i'm really heartbroken to write this, but stay away from this game. once this was the anakin skywalker of games for everyone nerding about the age of sail, but oh boy has this promise been crushed. coming from predecessor games like pirates of the burning sea, for me naval action seemed to be the next-gen prodigy to this in an open world, including beautifully crafted ships with excellent graphics an physics. the game's engine imho still holds up to this day from a technical point of view. the mmo experience has once been great with hundreds of players login in daily, epic port battles and clan rivalries.

this has all been lost.

the devs on their epic journey of turning this game into a pile of ♥♥♥♥ have managed to first destroy the motivation of all the casual players with recurring server wipes, then destroyed the ingame economy, But that wasn't enough. then their greed took over and they started bringing ships as paid DLCs. DLCs for single ships with a pricepoint exceeding what you might pay for a simplane on MSFS, which has actually professional level of simulation depth and systems integration.

At last they made the game free to play and started 3 stand alone server. one for PVP, one for PVE (to which both of no newby whoi did not buy the game before it went f2p has access to) plus a third server for the newbs, which gets wiped on a monthyish base. splitting the playerbase even further.

Please, to everyone considering to play this game, don't

go and wait for some alternative to be released (see 'Ahoy' for example) or just don't or you'll end up with an utterly miserable experience.