Hey there,
I've been playing SoT for roughly a week now and enjoy it overall. I have the usual issues happen too ofc. Bad hitreg, sudden lag, no-hit kills, crashes and repeated disconnects, glitches, you name it. But what keeps getting to me is that I sail into the wind fastest with the sails... flat against it. Really, what the eff?
This leads to the strange phenomenon that tacking is not a thing and you sail your boat more like a car than a sailing ship, and the Sloop appears to be the worst offender.
With the way combat works in this game, it makes perfect sense to keep the sailing itself arcadey. We just don't have the time to continually be readjusting sails while also manning the cannons, steering and repairing the ship, and fighting off any boarders. It's also necessary to be able to keep moving into the wind for this reason - recovering from a dead-stop would require you to stick to the sails for too long at a time.
As such, I don't want to propose full realism. But I do think that it should be geometrically advantageous to tack rather than sail into irons. This would also preserve the advantage of small vs. big ships - the smaller your vessel, the closer your tack.
The proposed changes above would in fact increase task saturation, simply because you would be adjusting your sails for a wider arc total when sailing into the wind. For the Brigantine and the Galleon, this difference should be very small as they already angle sails properly until they are almost dead into the wind anyway. But for the Sloop in particular this would be a huge change, requiring at least double the amount of attention to be paid to sails. Because this ship is also the one used for solo players, this is just not an option in combat. Hence I would suggest we change the sail plan of the Sloop entirely, to something historically more accurate. (And to be quite honest, I'm getting very strong impressions of stop-gap turned permanent solution from the Sloop sails in SoT anyway... It feels cheap in an unfortunate way.)
Traditionally the Sloop has a reasonably simple one-mast-two-sail (Bermuda rig) configuration as seen on the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloop.
I would suggest we switch to this setup and allow the arcadiness to come from having these sails be naturally more efficient up-wind. That way your typical solo-slooper still wouldn't have to worry about adjusting the sails too often and we also get a more healthy sense of actual sailing.
Edit: Forgot to add, this would also help with those endless chasing situations - a ship in the advantageous position will be a little better at catching or escaping than it is now, and better sailing skills actually make a difference, while the arcadiness should preserve the ability to both stop and enforce escape using the environment, kegs, anchoring, anchor turns, harpoons, harpoon turns, etc.
