the game rather than buy an alt and write a macro/other hack.

https://www.autoitscript.com/site/ If not this then other software is definitely used - when it says xxx online, I'm sure a large percentage are bots who do just that. This is why making NPC trader ships drop this stuff on occasion is probably the best way to go, that you can't script.

This is not a very good feature and definitely not welcomed by the players.

That'd be great for the health of the game for sure. Admin worked very hard to make pve a pain in the ass for sure, but that may not be entirely good for the game.