Souvlaki

That's nonsense. If the battle stayed open they wouldn't be able to hide their fleets now would they?

It was more than just one time, as a matter of fact, almost from the get go pirates around PR would use this exploit to seal club of all things. They'd sit in an instance and just pop out when their alt spotted a target. Pretty sad. And the Brits and others can't do it unless they use alts somehow. Given that it seems like everyone in the game has an alt, I suppose that's a possibility, but I wouldn't know, haven't played in weeks. Anyway, the pirates have abused that mechanic since the server reset. It only makes it worse because every noob and their brother joins pirates so they have the largest pop. Put those too things together and yeah, it makes it pretty unfun for everyone else.

The ability to hide your fleets is game breaking and honestly when the pirates started using that exploit to take ports I lost interested in the game and shortly thereafter it started dying. I'm not really complaining, because I think this was a good test and I'm sure the devs noticed and will fix issue, but yeah.

Why should anyone play a faction other than pirates when they enjoy significant advantages when it comes to game play mechanics? Everyone honestly should just pile into the pirate nation and have a free for all death match. It would be much more entertaining.

So the Pirates finally realized that exploiting game mechanics to take ports might be bad for the game? LOLOLOLOL

Agreed, but small nations will have to fight other small nations, or ally to take on bigger nations, or hit bigger nations in outlying areas that may not draw as many defenders. They still have options.

The same way the Dutch will take all of your territory. Oh wait, they won't, because they don't have enough players. Obviously every nation is going to be limited by the number of active and willing players they have. No mechanic will fix that.

No, I don't think you're looking at this a tester. This game is in Alpha TESTING right now. So the mechanics are in flux and the way the players are going to be handled is in flux. I honestly don't care what nation is using scummy tactics like hiding in a battle for an hour, I think the subject should be addressed head-on by the devs and corrected. Having a group of players testing the game mechanics and showing areas that can easily be exploited to produce results that the devs do not wish, is a good thing. So hats off to the pirates for exposing this weakness in the game design. My only question is, will these loopholes be fixed and the topic addressed? Because if you take a big picture look at how this hurts the game, you'll see this kind of exploit removes the relevance of a lot of players (anyone who isn't directly in the PB) from having fun and participating. It's also an unfair advantage for the Pirate faction as constructed because they are the only faction who can use this exploit. Considering they are one of the bigger factions in the game, this is a pretty huge advantage and will only get worse on official release when you have a majority of players flocking to the pirates.

No I don't think having naval battles in the open world is griefing. If I understand you correctly, what you're saying is the British population is too big, thus it's ok to cheat. Do I have the correct? I seem to remember participating in a port battle vs the pirates a few weeks ago where they clearly outnumbered my team and I didn't see them withdrawing any ships so it could be decided by skill.

So am I to understand that hiding for one hour in a battle to avoid any screening force is 'par for the course' and not cheating or exploiting the game mechanics? I mean, is that all it takes, some nerds with so much time on their hands they can circumvent how the game is intended to be played because they must win by any means, even if it means cheating? And the Devs are OK with this? If so, I'm ready to uninstall and stop wasting my time. Luckily I'm fairly new to the game, so no big loss. I'll do a nice little write-up on Steam about it and be done.

Yeah, either that, or he could learn from his mistakes and avoid those hot zones and buy a couple of refits. I think that the game shouldn't be dumbed down to cater to people unwilling to come up with a strategy to 'win'.