James Shaw

From what I understand, many people enjoy playing as pirates, so many in fact that it is becoming unbalanced. It is hard for me to imagine a player base who wants to play in SOLs being alienated when there are so many other nations to choose from. I am not against pirates in SOLs. I don't think it would be too difficult for pirates to obtain SOLs. I just don't think it should be practical, except in the case of raiding. Also the more ports a nation has the better the booty, to discourage picking on small nations. I agree with this mostly, but saying "nerf" just has a bad ring to it. No matter what course the Devs take, I hope pirates evolve into more of a high risk, high reward system that can keep larger nations looking over their shoulders, and smaller nations have room to grow instead of just disappearing from the map.

I'd like to see the pirate role changed, and I play pirate. I wouldn't mind being restricted to free towns, and have to eek out a living but have the freedom to be anywhere. Pirate outposts could be less expensive to counteract the lack of ports and pirate raids could take the place of capturing ports.