I love this game to death, the atmosphere, soundtrack, audio and art design, the naval combat mechanics and the lovely adventures.

However the extremely buggy hand to hand combat means that any of the forced PvP encounters will inevitably end with one or more hostile players silently boarding your vessel, and killing everyone on it with one shot. The skill gap between players who know how to abuse the hand to hand system, and those who don't, is utterly vast, and only dozens of hours of training in this, by far least interesting part of the game, will prevent you from being constantly ganked while trying to have fun with the game's hundreds of hours of enjoyable content.

In its current state I can't recommend this game to anyone who wants to play a pirate adventure game, as the predatory players have been consistently forcing all other types of player out of the game. When I played the game at launch, we would have a player versus player encounter maybe once every ten hours, the rest of the time we would either sail by other crews harmlessly, or exchange treasure and music over fun talk of our adventures. These days I can maybe finish a two hour session 20 percent of the time without being sunk somewhere along the way, usually just after leaving port initially.

I hope the developers disincentivise random hostility before all the players are gone.

I love this game to death, the atmosphere, soundtrack, audio and art design, the naval combat mechanics and the lovely adventures. However the extremely buggy hand to hand combat means that any of the forced PvP encounters will inevitably end with one or more hostile players silently boarding your vessel, and killing everyone on it with one shot. The skill gap between players who know how to abuse the hand to hand system, and those who don't, is utterly vast, and only dozens of hours of training in this, by far least interesting part of the game, will prevent you from being constantly ganked while trying to have fun with the game's hundreds of hours of enjoyable content. In its current state I can't recommend this game to anyone who wants to play a pirate adventure game, as the predatory players have been consistently forcing all other types of player out of the game. When I played the game at launch, we would have a player versus player encounter maybe once every ten hours, the rest of the time we would either sail by other crews harmlessly, or exchange treasure and music over fun talk of our adventures. These days I can maybe finish a two hour session 20 percent of the time without being sunk somewhere along the way, usually just after leaving port initially. I hope the developers disincentivise random hostility before all the players are gone.