5centmike

There is currently a feature/bug that allows you to overload the hold of a ship. If there is space in your hold you can always add 1 more stack of goods to it, even if it overloads the ship. This means the order in which you move goods from one ship to the other will effect how much you can bring. Using this trick you can usually take all of the cargo from a trader.

Recently the ability to search sinking ships for loot was added to the game. Combat NPCs have a chance of dropping valuable repairs as well as otherwise unobtainable and very valuable skill books and permanent upgrades. More recently trader ships acquired more cannons making them comparable opponents to their dedicated combat peers and the loot table for combat NPCs was expanded to drop more rare upgrades. The result of these changes is a severe imbalance of difficulty and rewards for a player sinking and looting a combat NPC vs a trader NPC. Currently on average a combat NPC will have more value in its hold in repairs, cannons, skill books, or permanent upgrades than a trader of equivalent strength will carry in resources or shipbuilding materials. Additionally combat NPCs give larger gold and xp bounties compared to their equivalent trader NPC. Since traders now have large armaments equivalent to their combat counterparts there is no longer any reason for a player to attack a trader instead of a combat NPC as the fight will be equally difficult and the rewards substantially less. Two suggestions should repair this imbalance. First, trader NPCs should have repairs, cannons, skill books, and permanent upgrades added to their loot tables in addition to the trade goods they currently drop. Second, the gold and xp bounties of trader NPCs should be increased to reflect their new strength in combat.

To help clarify what's actually happening in these battles one of the ship knowledge perks added in the new patch is called Fireships. It adds 0.4 to the chance of catching fire, 25% to the rate of fire spread, and 30% to the powder radius which I presume is the explosion. All 3 cutters in this case were made of Fir for an additional increased 10% increased fire rate and also used the open magazine access perk to add another 0.1 to fire chance. Because Fireships is a ship knowledge perk one person with access to the perk can outfit multiple cutters with the perk and distribute them to friends for free. I think this is the main issue with the perk as it is. I think the easiest way to balance this issue is for the Fireship to be moved to a permanent upgrade instead of a ship knowledge perk. Which would make more sense anyways. The additional cost of the upgrade would add risk to the endeavor but would still leave it viable for high stakes engagements like port battles. Just as an additional note we have hardly had a 100% success rate with this tactic and have been sunk many times over, albeit without bearing any cost for our failures.

Seeing as how there are players from the US, Britain, and Pirate nations upset about the lack of large, challenging fleets to fight, what if the fleets from each of those nations tried to find and fight each other? Really, in all seriousness, if everyone was using this farming technique then that means there are now large player fleets for each faction without anything to do. Why not take this dev-mandated pause of power-grinding as an opportunity to go out and engage in some fun and intense PvP fleet actions? Isn't that what everyone is grinding for anyways? I think the devs have heard the outcry that players want more end-game PvE content, and perhaps they will deliver it. But in the meantime let's have some real battles!