Hieronymous Alloy

EDIT: I am a bad person and would be sorely tempted 2nd edit: especially by the "Surprise" class

A "horizon chat" channel. anything you type into is only heard by visible ships.

Well, there always should be, that doesn't mean there always in fact is. The guy's alleging a bug and it sounds like the other players present are vouching for him. It's possible that there was some kind of bug with the mechanism that pulls everyone into combat within the circle. For what it's worth while I understand the reasoning behind the "no takebacks" principle, there probably should be SOME way to redeem your character, otherwise a lot of people are going to misclick and then quit the game rather than restart.

Yeah, the way to address this is to add realistic moon cycles. Edit for clarity: Add realistic moon cycles and the night sky has more interesting details, there's more variation in night time light levels, etc.. You'd still have some flat black dead blind nights, but most of the time you'd have a lot more light.

Well, there's already the PirateFrigate. Which seems historically inaccurate anyway since pirates mostly used schooners and sloops >_<

I would like a BONGGG of the ship's bell to sound whenever there is a new sail on the horizon or a new ship joins a fight.

I mean, heck, Bermuda Triangle I wish the old Sea Trials storm combat map would come back, it was awesome. Only problem with it in Sea Trials was it was in too heavy rotation.

I don't know if this counts but this is the exploit I was referring to in this post : http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/6971-make-the-yacht-free-like-thy-lynx/?p=131897 Glad y'all caught it.

The yacht needs to be made officially "premium" and unsellable. Current yacht value is exploitable (not sure what policy on posting that kind of thing is, but obvious to anyone who's played many online games). I am worried about losing my "premium" ship to explosions etc. come release. Be a shame if there's no way to buy more durability for it.

Honestly the more I read this the more confused I get >_< Is the idiot's version of this "try to maintain the weather gage at all times, and if you have the advantage of position, keep your distance" ?

Yeah this is a concern too. A game like this -- especially, and I mean this kindly, given the fairly long development course this game has been on since Sea Trials -- I play for a while, leave, come back later, etc. I like it but it's gonna spend months on the virtual shelf before I take it down again (kinda like Aubrey/Maturin, which I re-read every couple years). If I lose progress while I'm away or have my character harmed for inactivity that's going to blow.

I think this is one of those ideas that sounds better on paper than it would actually play in practice. As proposed it would be waaay too limiting to player freedom. I think you'd have a lot of folks who wanted the freedom to be a (trader, privateer, etc.) in playstyle but were also annoyed they couldn't be a National Naval Captain when it came time for big trafalgar-style battles and events. Besides, Naval Officers got to capture prizes for cash. I could see them having to sell their ships for a percent share or something, but I kinda assumed that's what was going on anyway. Maybe something like this *could* work but I would want to see a lot more details to the proposal before I signed up for it. I think it's something that ideally you'd want an actual team of writers supporting.

This is trivial, but I've noticed that some of the ports don't really reflect the actual historical port. In some cases the work the devs have done is really impressive -- Sansbury, GA no longer exists, you'd only find out about that if you did major historical work -- but then conversely, the port of Charleston is just all kinds of wrong. It's not even on a peninsula! Thing is, for at least some of these ports, there actually are period drawings, too, so the game could model them for "accuracy." (see, e.g., http://i.imgur.com/TZSMHfW.jpg for a roughly 1820's portrayal of Charleston Harbor). This is of course trivial and should probably be the lowest priority imaginable, but it would be nice if they had the art etc. resources and time for it.