I had the most exciting experience while playing last night. Let me start from the beginning.
I was humbly single man slooping my way over to a skull symbol that I saw in the air. I carefully approached a galleon that was in the distance docked at the fort. I assumed there was no way I could take a galleon by myself as in truth, I'm not an amazing player. I like to think I'm not bad but certainly not of the skill set where I expect to take out 4 people alone. So anyway, after anchoring my sloop far from the galleon, cannon balling myself over as close as I could and making a swim to their ship, I climbed aboard with my weapon holstered while throwing out some "Ahoys". I started jumping up and down trying to signal that I came in peace but, one of the crew aboard the ship shouted that "an a**hole was trying to take the ship" and started attacking me. I jumped in the water, ate a couple bananas and managed to kill the first attacker before a second one got me.
I scrambled to connect my mic as the loading screen for the ship of the damned appeared. Once there I tried to explain to the pirate that I killed that I come in peace. He was ok with this. I respawn on my ship, still cautious I again cannon myself over to them and again try for peace talks with all the crew. The guy I killed earlier said I was cool to the rest of the crew and as I hoped would happen, offered to give a couple pieces of loot for helping.
So I start helping them with skull fort killing some enemies. It's going well and I have no reason to think these folks are bad guys at this point. I go to move my ship to an opening in the fort as neither of our ships are in a position to fire at skeletons with cannons. As I am doing this and just about to anchor my ship, someone from the rival crew snipes and kills me. I am completely baffled as to why this was done to me other than pure greed. As I spawn on to my sinking ship, I am again killed by someone who got on board it and the next respawn I find myself at an outpost.
As one may imagine, I'm quite frustrated by this turn of events. As quickly as possible I rush to my new sloop and set sail for the nearby fort again. Usually I am upset by how close a sunken ship spawns to a fort but, I was overjoyed by it in this instance. I make my way back to the fort, park fairly far and rush in while trying get an answer from them over the mic as to why they attacked me, to which none reply but keep talking among each other. As I am fighting them as they are fighting the skeletons, I am killed.
Disheartened and feeling as if I am not skilled enough to defeat these guys, I respawn on my ship. I was still angry by the betrayal though and figured I was at least going to do my best to take them down. I swim back to the island being careful to not be spotted by the enemy and manage to grab a gun powder barrel.
I dove with the barrel underwater and started my suicide mission by swimming towards their galleon. There is one crew member aboard the ship but I rush past him and into the bottom level of their ship, detonating my barrel after doing so. I barely survive the barrel blast as I was a little close and start eating bananas. The crew member that was on the ship was surprisingly slow to respond and when he did arrive at the bottom level of the ship, I was able to kill him. I waited in case any other crew members appeared to repair the holes I created. Their ship was sunk.
The bad news here was, I could see during the time I spent sinking their ship, one of them also sunk mine. What happened next is for me the most unbelievable part, I managed to kill every crew member on the island and survive. I was seriously shocked at this as I was not expecting this to happen. There is nothing but the skeleton captain and two minor skeletons in my way of the key, which I was able to defeat.
I look out and of course see the galleon making it's way to the fort. I'm looking at it, fort key in hand and I just take a moment to think about my next move. Out of pettiness, I decided if nothing else I would rather no-one gets the loot over them. With that notion in mind, I find a location of the island I can swim from in a straight line, opposite of their incoming ship and hopefully find again. I swim a pretty big distance, surprisingly see no sharks and drop my key. My next move was drowning myself.
When I respawned at the Outpost with my fresh sloop, I again set sail for the skull fort. I keep a nice far distance from the island where I can keep an eye on the docked galleon. This is where I was very unsure what would happen. I figured they might search the island and look for the key for a time. I figured I would just wait it out while replying to a couple text messages on my phone that I missed due to my addiction to this game. My plan was I would just sail over if they are docked for more than 10 minutes or so and see if they managed to find the key in the water. I didn't have to wait near that long though. Off in the distance I see the galleon totally and suddenly disappear. The enemy crew logged off.
I excitedly sail back over to the fort and park near where I remembered leaving the island with the fort key. I dive underwater slightly and tried swim in the same straight line I remember doing before. I wasn't sure if the key would still be spawned, or if it would drift away but I was going to try. After some short swimming I actually do see the key floating in the water! Even though I'm sitting in my bedroom by myself, I was so excited I let out a bit of an audible squeak IRL. I swim back to the fort and open the door to my treasure.
After taking some time to load all the goods myself, sail back to an outpost and sell the loot the saga was over. There was a minor event where I bumped into another player near the end of unloading my loot but I sailed away from the outpost briefly, he did his thing and left me alone so I simply sailed back and finished selling.
This was such a fun experience. Had the adrenaline pumping at moments and it's only a game. Really I think getting back at people who turned on me, and the fact I was walking away with all of the loot from a fort as a one man sloop made it more sweet of a voyage than taking a fort with a full crew ever could feel like. I don't suspect to one man a fort again anytime soon, if ever again but wow I love this game.
