Pirates of the Burning Sea’s greatest problem

I don’t know what your stats show, but I know what I feel. I’m being bombarded with goodbye messages. I can’t even muster up a decent force to flip a port any more. The initial lift to our population from the mergers has passed, and we are once again in a downward trend. In this thread, I, and the others, will try to explain why we think this is happening. Please understand, every player has their own combination of things which is making them unhappy, and these are just a few of them.

1. The Self-Inflicted Mission-Grinding Roundabout of Ultimate Tedium

There are certain high-end missions that are extremely profitable. Urgent Fury(and it’s follow-ups) and Woes of Santiago are two. By deliberately failing them they can be repeated ad infinitum. The “feature” that causes anyone kicked from a group to also be kicked from a mission instance allows these missions to be ground at zero risk. This is what is called the path of least resistance. Players will always follow that path, and in this case it leads them to literally spend hundreds of hours repeating the same mission. This burns people out.

Why do they do it? Because their guilds desire 1st and 2nd rated ships. But when, finally, through the labour of many people these ships are finally built, there is another problem. Most players are too frightened to use such a ship in any situation where they have the slightest fear of losing them. As by losing such a ship, they are not only losing it for themselves, but they are letting down their guild in a massive way, throwing hundreds of man-hours of mindless grinding out of the window.

Thus we have the situation we have seen on Roberts. A Port Battle between Spain and Britain goes like this:

The two sides catch sight of eachother.
They count eachothers high rated ships.
The team with the least high rated ships exits the battle.