Neutral Starting Faction for Casual Players

[Slim McSauce]

I feel like this is sort of missing from the gameplay loop. Right off the bat you're forced into service in whatever faction's Navy you chose. This skips a portion of age of sail that is the ordinary sailor, trader, or privateer. I would say starting out, everyone should start out in this faction, and from there they could sail almost anywhere unprovoked except by player/AI pirates. They would sail under neutral flags, they cannot join player battles without letters of marque which last 1 month of game time, from there would have to reach a certain rank to become Navy.

[Hullabaloo]

Would have been a good idea. There was a big thread on precisely this some time ago. It got shouted down by those who didn't like the idea of not being able to tag an kill noobs at will.