Snail

You're describing the 2nd best player in a clan, here.

Problem is, you have people in the game who are less-than-reliable witnesses for said events, and the devs themselves have little accurate means of assessing said reliability.

Gee. What a surprise that all the non-pirate players should be leaping at any suggestion to nerf pirates. Or any "poll" weighted to suggest same.

I was in a Surprise, graping an NPC 3rd rate at close range. He (Kuthara) sailed his Niagra between me and the 3rd rate. I fired my broadside into the 3rd rate. Some of my grape hit Kuthara's sails. I held my course and the 3rd rate turned slightly away. Kuthara, having trapped himself between 2 larger ships, then took much of the 3rd rate's broadside, and sank. He then blamed me for the incident.

Fixed it by uninstalling, then going to program files(x86)/steam/steamapps/common and deleting the Naval Action folders that were left over. No collateral damage detected thus far.

...despite 40ish members actually online playing the game. All the members are listed, with proper ranks, but there's only the green light "online" indicator for me. I have tried relogging, logging into different servers, verifying steam cache, and uninstalling/reinstalling the game.

Dunno why the elitist masochist crowd always insists on the most boring, painful, grindy gameplay...except that...oh yeah. They're elitist masochists

6 months would be waaaayyy too long. Having the ability to sail everything does not equal having everything.

They say they'll be putting the kill and assist xp back where it was next week. Maybe it's something that needed to be done before this crucial first weekend. The way it is now is no doubt turning alot of people away with a first impression of: "Nope, leveling is too boring and grindy". Perhaps the fix for the exploit that made them change the xp wasn't quite ready yet. Unfortunate.

Many games "compromise" in rewarding group members who may be "riding the coattails" of thier groupmates. This is done in service of rewarding group play...which is usually a very good goal for any MMO design.

Wind, I know how the xp system works. I'm in as big ship as anyone in my clan has. So it's not about me sucking xp from others. Bit of an assumption on your part. Admin, thank you. That is good news.

As the only effective way to grind is now doing solo missions, and that is boring as hell...my time to burn-out on this game is going to come MUCH quicker. Please put assist and kill xp back to something approaching rewarding.