Decoy

I'm totally on board with this.

I accidentally pull people all the time while attacking NPC trader ships. A confirmation pop-up would be very convenient.

This already exists. You can hit the powder magazine and the ship will explode. It's just pretty rare.

1. Provisioning. I think the game would benefit in many ways by having a provisioning system. Crew would require food and fresh water the entire time at sea. If you run out of either, you would have the option of going into a "scavenging" stance to fish/hunt/whatever to try and get more supplies together (what you're able to get would depend on where you're currently anchored and what the weather is like: anchored near an island? Chances of finding food are good. Is it raining? Chances of collecting fresh water are good, etc.) If you are out of food or water for too long, crew morale drops to critical levels and the crew mutinies. You lose your ship as though it had been sunk. Combat would require having both powder and shot. The cannon info tool-tip would clearly state how much powder the cannon requires to fire. Multiply by the number of cannons and the number of shots you're comfortable setting out with. Now, this may seem like pointless micromanagement. But I think it opens up an quite a few interesting gameplay decisions to the player. Long trips suddenly become more than just "set heading, watch Netflix." If you find yourself in a battle that you did not intend, you have to decide whether you have the necessary shot and powder or whether you should just make a run for it. This also ties in pretty closely with what I would like to see next. 2. Realistic (or pseudo-realistic) Wind Patterns (including calms) I know that there's a lot of debate about calms. Many people think that they would add nothing to the game. And, as the game currently stands, they would be right. Calms would merely delay you; a pointless time-sink. But if you have to worry about having necessary food and fresh water for your crew, suddenly calms become a lot more interesting and dangerous. Planning your trips according to the prevailing winds (which would be clearly indicated on the map) becomes a lot more important. Would it be possible to, even with the best laid plans, find yourself becalmed by no fault of your own and lose your ship to a mutiny? It would (assuming you didn't provision appropriately). But that's a peril of the sea, every bit as much as the peril of being jumped and destroyed by enemy players. It would be a calculated risk that people would have to consider before disembarking. 3. Storms I would love to see some proper storms. Storms that pull you out of the open world and drop you on a battle map for a certain period of time. If you don't sail through them correctly, they will actually sink your ship. And even if you do sail through them correctly, will still tear you up. Even if I do literally everything correctly, I want to at least be blown off course. 4. Out-of-Battle Crew Mechanics Right now, the ships we sail might as well be model ships. They're beautiful and accurate, but lifeless. The game is completely lacking in personality. It's almost clinical. I think adding out-of-battle crew interactions would go a long way towards giving the game a much needed shot of personality. The (currently unused) Officer slots on the ships seem to indicate that there are already plans for something in this direction, but I think making players balance their officers between effectiveness and morale would make officer selection a lot more interesting. You could build your officer corps toward maximum effectiveness (under some pretty hellish conditions for the crew) and it would work fantastically for short voyages. But if something unexpected happened (like a calm, for example (see how this all ties together)) and you were forced to remain at sea longer than anticipated, managing morale to prevent a mutiny (increasing food rations, distributing alcohol amongst the crew (assuming you brought some with you), etc.) would be a real challenge. Or you could take the other route and hire officers that give bonuses to crew morale at the cost of effectiveness. Your chances for mutiny would be reduced substantially, but so would your ship's performance. Again, a calculated risk. 5. Navigation We need tools to navigate in the open world. At the very least, we should have access to the spyglass (how is this not already a thing?), a protractor, a sextant and whatever other tools they had at the time to figure out where they were. (Why do I have to go to burningsail.com to use a tool that I should have access to on the game map?) Things that no one has to use if they don't want to, but that would allow you to figure out your position if you get lost (like if you're blown off course by a storm and you're provisions are running low, for instance.) 6. General Living World Improvements This is all just visual fluff, but it would help to breathe some life into the game. Allowing us to see the townspeople of whatever port we're docked in going about their business behind our port interface would be welcome. Having the proper number of crew going about their business on the decks of our ships (and trading musket shots and racing around during battle) would be fantastic. (and don't talk to me about performance problems. Empire: Total War did this seven years ago. It can be done.) Birds, dolphins, whales, etc. The game needs some life and personality. Oh, and a hand-drawn calligraphy-style map would be awesome and thematically appropriate.

I'm really tired of games that I've purchased being parceled and sold back to me again. Premium ships are a terrible idea. Even premium cosmetics are offensive. I bought this game. I feel like I am entitled to whatever content is included in it. Now, if, after the full release, they want to do expansions or DLC packs or whatever, that's fine. But this isn't Path of Exile. I paid for this game. And it wasn't cheap. On the subject of premium ships specifically, they set a bad precedent. They're going to be better than other ships of the same class. If they weren't, no one would buy them. And if that happened, then player-versus-player would stratify into two groups: people who have to real life money to blow on losing premium ships and people who don't. The competitive playing field would be contaminated by the influx of power acquired through real-world money. The internal consistency of the game would be compromised.

Yeah, they can surrender, but doing so doesn't actually save them anything. They lose everything just as surely as if they had been sunk. I'm suggesting a middle ground. A way for the attacker to get the cargo and the victim to retain his ship.

Because that makes a lot more sense than the whole "Shoot X number of cannon balls to progress" paradigm that we have currently.

Were a system like this to be implemented, I wouldn't be the one designing it (obviously), but if I had to guess, I'd say you wouldn't accrue crew costs while offline or docked; only while at sea. Which means that you wouldn't be pushed to play any more than you currently are. You would, however, be incentivized to make your time at sea as profitable as possible (which is both realistic and interesting). I fail to see how that's a negative thing (unless you're really bad at earning money, in which case one might question whether you should be captaining a ship at all.) In addition, the actual costs per crew member can (obviously) be adjusted. If the developers feel that people are being punished too severely for not earning enough gold, the costs can be lessened.

So, right now progression is gated by XP. Gating by money would be functionally equivalent, but offer a couple of advantages: 1. It's less of an abstraction. You don't have to imagine that money represents some intangible thing. It represents money. 2. It's easier to balance. Right now, people have to worry about doing whatever activities provides them with the most XP, gold and fun, prioritized in that order. If XP were removed, and gold used as the only indicator of progression, that would be one less worry. People could do what was fun and profitable. I refuse to accept the notion that game design should be altered to accommodate players' inability to properly appropriate their time. Any game that rewards players for spending time in the game (i.e. all of them, whether explicitly by abstractions like experience points or money, or implicitly by accrual of player skill with practice) could be accused of encouraging players to make it an unhealthy priority. It's a ridiculous notion. It's also not your decision to make. Who are you to say what is healthy for anyone but yourself? False dichotomy and Red Herring. No one is suggesting that anyone should spend all their time playing. Removing XP would not require that anyone spend all their time playing. In fact, removing XP wouldn't require any more or less playtime than leaving it in. It's just a (slightly) different way to measure progression. We already use it as such (you have to use gold to purchase new ships). Removing XP and increasing the gold required to progress would simply free people from the arbitrary abstraction (you must shoot another ship X many times in order to crew the next larger ship) and provide a more logically consistent basis for progression. You can sail whatever you can afford to buy, crew and maintain. To me that seems like a far superior way of doing things.

With the current system in place, calms don't really provide any meaningful game-play. They're just a delay. But if you had to manage food, water and crew morale, then suddenly calms become a lot more interesting.

I think XP is a cumbersome abstraction. Captains should be limited by money. You should have to pay to maintain every crew member you have. You can sail whatever ship you can afford to purchase, crew and maintain. Get rid of XP. Add crew wages (or shares, if you're a pirate), require stocking provisions (food, water, powder and shot), and the managing of crew morale (and mutinies). Now you've got a proper game.

Right now, people who are obviously going to lose a piracy encounter have no incentive to cooperate with their assailants in order to spare themselves anything. Either they escape, or they lose it all. I think it would be beneficial if there was a way to negotiate a surrender so that the fleeing party has the option (if they so chose) to dump some or all of their cargo in order to preserve their ship. It would save pirates a lot of unnecessary hassle and it would save traders...their ship.